American Nations

These first Virginians proved to be such incompetent settlers because they hadn’t come to the New World to farm and build a new society, but rather to conquer and rule, much as the Spanish had. The Virginia Company’s founders expected their hirelings to act like the conquistadors, seizing control of awestruck Indian kingdoms and putting their new subjects to work mining gold and silver or slaving in the fields to feed their new masters. After all, the English had been following much the same program in Ireland, where Gaelic-speaking “savages” toiled on English-owned plantations. Jamestown wasn’t meant to feed itself, which is why it lacked farmers. It was, in essence, a corporate-owned military base, complete with fortifications, martial law, a small elite of officers, and a large contingent of rank-and-file soldiers.²

But the Virginia Company’s plan was based on the faulty assumption that the Indians would be intimidated by English technology, believe their employers were gods, and submit, Aztec-like, to their rule. The Indians, in fact, did none of these things. The local chief, Powhatan, saw the English outpost for what it was: weak and vulnerable but a potential source of useful European technology such as metal tools and weapons. Powhatan ruled a confederation that spanned the lower Chesapeake, comprising 30 tribes and 24,000 people. He lived in a large lodge on the York River, attended by forty bodyguards, a hundred wives, and a small army of servants, all supported by tributes paid by subordinate chiefs. In his sixties when Jamestown was founded, Powhatan had built his confederation piece by piece, defeating rival chiefs and taking them as sons in ritual adoption ceremonies. His plan was to isolate the English and make them into vassals, securing tools and firearms in tribute. The ensuing struggle would turn Tidewater into a war zone.³

While the gentlemen of New France were inviting Mi’kmaq chiefs to their gastronomic competitions, hungry Virginians resorted to extorting corn from Powhatan’s Indians by force, triggering a cycle of violence. The Indians ambushed one raiding party, killed all seventeen soldiers, stuffed their mouths with corn, and left the corpses for the English to find. John Smith led another party to try to capture Powhatan but instead stumbled into another ambush. Brought before the chief, Smith was subjected to the Indians’ adoption ritual—a mock execution (interrupted by the chief’s eleven-year-old daughter, Pocahontas) and theatrical ceremony which, from the Indians’ point of view, made Smith and his people into Powhatan’s vassals. Smith interpreted the situation differently: the child, overwhelmed by his charm, had begged that he be spared. Smith returned to Jamestown and carried on as if nothing had changed, flabbergasting the Indians. Skirmishes eventually led to massacres, and in 1610 the English wiped out an entire Indian village, throwing its children into a river and shooting them for sport. (Pocahontas herself was captured in 1613, married off to a colonist, and sent to back to England, where she died of illness a few years later.) The Indians gained revenge in 1622, launching a surprise attack on the expanding colony that left 347 English dead—a third of Virginia’s entire population. The English offered peace the following spring but poisoned the drinks they served at the treaty ceremony and slaughtered all 250 attendees. Warfare would continue, off and on, for decades.⁴

Despite the incompetence of Jamestown’s leaders, the Indians were on the losing side of a war of attrition. The Virginia Company continued to send wave after wave of colonists to the Chesapeake, particularly after it was discovered that tobacco grew marvelously there. Between 1607 and 1624, 7,200 colonists arrived; although only 1,200 survived, for every Virginian who died, two more came to take his or her place. Indian losses—from warfare, disease, and war-induced hunger—could not be replaced so easily. By 1669 Tidewater’s Indian population had been reduced to 2,000, 8 percent of its original level, while the English population had grown to 40,000, spreading across Tidewater, clearing Indian lands to grow tobacco.⁵

Two events changed the trajectory of Tidewater society, setting cultural patterns that persist to this day. The first came in 1617, when Pocahontas’s husband, John Rolfe, successfully transplanted West Indian strains of tobacco to Chesapeake soil, transforming Virginia from a corporate military base to a booming export-oriented plantation society almost overnight. The second was the English Civil War in the 1640s, the results of which prompted a mass exodus of the families who would form Tidewater’s aristocracy.

While tobacco was a lucrative crop and one that could be shipped back to England, cultivating it was quite labor-intensive, involving unskilled work but a great deal of it. Seedbeds had to be prepared, raked, and tended until the young plants were ready to be relocated to the main field. Kneehigh hills were dug for each one and picked clean of weeds and pests every week. Plants had to be pruned, harvested, dried, and packed for shipment by hand. Tobacco was also quick to wear out the soil and grew best on newly cleared fields.

Tidewater’s leaders recruited their workforce from the masses of desperate, malnourished laborers who’d been crowding London and other English cities. They offered prospective laborers transportation to Virginia or Maryland and a fifty-acre plot of land free of charge, in exchange for three years’ service as a “white slave” or indentured servant. Most of those who responded were single men aged fifteen to twenty-four. They quickly came to represent the majority of Tidewater’s European population. Scholars estimate indentured servants comprised between 80 and 90 percent of the 150,000 Europeans who emigrated to Tidewater in the seventeenth century. Few survived their period of servitude: the mortality rate was as high as 30 percent a year. Those who did had a reasonable chance of becoming independent farmers, and a few became very rich.

From the outset this was a society of a few haves and a great many have-nots. At the top a small cadre of increasingly wealthy plantation owners quickly came to dominate the economic and political affairs of the colony. At the bottom was an army of bound laborers who were effectively without political rights; they were expected to do as they were told and could be subjected to corporal punishment if they did not. It was a pattern that would carry on well into the twentieth century.

Life was harsh at the bottom. Indentured servants—some of whom had been kidnapped in England—were bought, sold, and treated like livestock. Wealthier colonists had a great incentive to buy the passage (and work contracts) of as many individuals as possible: the Virginia Company gave them twenty-five acres of land for every servant they transported. If, in building oneself a land empire, one wound up with surplus labor, their indentures could be sold, traded, or auctioned. As the frontier pushed farther inland in the eighteenth century, servants were bought in large groups by notorious distributors called “soul drivers” who would shackle them and “drive them through the country like a parcel of sheep,” under armed guard, to remote courthouses, where they were sold at a markup to local planters. Purchasers had an incentive to work their servants as hard as possible in order to maximize the return on their investment. Masters were allowed to beat their workers; William Byrd, gentleman of Virginia, whipped a young houseboy repeatedly and, when the boy began wetting his bed, forced him to drink pints of piss—facts Byrd matter-of-factly recorded in his diary. If a servant resisted, disobeyed, or attempted to run away, masters could add years to their terms of service. If they felt wronged or abused, they had little chance of finding redress in Tidewater’s courts, which were run by their masters’ peers.⁶

Most servants in the seventeenth-century Tidewater were from the hinterlands of London, Bristol, and Liverpool, but a handful were of African descent, starting with twenty bought from Dutch traders in 1619. Unlike the Deep South, however, Tidewater appears to have treated its African servants much as it did their white counterparts through the 1660s. White and black settlers were not segregated, and at least some blacks enjoyed the few civil rights available to commoners. Some even became masters themselves, like Anthony Johnson, who in the 1650s owned several African servants and 250 acres of land on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. Tidewater was inequitable, but it was not yet a racially based slave society.⁷

Life as a servant was harsh, brutal, and demeaning, but it did not last a lifetime, and it wasn’t an inherited condition. Those who survived their indenture received land, tools, and freedom. Like Anthony Johnson, many of them were able to become landowners, a status they could never have achieved in England. For the few immigrants who could pay their own way to Tidewater, obtaining land was even easier: as soon as they stepped off the boat in Virginia, they were entitled to 50 acres, plus 50 more for every relative or servant they brought with them. With land and servants, the aspiring planter could make a great deal of money growing tobacco for export. Profits could be reinvested in more land and servants, ultimately building considerable estates. After 1634, new arrivals could get an even better deal in the new colony of Maryland—100 acres per person—an offer that prompted many ambitious planters to move up the bay. With good health, perseverance, and a little luck, some built up substantial birthrights to pass down to their children, who were beginning in many respects to resemble the landed gentry back home.

Maryland was an oligarchy from the outset, the vast feudal preserve of Cecilius Calvert, second Lord Baltimore, whose coat of arms still graces the Maryland flag today. Calvert was given this 12-million-acre domain by a fellow Catholic, King Charles I, who liked the nobleman’s proposal to create a nominally Catholic colony where all religions would be tolerated. The initial settlement was a mixed outpost of English Catholics and Protestants at St. Mary’s City, eighty miles up the bay from Jamestown. As it attracted settlers from across the bay, Maryland would quickly come to resemble Tidewater Virginia: a Protestant-dominated tobacco colony, where indentured servants worked the land and the emergent aristocracy commanded most of the profits.⁸

Indeed, as we will see, Tidewater and Yankee New England stood at the opposite poles of the mid-seventeenth-century English-speaking world, with diametrically opposed values, politics, and social priorities. And when civil war came to England in the 1640s, they backed opposing sides, inaugurating centuries of struggle between them over the future of America.

England had been careening toward civil war for much of the century, torn between those faithful to the medieval traditions of the past and those who had embraced more modern ideas about power, trade, and religious governance. On one side was Parliament—dominated by Puritans and lawyers from London and the east of England—which was resisting the monarchy’s efforts to consolidate power, repress religious dissent, and head off what we would now call “free market reforms.” Opposing Parliament were the conservative allies of King Charles I, or “Cavaliers”: country gentlemen from the partly feudal north and west of England, the majority of England’s nobles, and the rural poor under their influence. When fighting broke out in 1642, Puritan New England backed Parliament while Tidewater remained loyal to the king.

Virginia’s governor at the time, Sir William Berkeley, was not only a Royalist but also a close acquaintance of the king, having served as one of his personal advisers in the last years of peace. One of England’s oldest noble families—the Berkeleys had arrived with William the Conqueror in 1066 and are still living in their eleventh-century family castle today—the Berkeleys were steadfast in their support of the monarchy. One of Berkeley’s brothers led a royal army while another served as the king’s wartime adviser. Berkeley himself returned to England briefly in 1644, where he fought for his king in the West Country before returning to Tidewater with a cache of weapons. In Virginia he deported the colony’s Puritan minority who, led by their Massachusetts-trained preachers, resettled across the bay to Maryland.^d After the king’s defeat and execution, Berkeley declared his loyalty to the king’s exiled son, Charles II, from whom he took his orders. The gentlemen who comprised Virginia’s General Assembly endorsed this view, passing a law that made questioning Charles II’s authority punishable by death.⁹

Berkeley strove to make his colony into a Royalist stronghold from which high-born allies of the king could continue their fight against the Puritans and their allies. Through his brothers and other supporters, Berkeley invited hundreds of these “distressed Cavaliers” to Virginia and granted them large estates and high offices on their arrival. These hard-core Royalists—many of them the younger sons or grandsons of landed aristocrats—were the founders of the vast majority of Tidewater’s leading families. Among them were Richard Lee (grandson of a Shropshire manor owner and great-great-great-grandfather to Robert E. Lee), John Washington (grandson of a Yorkshire manor owner and great-great-grandfather of George Washington), and George Mason (Royalist member of Parliament and great-great-grandfather of the namesake founding father).¹⁰

For these new elites in both Chesapeake colonies, the overriding goal wasn’t to build a religious utopia (as in early Yankeedom or the Midlands) or a complex network of Indian alliances (as in New France). Whether highborn or self-made, the great planters had an extremely conservative vision for the future of their new country: they wished to re-create the genteel manor life of rural England in the New World. By a quirk of history, they succeeded beyond their imaginations.

In the seventeenth century the English country gentlemen were, in effect, the kings of their domains. From their genteel manor houses they directed the lives and labors of the tenant farmers and day laborers who lived in the villages associated with their manors. As justices of the peace, they presided over the local courts while their sons, nephews, and younger brothers often served as the parsons of the village churches, which belonged, of course, to the official Church of England (the “Anglican” church, rebranded “Episcopal” in America after the Revolution). One of their peers represented the area in Parliament. The gentlemen were expected to show benevolence to their inferiors, host wedding parties for their servants, sponsor funerals for the poor, and display hospitality to their neighbors. They alone had the right to hunt, which was often one of their favorite pastimes. Their estates were largely self-sufficient, producing their own food, drink, livestock feed, leather, and handicrafts. (Surpluses were sold to England’s towns and cities.) On the lord’s death, virtually everything passed to his firstborn son, who had been groomed to rule; daughters were married off to the best prospects; younger sons were given a small sum of money and dispatched to make their own way as soldiers, priests, or merchants. One gentleman said children were treated like a litter of puppies: “Take one, lay it in the lap, feed it with every good bit, and drown [the other] five!”¹¹

Tidewater’s successful tobacco planters and Royalist émigrés strove to duplicate this world. They built graceful brick manors and housed their indentured tenants in cottages modeled on those at home, clustered in village-like residential areas. They bought servants with the skills to build and operate mills, breweries, smokehouses, and bakeries so that their plantations could meet all of their needs. Together with their neighbors they oversaw the construction of tidy Anglican churches and stately courthouses at convenient crossroads—institutions they controlled through their monopolization of the church vestry (which hired and fired priests) and the office of the justice of the peace (which presided over the courts). In Virginia they set up an analog to the English Parliament called the House of Burgesses, which required that all members be wealthy. (Maryland’s General Assembly had similar stipulations.) They, too, were expected to assume the role of benign patriarch toward ordinary residents, and they also sent their surpluses to England’s cities. But in one key respect they deviated from English practice: they did not disinherit their younger sons, with whom Tidewater gentlemen often felt a special bond; most had come to America precisely because they were themselves the disinherited younger sons of country gentlemen.¹²

Tidewater’s aspiring gentry created a thoroughly rural society without towns or even villages. It had no need for commercial ports and thus for cities, because the land was riven with navigable fingers of the Chesapeake, allowing each of the great planters to build his own dock. On clearing customs, oceangoing ships could sail directly to a plantation, unload the latest books, fashions, and furniture from London, and load barrels of tobacco. (Later, slaves would also arrive in this way.) “Anything may be delivered to a gentleman [in Virginia] from London, Bristol and etc., with less trouble and cost than to one living five miles in the country in England,” one English observer remarked. Few local manufacturers could compete with cheaply sourced English goods, discouraging craftsmen and industry.¹³

There were no towns at all until the end of the seventeenth century, apart from Jamestown and St. Mary’s City, and even these twin capitals remained little more than villages with a few hundred inhabitants each. Gentlemen would travel to them occasionally to convene their assembly or perhaps make a rare call on the governor but otherwise had little to do with them. Both capitals were crude and appeared abandoned when the provincial assembly was out of session, with many houses uninhabited and the taverns empty. New capitals would eventually be built in Williamsburg and Annapolis, but they, too, were government campuses, not urban communities.¹⁴ In sharp contrast to New England, there were no public schools (gentlemen’s children had live-in tutors) or town governments (the county courthouse sufficed).

By the early 1700s the Cavaliers and their descendants had turned Tidewater into a country gentlemen’s utopia, their manors lining the creeks and tributaries of the Chesapeake. Plantations were also taking shape on Albemarle and Pamlico sounds in the new colony of North Carolina and on the Atlantic shores of southern Delaware and the lower Delmarva peninsula.

Power in Tidewater had become hereditary. The leading families intermarried in both America and England, creating a close-linked cousinage that dominated Tidewater generally and Virginia in particular. The Virginia Royal Council served as that colony’s senate, supreme court, and executive cabinet, and it controlled the distribution of land. By 1724 every single council member was related by blood or marriage. Two generations later, on the eve of the American Revolution, every member was descended from a councilor who had served in 1660. In the interceding century they rewarded one another with the majority of the public lands under the colony’s control and appointments to the (very lucrative) post of collector of customs. At the county level, gentlemen controlled the distribution of justice and charity in their roles as justices of the peace and could hire and fire pastors at will from their seats on the church vestry. One newcomer recalled a gentleman’s warning him “against disobliging or offending any person of note in the Colony [because] either by blood or marriage we are almost all related and so connected in our interests that whoever of a stranger presumes to offend any one of us will infallibly find an enemy of the whole.”¹⁵

Running afoul of Tidewater gentlemen was a dangerous proposition. Late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century visitors constantly remarked on their haughty sense of personal honor and their furious reaction to the slightest insult. While the Yankee elite generally settled their disputes through the instrument of written laws, Tidewater gentry were more likely to resort to a duel. Commoners were equally prideful: arguments in the tavern commonly led to nasty fights in which it was acceptable to kick, bite, strangle, gouge out eyes, and dismember genitals of one’s opponent. Lower-status people almost never challenged their betters for fear of savage retribution, as gentlemen could have lesser persons whipped for minor offenses. When one commoner spoke out against a governor, a court ordered that he be brutally beaten by forty men, be fined £200 (a decade’s income for a peasant), have a hole bored through his tongue, and then be forever banished from Virginia. Indeed, cases that came to court were resolved by gentlemen judges who believed that issues should be decided by their own sense of justice rather than by precedents written in law books, even in matters of life and death. Court records show a clear pattern: leniency for masters and males, harsh sentences for servants and women. Even before the spread of full-fledged slavery, Tidewater’s hierarchy was maintained by the threat of violence.¹⁶

One might ask how such a tyrannical society could have produced some of the greatest champions of republicanism, such as Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and James Madison. The answer is that Tidewater’s gentry embraced classical republicanism, meaning a republic modeled after those of ancient Greece and Rome. They emulated the learned, slaveholding elite of ancient Athens, basing their enlightened political philosophies around the ancient Latin concept of libertas, or liberty. This was a fundamentally different notion from the Germanic concept of Freiheit, or freedom, which informed the political thought of Yankeedom and the Midlands. Understanding the distinction is essential to comprehending the fundamental disagreements that still plague relations between Tidewater, the Deep South, and New Spain on one hand and Yankeedom and the Midlands on the other.

For the Norse, Anglo-Saxons, Dutch, and other Germanic tribes of northern Europe, “freedom” was a birthright of free peoples, which they considered themselves to be. Individuals might have differences in status and wealth, but all were literally “born free.” All were equal before the law, and all had come into the world possessing “rights” that had to be mutually respected on threat of banishment. Tribes had the right to rule themselves through assemblies like Iceland’s Althingi, recognized as the world’s oldest parliament. Until the Norman invasion of 1066, the Anglo-Saxon tribes of England had ruled themselves in this manner. After the invasion, the lords of Normandy imposed manorial feudalism on England, but they never fully did away with the “free” institutions of the Anglo-Saxons and (Gaelo-Norse) Scots, which survived in village councils, English common law, and the House of Commons. It was this tradition that the Puritans carried to Yankeedom.

The Greek and Roman political philosophy embraced by Tidewater gentry assumed the opposite: most humans were born into bondage. Liberty was something that was granted and was thus a privilege, not a right. Some people were permitted many liberties, others had very few, and many had none at all. The Roman republic was one in which only a handful of people had the full privileges of speech (senators, magistrates), a minority had the right to vote on what their superiors had decided (citizens), and most people had no say at all (slaves). Liberties were valuable because most people did not have them and were thought meaningless without the presence of a hierarchy. For the Greeks and Romans there was no contradiction between republicanism and slavery, liberty and bondage. This was the political philosophy embraced and jealously guarded by Tidewater’s leaders, whose highborn families saw themselves as descendants not of the “common” Anglo-Saxons, but rather of their aristocratic Norman conquerors. It was a philosophical divide with racial overtones and one that would later drive America’s nations into all-out war with one another.¹⁷

Tidewater’s leaders imposed libertas on their society in countless ways. They referred to themselves as “heads” of their respective manors, dictating duties to their “hands” and other subservient appendages. Finding Jamestown and St. Mary’s City too crude, they built new government campuses in Williamsburg and Annapolis from central plans inspired by Rome; Williamsburg featured a sumptuous formal “palace” for the governor (surrounded by Versailles-like formal gardens) and the elegant Capitol (not “state house”) decorated with a relief of Jupiter, the god whose temple stood at the center of Roman civic life. They named counties, cities, and colonies after their superiors: English royals (Prince George, Prince William, Princess Anne, Jamestown, Williamsburg, Annapolis, Georgetown, Virginia, Maryland) or high nobles (Albemarle, Baltimore, Beaufort, Calvert, Cecil, Cumberland, Caroline, Anne Arundel, Delaware). While they were passionate in defending their liberties, it would never have occurred to them that those liberties might be shared with their subjects. “I am an aristocrat,” Virginian John Randolph would explain decades after the American Revolution. “I love liberty; I hate equality.”¹⁸

While the gentry enjoyed ever-greater liberties—including leisure (liberty from work) and independence (liberty from the control of others)—those at the bottom of the hierarchy had progressively fewer. Tidewater’s semifeudal model required a vast and permanent underclass to play the role of serfs, on whose toil the entire system depended. But from the 1670s onward, the gentry had an increasingly difficult time finding enough poor Englishmen willing to take on this role. Those who completed their indentures often could not support themselves in an agricultural export economy increasingly dominated by great plantations, and ex-servants led or joined rebellions in 1663, 1675, and 1683.

Slave traders offered a solution to this shortage, one developed on the English islands of the Caribbean and recently introduced in the settlements they’d created in the Deep South: the purchase of people of African descent who would become the permanent property of their masters, as would their children and grandchildren. This slave caste grew from a tenth of Tidewater’s population in 1700 to a quarter in 1720 and 40 percent in 1760. As one scholar would later put it: “The South was not founded to create slavery; slavery was recruited to perpetuate the South.” As we will see, this statement does not hold true for “the South” as a whole but rather for the distinct cultural nation of Tidewater.¹⁹ It was a strategy that would set Tidewater on a path to destruction.