1 Morgan, Virginians at Home, 5.
2 Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves, 61, estimates the proportion dying before age 20 as 39% in the 17th century and 33% in the 18th.
3 Daniel Blake Smith writes, “ … anyone who reads through the family letters and diaries from the eighteenth-century Chesapeake will discover an abundance of evidence of parental tenderness and affection toward young children. These sources clearly suggest that children were not treated as sinful beings whose willfulness and sense of autonomy had to be controlled, if not quashed, by age two or three—as children were apparently seen in much of Puritan New England. Rather, parents in Virginia and Maryland during the eighteenth century seemed to delight in the distinctively innocent and playful childhood years of their offspring” (Inside the Great House, 40).