1 Gentry families who survived from the early years of settlement included Archer, Eppes, Forrest, Powell, and Wingfield.
2 This is the conclusion of Wesley Frank Craven, White, Red and Black: The Seventeenth Century Virginian (Charlottesville, 1971); Russell Menard agrees that although this conclusion is “quite accurate … one might want to add some qualifications. A more precise timing would probably push its beginning back to the late 1640’s and its end up to 1680, and note that it was interrupted several times, severely in the mid-1660’s, less so in the mid-50s and early 70s. Two years outside the period, 1635 and 1699, may have witnessed the arrival of more new settlers than any single year between 1650 and 1675. Still, the annual average was almost certainly higher in the third quarter than in any other period of comparable length in the century.” These qualifications apply with more force to Maryland than to Virginia; Russell Menard, “Immigration to the Chesapeake Colonies in the Seventeenth Century; A Review Essay,” MDHM 68 (1973), 323-29.
3 The pattern appears in the following population estimates:
Colony |
1629 |
1640 |
1660 |
1670 |
Newfoundland |
|
| ||
New England |
|
|
| |
New Netherland |
|
|
|
|
Maryland |
— |
|
|
|
Virginia |
|
|
|
|
Bermuda |
|
|
|
|
Barbados |
|
|
|
|
Jamaica |
— |
— |
|
|
Leeward Islands |
|
|
|
|
Providence Island |
— |
|
— |
|
From 1629 to 1640, English emigrants went mostly to New England and Barbados. The great migration to the Chesapeake occurred from 1640 to 1600, when population grew threefold in Virginia and elevenfold in Maryland, while merely doubling in New England. These estimates are from many sources, mainly those summarized in Carl Bridenbaugh, Vexed and Troubled Englishmen, 1590-1642 (New York, 1968), 410, 432, 473; Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713 (Chapel Hill, 1972), 311-13; Russell Menard, “Population, Economy and Society in Seventeenth Century Maryland,” MDHM 79 (1984), 71-92, and standard works on individual colonies.
For Virginia, a variant estimate appears in Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 404, which reckons the population of that colony at 25,600 in 1662, 31,900 in 1674, and 40,600 in 1682, These numbers are too low; Morgan assumed that ratios between tithables and the general population were linear, but in fact the pattern was parabolic with its apogee in 1662. Informed contemporaries believed that Virginia’s population had reached 40,000 as early as 1660 (Berkeley, Discourse and View of Virginia, 6-7), but this estimate seems too high. A more probable estimate for 1660 was 30,000 (12,000 tithables). The estimates in HSUS are far off the mark.
Total immigration has been estimated at 82,000 for Virginia (1607-99), 42,000 for Maryland (1634-99), and 120,000 to 130,000 for the Chesapeake during the 17th century; Berkeley reckoned in 1670 that “yearly, we suppose there comes in, of servants, about 1,500, of which most are English, few Scotch and fewer Irish.” This estimate, plus freemen and slaves, is roughly consistent with other evidence. See Craven, White, Red and Black, 16; Menard, “Immigration,” 323; J.P.P. Horn, “Social and Economic Aspects of Local Society in England and the Chesapeake: A Comparative Study of the Vale of Berkeley, Gloucestershire, with the Lower Western Shore of Maryland, 1660-1700” (thesis, Univ. of Sussex, 1982), 6; William W. Hening, Hening’s Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia … (13 vols., New York, 1819-1923), 11,515.