THE SOUTH OF ENGLAND TO VIRGINIA

 

Image Distressed Cavaliers and Indentured Servants, 1642-75

 

Virginia [was] the only city of refuge left in His Majesty’s Dominions, in those times, for distressed cavaliers.

—Ingram’s Proceedings, Virginia, 1676

The gentlemen called Cavaliers are greatly esteemed and respected, and are very courteous and honorable. They hold most of the offices in the country.

—Durand of Dauphine on Virginia, 1687

The people of fortune … are the pattern of all behaviour here.

—Philip Fithian on Virginia, 1773

IN THE WINTER OF 1641, just as the Puritan migration was coming to an end, a young Englishman boarded an emigrant ship for Virginia. He would have been received with high ceremony by the captain and crew, for he was no ordinary passenger. His appearance was that of a nobleman—short cloak, deep bands, great boots, belted sword, and long hair cascading in ringlets around his patrician face. His manners were those of a courtier, polished by years in the presence of the King. His speech was that of a scholar, full of Oxford learning; and he had the bearing of a soldier, knighted on the field of honor by Charles I. The name of this traveler was Sir William Berkeley. In his baggage, he carried the King’s commission as Royal Governor of Virginia.

This proud young cavalier was destined to rule the colony of Virginia for more than thirty years. In that period, he had a profound impact upon its development. At a critical moment, he bent the young sapling of its social system and made it grow in the direction that he wished. The cultural history of an American region is in many ways the long shadow of this extraordinary man.1

Sir William Berkeley was born in 1606 to a powerful West Country family which had been seated since the eleventh century at Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire. The massive battlements of this great building still loom high above the Vale of the Severn, where on a bright fall day one may see the Berkeley Hunt in its distinctive yellow riding coats quartering the countryside, as members of that ancient family have done for more than nine centuries.2

The future governor of Virginia belonged to a cadet branch of his family. It kept two houses: one high on a hill above the ancient wool town of Bruton, Somerset; the other in London where the future governor was born. He lived his youth in a broad belt of territory between London and Berkeley Castle—the region which was to become the cradle of Virginia’s culture.3

As a young man, Berkeley showed something of a scholar’s bent. He matriculated at The Queen’s College in Oxford, earned his degree at St. Edmund Hall and became a fellow of Merton College. After graduating, he took himself to London and became a literary figure of some consequence, publishing a highly polished “tragy comedy” called The Lost Lady in 1639. He was also introduced at court by his brother John Lord Berkeley, and made such an impression that the King appointed him Gentleman of the Privy Chamber Extraordinary. In 1639, he was knighted in the field at Berwick, and two years later became Royal Governor of Virginia.4

In many ways, Berkeley was not an admirable character. He bullied those beneath him, and fawned on people above. He openly enriched himself from his offices, and set a sad example for peculation that long persisted in Virginia. In 1667, for example, he wrote directly to his superior, Lord Arlington, “Though ambition commonly leaves sober old age, covetousness does not. I shall therefore desire of your lordship to procure of His Majesty the customs of two hundred hogsheads of tobacco.”5

These were the vices of his age, and Berkeley had them in high degree. But he also had the virtues of candor, courage, fidelity to family and loyalty to a cause. His social values were as highly developed as those of the Puritans—though in a very different direction. And he cared deeply for Virginia. For thirty-five years, Berkeley devoted himself to the welfare of his colony with energy, intelligence, and effect.

When Sir William Berkeley reached Virginia in February 1642, it was a sickly settlement of barely 8,000 souls. The colony had earned an evil reputation “that none but those of the meanest quality and corruptest lives went there.” The quality of life in early Virginia was more like a modern military outpost or lumber camp than a permanent society. Its leaders were rough, violent, hard-drinking men. Berkeley’s predecessor, Governor John Harvey, had knocked out the teeth of a councilor with a cudgel, before being “thrust out” himself by the colonists in 1635. When Harvey returned with royal warrant to arrest his enemies, he was driven out again in 1639.6 The colony was in a state of chronic disorder. Its rulers were unable to govern, its social institutions were ill-defined, its economy was undeveloped, its politics were unstable, and its cultural identity was indistinct.7

In the thirty-five years of Sir William Berkeley’s tenure, Virginia was transformed. Its population increased fivefold from 8,000 to 40,000 inhabitants. It developed a coherent social order, a functioning economic system, and a strong sense of its own special folkways. Most important, it also acquired a governing elite which Berkeley described as “men of as good families as any subjects in England.”8

This social system did not spring spontaneously from the soil of the new world. No less than New England, the colony of Virginia was the conscious creation of human will and purpose. In that process, Sir William Berkeley played the leading role, laboring through his long years in office to build an ideal society which was the expression of his own values. More than any other individual, he framed Virginia’s political system—becoming, in Thomas Ludwell’s words, “the sole author of the most substantial

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This portrait of Sir William Berkeley (by Peter Lely, 1661-62) was an image not merely of the man himself but also of the Royalist ideals that guided his actions in Virginia. The governor is dressed for war. He wears an officer’s half armor with a baton in hand and a sword hanging at his side. In the background the artist painted a cavalry charge, probably in the Western campaign of 1644, in which Berkeley fought for his King. This painting also reveals an identity with the King in yet another way. Berkeley stands in an unnatural pose with his right hand extended, left hand bent back above the hip, left leg extended forward and head turned sharply to the side. His posture imitated a favorite pose of Charles I which appears in Van Dyck’s Roi à la chasse, now in the Louvre. Even Berkeley’s facial expression mimicked that of his royal master. This is a portrait of the governor in middle age. His youth has faded, and his swollen face is ravaged by the chronic illness that afflicted many Virginians. In his cruel eyes we see a hint of the tyranny that lay ahead. But this is a likeness of Sir William Berkeley in the prime of his maturity, secure in his power, and firm in his determination to create in Virginia a Royalist utopia dominated by ideals of honor and hierarchy.

parts of it, either for laws, or other inferior institutions.”9 When the laws of Virginia were first published, the volume was dedicated to Sir William Berkeley, who was identified as himself “the author of the best of them.” Berkeley governed the colony through a pliant “long assembly” which he kept in office for fourteen years, refusing to call an election from 1662 to 1676. Its laws expressed the wishes of the governor; many were drafted by his own hand.10

Important as his role as a lawgiver may have been, Berkeley had his greatest impact upon Virginia in another way. More than any other person, he shaped the process of immigration to the colony during a critical period in its history. That process in turn defined its culture, and largely determined the main lines of change for many generations to come.

Image Sir William Berkeley and Virginia’s Elite

 

Of all Sir William Berkeley’s many projects as governor, the most important was his recruitment of a Royalist elite for Virginia. In the words of historian Philip Bruce, he “encouraged the cavaliers to come over in large numbers.” When they arrived, he promoted them to high office, granted them large estates and created the ruling oligarchy that ran the colony for many generations.1

This cavalier migration continued throughout Berkeley’s tenure as governor (1642-76). Much of it occurred during the decade of the 1650s, when a Puritan oligarchy gained the upper hand in England and tried to impose its beliefs by force upon an unwilling people. Virginia’s Royalist immigrants were refugees from oppression, just as New England’s Puritans themselves had been. Many had fought for Charles I in England’s Civil War. Some continued to serve him until his armies were broken by Parliament and the King himself was killed in 1649. Others rallied to the future King Charles II, and in 1651 fought at his side on the field of Worcester, where they were beaten once again.

They suffered severely in this struggle. One Royalist wrote, “ … in our unnatural wars, most of the ancient gentry were either extinct or undone. The king’s side was almost all gentlemen, and of Parliament’s few … in the quarrel of the Two Roses there were not half as many gentlemen slain.”2 So shattered was the Royalist cause that William Sancroft wrote, “ … when we meet, it is but to consult to what foreign plantation we shall fly.” Indeed, Henry Norwood later remembered that “a very considerable number … did fly from their native country, as from a place infected with the plague.”3

Most of these émigrés took refuge in Europe. But many were recruited by Sir William Berkeley. Some had been his kinsmen and friends before they came to America; others became his relations in the New World. They shared his Royalist politics, his Anglican faith, and his vision for the future of the colony.4

These “distressed cavaliers” founded what would later be called the first families of Virginia. But they were not chronologically the first to settle in the colony. Only a few had appeared during the first forty years of its history. Their great migration came later, and was nearly as concentrated in time as the exodus of the English Puritans had been. If most Yankee genealogies commenced within six years of 1635, the American beginnings of Virginia’s ruling families occurred within a decade of the year 1655.

The founder of the Carter family, for example, came over in 1649. His forebears had been very rich in England; his children became still richer in Virginia. The first Culpeper also arrived in 1649; as did the first Hammond, Honywood and Moryson. The first Digges migrated in 1650, together with the first Broadhurst, Chicheley, Custis, Page, Harrison, Isham, Skipwith and Landon. The first Northampton Randolph appeared circa 1651, and the first Mason in 1652. The first Madison was granted land in 1653, the first Corbin in 1654. The first Washington crossed the ocean in 1657; he was John Washington, the younger son of an Oxford-trained clergyman who had been removed from his living by the Puritans. The family seat was Sulgrave Manor, a few miles north of Oxford. Also in 1657 arrived Colonel William Ball, the ancestor of George Washington’s mother, and in 1659 the first Fairfax. Every year of that troubled decade brought a fresh crop of cavaliers to Virginia. Of seventy-two families in Virginia’s high elite whose dates of migration are known, two-thirds arrived between 1640 and 1669. A majority appeared between 1647 and 1660.5

After the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, Sir William Berkeley continued his recruiting campaign. In 1663 he published a pamphlet addressed to the younger sons of England’s great families:

A small sum of money will enable a younger brother to erect a flourishing family in a new world; and add more strength, wealth and honor to his native country, than thousands did before, that dyed forgotten and unrewarded in an unjust war … men of as good families as any subjects in England have resided there, as the Percys, the Barkleys, the Wests, the Gages, the Throgmortons, Wyatts, Digges, Chichelys, Moldsworths, Morrisons, Kemps, and hundred others which I forbear to name, lest I should misherald them in this catalogue.6

Sir William Berkeley’s recruiting campaign was highly successful. Nearly all of Virginia’s ruling families were founded by younger sons of eminent English families during his governorship. Berkeley himself was a younger son with no hope of inheriting an estate in England. This “younger son syndrome,” as one historian has called it, became a factor of high importance in the culture of Virginia. The founders of Virginia’s first families tried to reconstruct from American materials a cultural system from which they had been excluded at home.7

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Colonel Richard Lee was the younger son of an old Shropshire family. He emigrated to Virginia ca. 1640 and became Attorney General, Secretary of State, and Sir William Berkeley’s chief lieutenant. For long and loyal service, he received vast holdings of land and by 1663 owned at least seven plantations and many servants and slaves. Colonel Lee was immensely proud of his lineage. His Saxon family was as ancient as the Berkeley’s had been and looked down upon England’s Norman nobility as coarse and vulgar upstarts. He lived in high style. In 1655, agents of the Puritan Commonwealth seized Lee’s baggage and found “200 ounces of silver plate, all marked with his coat of arms.” Above his front door, Lee hung a wood carving of his arms, which still survives with one side broken and faint traces of its original paint. Worked into the design was a crescent, the heraldic mark of a second son which appeared on many escutcheons in Virginia. The Lee family became the archetype of Governor Berkeley’s armigerous elite.

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The great majority of Virginia’s upper elite came from families in the upper ranks of English society. Of 152 Virginians who held top offices in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, at least sixteen were connected to aristocratic families, and 101 were the sons of baronets, knights and the rural gentry of England. Seven more came from armigerous urban families, with coats of arms at the college of heralds. Only eighteen were the sons of yeomen, traders, mariners, artisans, or “plebs.” None came to Virginia as laborers or indentured servants except possibly the first Adam Thoroughgood who was also the brother of a baronet. Only two were not British, and nine could not be identified.8

Some of these families had grown very rich before the Civil War. As early as the sixteenth century, they had made matrimonial alliances with mercantile families and also with others who prospered in the countryside. An example were the Spencers of Althorpe, a family of humble sheep graziers in the fifteenth century who rose so rapidly in the sixteenth century that by 1603 Sir Robert Spencer was reputed to have “the most money of any person

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Anna Constable Lee, the beautiful wife of Colonel Richard Lee, raised five sons in Virginia. Those children produced a vast progeny of Lees who became the archetypical first gentlemen of Virginia. The carriers of this culture from one generation to the next were women such as Anna Lee. She was a “lady of quality” who came to Virginia in the household of Sir Francis Wyatt, perhaps as his ward. In the handsome features of her portrait, the artist has captured the cultural values that were shared by Virginians of both sexes. Her open expression implies an ideal of candor and an utter contempt for falsehood and deceit. Her erect carriage communicates a pride of rank and reputation that was called honor in a gentleman and virtue in a lady. The firm lines of her mouth and chin suggest independence of mind and strength of character. The costume creates a feeling of simple dignity and grace that requires no ornament for its embellishment. In her eyes one sees a hint of sadness and sufferingwhich may serve to remind us that the ideals of this culture were continuously tested by its environment, and toughened in the testing. Here was the ideal type of a first lady of Virginia.

in the kingdom.”9 Some of these Spencers settled in Virginia, as did the children of other great landed families. A few were able to bring capital to Virginia. Others in Oldmixon’s phrase were “men of good families and small fortunes,” whose pedigrees became their passports to Sir William Berkeley’s favor.

These younger sons, by reason of their birth order, were forced to leave the land. Many, perhaps most of them, entered commerce in London and Bristol. There they adopted mercantile and maritime occupations which brought them in contact with Virginia. John Washington followed this path, as did Nicholas Spencer and Thomas Chamberlain and many other progenitors of Virginia’s first families. But the roots of all these men were in the English countryside, and Virginia offered a chance to return to the rural life which they preferred. Even the minority of Virginia who had been city-born and city-bred shared this cultural attitude. The first William Byrd found “a private gentleman’s life in the country … (at this time) most eligible.”10

With very few exceptions, these immigrants were staunch Royalists. Many had served in the Civil War as military officers of company or field grade. Of those whose opinions are known, 98 percent supported the King in the Civil War. If they had gone to a university, they tended to choose Oxford—especially the colleges of Christ Church, Merton and Queens which had an association with the royal family. They were Anglican in their religion, and their faith was as important to them as it had been to the Puritans.11

These families came from every part of England. But two-thirds (68%) had lived within a triangle of territory in the south and west of England, stretching from the Weald of Kent to Devon and north to Warwickshire. If emigrants from London are added to this regional group, its proportion rises from two-thirds to nearly three-quarters. Comparatively few came from the north of England (8%), and fewer from East Anglia (7%). There were only a scattering from Cornwall, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and abroad.12

In England, most had lived within a day’s journey of London or Bristol. These cities, especially London, had been an important part of their world. One-third of them had lived in London before coming to America.13

In 1724 Hugh Jones wrote, “The habits, life, customs, computations, etc., of the Virginians are much the same as about London, which they esteem their home … for the most part [they] have contemptible notions of … country places in [other parts of] England and Scotland, whose language and manners are strange to them. … they live in the same manner, dress after the same fashion, and behave themselves exactly as the gentry in London.”14

In houses as ancient as the Berkeleys, younger sons and daughters married London merchants. In families as honorable as the Filmers, country cousins did their city business with traders and lawyers who were their kin.15 At the same time London merchants intermarried with the gentry of Essex and Kent: an example was the Byrd family, prosperous goldsmiths who were descended from landed gentry and who proudly possessed their own arms.16

After 1650 these families continued to intermarry on both sides of the Atlantic, and moved freely back and forth across the ocean. The result was a tightly integrated colonial elite which literally became a single cousinage by the beginning of the eighteenth century. Historian William Cabell Bruce compared the genealogies of these Virginia families to “a tangle of fishhooks, so closely interlocked that it is impossible to pick up one without drawing three or four after it.”17

One genealogical example was the Filmer-Horsmanden-Byrd-Beverley-Culpeper-Carter connection. The ancient Kentish family of Sir Edward Filmer produced several sons in the early seventeenth century. Among them was Sir Robert Filmer, author of the royalist treatise Patriarcha which became a favorite target for Locke and Sydney. This Patriarcha Filmer had a son named Samuel Filmer, who married his cousin Mary Horsmanden and moved to Virginia where he died in the dreaded “seasoning.” The young widow quickly remarried the prosperous planter William Byrd. She became the mother of William Byrd II, the mother-in-law of Robert Beverley and James Duke, and the grandmother of Thomas Chamberlayne, Charles Carter, Landon Carter and John Page. Within three generations most of Virginia’s first families were related to Mary Horsmanden Filmer Byrd, whose genealogy might be titled Matriarcha.18

That same royalist lady was also related to leading families in other southern colonies. Her first cousin Frances Culpeper married no fewer than three colonial governors in a row: Samuel Stephens, governor of North Carolina; Philip Ludwell, governor of South Carolina; and Sir William Berkeley, governor of Virginia. Frances Culpeper was also the cousin of William Penn and Nathaniel Bacon who became her husband’s mortal foe.19

Virginia’s Royalist Elite
The Filmer-Byrd-Beverley-Carter-Culpeper-Berkeley Cousinage

 

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Sources: Mildred Campbell Whitaker, Genealogy of the Campbell, Noble, Gorton, Shelton, Gilmour and Byrd Families (St. Louis, 1927); Marion Tinling, ed., The Correspondence of the Three William Byrds of Westover, Virginia, 1684-1776 (2 vols., Charlottesville, 1977), II, 825-36; genealogical materials listed in Swem, Virginia Historical Index; William Berry, County Genealogies: Pedigrees of the Families in the County of Kent (London, 1830).

The Northampton Connection
The Isham-Washington-Spencer-Randolph-Jefferson-Bland-Beverley-Bolling-Eppes-Hackett Cousinage

 

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Sources: “The Washington Memorials at Garsden,” WMQ V1 (1910), 482-85; VII (1911), 1-6, 337-43, 452-57, 529-36; Henry Isham Longden, Visitation of Northamptonshire HARLSP 87 (1935), 250-63; Henry Isham Longden, The History of the Washington Family (Northampton, 1927); Oswald Barron, Northamptonshire Families (London, 1906); Finch, The Wealth of Five Northamptonshire Families, 141-68.

This Filmer-Byrd-Culpeper-Berkeley connection, centered on the person of Mary Horsmanden Filmer Byrd, was merely one of many alliances among Virginia’s ruling families. Another was a Northampton cousinage which formed mainly around the Isham family, and included the Randolphs, Washingtons, and Spencers of Althorp. All of these houses intermarried in Northamptonshire during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.20 They were closely linked to the Filmer connection. For example, the Washingtons of Sulgrave Manor, Northamptonshire (from whom George Washington was descended), had at least three ties to the Filmers. One branch of the Washingtons settled in Kent near Sir Robert Filmer; in the beautiful little church next to the Filmers’ seat at East Sutton (now a school for wayward girls) one may still see an old window dedicated to Washingtons who intermarried with Filmers. Another cadet branch resided briefly in Essex when the Reverend Lawrence Washington of Sulgrave (sometime fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford) obtained a place there through the patronage of the Horsmanden family. The sons of this Royalist clergyman migrated to America after his living was taken away by the Puritans. Other Washingtons intermarried with the Fairfax and Culpeper families who lived at Leeds Castle in Kent, only a few miles from the Filmers’ estate in East Sutton.21

Still a third Virginia connection centered on the family of Sir William Berkeley in Gloucestershire and Somerset. In the old woolen town of Bruton, Somerset, the Berkeleys were related to the Ludwells and Pages, both old and eminent families who had held many high offices. Sir William Berkeley himself was also kin to the Carys who came from the neighboring town of Castle Cary three miles from Bruton, and intermarried with rich merchants in Bristol.

This Berkeley connection was also tied to the Northamptonshire group, and to the Kentish alliance. Sir William Berkeley’s family was related to the Washingtons of Northampton and to the Filmers of Kent. Berkeley himself was a cousin of Mary Horsmanden

Filmer Byrd, a kinsman of her father-in-law, Patriarcha Filmer, and a second cousin, once removed, of William Byrd. Many of these ties were cemented by cousin marriages, which were carefully planned to create a web of kinship as dense as that of the Roman patriciate. It is difficult to think of any ruling elite that has been more closely interrelated since the Ptolemies.

A case in point was the composition of Virginia’s Royal Council. In 1724, there were twelve members of this body; all without exception were related to one another by blood or marriage. Most were kin of Mary Horsmanden Filmer Byrd. They included Robert “King” Carter and his son John Carter, and their cousins William Byrd, Nathaniel Harrison, and Peter Beverley. The other councilors were John Robinson, who had married Katherine Beverley; Philip Ludwell II, who had married Hannah Harrison; James Blair, whose wife was Sarah Harrison; John Lewis, who had married the daughter of Augustine Warner and was tied to all the major connections; Mann Page, who was kin to Judith Wormeley; Edmund Jennings and Cole Digges, who were related by marriage and birth to many of these families.22

This elite gained control of the Council during the mid-seventeenth century and retained it until the Revolution. As early as 1660, every seat on the Council was filled by members of five related connections. As late as 1775, every member of that august body was descended from a councilor who had served in 1660.23

A seat on the Council was not an empty honor. This small body functioned as the governor’s cabinet, the upper house of the legislature and the colony’s supreme court. It controlled the distribution of land, and the lion’s share went to twenty-five families who held two-thirds of the seats in that body from 1680 to 1775. These same families also controlled other offices of power and profit: secretary, treasurer, auditor general, receiver general, surveyor

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Norborne Berkeley, Lord Botetourt, personified the special relationship that long persisted between the Berkeley family and Virginia. Lord Botetourt (1718-70) was “a gracious, amiable and bankrupt nobleman” who became one of Virginia’s most popular colonial governors. Appointed to that office in 1768, he conducted himself in the same vice-regal manner as his kinsman had done before him. Just as Sir William Berkeley copied the gestures of Charles I, so Lord Botetourt imitated George III, opening the Assembly much as the King opened Parliament, riding through Williamsburg in a state coach drawn by a matched team of cream-colored Hanoverian horses. When he spoke in public Botetourt mimicked the dress, manners, appearance and even the peculiar speech defects of George III. By 1768, the first gentlemen of Virginia like many old Royalist families in England had become outspoken Whigs. They disagreed with Lord Botetourt on constitutional questions, but they held him in high respect, liked him enormously and accepted him as one of themselves. When Lord Botetourt died suddenly of a tidewater fever in 1770, the Virginians erected a monument that survived the Revolution.

general, collectors and naval officers, and governors of William and Mary College.24

In company with a larger group of lesser gentry, they also kept a firm grip on the economic life of the colony. In 1703 an official wrote, “ … in every river of this province there are men in number from ten to thirty, who by trade and industry have gotten very competent estates. Those gentlemen take care to supply the poorer sort with goods and necessaries, and are sure to keep them always in their debt, and consequently dependent on them. Out of this number are chosen His Majesty’s Council, the Assembly, the Justices, and Officers of Government.”25

This small elite was destined to play a large role in the history of Virginia—not merely in its politics and economics, but also in its society and culture. The formation of southern folkways owed much to their example. An English immigrant who came in 1717 observed, “ … at the Capitol, at publick times, may be seen a great number of handsome, well-dressed, complete gentlemen.” He thought that they made “as fine an appearance … as I have seen anywhere.”26 In 1773, a clear-sighted northern visitor to Virginia, Philip Fithian, observed that “the people of fortune … are the pattern of all behavior here.”27

The more hierarchical a society becomes, the stronger is the cultural dominion of its elite. The hegemony of Virginia’s first families was exceptionally strong through the first century of that colony’s history. One English emigrant named George Fisher remembered being warned about their power:

John Randolph, in speaking of the disposition of the Virginians, very freely cautioned us against disobliging or offending any person of note in the Colony …; for says he, either by blood or marriage, we are almost all related, and so connected in our interests, that whoever of a stranger presumes to offend any one of us will infallibly find an enemy of the whole. Nor, right or wrong, do we forsake him, till by one means or other his ruin is accomplished.28

This Virginia elite was firmly established during the governorship of Sir William Berkeley, and remained dominant for more than a century. Throughout this long period, English aristocrats who came to the New World instantly recognized a cultural kinship with the great planters of Virginia. In 1765, for example, Lord Adam Gordon, the first son of the second Duke of Gordon, observed that the “topping families” of Virginia had been founded by “younger brothers of good families of England.” He felt perfectly at home among them. “Upon the whole,” he wrote, “was it the case to live in America, this province in point of company and climate would be my choice.”29

The social origins of Virginia’s “topping families” were better understood by Lord Adam Gordon than by many middle-class historians in the twentieth century, who have replaced the image of “topping families” and “complete gentlemen” with an idea of upwardly-mobile bourgeois entrepreneurs. But the legend of the Virginia cavalier was no mere romantic myth. In all of its major parts, it rested upon a solid foundation of historical fact.30

Image Virginia’s Great Migration: Social Origins

 

The settlement of Virginia had actually begun more than a generation before the arrival of Sir William Berkeley and his elite. Its starting point was the founding of Jamestown (1607) by English colonists in the ship Susan Constant and her two small consorts Godspeed and Discovery. These immigrants succeeded in planting the first permanent English settlement in America. But there is today no Susan Constant Society comparable to that of the Mayflower descendants. Most of Jamestown’s founders either died in their new homes or speedily returned to England.1

The population of Virginia began to grow rapidly at a later date—after the Puritan migration to New England. Many authorities now agree that English “immigration to the Chesapeake colonies was heavily concentrated in the third quarter of the seventeenth century.”2 From 1645 to 1665, Virginians multiplied more than threefold and Marylanders increased elevenfold, while New Englanders merely doubled. Given the very high mortality rates in the Chesapeake colonies and low birth rates during the first generation, the number of immigrants to the Chesapeake was probably in the range of 40,000 to 50,000 during the period from 1645 to 1670.3

Virginia’s second great migration differed from the Puritan exodus to Massachusetts in many ways—in its English origins, in its American destination, and especially in its social composition. New England had drawn mostly from the middle of English society. Virginians came in greater numbers from both higher and lower ranks. In quantitative terms, Sir William Berkeley’s “distressed cavaliers” were only a small part of the total flow to the Chesapeake colonies. The great mass of Virginia’s immigrants were humble people of low rank. More than 75 percent came as indentured servants.4

One surviving English register of emigration contains the names of approximately 10,000 servants who sailed from Bristol to America between 1654 and 1678. Roughly half of these emigrants went to Virginia. The rest found their way to the West Indies—mainly the island of Barbados which was much favored during the 1650s, and the beautiful little island of Nevis which was preferred in the early 1660s. Scarcely any chose to make New England their home. The main stream flowed from the south and west of England to the Caribbean and the Chesapeake.5

Virginia’s servants were recruited mainly from the lower strata of English society, but not from the very lowest—“the bottom of the middle ranks,” one historian has written, “below their older and wealthier contemporaries, but above the poor laborers, vagrants and the destitute.” Unlike most emigrants to New England, their passage was paid by others.6 They tended to be more rural and agrarian than the founders of Massachusetts. Two-thirds of Virginia’s colonists were unskilled laborers, or “farmers” in the English sense—agrarian tenants who worked the land of others. Only about 30 percent were artisans (compared with nearly 60 percent in New England). Most were unable to read or write; rates of literacy in the Chesapeake Bay were much lower than in Massachusetts Bay.7

Patterns of gender were also very different from New England’s great migration. Altogether, females were outnumbered by males by more than four to one—in some periods, as much as six to one.8 Few women freely chose to settle in Virginia. Some were “trapanned” or “snared” and sent against their will, as an old folk ballad called “The Trappan’d Malden” tells us:

Give ear unto a Maid, that lately was betray’d,

And sent into Virginny, O:

In brief I shall declare, what I have suffer’d there,

When that I was weary, weary, weary, weary, O. …

Five years served I, under Master Guy,

In the land of Virginny, O,

Which made me for to know sorrow, grief and woe,

When that I was weary, weary, weary, weary, O. …

I have played my part both at Plow and Cart,

In the Land of Virginny, O;

Billets from the Wood upon my back they load,

When that I am weary, weary, weary, weary, O. …

Then let Maids beware, all by my ill-fare,

In the Land of Virginny, O;

Be sure to stay at home, for if you here do come,

You all will be weary, weary, weary, weary, O. …9

In 1643 a woman named Elizabeth Hamlin was sent to Newgate for “trapanning” girls in this manner. Another ballad tells the

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Virginia’s immigrants in the late seventeenth century were mostly indentured servants whose families had been poor tenant farmers and country laborers. The last remnants of this class still survive today in remote rural villages of southern England. As recently as 1985, two tenant-laborers named Jack and Roy French were suddenly thrust into the national limelight by the death of their landlord. They lived in the Cotswold village of Great Tew (Oxfordshire), in old stone cottages without electricity or water, and were tenants of a local squire named Major Eustace Robb. The death of Major Robb caused a furious controversy in the West Oxfordshire District Council about the disposition of the cottages and occupants.

tale of an “honest weaver” who sold his wife to Virginia. This practice, bizarre as it may seem, actually occurred in England during the seventeenth century.10

Most of Virginia’s servant-immigrants were half-grown boys and young men. Three out of four were between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four. Only 3 percent were under fifteen, and less than 1 percent was over thirty-five—a sharp contrast with Massachusetts.11 More than a few of these youngsters were “spirited” or kidnapped to Virginia. Parliament in 1645 heard evidence of gangs who “in a most barbarous and wicked manner steal away many little children” for service in the Chesapeake colonies.12 Others were “lagged” or transported after being arrested for petty crime or vagrancy. Another ballad tells the story of a London apprentice was who “lagg’d” by a “hard-hearted judge,” and “sold for a slave in Virginia”:

Come all you young fellows wherever you be,

Come listen awile and I will tell thee,

Concerning the hardships that we undergo,

When we get lagg’d to Virginia …

 

When I was apprentice in fair London town,

Many hours I served duly and truly,

Till buxom young lasses they led me astray,

My work I neglected more and more every day,

By that I got lagg’d to Virginia.

 

But now in Virginia I lay like a hog,

Our pillow at night is a brick or a log,

We dress and undress like some other sea hog,

How hard is my fate in Virginia.13

 

The character of Virginia’s great migration thus differed in almost every important way from the Puritan exodus to Massachusetts. From the start, immigrants to the Chesapeake colony were more highly stratified, more male-dominant, more rural, more agrarian, less highly skilled, and less literate. Many came from the south and west of England; few from East Anglia or the north. These patterns did not develop merely by chance. Virginia’s great migration was the product of policy and social planning. Its royalist elite succeeded in shaping the social history of an American region partly by regulating the process of migration.

Image Virginia’s Great Migration: Religious Origins

 

Religion was not as central to the origins of the Chesapeake colonies as it had been in New England. But the founders of Virginia shared the religious obsessions of their age, and they were sent upon their way with an abundance of spiritual exhortation. John Donne, the poet dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, called himself “an adventurer; if not to Virginia, then for Virginia”. He preached a sermon to departing planters, and told them:

Your principal end is not gain, nor glory, but to gain souls to the glory of God. This seals the great seal, this justifies itself, this authorises authority, and gives power to strength itself. … you shall have made this island, which is but the Suburbs of the old world, a Bridge, a Gallery to the new; to join all to that world that shall never grow old, the kingdom of heaven.1

John Donne had mainly in mind the salvation of Indian souls. Others suggested that the founding of Virginia might also be a means of redeeming a few unregenerate Englishmen. The Reverend William Crashaw delivered another departure sermon for the Virginia Company, in which he declared:

As long as we have wise, courageous and discreet Governours, together with the preaching of God’s word, we much care not what the generality is of them that go in person, considering we find that the most disordered men that can be raked up out of the superflaitie, or, if you will, the very excrements of a full and swelling state, if they be removed … from the licentiousness and too much liberty of the states where they have lived, into a more base and barren soil, as every country is at first, and to a harder course of life, wanting pleasures, and subject to some pinching miseries, and to a strict form of government and severe discipline, do often become new men, even as it were cast in a new mold.2

This advice was addressed to one “discreet governor” in particular, Lord De la Warr, who did as he was urged. One of his first acts in the New World was to open a “pretty chapel” decorated every day with fresh flowers, complete with a chancel of Virginia cedar, a communion table of black walnut, and a font in the shape of an Indian canoe. Lord De la Warr required every Virginian to assemble for prayers twice a day “at the ringing of a bell.” Every Sunday all the settlers were compelled to attend two services conducted with high ceremony. The governor himself sat on a splendid green velvet throne, surrounded by “all the Councilors, Captains, other officers, and all the gentlemen, and with a guard of Halberdiers in his Lordship’s Livery.”3

For more than a century, the religious life of Virginia developed along these lines. It was ceremonial, liturgical, hierarchical, ritualist—and very different from New England. Each individual was not expected to share the same opinions. But all were compelled to join in the same rituals. The gentry who came from southwestern England had long favored “an uniform government of the Church in all points.”4

During its first few decades, Virginia’s immigrants held many varieties of Protestant belief. A few laymen and clergy had puritanical leanings. The marriage of Pocahontas and John Rolfe was performed by Richard Buck, a staunch Puritan. But Virginia did not attract many of that persuasion. In 1613, one clergyman marveled that “so few of our English ministers that were so hot against the surplice and subscription, come hither, where neither are spoken of.”5

After Virginia became a royal colony, an ideal of Anglican conformity began to be more actively pursued. In 1632 the Assembly enacted seventeen laws which required “uniformity throughout this colony, both in substance and circumstance to the canons and constitutions of the Church of England.” Each minister was compelled to preach every Sabbath, to give communion three times a year, to “examine, catechise and instruct” all the children in his parish, and to “excel all others in puritie of life.” Parishioners were required to attend church on Sundays and holidays, or to pay a shilling for each absence. They also had to pay tithes, and were forbidden to “disparage” their ministers.6

After 1642 Governor William Berkeley added other laws which required “all nonconformists … to depart the colony with all conveniency.” Several small Puritan communities had been founded before he arrived, and nonconformist ministers had been sent to serve them. Berkeley scattered these settlements, and banished the Puritans from Virginia. More than 300 fled to Maryland, and others departed for New England. After the Civil War, the Protectorate was unable to break the Anglican establishment in Virginia. The Book of Common Prayer was specially permitted in the colony, as long as prayers to the King and Royal family were omitted.7

When Quakers began to appear the authorities moved quickly against them. A law in 1658 ordered all Quakers to be banished. Shipmasters who brought them were required to remove them in close confinement. One defiant female Friend was ordered to be whipped twenty strokes upon her bare back, and (more painful to a Quaker conscience) she was also required to confess her error upon bended knee. The whipping was remitted when she promised to conform. Quakers were also fined for failing to attend Anglican services and for refusing to pay tithes. In 1661 other laws punished Anglicans who were merely “loving to Quakers.”8

This persecution worked. Puritan congregations were virtually eliminated from Virginia, and Quakers were reduced to a few small meetings. By the end of the seventeenth century, religious belief was remarkably uniform in the colony. Robert Beverley reported in 1705 that dissenters were “very few,” with “not more than five conventicles amongst them, namely three small meetings of Quakers, and two of Presbyterians.”9

A religious survey of Virginia in 1724 showed that the Anglican establishment was strong and healthy throughout the colony—more so than in the mother country. Most clergy reported that their services were well attended every Sunday by most white adults in the parish, and that a larger proportion took holy communion than in England. Dissenters were reported to be few, and in some parishes nonexistent.10

Later in the eighteenth century, this pattern rapidly changed with the increase of Presbyterians, Baptists and Methodists. But through the Old Dominion’s first six generations Anglican orthodoxy was strong, and growing stronger. Here was a fact of high importance for the history of Virginia, for the culture of this colony, no less than Massachusetts, was shaped by its religion.

Image Virginia’s Great Migration: Regional Origins

 

Virginia’s immigrants came from every county of England, and from thousands of parishes. But a majority of Virginia’s indentured servants hailed from sixteen counties in the south and west of England—the same area that produced Virginia’s elite. A case in point was the population that settled in Virginia’s Isle of Wight County. A local historian found that “early Isle of Wight families seem to have come mostly from the southwest of England, that is the counties of Gloucester, Somerset, Devon, Dorset, Wiltshire and Hampshire … their names appear to be more numerous in the west country than in any other part of England. After the west country, London and its surrounding counties seem to be next.”1

Another example was the population of Berkeley Hundred in Virginia. Its historian found that “the majority … whether sponsors, tenants at labor or indentured servants, were … born and bred in Gloucester, where many of them were natives of the Berkeley vale, the Cotswold Edge, or the Winchcombe area.”2

In yet another group of 1,200 immigrants to all parts of Virginia, it was observed that “most of them [were] choice men, born and bred up to labor and husbandry. Out of Devonshire, about an hundred men, brought up to husbandry; out of Warwickshire and Staffordshire, above one hundred and ten; and out of Sussex about forty, all trained to ironworks; the rest dispersedly out of divers Shires of the realm.”3

These regional patterns changed a little during the mid-seventeenth century. One historian has reckoned that before 1650 as many as 80 or 90 percent of Virginia’s servants sailed from London, and the great majority came from “the southeastern part of the country, particularly London and the Home counties.” Roughly half (52%) of these servants who sailed from the River Thames identified their homes as London itself—mostly the suburbs. Only about 2 percent came from the inner city. The other half came mostly from counties to the west of London—Middlesex, Buckingham, Surrey, Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Warwickshire and Northamptonshire. Few came from East Anglia.4 After 1650, Bristol became more important in Virginia’s servant trade. The great majority of emigrants from Bristol (87% in one sample) came from the west of England and South Wales. The most important place of origin was the Severn Valley.5

In the mid-seventeenth century, Virginia’s recruiting ground in England might have been encompassed by two great circles around the cities of London and Bristol, each with a radius of roughly sixty miles.6 To this rule, however, there were important exceptions. Comparatively few of Virginia’s immigrants came from East Anglia, though parts of that region lay very near to London. Even fewer came from Cornwall, though that county lay

Image

within easy reach of Bristol.7 The people of Cornwall, many of whom still spoke Gaelic in the seventeenth century, were culturally distinct from other counties of southwestern England. This pattern shows that for Virginia’s indentured servants, the location of the seaport did not determine the region. It was more nearly the other way around—the region determined the seaport.8

The regional origins and social purposes of Virginia’s English immigrants also appeared in the names that they gave to the new land—an important piece of evidence, for it is independent of registers and shipping lists. Altogether, twenty-five counties were created in Virginia by the year 1703. Two kept their Indian names—Accomac and Nansemond. Eight other names reflected the Royalist politics of the Virginians: James City County, Charles City County, Elizabeth City County, Henrico, Prince George, Princess Anne, King William, and King and Queen County. All the rest bore the names of British counties and towns. Only two names came from the east of England, and only four from the north. The remainder (8 of 14, or 57%) were drawn from the same region in southwestern England which also dominated the shipping lists, servant registers and genealogies of the ruling elite. In southern Maryland and southern Delaware, county names also were drawn entirely from the south and west of England.9

A similar pattern also appeared in the names of Virginia’s parishes. Of 54 parishes founded before 1726, most were given the names of Christian saints or Indian places. But fourteen parishes were named after English communities. All of them without exception were in the south and west of England—the same triangle of territory between Bristol, Warwick and Kent.10

Image The Cradle of Virginia: The South of England

 

Virginia’s recruiting ground was a broad region in the south and west of England, running from the weald of Kent to Devon and north as far as Shropshire and Staffordshire. This area was not defined by its physical features. It did not share the same soil resources or a single topography or a dominant agricultural regime. Its regional character was formed not by any of these material factors, but by its culture and history.

The heart of this territory was Wessex, Hardy country. Thomas Hardy’s fictional Wessex included the counties of Wiltshire (“Mid Wessex”); Dorset (“South Wessex”); Somerset and Gloucestershire (“Outer Wessex”); Devon (“Lower Wessex”), Hampshire, West Sussex and Surrey (“Upper Wessex”), plus Berkshire, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire (“North Wessex”).1 This area sent large numbers of gentry and servants to the Chesapeake. The first families of Virginia even included the Turbervilles from Bere Regis (Hardy’s Kingsbere) who were the originals for Hardy’s fictional D’Urbervilles. In the court records of the Chesapeake colonies, one may also find the saga of many a tidewater Tess.2 But Virginia’s recruiting ground was larger than Hardy’s modern literary Wessex. It more nearly resembled the ancient historical Wessex of Alfred and Athelred, which with its Mercian protectorate reached east as far as Canterbury, and north beyond Warwick and Northampton.

Through many centuries, this area developed its own distinctive culture. Its language and laws were those of the West Saxons, rather than the Danes who settled East Anglia, or the Norse who colonized the north country, or the Celts who held Cornwall and Wales. Its shires were divided into hundreds rather than wapentakes; its tax units were reckoned in hides instead of carucates; its weights and measures were old British rather than Scandinavian.3

The countryside of this region was divided into comparatively large manors—larger than in the east of England—and dominated by a small landholding class. The boundaries of its estates were very ancient. Historian J. H. Bettey writes that “the arrangement of the Wessex landscape and its administrative divisions and estate boundaries had already been in existence for many centuries before the Norman conquest.”4

During the early middle ages slavery had existed on a large scale throughout Mercia, Wessex and Sussex, and had lasted longer there than in other parts of England. Historian D.J.V. Fisher writes that “the fate of many of the natives was not extermination but slavery.”5 This was not merely domestic bondage,

Image

but slavery on a larger scale. During the eighth and ninth centuries, the size of major slaveholdings in the south of England reached levels comparable to large plantations in the American South. When Bishop Wilfred acquired Selsey in Sussex, he emancipated 250 slaves on a single estate. Few plantations in the American South were so large even at their peak in the nineteenth century.6 Serfdom also had been exceptionally strong in this region. Painstaking analysis of the Domesday book by historical geographers has shown that the proportion of servi was larger in Wessex than in other parts of England.7

By the time of American colonization, both slavery and serfdom were long gone from this region. But other forms of social obligation remained very strong in the seventeenth century. A smaller part of the population were freeholders in the south and west of England than in East Anglia.8

The political character of southwestern England was consistent with its social history. This was the territory that remained loyal to King John in 1215. It rallied to Richard II in 1381, and generally stood by the Tudors in the mid-sixteenth century. Most of this region supported the Stuarts during the Civil War.9 With a few exceptions it was stony ground for Puritan proselytizers and dissenting denominations in the seventeenth century.10

In its religion this region leaned toward the orthodox side of the Anglican spectrum. Its churches and monasteries had nourished a rich tradition of liturgical Christianity for many centuries. In 1549, this region supported the Western Rebellion, a violent protest against Protestant innovations which spread through Hampshire, Dorsetshire, Devonshire, Warwickshire, Somersetshire and Leicestershire.11 In 1655 it was also the place of Penruddock’s Rebellion, the largest armed rising against Puritan rule in England. The leader of this movement, Col. John Penruddock, called himself “a free-born gentleman of England.” His lieutenants were drawn from the county gentry of Wessex. In the words of the Roundhead who ordered their execution, they were “many of good quality, many of ingenious education, some of better parts than myself.”12

In the early seventeenth century, the landscape of the south and west of England differed in its appearance from East Anglia. Much of it was a shaggy country, still very heavily wooded. The county of Somerset in 1623 was described as “a great part of it being forest and woodlands.” Berkshire was “covered far and wide with forests and woods.” Similar statements were also made about other counties in this part of England.13

A large part of this region were royal forests, some of enormous size—notably the Forest of Dean, Windsor Forest, and New Forest where two sons of William the Conqueror were killed. These vast tracts were governed by “forest law,” a judicial system of exceptional rigor.14

Much of the land was also kept as parks and chases for the sport of country gentlemen. For many centuries, deer parks had been more numerous in the south and west of England than in the north and east. The Domesday survey, for example, listed thirty-one deer parks in England—of which only three were in East Anglia and none were in the Midlands or the North. Most were in the south and west of England. In the sixteenth century, deer parks continued to be more common in Gloucestershire, Devonshire and Staffordshire than in other counties. They were comparatively rare in Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire and Huntingdonshire. As late as 1712, Northamptonshire was thought to have more deer parks than any county of England. The long continuity from the twelfth to the eighteenth century was very striking.15

Before 1700, the south and west was less densely settled than East Anglia. This was a cultural region without a capital. One of its modern historians writes that “the Wessex region has no natural center.”16 Between London and Bristol, there were no large towns and remarkably few little ones. In year 1600, for example, the entire county of Hampshire contained only two towns as large as 3,000 inhabitants—Winchester and Southampton, which were both about that size. Only six Hampshire villages were above 1,000 (Alton, Andover, Fareham, Basingstoke, Petersfield and Portsmouth). In Dorset, the largest town was Dorchester with only 1,500 souls; in the county of Sussex, only Chichester and Lewes had as many as 2,000 inhabitants.17

The population of the south and west was mostly scattered in manorial settlements. One local historian writes, “ … the classic manorial system of medieval England decayed only very slowly in Berkshire.”18 The same statement could be made of every county in the south and west. The countryside was dominated by the great estates of the gentry, with their environing clusters of small houses inhabited by tenants and subtenants.19

The economy of this region was organized primarily around the production and sale of agricultural staples—principally grain and wool. The mid-seventeenth century was a dark period for this region. Its economy was as deeply depressed in the 1640s and 1650s as that of East Anglia had been in the 1620s and 1630s.20 From 1642 to 1666, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse rode freely through this troubled countryside. It suffered much from the violence of the Civil Wars, and labored severely under a cruel regime of martial law that was imposed by Parliament. The woolen trade was disrupted in this period; the old cloth towns of the west lost population and poverty rapidly increased. So also did epidemic disease, culminating in major epidemics of plague. Social anarchy became a serious problem. In 1644-45 the risings of the English Clubmen, who sought to restore order in their communities, corresponded almost exactly in their distribution with the region of emigration to the Chesapeake.21

There were many strong links between the character of the south and west of England and the culture of Virginia. Both regions were marked by deep and pervasive inequalities, by a staple agriculture and rural settlement patterns, by powerful oligarchies of large landowners with Royalist politics and an Anglican faith.

Even today, this historian who was born and raised in Maryland feels strangely at home when walking the country lanes of southwestern England. One finds much that seems familiar. Large brick manor houses are set back from the road behind hedges of privet or boxwood. Small farm cottages stand in isolation along the highways, surrounded by green rolling fields. Where two or three roads meet, there is apt to be a humble pub of the sort that seventeenth-century Englishmen called an “ordinary”—a word that long survived in Virginia.22 In summer the roadside is white with Queen Anne’s lace; and the air is heavy with the sweet smell of honeysuckle. The countryside is so shaggy and overgrown that the country roads sometimes become dark tunnels of dense foliage. As the traveler passes through these lanes, he has an eerie feeling that he has entered a tunnel through time. When he emerges into the light and the English landscape opens before him, this American from the Chesapeake Bay has a sense of coming home.

Image The Chesapeake Environment

 

English folkways were not the only determinant of Virginia’s culture. Another factor was the American environment. New England and Virginia were very different in their physical setting—more so than the distance between them would lead one to expect. Jamestown and Boston were separated by only five degrees of latitude (300 nautical miles). But they were much farther apart in their climate and geography.

The dominant feature of Virginia’s environment was the Chesapeake Bay, always known to natives as the Bay. In ecological terms the Bay is an estuary, where fresh and salt water meet in a marine environment of exceptional fertility. The light of the sun reaches down through warm and shallow waters, rich in nitrogen and phosphorous, to nourish large populations of bacteria and plankton. The sandy bottom of the Bay is choked with eelgrass, sea lettuce and wild celery which support a great chain of marine life, culminating in the striped bass and shellfish that are an epicure’s delight. For English colonists who settled on its shoreline, the teeming waters of the Bay held immense riches—and fatal dangers.

The surface of the Bay is a vast sheet of water, 200 miles long, 4 to 30 miles wide, and open throughout its length to oceangoing vessels. “No country can compare with it,” wrote Hugh Jones, for “number of navigable rivers, creeks and inlets.”1 The Bay is fed by hundreds of streams and forty-eight navigable rivers, some of immense size. The James River is larger than London’s Thames; the Potomac is longer than the Seine. The Bay and its tributaries hold many dangers for unwary navigators—treacherous shoals, shifting sandbanks, coastlines that rise and fall without warning, disastrous worms which can devour a ship’s wooden bottom. But with care, a colonial captain could sail where he pleased in this vast waterway and find good anchorages for the largest vessel. Virginia planter Robert Beverley wrote that ocean-going ships could anchor directly “before that gentleman’s door where they find the best reception, or where ’tis most suitable to their Business.” Maryland’s Dr. Charles Carroll observed that “planters can deliver their own commodities at their own back doors.”

This fact led one visitor in the seventeenth century to predict that the Chesapeake would become “like the Netherlands, the richest place in all America.”2

This watery maze of rivers and streams created vast tracts of rich alluvial soil. The best land was quickly appropriated by Governor Berkeley’s Royalist elite for their large plantations. “Gentlemen and planters love to build near the water,” wrote Hugh Jones, “though it be not so healthy as the uplands and barrens.”3 When William Hugh Grove sailed into the York River in 1732, he observed that it was “thick seated with gentry on its banks … the prospect of river render them very pleasant [and] equal to the Thames from London to Richmond, supposing the towns omitted.”4

The “omission of towns” was encouraged by the structure of the Bay and its rivers. Their 6,000 miles of shoreline created an opportunity for dispersed settlement that did not exist in other environments. The people of the Bay were able to scatter themselves through a vast amphibious territory. Robert Beverley wrote that all the colonists on the Bay had “fallen into the same unhappy form of settlements, altogether upon country seats without towns.”5

The shape of the terrain differs on the two sides of the Bay. On the eastern shore it tends to be as flat as a billiard table. The western shore is a more varied and rolling countryside that falls to the water’s edge in gentle undulations. Captain John Smith accurately described it as a succession of “pleasant plain hills and fertile valleys, one prettily crossing another, and watered so conveniently with their sweet brooks and crystal springs, as if art itself had devised them.” When cleared and cultivated, the western shore took on a quiet, pastoral beauty that reminded homesick colonists of southern and western England.6

Between the rivers were ridges or “necks” that tended to be thin and barren land. Here poor whites pitched their small houses and scratched out a miserable living from the earth. Upland soil sold for as little as five shillings an acre in the eighteenth

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century. The price of rich bottom land was five pounds an acre—twenty times as much.7

The best river land was immensely fertile, and there was a great deal of it—vast tracts of virgin soil, which natives and visitors alike uniformly praised for its “extreme fruitfulness.” It was farmed by primitive methods of husbandry, producing large yields until the late eighteenth century.

When Virginia was young, the tidewater was a lush, green country. “The whole country is a perfect forest,” wrote Hugh Jones in 1724, “except where the woods are cleared for plantations, and old fields, and where have been formerly Indian towns.” By the mid-eighteenth century more of the tidewater was cleared than today. The countryside around Williamsburg was described by the German traveller Johann Schoepf in 1784 as “a pleasant open plain.” But he characterized the colony in general as an “eternal woods,” broken by dense swamps and grassy uplands which the planters called “savannahs” or “barrens.”8

The Chesapeake woodlands were magnificent stands of ancient trees, soaring “thirty, forty, fifty, some even sixty or seventy feet high without a branch or limb.” There were towering tulip trees with gaudy yellow-orange flowers, and aromatic sweet gums with delicate star-shaped leaves, and majestic white oaks as much as five hundred years old. The variety of trees was astounding—as many as fifty varieties of oak alone. The swamps were dense with cypress and cedar; and the uplands were covered with sassafras and chinkapin.9 Wild fruit trees flourished in profusion; among them, many wild plums and cherries (“the most delicious cherry in the world,” wrote Robert Beverley); and persimmons which could be made into “an agreeable kind of beer.” The open fields were choked with currants, raspberries, and delicate wild strawberries “so plentiful that few persons take care to transplant them, but can find enough to fill their baskets.”10

To its first English colonists, the Chesapeake country appeared another Eden, demi-paradise. Captain John Smith thought that “heaven and earth never agreed better to frame a place for man’s habitation.”11 It would have been so, were it not for one terrible defect. To colonists from northern Europe, the Chesapeake proved to be desperately unhealthy. The best lands on the water’s edge became death traps in the summer and fall.

The climate of the Chesapeake in the seventeenth century was nearly as warm as in the twentieth. Such was the pattern of circulation in the “little ice age” that temperatures were about the same as today throughout the southern colonies while New England was colder. “The natural temperature of the inhabited part of the country, is hot and moist,” observed Robert Beverley of Virginia. “The summer is as hot as Spain; the winter cold as in France or England,” wrote Captain John Smith. The scientific traveler Johann Schoepf observed in the eighteenth century that “the Fahrenheit thermometer often stands at 80-90-95 degrees.”12

This warm climate gave tidewater Virginia an asset in the length of its growing season, which was 210 days between heavy frosts—two months longer than in New England. But it also brought a liability in the relation between climate and disease. As the temperature rose, so did the death rate.

One part of the problem rose from the Bay itself. Fecal pollutants washed into swamps and stagnant pools. The estuary itself became an ideal breeding ground for typhoid fever and amoebic dysentery, trapping deadly organisms which ravaged the sickly population in the summer months. The “dying time” came mostly in the summer and early fall, when “fevers” took a heavy toll of young life. Every year this mortal season lasted much longer in Virginia than in New England.13

Another part of the problem was malaria. The tidewater was a perfect nursery for mosquitos. In the hot summers Robert Beverley wrote that “musketaes are a sort of vermin, of less danger [than others] but much more troublesome, because more frequent.”14 Malaria parasites were introduced at an early date by immigrants from Europe and Africa—first the comparatively mild Plasmodium vivax from southern England; then the more dangerous Plasmodium falciparum by which Africa had its revenge for the slave trade. P. vivax was a great debilitator; P. falciparum was a killer. Particularly at risk were pregnant women, infants, small children, new immigrants and the chronically ill.15

Malaria, typhoid, dysentery, enteritis and other diseases took a terrific toll in that part of tidewater Virginia where the soil was richest, and where gentlemen liked to build their seats. A French visitor observed that the sallow faces of people in tidewater Gloucester County, “looked so sickly that I judged the neighborhood to be unhealthy.” On higher ground in Rappahannock and Stafford counties, he remarked that complexions were “clear and lively.”16

The heat and humidity of the tidewater, and its endemic summer diseases had other social consequences. Travelers and natives both remarked on the “idleness,” “indolence” and “sluggishness” of the Virginians, as well as their irritability and quick tempers. Geographer Carville Earle has pointed out the similarity between this behavior and the symptoms of endemic diseases in the tidewater.17

The environment of the Chesapeake combined with the culture of Sir William Berkeley’s Royalist elite to create the folkways of Virginia. The rich resources of the region supported a strong agricultural regime. But heavy mortality among European colonists disrupted nuclear households and discouraged immigration from Europe. Virginia’s unique folkways emerged from the interplay of English culture and an American environment.

Image The Colonial Mood: Virginia and the Mother Country

 

From an early date in the seventeenth century, Virginians began to speak affectionately of their new colony as the “Old Dominion” or even the “Ancient Dominion.”1 This curious phrase bespoke an attitude of mind that developed in many colonial environments.

Throughout the New World, colonists far from home formed a strong attachment for what seemed old and even ancient in their culture.

This colonial mood became especially strong in Virginia, where it was reinforced by the values of an English culture that tended to be profoundly conservative in every sense—elitist, hierarchical, and strenuously hostile to social change. The writings of Sir Robert Filmer, the political philosopher whose family was so closely connected with Virginia, expressed these attitudes with exceptional clarity and force. One modern student of his thought observes that Filmer “succeeds in justifying the status quo in every little, almost accidental detail. He tried to prove that the slightest change in anything that went to make up the world as he knew it could be disastrous.”2

Filmer was not alone in these opinions. Almost any Royalist diary or commonplace book revealed the same world view. The Hampshire gentleman Sir John Oglander warned others to “take heed of innovation, of bringing in any new device into our island.” Words such as “innovation,” “novelty” and “modern” were pejorative terms.3

This conservatism was deepened in Virginia by the mood of cultural nostalgia that developed in most new colonies. The Virginians long retained a sense of longing for the land they had left. Their children shared a common feeling of cultural loss that continued for many generations. As late as 1736, more than a century after settlement, William Byrd II wrote to an English correspondent, “Our lives are uniform without any great variety, till the season brings in the ships. Then we tear open the letters they bring us from our friends as eagerly as a greedy heir tears open a rich father’s will.” Byrd’s choice of metaphor was specially revealing. Six generations after settlement, Virginians still perceived the culture of England as a precious inheritance to be protected from change, and passed intact from one generation to the next.4

For a very long time, the Chesapeake colonists thought of themselves as Englishmen apart from England—cultural exiles in a distant land. They often referred to their nation as “the mother country,” in maternal terms which implied a warm, nurturing, affective relationship—a very different idea from the Roman “patria” or the German “fatherland.”

This consciousness of cultural exile created a curious melange of feelings: chief among them, an obsessive sense of colonial inferiority. In 1728, for example, Maryland’s Governor Benedict Leonard Calvert wrote to the Earl of Litchfield, “We are at best but a feeble miniature of England.”5 The New World seemed a forlorn and empty place to these people. Henry Chicheley wrote home from Virginia in 1674, “For news I suppose you expect none from this barren part of the world.”6 As late as 1726, William Byrd wrote in the same deprecatory spirit of Virginia as “this silent country.”7

This attitude did not merely exist among the colony’s small elite. It was also shared by colonists of other ranks—perhaps by indentured servants most of all. One servant ballad sang:

Old England, Old England, I shall never see you more,

If I do it’s ten thousand to twenty;

My bones are quite rotten, my feet are quite sore,

I’m parched with fever, and am at death’s door,

But if ever I live to see seven years more,

Then I’ll bid adieu to Virginia.8

Another side of this aching nostalgia for the “mother country” was a strenuous hostility to “strangers.” In 1738, for example, William Byrd II in 1738 wrote, “I have learnt by long experience to be upon my guard against all strangers not well recommended, so that they can cheat me of nothing but my civilities.”9 This attitude deepened into a positive hatred of “foreigners,” a category which included all people not English. The correspondence of the three William Byrds overflowed with virulent prejudices against

“foreigners.” They detested every nation except England and despised all races except their own. They were intensely anti-Semitic. “As clamorous and unreasoning as any Jew,” was a casual phrase that William Byrd II used without thinking. They also spoke ill of the French, Germans, Dutch, Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians, Roman Catholics, Calvinists, Puritans, Quakers, and Dissenters of every stripe.

These were the traditional prejudices of English gentlemen. The Duke of Wurtemberg, while traveling in England, observed that “they care little for foreigners, but scoff and laugh at them.” The same attitudes were reinforced in Virginia by the colonial mood of anxiety, nostalgia, and cultural loss.10

Another symptom of the colonial malaise was a deep sense of uneasiness about present conditions and future events. These feelings grew steadily in mid-seventeenth-century Virginia, reaching a flash point in Nathaniel Bacon’s Rebellion (1676), and the bloody repression that followed. The rebel Bacon himself was Governor Berkeley’s kinsman and protégé. Both men came from the same rank and shared similar Royalist ideals. Bacon’s “Declaration of the People” was far from a democratic document; he complained that Virginia was not hierarchical enough, and that its institutions had been corrupted by “vile” men. Both leaders expressed deep fears of external enemies and internal subversion. Bacon’s Rebellion was a conflict that rose from a cultural mood that was widely shared in the colony.11

These emotions deepened the determination of Virginia planters to cling to their inherited folkways, but the cultural results of this effort were not always as they intended. A tenacious conservatism sometimes becomes a powerful engine of change. So it would be in Virginia. In an effort to preserve a cultural hegemony, for example, the gentry of Virginia would develop a novel type of race slavery on a large scale—a radical innovation with profound consequences for the future. As we shall see in a subsequent volume, these new forms of slavery did not create the culture of the tidewater Virginia; that culture created slavery.

In any case, the culture of Virginia gradually took on its distinctive character during the second half of the seventeenth century, from 1640 to 1690. One may observe its emergence in the laws and court records of that period, in the accounts of travelers before 1690, in the correspondence of the Virginians themselves during the late seventeenth century.12 By that date, this region had acquired distinctive habits of speech, special styles of architecture, settled norms of family life, and many other customs which set it apart from other parts of the English-speaking world. But these folkways were not unique. In some respects they were similar to habits and customs throughout the south and west of England. Let us examine this pattern in more detail, beginning with the speech ways of Virginia.

Image Virginia Speech Ways:
English Origins of the Southern Accent

 

Before the American Revolution, travelers from the northern colonies had begun to express surprise at the speech ways of the Chesapeake provinces. A Pennsylvania lady, for example, found herself strangely attracted to a Maryland gentleman, “who has the softest voice, never pronounces the R at all.”1

Even more startling to northern travelers was the dialect of Virginians. In 1773, a young Princetonian named Philip Fithian came south to teach at Nomini Hall, the great Carter plantation near Richmond. In his journal he described the language that he heard there:

The people here pronounce Shower “Sho-er.”—And what in New-Jersey we call a Vendue here they call a “sale”—All Taverns they call “Ordinarys”—When a horse is frolicsome and brisk, they say at once he is “gayly.” … I piddled at my Exegesis, but (as they say here in Virginia) I did a mighty little … 2

Fithian discovered that Virginia speech ways differed from those of his native New Jersey in many ways at once. Where a northerner said, “I am,” “You are,” “She isn’t,” “It doesn’t,” and “I haven’t,” a Virginia even of high rank preferred to say “I be,” “You be,” “She ain’t,” “It don’t,” and “I hain’t.”3 The people of the Chesapeake used “like” for “as if”—“He looks like he’s dead.” Boston’s James Russell Lowell noted with an air of disdain that this construction was “never found in New England.”4

The Virginia dialect also had its own vocabulary. Examples, recorded as early as the seventeenth century, include bide for stay, howdy for hello, afterclap for any unexpected event, shuck for husk, porely for unwell, drag for harrow, craw for throat, afeared for afraid, cater-cornered for crooked, tarry for stay, tote for carry, passel for pack, woebegone for wretched, call for cause (“no call to do it”), chomp for chew, fresh for flood, grit for courage, lick for beat, links for sausage, bimeby for by and by, belly-ache for pain in the stomach, andirons for firedogs, flapjack for pancake, bandanna for handkerchief, botch for blunder, favor for resemble, unbeknownst for unknown, allowed for admitted, pekid for unwell, moonshine for distilled liquor, shock for a sheaf of corn, mess of greens for a serving of vegetables, laid off for out of work, skillet for frying pan, traipse for walk, disremember for forget, right good for very good, get shut of for get rid of, mighty and monstrous for very, proud for happy or glad (as, “proud to know you”), yonder for distant, cross-grained for difficult, innards for insides, pretend for intend, angry for infected, book-learning for schooling, and jeans for cloth of a course twill weave (an old English corruption of Genoa, whence this fabric was imported). By the late eighteenth century these words had disappeared from polite usage in Britain. They are identified as archaic or provincial expressions in the Oxford English Dictionary. But they survived in Virginia for three centuries.

At the same time that these old words were preserved, new words were also created in the Chesapeake. Many terms were borrowed from the Indians and later from Africans. Novel expressions were necessary to describe the new Chesapeake environment, new techniques of tobacco farming, and the new institution of race slavery. This unique combination of continuity and change defined the vocabulary of an American region.5

The Virginia dialect was also distinctive in its pronunciation. In place of New England’s harsh, rapid, rasping, metallic whine, Virginia’s speech was a soft, slow, melodious drawl that came not from the nose but the throat. Virginians tended to add syllables where New Englanders subtracted them. Vowel sounds were prolonged, embellished and softened as in ha-alf for half, gyarden for garden, ke-er for care, holp for help, puriddy for pretty, fuust for first, Aah’m for I’m, doo for do, and the spectacular wah-a-tahmill-i-an for watermelon. A conversation in Virginia about a watermelon could occupy an afternoon.6

Consonants were also softened and prolonged, as in sebem for seven, chimbly for chimney, vahmint for vermin, holt for hold, mo’ for more, flo’ for floor, do’ for door, fo’ for four, dis for this, dat for that, dare for there, ax for ask, go-in’ for going, perserve for preserve, foller for follow, yaller for yellow, acrost for across, wunnerful for wonderful, mistis for mistress, and wid or wud for with. Redundancies were added, as in you all or y ‘awl for you.7

Proper nouns were pronounced in unexpected ways. The Carter family called itself Cy’ah-tah. Randolph was Randall in the tidewater, as it had been in the mother country. Armistead was pronounced Um’sta-ed; Berkeley remained Barkly as at home; and

Blount was Blunt. The family of Lincoln’s mad assassin John Wilkes Booth was called Bowthe. Botetourt was the rhythmic Boat’a‘tote, Chisman was Cheeseman, Dinwiddie was De-in-wood-y, Fantleroy was Fantilroy, Fauquier was Fawkeer, Gooch was Gouge, Hackett was Haa-yak-it, Heyward was Howahd, Langhorne was Langon, Napier was Napper, Sclater was Slaughter, Semple was Sarmple, James was Jems or Jims, Yeardley was Yardly, and the family of Virginia playright Robert Munford was known as Mumfud to his contemporaries. Some of these tidewater pronunciations bore no recognizable resemblance to the written word. Crenshaw improbably became Granger, and Enroughty was somehow transformed into Dahby. A Florentine adventurer named Taliaferro so twisted Virginia tongues by the Tuscan rhythms of his name that he and his many descendants were always called Toliver in the tidewater.8

These Virginia speech ways were not invented in America. They derived from a family of regional dialects that had been spoken throughout the south and west of England during the seventeenth century. Virtually all peculiarities of grammar, syntax, vocabulary and pronunciation which have been noted as typical of Virginia were recorded in the English counties of Sussex, Surrey, Hampshire, Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Oxford, Gloucester, Warwick or Worcester.9

In the mid-nineteenth century, for example, an English antiquarian published the Song of Solomon in a Sussex dialect which sounded remarkably like the speech ways of both whites and blacks in tidewater Virginia:

De Song of songs, dat is Solomon’s,

Let him kiss me wud de kisses of his mouth;

for yer love is better dan wine

Cause of de smell of yer good intments, yer naum is lik intment tipped out; derefore de Maldens love ye …

Look not upan me, cause I be black, cause de sun has shouun upan me; my mother’s childun was mad wud me; dey maud me kipper of de vineyards; but my own vineyard I han’t kept …

My beloved spoke, an said to me: Git up, my love, my fair un, an come away …

Jest a liddle while ahter I passed by em, I foun him dat my soul loves …

This Sussex accent was reported to be “almost extinct” in 1860. In the twentieth century, dis and dat were rarely heard in any part of rural England, but they persisted among both poor whites and blacks in the American south.10

Thomas Hardy described the deliberate destruction of these dialects in The Mayor of Casterbridge, where Elizabeth says in a Wessex drawl, “Bide where you be a minute, father!”

“Bide where you be,” he echoed sharply. “Good God, are you only fit to carry wash to a pig-trough, to use such words as those?” She reddened with shame and sadness. “I meant, ‘Stay where you are,’ Father,” she said in a low, humble voice. “I ought to have been more careful.”11

Five generations of Wessex children learned to be “more careful,” just as Elizabeth did. But traces of these archaic speech ways still survive in the American south.12

Much of Virginia’s vocabulary (as well as its pronunciation) also appeared in word lists of Sussex speech, for example: atwixt, bandanna, bimebye, bide, dis and dat, wud for with, fambly, favor, flapjack, fust, his ’n, holp, holt, hotted up, innards, lay-off, leastways, such-

like, mess of greens, moonshine, passell, pekid, shock, skillet, traipse, and unbeknownst.13

The dialect of rural Sussex in the nineteenth century startled American travelers by its resemblence to Virginia speech. One visitor from the United States wrote of a Sussex countryman that “but for his misplaced h’s—and he dropped them all over the road in a most reckless and amazing manner—he might have been a Southern or Western American.”14

Sussex speech belonged to a family of regional dialects in the south and west of England. Every county had its own linguistic peculiarities; so also did many small villages. But students of language have observed that these local speech ways throughout the south and west of England were closely related to one another. Sir William Cope concluded from long research that “the language or dialect of the counties which formed the kingdom of Wessex has in many respects great similarity. And of these the people of the district formed by West Sussex, Hampshire and Wiltshire have many words in common.”15

This cluster of Wessex dialects bore a strong resemblance to Virginia speech ways. Hampshiremen, for example, used words such as chitterlings or chittlins for entrails, no-count for worthless, dawg for dog, passel for bunch, poke for thrust, and whopper (pronounced whoppah in Hampshire) for anything of large size. The people of that county also used the preterite instead of the participle in auxiliary verbs—“he was took bad,” or “he was drove to it”—much as in Virginia.16 Devon folk said ha’af for half, marster for master, keer for care, yaller for yellow, and a-go-in for going. Natives of Somerset had a way of saying bide, taters, porkers and holler.17 Wiltshire people used words such as craw, cross-grained, drag, handy, and purserve. In counties around Oxford, countrymen said holt, gyarden, sebem, vahmint, priddy and chimbly. All of these usages were carried to the Chesapeake during the seventeenth century.18

The Virginia dialect as it developed through the years was not merely a simple replication of Wessex speech. The transfer of language was a dynamic process of linguistic selection and recombination. Moreover, the speech ways of southern and western England were not monolithic, but comprised a complex family of local dialects. A Sussex countryman commonly dropped his h’s; but neighboring counties tended to sound that consonant clearly. Somerset folk had a way of turning s into z, and o into u, so that their county name became Zumerzet. This usage did not occur in other parts of southern England.19

Other linguistic differences existed even between English villages and even neighborhoods. A case in point was Berkeley Hundred in Gloucestershire, where an antiquarian wrote in the seventeenth century,

In this hundred of Berkeley are frequently used certain words, proverbs and phrases of speech which we hundreders conceive of as we do of certain market moneys, to be not only native but confined to the bounds and territories thereof; which if found in the mouths of foreigners we deem them as leapt over the wall, or as strayed from their proper pasture and dwelling place.20

“Berkeley Hundreders” as he called them preserved many old Saxon words such as geboren for born and wenchen for girls. An initial ν was pronounced f in the Saxon way, so that venison became fenison; at the same time f became v, so that folks were volks. In the same fashion, a hard c became a g, as grabs for crabs. This and that became thicke and thucke, and a y was commonly inserted between words and especially names that ended and began with consonants, so that a name such as Bill Carter became Bill-y Carter in England’s Vale of Gloucester.21 Some of these Berkeley speech habits became part of the American southern accent—the nominal y between consonants, for example. But it is interesting to observe that most of Berkeley Hundred’s special speech ways did not survive in Virginia, despite the fact that so many inhabitants migrated there.

Here is an important clue to the dynamics of linguistic transmission, and to the complex process by which the Virginia accent was born. From a mixed family of dialects in southern and western England, local peculiarities tended to disappear and general characteristics survived. The dropped h of Sussex and the hard s Somerset did not take root in Virginia. But most countrymen throughout the south and west of England said Ah be for f am, and that usage became an important part of the Virginia accent. In this manner, a new speech way was manufactured out of old materials.

Other types of change also occurred. In the New World, English country accents tended to be overprinted with a layer of London uniformity—a common tendency in many parts of British America. “In general,” observed the German traveler Johann Schoepf, “the dialects of the English speech in the several American colonies are not as sharply distinct as those of the sundry districts and counties of England itself.”22 Differences between a southern drawl and a Yankee twang became more muted than those between the Wessex broad and the Norfolk whine, in part because they added a common element of London speech.23

Another complexity appeared in the development of subregional dialects in America. Virginia speech ways rapidly created their own local variations in such number and variety that by the nineteenth century the birthplace of a native could be located within a few miles by subtle distinctions in the way that he sounded a and r. Other variations also developed between Virginians of different ranks; the speech ways of Virginia’s first families were closest to educated London speech.

Yet another layer of complexity was added later when African expressions began to enrich southern speech. Africanisms were adopted throughout the southern colonies, especially in the Carolina lowcountry. In Virginia the borrowings were not so numerous, but as early as 1783, a German traveler observed that “here and there a few negroisms have crept in, and the salmagundy of the English language has here been enriched even by words of African origin.” The major features of the Virginia accent, however, were established before African slaves could possibly have had much impact on language.24

Altogether, the creation of this speech way was a cultural process of high complexity. On balance, one may conclude that the southern drawl developed in a new American environment from the dialects of southern and western England, just as the Yankee twang evolved from the speech ways of the East Anglia.

Image Virginia Building Ways:
English Origins of Chesapeake Houses

 

Similar patterns also appeared in the vernacular architecture of Virginia. During the governorship of Sir William Berkeley, a distinctive building style developed there. By the mid-seventeenth century, homes and barns had become so standard throughout the colony that when the Burgesses ordered a structure to be built in 1647, they merely insisted that its construction should be “according to the form of Virginia houses.” No further specifications were thought necessary.1

Virginia’s building ways, like its speech ways, were not created de novo in the New World. They grew out of the vernacular architecture of southern England in a process that was guided by cultural purposes, environmental conditions and the inherited memory of an English past.2

The vernacular architecture of Virginia was a complex hierarchy of styles, plans, materials and techniques. Its highest expression was the “great house”—a handsome, brick-built structure, surrounded by outbuildings, gardens and fields. It tended to be one and a half or two storys high and perfectly symmetrical, with a great central passage, or “summer hall,” running through the house from front to back. The hall was flanked by large, lofty living spaces on the first floor, and small, low-ceilinged chambers below stairs. William Hugh Grove wrote in 1732, “The manner of building is much alike. They have a back staircase with a passage through the house in the middle which is the summer hall and draws the air; and two rooms on each hand.”3

Interior plans were designed for congregate living. Even the largest houses had comparatively few rooms. “They always contrive to have large rooms,” wrote Robert Beverley, “that they may be cool in the summer.”4 In the grandest houses, small private rooms called closets were constructed for the master and mistress of the house. But few Virginians had private spaces of their own in the mid-seventeenth century.5

The first great house in Virginia was Green Spring, a brick mansion built by Sir William Berkeley in 1646. The cost of its construction was supported by a special tax which the assembly levied with “an eye to the honor of the place.” No longer in existence, Green Spring stood on an estate of 1,000 acres near Jamestown. In its own time it was the largest house in Virginia, with an imposing facade one hundred feet in breadth. Its central block, 48 feet wide by 43 feet deep, was flanked by two symmetrical wings, each extending 26 feet. The interior consisted of six large rooms and a long central hall. Later an elevated loggia and curious double dormers were added—fashions which did not catch on. But the general plan of this building set the fashion to which plantation architecture conformed for two centuries.6

Image

Green Spring, the home of Sir William Berkeley, was Virginia’s first great house. It set the example for plantation architecture in generations to come. Built in 1646 with the aid of a special appropriation by the colonial assembly, it was originally a large symmetrical brick structure, with a central entrance and great hall flanked by “public” spacious rooms on the main floor. In 1796, British architect Benjamin Latrobe visited Green Spring and sketched the house shortly before it was pulled down. “It is a brick building of great solidity, but no attempt at grandeur,” Latrobe wrote. “The lower story was covered with an arcade which is fallen down. The porch has some clumsy ornamental brickwork about it of the style of James the 1st.” This drawing shows the building without its arcade (a later addition) as perhaps it might have looked in the time of Berkeley himself. The source is Edward C. Carter, ed., The Virginia Journals of Benjamin Henry Latrobe (2 vols., New Haven, 1977), I, 181-82, 247, plate 21.

Much has been written of this architecture as an adaptation to the Chesapeake environment. Long halls open at both ends caught refreshing summer breezes. High ceilings retained cool morning temperatures throughout a summer day. Massive brick fireplaces and chimney stacks repelled the winter chill. Steeppitched slate roofs proved useful in heavy summer storms, and were more durable than in New England.

This was indeed an American architecture, but it was also English in its roots. In most respects Virginia’s plantation houses were exactly like middle-sized manors in south and west of England during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. One study of manorial architecture in this part of England found that the following general characteristics were typical of the genre: broad fronts of 70 to 100 feet; symmetrical plans; a first floor with a modest number of large rooms, generous proportions and high ceilings; a large central hall open at both ends; and a low “ground floor” with bed chambers. The great house was set far back from the road, with a cluster of small outbuildings for kitchens, stables, servants, and elaborate gardens in front. This description of manor houses in the south and west of England fits the great houses of Virginia exactly.7

The plans of these great country houses were highly symmetrical on both sides of the water, sometimes in surprising ways. The plan of the great plantation house at Shirley in Virginia, for example, looked at first sight to be a simple arrangement of boxes. It was in fact a complex mathematical structure, conceived with great care. Every dimension in the main block and wings was a multiple of the cabalistic Christian numbers of three and twelve. The design of Shirley became an act of architectural liturgy in this Anglican culture.8

The great hall running through the center of the house was not a Virginia invention. G. C. Tyack found that this feature was “universally popular” in larger country houses throughout the south and west of England during the seventeenth century.9

Large country houses were also set in much the same way in England and Virginia, surrounded by “gardens, stewponds, bowling-greens, terraces, and other natural concomitants of baronial residences.” Recalcitrant American shrubs and trees were ruthlessly cut and pruned into imitations of English flora. On very large and rich plantations even the land itself was laboriously rearranged by sweating servants until it provided English vistas to please nostalgic masters.10

Plantation buildings in Virginia were also similar to English country houses in their architectural details. Virginia planters, like West Country gentry, ornamented their houses with emblems of royalism. In the twentieth century, archeologists have found plaster fragments of royal arms and other monarchical motifs which were used as ceiling decorations.11

In both England and Virginia, these structures were mainly designed not by professional architects but by local gentlemen. Their remarkable similarities were evidence that tastes were very much the same among the gentry on both sides of the Atlantic.12

There were also important differences between the country houses of England and America. Many changes were required by the American environment. Stone, for example, had been a common building material in a belt of territory that extended from Dorsetshire north across the Wiltshire Downs to the Cotswolds. During the seventeenth century, Virginians tried to build with a local yellow sandstone which seemed similar to Cotswold limestone. But in practice it proved too soft for general use, and nothing better was available. Thereafter, stone was generally abandoned in Virginia except for embellishments.13

The taste for stone survived, however, and found expression in curious ways. An example was Mount Vernon, the pretentious home of George Washington. Its exterior consisted of wooden weatherboards which were carved to resemble masonry and sprinkled with sand to give the look and feel of stone. The effect was somewhat spoiled by the dampness of Virginia’s climate, which caused wooden seams to show through their gritty camouflage. But when Mount Vernon was seen in a haze of nostalgia after a bottle or two of madeira, the woodwork turned to stone in the eyes of homesick Englishmen.

With stone unavailable and craftsmen in short supply, Virginians were forced to adapt English building customs to the material realities of the New World. But they did so in ways that showed a strong continuity of cultural purposes. For the best tidewater buildings, the preferred building material was brick, which had rapidly gained popularity in England during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Brick was used for foundation walls, cellar floors, building columns, curtain walls, and chimney stacks. Specially cut or moulded bricks were employed as window mullions, door frames, rounded cornices and corbelled parapets.

Brick building developed slowly in Virginia during the seventeenth century. Most houses even on large plantations continued to be made of wood for many years. But handsome brick of good quality was the ideal. It was made from local clay which fired to warm and beautiful colors that ranged from dark red to pale orange. The size of bricks in England was regulated by royal proclamation—precisely 9 by 4¼ by 2Image inches in Elizabeth’s reign, and 9 by 4Image by 2¼ inches under Charles I. Virginians generally conformed to these standards; the size of bricks in seventeenth-century Virginia houses tended to be the same as in England.14

Techniques of bricklaying in Virginia were also very English for many generations. During the period 1625-50, Flemish bond (alternating stretchers and headers in every course) had been especially popular in the south of England. It also came to be widely used in Virginia, together with English bond (alternate courses of headers and stretchers) and various Garden bonds (which increased the proportion of stretchers in various combinations). Other patterns peculiar to the north or east of England (Yorkshire bond, Monk’s bond) rarely appeared in the Chesapeake colonies.15

These great houses were of course few in number. Most houses in the Chesapeake were very modest. From an early date in the

Image

Stratford, the ancestral home of the Lees, was one of many gentlemen’s houses built in the half-century after the death of Sir William Berkeley. Constructed about the year 1725 for Thomas Lee, Stratford was the birthplace of Richard Henry Lee, Francis Lightfoot Lee and Robert E. Lee. It stands today in Westmoreland County, surrounded by outbuildings, and shaded by huge beech trees. The plan is H-shaped, with a large central hall flanked by “public” rooms few in number but large in scale. On the ground floor are smaller low-ceilinged bedrooms and workrooms which stay comfortably cool in the summer. The brick exterior is dominated by two massive chimney clusters. The architecture creates a feeling of austerity, solidity, integrity, seriousness and permanencea suitable symbol of the family who lived there for two centuries. Grand houses of this sort were few in number before 1690, but many were constructed after that date. Their appearance changed in many superficial ways with the whirl of architectural fashion, but their structure and function remained the same for many generations.

seventeenth century smaller houses were also highly stylized in their design, and continued to be built in the same way for many years. They ran heavily to a single type called the hall and parlor house by architectural historians. These were humble structures of one or one and a half storys, divided into two large rooms. Exterior chimneys stood on one or both gable ends, and a corner staircase led to a sleeping loft which was sometimes lighted by gable windows.16

The French visitor Durand noted of the Virginians in 1687, “whatever their rank, and I know not why, they build only two rooms with some closets on the ground floor, and two rooms in the attic above. But they build several like this according to their means. They build also a separate kitchen, a separate house for the Christian slaves, one for the negro slaves, and several to dry the tobacco.”17 This design was carried from the southern and western counties of England, which contributed so heavily to the colonization of Virginia. The cultural continuities were as strong for smaller buildings as for larger ones.18

The typical size of a small farm house in Virginia was sixteen by twenty feet—a little smaller than in England. Furnishings were very sparse. Many Chesapeake houses lacked even beds in the mid-seventeenth century; families slept on piles of straw and leaves.19 Building materials were modest as well. In Virginia as in England, smaller houses were rarely built of brick. Eric Mercer writes of English vernacular architecture that “small brick houses were nowhere erected before the second half of the 17th century.” They remained uncommon for many years thereafter. Small Virginia houses were also constructed mostly of wood, but in a style very different from the prevailing East Anglian fashions of Massachusetts. They tended to be simple frame structures, one story high or a story and a half, with a steep pitched roof. Walls were sometimes strengthened by a technique in which clay filling was rammed between the studs, and protected from the damp by oak clapboards.20

Methods of house carpentry were much simplified—more so than in Massachusetts. Virginians typically gave minimal attention to the foundations of their houses, which stood two or three feet above the ground on irregular posts or blocks. Walls were framed with as much simplicity as possible. Roofs were made of light collars and common rafters, which were mortised at the top and nailed at the bottom into ingenious false plates that allowed a great deal of play in the structures of these insecure buildings.21 These patterns reflected economic realities in Virginia, where lumber was cheap and labor was costly. In 1687, William Fitzhugh warned a correspondent that “labor is so intolerably dear, and workmen so idle,” that framing costs were at least a third higher than in London, “and near three times as long preparing.” Material conditions made a major difference in colonial building.22

In the hierarchy of Virginia’s vernacular architecture, there was also a third level of housing which consisted of rough one-room shacks or shanties, made of whatever materials came to hand. By the end of the seventeenth century, many of these structures were made of “puncheons,” or timbers which had been crudely split. The quarters of servants and slaves were often puncheon houses. But they were not log cabins. Their plan and style followed the conventions of English architecture.23

None of these architectural forms was static. During the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, building styles changed on both sides of the Atlantic. New tastes ran to neo-classical proportions, pediments, pillars, quoins, bands, and hipped roofs. But through all of these changing fashions, strong continuities persisted in Virginia architecture. In an environment where firewood remained comparatively abundant, massive fireplaces and broad chimney stacks remained in fashion. Brick continued to be the building material of choice, rather than stone or stucco which became more fashionable in rural England. The result was a strong and vibrant combination of austere neoclassical forms with

Image

The Hall and Parlor House was typical of middling farmhouses in Virginia. It was commonly a small, simple building, more often built of wood than brick, with chimneys and fireplaces on the gable ends. Historian Dell Upton has found that half of all houses in Virginia inventories had only two rooms on the ground floor: often a hall and parlor, sometimes a hall and kitchen, or a kitchen and parlor, plus several small chambers above. This was the modal house type in Virginia for many generations. The average number of rooms remained constant at approximately five per house from 1646 to 1720.

vivid red walls, grey slates, and painted wooden trim. In all of these ways, the plantation architecture of Virginia was derived from the English rural forms but it became a unique provincial style, with its own distinct identity.

Image Virginia Family Ways:
The Anglican Idea of the Patriarchal Family

 

The family customs of the Virginians were as distinctive as their architecture and speech ways.1 The gentry of southern and western England brought to this colony a sense of family which was as strong as that of Puritan Massachusetts. The political theory of Robert Filmer, for example, has been described as “above all things an exaltation of the family. It made the rules of domestic society into the principles of political science.”2 The same attitude routinely appeared among the English gentry. An example was Sir John Oglander, a Royalist gentleman with Virginia connections who lived on the English Isle of Wight. It was observed of him that “family pride indeed was the ruling passion of his life.”3

Among Virginians and New Englanders, ideas of the family were similar in strength, but different in substance. Virginians gave more importance to the extended family and less to the nuclear family than did New Englanders. Clear differences of that sort appeared in quantitative evidence of naming practices and inheritance patterns. The language of familial relationships differed too. The word “family” tended to be a more comprehensive term in Virginia than in Massachusetts.4 Virginians addressed relatives of all sort as “coz” or “cousin,” in expressions that were heavy with affective meaning; but the term “brother” was used more loosely as a salutation for friends, neighbors, political allies, and even business acquaintances. It is interesting to observe that an extended kin-term tended to be more intimate than the language of a nuclear relationship. The reverse tended to be the case in Massachusetts.5

Individuals in Virginia were stereotyped by traits that were thought to be hereditary in their extended families. Anglican clergyman Jonathan Boucher believed that “family character both of body and mind may be traced thro’ many generations; as for instance every Fitzhugh has bad eyes; every Thornton hears badly; Winslows and Lees talk well; Carters are proud and imperious; and Taliaferros mean and avaricious; and Fowkeses cruel.” Virginians often pronounced these judgments upon one another. The result was a set of family reputations which acquired the social status of self-fulfilling prophecies.6

For most Virginians the unit of residence tended to be a more or less nuclear household, but the unit of association was the extended family, which often flocked together in the same rural neighborhoods. Jonathan Boucher noted that “certain districts are there known and spoken of … by there being inhabited by the Fitzhughs, the Randolphs, Washingtons, Carys, Grimeses or Thorntons.” These kin-neighborhoods developed gradually during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century by continuing subdivision of estates.7

From an early date in the seventeenth century, extended families were also buried together in Virginia—a custom that was uncommon in Massachusetts. Hugh Jones noted, “ … it is customary to bury in gardens or orchards, where whole families lye interred together in a spot generally handsomely enclosed, planted with evergreens.” This had also been the practice of country gentry in England for many centuries. In New England, extended family cemeteries rarely existed; people of every rank were normally interred in a common burying ground near the meetinghouse—and were not grouped by family until the late eighteenth century.8

Relations within Virginia’s extended families were not always harmonious. John Randolph, for example, looked with contempt upon many of his uncles and cousins. He wrote:

It was not necessary or even desirable that the descendants of these families should be learned or shining men, but they might have been better than mere Will Wimbles. Ah! I wish they were no worse than humble Will. But some are what I will not stain my paper with.9

The actual unit of residence in Virginia was not the extended family, but a more or less nuclear unit. Its physical constitution differed very much from those of Massachusetts. Many of these households (more than in New England) included servants, lodgers, and visitors, sometimes on a scale that did not exist in New England. The northern tutor Philip Fithian was astonished to learn from the wife of his employer, Mrs. Robert Carter of Nomini Hall, that “this family one year with another consumes 27,000 pounds of pork and twenty beeves, 550 bushels of wheat, besides corn, four hogsheads of rum, and 150 gallons of brandy.”10 In winter, 28 large fires were kept burning constantly at Nomini Hall, and six oxen were needed every day to haul in the wood. The pattern of consumption was very similar to great country houses in the south and west of England. No household in Massachusetts operated on such a scale.11

Chesapeake households also tended to include more step-relatives and wards, fewer children in the primary unit and also many more servants than in New England. This was largely because the southern colonies had higher rates of illness and death. Children died young, and marriages were cruelly shattered at an early age.12

In tidewater Virginia during the seventeenth century, most children—more than three-quarters in fact—lost at least one parent before reaching the age of eighteen. One consequence was to enlarge the importance of other kin; for when a nuclear family was broken in Virginia the extended family picked up the pieces. Another consequence was to change the structure of the household in a fundamental way. Historians Darrett and Anita Rutman observe that in “just about any” household one might find “orphans, half-brothers, stepbrothers and stepsisters, and wards running a gamut of ages. The father figure in the house might well be an uncle or a brother, the mother figure an aunt, elder sister, or simply the father’s ‘now-wife,’ to use the word frequently found in conveyances and wills.”13

Yet another consequence was to increase the emotional complexity of domestic life. The courts of the Chesapeake colonies heard many complaints of cruel step-parents, who often lived up to their reputation. The courts also dealt with bitter conflicts over step-children. In 1696, for example, one Thomas Price was presented to a county court “by the information of Hannah Price his wife for selling a child of the said Hannah which she had by another husband in the colony of Virginia.”14

There were also large numbers of servants in these households. Throughout tidewater Maryland, Virginia and the Carolinas, the number of servants in an average household was always much greater than in New England. As early as 1667, in Middlesex County, Virginia, male heads of households held as many as five servants and slaves on the average.15

On both sides of the Atlantic, these large households were very complex in their internal structure. Masters and house servants lived close together—often sleeping in the same room. “I called up my man, who lay in my room with me,” one English gentleman noted in his diary.16 Things were the same in Virginia, where masters, servants and visitors often shared the same room and sometimes even the same bed.17

The doors of these houses were rarely closed to strangers. A bed and a meal were offered to visitors of every rank, from the governor of the colony who was received as a royal personage to the most wretched beggar who was given a mat before the kitchen fire. There was a class of impoverished gentlemen in England and America who made “visiting” their profession. The Yankee tutor Philip Fithian met one of these threadbare gentry, who lived almost entirely upon the hospitality of others, and became a semi-permanent fixture in other men’s houses. Fithian wrote:

To day about twelve came to Mr. Carter’s Captain John Lee, a gentleman who seems to copy the character of Addison’s Will

Wimble. When I was on my way to this place I saw him up in the country at Stafford; he was then just sallying out for his winter’s Visit, & has got now so far as here, he stays, as I am told about eight, or ten weeks in the year at his own house, the remaining part he lives with his waiting man on his Friends.18

A gentleman of Virginia took pride in his hospitality, and gained honor by its display. Those who accepted his invitation tacitly agreed to place themselves under his protection and authority. This custom had long existed in England, but in the seventeenth century English country houses were rapidly closing their doors to all but invited guests, much to the regret of those who remembered the old way. In 1709, one gentleman wrote in his diary:

Died Sir Richard Brooke of Norton, Bart., an honest friendly gentleman whose hospitality justly gained him the prayers of the poor & applause of the rich … that good and ancient way of housekeeping has decayed to bring in new and more pernicious fashions.19

In Virginia the “good and ancient way” of open hospitality continued to flourish for a longer time. While it survived, a Virginia patriarch extended the word “family” to include all the people who slept under his roof—his nuclear family, visiting relatives, impecunious friends, tutors and clerks, servants and house slaves, and even total strangers who accepted his hospitality. When George Washington was at Valley Forge, he referred to his wife, servants, aides, staff and visitors as his “family,” for they had placed themselves under his fostering hand. Here was yet another clue to the meaning of “family” in Virginia. In the great houses of the Chesapeake, as in the works of Filmer, “family” was fundamentally a sphere of authority, in which everyone was placed under a patriarch’s protection.

These Virginia families tended to be more hierarchical than those of New England. Fathers and fathers-in-law were addressed not merely as “Sir” but “Worthy Sir.”20 The head of the family thought of himself as a patriarch, a word that often occurred in their self-descriptions, but was not much used in Massachusetts.

William Byrd liked to compare himself with the biblical patriarchs. He wrote, “Like one of the Patriarchs, I have my flocks and my herds, my bondsmen & bond women and every sort of trade amongst my own servants so that I live in a kind of Independence of every one but Providence.”21 On another occasion, Byrd wrote, “Our comforts, like those of the good patriarchs are mostly domestique. …” Patriarchy was a word that came to be much used in Virginia, as it had been by English Royalists such as Filmer. It was rarely employed by the Puritans, and sometimes actually condemned.22

This patriarchal idea also appeared in the law of the family. The courts of Virginia regarded the slaying of a father by his son, or the killing of a husband by his wife, or the murder of a master by his servant not as homicide but treason. The penalty was to be burnt to death—a sentence which was actually inflicted upon a woman who murdered her common-law husband in Maryland. Even these laws were thought to be insufficently severe by Robert Filmer, who wished to extend the law of petty treason to include adultery by the wife.23

The laws of Virginia added a material base to the patriarchal idea by requiring the “masters of the several families” to “detain and keep within their hands and custody the crops and shares of all freemen within their families,” so as to ensure the payment of taxes.24

The hard realities of life in the Chesapeake colonies tended to reinforce these ideals in unexpected ways, and to make the family ways of Virginia more extended and patriarchical than they might otherwise have become. Altogether, the family ways of Massachusetts and Virginia were two distinct cultural systems. Even as they shared important qualities in common, they rose from different English roots, and responded to different American environments.

Image Virginia Marriage Ways:
The Anglican Idea of Marriage as a Sacred Union

 

Marriage in Virginia was a social condition which everyone was expected to achieve. Bachelors and spinsters were condemned as unnatural and even dangerous to society. When William Byrd II was slow to remarry after the death of his wife, his female relatives urged him forward in no uncertain way. “At night,” he wrote, “the girls put a drawn sword and common prayer book open at the matrimony on my bed.”1

Virginia and New England were alike in their ideas of universal marriage; both rejected the ideal of celibacy which was so strong in Catholic countries. But these two Protestant cultures of British America also differed in many ways as to their ideas of marriage, and their matrimonial institutions. In Massachusetts, as we have seen, marriage was thought to be a covenant which could be terminated when its terms were not fulfilled. In Virginia, matrimony was regarded as an indissoluble union—a sacred knot that could never be untied by mortal hands. Divorce in the modern sense did not exist. Only permanent separation and maintenance could be obtained, and even that release was rarely granted. In 1681 the Virginia lawyer William Fitzhugh wrote that his colony had allowed no divorces and only a single permanent separation during the previous sixty years. The sole exception was a decree given to the wife of Giles Brent after acts of physical cruelty so extreme that her life was thought in danger.2

Social rituals of matrimony reflected these ideas of marriage. Virginians followed the Church of England’s elaborate five-step process of espousal, publication of banns, religious ceremony, marriage feast, and sexual consummation. The clergy of Virginia were forbidden to conduct any marriage without the prior publication of banns. In order to marry, children under age were compelled to obtain the written permission of parents or guardians. Clandestine marriages were punished by imprisonment.3

The favored periods of marriage in Virginia were early November and late December after Christmas. In the Church of England, vows could not be exchanged during Lent (the forty weekdays from Ash Wednesday to Easter), or Advent (the four Sundays before Christmas), or the three weeks prior to the Feast of St. John. These customs were generally kept in the Chesapeake colonies.

The bride and groom in Virginia were often united in two ceremonies—both of which were condemned in Puritan New England. The first was a Christian ceremony, which was solemnized sometimes in a church or more often in the bride’s home, but always by a minister according to the laws of the Anglican Church and the Book of Common Prayer. The other ceremony was an ancient pagan practice in which the bride and groom were made to jump over a broomstick. This ritual had long been observed throughout Britain and much of western Europe, and especially in the kingdoms of Wessex and Mercia. The custom of the broomstick marriage came to be widely practiced by white families throughout the southern colonies in addition to the Christian ceremony. For black slaves, it was the only type of marriage ceremony that was permitted, and rapidly acquired a special meaning in Afro-American culture.4

The marriage ceremony was followed by a feast, which among the great planters included a fancy ball and a house party that went on for days. Expensive gifts were given by the groom to his guests. At one marriage in Devon, six dozen guests received watches and silver ribbons as “favors.”5 Families of yeoman farmers celebrated on a smaller scale, but their customs were much the same. They appeared in Virginia during the mid-seventeenth century and persisted to the nineteenth and early twentieth. In the year 1686, the French traveler Durand was invited to a wedding feast in Gloucester County, Virginia:

There were at least a hundred guests, many of social standing & handsome, well-dressed ladies. Although it was November, we ate under the trees. The day was perfect. We were twenty-four at the first table. They served us so copiously with meats of all kinds that I am sure there would have been enough for a regiment of five hundred soldiers, even entirely made up of men from Languedoc. … It is the custom to take only one meal upon such occasions, at two o’clock in the afternoon. … they caroused all night long & when it was day … I did not see one who could stand straight.6

Before the marriage ceremony took place, espousal was also a complex social ritual which involved many people in addition to the intending couple. Amongst landed families, marriage was regarded as a union of properties as well as persons, and the destinies of entire families were at stake. One English gentleman advised another to “marry thy daughters betimes, lest they marry themselves.”7

Love was not thought to be a necessary precondition for these unions. Moralists insisted that love should follow marriage, but they did not believe that it would normally precede it. An English gentlemen recommended that one should “take a wife thou canst love.” He did not think in terms of marrying a woman whom one loved already. Love was not thought to be special or exclusive bond between two unique personalities—a romantic idea that did not develop until a later era. The prevailing male attitude in the seventeenth century was summarized by Sir John Oglander, who believed that “any woman may be won, and almost by any man … importunity and opportunity overcometh all women. Experientia docet [Experience teaches].”8

The parents had an active role in the marriage decision. Many Virginians owned an English marriage manual which commented, “Children are so much the goods, the possessions of their parents, that they cannot without a kind of theft, give away themselves without the allowance of those that have the right in them.” These ideas were carried into practice. Children who defied their parents were denied dowries and inheritance.9

Children were rarely made to marry against their will, but neither were they left to decide the question for themselves. Parents and guardians entered into complex negotiations to settle the size of the marriage portion or “dot” which a couple needed to make its way in the world. Written prenuptial agreements of high complexity were common not only among members of the gentry but also among yeomen and husbandmen.10 Many people were sometimes involved in these agreements. One English marriage agreement in the county of Hampshire (1676) was executed among five sets of parties—the bride, the bride’s relatives, the groom, the groom’s kinfolk, and the tenants of lands that were given to the couple. Agreements in Virginia were similar in every important way.11

In both England and Virginia, many of these unions were cousin-marriages that had been arranged by elders. In England, for example, Francis Carew sent a letter to his kinsman Sir Nicholas Carew:

I have a daughter who for handsomeness, education, and competency of portion, shall be a wife for any Gentleman in England. If you propose to marry a young woman, I shall be willing to treat with you therein & shall wish good success thereto.12

The marriage of first cousins was condemned by New England Puritans as violating the law of consanguinity. But many an Anglican lady “changed her condition but not her name.”13 The same custom was common in Virginia, and fundamentally important to the cohesion of the tidewater elite. The culture of New England created a different set of matrimonial priorities.

One consequence of these customs appeared in the pattern of age at marriage. Male Virginians married at nearly the same age as in New England, twenty-five or twenty-six on the average. But brides in the Chesapeake colonies were much younger than in Puritan Massachusetts. Before 1700, most Virginia girls found a husband by the age of seventeen. Mean age at marriage was a little higher—eighteen to twenty—but below the Massachusetts average.14

Another consequence was a large difference in the ages of husbands and wives. In Virginia’s Middlesex County before 1670, grooms tended to be nearly ten years older than brides: 28.4 against 18.7. That disparity diminished to about five years in the mid-eighteenth century, but it remained much greater than in Massachusetts, where only a year or two separated the average ages of men and women at first marriage.15

Other inequalities appeared in the proportion of Virginians who married at all. Though the ideal was universal marriage, the reality was very different in seventeenth-century Virginia, because so few immigrants were females. Nearly all women were able to marry, but for men the pattern was very different. One study of estate-inventories in southern Maryland from 1658 to 1708 finds that one-quarter of men died without ever marrying. A man’s chances of finding a wife were a function of his social rank. Here was yet another system of inequality in this hierarchical society.16

The Virginia pattern developed within a culture where marriage was regarded as something to be arranged between families, something that did not require love as a precondition, something that could never be dissolved, and something that joined husband and wife in an organic and patriarchal hierarchy. Given such an idea of matrimony, it seemed right and fitting in this culture that a typical Virginia marriage in the seventeenth century should join a man of maturity to a miss in her teens. These Virginia customs were very different from the marriage ways of Massachusetts.

Image Virginia Gender Ways:
True-born Englishmen and Spirited “She-Britons”

 

On the subject of marital relations between husbands and wives, Virginia’s governor Sir William Berkeley set his colony a high example of marital felicity and domestic peace. His will testified to his love for his wife and to the happiness of their married life together. Governor Berkeley left all his property to his “dear and most virtuous wife,” declaring that “if God had blessed me with a far greater estate, I would have given it all to my most dearly beloved wife.”1

The tone of this document captured the ideal of conjugal relations in both England and the Chesapeake—a devoted husband, a virtuous wife, and a loving life together. Many successful marriages came close to realizing these goals. Much domestic correspondence survives to tell us how deeply English-speaking men and women on both sides of the Atlantic valued a happy and loving marriage.

An outward expression of affection was also much encouraged in this culture. In the seventeenth century, husbands and wives addressed each other as “dearest heart,” “sweet spouse,” “my most sweet heart.” The language of love changed during the eighteenth century, but the custom remained the same.2

Domestic realities, unhappily, were often different. In every culture there are happy marriages and unhappy ones. But historians of the family have remarked upon the extent of marital discord among the gentry of Virginia and southern England. One leading historian, Julia Cherry Spruill, testified that her sources “reveal a surprisingly large amount of general domestic dissatisfaction” throughout the southern colonies—more than in New England. Much strife also occurred within marriages that were generally happy.3

A case in point was the successful but very stormy marriage between William Byrd II and Lucy Parke Byrd. In this relationship, which lasted ten years (1706-16), Byrd acted the role of the domestic patriarch. He disposed of his wife’s estate without consulting her, kept all his property in his own hands, and forbade her even to borrow a book from his library without permission. He also interfered in her domestic management, and infuriated her by dictating the smallest details of her appearance even to the shape of her eyebrows, which she was compelled to pluck according to his pleasure. At table one day, he and his male guests entirely consumed the best dish and left nothing for his wife to eat. She did not hide her outraged feelings.

Lucy Byrd, for her part, was the daughter of Colonel Daniel Parke, a high-born Virginia gentleman who later became governor of the Leeward Islands. By all accounts she was an exceptionally beautiful, proud and headstrong lady, with strong passions, a stubborn will, and a mind of her own. She did not submit meekly

Image

William Byrd II (1674-1744) of Westover came of an armigerous family of London goldsmiths who were connected by marriage to elites in counties near the English metropolis. These ties were reinforced by the marriage between Byrd’s parents, William Byrd I and Mary Horsmanden Filmer Byrd, which anchored the family firmly at the center of the Chesapeake elite. His secret diary, kept in shorthand for many years, is a major source for the cultural history of Virginia, and especially enlightening on the subject of gender, sex, marriage and domestic life. It records in elaborate detail the acts and prejudices of a Virginia patriarch throughout his mature life in both England and America.

Image

Lucy Parke Byrd, beautiful, sensual, imperious and high-spirited, was the daughter of Colonel Daniel Parke and the first wife of William Byrd II. Her domestic life is known in more intimate detail than that of any woman in early Virginia, mainly through the medium of her husband’s diary. That source describes a stormy union, but one that was also loving and supportive. It ended prematurely when Lucy Byrd died of smallpox in 1716. “How proud I was of her,” her grieving husband wrote, “and how severely am I punished for it. … All pronounced her an honor to Virginia.” This sketch follows an unfinished painting which was interrupted by her death.

to her husband’s rule. In consequence, Lucy Byrd and her husband quarreled frequently, as William Byrd confided in his secret shorthand diary:

[April 5, 1709] I was ill treated by my wife, at whom I was out of humor. …

[April 6] My wife and I disagreed about employing a gardener. … My wife and I continued very cool.

[April 7] I reproached my wife with ordering the old beef to be kept and the fresh beef used first, contrary to good management, on which she was pleased to be very angry … then my wife came and begged my pardon and we were friends again. …

[April 8] My wife and I had another foolish quarrel about my saying she listened on top of the stairs … she came soon after and begged my pardon.

[April 9] My wife and I had another scold about mending my shoes, but it was soon over by her submission.4

The most violent quarrels were about the house servants, whom Mrs. Byrd abused with a sadistic cruelty that shocked even her husband, who was no humanitarian. One domestic battle occurred when Lucy Byrd ordered a little slave girl named Jenny to be burned with a hot iron for a minor fault. On another occasion, William Byrd wrote:

I had a terrible quarrel with my wife concerning Jenny [whom] I took away from her when she was beating her with the tongs. She lifted up her hands to strike me but forbore to do it. She gave me abundance of bad words and endeavored to strangle herself, but I believe in jest only. However, after acting the mad woman for a long time she was passive again.5

These terrible scenes often ended as suddenly as they began, and within moments husband and wife became “good friends” again, strolling arm and arm in the garden, and talking so merrily together that in one such tête à tête with her husband Mrs. Byrd

“burst herself laughing—” splitting open the seams of her dress in high hilarity.6

Often a bitter quarrel ended in a bout of love-making. One furious battle began when Mrs. Byrd flogged a slave in the presence of a house guest—a major breach of etiquette in Virginia where slaves were supposed to be beaten after the guests had gone home. It ended in bed the next morning, when Byrd noted, “I lay abed till 9 o’clock this morning to bring my wife into temper again and rogered her by way of reconciliation.”7

The rhythm of love-making in the Byrd household was less legato than staccato. For long periods, husband and wife abstained from sex with one another—sometimes because of pregnancy or childbirth; more commonly because one or the other was ill with malaria, dysentery, enteritis or some endemic Chesapeake complaint. But when both husband and wife were in good health, they made love frequently and spontaneously—once on top of a billiard table after an afternoon game. Sex seems to have been deeply satisfying to them both. Byrd noted once in his diary that “I gave my wife a flourish, in which she had a good deal of pleasure.”8

There were also moments of quiet affection, which they cherished best of all. When Byrd fell ill with malaria, his wife gave him his quinine bark, and “looked after me with a great deal of tenderness.”9 After a painful episode of dysentery, William Byrd recorded that his wife “anointed my bum with hot linseed oil,” and made him feel much better.10 When Mrs. Byrd fell seriously ill (as frequently she did), and when her son died and she suffered paroxysms of grief, her husband was constantly at her side. He wrote that “I comforted her as well as I could.” This was a stormy but happy marriage. It ended suddenly in 1716, when Lucy Byrd died of smallpox in London. William Byrd was shattered by her loss.11

Every Virginia marriage had its own history, and no two were quite alike. But many of these chronicles were filled with strife—some much more so than the Byrds. These domestic conflicts were elaborately patterned. The trouble commonly arose from deep contradictions in the gender ways of Virginia. Perhaps the most common cause of trouble was money. Men were taught to believe that they were masters of their households. But women often possessed property of their own, and wished to make economic decisions independent of their husbands. An example was the disastrous marriage of Colonel John Custis of Arlington, one of the most powerful men in Virginia, and Frances Parke Custis, the daughter of Colonel Daniel Parke and the sister of Lucy Parke Byrd. The strife in this union seems to have arisen mainly from disputes over property. Mrs. Custis was a woman of wealth, which her husband had the right to manage as he wished. But he also had the duty to pass her property intact to her children. An elaborate marriage contract existed, but it became an invitation to struggle between husband and wife. So bitter was this strife that Col. Custis ordered that a record of his domestic misery should be carved upon his gravestone.12

For years, this unhappy couple refused to speak to one another, communicating only through their slaves. Long silences were punctuated by outbursts of rage so wild and violent as to border upon madness. After one such tempest, Col. Custis surprised his lady by inviting her to go driving with him. They rode in sullen silence through the Virginia countryside, until suddenly the colonel turned his carriage out of the road, and drove straight into Chesapeake Bay.

“Where are you going, Mr. Custis?” the lady asked, as the horses began to swim.

“To hell, Madam,” he replied.

“Drive on,” said she, “any place is better than Arlington.”13

Domestic conflicts over property were common in this culture. In Virginia, as in England, it was not unusual for husbands and wives to keep written cash accounts with one another. Colonel and Mrs. Custis bound themselves to do so by their marriage contract. So also did English gentlemen such as the Dorset Squire John Richards of Warmwell, who gave his wife an annual allowance, and often found himself in the humiliating position of having to borrow money back from her:

Borrowed of my Alice 15 Guineas

16.2.6

I owe her last year’s allowance money

10.0.0

 

23.2.6

Received of her 10 Guineas

10.10.014

Altogether property appears to have been the leading source of marital discord in seventeenth-century Virginia—in conflicts that rose directly from contradictions in the gender ways of this culture.

A second source of marital strife was sex, on which there were cultural contradictions of another kind. Men were bound to fidelity by their marriage vows. But the unwritten customs of that culture created a different standard of behavior, as we shall see below. The diaries of the English gentleman John Richards and the Virginia patriarch William Byrd documented in melancholy detail the domestic conflicts that arose when both men engaged in sexual adventures. Richards, for example, had a liaison with a lady called M. in his diary. One day he wrote:

This evening A [his wife Alice] was angry as usual about M telling me that I loved her more than her, and that because of ill-treatment in this house she had often thought of killing herself.15

Richards’ diary became a running record of domestic strife between husband and wife. His wife Alice did not meekly accept her lot. She was “enraged to the last degree, and roared all the while,” forcing her husband to sleep in the dining room, and some nights even in the cellar. The journal which recorded these events was normally kept in English, but when things went wrong, Richards switched to French, and when they went very wrong he wrote in Italian.16

Another cause of domestic conflict rose from the politics of family life. Here again, the gender ways of this culture were contradictory. A wife was bound by her marriage vows to obey her husband. An apparently male essayist in the Virginia Gazette laid down rules of “matrimonial felicity” for the instruction of wives: “Never dispute with him … if any altercation or jars happen, don’t separate the bed, whereby the animosity will increase … read often the matrimonial service, and overlook not the important word OBEY.”17

But the unwritten customs of the culture encouraged women to demand more freedom and respect. In 1687, for example, a spirited lady named Sarah Harrison married Dr. James Blair, the future founder of William and Mary College. When the minister

Image

Sarah Harrison disrupted her own wedding ceremony in 1687. When asked if she would love, cherish and obey her husband, she responded firmly, “No obey,” and persisted in that answer until her husband agreed to marry on her own terms. Few women in Virginia were prepared to go quite so far, but many had a strong sense of their English liberties, and a determination to defend them. At the same time, the men of Virginia were raised to a tradition of high patriarchy. The domestic results were often explosive.

recited the marriage vows, she startled the congregation by responding, “No obey!” Three times the vows were repeated. Three times Sarah Harrison answered with increasing firmness “NO OBEY,” until Dr. Blair finally agreed to take his chances and the wedding went forward without any promise of obedience. Their married life together proved to be deeply unhappy. Some years later, William Byrd noted in his diary:

Went to the Commissary’s, where … I was very much surprised to find Mrs. Blair drunk, which is growing pretty common with her, and her relations disguise it under the name of consolation.18

Few women were as outspoken as Sarah Harrison. But many resisted by other means. Yet most were compelled to obey their husbands, often much against their will, in matters which they cared deeply about. Thus William Byrd compelled his wife to send her sick baby Otway to her mother-in-law, who lived at a plantation which was thought to be more healthy. The wife replied,

I am very sorry you have limited Poor, sweet Otway, so that he has but a short time to stay with me. Poor dear babe … But Sir, your Orders must be obeyed whatever reluctance I find thereby.19

Here was a fertile source of domestic strife.

A particular cause of trouble was the use of physical violence and verbal abuse by husbands against wives, and sometimes by wives against husbands as well. Here again the customs of the country were inconsistent. Men were expected to exercise authority over their wives, and were encouraged by custom to use moderate “chastisement” from time to time. But wife-beating was thought to be dishonorable and was punished in both England and American by practices variously called “rough music,” the “charivari,” and “riding skimmington.” A Berkshire gentleman explained:

A custom almost universally prevails in villages and rural districts, whenever a quarrel takes place between a man and his wife and the husband resorts to violence against his wife, for the laborers and the idle inhabitants of the parish and neighborhood to assemble together with flags, horns, bells, pieces of iron and all kinds of sonorous instruments with which they resort to the house where the unfortunate couple resides and create all the noice and disturbance in their power, much to the chagrin of the unhappy husband and greatly to the annoyance of the quiet and orderly inhabitants. … This recreation among the country people is called “rough music.”

The sound of this “rough music” carried for miles across the countryside. Sometimes it continued every night for several weeks.20

Precisely the same punishment was also used against wives who abused their husbands. In one such case, a Wiltshire mob punished both spouses by rough music, and then assaulted both the man and wife together. In this instance, the local gentry prevented the mob from ducking the woman, but by and large country gentlemen looked upon rough music with approval. At Montacute Hall, one of the great Wessex houses, Sir Edward Phelips ordered for the central decoration of the great hall a plaster relief of a “Skimmington ride.” This was not a device which arose spontaneously from rural communities; it was nourished by rural elites.21

Yet another tension in gender roles developed from ideas about love. Husbands and wives were expected to love one another—but not overmuch. Landon Carter complained of a Virginia lady who was “more fond of her husband perhaps than the politeness of the day allows for.”22 Even in happy marriages, the love that men felt for their wives was not a love between equals, and sometimes it seemed to be less a love for a person than for a valuable piece of property. One gentleman wrote when his wife died:

All grief will allow me to say of her is, that she was known to be a humble pious, virtuous, discreet woman, an ornament to her sex, and a crown to her husband. But woe is me the crown has fallen from my head.23

A further source of conflict arose from a confusion of roles for women in Virginia. They were expected to be feminine, refined, delicate, gracious, modest, virtuous. At the same time, all but the most privileged of women were also expected to do farm work and even field labor as well as housewifery. Women of every estate were required to be resourceful but self-effacing. Sir John Oglander celebrated his “most careful, thriving wife, who wore no splendor, never wore a silk gowne, but for her credit when she went abroad in company and never to please herself.”24

There were even theological disputes in Virginia on questions of gender. Some members of this culture shared a deeper sense of spiritual inequality between men and women than commonly existed in Massachusetts. At a rich planter’s table as late as 1773, the northern tutor Philip Fithian was startled to hear an argument on the question of whether women had souls. That ancient conundrum had long since been laid to rest among the Puritans. But it still remained a topic of debate in Virginia.25

All of these conflicts had a common denominator. In this society of English-speaking people, the rights which Christian Englishmen claimed for themselves were a standing reproach to the status of women in their society. A free-born English gentleman was in many ways the unfittest of all males to argue his wife into a condition of dependency. By an early date in the eighteenth century some of the ladies of Virginia were thinking of themselves as “She-Britons,” and demanding a share of the rights that their husbands enjoyed. As early as 1736, the Virginia Gazette published an angry poem called “The Lady’s Complaint,” which captured the deepest contradiction in the genderways of Virginia:

They plainly can their Thoughts disclose,

Whilst ours must burn within:

We have got Tongues, and Eyes, in vain,

And Truth from us is sin. …

 

Then Equal Laws let Custom find,

And neither Sex oppress;

More Freedom give to Womankind,

Or give to Mankind less.26

 

Image Virginia Sex Ways:
Male Predators and Female Breeders

 

Sexual relations between men and women tended to be less strictly regulated in the Chesapeake than in Puritan New England. They were also regulated in a different way. Rates of prenuptial pregnancy during the seventeenth and early eighteenth century were comparatively high in the Chesapeake region—higher than in the Puritan colonies, particularly among indentured servants. In Somerset County, Maryland, more than a third of immigrant brides were pregnant before they married. Overall, about a fifth of all women who married in that county, immigrants and natives together, were carrying a child on their wedding day.1

Despite this tendency, or perhaps because of it, fornication was not punished as frequently or as severely in the Chesapeake colonies as it had been in New England. In Maryland, the courts did not often hear cases of this sort, despite very high rates of illegitimacy and prenuptial pregnancy. When they did so, the female was punished severely, usually by whipping. But the male either escaped with a token penalty such as a bond for good behavior, or in most cases was not punished at all. This pattern of discrimination against women in fornication cases was the reverse of New England customs, which penalized the male more harshly than the female during the early and mid-seventeenth century.2

Bastardy was punished with savage ferocity in the Chesapeake. When an unmarried woman gave birth outside of wedlock, a heavy fine was levied upon her. If the fine could not be paid (as often happened), she was trussed up like an animal, her dress was ripped open to the waist, and she was publicly whipped in the sight of a shouting mob until the blood flowed in rivulets down her naked back and breasts. Further, if she was a servant, she was also required to compensate her master for the time lost in her pregnancy by serving an additional term, even in some cases when he was the father of the child. Bastardy was regarded as an offense of the utmost seriousness in Virginia—not because it was a sexual transgression, but because it threatened to place a burden of support on the parish poor rolls, and to deprive a master of work that was thought due to him.3

Other sexual offenses were also punished in seventeenth-century Virginia, but not in the same way as in New England. Adultery was a case in point. In both New England and Virginia, adultery was defined as extramarital sex involving a married woman (not necessarily a married man). One study has found that in Massachusetts, men and women found guilty of adultery in most cases received similar punishments. In the Chesapeake, however, adulterous women were punished more harshly than adulterous men. For that offense, women were flogged severely or dragged through the water behind a boat until they nearly drowned. Men were treated leniently.4

This difference was not the result of mindless or instinctive sexism. It rested upon the assumption that the bloodline within a family was threatened by a wife’s adultery, but not by the husband’s. That way of thinking was more important in Anglican Virginia than in Puritan New England. Here again we find evidence that Virginians held themselves to different standards of behavior according to their rank, gender and standing in society.5

A multiple standard of sexual behavior (not merely a double standard) appeared not only in the laws of Virginia but also in its customs. Women, especially gentlewomen, were held to the strictest standards of sexual virtue. Men, especially gentlemen, were encouraged by the customs of the country to maintain a predatory attitude toward women. A famous example was the secret diary of William Byrd II, an exceptionally full and graphic record of one planter’s very active sex life. In its attitude toward sex, this work was very different from any diary that was kept in Puritan New England. William Byrd was a sexual predator. Promiscuous activity was a continuing part of his mature life, and in some periods an obsession. With very mixed success, he attempted to seduce relatives, neighbors, casual acquaintances, strangers, prostitutes, the wives of his best friends, and servants both black and white, on whom he often forced himself, much against their wishes.

In the period 1709 to 1712, for example, when Byrd was more or less happily married, he was frequently engaged in sexual adventures:

2 [November 1709] I played at [r-m] with Mrs. Chiswell and kissed her on the bed till she was angry and my wife also was uneasy about it, and cried as soon as the company was gone. I neglected to say my prayers, which I ought not to have done, because I ought to beg pardon for the lust I had for another man’s wife.