Every historian builds on the work of those who precede him. My study has depended, probably more than I realize, on the work of Alexander Brown, Philip A. Bruce, Thomas J. Wertenbaker, Wesley Frank Craven, Richard L. Morton, and Wilcomb E. Washburn. But my story is different from theirs, and probably none of them would or will find it wholly acceptable. I have tried to acknowledge particular debts in footnotes, which I hope may serve in lieu of a formal bibliography of secondary works. But since I have relied primarily on original sources, and since a book is generally shaped by the nature of the sources available, a note about them may be appropriate.
The printed sources for study of colonial Virginia are voluminous. England’s first approaches to colonization can be viewed not only in Richard Hakluyt’s Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America (London, 1582) and Principall Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (London, 1589, 1598–1600), but also in the many Works issued by the Hakluyt Society, especially E. G. R. Taylor, ed., The Original Writings and Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts (London, 1935, 2nd ser., LXXVI, LXXVII); Clements R. Markham, ed., The Hawkins Voyages (London, 1878, 1st ser., LVII); R. Collinson, ed., The Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher (London, 1867, 1st ser., XXXVIII); David B. Quinn, Voyages and Colonizing Enterprises of Sir Humphrey Gilbert (London, 1940, 2nd ser., LXXXIII, LXXXIV), and the same editor’s great collection of The Roanoke Voyages, 1584–1590 (London, 1955, 2nd ser., CIV, CV). Many of the English voyages, as reported by Spanish officials in the Caribbean, can be followed in Irene A. Wright, ed., Documents concerning English Voyages to the Spanish Main, 1569–1580 (London, 1932, 2nd ser., LXXI); Further English Voyages to Spanish America, 1583–I594 (London, 1951, 2nd ser., XCIX); and Kenneth R. Andrews, ed., English Privateering Voyages to the West Indies, 1588–1595 (Cambridge, 1959, 2nd ser., CXI). A further perspective on the Roanoke venture can be gained from Raleigh’s later enterprises in Guiana, in Vincent T. Harlow, ed., The Discoverie of the Large and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana (London, 1928) and Ralegh’s Last Voyage (London, 1932).
The largest collection of documents for the early years of the Jamestown settlement is Alexander Brown’s monumental work The Genesis of the United States (Boston, 1890), which is only partially replaced by Philip Barbour’s more limited selection in The Jamestown Voyages under the First Charter, 1606–1609 (Cambridge, 1969, Works issued by the Hakluyt Society, 2nd ser., CXXXVI, CXXXVII). The single most important contemporary account of these years lies in the Travels and Works of Captain John Smith, Edward Arber and A. G. Bradley, eds. (Edinburgh, 1910). A critical edition of all of Smith’s writings is much needed, for in some passages he writes from his own experience, while in others he copies or paraphrases other writers, often without indicating that he is doing so. The segments of Smith’s writing contained in Barbour’s Jamestown Voyages are more accurately transcribed from the original than in the Arber-Bradley edition; but the annotation falls short of what is needed.
As Smith copied from others, William Strachey in his Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania, Louis B. Wright and Virginia Freund, eds. (London, 1953, Works issued by the Hakluyt Society, 2nd ser., CIII), seems to have copied mainly from Smith, though Strachey himself had been in Virginia and supplied some details of his own. Strachey was responsible for publishing For the Colony in Virginea Britannia: Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall (London, 1612; David H. Flaherty, ed., Charlottesville, 1969). And he also wrote “A True Repertory of the Wreck and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight,” Louis B. Wright, ed., A Voyage to Virginia in 1609 (Charlottesville, 1964).
Other participants in the Jamestown venture who recorded their experiences or their impressions included Gabriel Archer, John Pory, John Rolfe, Henry Spelman, Lord De la Warr, and Edward Wingfield, whose accounts are included along with other documents, in the introduction by Arber and Bradley to Smith, Travels and Works, or in L. G. Tyler, ed., Narratives of Early Virginia, 1606–1625 (New York, 1907). Not included in these two convenient collections are Ralph Hamor, A True Discourse of the Present Estate of Virginia (London, 1615); George Percy, “A Trewe Relacyon of the Procedeinges and Occurrentes of Momente …,” Tyler’s Quarterly Historical and Genealogical Magazine, III (1922), 260–82; and Alexander Whitaker, Good Newes from Virginia (London, 1613). A valuable tract by a nonparticipant that is not fully reprinted in any collection is Robert Gray, A Good Speed to Virginia (London, 1609).
The earliest records of the Virginia Company are missing, but those for its last years, 1619–24, along with various miscellaneous papers and correspondence, including the journals of the first two meetings of the House of Burgesses, have been published (without annotation) in Susan Kingsbury, ed., The Records of the Virginia Company of London (Washington, D.C., 1906–35). The decades that followed the demise of the company are less well documented in printed works than the early years. Since the crown was responsible for administration of the colony after 1624, the great bulk of available documents are those in the Public Record Office of Great Britain. Many of these were printed or summarized in early issues of the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography abstracted by W. Noel Sainsbury, with fuller extracts than he printed in the Calendar of State Papers, Colonial. A number of others may be found in Edward Neill, Virginia Carolorum (Albany, N.Y., 1886). Many previously unpublished early manuscripts, both from Virginia sources and from English archives, are scattered through the volumes of the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, the William and Mary Quarterly, Tyler’s Quarterly Historical and Genealogical Magazine, and the Virginia Historical Register (a convenient aid in using these is Earl G. Swem, Virginia Historical Index, Roanoke, 1934–36). And many early published tracts relating to the colony were reprinted by Peter Force in his Tracts and Other Papers Relating Principally to the Origin, Settlement, and Progress of the Colonies in North America (Washington, D.C., 1836–46). The “Aspinwall Papers,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, 4th ser., IX (1871), contains documents from the 1620s and 1630s as well as from the time of Bacon’s Rebellion. David Peter de Vries, “Voyages from Holland to America, A.D.1632 to 1644,” New-York Historical Society, Collections, 2nd ser., III (1857), 9–136, gives a Dutchman’s impressions.
Virginians did not write about themselves or their colony with anything like the zeal shown by New Englanders, but a number of them at different times did attempt to describe the “present state” of the colony, usually with some political end in view. William Bullock, Virginia Impartially Examined (London, 1649) is not quite of this sort, since the author seems never to have been to Virginia, but he thought he knew enough to denounce its governing class. Lionel Gatford, Publick Good without Private Interest (London, 1657) is another denunciation, not merely of the governors but of the people they governed. William Berkeley, A Discourse and View of Virginia (London, 1663) was written to promote his plans for diversification. The tracts relating to Bacon’s Rebellion, most of which are reprinted either in Force, Tracts, or in C. M. Andrews, ed., Narratives of the Insurrections (New York, 1915), are expectably partisan, in one direction or the other. Henry Hartwell, James Blair, and Edward Chilton, The Present State of Virginia and the College (London, 1727) is a report submitted to the Board of Trade thirty years earlier, in order to discredit Governor Francis Nicholson. Robert Beverley also filled his History and Present State of Virginia (London, 1705; L. B. Wright, ed., Chapel Hill, N.C., 1947) with diatribes against Nicholson. Hugh Jones, The Present State of Virginia (London, 1724) is much less partisan, though Jones, a clergyman, was a friend of Governor Spotswood and an opponent of James Blair. William Stith, another clergyman, in his History of the First Discovery and Settlement of Virginia (Williamsburg, 1747), managed to express a contemporary political position in recounting the history of the colony under the company. Stith’s was the first book about Virginia to be printed in the colony itself. Subsequent political controversies, including the quarrel with England, elicited a good many more publications from the colony’s presses as well as filling many of the pages of the Virginia Gazette, but most of these lie beyond the scope of the present work. Edmund Randolph’s History of Virginia, written in the early years of the nineteenth century, was not published until 1970 (Charlottesville, Arthur H. Shaffer, ed.). This and John Daly Burk’s History of Virginia (Petersburg, 1804–16) are still valuable, because the authors had access to documents that have since been lost or destroyed.
Most of the official records of seventeenth-century Virginia subsequent to the dissolution of the company have been lost, many of them in the burning of Richmond. But the records of the governor and council covering the period 1622–32 and 1670–76 survived and are printed, along with notes on the missing years by Conway Robinson (made before the fire), in H. R. McIlwaine, ed., Minutes of the Council and General Court of Colonial Virginia … (Richmond, 1924). William Waller Hening printed all the statutes and orders passed by the assembly, so far as he could find copies, in The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia … (Richmond, 1809–23). One set of records that survives nearly intact is that of the patent books, in which were copied the patents granting lands to individuals. Abstracts of Books 1–5, containing patents issued from 1623 to 1666, have been published in Nell M. Nugent, Cavaliers and Pioneers (Richmond, 1934). Miss Nugent also prepared abstracts of Books 6–9, which have not been published but are available at the State Library.
Copies of Virginia legislative acts and proceedings were regularly sent to England and to the county courts; and copies and notes were also made of some of them in the eighteenth century for Sir John Randolph (the so-called Bland Manuscript now in the Library of Congress). It is from such copies and notes that it has been possible to recover much of the early legislative record of seventeenth-century Virginia, as printed in Hening and in J. P. Kennedy and H. R. McIlwaine, eds., Journal of the House of Burgesses. There are twelve volumes of this work, covering the years from 1619 to 1776, each distinguished, not by a volume number, but by an indication on the title page of the years covered. The volumes were published at Richmond from 1905 to 1915, in an edition more noteworthy for typographical than for editorial care. The text has often been taken from Hening or from other reprintings even when the original manuscript was available; and although a number of legislative papers and documents from the British Public Record Office have been included in the early volumes in order to fill gaps in the record, the selection of these seems capricious.
Some of the gaps in Hening and in the printed Journals have been filled in other publications. The acts of the assembly for the session beginning January 6, 1639/40, are in William and Mary Quarterly, 2nd ser., IV (1924), 16–35, 145–62. The acts for the session beginning January 12, 1641/2, are in Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, IX (1901–2), 51–59. Those for the sessions in 1643–46 are in ibid., XXIII (1915), 225–55. Other missing seventeenth-century acts and proceedings must be sought in manuscript sources (see below), but for the period 1700–1750 acts missing from Hening have been gathered and printed in Waverly K. Winfree, The Laws of Virginia: Being a Supplement to Hening’s The Statutes at Large (Richmond, 1971).
The legislative and executive journals of the governor’s council from 1680 onward have survived (though not the records of the council acting in its judicial capacity as the General Court). The council evidently kept separate journals in its different capacities, at least from 1680 on and probably earlier. The existing journals have been published: H. R. McIlwaine, ed., Legislative Journals of the Council of Colonial Virginia (Richmond, 1918–19); and H. R. McIlwaine et al. eds., Executive Journals of the Council of Colonial Virginia (Richmond, 1925–66).
The Journals are often disappointingly silent about substantive issues discussed by the council and the burgesses, and the formal record should be read in conjunction with official and unofficial correspondence and reports. The most valuable single body of material of this kind is in the British Public Record Office, and abstracts have been published, as noted above, in the Calendar of State Papers, Colonial and the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, but any intensive study requires use of the full originals, which are readily available on microfilm (see below). Other surviving papers and documents are abstracted in W. F. Palmer, ed., Calendar of Virginia State Papers and Other Manuscripts … Preserved in the Capitol at Richmond (Richmond, 1875–93). The most valuable printed collections of letters by governors are those of Spotswood and Dinwiddie: R. A. Brock, ed., The Official Letters of Alexander Spotswood (Richmond, 1882–85, Virginia Historical Society, Collections, n.s., I–II); R. A. Brock, ed., The Official Records of Robert Dinwiddie (Richmond, 1883–84, Virginia Historical Society, Collections, n.s., III—IV). For a much earlier date there are official papers of Governor Sir Francis Wyatt, in William and Mary Quarterly, 2nd ser., VI (1926), 114–23; VII (1927), 42–47, 125–31, 204–14, 246–54; VIII (1928), 48–57, 157–67. William Stevens Perry, ed., Historical Collections Relating to the American Colonial Church, vol. I: Virginia (Hartford, 1870) contains many documents bearing on the activities of James Blair and his dispute with Governor Nicholson. Other papers relating to this dispute arc published in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, III (1895–96), 373–82; VII (1899–1900), 153–72, 275–86, 386–401; VIII (1900–1901), 46–64, 126–46, 260–78, 366–85; IX (1901–2), 18–29, 152–62, 251–62. Another convenient collection on a topic of particular importance for the present study is Elizabeth Donnan, ed., Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America, vol. IV: The Border Colonies and the Southern Colonies (Washington, D.C., 1935), 49–234.
The only extensive private correspondence surviving from the seventeenth century is that of William Fitzhugh, edited by Richard B. Davis in William Fitzbugh and his Chesapeake World (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1963). Letters of William Byrd I, from 1684 to 1691, are in Virginia Magazine of History and Biography XXIV (1916), 225–35; XXVI (1918), 17–31, 124–34, 247–59, 380–92; XXVII (1919), 167–68, 273–78; XXVIII (1920), 11–25. For the eighteenth century private records are much more numerous. The letters of William Byrd II are in Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, IX (1901–2), 113–30, 225–51; XXXV (1927), 221–45, 371–89; XXXVI (1928), 36–44, 113–23, 209–22, 353–62; XXXVII (1929), 28–33; 101–18. Byrd’s other writings and diaries have been edited by Louis B. Wright and others in a succession of volumes: L. B. Wright and Marion Tinling, eds., The Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover, 1709–1712 (Richmond, 1941): Maude H. Woodfin and Marion Tinling, eds., Another Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover, 1739–1741, with Letters and Literary Exercises, 1696–1726 (Richmond, 1942); Louis B. Wright and Marion Tinling, eds., The London Diary (1717–1721) and Other Writings (New York, 1958); L. B. Wright, ed., The Prose Works of William Byrd of Westover (Cambridge, Mass., 1966).
The Byrd diaries reveal less than one could wish about plantation life, but the Diary of Colonel London Carter, Jack P. Greene, ed. (Charlottesville, 1965), is full of the details of plantation management. Louis B. Wright has edited the letters of Landon’s father, Letters of Robert Carter, 1720–1727 (San Marino, Calif., 1940), most of them to business correspondents in England. Two diaries kept by newcomers to Virginia give a perspective not to be found in either Byrd or the Carters. Edward M. Riley, ed., The Journal of John Harrower (Williamsburg and New York, 1963) is that of a Scottish indentured servant employed as a tutor on the plantation of Colonel William Daingerfield. Hunter D. Farish, ed., Journal and Letters of Philip Vickers Fithian (Williamsburg, 1957; Charlottesville, 1968) is that of a young Princeton graduate employed as a tutor by Robert Carter of Nomini Hall (nephew of Landon Carter and grandson of the Robert Carter mentioned above).
A number of foreign travelers in Virginia also recorded their impressions. The most notable such record from the seventeenth century is that of one Durand, in Gilbert Chinard, ed., A Huguenot Exile in Virginia (New York, 1934). Another Huguenot’s journal is Edward P. Alexander, ed., The Journal of John Fontaine: An Irish Huguenot Son in Spain and Virginia, 1710–1719 (Charlottesville, 1972). A few more early visits are in Newton D. Mereness, ed., Travels in the American Colonies (New York, 1916), but far more travel accounts exist from the revolutionary period and after. Among the keener observers of Virginia society in those years were the Marquis de Chastellux (Travels in North America in the Years 1780, 1781, and 1782, Howard C. Rice, ed., Chapel Hill, N.C., 1963); J. P. Brissot de Warville (New Travels in the United States of America, 1788, Durand Echeverria, ed., Cambridge, Mass., 1964); the Baroness von Riedesel (Baroness von ‘Riedesel and the American Revolution, Marvin L. Brown, Jr., ed., Chapel Hill, N.C., 1965); and Sir Augustus John Foster (Jeffersonian America, Richard B. Davis, ed., San Marino, Calif., 1954).
The manuscript sources for Virginia’s colonial period are even richer than those which have been published. On the occasion of the 350th anniversary of the first settlement at Jamestown the state undertook an extensive search for documents in England and France relating to Virginia. The Virginia Colonial Records Survey compiled reports on nearly 10,000 documents and collections of documents in the British Public Record Office, the British Museum, the Bodleian Library, and other English and European repositories. On the basis of the reports nearly 1,000 reels of microfilms were made of the most important collections, and copies were deposited, along with a complete set of the reports, at the Alderman Library in Charlottesville, the State Library, and the Research Library of Colonial Williamsburg. The collection constitutes the basic resource for study of Virginia history, especially political history, and the reports are the basic guide to that resource. But the films and reports are so voluminous that further indexes and finding aids are now much needed. The staff of the Colonial Williamsburg Research Library have prepared several of these already and thereby greatly facilitated the use of the collection.
The most valuable papers for this study were the familiar Colonial Office group in the Public Record Office, especially classes 1 and 5, which are also available in transcripts and films at the Library of Congress. But a number of collections outside the Public Record Office contain materials of the first importance for seventeenth-century Virginia history. At the Bodleian Library in Oxford the Locke Mss. contain some of James Blair’s lengthy strictures on the administration of Governor Nicholson. The Rawlinson Mss. and the Clarendon Mss. contain a variety of letters and reports from Virginia. Of particular importance is Clarendon Ms. 82, the record of expenditures authorized by the assembly in 1662 and also the number of tithables in the colony that year. It is comparable to the records for 1677, 1682, and 1684 printed in McIlwaine’s Journals of the House of Burgesses, 1659/60–1693, which McIlwaine assumed to be the only such document surviving. Similar records for 1673 and 1674 are in another collection, the Coventry Papers of the Marquess of Bath at Longleat House (microfilm in the Library of Congress). This collection also contains the most valuable papers relating to Bacon’s Rebellion outside the Public Record Office. Another special collection, the Baron Howard of Effingham Papers in the Library of Congress, contains not only the reports made by Governor Howard to his superiors but also the journals of the assembly for the sessions of November, 1682; April, 1684; November, 1685; October, 1686; and April, 1688, along with acts passed. Those for 1682, 1685, and parts of 1684 are missing from McIlwaine’s edition and available only here.
The Research Library at Colonial Williamsburg has the largest body of Blathwayt Papers. William Blathwayt became involved in the administration of the colonies in 1675 and remained so for the rest of the century, from 1680 on as auditor general and after 1696 as a member of the Board of Trade. The papers contain many reports to him by colonial officials. Among them is the list of Virginia tithables for 1674. Blathwayt’s own journals are in the Public Record Office and more of his papers are in the Henry E. Huntington Library in San Marino, California, which also has various other papers relating to colonial Virginia.
The Virginia State Library has a great variety of manuscript materials, including the “Colonial Papers” which are abstracted in the Calendar of Virginia State Papers. But its most valuable holding, apart from the microfilms from the Virginia Colonial Records Survey (which unaccountably are not at present available to readers at the Library), is the great collection of microfilms and photostats of Virginia county court records, some made by the Library, others by the Genealogical Society of Utah. The court records are the principal source available for the study of Virginia social history in the colonial period. Unfortunately, few of the earliest records survive, especially in the counties on the peninsula between the James and the York. The most complete records for the seventeenth century are those for Northampton and Accomack counties on the Eastern Shore and those for Norfolk on the south side of the James. But there are extensive records for several other counties from the second half of the century. Those used for the present study are indicated in the explanation of footnote abbreviations on pp. 389–93. As explained there, only two volumes of these records have been published. Selected abstracts from several more are scattered through the pages of the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography and the William and Mary Quarterly and in Beverly Fleet, ed., Virginia Colonial Abstracts (Richmond, 1937–48). But the latter were selected with an eye more to their genealogical than to their historical interest.
The Alderman Library at Charlottesville has extensive manuscript collections relating to Virginia, but few date from the seventeenth century. Those from the early eighteenth century that proved of greatest use for this study were the Carter Family Papers, the Journal of William Hugh Grove and the Letter Book of Robert Anderson. The only other important repository of Virginia manuscripts is the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond. Its most valuable seventeenth-century holdings for this study, including many of the colony’s officials records and private papers of the Byrd family, have been published, but it contains a wealth of other materials.