Image Virginia Sport Ways: The Great Chain of Slaughter

 

Another part of the cavalier legend also had a foundation in fact. This was its association with amusements of a certain type. Here again, the sporting life of Virginia differed very much from that of New England, both as to sports actually played in the Chesapeake colony, and the general relationship between sport and society.

The most striking fact about sport in Virginia was its stratification. From an early date in the mid-seventeenth century, a hierarchy of sports was deliberately created by high authority and actively enforced by law. A special class of recreations was reserved exclusively for the colony’s ruling elite. In 1691, for example, Virginia’s governor Sir Francis Nicholson ordered the establishment of annual tournaments or field days, with prizes for feats of strength and skill. Competition was carefully restricted to “the better sort of Virginians only.” Gentlemen competed for honor among themselves, in a manner that set them apart from the rest of the population.1

By law and custom, horse-racing and betting were also reserved for gentlemen alone. People of “lower estate” were forbidden to compete, and punished when they did so. A famous example was the fate of an unfortunate artisan who failed to keep his station: “James Bullock, a Taylor, having made a race for his mare to run with a horse belonging to Mr. Matthew Slader for two thousand pounds of tobacco and cask, it being contrary to law for a laborer to make a race, being a sport only for gentlemen, is fined for the same one hundred pounds of tobacco and cask.”2

At the same time, the gentry themselves were strongly encouraged by the custom of the country to make extravagant and even ruinous bets on horses. Wagers of hundreds and even thousands of pounds of tobacco were not uncommon. In 1693, one bet between two planters in Northumberland County amounted to £22 sterling at a time when an average planter realized a net profit of only about £8 a year from the sale of his tobacco. It was this excess that caused the courts to intervene, and to insist that only the gentry could play the horses. Poor servants and slaves were permitted to look on, but only gentlemen could place bets.3

Virginia horse races were apt to be spontaneous affairs. In Rappahannock, for example, a race ground lay next to the church. On Sunday mornings, the congregation would commonly adjourn to this field, in hopes that the young bloods of the congregation might challenge each other on the spur of the moment. Even the clergy were in attendance. On at least one occasion the court summoned the testimony of the Reverend James Blair to decide a disputed wager.4

Races also occurred on court days. The gentry of the county liked to gather round a jug of peach brandy, and brag about their horses. When a wager was made, the company would shout “Done! Done!” and adjourn to an open field. The gentleman-justices themselves would sometimes leave the bench and volunteer to decide the winner. The race tracks were only ten or twelve feet wide and a quarter-mile long. At one end of the field the horses would be brought together, wild with excitement, backing and rearing as their riders struggled to turn their heads in the general direction of the finish line. A gun would be fired, and in a billowing cloud of white smoke the race was on. The awkward riders (their old-fashioned horsemanship was much despised by European visitors in the eighteenth century) sat nearly upon their horses’ necks, legs dangling straight down in long stirrups. The animals were compact and wiry—the ancestors of the American quarter horse which was bred for these races. Virginia horses lost about six inches in height during the first century of American history.5 Their heads were small in proportion to their bodies, but their powerful hindquarters allowed them to spring forward with tremendous acceleration. Thomas Anburey wrote that “If you happened to be looking the other way, the race is terminated before you can turn your head.”6

Early Virginia horse races often became brutal bloodsports in which gentlemen-jockeys lashed at one another with whip and spur, in a flying tangle of elbows and feet. Now and again, the riders might agree to a “fair race,” in which no blows were to be exchanged. But Chesapeake races were apt to be wild melees.7

Similar customs surrounded English horse races, which were run with scant regard for people of lesser rank who happened to get in the way. In Northamptonshire, for example, one gentleman wrote of another, “ … he rode down a man and the poor fellow fell from his horse.” No sympathy was shown for the unlucky plebeian who was trampled beneath the galloping hooves. Concern was expressed only for the gentleman-jockey who lost his seat.8

Horse-racing in the Chesapeake was part of a complex culture of sport, which contrasted sharply with the customs of New England.9 The Virginians looked with contempt upon the town games of Massachusetts. Thomas Jefferson wrote to his nephew Peter Carr, “Games played with the ball, and others of that nature, are too violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind.” The master of Monticello preferred a gentleman’s traditional recreations of riding and shooting. “As to the species of exercise,” he wrote, “I advise the gun. While this gives a moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprize and independence to the mind.”10

Virginia’s favorite amusements were bloodsports. There was an entire hierarchy of these gory entertainments. Virtually every male in Virginia could be ranked according to the size of animals that he was allowed to kill for his pleasure. At the top was the noblest of bloodsports—the hunting of the stag. This was the sport of kings and noblemen in the seventeenth century. It was staged in Virginia with the same elaborate pomp and ritual that had occurred in Europe.

Lesser gentry chased the fox—a quarry that the high nobility despised as low and vulgar until the sport came to be elaborately rationalized by the Meynell family in the eighteenth century. English fox hunting was not easily introduced to the New World. Then, as now, Vulpes americanus made a more elusive quarry than his Old World cousin. At great trouble and expense, the gentry of Virginia imported the red fox from England for their sport in the eighteenth century.

Before that date, fox hunting was an impromptu affair on both sides of the water. It was commonly done with the gun in the seventeenth century, and sometimes culminated in scenes of high savagery. “When they hunted last in Laxton wood,” one English gentleman wrote, “Mr. K. shot a fox before the hounds after they had run him sharply for some time, which they tore to pieces and it has given them very good blood.”11

“Very good blood” was also the object of another entertainment which was followed by the yeomanry and parish clergy on both sides of the water. This was the sport of coursing—an afternoon’s diversion, in which hares, rabbits and small vermin were hunted on foot with the aid of specially trained dogs. Such was the enthusiasm for this pedestrian slaughter that it was not uncommon to have several courses in a single day.12

Husbandmen and laborers amused themselves in a more humble manner, by murdering birds of various sizes in social rituals of high complexity. One favorite bloodsport of farmers in Virginia was called ganderpulling. By an irony of the Christian calendar, this savage event was commonly staged on Easter Monday—a day of riotous celebration in the eighteenth-century Chesapeake. An old male goose was suspended upside-down by his feet from the branch of a tree, and the neck of the bird was lathered with grease. The contestants mounted their horses and galloped past the goose, endeavoring to tear off the bird’s head by brute force as they rode by. The game was dangerous to the galloper as well as the goose. More than one contestant was pulled backward off his speeding horse and succeeded only in snapping his own neck while the goose cackled in trumph. Others lost fingers or thumbs in the gander’s angry beak. But as the contest continued, the bird’s neck was slowly stretched and torn by one contestant after another, until some rural champion finally succeeded in ripping off the head, claiming the body as his prize. In early Virginia, one man remembered that a good ganderpull was “anticipated with rapture.” The scene was a lively one—shouting crowds, a swirl of violence, the goose twisting in agony, dismounted riders rolling in the dust, and finally the climax when the carotid artery gave way and the winner rode in triumph through a shower of crimson gore.13

Apprentices enjoyed still another sort of bloodsport called cockshailing, which they played at Shrovetide. A cock or chicken was tethered to a stake, and crowd of youths tried to torture and kill it by throwing dangerous objects. The Puritans detested this barbarous amusement, and did all in their power to suppress it in New England—without entirely succeeding in doing so. But it flourished in Virginia, as it had done in the south and west of England, where one countryman wrote to another in 1668, “I cannot but give some touch of public affairs—what with the throwing at shrovetide and fighting this Lent time there’s a great mortality of Cocks.”14

Smaller boys amused themselves in yet a different way by the juvenile bloodsport of annihilating songbirds. In Devon, one of these diversions was called “muzzling the sparrow.” A local historian described it thus: “A boy had his hands tied together behind him, and the tip of one wing of a sparrow or other small bird was placed in his mouth. He then tried by the action of his teeth and lips gradually to draw the wing of the bird into his mouth and bite off its head, the bird in the meantime pecking at his cheeks and eyes and endeavoring to escape.”15

At the bottom of this hierarchy of bloody games were male infants who prepared themselves for the larger pleasures of maturity by torturing snakes, maiming frogs and pulling the wings off butterflies. Thus, every red-blooded male in Virginia was permitted to slaughter some animal or other, and size of his victim was proportioned to his social rank. Sport became a great chain of slaughter in this society. A European tourist observed with wonder, “ … everything that is called fighting is a delicious pleasure to an Englishman.”16

Image Virginia Work Ways:
The Ambivalence of the Cavalier Ethic

 

Attitudes toward pleasure in this culture were related to its ideas about work. The Wessex Royalist Sir John Oglander summarized the cavalier work ethic in a sentence. “I scorn base getting and unworthy penurious saving,” he wrote, “yet my desire is to lay up somewhat for my poor children.”1

Here was a paradox that commonly appeared in the attitudes toward work and trade among English gentlemen and Virginia planters. To characterize these workways in rounded and accurate terms is not an easy task. Most Virginia gentlemen worked harder than they cared to admit. They engaged in raising crops for the market, and as a consequence found themselves deeply engaged in trade. The great planters also functioned as merchants and bankers for their neighbors. Many owned shops, stores, ships and warehouses.2 But even as Virginians did all of these things, they did not value the doing of them as highly as did the people of Massachusetts or Pennsylvania. The work ethic in Virginia thus became a classical study in cultural ambivalence.3

Many people who actually visited the colony of Virginia—natives, immigrants and casual travelers alike—testified that the ethic of work was very weak in this society. As early as 1622, John Martin observed that in the Chesapeake, even the Indians “work better than the English.”4 The Virginians themselves commonly agreed with this assessment. From the planter’s perspective, William Byrd wrote, “Nature is very indulgent to us, and produces its good things almost spontaneously. Men evade the original curse of hard labour, and sweat as much with eating their bread as getting it. … if plenty and a warm sun did not make us lazy and hate motion and exercise.”5

Robert Beverley shared this view. In a book that generally celebrated the virtues of Virginians, he wrote, “I must … reproach my countrymen with a laziness that is unpardonable.”6 Beverley believed that the problem developed not from the climate but from the culture, and particularly from the inability of Virginians to think in what he called “oeconomic” terms. “Nay,” he declared, “they are such abominable ill husbands, that though their country is overgrown with wood, yet they have all their wooden ware from England.”7

These judgments did not accurately describe material conditions in Virginia. But in company with other evidence they revealed an important truth about cultural attitudes in that society. Many Virginians of middle and upper ranks aspired to behave like gentlemen. In the early seventeenth century an English gentleman was defined as one who could “live idly and without manual labor.”8 The words “gentleman” and “independent” were used synonymously, and “independence” in this context meant freedom from the necessity of labor.9 But in Virginia, independence could be achieved or maintained only by labor of the sort that a gentleman was trained to despise. Here was the root of an ambivalence toward “base getting” which became part of the folkways of Virginia.

These ideas about labor were closely linked with attitudes toward commerce. The gentlemen-planters of Virginia repeatedly expressed an intense contempt for trade, even as they were compelled to engage in it on a daily basis. They were even more contemptuous of traders, at the same time they were forced to deal with them. Governor William Berkeley, for example, raged against the greedy materialism of merchants. “We cannot but resent,” he wrote, “that forty thousand people should be impoverished to enrich more than forty merchants.”10 It did not trouble him that forty thousand people should enrich forty landed gentlemen. On another occasion he collectively described merchants as “avaricious persons, whose sickle hath bin ere long in our harvest already.”11

But Berkeley also recognized the necessity of these mercenary people whom he so despised. He actively recruited them for the colony, and encouraged the creation of markets and entrepôts. One of his statutes provided that if any “particular persons shall settle any such place whither the merchants shall willingly come for the sale or bringing of goods, such men shall be looked upon as benefactors to the publique.” The wording of this law did not suggest that the merchants themselves were “benefactors to the publique,” but that any man who attracted them and their wares to Virginia might be thought of in such a way.12

The same ambivalence also appeared in attitudes toward money, which Virginians liked to have, but hated to handle. The writings of William Byrd provided many examples. To his friend the Earl of Orrery, William Byrd boasted (far beyond the material fact) that he lived apart from the market: “Half a crown will rest undisturbed in my pocket for many moons together,” he wrote. But Byrd often manifested an obsessive interest in money, and shared a tendency (more common in Virginia than in New England) to rank people in proportion to their riches.13

There was a deep ambivalence in attitudes toward wealth, which was much valued by Virginians, but not for its own sake. Wealth was regarded not primarily as a form of capital or a factor of production, but as something to be used for display and consumed for pleasure. A gentleman could never appear mean-spirited (in the old-fashioned sense of niggardly and grasping) without losing something of his rank. The display of wealth was important to Virginians not only as a way of demonstrating material riches but also as a means of showing a “liberal” spirit, which was part of the ideal of a gentleman.14

The economic consequence of this attitude was debt. Most great families of Virginia fell deep into indebtedness. Even the richest planters were permanent debtors. Robert Carter of Nomini Hall had heavy debts to British creditors. In 1758, he wrote that “the produce of my land and negroes will scarcely pay the demand requisite to keep them.” He was often compelled to sell capital in order to stay afloat.15 The magnitude of private debt was greater in Virginia than in other parts of British America. After the War of Independence, it was officially determined that Americans owed about three million pounds to British creditors. Of that total, nearly half (£1.4 million) was due from the planters of Virginia, and a large part of the remainder from the neighboring colony of Maryland. In 1776, at least ten gentlemen of Virginia owed more than £5,000 to British creditors, a very large sum. Many owed in excess of £1,000, among them George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.16

Some economic historians believe that the chronic debts of Virginian gentlemen arose mainly from the difficulties of tobacco growing, and also from the structure of credit in the British empire. But it is interesting to note that chronic indebtedness had long been part of the life style of country gentry in the south and west of England. One study of the Warwickshire gentry found that heavy debts were a common and continuing part of their economic condition. In Warwickshire, as in Virginia, some men were more prudent than others, and some seasons were better than the next. Debt was sometimes an instrument of growth, and sometimes of decline. But chronic indebtedness itself was a normal condition of life.17 Among both English gentry and Virginia planters it arose not so much from a material but a cultural imperative.

Image Virginia Time Ways:
The Cavalier Idea of “Killing the Time”

 

In the year 1732, William Byrd was visiting his lands in a “retired part of the country,” and stayed the night at Tuckahoe, the home of the Randolph family. After supper another guest brought out a copy of The Beggar’s Opera and the assembled company amused themselves by reading the play aloud. “Thus,” Byrd wrote in his diary, “we killed the time.”1

This notion of “killing the time” set the Virginians apart from the people of Massachusetts. The destruction of time was not an idea which sat well with the builders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Whenever the hours hung heavily upon a New England conscience, the people of that northern region attempted to “improve the time”—an attitude far removed from the temporal folkways of Virginia.

The temporal differences between these two English cultures were remarkable in their complexity. By comparison with New England, the time ways of the Chesapeake were in some ways more relaxed, but in other respects more rigid. The people of Virginia were less obsessed than New Englanders with finding some godly purpose for every passing moment, but their lives were more tightly controlled by the rhythms of a rural life.

Time in seventeenth-century Virginia meant mainly the pulse of nature and the organic processes of life itself. Even among great planters the language of time was sometimes closer to that of American Indians than to English Puritans. William Byrd reckoned the passing of time in expressions such as “many moons together.” The rhythms of nature played a significant part in his own way of reckoning time.2

The most important of these natural rhythms might be called crop time, which in the Chesapeake arose primarily from the growing season of tobacco. In 1800, a merchant named William Tatham described in detail the tobacco cycle in Virginia. It began “as early after Christmas as the weather will permit,” with the sowing of seedbeds. The seedlings sprouted slowly, and were not ready for the fields until five months had passed. Then the farmer awaited a “planting season.” Tatham explained:

the term, season for planting, signifies a shower of rain of sufficient quantity to wet the earth … these seasons generally commence in April, and terminate in what is termed the long season in May; which (to make use of an Irishism) very frequently happens in June. … when a good shower or season happens at this period of the year … the planter hurries to the plant bed, disregarding the teeming element which is doomed to wet his skin.3

Once planted, tobacco required unremitting care. The young plants needed “hilling” and “weeding until the lay-by,” which was the happy moment when that heavy work could cease. At precisely the right moment, the plants also had to be “primed,” “topped” and “suckered.” Always they needed watching for the

“rising” of the worm. When these dreaded enemies appeared, Tatham noted, then the “whole force is to be employed in searching round each plant, and destroying this worm.” Then came the harvest—another difficult moment. If the leaf was cut a week too early it could rot in the cask; if only a few days late it might not be cured properly. In the eighteenth century, expectant planters waited anxiously for a moment when the leaves took on a slightly greyish cast, and began to feel thick and brittle between the fingers. When these signs appeared, the crop was instantly harvested. Next the curing began, another long and arduous cycle with disaster lurking at every turn.

This tobacco cycle exercised a complete temporal tyranny over the lives of Virginians. It created alternating periods of crisis and calm, and culminated in climactic moments of frantic intensity. Major events such as the lay-by and the harvest were celebrated with high enthusiasm by masters and slaves alike. For many years, Chesapeake planters kept the ancient custom of largesse or harvest-home when servants paid homage to the master and mistress, and carried round the house a pair of painted ram’s horns, trimmed with flowers.4

Natural rhythms were not the only determinants of Virginia’s time ways. Imposed upon the crop cycle was a cadence of cultural time which was regulated by the Christian calendar. Accounts were settled and rents were due on Lady Day (March 25), Midsummer’s Day (June 24), Michaelmas (September 29), and Christmas Day, in both Virginia and southern England. Events such as Twelfth Night, Shrovetide, Lent, Easter, Ascension and Lady Day were also times of high celebration. Whitsunweek was a long holiday. So also was Easter Monday and Hock Tuesday, the second Tuesday after Easter. Many saints’ days were also observed in the Chesapeake.5 The climax of the year was Christmas, a happy season of parties, dances, visits, gifts and celebration. On Christmas Eve, for example, Philip Fithian noted that “Guns were fired this Evening in the Neighborhood, and the negroes seem to be inspired with new Life.”6

The most elemental acts of life were regulated by these rhythms. The season of marriage in Virginia, for example, was determined by the Anglican calendar and the crop cycle. The favored time for marriage fell in the period between Christmas and Ash Wednesday when Lent began. Few Virginians married during Lent; the eight weeks from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday were a period when marriage had long been prohibited to Anglicans. After Easter, the number of marriages rose moderately, but remained far below the winter peak. They continued at a low level in the planting season, revived after the harvest, and then fell again in the weeks before Christmas, which was another period when marriage was prohibited in the Church of England. This rhythm was different from the marriage cycle in Puritan Massachusetts and Quaker Pennsylvania, but it was the same as in the south and west of England. In the Chesapeake it was highly stable, recurring every year from the mid-seventeenth century to the late eighteenth. In this historian’s Maryland family, it has persisted even into the mid-twentieth century.7

Fertility also had a distinctive rhythm in Virginia. Babies were made in the spring, more than in any other season. This pattern also appeared in most parts of British America, but its magnitude was exceptionally large in the Chesapeake colonies—larger than in Puritan Massachusetts or Quaker Pennsylvania. In one parish of tidewater Maryland, twice as many babies were conceived in the peak months of May, June and July as in February, March or April when conceptions fell to their lowest level through the year. The cause was a complex interplay of many factors—nutrition, morbidity, the crop cycle and the Christian calendar. The amplitude of this fertility cycle demonstrates that the people of Virginia lived closer to the seasons than did the Puritans in New England or Quakers in Pennsylvania.8

The Virginians regulated their lives more by these natural and cultural rhythms than by mechanical clocks or mathematical calendars. They also thought in much the same way about the life cycle itself. In a generation when Puritan ministers in Massachusetts normally defined old age in quantitative terms as life after sixty, Virginians took a very different view of the subject. “Age,” wrote William Byrd II, “should be dated from the declension of our vigor, and the impairing of our faculties, rather than from the time we have lived in the world.”9

These general time ways in Virginia were marked by many variations. In particular, the temporal lives of individuals varied according to their social rank. Time was hierarchical in Virginia. Gentleman demonstrated their status by making a great show of temporal independence. The diaries of gentry in Virginia and England during the seventeenth century displayed a cultivated contempt for temporal regularity. An example was the time of rising from bed. The diary of Bullen Reynes, kept alternately in French and English, was very interesting in that respect. One morning he might rise at six or earlier; on another he would stay abed till noon or even later. Early risings tended to be recorded in English; late sleepings were noted in a fractured French:

Je dormi tout le matin [sic].

Je dormi jusqua deux heures [sic].10

This English gentlemen kept his insouciant schedule not merely because it pleased him. It also demonstrated his independence—a condition fundamental to the status of a gentleman.

Very different was the temporal condition of servants and slaves. Their time was not their own. It belonged to their masters, who decreed that a field slave must work from “day clean” to “first dark.” A slave had very little control over daylight time except on Sundays and holidays which were days of riotous celebration. Some such hierarchy of time has existed in most cultures, but rarely has it been as stark as in Tidewater Virginia.11

The temporal hierarchy of Virginia ranked people largely by their ability to regulate their own time whenever and however they pleased. Time-killing thus became an expression of social rank. Through many centuries, when the people of Virginia found a moment of leisure, they “killed the time” with any lethal weapon that came to hand. A dice box did nicely, or a pack of playing cards, or a book of dramatic readings, or long conversation at table in the gathering dusk of a Chesapeake “evening”—a word which was enlarged in this culture to include the entire afternoon. The progeny of the New England Puritans, on the other hand, preferred to “improve the time” by inventing alarm clocks and daylight saving time and by turning every passing moment to a constructive purpose. Here were two distinctly different time ways which lay very near the heart of regional cultures in British America.

Image Virginia Wealth Ways:
Cavalier Ideas of the Material Order

 

“Praised be to God,” wrote a gentleman of Virginia in 1686, “I neither live in poverty nor pomp, but in a very good indifferency, and to a full content.” This ideal of material moderation was widely shared by Virginians.1 The reality, however, was very different. From the outset, the distribution of wealth was profoundly unequal. During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century it became even more so. Magnitudes of material inequality varied from one part of the colony to another, but the general trend was very much the same throughout the tidewater region.

In terms of their possessions, the adult male population of Virginia was divisible into several groups. At the top were the planters, who owned much of the land, most of the servants and nearly all of the slaves in the colony. The size of this tidewater elite was relatively large by comparison with other ruling groups. In point of numbers, the Chesapeake gentry were more like a large continental nobility than the exceptionally small aristocracy of England. As many as 10 percent of adult males belonged to this group. Together they owned 50 to 75 percent of productive assets in Virginia.

Below them was a stratum of yeomen who owned their own land and tilled it with their own hands, often with the help of a servant or two. This group of small freeholders was always a minority of Virginia’s population from 1680 to 1760—in many counties, a very small minority. Overall, it ranged from 20 to 30 percent of the population.

The bottom 60 to 70 percent of Virginia’s male population owned no land at all, and very little property of any other sort. This landless majority included a large number of tenant farmers, who worked the land of others and owned no real estate. Their numbers varied from one part of Virginia to another; in some neighborhoods they were the great majority. Below these tenants were poor white laborers, servants and black slaves. They were a rural proletariat who in most cases owned next to nothing—not even themselves.2

Overall, the Gini ratio for wealth distribution in Virginia was in the range of .60 to .75 during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. It was rising in the direction of still greater inequality.3 This typical pattern of wealth stratification in the

Chesapeake was much less equal than to Massachusetts, where Gini ratios ranged from .40 to .60 in most New England towns. Throughout the Puritan colonies, the middle class of yeoman farmers and artisans made up the great majority of the population. Slaves, servants and tenants were comparatively few.4

The Virginia pattern was, however, much the same as in the south and west of England during the seventeenth century. Historian J.P.P. Horn has made a comparative study of wealth distribution in Gloucestershire and the Chesapeake colonies. He concludes that “one is immediately struck by the similarity. Both had large numbers of poor, both had middling groups making up about 30 to 40 per cent of the population, and both had a small elite of rich comprising 10 to 12 per cent.” In both Gloucestershire and Virginia, the middling ranks were minorities, and wealth was largely concentrated in the hands of a small elite.5

The leading cause was the method of land distribution, which was managed in a manner very different from Massachusetts. In Virginia, the land belonged to the Crown. Access was carefully controlled by the Royal Governor and Council. This narrow oligarchy of great planters was able to dominate the distribution of land for the better part of two centuries. The result was a pattern of ownership opposite to that of New England in a great many ways. Only a few tracts of land in Virginia went to corporate groups; most were given directly to individuals. One basis for distribuiton was the headright system in which a “privilege” of fifty acres was given for every person transported to Virginia—another device by which a large part of Virginia’s land was controlled by a few great holders.6

The average size of individual land patents in Virginia was always larger than in New England. They reached their peak in the last years of Governor Berkeley’s administration, at 890 acres on the average. Some grants were as large as 20,000 acres, or more than thirty square miles—an area larger than entire towns in Massachusetts.7

A few were of even greater size. The leading example was Virginia’s “northern neck,” a vast area of more than two million acres bounded by the Rappahannock and Potomac rivers. This enormous tract, three times larger than the colony of Rhode Island, was granted by Charles II to his Royalist supporters after the Restoration. Title was acquired by Thomas Lord Culpeper, and later passed by inheritance to Thomas Lord Fairfax, whose family held it until after the War of Independence. Many other holdings were similar in structure, though not in size Beverley manor, for example, was an area of 118,000 acres which had been given to William Beverley in 1736 for an annual rent of one pound for every thousand acres.8

A large proportion of land grants in Virginia were awarded by the Council to its own members and their kin—Carters, Byrds, Wormeleys, Beverleys, Fitzhughs and others. The contrast with New England could scarcely have been more complete. In Massachusetts, access to the land was controlled by men of middling status who used it to reproduce families of their own rank. In Virginia, the distribution of land was dominated by an elite who employed it to maintain their own hegemony. The authority of Virginia’s first families rested in part upon this material base.

Virginia’s planting elite owned not merely a large proportion of arable farmland in the tidewater, but also much of what little urban real estate there was in the colony. A case in point was a little trading town optimistically called Urbanna, which stood on Rosebud Creek across from Rosegill, the great house of the Wormeley family. The entire town was built on fifty acres of Wormeley land. For many years the Wormeleys dominated the affairs of Urbanna—by law when possible, by force if need be. When a building project displeased Ralph Wormeley, he simply sent his servants across Rosebud Creek with orders to pull it down.9

Other planters also behaved as if they owned the Anglican churches near their estates. In 1747, an Anglican minister named William Kay infuriated the great planter Landon Carter by preaching a sermon against pride. The planter took it personally, and sent “his kindred relations, or such as were subject to him” and ordered them to nail up the doors and windows of all the churches in which Kay preached.10

These great tidewater families also controlled much undeveloped land on the western frontier of Virginia. The Byrd family, for example, acquired vast tracts of virgin territory in the Piedmont and the Southside. So also did many other great planters. The frontier in the southern colonies never functioned as an engine of equality; its effect on wealth distribution was to reinforce dominant tendencies in the material culture that was carried to it.

In some parts of Virginia a very large proportion of the white population were tenants of these great landed families. Many white householders owned no land at all, and not even the roofs over their heads. This was the especially the case in the Northern Neck, where the Fairfax family had vast proprietary holdings and the great majority of all householders were its tenants. The Northern Neck was exceptional in that respect, but the number of tenant-farmers was also large throughout many tidewater counties, and in the Piedmont as well.11

Entire estates such as Beverley Manor on the Rappahannock were worked by leaseholders who paid rent in money, labor and a share of their crops. Southern share-cropping was not an invention of the post-Civil War period. Before the end of Governor Berkeley’s administration, it was well established in tidewater Virginia, where it had been introduced from southern England.12 As late as 1724, the word “farming” in Virginia still meant “tenant farming” in the English sense—a meaning it had already lost in Massachusetts.13 This was an echo of something very old in the Western world, and at the same time the beginning of something new—a material order destined to spread throughout the American south from the seventeenth century to the twentieth.

This material system supported the cultural achievements of Virginia gentlemen. It also produced a degraded caste of poor whites and an exploited black proletariat. There were large numbers of desperately poor farm workers in seventeenth-century Virginia. Some were indentured servants; others were tenants; a few were free laborers who wandered from job to job. The condition of the working poor in the Chesapeake was as harrowing as it had been in England. They were required to work from sunup to sun-down. They slept wherever they could find shelter in sheds, barns and filthy lofts. They dressed in rough, baggy linsey-woolsey trousers, with ill-fitting shirts tied at the waist with a bit of yarn, or perhaps a piece of green vine. Their diet consisted mainly of a gruel made of corn. And on top of all else they were despised as the refuse of the earth by the people who exploited them. In all of this, Virginia and England were similar; Massachusetts was a world apart.14

The working poor of Virginia, miserable as they may have been, were not the lowest stratum of the white population in this colony. At the very bottom were dependent paupers who were supported by the Anglican parishes. Pauper poverty was a persistent problem in Virginia, as it had been throughout the south of England. Where New England towns spent most of their taxes for the support of churches and schools, southern parishes were compelled to contribute the bulk of their hard-won public funds to poor relief. Here again, they resembled southwestern England in the seventeenth century.15

Another part of Virginia’s wealth ways was its system of inheritance. From an early date the laws of the colony insisted that primogeniture and entail must apply in all intestate estates. Whenever a Virginian died without a valid will, the eldest son inherited the homestead and all the lands, in fee tail rather than fee simple. This law had a genuine impact upon inheritance practices, for many Virginians died intestate.16

Planters who prepared their own testaments were permitted to do as they pleased. In the early and mid-seventeenth century, few of them observed the rules of primogeniture. Most divided their lands and chattels amongst their several children. The greater abundance of land in the New World allowed parents more latitude in that respect. As late as 1724, Hugh Jones wrote that this practice was customary in Virginia, “the tracts being divided every age among several children not unlike gavelkind in Kent.”17

But these divisions were not equal, and the eldest son tended to be specially favored. Often he inherited the “great house,” if the family was fortunate enough to own one. Younger sons commonly received less, and youngest sons got least of all. In 1699 Virginia planter John Washington (himself a youngest son) testified to the custom of the country. “I had not the value of twenty shillings of my father’s estate,” he wrote bitterly, “I being the youngest and therefore the weakest which generally comes off short.”18

As time passed, the custom of primogeniture grew stronger in Virginia. The proportion of testators who gave their land to a single child increased steadily. In western Albemarle County, for example, during the 1750s less than 8 percent of property owners with two or more children left all or most of their real estate to a single heir. That proportion rose to 19 percent in the 1760s, and 26 percent in the 1770s. The same trend appeared much earlier in tidewater counties. When land ran short, parents quickly abandoned the principle of partibility.19

The primary purpose of these customs was not to serve the interest of individuals, but to promote the welfare of the family and even the estate. When, for example, a member of the Newdigate family disposed of his lands in Warwickshire, he wrote, “ … my wife shall have the possession of the whole during her life, not only thereby the better to maintain my children, but also for the better increase of the profits of my lands.” The land itself seemed more in his mind than his own kin. More than one English gentlemen believed that his estate did not exist to serve posterity; but that posterity existed to serve the estate.20

The same concern also appeared in the Chesapeake colonies where even very rich men were forced to choose between the interest of individual children and the welfare of the family. When every child was given an equal share, the family tended to decline in status. In Maryland, for example, when a Huguenot gentleman named Mareen Duvall divided his large estate equally amongst twelve children, only three were able to marry into families of their fathers’ rank. The rest were wed to yeomen or husbandmen. The entire family lost status as a consequence of partible inheritance.21 In general, inheritance customs were very similar in the Chesapeake and southwestern England. They were an important factor in maintaining social hierarchies on both sides of the Atlantic.22

Altogether the wealth ways of Virginia were similar to those of southern England in many ways—in the small and very powerful class of landed gentry, in the large majority of landless tenants and laborers, in the minority status of its middle class, in the general level of wealth inequality (Gini ratios of .60 to .75), in the magnitude of poverty and in the degradation of the poor. The rise of this wealth system cannot be explained merely in terms of market relationships or material factors. It was shaped by the values of Virginia’s ruling elite, and transmitted through social institutions from one generation to the next.

Image Virginia Rank Ways: A System of Extended Orders

 

Virginia’s wealth ways developed within a system of stratification, which is not easily translated into the social language of a later age. Even in its own time, it was commonly described in metaphorical terms—which may still be the best way to approach it. In the year 1699, for example, an English landowner named Richard Newdigate explained his idea of society by a metaphor that came readily to the mind of a country gentleman. Society, he wrote, was like the landscape of his native Warwickshire. The common people were the grass that grew in the fields. The nobles and gentry were the trees that shaded the grass. And the clergy were the cherries that hung from the trees.1

That curious image was not unique to its author. Many similar metaphors of social stratification were carried outward to the Chesapeake by English emigrants in the seventeenth century. These ideas were similar in some respects to those that went to

Massachusetts. Both Anglo-American cultures preserved many forms of inequality which had existed in the mother country. Neither had modern class systems in which rank was determined by riches. In those respects, Virginia and Massachusetts were the same.

In other ways, however, these two ranking systems were different. New England, as we have seen, had a truncated system of social orders. The Virginians, on the other hand, extended the full array of English social orders, and reinforced them. There was much discussion of this ranking system among English country gentlemen during the period when Virginia was founded. Most described it as a hierarchy of “orders” and “degrees.” In the year 1630 one observer who signed himself “Thomas Westcote, Gent.” wrote that in Devon “there are (as I conceive it) but four degrees of difference.” He labeled them “1. nobility or gentility; 2. yeomanry and husbandmen; 3. merchants; 4. day laborers and hirelings.”2 Others offered more elaborate descriptions. Camden in his Britannia, and Dugdale in his Diary, enumerated no fewer than six ranks of “esquires” alone, plus many shadings of “gentility.” The authors of these various taxonomies differed in many details. In particular, country gentlemen were never very clear about the proper place of merchants in the scheme of things. Thomas Westcote ranked them below the “husbandmen” who were his tenant farmers; but others put them closer to the top; and some set them to the side in another social dimension altogether. Despite these differences, nearly everyone agreed on the fundamental fact that rural England was a layered society of high complexity—a hierarchy of orders and estates.3

Many twentieth-century historians have tried to translate these social orders into materialist terms. But most conceptions of social rank in the seventeenth century were not materialist. Westcote, for example, wrote that gentlemen and nobles were “not only such as by descent from ancient and worthy parentage are so, but those also as by their own proper virtues, valiant actions, travels, learning and other good deserts, have been and are by their sovereign advanced thereto.”4 In the same vein, William Harrison wrote that “gentlemen be those whom their race and blood, or at least their virtues, do make noble and known.” In both England and Virginia gentility was normally defined in terms of ancient and worthy descent, virtue and valor, reputation and fame. Most of all, gentility was a matter of honor.5

This ranking system was more rigid than a modern class system. In the twentieth century, status changes instantly with one’s material possessions; in consequence, many studies find that social mobility (in small steps) is a common and even normal part of the ranking system. In a world of social orders movement was more constrained in some respects, and less so in others. But status was also more brittle, and more easily shattered—by loss of honor for example.

All of these characteristics were carried to Virginia. In the period from 1650 to 1775, few men in that colony succeeded in rising above the social order in which they were born. Many servants became freemen, but comparatively few rose to the rank of freeholder. Further, historian Martin Quitt finds that “not a single indentured servant who arrived after 1640 appears to have won a seat in the assembly before 1706.” Further, Quitt also discovered that “apparently none of the burgesses from 1660 to 1706 was descended from indentured servants who emigrated after 1640.” Virginia’s social system had been more fluid before the arrival of Governor Berkeley. But by 1676, the rigidity of social orders was very great. It was exceptionally difficult to cross the great divide that separated “common folk” and “gentle folk” in that colony.6

The psychological cement of this system was a culture of subordination which modern historians call deference. Country gentlemen in England and Virginia normally expected a display of social deference from their inferiors, and by and large they received it. “Everybody offered me abundance of respect,” William Byrd entered in his diary on more than one occasion.7 Gentlefolk and common folk agreed on the fundamental fact that social deference was normal in Virginia. The classical account, often quoted by historians, is the autobiography of Devereux Jarrett, who was born in the lowest order. “We were accustomed to look upon, what were called gentle folks, as beings of a superior order,” he remembered. “For my part, I was quite shy of them, and kept off at a humble distance.”8

This relationship created intense feelings of anxiety and fear among the “common folk,” in a manner that is not easy for people of another world to understand. A clergyman named James Ireland remembered an encounter with a Virginia gentleman: “When I viewed him riding up, I never beheld such a display of pride in any man. … arising his deportment, attitude and gesture; he rode a lofty elegant horse … his countenance appeared as bold and daring as satan himself.”9

Social rank in Virginia was an extended hierarchy of deferential relationships. Even the greatest planters were conscious of a rank above them, which was occupied by the King himself and the royal family. Distant as the sovereign may have been, the gentry of Virginia thought much about him. William Byrd even dreamed about imaginary intimacies with members of the royal family, as did many English-speaking people in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century. “I … dreamed the King’s daughter was in love with me,” he wrote in his diary on one occasion—a common fantasy in the minds of seventeenth-century Englishmen, who were obsessed with the feelings of those above them.10

Just as the gentlemen of Virginia deferred to their King, so the yeomanry were expected to defer to gentlemen, servants were required to defer to their yeoman masters, and African slaves were compelled to submit themselves to Europeans of every social rank. These rules were generally obeyed in Virginia. Acts of criminal violence, for example, were rarely committed on people of higher rank by social inferiors.

Deference also had a reciprocal posture called condescension—a word which has radically changed its meaning in the past two hundred years. To condescend in the seventeenth and eighteenth

Image

The iconography of deference in Royalist England appears in a self-portrait by the court painter Anthony Van Dyck. This work had a very different purpose from self-portraiture in our own time. Van Dyck sought to celebrate a spirit of subordination, obligation and deference in his hierarchical world. The artist’s right hand points to an enormous sunflower, while his left hand fingers a heavy gold chain. In Thynne’s Emblems and Epigrams presented to Sir Thomas Egerton the sunflower was made to represent the bond between king and people, for “just as the sunflower turns to the sun for strength and sustenance, so the subject turns toward his monarch.” The same symbol also appeared in The Mirror of Majestie (1618), where the courtier is compared to a sunflower, “waiting upon the sonne of his Majestie” (Brown, Van Dyck, 147). Another symbol of obligation was Van Dyck’s golden chain, which had been given to him by Charles I, together with a portrait medallion of the king. These hierarchical relationships were thought to exist not merely between the king and his loyal subjects, but between superiors and inferiors of every rank.

centuries was to treat an inferior with kindness, decency and respect. The gentlefolk of Virginia were taught to “condescend” in this special sense, and many of them tried to do so. St. George Tucker recalled that in colonial Virginia “the rich rode in Coaches, or Chariots, or on fine horses, but they never failed to pull off their hats to a poor man whom they met, and generally appeared to me to shake hands with every man in a Court-yard, or a Church-yard.” Gentlemen and ladies were taught to “condescend” graciously to their inferiors in this manner.11

But not all of them learned to do so. The social reality was sometimes very far from this ideal. The darker side of deference was a common attitude of contempt for the poor and weak and unlucky. This was a world without pity. Charles Woodmason described an encounter in the low country of South Carolina with the vestrymen of St. Mark’s parish—many of whom were transplanted tidewater Virginians:

When I first came over, they advis’d me to marry—a circumstance I am wholly unfit for, as being both old and impotent for many years past, ’thro a fall received from an horse, and a kick received in the scrotum. … I told our vestry my unfitness, which they laughed at as a joke.12

In all of these respects, Virginia’s system of stratification was very similar to that in the south and west of England. In another way, however, the rank ways of that colony were profoundly different from those of the mother country. To the English system of social orders, Virginians added the even more rigid category of race slavery. Sir William Berkeley himself played a major role in its development. He tried first to establish an Indian slave trade. In 1666, he wrote:

I think it is necessary to destroy all these northern Indians. … ’Twill be a great terror and example and instruction to all other Indians … it may be done without charge, for the women and children will defray it.13

When these efforts failed, Berkeley encouraged the development of African slavery. It is important to remember the timing of its appearance. Slavery came late to Virginia. The first Africans appeared in the colony as early as 1619; a census of 1625 enumerated 23 blacks.14 But when Sir William Berkeley first arrived, there were fewer Africans in the Chesapeake than in New England or New Netherlands. Their legal status remained very unclear. The concept of chattel slavery was defined very gradually in a series of statutes through the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Several of the major statutes were probably written by Sir William Berkeley himself.15

The development of slavery in Virginia was a complex process—one that cannot be explained simply by an economic imperative. A system of plantation agriculture resting upon slave labor was not the only road to riches for Virginia’s royalist elite. With a little imagination, one may discern a road not taken in southern history. In purely material terms, Virginia might have flourished as did her northern neighbors, solely by complex speculations in land and trade, and by an expansive system of freehold farming. But Virginia’s ruling elite had other aims in mind. For its social purposes, it required an underclass that would remain firmly fixed in its condition of subordination. The culture of the English countryside could not be reproduced in the New World without this rural proletariat. In short, slavery in Virginia had a cultural imperative. Bertram Wyatt-Brown writes, “ … the South was not founded to create slavery; slavery was recruited to perpetuate the South.”16

But this solution created another set of problems. The harsh reality of slavery undercut the cultural ideal that it was meant to serve. The result was an elaborate set of subterfuges, in which Virginia planters tried to convince themselves, if no one else, that their peculiar system was little different from that which had existed in rural England. As early as 1727, William Byrd II wrote to the Earl of Orrery, “Our poor negroes are freemen in comparison of the slaves who till your ungenerous soil; at least if slavery consists in scarcity, and hard work.”17

Other subterfuges were also resorted to. A slave was rarely called a slave in the American south by his master. Slaves were referred to as “my people,” “my hands,” “my workers,” almost anything but “my slaves.” They were made to dress like English farm workers, to play English folk games, to speak an English country dialect, and to observe the ordinary rituals of English life in a charade that Virginia planters organized with great care.

In the end, these fictions failed to convince even their creators. William Byrd, in a more candid mood, confessed to the Earl of Egmont in 1736 that slavery was a great evil. It was typical of him (and others of his rank) to believe that it was hateful not so much because of its effect on the slave but because of what it did to their masters. “They blow up the pride, and ruin the industry of our white people,” he wrote, “ … another unhappy effect of my negroes is the necessity of being severe.”18

William Byrd, in company with many large planters, came to favor a parliamentary prohibition of the slave trade. But this was after his status as a country gentleman was secure. If slavery was not quite what Virginians really wanted, it carried them closer to their conservative utopia than any alternative which lay within reach.19

Image The Virginia Comity:
Patterns of Migration, Settlement and Association

 

In the year 1754, a planter of high rank named Peter Fontaine gave his brothers a prescription for social happiness in Virginia. “The most happy state this life affords,” he wrote, “is a small estate which will … set him above the necessity of submitting to the humors and vices of others. … One thousand acres of land will keep troublesome neighbors at a distance.”1

Few Virginia families were able to achieve this material goal, but many shared the same dream. In consequence, patterns of settlement in the Chesapeake colonies were very different from those in Massachusetts. Despite strong official efforts to encourage the growth of towns and cities, the people of Virginia preferred to scatter themselves across the countryside. Many visitors remarked upon the Virginians’ taste for “living solitary and unsociable … confused and dispersed.” But their houses were not scattered at random across the countryside. By the mid-seventeenth century, a distinct system of settlement had developed in Virginia—small market villages straggling along major streams, large plantations and little farms.2

This pattern was not invented in the New World. English travelers commonly recorded an impression that they had seen it all before. The little towns of Virginia reminded them of small market centers in the south and west of England. William Hugh Grove, for example, thought that the market town of Yorktown resembled Richmond Hill in Surrey.3 Tidewater plantations were often compared to English manorial communities. Grove observed that the great houses, with their surrounding servant quarters “shew like little villages.” A French traveler in Virginia thought that they had “the appearance of a small town.” Other tourists in the mother country had recorded similar impressions of larger manors throughout southwestern England.4 The small dispersed farms of Virginia also reminded observers of settlement patterns in southern England. Robert Beverley wrote, “‘the neighborhood is at much the same distance as in the country in England. … The goodness of the roads and the fairness of the weather bring people together.”5

In the absence of townships, local attachments were not as strong in Virginia as in New England, and rates of geographic migration were much higher. Persistence rates (by decade) for the

Image

free whites were only about 40 to 50 percent in seventeenth-century Virginia, compared with 60 to 70 percent in most Massachusetts towns.6 Migration in Virginia tended to be more hierarchical than in New England. A study of geographic mobility in Massachusetts found remarkably little difference between rich and poor in rates of persistence. But in the Chesapeake colonies, that disparity was very great.7

Studies of migration in England have not been done by methods which permit exact comparison. But the best available evidence suggests that persistence rates in the Chesapeake colonies were similar to those in those parts of England from which the most Virginians came. Rates of migration in Northampton County, Virginia, for example, were almost exactly the same as in the parish of Cogenhoe, Northamptonshire.8

This system of migration and settlement had an impact upon patterns of association in Virginia. The primary units of belonging were the family and the rural “neighborhood,” a word often used in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to describe a group of ten or twenty households which were close enough to think of themselves as neighbors. The size of these rural neighborhoods was much the same in the Chesapeake and the west of England.9

As one generation succeeded another, neighborhoods tended to become kin-groups. Ties of blood and marriage created a web of increasing density. The members of these kin-neighborhoods worked together, played together, and went to church and court days together. They borrowed from one another, becoming also a network of credit and barter relationships. Gifts were frequently exchanged within these groups. The most important time for gift-giving was the new year. Cousins and neighbors exchanged presents such as sugar loafs, pomegranates, capons, spices, tobacco pipes, porcelain dishes. This tradition had been specially strong in the south of England—stronger than in the North or East Anglia. “Sussex is the freest place in England for the giving of New Year’s gifts,” one gentleman observed in 1622. The custom was also stronger in Virginia than in New England.10

Among the high elite, patterns of association were a little different. Virginia’s elite tended to mix with others of their own rank at a greater distance through the colony. But in other respects, the structure of these relationships was the same as within small neighborhoods of middling farmers. The gentry also increasingly became a cousinage, working and living together in unitary relationships of increasing intensity.11

Diaries on both sides of the Atlantic recorded the density of this associative pattern:

10 April 1649 [visiting with] Sir Thomas Wilbraham, my cozen Thomas, my cozen Roger Wilbraham of Derfold & my cozen Peter, my cozen John Bellot, Mr. Morgell & my cozen Ed. Nyonhall with divers others.

11 April at Baddesley, nothing remarkable

12 April at Baddesley. That day my cozen Peter Wilbraham and his wife, my cozen Rachel Lothian and my cozen Alice Wilbraham were here.

13 April at Stoke; in the afternoon my cozen Roger Wilbraham and old cozen Bellot came thither.12

These neighborhoods were intensely curious about strangers. When one West Countryman was traveling in England from

Somerset to Berkshire, he recorded many instances of this attitude. At Castle Cary in Somerset he wrote, “A crowd gathered and asked of what country I was,” though he was only a few miles from home. The same thing happened to him at Andover in Hampshire and Reading in Berkshire. A similar attitude also existed in Virginia.13

In southwestern England and tidewater Virginia, the rhythm of association was much the same. Through the week, people worked on their farms and plantations, mixing mostly with their own families and neighbors. But on church days and court days, the scale of association suddenly changed. Virginians of all ranks and conditions met and mingled at their parish churches and county courthouses, which were favorite places for buying and selling, racing and gambling, meeting and gossiping.

This tidewater pattern followed the prevailing customs in southwestern England. The seventeenth-century diary of an affluent Devon yeoman named William Honeywell, for example, detailed very much the same sort of life in the West Country of England, near the town of Exeter. Most days, Honeywell labored on his land. He had daily contacts with what he called his “principal friends” in his rural neighborhood, and he remembered them all in his will:

To my principal friend Mrs. Staplehill forty pounds, to my delighted sure friend Mr. Estchurch, thirty pounds, to my singular great friend Mr. Simon Clifford twenty pounds, to my constant friend Mr. Bollen twenty pounds, to my fast friend and cousin Mr. Bagwell of Exon twenty pounds, to my trusty friend Mr. Augustine Rackley five pounds, to my ancient and loving friend Mr. Simons five pounds.

Several times a year William Honeywell traveled to the shire town on court day:

August 6 [1602].—I did reap my rye. … August 10.—I rode to Exeter at the Assize and staid at Hole’s myself and horse, and spent there xvid. … August 11, 12, 13.—I remained at the Assizes. I bought a pair of shoes, and paid 2s. 6d. I bought a pair of boots, and a pair of shoes, and am to pay 9s. I spent there this week in horse and self 15s. …

William Honeywell’s diary also showed that Sundays were a time for recreation in rural Devon:

August 22—I went to Trusham Church. After evening prayers went to bowles.14

These patterns of association were closely interwoven with the structure of material life in southwestern England. The inhabitants of that region were not isolated subsistence farmers. A large part of its social life consisted of market relationships. Our Devon yeoman William Honeywell accumulated an estate of several hundred pounds sterling. His wealth did not sit idle in a strong chest. It was loaned in sums of ten or twenty pounds to neighbors of all ranks and conditions. Most lenders charged a fixed interest of a shilling on a pound (5.0%), the custom of the country. A few were allowed to borrow without interest. Most loans were shortterm transactions, settled at Christmas, Candlemas or Lady Day.

Altogether, a large part of this Devon yeoman’s wealth was liquid capital which was carefully invested in a local money market and brought handsome returns. In the year 1600, for example, Honeywell reckoned his total assets at £440, of which £220 were stock and household goods, and £211 were loaned to his neighbors. At the same time he also owed £80 to others.15

Here was a capital market without capitalists, a financial market without banks, and a money market without middlemen of any kind. It was a web of many small transactions among family, friends and neighbors. Most countrymen participated in proportion to their wealth without distinctions of rank or station. Agreements were not reduced to writing but made orally in the presence of witnesses. The memory of the community thus became the record of its transactions. An oral contract was thought to be binding:

Jan. 14 [1599]. I agreed with Hugh Clampitt and Arthur Home’s son-in-law to build the barn at Riddon … I must pay him 56 shillings 8 pence and if I bring the water to the place, then he is to abate five shillings. Hugh Clampitt hath given his word to see it finished … and this agreement was between us in the presence of George Murch, and I gave him fourpence in earnest.16

Some of the transactions became triangular exchanges, in which debts and credits passed current to a third party.

June 23, 1601. I lent to Dick Drake of Morchard, on the 23rd of June five pounds in old gold, 2 Royals and 5 angels, and one piece of twenty shillings. He engaged himself with a great many oaths not to exchange it, but he would deliver it to his Aunt and have silver for it: he promised on his soul’s health to bring it whole, in the presence of my sister Elisabeth.17

In the margin next to this entry, Honeywell later noted, “paid by Mrs. Thomas Clifford.”

When William Honeywell’s loans were not repaid, he went to law to recover them even from members of his own family. The result was a vast tangle of litigation in the country courts of southern England. Large numbers of little cases were tried without lawyers, and settled quickly by a member of the local gentry. The diaries of Chesapeake planters described precisely the same patterns as did the journals of southwestern England.18

This system of association was linked to a special idea of social bonding and belonging, in which reputation played a large part. Much depended on one’s “standing” in the eyes of neighbors, friends and family. Particularly important was that form of reputation which Virginians called honor.

Honor in Virginia was compounded of two ideas. One of them was what historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown calls “primal honor,” which meant physical courage and tenacity of will—in short, honor as valor. This was the meaning that Nathaniel Bacon had in mind when he cried out to his followers in 1676: “Come on, my hearts of gold! He that dies in the field lies in the bed of honor.”19 The other idea had to do with gentility, breeding, character and good conduct. This was honor as virtue. One English moralist in 1616 wrote, “ … honor in [its] true definition is a certain reverence, which one man yieldeth to another extraordinarily, for his virtuous merit, and worthy desert, so that it should not be wealth but virtue, which should make an honorable man.” An honorable person never lied, cheated, stole, or betrayed his family or friends. He was not disloyal, cowardly or meanspirited.20

These two ideals of honor-as-valor and honor-as-virtue were interwoven in a creed that had great force in the culture of Virginia. Honor was a hierarchical principle. A high-born gentleman had great honor. A yeoman had less honor, but was thought capable of behaving honorably. A servant had little honor, and a slave had none at all. But people of every rank were mindful of reputation, in a way that does not exist in our modern world.

When Virginians misbehaved, they were punished by rituals of public humiliation. The common punishments were meant to shame them, sometimes by the same devices that were used in Puritan New England. One miscreant in Virginia was ordered to stand “several Sundays in time of divine service … in a white sheet with a white wand in his hand.” This custom had long been kept in English parish churches, where people were required to appear “barehead, barefoot and barelegged,” with a white sheet wrapped around a body “from the shoulder to the feet” and a white wand in one’s hand.”21

Shame had an emotional power which it has lost today. In a seventeenth-century suit for slander, it was said of a woman that:

She lives forever in eternal shame

That lives to see the death of her good name.22

The image of mortality was appropriate, for loss of reputation was a form of social death in this culture. In the comity of both Virginia and New England, rituals of honor and reputation, shame and humiliation were highly important during the seventeenth century, but in very different ways.

Image Virginia Order Ways:
The Anglican Idea of Order as Hierarchy

 

In seventeenth-century Virginia, order was fundamentally a hierarchical conception. The classical expression of this idea was the Anglican Homily of Obedience, which was read in the churches of the colony:

Almighty God hath created and appointed all things in heaven, earth and waters, in a most excellent and perfect order. In heaven he hath appointed distinct and several orders and states of archangels and angels. In earth he hath assigned and appointed kings, princes and other governors under them, all in good and necessary order. … The sun, moon, stars, rainbows, thunder, lightning, clouds and all the birds in the air do keep their order. The earth, trees, seeds, plants, herbs, corn, grass, and all manner of beasts keep themselves in order. … And man himself hath all his parts … members of his body in a profitable, necessary and pleasant order. Every degree of people in their vocations, calling and office, hath appointed to them their duty and order. Some are in high degree; some in low, and every one have need of the other.1

This hierarchical idea of order had its antithesis in “confusion” or “conmingling,” two words which were used as synonyms. In the neighboring province of Maryland, for example, the Royalist writer George Alsop defined order as the opposite of confusion; and confusion as “ranging in contrary and improper spheres.”2

The ordering institutions of Virginia were as hierarchical as the idea of order itself. The most important order-keepers were not town constables who had been elected by the people, as in New England, but county sheriff’s who had been appointed in the name of the Crown. In the seventeenth century, this office was established in Virginia, and it has survived throughout the southern and western United States even to our own time. By law, a sheriff was required to reside in the county where he served. By custom, he was also expected to be a landed gentleman. In 1623, Michael Dalton dedicated his essay on the duties of the sheriff “to the better encouragement of the gentry, upon whom the burthen of the office lyeth.”3

In some Virginia counties the office of sheriff was held in rotation by the gentlemen justices. In others it became a patronage appointment. The justices of York County recommended one of their number, Captain Ralph Langley, on the ground that the “sheriff’s office may be a great help to him in his present suffering condition.”4

But the job was no sinecure. The sheriff was the leading executive officer of the county. His duties were to organize the courts, impanel juries, issue writs, call elections, read royal proclamations, maintain the peace, protect the church, administer judicial punishments, run the jail, and keep the county’s records.

The sheriff was not expected to do these things himself. A gentlemen did not work with his hands, but guided the hands of others. Just as a physician did not cut open a body (a barber/surgeon’s work) and a barrister did not actually engross a will (the task of a scrivener), so a sheriff was not actually required to lay hands upon a dirty felon. This was the work of under-sheriff’s, deputies, jailers, county whippers, and clerks who did the dangerous manual labor of order-keeping in Virginia. The gentlemen-justices sometimes compelled one criminal to punish another. One convict was sentenced to serve as a hangman; another was ordered to cut off the ears of a culprit in the pillory.5

The same hierarchical ideas also appeared in treatment of the disorderly. Convicted felons in Virginia received very different punishments according to their rank. For all but the most serious crimes, literate criminals could plead “benefit of clergy.” By reading aloud the “neck verse”6 from the Bible they escaped a hanging, and were sentenced to be branded on the brawn of the thumb. Gentlemen-felons were sometimes sentenced to be branded with a “cold iron” which left no mark that might destroy their honor. But the poor and illiterate went to the gallows.7

The death penalty was very common in Virginia. As in the mother country, hundreds of felonies were capital crimes—which was not the case in the Puritan colonies. In a sample of forty-seven Virginia court sessions from 1737 and 1772, 164 people were convicted of a felony and not allowed to plead benefit of clergy. Of that number, 125 were actually executed.8

The method of execution was the same as in England. The convict was carried in a cart to the gallows which were sometimes erected at the scene of the crime. The condemned man was made to stand in the cart with a rope around his neck, and was invited to speak his last words before a huge crowd. Then the cart was driven forward, and he was left kicking and choking in the air. Death sometimes came slowly. In 1738, when a confessed murderer named Anthony Ditton dangled alive at the end of his rope, the hangman grabbed his legs in an effort to strangle him, and succeeded only in breaking the rope. Ditton fell unconscious to the ground; when he revived he mounted the cart once more and was hanged yet again.9

Punishment did not end with death. The body was given to physicians for dissection, or for the most heinous crimes was hung in chains on the public highway as a warning to others. The bodies of pirates were hung in chains at a river’s edge. In another process called “corruption of blood,” the convicted felon also forfeited his property to the Crown. This was done in the colony of Virginia.10

In addition to the violence of law, there was also customary violence, which occurred in many forms. These were not random or promiscuous acts. The use of nonjudicial violence was sanctioned and regulated by the unwritten rules of this society, more or less as follows. First, Virginia’s system of customary violence was hierarchical in its nature. It was often used by superiors against inferiors, and sometimes by equals against one another, but rarely by people of subordinate status against those above them. Violence was thought to be the legitimate instrument of masters against servants, husbands against wives, parents against children, and gentlemen against ordinary folk. But violent acts by servants against masters, or common folk against gentle folk was followed by savage punishment.

Second, this legitimate social violence in Virginia was usually a response to some social or moral offense which affronted either the authority of a superior or the honor of an equal. In its customary forms it was meant to be measured violence. It tended to be proportionate to the seriousness of the offense, to the social status of the offender, and to the rank of the offended. But sometimes it exceeded these bounds.

The diary of William Byrd recorded many examples of customary violence:

4 April 1720 My maid Rose had endeavored to steal a sheep from Jack, for which reason I caused her to be whipped …

26 April 1720 I walked home and by the way beat my man for being drunk and saucy …

4 August 1720 Jenny B-s-n was whipped for several faults …

7 August 1720 My people almost all got drunk with cider I had given them, for which I was very angry with them and threatened to punish them that I should ever see drunk again.

The use of violence and even torture against servants and slaves occurred very frequently. An example was Byrd’s treatment of a house boy named Eugene in the year 1709:

8 February 1709 Jenny and Eugene were whipped

10 June 1709 Eugene was whipped for running away and had the [bit or boot] put on him. I said my prayers and had good health, good thoughts and good humor, thanks be to God.

30 November 1709 Eugene was whipped for pissing in bed 1 December 1709 Eugene was whipped

3 December 1709 Eugene pissed abed again for which I made him drink a pint of piss.

10 December 1709 Eugene had pissed in bed for which I gave him a pint of piss to drink

16 December 1709 Eugene was whipped for doing nothing11

This treatment continued for years:

18 September 1712 I found Eugene asleep instead of being at work, for which I beat him severely

Occasionally a servant resisted—not by violence of his own, which would have brought terrific punishment, but by announcing that he would not agree to be whipped. Some masters acquiesced in this resistance, or found another mode of punishment. But the usual response was that of William Byrd, who summoned reinforcements and increased the punishment, without reflecting very much about it.

17 June 1720 I found my man Johnny drunk, for which I threatened to beat him. He said I should not, so I had him whipped and gave him thirty lashes. I danced my dance. Read some Latin till dinner, then ate some cold ham and sallet. After dinner I took a nap …,12

It is interesting to observe that William Byrd also used the same customary violence against wives, children, servants, slaves, and animals—especially animals:

2 July 1720 I took a walk about the plantation and shot an old dog with an arrow for flying at me but did not kill him.

23 July 1720 I talked with my people and Jack told me of some horses that had destroyed a hogshead of tabacco and I gave him orders to shoot them as not being fit to live. I said my prayers and retired.13

William Byrd thought of himself as the patriarchal master of his animals as well as of his people. Here was an old English folk attitude, related to the ancient feudal law of deodand that ordered the death of any animal which caused mortal injury.

These forms of heirarchical violence were carried to Virginia from England, where they had long existed in the same form. One famous example involved Lord Lovelace in a horrific chain of violence:

Lord Lovelace seeing a maid in his kitchen pursue a dog with a spit snatched it from her and killed her on the spot. The girl’s lover revenged her death by similarly killing Lord Lovelace.14

A similar chain of violence appeared in a letter by a little girl in Virginia, Sally Fairfax, who described her feelings when a cat scratched a slave, and the slave killed the cat. Little Miss Fairfax was moved not to sadness for the cat but rage against the bondsman:

That vile man Adam at night killed a poor cat of rage, because she eat a bit of meat out of his hand and scratched it. A vile wretch of new negroe, if he was mine I would cut him to pieces, a son of a gun, a nice negroe, he should be killed himself by rights.15

Other acts of social violence had a different context. When any neighbor, stranger or even kinsman invaded the property of a landed gentleman without leave to do so, he could expect a violent response. One English country gentleman described such an event in Dorset:

I espied a pack of hounds with a man on horseback in my green lands, about my chalk hills … I scolded him very passionately, whipped off his dogs and forbade him coming any more on pain of having all his dogs killed and himself hanged, whereupon he packed away in haste and promised to come that way no more.16

Virginia gentlemen behaved in exactly the same way—responding violently to interlopers on their lands.17

Hierarchical violence of this sort was commonplace in Virginia. But there was remarkably little violence by the poor against the rich, or by the humble against the elite. William Byrd wrote to an English friend, “We all lye securely with our doors unbarred, and can travel the whole country without arms or guard.”18 Even small acts of symbolic protest against superiors brought down horrific punishments of unimaginable savagery. When, for example, Richard Barnes made “base speeches” against Governor Wyatt, he was sentenced to have his weapons broken, to be bored through the tongue, to “pass through a guard of 40 men” and be “butted by everyone of them,” to be “knocked down and footed out of the fort,” to pay £200 and to be banished from the colony.19

In that respect, the first gentlemen of Virginia were the same as the English gentry, savagely punishing anyone who used violence against them. In Wiltshire during the year 1631, for example, a shoemaker convicted of highway robbery hurled a brickbat at the judge. Instantly the shoemaker was seized. His hand was cut off and nailed to the gibbet from which he was hanged. There all could see the penalty for threatening a superior.20 Altogether, this system of violence was itself an order, as elaborately hierarchical in Virginia as it had been in southern England. In both places its social function was very much the same.

The criminal courts of the Chesapeake colonies were less active than in New England. Rates of criminal prosecuton were less than half as high as in New England.21 The distribution of criminal offenses in the Chesapeake was also different from New England. In five Maryland county courts crimes against order were less than half their proportion in New England, but crimes of violence were more than twice as high.22

Individual offenses also differed in their frequency. Prosecutions for sexual morality commonly consisted of fornication in Massachusetts and bastardy in Maryland. Crimes against order in Puritan colonies were often sabbath violations, profane speech, blasphemy, idleness and lying; in the Chesapeake this category consisted almost entirely of disturbing the peace, disorderly conduct and drunkenness, which often involved acts of violence.23 In the punishments meted out to defendants, Chesapeake courts were more apt to discriminate by social status. Masters were treated leniently; servants were punished harshly. Men received lighter sentences than women in the Chesapeake colonies. These practices were very different from New England, where discrimination by rank was more muted, and in most cases men and women were treated equally. Altogether, historian Mark Saloman concludes that systems of criminal justice in Massachusetts and Maryland had two different purposes—the former primarily to preserve comity; the latter mostly to maintain hierarchy.

Image Virginia Power Ways:
The Politics of Court and Vestry Government

 

In the year 1685 a French Protestant nobleman named Durand de Dauphiné was forced to flee his native Languedoc on account of his religion. In his flight he had many adventures—a hair’s-breadth escape from the dragoons of King Louis XIV, an intimacy with a beautiful Italian widow, a chase by Turkish pirates, a terrific storm in the English Channel, a desperate illness in London, starvation on a transatlantic voyage, and shipwreck on the coast of Virginia where he landed with his belt drawn in sixteen inches and his “clothes all covered in pitch and tar.” To his surprise this ragged French aristocrat was welcomed by the first gentlemen of Virginia, who instantly accepted him as one of themselves. Durand de Dauphiné wrote a book about his experiences among Virginia’s ruling elite in the late seventeenth century, a few years after Governor Berkeley had left office.

“The gentlemen called cavaliers,” Durand wrote, “are greatly esteemed and respected, and are very courteous and honorable. They hold most of the offices in the country.” Durand was invited to dine with the governor and councilors, and to sit with the Assembly which like his hosts he called the Parliament of Virginia. “I saw there fine-looking men, sitting in judgment booted and with belted sword,” he reported.1

This oligarchy of “gentlemen called cavaliers,” who bestrode Virginia booted and spurred, was no novelist’s dream. It actually existed, and played a role of high importance in the political history of the colony.

The distinctive polity which Durand observed in Virginia had developed during the governorship of Sir William Berkeley. By and large it was not imposed upon an unwilling population by imperial authorities, but created within the colony by Virginia gentlemen from materials which had been familiar to them at home. The result was a political culture that proved to be remarkably stable for more than a century, from its emergence in the mid-seventeenth century to the American War of Independence.

In this Virginia polity, the leading local institutions were the parish and county. Both were dominated by self-perpetuating oligarchies of country gentlemen—the parish through its vestry, and the county through its court. They were more complex in their structure than the town meeting system of new England, but less active in the life of the community. Levels of per capita public spending in Virginia tended to be less than half that of Massachusetts.2

The vestry system was established by law in 1643, shortly after Governor Berkeley arrived in Virginia. A law passed in that year required every parish to have a vestry. By 1665 or earlier, these vestries had become closed oligarchies, and control was securely in the hands of a small group of “the most selected and sufficient men.” Their responsibilities extended far beyond the affairs of the parish church itself, to include the administration of the poor law, and much other secular business. By 1670, there were approximately forty parishes in the colony. Each vestry looked after a population of about two or three hundred families.3

The vestry was a familiar institution in southern England. But it was not very old as English institutions went—not nearly as old as the town or folkmoot. The word vestry itself came from the Norman French vestiarie, which was introduced to England after the Conquest. The vestry was an imposition from above; the town was an emanation from below. By the seventeenth century, these two institutions tended to blur into one another in some parts of England. But they were distinctly different in their origins, and they were put to very different uses in Massachusetts and Virginia.

Another unit of local government in Virginia was the county. Its principal officers were the county justices, the county sheriff and the county surveyor, who were nominally appointed from above rather than elected from below. In practice they were controlled by the county gentry, who regarded these offices as a species of property which they passed on to one another. William Fitzhugh in 1685 proposed that High Sheriff’S should be appointed “in fee or for life.” He explained that “for the sheriff’s place to be granted in fee, has been anciently practicable in

England, and in one county is still retained in the family of Cliffords.” Fitzhugh’s suggestion was not adopted, but local offices often became a form of property in fact if not in law.4

On court days a large part of the county came together in a great gathering which captured both the spirit and substance of Virginia politics. Outside the courthouse, the county standard flew proudly from its flagstaff, and the royal arms of England were emblazoned above the door. The courthouse in Middlesex County actually had two doors which symbolized the structure power in that society—a narrow door at one end of the building for the gentry, and a broad double door at the other for ordinary folk. Inside, on a raised platform at one end of the chamber sat the gentlemen-justices, their hats upon their heads, and booted and spurred just as Durand observed them. To one side sat the jury, “grave and substantial freeholders” who were mostly chosen from the yeomanry of the county. Before them stood a mixed audience who listened raptly to the proceedings. Outside on the dusty road, and peering in through the windows was a motley crowd of hawkers, horse traders, traveling merchants, servants, slaves, women and children—the teeming political underclass of Virginia.5

Any expression of disorder in the courtroom, or of disrespect for the court itself, was punished instantly, sometimes with savage severity. Deference was routinely demanded and received. It was repaid in the coin of “condescension,” a special form of courtesy that was reserved for inferiors throughout the English-speaking world.

These county oligarchies were not sovereign bodies. Above them sat the Assembly, Council and Royal Governor. The status of these institutions was in dispute until the American War of Independence. The Assembly was understood by Imperial officials as the colonial equivalent of a municipal council in England. They called it the House of Burgesses, a name which brought to mind the Burgesses of Bristol and other British towns. But Virginians had a different idea of their Assembly. In 1687, William Fitzhugh called it “our Parliament here,” a representative body which knew no sovereign except the King himself.6

Whatever their parliamentary standing, the Assembly represented not the people at large, but the county oligarchies who really ran Virginia. Most of its members had served for many years in public office, rising slowly through the vestries and courts of their counties.7

At the pinnacle of this system was the royal governor. For thirty-five years this office was held by Sir William Berkeley. Until the disaster of Bacon’s Rebellion at the end of his tenure, he was very popular—“the darling of the people,” one Virginian described him. Berkeley was removed from office by the English Puritans, and forcibly retired to the privacy of his plantation at Green Spring. But after the fall of the Protectorate, the Virginians themselves “unanimously chose him their governor again.”8

Young Governor Berkeley was an outspoken royalist, a high Anglican and a staunch prerogative man who demanded of the colonists the same unquestioning loyalty that he gave to the King above him. In his prime he was also a leader of exceptional intellect and ability. From the start he was so popular that the Virginia assembly, “with an eye to the honor of the place,” levied an extra tax of two shillings on every tithable specially for his support, payable in country produce. The people of Virginia made an act of homage of this obligation. They arrived at Green Spring bearing tribute of “corn, wheat, malt, beef, pork, peas, capons, calves, goats, kids, turkeys, geese, butter and cheese” until the governor’s estate looked like a fairground.9

Berkeley dominated the colony through the Assembly, which sat for many years without an election in what was described as the governor’s “long Parliament.” He despised popularity, and once acidly observed that “never any community of people had good done to them, but against their wills.”10 But a large part of Governor Berkeley’s power derived from his standing with the county oligarchies that ran Virginia. William Byrd later wrote to a friend, “Our government … is so happily constituted that a governor must first outwit us before he can oppress us. And if he ever squeezes money out of us he must first take care to deserve it.”11

Popular elections were a part of this system, just as they had been in England. From time to time, the “freeholders” were invited to choose their county burgesses in elections that resembled those in the south and west of England. The electors voted for men rather than measures, picking the most congenial gentleman-candidate from several who “stood” for election.

In the elections of 1755 about 40 percent of tithables voted in most tidewater counties. The pattern of participation differed from New England town meetings. Average levels of turnout tended to be higher on the average in Virginia than in Massachusetts, but without the sudden surges of participation that occurred in New England town meetings when controversial questions were introduced.

Many free whites, and all servants and slaves, were disfranchised by property qualifications. These restrictions tended to increase rather than to diminish before 1776. Through more than a century, the trend in Virginia did not move toward an enlargement of democracy. Before 1776, the only elections in Virginia were those for Burgesses, which occurred at very infrequent intervals. These occasional events were great social happenings which attracted the planter elite and many taxable males, but were not democratic in any meaningful sense.12

This system of government developed in Virginia by a process of prescription. As early as the year 1679 it was spoken of as “the constitution of the country,” in the traditional British sense of unwritten customs and established institutions, rather than the future American sense of fundamental written law. This “constitution” was radically different from the polity of Massachusetts. But the gentlemen oligarchs of Virginia thought of it as the ordinary and natural way in which English-speaking people ordered their political affairs.13

William Fitzhugh wrote in 1684, “The laws we have made amongst us here since our first settlement, are merely made for our own particular Constitution, when the laws of England were thought inconvenient in that particular, and rather disadvantageous & burdensome … Our continual usage and practice since the first settlement, hath been according to the laws and customs of England.”14 Any other idea of “laws and customs” was not merely uncongenial to Virginia gentlemen. It was literally inconceivable.

Image Virginia Freedom Ways:
The Anglican Idea of Hegemonic Liberty

 

“How is it,” Dr. Samuel Johnson asked, “that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” That famous question captured a striking paradox in the history of Virginia. Like most other colonists in British America, the first gentlemen of Virginia possessed an exceptionally strong consciousness of their English liberties, even as they took away the liberty of others.1 Governor William Berkeley himself, notwithstanding his reputation for tyranny, wrote repeatedly of “prized liberty” as the birthright of an Englishman. The first William Fitzhugh often wrote of Magna Carta and the “fundamental laws of England,” with no sense of contradiction between his Royalist politics and libertarian principles. Fitzhugh argued that Virginians were both “natural subjects to the king” and inheritors of the “laws of England,” and when they ceased to be these things, “then we are no longer freemen but slaves.”2

Similar language was used by many English-speaking people in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. The fine-spun treatises on liberty which flowed so abundantly from English pens in this era were rationales for political folkways deeply embedded in the cultural condition of Englishmen.

These English political folkways did not comprise a single libertarian tradition. They embraced many different and even contradictory conceptions of freedom. The libertarian ideas that took root in Virginia were very far removed from those that went to Massachusetts. In place of New England’s distinctive idea of ordered liberty, the Virginians thought of liberty as a hegemonic condition of dominion over others and—equally important—dominion over oneself.

The Virginia idea of hegemonic liberty was far removed from the New England system of communal restraints which a town meeting voluntarily imposed upon itself. The English traveler Andrew Burnaby observed that “the public and political character of the Virginians corresponds with their private one: they are haughty and jealous of their liberties, impatient of restraint, and can scarcely bear the thought of being controlled by any superior power.”3

Virginia ideas of hegemonic liberty conceived of freedom mainly as the power to rule, and not to be overruled by others. Its opposite was “slavery,” a degradation into which true-born Britons descended when they lost their power to rule. The idea was given its classical expression by the poet James Thomson (1700-1748) in a stanza that everyone knows without reflecting on its meaning:

When Britain first, at Heaven’s command,

Arose from out of the Azure main,

This was the charter of the land,

And guardian angels sang this strain:

Rule, Britannia, rule the waves;

Britons never will be slaves.4

In Thomson’s poetry, which captured the world view of the Virginians in so many ways, we find the major components of hegemonic liberty: the concept of a “right to rule”; the notion that this right was guaranteed by the “charter of the land”; the belief that those who surrendered this right became “slaves”; and the idea that it had been given to “Britain first, at heaven’s command.”

It never occurred to most Virginia gentlemen that liberty belonged to everyone. It was thought to be the special birthright of free-born Englishmen—a property which set this “happy breed” apart from other mortals, and gave them a right to rule less fortunate people in the world. Even within their own society, hegemonic liberty was a hierarchical idea. One’s status in Virginia was defined by the liberties that one possessed. Men of high estate were thought to have more liberties than others of lesser rank. Servants possessed few liberties, and slaves none at all. This libertarian idea had nothing to do with equality. Many years later, John Randolph of Roanoke summarized his ancestral creed in a sentence: “I am an aristocrat,” he declared, “I love liberty; I hate equality.”5

In Virginia, this idea of hegemonic liberty was thought to be entirely consistent with the institution of race slavery. A planter demanded for himself the liberty to take away the liberties of others—a right of laisser asservir, freedom to enslave. The growth of race slavery in turn deepened the cultural significance of hegemonic liberty, for an Englishman’s rights became his rank, and set him apart from others less fortunate than himself. The world thus became a hierarchy in which people were ranked according to many degrees of unfreedom, and they received their rank by the operation of fortune, which played so large a part in the thinking of Virginians. At the same time, hegemony over others allowed them to enlarge the sphere of their own personal liberty, and to create the conditions within which their special sort of libertarian consciousness flourished.

To a modern mind, hegemonic liberty is an idea at war with itself. We think of it as a contradiction in terms. This is because we no longer understand human relationships in hierarchical terms, and can no longer accept the proposition that a person’s status in the world is determined and even justified by his fortune. But in Virginia during the seventeenth and eighteenth century,

Image

The noblest product of Virginia’s culture was the idea of a gentleman, here represented by Thomas Lee, who was so renowned for his character that his portrait hung in a place of honor at Badminton, home of the Dukes of Beaufort. When he suffered a fire a purse was contributed by the Queen herself.

The code of a Virginia gentleman made moral absolutes of truth, candor, fidelity, courage, manners, courtesy, and responsibility. Most of all, a gentleman treated others decently and was true to his own convictions. He was required to lead others of lower rank, and they were expected to follow his high example. The moral authority of a gentleman derived from his material independence. So important was this condition that in occupational lists of the eighteenth century, “independent” and “gentleman” were used as synonyms. Freedom was the necessary condition of a Virginia gentleman’s existence, but others in that society lived in various degrees of unfreedom and many had no freedom at all. Their bondage supported a gentleman’s freedom and independence, which thus became a hegemonic idea, very different from libertarian thinking in New England and Pennsylvania.

and throughout much of the American south until 1865, this idea of hegemonic liberty was entirely in harmony with its environing culture.

One acute English observer in the eighteenth century clearly perceived the special meaning of hegemonic liberty in what he called the “southern colonies.” Edmund Burke declared in Parliament:

a circumstance attending these colonies … makes the spirit of liberty still more high and haughty than in those to the northward. It is, that in Virginia and the Carolinas, they have a vast multitude of slaves. Where this is the case in any part of the world, those who are free are by far the most proud and jealous of their freedom.

Freedom is to them not only an enjoyment, but a kind of rank and privilege. Not seeing there that freedom, as in countries where it is a common blessing and as broad and general as the air, may be united with much abject toil, with great misery, with all the exterior of servitude, liberty looks amongst them like something that is more noble and liberal.

 

I do not mean, Sir, to commend the superior morality of this sentiment, which has at least as much pride as virtue in it; but I cannot alter the nature of man. The fact is so; and these people of the southern colonies are much more strongly, and with a higher and more stubborn spirit, attached to liberty than those to the northward. … In such a people, the haughtiness of domination combines with the spirit of freedom, fortifies it, and renders it invincible.6

 

Burke understood very well this system of hegemonic liberty in Virginia—perhaps because it was also shared by so many English gentlemen in the eighteenth century. He correctly perceived that liberty in Virginia was both a right and a rank, with a good deal of “pride” in it, and many contradictions. He also understood that this conception of hegemonic liberty contained larger possibilities which would expand in years to come.

One of these larger libertarian possibilities lay in its conception of self-government and minimal government. Hegemonic liberty was not an anarchical idea, opposed to all government. The preservation of liberty was thought to require the protection of the state. But the function of the state was largely limited to that minimal role. These ideas were introduced at the very beginning of

Virginia’s history. In the critical years from 1649 to 1652 the people of Virginia agreed to stand by Governor Berkeley and the Royalist cause only on condition that light taxes and loose restraints would be guaranteed to them. This wish was granted. Berkeley agreed to a general reduction of taxes, to the abolition of poll taxes altogether, to the principle of no taxation without representation, and to the idea of equitable assessments—“proportioning in some measure payments according to men’s abilities and estates.” Berkeley’s tax policy lay at the root of his popularity. The burgesses acknowledged a debt of gratitude for themselves and their descendants. “This is a benefit descending unto us and our posterity,” they declared, “which we acknowledge [is] contributed to us by our present governor.”7

Another important possibility within hegemonic liberty lay in its principle of the rule of law. In that regard, Governor Berkeley also made a change in the constitution of his colony. In the year 1643, he agreed to a statute which allowed appeals to be taken from the courts to the Assembly. This reform established the rule of law in a way which made the gentlemen-burgesses of Virginia the masters of their own world. Later the Assembly lost their appellate role, but the Council continued to function in Virginia as the court of last resort, and this body remained firmly in the hands of the planter elite of Virginia. It created for them a condition of cultural hegemony which continued for more than two centuries. At the same time, it also provided a firm base for the rule of law through two turbulent centuries of Virginia’s colonial history.8

Yet another expansive possibility in hegemonic liberty existed in its conception of freedom as a condition of social independence. This also was originally an hierarchical idea. The higher a person’s social status, the more independent he was thought to be. Great planters took special pride in their independence. Thus, Landon Carter characterized his estate which he called Sabine Hall as an “excellent little fortress … built on a rock of Independency.” Peyton Randolph used precisely the same formulation. In a quarrel with his British creditors, he wrote, “I shall never be affected with any reply that can be made, having an excellent little fortress to protect me, one built on a Rock not liable to be shaken with Fears, that of Independency.”9 Foreign travelers also commented upon this condition of “independence” among the great planters. A French visitor to Virginia in the seventeenth century observed that “there are no lords, but each is sovereign on his own plantation.”10

The largest possibility in this idea of hegemonic liberty lay in its conception of dominion over self. A gentleman of Virginia was trained to be, like Addison’s Cato, “severely bent against himself.” He was taught to believe that a truly free man must be the master of his acts and thoughts. At the same time, a gentleman was expected to be the servant of his duty. “Life is not so important as the duties of life,” said John Randolph, in one of the best of his epigrams.11

So exalted was this ideal of hegemony over self that every gentleman fell short. But the ideal itself was pursued for many generations. At its best, it created a true nobility of character in Virginia gentlemen such as George Washington, Robert E. Lee and George Marshall. The popular images of these men are not historical myths. The more one learns of them, the greater one’s respect one becomes. Their character was the product of a cultural idea.12

Hegemonic liberty was a dynamic tradition which developed through at least three historical stages. In the first it was linked to Royalist cause in the English Civil War. The Virginia gentleman Robert Beverley boasted that the colony “was famous, for holding out the longest for the Royal Family, of any of the English Dominions.”13 Virginia was the last English territory to relinquish its allegiance to Charles I, and the first to proclaim Charles II king in 1660 even before the Restoration in England.14 Speeches against the Stuarts were ferociously punished by the county courts.15 The Assembly repeatedly expressed its loyalty to the Crown, giving abundant thanks for “his Majesty’s most gracious favors towards us, and Royal Condescensions to anything requisite.”16

In the second stage, hegemonic liberty became associated with Whiggish politics, and with an ideology of individual independence which was widely shared throughout the English-speaking world. In Virginia, many families who had been staunch Royalists in the seventeenth century became strong Whigs in eighteenth century; by the early nineteenth century they would be Jeffersonian Republicans. Their principles throughout tended to be both elitist and libertarian—a clear expression of a cultural ethic which was capable of continuing expansion.

In Britain, this Whiggish idea of hegemonic liberty was taken up by English landed families who had tended to be Royalists in the seventeenth century, and became Whigs in the eighteenth. The classical examples were England’s great aristocratic families such as the Russells and Cavendishes. Both had been Royalist in the Civil Wars of the seventeenth century. William Cavendish, the third Earl of Devonshire, lost his fortune in the service of Charles I. His brother Charles Cavendish lost his life in the same cause, and became the beau ideal of a gallant cavalier. The poet Waller celebrated the loyalty of these royalist Cavendishes:

Two loyal brothers took their Sovereign’s part,

Employed their wealth, their courage and their art;

The elder did whole regiments afford,

The younger brought his courage and his sword.17

In the 1680s, another William Cavendish, the fourth Earl and first Duke of Devonshire, in the words of a family historian, removed “the politics of his race from a Cavalier to a Whig foundation.”18 The Cavendishes and Russells supported the Revolution of 1688, and became staunch Whigs for a century, until the French Revolution divided them. Late in the eighteenth century, the Cavendish connection stood with Burke, and the Russells went with Fox. But through the eighteenth century, many of the great landed families of England were as staunchly Whiggish as they had been Royalist a century before. Among them were the

Berkeley family, who were among the most extreme Royalists in the seventeenth century, and would become decided Whigs in the eighteenth.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the tradition of hegemonic liberty entered a third stage of development, in which it became less hierarchical and more egalitarian. Such are the conditions of modern life that this idea is no longer the exclusive property of a small elite, and the degradation of others is no longer necessary to their support. The progress of political democracy has admitted everyone to the ruling class. In America and Britain today, the idea of an independent elite, firmly in command of others, has disappeared. But the associated idea of an autonomous individual, securely in command of self, is alive and flourishing.