It is important to note that the remorse he felt on this occasion had to mainly to do with his sense of violating another gentleman’s property. More often, he felt no remorse at all.

Sometimes Byrd and his Virginia gentleman-friends went on collective woman hunts:

11 Mar. 1711. After church Mr. Goodwin invited us to dinner and I ate fish. Here we saw a fine widow Mrs. O-s-b-r-n who had been handsome in her time. From hence we went to Mr. B’s where we drank cider and saw Molly King, a pretty black girl.

 

20 [October 1711] Jenny, an Indian girl, had got drunk and made us good sport.

 

21 [October 1711] At night I asked a negro girl to kiss me.6

 

During this period in his life, Byrd’s sexual adventures were comparatively restrained. After his wife died, he sometimes engaged in this activity on a daily basis. An example comes from a visit to London in the month of September 1719:

7 September … went to see Mrs. S-t-r-d but she was from home …

 

8 September … saw two women, a mother and daughter who stayed about two hours and then came Mrs. Johnson with whom I supped and ate some fricasee of rabbit and about ten went to bed with her and lay all night and rogered her twice …

 

9 September … the two Misses Cornish called on us to go to Southwark Fair. We were no sooner there but Sally Cornish was so ill she was forced to go away to her sister and Colonel Cecil and I gallanted them to G-v-n [Covent] Garden

 

11 September … I wrote some English till nine and then came Mrs. S-t-r-d. I drank a glass of wine to our good rest and then went to bed and rogered her three times. However, I could not sleep and neglected my prayers. …

 

12 … went to the coffeehouse … after supper I was very sleepy and about nine went home in a chair. It rained hard.

 

14 … About eight I went to Mrs. Smith’s where I met Molly and had some oysters for supper and about eleven we went to bed and I rogered her twice …

 

17 … about seven I went to Mrs. FitzHerbert’s where I ate some boiled pork and drank some ale. About nine I walked away and picked up a girl whom I carried to the bagnio and rogered her twice very well. It rained abundance in the night.

 

October was a lean month.

1 October … we went to Will’s and from thence to the play, where was abundance of company and particularly Mrs. [Cambridge], as pretty as an angel. After the play I walked home and said my prayers.

 

2 October … went to meet Molly H-r-t-n at Mrs. Smith’s in Jermyn Street where I went to bed with her and lay till 9 o’clock but could do nothing. Then we had chicken for supper and I gave her two Guineas and about twelve walked home and neglected my prayers …

 

6 October. … endeavored to pick up a whore but could not. I neglected my prayers, for which God forgive me …

 

7 October … picked up a whore and carried her to a tavern where I gave her a supper and we ate a broiled fowl. We did nothing but fool and parted about 11 o’clock and I walked home and neglected my prayers …

 

Within a few weeks he was well again.

16 October picked up a woman and went to the tavern where we had a broiled fowl and afterwards I committed uncleanness for which God forgive me. About eleven I went home and neglected my prayers.

 

17 October … to the play where was but indifferent company …

 

20 October … to the play where I saw nobody I liked so went to Will’s and stayed about an hour and then went to Mrs. Smith’s where I met a very tall woman and rogered her three times …

 

In November, William Byrd and his English gentleman-friends were prowling in packs.

11 November, went with Lord Orrery to Mrs B-r-t-n where we found two chambermaids that my Lord had ordered to be got for us and I rogered one of them and about 9 o’clock returned again to Will’s where Betty S-t-r-d called on me in a coach and I went with her to a bagnio and rogered her twice, for which God forgive me …

 

12 … sat a little with Mrs. Perry …

 

13 … took my ways towards Mrs. Southwell’s but she was from home. Then I walked in the park and went to Ozinda’s … After we went to Will’s … then … to Mistress B-r-t and stayed about an hour

 

14 … went away to Will’s where a woman called on me … then went to a bagnio where I rogered my woman but once. Her name was Sally Cook. There was a terrible noise in the night like a woman crying. …

 

22 … walked home and by the way picked up a woman and committed uncleanness with her, for which God forgive me …

 

27 … We sat and talked till ten and then retired and I kissed the maid and neglected my prayers

 

28 … I ate some boiled milk for supper and romped with Molly F-r-s-y and about 9 o’clock retired and kissed the maid so that I committed uncleanness, for which God forgive me.

 

29 … After dinner it rained, that I could not walk so was content to romp with Molly F-r-s-y. In the evening we drank tea, and then sat and talked till seven, when I ate some boiled milk for supper. After supper we sat and talked and romped a little. About ten I retired and kissed the maid and said my prayers …7

 

Sexual predators such as William Byrd have existed in every society. But some cultures more than others have tended to encourage their activities, and even to condone them. This was the case in tidewater Virginia, with its strong ideas of male supremacy and masculine assertiveness. William Byrd’s behavior differed only in degree from Thomas Jefferson’s relentless pursuit of Mrs. Walker, or George Washington’s clumsy flirtation with Mrs. Fairfax. These men represented the best of their culture; the sexual activities of other planters made even William Byrd appear a model of restraint. An old tidewater folk saying in Prince George’s County, Maryland, defined a virgin as a girl who could run faster than her uncle.8

The sexual predators of Virginia found many opportunities among indentured servant girls during the seventeenth century. The journal of John Harrower described free and easy fornication with female servants in Virginia. Exceptionally high rates of prenuptial pregnancy and illegitimacy among English female immigrants to Virginia was in part due to this cause. There is evidence in the records that some masters deliberately impregnated their servants as a way of extending their indentures.9

In the eighteenth century, race slavery created other opportunities for planter predators, some of whom started at an early age to exercise a droit du seigneur over women in the slave quarters. Philip Fithian noted that the master’s son, Bob Carter, one Sunday morning took “a likely Negro girl” into the stable and was for a “considerable time lock’d … together.” Bob was sixteen years old.10

The abolitionist indictment of slavery for its association with predatory sex had a solid foundation in historical fact. One thinks of Mary Boykin Chesnut’s response to the antislavery movement in the nineteeenth century:

Like the patriarchs of old our men live in one house with their wives and their concubines, and the mulattoes one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children—and every lady tells you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household, but those in her own she seems to think drop from the clouds. … You see, Mrs. Stowe did not hit on the sorest spot. She makes Legree a bachelor.11

Mrs. Chesnut knew whereof she spoke, and was haunted by her knowledge of sexual predators within her own family. But she (and the abolitionists, and many historians too) were very much mistaken in thinking that the “peculiar institution” of race slavery itself was the first cause of this behavior. The same pattern had appeared in Virginia before slavery was widespread. It had also existed in rural England.

The cultural idea of the predatory male was carried very far in early Virginia—even to the point of condoning rape. The diaries and commonplace books of Anglo-American gentlemen often recorded a complaisant and even jocular attitude toward rape that differed very much from prevailing mores in Puritan New England. The founders of New England made rape a hanging crime. In the courts of the Chesapeake colonies, it was sometimes punished less severely than petty theft—a different attitude from the Puritan colonies.12

The sex ways of the southern colonies differed from New England in other ways as well. Virginians had a way of thinking about fertility which set them apart from New England Puritans. The people of Virginia thought less of the biblical commandment to increase and multiply and replenish the earth which so obsessed the Puritans, and more of breeding stocks and bloodlines. Children of the elite were bred to one another in a manner not unlike dogs and horses. Much interest was shown in blood lines. The gentry of Virginia studied one another’s genealogies as closely as a stockman would scrutinize his stud books.

Gentlemen took pride in the fertility of their women and their animals—sometimes in the same breath. A seventeenth-century gentleman named William Blundell expressed delight in his ménage, when within 24 hours his wife was delivered of a son, his prize cow produced a calf, a sow dropped fifteen piglets, a bitch gave birth to sixteen puppies, a cat had four kittens, and his hens laid fifteen eggs.13

Women in the Chesapeake were called “breeders,” a word not unknown in New England, but decidedly uncommon.14 A great planter, Landon Carter, complained of Virginia ladies, “I do believe women have nothing general in view, but the breeding contests at home. It began with poor Eve and ever since then has been so much of the devil in woman.”15

Little girls were encouraged to think of themselves in these terms. The Presbyterian tutor at Nomini Hall, Philip Vickers Fithian, was shocked to discover Fanny Carter (aged ten) and Harriet (aged six) playing at pregnancy. “Among the many womanish Fribbles which our little Misses daily practise,” he wrote in his diary, “I discovered one today no less merry than natural; Fanny and Harriet by stuffing rags and other Lumber under their Gowns just below their Apron-Strings, were prodigiously charmed at their resemblance to Pregnant Women! They blushed, however, pretty deeply on discovering that I saw them.”16

There was little prudery in this society—less than in New England. A visitor to Virginia was startled to see ladies buying naked male slaves after carefully examining their genitals.17 The earthiness of this culture appeared in a case of adultery heard by the court of Accomack and Northampton counties in 1643. Two witnesses, John Tully and Susanna Kennett, heard a “great snoring” on a house. John Tully testified that “there was a hogshead of tobacco in the entrie directly agynst the door, so this deponent and the said Susanna stood upon the said hogshead,” and peered inside. They saw Goodwife Mary West and Richard Jones lying abed, “both arm in arm,” Jones asleep and snoring lustily into

Mary West’s plackett. Susanna Kennett testified that she saw Mary West

put her hand in his codpiece and shake him by the member, whereupon this deponent could not forbear from laughing. And then this deponent and the said Tully did run away from the place where they stood.18

What was striking about this episode was not merely the event itself, but the spirit in which it was described, which was far removed from the tone (if not the substance) of prevailing sexual attitudes in Puritan New England.

Image Virginia Naming Ways: Anglican Onomastics

 

After a baby was born in Virginia, a complex set of cultural rituals was put in motion. Among them was the naming of the infant an intricate process which tells us many things about ethical values, family structure, and ideas of childhood itself. The naming ways of Anglican Virginia were different from those of Puritan Massachusetts, and similar to naming customs throughout the south and west of England.

The leading features of this onomastic system might be summarized by a single English example. In 1737, the historian Edward Gibbon was born into an armigerous Surrey family with a strong Virginia connection. He was the eldest of six brothers, and received the name of his paternal grandfather. So important to the family was the survival of the name that the future historian wrote, “in the baptism of each of my brothers my father’s prudence successively repeated my Christian name of Edward, that, in case of the departure of the eldest son, this patronymic appellation might still be perpetuated in the family.” That precaution proved to be necessary, for of the six brothers named Edward Gibbon, only one survived childhood.1

Edward Gibbon’s forename came not from the Bible, but from the king list of ancient Wessex. Three West Saxon monarchs had borne the name of Edward including Edward the Confessor, the last of the line, who personified the values of Royalists and High Anglicans in the seventeenth century. In old English, the name Edward meant “lucky leader” (ead, fortunate; weard, guardian or leader). It remained a favorite in Wessex for a thousand years, and would be heavily used in Virginia for many generations. But in New England the name was very rare; Harvard College enrolled only one student called Edward in its first forty undergraduate classes.2

The onomastic customs which Edward Gibbon personified were widely imitated in Anglican Virginia, both as to the choice of forenames, and the descent of names within the family. Biblical names were less common in Virginia than in Massachusetts. Only about half of all forenames in the Chesapeake colony came from the Scriptures, compared with 90 percent in New England. But the proportion of biblical names in Virginia was almost exactly the same as in the parish of Colyton, Devon. It was broadly similar to naming patterns among both the gentry and the general population in south and west of England.3

Virginians preferred to name their sons after Teutonic warriors, Frankish knights and English kings. Special favorites included William, Robert, Richard, Edward, George and Charles—choices rarely made in Massachusetts during the seventeenth century. The daughters of Virginia received the names of Christian saints who did not appear in the Bible and also traditional English folk names—Margaret, Jane, Catherine, Frances and Alice—as well as the universal English favorites of Mary, Elizabeth, Anne and Sarah. This distribution of names was much the same among native-born Virginians and English emigrants in the seventeenth century.4

This onomastic system was also distinctive in the descent of names. In Massachusetts, as we have seen, eldest children were named after their parents, and younger children after grandparents and other relatives. That pattern was reversed in Virginia: first-born children were named for their grandparents, and second-born for parents. One study of naming patterns in Middlesex County, Virginia finds that only 27 percent of eldest sons and 19 percent of first-born daughters were given their parents’ forenames, compared with more than 67 percent in Massachusetts. But 60 percent of eldest sons in Virginia received their grandparents’ names, compared with 37 percent in Massachusetts. The nuclear naming strategies of New England were subordinated to a stronger concern for the extended lineage in Virginia.5

Once again, the Virginia pattern closely followed the conventions of Anglican families in the south and west of England. Among the Filmers of East Sutton, every first-born son in the male line of the Filmer family was named for his paternal grandfather, and every second-born son for his father:

Image

In the fourth generation, the eldest male Filmer had no issue, and the title descended through a younger brother. Even so, the rhythm of three generation-naming was carefully preserved.6

These naming customs were very common among armigerous Anglican families in both southern England and tidewater Virginia. Another example was the Peyton family of Bedfordshire, Suffolk and Gloucestershire. Its younger sons settled in Virginia during the seventeenth century. For many generations, the Peytons used the same three-generational rhythm as did the Filmers:

Image

The Peytons, like the Filmers, were normally patrilineal in the descent of names. But that tendency varied in different families according to relative social standing of paternal and maternal lines. When Sir Algernon Peyton married Frances Sewster, daughter of Sir Robert Sewster, their first-born son was named Sewster Peyton.7 Here was yet another naming-custom in that culture—the use of surnames as forenames to reinforce connections between families and strengthen the solidarity of the elite. As early as 1634, for example, William Gray of Middlesex County, Virginia, left his land to a nephew called Hugh Stewart on the condition that “the said Hugh Stewart shall name the first male child lawfully begotten of his body Gray Stewart.”8 This custom of using surnames as forenames was mostly used for boys, but it was not unknown for girls. The wife of the leader of Penruddock’s Rising was named Arundel Penruddock.9

Complex patterns of cousin naming also appeared in Virginia, as they also did among the gentry of the south of England. Lateral ties were added to linear ties, to create a complex grid of naming customs. Godparents were closely involved in the choice of names in both Virginia and the south and west of England.

The naming of children was not entirely determined by this calculus of social rank and material interest. Names were also chosen for magical properties. Astrologers were consulted in an attempt to find a fortunate name. The “fortune books” of the first gentlemen of England and Virginia were full of astrological lore on this question.10 This search for a lucky name tempered the use of necronyms in this culture. The Virginians, like New Englanders, tended to repeat forenames whenever children died. But they did so with some reluctance, for when children died young, their fathers feared to use names which had seemed unlucky. Thus, Sir John Oglander discussed in his diary the use of a necronym for his second-born son:

I also named him John, the eldest being also by me named of the same name and died 12 months before, and if this dieth, I will never Christen any of that name more. Sir Richard Dillington and my lady Richards were the other gossips with me.11

In many ways, the onomastic customs of Anglican Virginia were far removed from the naming patterns of Puritan New England. The contrast of cultures began in the first years of life.

Image Virginia Child-rearing Ways: Bending the Will

 

“An infant coming into the world in Virginia during the eighteenth century,” writes Edmund Morgan, “had a good deal more reason to cry about it than one who arrives in any part of the United States today.”1 Roughly one-third of newborn babies perished within the first twenty months of life, and nearly half were dead before they reached adulthood.2 Those who survived also faced another ordeal, which was not physical but cultural in its nature. Growing up in Virginia was a process full of pain and difficulty for the young.

At first sight, it did not appear to be so. Visitors commonly remarked that Virginians seemed to be exceptionally indulgent toward their children—an observation that was never made in New England during the seventeenth century. The Calvinist doctrine that children were inherently evil rarely appeared in the writings of Anglican parents in Virginia. In consequence the Puritan custom of will-breaking was not much practiced in the Chesapeake colonies.3

But growing up in Virginia was in some ways even more difficult than in New England. The culture of the Chesapeake colonies placed two different and even contradictory demands upon its young. On the one hand youngsters were compelled to develop strong and autonomous wills. On the other hand, they were expected to yield willingly to the requirements of an hierarchical culture. These psychic tensions took a heavy toll.

In place of the Puritan will-breaking, young Virginians at a very early age were actively encouraged to exercise their wills. Parents took pride in their youngsters’ childish acts of psychic autonomy. In 1728, a planter named Thomas Jones boasted that his infant nephew “struts around the house and is as noisy as a bully.” The same man expressed delight at the antics of his own two-year-old son, Tom Junior. A sister-in-law complained that little Tom’s wild behavior in the house was “enough to distract all about him except his papa, and to him I believe all his [son’s] noise is music. If he can’t have and do everything he has a mind to, he is ready to tear the house the down.”4

For boys, this regime of parental permissiveness commonly continued through childhood to adolescence. The German traveler Johann Schoepf observed that “a Virginia youth of fifteen years is already such a man as he will be at twice that age. At fifteen, his father gives him a horse and a negro, with which he riots about the country, attends every fox-hunt, horse-race and cockfight, and does nothing else whatever; a wife is his next and only care.”5

Boys especially were required to develop strong wills and boisterous emotions. Not to possess them was thought to be unmanly. Philip Fithian was struck by the passionate nature of his young male charges at Nomini Hall: he described the elder son as “of a warm, impetuous disposition,” and the younger son as “extremely volatile and unsettled in his temper.”6 Foreign travelers repeatedly noticed a clear difference in that respect between children in the northern and southern colonies. One English visitor in Maryland and Virginia observed that “the youth of these more indulgent settlements, partake pretty much of the Petit Maître kind, and are pampered much more in softness and in ease than their neighbors more northward.”7

But these descriptions could mislead a reader in the twentieth century. Child rearing in the Chesapeake was not indulgent in the modern sense. By comparison with New England, it was not so much a method of freedom as a different system of constraint.

A primary goal of socialization in Virginia was to prepare the child to take its proper place in the social hierarchy. The child’s will was not broken, but in a phrase that Virginians liked to use, it was “severely bent against itself.” This end was accomplished primarily by requiring children to observe elaborate rituals of self-restraint.

Child rearing in Virginia included many rituals of restraint which did not appear in New England. An example was the dance, which children of good family were compelled to study with close attention. Dancing was discouraged in the Puritan and Quaker colonies, and in some instances even forbidden outright. But in Virginia, children were compelled to dance. The Presbyterian tutor Philip Fithian was astonished by the seriousness with which Virginians applied themselves to dancing. He described an all-day dancing lesson at Nomini Hall, taught by a sadistic martinet ironically named Mr. Christian—one of many professional dancing masters who found employment in the colony:

After breakfast, we all retired into the dancing-room, and after the scholars had their lesson singly round Mr. Christian. … There were several minuets danced with great propriety, after which the whole company joined in country-dances; and it was indeed beautiful to admiration, to see such a number of young persons, set off by dress to the best advantage, moving easily, to the sound of well-performed music, with perfect regularity, tho’ apparently in the utmost disorder.

The dance continued til two; we dined at half after three. Soon after dinner we repaired to the dancing room again. I observe in the course of the lessons, that Mr. Christian is punctual, and rigid in his discipline, so strict indeed that he struck two of the young Misses for a fault in the course of their performance, even in the presence of the mother of one of them!

 

And he rebuked one of the fellows so highly as to tell him he must alter his manner, which he had observed through the course of the dance to be insolent, and wanton, or absent himself from the school—I thought this a sharp reproof, to a young gentleman of seventeen, before a large number of Ladies. …

 

When the candles were lighted we all repaired for the last time into the dancing room. First each couple danced a minuet. Then all joined as before in the country dances, these continued till half after seven, when Mr. Christian retired.8

 

Altogether, the lesson lasted nine hours, from ten o’clock in the morning till after seven at night. As the exacting Mr. Christian insisted, dance was a form of discipline for young ladies and gentlemen of Virginia. The complex rhythms of minuet and country dance became metaphors for an entire cultural system. Governor Gooch boasted of Virginia’s ruling elite that there was “not a bad dancer in my government.” He had more in mind than merely their “easy movements” on the ballroom floor.

By the third quarter of the seventeenth century, the social ritual of the dance had become an important part of Virginia’s culture, and also an instrument of the socialization process. Professional dancing teachers were employed in the colony as early as the 1660s. In the course of the eighteenth century, these customs changed mainly in an involutionary way by becoming more elaborately the same. In the process, they preserved their primary cultural functions. For many generations in Virginia, the ritual of the dance became a school of manners where young people learned to bend gracefully in more than merely a physical sense.9

Another closely related child-rearing custom was the careful instruction of young people in formal rules of right conduct. In Virginia, youngsters of every rank were required to master these rules, and they were punished severely for failing to respect them. All children without exception—even orphans, apprentices and slaves—were compelled to learn them. The higher a child’s social rank, the more elaborate and constraining the rules became. During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, these rules were much more than an “etiquette” in the modern trivializing sense. They comprised an entire grammar of cultural ethics.

In substance, these rules were very much the same in Virginia and the south of England. One schoolmaster in the English county of Somerset, for example, compelled his students to memorize no fewer than 96 of these cultural axioms. A selection will suggest their quality:

1. Fear God

2. Honour the King

3. Reverence thy Parents

4. Submit to thy Superiors

5. Despise not thy Inferiors

6. Be courteous to thy Equals

7. Pray daily and devoutly

8. Converse with the good

9. Imitate not the wicked …

22. Approach near thy parents at no time without a bow …

28. Never speak to thy parents without some title of respect—viz.—Sir, madam, etc. according to their Quality …

32. Ask not for anything but tarry till it be offered thee …

38. Stare not in the face of anyone (especially thy superiors) …

60. Laugh not aloud, but silently smile upon occasion …

62. Be not among Equals forward or fretful but gentle and affable …

67. Boast not in discourse of thy wit or doings.

68. Beware thou utter not anything hard to be believed …

78. Affront no one, especially thy elders by word or deed …

80. Always give the wall to thy superiors that thou meetest, or if thy walkest with thy elder give him the upper hand …

87. Give always place to him that excelleth thee in quality, age or learning …

89. Be not selfish altogether; but kindly, free and generous to others …

96. Let thy words be modest and about those things only which concern thee.10

This list was drawn from a book called The School of Manners, which went through many editions in the early eighteenth century, and circulated widely in Europe and America. Many similar works were published in England, France and Italy during the seventeenth century.11

The children of Virginia were required to learn these rules by rote. Among the earliest writings by George Washington was a list of 110 “rules of civility and decent behaviour in Company and conversation,” which the young scholar had been compelled to inscribe in his best copybook hand:

1st Every action done in Company ought to be with some sign of respect to those that are present …

19th Let your countenance be pleasant but in serious matters somewhat grave …

26th In pulling off your Hat to Persons of Distinction, as Noblemen, Justices, Churchmen &c make a reverence, bowing more or less according to the custom of the better bred …

31st If any one far surpasses others, wither in age, Estate, or merit [yet] would give place to a meaner than himself the one ought not to accept it …

37th In speaking to men of Quality do not lean nor Look them full in the Face, nor approach too near them. At least keep a full pace from them …

39th In writing or Speaking, give to every person his due Title According to his Degree & the Custom of the Place …

40th Strive not with your superiors in argument, but always submit your judgment to others with modesty … 42d Let thy ceremonies in Courtesie be proper to the Dignity of his place with whom thou conversest for it is absurd to act the same with a Clown and a prince …

46th Take all admonitions thankfully [even when not culpable for them] …

57th In walking up and down in a House, only with one in company if he be greater than yourself, at the first give him the right hand and stop not till he does and be not the first that turns and when you do turn let it be with your face towards him, if he be a man of great quality, walk not with him cheek by jowl, but somewhat behind him; but yet in such a manner that he may easily speak to you …

110th Labour to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience.

These lists were given to children not merely as copybook exercises. They were instruments of a larger purpose, which was to discipline the will.12

Young gentlemen of Virginia were given “freedom of the will” not as an end in itself, but as a means of achieving virtue—that is, of living in harmony with reason, nature, and fortune. This idea was very far from the restless striving of New England Puritans. It was a stoic ideal which cultivated a calm acceptance of life. It taught that one must fear nothing and accept whatever fate might bring with courage, honesty, dignity and grace. The mastery of this stoic creed was one of the central goals of socialization in Virginia.

A case in point was the childhood of George Washington, whose upbringing is full of clues about the culture of Virginia.13

Washington had little formal schooling. When he was eleven years old, his family was shattered by the death of his father. The usual institutions of child rearing functioned very badly for him, as they did for many children in this world. Society itself became his schoolroom; in it he mastered a complex system of social ethics which was widely shared among the Anglican gentry in England and Virginia.

This social creed was fundamentally a form of stoicism—not quite the same as that of the ancient world, but directly derived from classical authorities. One of the few books that young George Washington is known to have owned and read was an English summary of Seneca’s dialogues. The chapter titles of this work comprised another set of rules to be learned by a Virginia gentleman:

An honest man can never be outdone in courtesy.

A good man can never be miserable, nor a wicked man happy.

A sensual life is a miserable life.

Hope and fear are the bane of human life.

The contempt of death makes all the miseries of life easy to us.

Washington was never much of a reader. But in company with his friend Sally Fairfax he read Addison’s tragedy Cato, which became one of his favorite works. That Augustan classic, with its prologue by the poet Pope, celebrated the stoic virtues of the great Roman patrician who became a model for young George Washington. In the play, one character declaims:

Turn up they eyes to Cato!

There mayst thou see to what a godlike height

The Roman virtues lift up mortal man.

While good, and just, and anxious for his friends,

He’s still severely bent against himself.

At Valley Forge, Washington ordered that Addison’s Cato should be performed for all his officers, and he attended the production himself. He quoted Cato in his presidential papers, and in his last years returned again and again to this work. Washington’s character and conduct embodied Cato’s creed. This was Virginia’s ideal of an autonomous gentleman, with a character that was “severely bent against himself.”

The inner stresses were sometimes very great. A gentleman of Virginia was expected to have boisterous feelings and manly passions and a formidable will. But at the same time he was also expected to achieve a stoic mastery of self. This vital tension became a coiled spring at the core of Virginia’s culture, and a source of its great achievements during the eighteenth century. In the personality of George Washington, Virginia’s system of child rearing had a spectacular success. Here was a character who seemed to be perfectly in harmony with his cultural environment. But other gentlemen of Virginia personified the inner tensions which were created by this culture.

A leading example was Colonel Daniel Parke (1669-1710), whose daughters Frances and Lucy we have already met. Daniel Parke was a fantastic figure, whose exploits made him a legendary character throughout the English-speaking world. He was also a typical product of Virginia’s socialization process. As a young gentleman, he gained a reputation for pride and “willfulness.” Commissary James Blair described him as a

handsome young man … who, to all the other accomplishments that make a complete sparkish gentleman, has added one upon which he infinitely values himself, that is, a quick resentment of every the least thing that looks like an affront or injury. He had learned, they say, the art of fencing, and is as ready at giving a challenge, especially before company, as the greatest Hector in the town.14

Parke once challenged the visiting Governor of Maryland to a duel at a public gathering—an act which doubly shocked respectable opinion in the Chesapeake. Challenges were properly delivered in private, and governors were thought to be exempt. He also caused another scandal when on a visit to England he eloped with a gentleman’s beautiful wife and brought her to Virginia as a thrall of love. This act prompted Commissary James Blair to thunder against adultery from the pulpit of Bruton Parish Church, which led the hot-blooded young Daniel Parke to challenge even his clerical critic—another grievous breach of the rules. In later life, Colonel Parke openly kept a mistress as his consort—and ordered that she should inherit his coat of arms, which was the most shocking impropriety of all in armigerous Virginia.

But even as he behaved so badly by the standards of his own culture, there was also another side to Daniel Parke’s personality. At an early age he imbibed the stoic creed of a Virginia gentleman,

Image

The troubled life and violent death of Colonel Daniel Parke expressed the tension between the stoic ideas of Virginia gentlemen and the turbulent reality of their world. In an old painting Daniel Parke wears as a badge of honor on his breast a pearl-encrusted miniature that Queen Anne gave him when he was chosen for his gallantry to bring her the news of the great British victory at Blenheim. Colonel Parke honorably refused all material reward for that service except a picture of his sovereign, and an engraved silver service of the sort that Virginians loved to display. A few years after this likeness was painted, Colonel Parke became governor of Antigua, where he was captured by rebels and tortured to death. His last words, long admired in Virginia, were “Gentlemen, you have no sense of honor left, pray have some of humanity,” and he died “recommending his soul to God, with some pious ejaculations.”

and tried to live according to its precepts. To one of his daughters, Daniel Parke wrote,

Mind your writing and everything else you have learnt, and do not learn to romp, but behave yourself soberly and like a gentlewoman. Mind reading, and carry yourself so that everybody may respect you. Be calm and obliging to all the servants, and when you speak, do it mildly, even to the poorest slave.15

Colonel Parke was long remembered in Virginia for his gallantry. In 1697 he returned to England and was commissioned a colonel in the British Army. He became aide-de-camp to the Duke of Marlborough in the Wars of Louis XIV, and was ordered to carry home the report of the great English victory at Blenheim. Offered a gift of £500 by Queen Anne, Colonel Parke refused the money and asked only a small picture of his sovereign—an act of gallantry which was praised even by his enemies.16

The most memorable scene in Colonel Parke’s life was its remarkable ending. Sent as Royal Governor to the Leeward Islands, he was captured by rebels in Antigua and tortured to death. In an extremity of pain and suffering, Colonel Parke’s behavior became a model of stoic virtue. “Insulted and reviled by every scoundrel, in the agonies of death,” he made “no other return but these mild expressions, ‘Gentlemen, you have no sense of honor left, pray have some of humanity,’” and died “recommending his soul to God, with some pious ejaculations.”17

Here was a spectacular example of a Virginia gentleman, sternly bent against himself. Altogether, the process of socialization was less successful for Colonel Parke than for General Washington. In Daniel Parke’s life, the inner tensions of this culture were outwardly expressed with exceptional clarity and force. For two hundred years, the example of his troubled life and noble death was held up for the moral instruction of young gentlemen in Virginia.

Image Virginia Age Ways:
The Anglican Idea of the Elder-Patriarch

 

Attitudes toward age, and actual experiences of aging, were not the same in Virginia and Massachusetts. Respect for age was very strong in both cultures—but not in the same way. In place of the Puritan ideal of the venerated elder-saint, Virginians organized a system of age deference around the paternal figure of the elderpatriarch.

In seventeenth-century England, a vital principle of Royalist political thought had been what Sir Robert Filmer called “the agreement of paternal and regal power.” In his treatise Patriarcha, Filmer explained:

If we compare the natural duties of a Father with those of a King, we find them to be all one, without any difference at all but only in the latitude and extent of them. As the Father over one family, so the King, as Father over many families, extends his care to preserve, feed, clothe, instruct and defend the whole commonwealth. His wars, his peace, his courts of justice, and all his acts of sovereignty tend only to preserve and distribute every subordinate and inferior father, and to their children, their rights and privileges, so that all the duties of a King are summed up in an universal fatherly care of his people.1

This argument worked two ways. It invested a king with the legitimacy of a father, and endowed a father with the authority of a king. Further, Royalist writers such as Filmer also identified elders with father-kings. In Patriarcha Filmer quoted with approval Aristotle’s axiom that “the eldest in every house is King.”2

This patriarchal principle of respect for age was very strong in gentry families throughout the south of England. Elders were normally treated with deference. In a Warwickshire family, Richard Newdigate II in his mature years routinely addressed his father as “Honored Sir,” and signed himself “your truly obedient son.” The letters were studded with sentences such as “your direction in this business which shall most readily be obeyed by, most dear father, your ever obedient son.” Letters from sons to their fathers were couched in language so elaborately submissive that one modern scholar describes them as “priggish,” “stiff,” and “pompous.” But the same phrases rang differently in seventeenth-century ears.3

The submission of youth to age was more than merely an empty ritual. It was also accompanied by substantive acts. When John Oglander was offered a knighthood, for example, he refused to accept it because his living father had not preceded him in that honor. “Sir John Oglander,” a friend wrote, “might have been knighted before all the gentleman of the Island [of Wight] but out of too much niceness, as his father, then living, refused it.”4

Respect for age was strongest when elders were men of high rank in society. But the same principle also extended to people of humble stations. In the west and south of England during the seventeenth century, elders who were not gentlemen received the honorific title of Gaffer, and older women were called Gammer. These salutations were used as genuine titles of respect even by young noblemen when they addressed elders of low rank. They were also accompanied by acts of highly complex mutual deference from young men of high rank to elders of a lower order. When, for example, the Dorset gentleman John Richards had a falling out with a young servant named Arthur Cryde, the boy was sent home “to take his father’s advice.” When the father supported his son, the master himself deferred to the judgment of “father Cryde.”5

This rule of respect for age was not confined to private affairs. It also appeared in public life during the seventeenth century. In the south of England, young gentleman-justices routinely deferred to senior colleagues. Sir John Oglander, for example, when appointed to the Commission of Peace in England’s Isle of Wight at the exceptionally early age of twenty-two, described a sense of “shame” that he felt because of his youth. “I was put into the Commission of peace at the age of 22 years,” he wrote, “when I not well understood myself or place, and was ashamed to sit on the bench as not having then any hair on my face and less wit.”6

The same principle of a patriarchal respect for age was carried to the Chesapeake. In the county courts of Virginia, justices were ranked and seated by seniority. When openings occurred, older men were preferred over younger ones. The court of Essex County as late as 1787 stated the common belief that “senior magistrates would keep more order and decorum on the bench.”7 The laws of Virginia gave special responsibilities to the justice who was “the eldest in every commission.” In actual practice, the eldest was sometimes not very old; high rates of mortality rapidly promoted the young. But seniority remained the rule.8

The patriarchal principle was also very strong in family relationships throughout tidewater Virginia. Historian Daniel Blake Smith, in a general survey of family correspondence throughout the Chesapeake colonies finds a “general pattern of paternal dominance and deferential conduct in sons that prevailed in most gentry families until the late eighteenth century.”9

This Virginia habit of deference to elder-patriarchs was different from the New England practice of veneration for elder-saints. Empirical evidence appears in patterns of age-heaping: that is, the systematic distortion of ages reported to a census taker. In twentieth-century America, with its intense youth bias, people tend to make themselves a little younger than they actually are; many choose to remain 39, or 49, or 59. In early America a very different sort of age bias appeared: people of mature age tended to make themselves a little older. This was the case both in New England and Virginia. But in the Puritan colonies the tendency to inflate one’s age was strongest in later life, and comparatively weak in early adulthood. In Virginia, on the other hand, people tended to make themselves a little older in every stage of adulthood. The explanation may be found in cultural ideals. In the Puritan colonies, which made long life into a Calvinist “Sign,” the status of elder saint applied only to people of advanced age. But in Virginia, the idea of patriarchy applied to senior adult males of any age. One culture exalted old age; the other rewarded seniority—two very different systems.10

In Virginia, this patriarchal system of respect for seniority made a major difference in family relations—particularly between fathers and sons. As fathers grew older, they commonly kept at least one son beside them. Thus, George Hume, of Spotsylvania County, in 1751 wrote, “I thank God I have now a son who does my business for me, and when he leaves me I hope to have another ready.”11

These relationships were often full of tension. A few sons rebelled outright against this treatment. An example was the strife that developed between the great planter Landon Carter of Sabine Hall (1710-78), and his son Robert Wormeley Carter (1734-97). In the year 1766, the son was thirty-two years old and married, with money of his own but not enough for independence. He was forced to live under his father’s roof, still subject to paternal authority. The two men quarreled endlessly. The son called his father a “bashaw,” an Oriental despot, and at the age of forty protested that “he was not a child to be controlled.” So heated did these quarrels become that the father began to fear for his life. “Surely it is happy our laws prevent parricide,” he wrote, “ … Good God! That such a monster is descended from my loins!”12

Open hostility of this sort was very much an exception in Virginia. But tensions so commonly existed that Philip Fithian advised another tutor in Virginia to “place yourself, according to your most acute calculation, at a perfect equidistance between the father and the eldest son.”13

Relations between patriarchal fathers and sons, even when not so stormy, were often laden with emotional complexity. William Byrd II in his mature years was literally haunted by the memory of his dead father. In 1710, he ordered his father’s corpse to be dug up, so that he could look his sire in the face. “I had my father’s grave opened to see him,” Byrd wrote, “but he was so wasted there was not anything to be distinguished.”14

William Byrd’s secret diary reveals many other things about age-relations, and also about the process of aging in that society. A secret shorthand notebook that he kept from 1739 to 1741 (age 65-67) exposes the inner feelings of a Virginia patriarch in his sixties, who was feeling his age in many ways. He was plagued by illness and worried about the decline of his mental faculties. “God preserve my head,” he wrote in 1740, “and grant I may not lose my memory and sense.” Yet his diary showed little loss of activity in the last years of his life, by comparison with our own world. To the end of his life he continued his career in politics, reaching his highest office in the last year of his life when he was elected president of the Virginia council. This was an important office in the colony, and it came to Byrd because of his age. He was senior councilor and had been so for many years. But the incumbent president James Blair clung stubbornly to life, dozing in his chair of state for many years until the end finally came at the age of eighty-seven; and Byrd, a mere stripling of seventy, inherited the office.15

In his last years, Byrd’s private life continued to be as crowded as his public career. He began each morning with lessons in

Latin, Hebrew and Greek, and took his exercise almost every day. In the evenings he proved himself a mighty trencherman, and at any hour of the day he could be dangerous to unwary housemaids who came within reach. Even in his seventies, William Byrd continued to be a sexual predator:

9 May 1741 I played the fool with Sally …

15 June 1741 In the evening I played the fool with Marjorie. God forgive me.

In old age Byrd moved more slowly, and rarely caught his prey. But he preserved most activities in his life even as he approached the end of it.16

Image Virginia Death Ways:
The Anglican Idea of Stoic Fatalism

 

On the dark subject of death in Virginia, a curious double paradox presents itself. The most striking fact about death in the Chesapeake was how much there was of it, compared with New England and western Europe. Rates of mortality may have been at least twice as high in tidewater Virginia as in rural Massachusetts, and higher also than in many parts of England during the seventeenth century. Illness and death were constant companions in this “pestered country.”

A second fact was equally striking. Virginians appeared, on the surface at least, to have been remarkably nonchalant about the mortal dangers that surrounded them. They showed comparatively little of the anxiety about death that was so much a part of Puritan culture. They did not observe the rituals of “daily dying” which became standard spiritual exercises in Massachusetts. Neither did they drag their children screaming to the open grave. By comparison with other people, the Virginians responded to sudden and terrible mortality with a cultivated sang froid that could not have been more different from the manic behavior of Massachusetts Calvinists.

In the year 1720, for example, William Byrd II traveled to Williamsburg on public business. “About 12 o’clock,” he wrote in his diary, “I went to the Capitol and in court the Secretary was struck with the fit of an apoplexy and died immediately and fell upon me. This made a great consternation. About two I dined at [illeg.] and ate some wild duck.” Byrd added no reflections on the frailty of life, or the omnipotence of God. Immediately after this event he sat down to a heavy dinner with no sense of incongruity or loss of appetite.1

Subsequent passages in his diaries suggest, however, that this show of unconcern was merely a facade. A few months after the courtroom death of Secretary Cocke, Byrd began to be deeply troubled by dreams of his own impending demise. On December 2, he wrote,

Colonel Harrison came to us and we played at cards and I lost ten shillings and about 11 o’clock went home and said my prayers. I dreamed that I had notice given me that I should die suddenly in six or seven days.

The next day, he was horrified when his friend Colonel Harrison told him “he dreamed there was a funeral at Westover, which agreed with my dream last night and made me begin to think there was something to it.”

The day after, Byrd went to church twice, and was careful to say his prayers morning and night. When a housemaid incautiously entered his bedroom he showed unusual restraint. “After I was in bed,” he wrote, “the maid of the house came into my chamber and I felt her and committed uncleanness but did not roger her.”

Seven days later William Byrd awoke to discover that his dream was false. He hurled himself back into the business of life. When a young slave girl came within reach, he forced himself upon her. “I felt the breasts of the negro girl, which she resisted a little,” he noted. Then he went out and visited his friends and in the evening “walked a little to pick up a woman and found none.” He dined with his friends, gambled at cards, and was delighted to have a winning streak. While his luck continued at the gaming table, all thoughts of death disappeared.2

Another outlet for the fears that lurked below the surface in Virginia was elaborate death ritual—much more elaborate than in early New England. After Secretary Cocke died, for example, there was a splendid service at Bruton Church, with Governor

Spotswood in attendance. A table was erected which proclaimed that “the principal gentlemen of the country attended his funeral, and, weeping, saw the corpse interred. …”3

State funerals made a great show in Virginia—more so in the eighteenth century than the seventeenth. When Governor William Botetourt died in 1770, an elaborate procession was staged in Williamsburg. The street was lined with militia from York and James City counties, and the bells of the town tolled mournfully. The funeral parade was led by the hearse surrounded by six mutes and eight pallbearers, followed by the governor’s servants in “deep mourning,” and the chief mourners in white hatbands and white gloves. The aisle of Bruton church was carpeted in black; the altar, pulpit and governor’s throne were hung with black cloth. The sermon was heard by a large crowd who wept copiously through the ceremony, in an open and extravagant display of grief which was also customary at Virginia funerals, and very different from the grim restraint of New England burials.

Interments were conducted with high ceremony even for Virginians of modest rank. The minister and pallbearers wore mourning gloves, love scarves, ribbons and other tokens of grief. A common part of the proceedings was a fusillade which by the quantity of gunpowder indicated the status of the deceased. Thomas Wall in 1650 in his will requested “three volleys of shot for the entertainment of those who came to bury him.” As many as ten pounds of black powder were expended on these occasions—enough for many volleys.4

Even more lavish was the consumption of food and liquor. At the funeral of Mrs. Elizabeth Eppes, the assembled mourners consumed three entire sheep and a steer, plus five gallons of wine and two gallons of brandy. That was a comparatively abstemious event; at other funerals as many as fifty or sixty gallons of alcoholic beverages were drunk by a crowd of mourners who were highly volatile and heavily armed. More than a few Virginians requested in their wills that weapons and alcohol be omitted from their funerals, in hopes of preventing “excess.”5

The place of burial in Virginia was normally not a public burying ground as in New England, but a private family plot in some secluded corner of a farm or plantation. Hugh Jones described the prevailing customs:

The parishes being of great extent (some sixty miles long and upwards) many dead corpses cannot be conveyed to the church to be buried: So that it is customary to bury in gardens or orchards, where whole families lye interred together, in a spot generally handsomely enclosed, planted with evergreens, and the graves kept decently: Hence likewise arises the occasion of preaching funeral sermons in houses, where at funerals are assembled a great congregation of neighbours and friends; and if you insist upon having the sermon and ceremony at church, they say they’ll be without it, unless performed after their usual custom.6

Indentured servants who died in appalling numbers were hurried into the ground with little ceremony. Black slaves were often buried in unmarked graves, apart from their masters. Public funerals for slaves were forbidden by order of the Virginia Council in 1687.7 Great planters noted the death of slaves without even bothering to record their names:

18 August 1739 several people sick above, God preserve them.

22 August … my sick people continued bad, God preserve them.

23 August … My people were still ill: God save them if it be his good pleasure. … After dinner I was a little out of order myself but visited my sick people again who were better, thank God. I had a negro girl die. God’s will be done.8

There were a great many deaths to record in the Chesapeake, but Virginians never really became hardened to them. They mourned their losses as deeply as people in other times and places. The death of infants caused parents to suffer as grievously as in our own time. An example was the death of William Byrd’s infant son Parke Byrd in 1710:

3 [June 1710] … news was brought that the child was very ill. We went out and found him just ready to die and he died about 8 o’clock in the morning. God gives and God takes away; blessed be the name of God. Mrs. Harrison and Mr. Anderson and his wife and some other company came to see us in our affliction. My wife was much afflicted but I submitted to His judgment better, notwithstanding I was very sensible of my loss, but God’s will be done. … My poor wife and I walked in the garden …

4 … my wife had several fits of tears for our dear son but kept within the bounds of submission …

5 … my wife continued very melancholy, notwithstanding I comforted her as well as I could …

6 … we prepared to receive company for the funeral … we gave them burnt claret and cake. About 2 o’clock we went with the corpse …

7 … my wife continued to be exceedingly afflicted for the loss of her child, notwithstanding I comforted her as well as I could …

8 … my wife continued disconsolate …

9 … my wife continued melancholy …

11 … my wife was still disconsolate …

14 … my wife began to be comforted, thank God …

18 … In the afternoon my wife told me a dream she had two nights. She thought she saw a scroll in the sky in form of a light cloud with writing on it. It ran extremely fast from west to east with great swiftness. The writing she could not read but there was a woman before her that told her there would be a great dearth because of want of rain and after that a pestilence …9

In the twentieth century, the death of an infant is an exceptional event. But in Virginia households during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century it happened very freqently. Even so, the psychic cost of these losses was very great. Their cumulative effect was greater still.

Virginians found a way of coming to terms with death by cultivating a spirit of stoic fatalism which was in keeping with other aspects of their culture. This attitude was not invented in America, but carried out of England in the seventeenth century. In Warwickshire, for example, when a father was grieving deeply for the death of a young child, a friend sent a typical letter of condolence:

Noble Sir,

I am very sorry that I am not able to give sufficient comfort to one, that hath such cause of sorrow as now you have, but we all knowing that all things happen according unto the will of God, the best remedy I think is ever for all things with patience to give praise unto him, and no doubt but he that took away that child, which now to you justly doth bring great grief, can and will in his good time give more children that then will yield more cause of rejoicing then this now of sorrowing, so that I know your wisdom is such that it will not let you give yourself ever too much unto sorrow’s yoke, and for your bedfellow, who hath an equal if not a greater part in this sorrow than yourself, I am sorry that I am neither worthy nor able to send her sufficient comfort for her now too much greaved and discontented mind, but I pray you let my best service be remembered unto her. …

 

Your always well-wisher
and true affectionate friend.10

Virginians shared the same attitude, and found frequent opportunity to express it. An example was Frances Bland Randolph (1752-88), who lost her husband when she was twenty-three, and followed him to the grave when barely thirty-six. When she was fifteen, the death of a much-loved sister prompted her brother to write, “Alas, Fanny, ‘tis in vain for us to grieve at misfortunes.” She agreed, “It is of little use to dwell on melancholy subjects.”11

The children of the Chesapeake were taught this stoic fatalism at an early age. William Fitzhugh in 1698 wrote to his mother, “Before I was ten years old … I look’d upon this life here as but going to an inn, no permanent being by God’s will … therefore always prepared for my certain dissolution, which I can’t be persuaded to prolong by a wish.” The death of one’s children, he wrote, could be “cheerfully and easily borne” if one cultivated the proper attitude of resignation.12

Here was a way of thinking about mortality that was far removed from the cultivated death-obsessions of Calvinist New England. The Virginia attitude of stoic fatalism rested upon a belief that people were not personally responsible for their misfortunes, and that they must accept what fate might bring. That brave defense, alas, did not always work for them. In 1720, Robert Carter wrote to a friend after losing his wife, “ … after we have preached up all the lessons of resignation we are masters of, so long as we carry flesh and blood about us … all our philosophy will sometimes recoil and give ground under such severe trials. I remain a mourner to this day.”13

Image Virginia Religious Ways:
The Anglican Devotional-Liturgical Style

 

In a world that was haunted by death, religion became urgently important to the Virginians—more urgent then their worldly business, and more important than many secular historians have believed. When Sir William Berkeley sat down to write his will, for example, his first thought was not for his material wealth, but his spiritual estate:

First, I desire God, who gave it, to take my soul into his mercy; and that, for the only merits and mercies of my blessed Saviour Christ Jesus. My body I give to the earth, from whence it came.1

This concern was typical of its time and place. Another example was the will of Colonel John Stringer, which began with an elaborate declaration of faith. He wrote:

I bequeath my soul to God, who first gave it to me, Father, Son and Spirit in Unity and Trinity, and Trinity and Unity, who hath redeemed and preserved me by and through Jesus Christ, and also died for my sins, and for the sins of all peoples that truly believe in Him by unfeigned faith and repentance, for whose sake and loving kindness I hope to entertain everlasting life, wherefore, Dear Father, have mercy upon my soul.2

The spontaneity of this devotional creed revealed the depth of feeling that lay behind it.

Other wills testified not only to the religion of their makers, but also to their concern for its continuing support. In Surry County, for example, George Jordan insisted that his kin could inherit his estate only if they paid for a sermon to be preached every year in memory of his dead daughter. He also required that Holy Communion should be celebrated if the day fell on Sunday, and that all the neighborhood should be given food and drink. He demanded that this ritual should continue every year until the

“destruction of the world,” and that any owner who failed to honor it should lose the estate, “though it be a thousand generations hence.”3

Still more striking were the many wills in which Virginians provided for the religious education of their children, often at great trouble and expense. Historian Philip Bruce has published large numbers of these provisions, which show the breadth of Christian belief in Virginia during the seventeenth century.4

Virginia wills sometimes expressed their religious feeling in unpuritanical ways. An eminent gentleman of Westmoreland County, Colonel Richard Cole, ordered that the following words should be engraved upon his tombstone:

Here lies Dick Cole, a grievous sinner,

That died a little before dinner,

Yet hoped in Heaven to find a place

To satiate his soul with grace.5

Even these light-hearted words tell us that religion was important to the cavaliers of Virginia, as it had been to the Puritans of Massachusetts; but it was important in a different way. Strong contrasts appeared in the vernacular religions of these colonies—that is, in ordinary rituals of common worship, and also in the individual exercise of faith.

The vernacular religion of Virginia was closely linked to its official Anglican creed, which had been imposed upon the colony partly by persuasion and partly by force. Private eccentricities were tolerated, but open dissenters were harassed and driven out. The leading architect of this policy was once again Sir William Berkeley. By the end of the seventeenth century, religious belief was remarkably uniform in Virginia. Robert Beverley wrote in 1705, “There are very few dissenters … they have not more than five conventicles amongst them, namely three small meetings of Quakers, and two of Presbyterians.” Through the first century of Virginia’s history, Anglican orthodoxy was strong—and growing stronger.6

Governor Berkeley also worked to support this orthodoxy by actively recruiting an Anglican clergy for Virginia. Before he took office, a few of its ministers were thought to have a low-church bias and even a tincture of Puritanism in their beliefs. Berkeley recruited churchmen of a different cast, and urged them to “pray oftener and preach less.” The Royalist elite also tried to attract what William Fitzhugh called “able, painfull and sober Pastors” for the colony. This effort was successful. By the late seventeenth century many of Virginia’s clergy were able and pious men of good family and education. Several were younger sons of noble families; many were graduates of the more Royalist Oxford colleges, in particular Christ Church, Corpus Christi, Merton, Oriel and Queens.7

Led by these men, the vernacular religion of Virginia reached deeply into the lives of ordinary people. The Christian faith of the Chesapeake planters was not the central purpose for the founding of their colony, but many were men and women of deep piety.8 Henry Filmer called his plantation Laus Deo, and in 1672 left a large legacy to the parish of Mulberry Island for the purchase of communion silver. Bequests of that sort were very common in the colony.9

Family libraries gave special attention to Bibles, prayer books and religious tracts of various kinds, which were very common in Virginia households. In the library of Ralph Wormeley of Rose-gill, as many as 123 of 391 works were religious or moral in their nature—a smaller proportion than in New England, but large by comparison with other times and places.10

One of the books in Ralph Wormeley’s library was Richard Allestree’s The Whole Duty of Man (London, 1660), a devotional work which was found more often in Virginia libraries than any other book. Its ideal of quietism and practical piety contrasted sharply with the restless striving of the New England Puritans. Other favorites were Richard Allestree’s The Gentleman’s Calling (1660), Jeremy Taylor’s The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living and Holy Dying (1650, 1651), Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1613), and Edward Synge’s A Gentleman’s Religion (1693).11

Image

ImageBruton Church in Williamsburg is a classic example of Anglican architecture. The first building in this parish (ca. 1674) was a temporary wooden structure. The second (1681-83) was a small gabled brick building with five buttresses on a side. The third (1(1711) still stands, and claims to be the oldest church in continuous use in the southern colonies. It is in the shape of a long Latin cross, with the altar, rail and crucifix on the east wall, flanked by the pulpit and the governor’s throne. The baptismal font is said to have been brought from the old church at Jamestown; George Washington stood as godfather to at least fourteen slaves who were baptized here. A gallery was added in 1715 for unruly students from the College of William and Mary. Their graffiti still appear in the gallery railing. This church was the scene of many funerals where the first gentlemen of Virginia were mourned in high pomp. In 1720, after Secretary Cocke suddenly fell dead at the Capital, “the principal gentlemen of the country attended the funeral, and weeping saw the corpse interred.” For state funerals, the aisle, altar, pulpit and governor’s throne were draped in black cloth. Bruton Parish was named for the town of Bruton, Somerset, the English home of Governor William Berkeley, Philip Ludwell and John Page.

In place of the Puritans’ conversion journals and spiritual autobiographies, Anglican gentlemen kept devotional diaries which placed heavy emphasis on rituals of prayer and acts of exemplary piety. They showed less concern about salvation than did the Puritans, but gave more attention to liturgy and devotion such as morning and evening prayers.12

The religious differences between Virginia and Massachusetts were visible in the physical setting of public worship. The Anglican ideal was a small parish church, solidly constructed on a cruciform plan, with an altar and cross at the eastern end of the building and a pulpit tucked into a corner. At least forty-nine prerevolutionary churches still stand in Virginia, of which forty-three were built by Anglicans. In southern Maryland, twenty-eight survive, of which twenty-three were erected by the Church of England.13

The church architecture of Virginia was designed on the assumption that Christian worship was mainly a devotional act. Every part of the Anglican service had a liturgical quality which distinguished it from the “meeting and lecture” style of New England. The order of worship in morning and evening services, and also the administration of the sacraments, was strictly defined by the Book of Common Prayer. The exquisite cadences of this beautiful work celebrated moderation, proportion, refinement and restraint. Virginians commonly used an edition of the Book of Common Prayer which included the “Black Rubric” or “Declaration on Kneeling,” which was specially disliked by the Puritans.

Sermons were a secondary part of Anglican worship, and in tone and substance they were also very different from Puritan preaching. Northern visitors observed that Virginia sermons were much shorter than in New England, less theological, more pietistic and “all in the forensic style.” Philip Fithian was astonished to find that they were “seldom under and never over twenty minutes, but always made up of sound morality or deeply studied metaphysicks.”

Image

Tyeocomico Church (Westmoreland County, 1706), is the oldest surviving T-form church in Virginia. A leading member of the vestry was Colonel William Ball, the grandfather of George Washington. The northern tutor Philip Fithian often worshiped here in 1773-74. He heard the parish clergyman Thomas Smith, a man of great wealth, preach on “the uncertainty of riches and their insufficiency to make us happy.” It was also at Yeocomico that Fithian was “surprised when the psalm began to hear a large collection of voices singing at the same time, from a Gallery, entirely contrary to what I had seen before.”

For all their brevity, these twenty-minute Anglican sermons had rhetorical structures of high complexity. They developed in fixed and regular stages from the opening praecognito to partitio, explicatio, amplificatio, applicatio, and peroration. The composition was cast in a belletristic style which made much use of tropes and flowers and figures of speech. The religion of the cavaliers celebrated the holiness of beauty as well as the beauty of holiness.14

Anglican church music was more important than in New England, and very different from that of the Puritans. Philip Fithian visited Yeocomico Church one morning and was amazed by the sound of a choir which he had never heard before. “I was surprised when the psalm began,” he wrote, “to hear a large collection of voices singing at the same time, from a Gallery, entirely contrary to what I had seen before.” It is not clear what most astonished this northern visitor—the existence of the choir itself, or the fact (surprising to a Calvinist) that they were all “singing at the same time.” This was very different from the traditional rote singing in Puritan meetinghouses.15 Bruton Parish Church also had an organ, and even a professional organist. Virginians enjoyed singing complex four-part hymns and anthems, and gave employment to as many as seven professional singing masters before 1711.16

On a Sunday in Anglican Virginia, these liturgical structures of common prayer, religious rhetoric and sacred harmony were joined to yet another set of secular rituals which preceded and followed the service itself. At Christ Church, Lancaster County, Virginia, built by the great planter Robert “King” Carter, the act of worship began with a grand entrance by the patriarch himself. “On the sabbath,” writes historian Louis Morton, “no member of the congregation dared to enter Christ Church until Carter’s carriage, drawn by six lively horses, drew up before its entrance. ‘King’ Carter would then alight and enter the place of worship, the others following respectfully. After he had taken his seat, the service would start.”17

This beautiful church still stands today, a fitting symbol of the style of worship that inspired it. The plan of the church is a perfeet

Image

ImageChrist Church (Lancaster County, 1132-35), with its elegant swag roof and opulent detail, is built in the shape of a symmetrical Greek cross, 68 feet on each side. The walls are three feet thick, and the round window arches are of rubbed brick with masonry keystones. Its construction was paid for by the first gentleman of the parish, Robert “King” Carter of Corotoman (d. 1732). A special road, bordered with cedar trees, ran three miles from Corotoman Plantation directly to the churchyard. Every Sunday the congregation waited outside the church until “King” Carter arrived in his six-horse coach, entered the large front door and walked to his large pew which was decorated with damask curtains on heavy brass rods. The entire north transept was reserved for Carter servants and tenants. Many generations of Carters headed the vestry list of this parish from as early as 1654. Outside the church are the large sarcophagi of “King” Carter himself and his wives, embellished with the Carter arms and Latin epitaphs, to which one disgruntled parishioner added a chalk inscription:

Here lies Robin, but not Robin Hood

Here lies Robin that was never good

Greek cross sixty-eight feet on a side, with massive walls three feet thick, a pilastered entrance, oval windows, and an elegant swag roof. The interior still contains the original walnut table, a marble font, a handsome wineglass pulpit and other trappings of Anglican ritual.

Every Sunday the congregation of Christ Church joined in its devotions before that magnificent table, and heard a short sermon from the pulpit. After the formal service was over, the Sunday ritual continued in the churchyard. “Over three-quarters of an hour spent strolling round the Church among the Crowd,” Fithian noted in his journal, “in which time you will be invited by several different gentlemen home with them to dinner.”18 Altogether, Philip Fithian concluded, “a Sunday in Virginia don’t seem to wear the same dress as our Sundays to the northward.”19

Image Virginia Magic Ways:
The Cavalier Obsession with Fortune

 

In most seventeenth-century cultures, religion was closely linked to what the modern world calls magic. Virginians were deeply interested in magic—even obsessed by it. But the quality of their obsession was not the same as in Massachusetts. In the Chesapeake colonies, there as nothing like the Puritans’ concern with witchcraft. No person was ever executed in Virginia for that offense.1 Instead, the courts actively punished false accusations of witchcraft, often assessing heavy fines and costs against those who denounced their neighbors as minions of the Devil. Many denunciations were indeed brought forward by people of low estate, particularly during the decade of the 1650s which was a painful and uncertain period in the colony. But Virginia’s ruling elite had little sympathy for witchcraft prosecutions, and actively discouraged them in a manner very different from the ministers and magistrates of Massachusetts.2

This distaste for witchcraft persecutions had also appeared among the Royalist gentry of southern England. As early as 1653, Sir Robert Filmer published a polemic against capital punishment for witchcraft. He argued that the biblical injunction, “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” had no jurisdiction in England but applied only to Jewish witches. The Manichean conception of the world which so haunted the Puritans had comparatively little part in Filmer’s thinking, or in that of Virginia’s gentry.3

At the same time, however, Virginians were much interested in other forms of magic which had comparatively little meaning (or a different meaning) for the people of New England. The gentlemen of Virginia were deeply absorbed in the study of stars, planets, spheres, and portents—not as signs of God’s purpose but as clues to their own fate. They believed that every man possessed a certain fixed quality called fortune, which could be understood by knowledge of these things. This idea had been widely accepted in Elizabethan England.4

Many gentlemen kept “fortune books,” which were collections of magical and astrological lore for good luck in love, marriage, sex, health, travel. One such fortune book included an entire chapter on marriage with entries on “whether a man shall marry, the time of marriage, how many husbands a woman shall have, who shall be master of the two, how they shall agree after marriage, and whether the man or his wife shall die first, and the time when.”5

This cult of fortuna implied that life was a game of chance in which the odds were rigged by mysterious powers in the universe.

A Devon gentleman named Samuel Watts noted in his commonplace book:

Love is a play at table where the dye

Of maides affection doth by fancy fly

If that you take her fancy at a blot

Tis ten to one, if straight you enter not6

Another example was the English autobiography of John Holden (1691-1730), a fascinating chronicle in which entries for each year culminated in an anniversary verse that testified to the sway of fortune over individual life:

Something presents itself in ev’ry year

That puts so often between hope and fear;

Makes so uneasy in a doubtful state

To know how fortune will decree or fate. …

 

Great things were moved this septinary year

Tho’ little but the fruits of love appear

Yet time may soon produce some great event

That nothing but ill fortune can prevent.7

This interest in fortune was linked to another striking characteristic of Virginians—their obsession with gambling. Virginians were observed to be constantly making wagers with one another on almost any imaginable outcome. The more uncertain the result, the more likely they were to gamble. They made bets not merely on horses, cards, cockfights and backgammon; but also on crops, prices, women and the weather. “They are all professional gamesters …,” a French traveler observed of Virginia’s gentry, “Colonel Byrd is never happy but when he has the box and dice in his hand.”8

Gambling had many meanings in the lives of Virginia planters. Historians have demonstrated that it was an expression of social status and a form of social bonding. But it was also something else. The cabalistic patterns that the dice made as they tumbled out of the box represented something more than merely an idle amusement, and something other than a form of status-striving. A gentleman’s dice were like the soothsayer’s bones from which they had descended—a clue to the cosmos, and a token of each individual’s place within it. If the Puritans searched desperately for signs of God’s redeeming providence in the world, the Virginians sought another sort of assurance about fortuna in their incessant gambling.

In Massachusetts gambling was strictly forbidden by law, and severely punished by the magistrates. It was condemned by Puritan moralists as not merely idleness but blasphemy. To John Cotton and Cotton Mather, gambling made a mockery of God’s presence in the world. The attitudes of Virginians were very different. Gambling was formally recognized and regulated by law. Betting was prohibited to those with “no visible estate, profession or calling to maintain themselves.” Courts enforced wagers as a form of contract, and required that gambling debts should be faithfully paid. Fraudulent gaming was ferociously punished, and the highest powers in the colony were invoked to secure honest games. This common law of wagering was an indication that gambling was more than merely a game in Virginia. It was a way of testing one’s fortuna.9

These attitudes were not invented in the New World. They had long existed among the gentry of the south and west of England, with whom gambling was also an obsession. The diary of the Dorset gentleman John Richards was also a betting book which became a running record of many small wagers with friends and acquaintances. Richards often set down the results of bets in which he had no personal stake, by other gentlemen who engaged compulsively in heavy and even ruinous wagers. He was as much interested in the fortuna of others as of himself.10

Virginians of all ranks also showed still another interest in magic. On their house, they carved signs which were thought to bring the occupants good fortune. Some of these signs were very old—older than the sign of the cross. They had long appeared on buildings in the south and west of England, from whence so many Virginians came. These signs might be thought of as a sort of liturgy—that is, a ritual which was thought to be a way of propitiating the powers of fortune.11

The magic of the Virginians was closely linked to their vernacular religion. To a modern mind these spheres of thought seem opposed, but in the seventeenth century they tended to blur into one another. In respect to both magic and religion, the beliefs of the Virginians tended to be less Manichean than did those of New Englanders. They were also less instrumental. The prevailing cosmology of the Chesapeake colony minimized man’s responsibility for his fate. The idea of fortune lay very near the heart of this culture.

Image Virginia Learning Ways:
Anglican Traditions of Hierarchical Learning

 

Virginia’s folkways also appeared in its patterns of learning and literacy. In the year 1643, for example, an illiterate farmer named Robert Lawson lay dying in his home on Virginia’s eastern shore. He had a substantial property but no family, and in his last hours the neighbors gathered around his deathbed. After a few perfunctory inquiries about his health, they began to ask pointed questions about his property.

“If thou dyest, who shall have thy cow,” one neighbor asked bluntly.

“George,” whispered the dying man.

“George Smith?” the neighbor persisted.

“Yea,” he answered.

“Who shall have your Bulchin?”

“George Smith.”

“Who shall have your sow—shall George Smith have it?

“Yea,” came the reply.

“Who shall have your match coat?”

“Robert West is a knave,” the dying man inexplicably answered. Then he turned from his questioners and “did most fearfully rattle in the throat” and passed away.

The neighbors were much concerned about the disposition of his estate. “This will by word of mouth … is worth nothing,” one of them observed, “the king will have all because there was no literate fellow to the making of it.”

Their fears proved to be well founded. Two shady characters called Mr. Thomas Parks and Robert West suddenly appeared in court with a sealed paper which they represented to be Robert Lawson’s will. The document was written in Thomas Parks’ hand and signed by mark. It left everything to Robert West, except a few choice items that went to Parks.

The neighbors were outraged. They swore up and down that this document was false, and the very opposite of Robert Law-son’s intention. But they failed to convince the court, because there had been “no literate fellow” among them who could provide written proof. The court accepted the document of “Mr. Parks,” who had the rank if not the character of a gentleman.1

This episode reveals an important truth about Virginia. It tells us that literacy was an instrument of wealth and power in this colony, and that many were poor and powerless in that respect.

The proportion of adults who could read and write in Virginia was significantly lower than in Massachusetts. In the seventeenth century, most adult Virginians (white and black, male and female altogether) were unable to sign their own names. Disparities by wealth, race, class and gender were very great. Among Virginia’s gentry, literacy approached 100 percent. But of male property holders in general, about 50 percent were able to write. Among tenants and laborers that proportion fell to about 40 percent. Even the minority who could spell their own names often did so in a clumsy and trembling script which suggested that writing was an alien act.2 Indentured servants in the Chesapeake had even lower rates of literacy; only about 25 to 30 percent were able to sign their names in the seventeenth century.3 And of African slaves, less than 1 percent were literate in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century. These disparities were larger than in New England.4

Large differences in literacy also existed between men and women. Before 1641-1700, less than 25 percent of women could sign their names on legal documents. Even women of the highest rank in Virginia were unable to write their names. The wives of Colonel John Washington, Colonel George Mason and Colonel John Ashton all signed by mark. More women could read than write in Virginia—a condition of passive literacy which was the common lot of females in the seventeenth century.5

Altogether, the pattern of literacy in seventeenth century Virginia differed from that of Massachusetts in many ways, but it was similar to those parts of rural England from whence the colonists came. It is interesting to note that the incidence of literacy in the rural south and west of England was markedly lower than in East Anglia.6

During the eighteenth century, literacy rapidly increased on both sides of the Atlantic. As it did so, differences between people of high and low status tended to diminish in New England and Britain. But in Virginia the opposite was the case. Disparities in literacy between rich and poor actually grew greater. Here was yet another system of inequality in the cultural life of the colony.7

As it was with literacy, so also with learning. There was a striking paradox in attitudes toward schools and schooling in Virginia. The elite was deeply interested in the education of gentlemen. “Better be never born than ill-bred,” wrote William Fitzhugh in 1687. By “ill-bred” in that passage, he meant “unschooled.”8

At the same time, visitors and natives both agreed that schools were few and far between, that ignorance was widespread, and that formal education did not flourish in the Chesapeake. This condition was not an accident. It was deliberately contrived by Virginia’s elite, who positively feared learning among the general population. The classic expression of this attitude came from Governor William Berkeley himself. When asked in 1671 by the Lords of Trade about the state of schools in Virginia, he made a famous reply: “I thank God,” he declared, “there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these [for a ] hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them, and libels against the best government. God keep us from both!”9

This remark has earned Governor Berkeley a place of infamy in the history of education. But it was not merely the isolated absurdity of an eccentric reactionary. Precisely the same policy was adopted by Berkeley’s kinsman and successor, Lord Culpeper, who actively suppressed printing in the colony. When John Buckner set up a press, he was “prohibited by the governor and council from printing any thing, till the King’s pleasure should be known.” An historian observes that the King’s pleasure was “very tardily communicated, as the first evidence of printing thereafter in Virginia was … 1733.”10

Berkeley and Culpeper were not unique. Many English Royalists were of the same mind in the seventeenth century. William Cavendish wrote to Charles II in the 1650s, “The Bible in English under every weaver and chambermaid’s arm hath done us much hurt.”11 This fear of learning in the general “populace” was shared even by gentlemen who are remembered for their devotion to scholarship. Francis Bacon wrote to James I in 1611 that England was in danger of educational “excess,” at a time when three-quarters of adult men and women were illiterate. Bacon feared that if schools were expanded, “Many persons will be bred unfit for other vocations and unprofitable for that in which they are brought up, which fills the realm full of indigent, idle and wanton people.” This attitude was carried to Virginia by “distressed Royalists” in the mid-seventeenth century, and became a persistent part of Chesapeake culture for many generations.12

These hierarchical attitudes toward learning also appeared in the distribution of books in Virginia. The libraries of great planters William Byrd and Robert Carter were among the best in British America, superior to the holdings of most colleges in the northern colonies. But the yeomanry of Virginia owned few books, and servants nearly none. Slaves were forbidden to read at all, on pain of savage punishment. The penalty for a slave who tried to learn how to write was to have a finger amputated. The riches of great plantation libraries made a dramatic contrast with the inaccessibility of books for ordinary people.13

The same duality also appeared in regard to schooling. Virginia gentlemen cultivated the arts, sciences and education among themselves, but did not encourage schools for the general population. They hired private tutors for their own youngsters, sponsored schools of high quality for children of the elite, founded the College of William and Mary at Williamsburg, and sent their sons to Oxford.14 Altogether, the proportion of planters’ sons who were sent to college in England and America was similar to that of the gentry of southern England. But these same county oligarchies were largely responsible for the miserable condition of parish schools throughout Virginia, and for the long absence of printing in the colony.15

It might be noted that Virginia learning ways were not the product of slavery, or of rural poverty. They were fully developed before slaves appeared in large numbers, and when that colony was one of the richest in British America. They were rooted in a culture which came out of England in the seventeenth century, and persisted in the southern states for three hundred years.16

Image Virginia Food Ways: Origins of Southern Cooking

 

Also carried out from England was the material structure of this culture—that is, its methods of managing physical things. A case in point was its food ways. As early as the mid-seventeenth century, the dietary habits of the Virginians were distinctly different from those of New Englanders, particularly in what might be called the sociology of food. From the start, Virginia’s culinary customs were more highly stratified than in the Puritan colonies.

Prosperous planters kept the same food ways as did the gentry of southwestern England. Both of these elites consumed red meat in large quantity. Roast beef was so closely identified with English milords that in Italy and Spain it was called rosbif. Gentlemen of Virginia also had a taste for game, and particularly for animals of the chase. William Byrd paid others to supply his table with venison, blue-winged teal, pigeon and partridge. But even the succulent shellfish and waterfowl of the Chesapeake were not esteemed as highly as the roast beef of old England. Byrd complained of having to eat oysters and geese too often when away from his own table.

Rich planters also consumed large quantities of fresh vegetables and fruits throughout the year. Again, their favorites were very English. Byrd ate asparagus and strawberries every day when he could get them. But native American plants such as potatoes and tomatoes rarely appeared on the best colonial tables until they had become fashionable in the mother country. Culinary tastes of gentlefolk in Virginia remained English in all of these ways.1

Colonists of humble rank commonly ate a one-dish meal, which was called a “mess” in the old English sense of a “dish of food.”2 It often consisted of greens and salt meat, seasoned with wild herbs. Another staple was hominy or the corn porridge called mush in the south, served in a common bowl or cup. The diet of ordinary Virginians in the seventeenth century was similar to black “soul food” in the twentieth. With the addition of Indian corn it was much like the diet of farm workers in the south and west of England.3

Among both high-born and humble folk, eating was a more sensual experience in Virginia than in Massachusetts. There was nothing in the Chesapeake colonies to equal the relentless austerity of New England’s “canonical dish” of cold baked beans. Poor whites improved their simple food with high seasonings and delicate flavors. Slaves supplemented their basic rations of corn and salt fish with American and African foodstuffs that added spice and variety to their meals. Great planters carefully cultivated the only true haute cuisine in British America before the nineteenth century. William Byrd took a special interest in imaginative and highly seasoned dishes. His diary recorded memorable meals of stewed swan, spiced udder and roast snipe.4 These elaborate dishes were similar to others recorded in cookery books of country houses throughout the south and west of England.5

If baked beans were the canonical dish of Massachusetts, a special favorite among middling and upper ranks in Virginia was the

“frigacy” or “fricassee.” One English recipe called for chicken, veal, or rabbit to be simmered in an open pan, with “a good handful of sweet herbs as of marjoram, a little thyme, savory or sprig of penny royal.” Sometimes a pint of claret was added, and a pint of oysters, and a dozen egg yolks. William Byrd often ordered a fricassee of chicken, veal or game for his dinner. Virginia cooks had broad repertory of these dishes. There were brown fricassees of beef or venison, white fricassees for “small fowls, rabbits, lamb, veal and other white meats,” and clear fricassees of calves’ feet or cod sounds.6

Byrd also enjoyed fried chicken, often cooked with bacon or ham—a dish different from fricassees, which tended to be simmered in the pan rather than fried. As early as the first decade of the eighteenth century, fried chicken had become a distinct regional favorite in Virginia. Later in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, some Virginia cookery books dismissed fried chicken as a vulgar dish. But that view was not shared by the Byrds and Carters, who tucked into their fried chicken with high enthusiasm.7

This style of Virginia cooking became the basis of a distinctive regional food way in America—highly seasoned, with much roasting, simmering and frying. It was very similar to the regional cuisine of southern and western England, where frying, simmering and sautéing in a skillet were methods of preparation called “Dorset fashion” or “Dorset cooked.”8

In the twentieth century, quantitative surveys of regional cooking in England have found that frying, roasting and grilling continue to be specially characteristic of the south and west of England, as baking is of East Anglia and boiling of the North. The same survey also reported that a taste for spicy food was more developed in the south and west than elsewhere in England. Merchants in the early twentieth century stocked more salty bacon, pungent cheese and peppery sausage in the south and west than elsewhere in Britain.9 In both southwestern England and the Chesapeake colonies, methods of cooking varied by social rank.

One study finds that virtually every household had kettles for boiling and pans for frying. But very poor families tended not to have roasting equipment such as spits, which were commonplace in households of higher rank. Most middling and upper families practiced a great variety of cooking methods. Boiling, stewing, frying, braising, grilling, broiling and roasting were all highly developed in Virginia.10

But another form of cooking tended to lag behind. Baking, which was central to New England cuisine, developed very slowly in the Chesapeake. One historian of cooking in Virginia writes that “a built-in brick oven for baking breads and cakes, apparently came late to Virginia kitchens; certainly most of the surviving ones date from the eighteenth century.” Outdoor ovens appeared at an early date, as did cast-iron Dutch ovens. A good deal of open baking was also done directly on the hearth. But baking in general had a less prominent place in Virginia cooking than in Massachusetts. Here again the differences between the Chesapeake and New England were similar to those between Wessex and East Anglia.11

Customs of eating, as well as cooking, also differed by region in British America. Virginians dined; New Englanders merely ate. “Dining was a fine art in Virginia,” writes historian Edmund Morgan. In households of even middling rank, meals were highly developed rituals. The major repast of the day was served at two or three o’clock in the afternoon, in a dining room that was one of the most important spaces in the house. Chesapeake epicure Frederick Stieff writes, “ … in all my Maryland meanderings, I have yet to see an unimportant dining room in an important Maryland manor.”12

Men and women in prosperous households were expected to primp for dinner—to dress their hair, to change their clothing and generally to make a pleasing appearance. The table and sideboard in a great house were set with a great display of silver, all engraved with the family arms. Even small farmers proudly put out a piece or two of plate, investing their hard-won tobacco profits not in agriculatural improvements, but in this form of consumption. Even very poor families in Virginia had tablecloths in their inventories, as did English families in Gloucestershire. In prosperous houses, an abundance of food was set upon the table, and Virginians cultivated the art of conversation in which all adults were expected to join. When Philip Fithian, the Princeton tutor at Nomini Hall, once neglected to appear for dinner, he was chastised by his employer for his churlishness. He wrote in his journal:

I took a whim in my head and would not go to dinner. My head was not dressed, and I was too lazy to change my clothes. Mrs. Carter, however, in the evening lashed me severely. I told her I was engaged in reading a pleasant novel, that I was not perfectly well. But she would not hear none [sic], and said I was rude, and censurable.13

This ritual of dining has persisted for three centuries in the country houses of England and the Chesapeake—even to our own time. A pleasant conversation was thought to be an indispensable part of a social existence. A gentleman of Virginia who somehow survived into the twentieth century put it this way:

Salt yo’ food, suh, with humor … season it with wit, and sprinkle it all over with the charm of good-fellowship, but never poison it with the cares of life. It is an insult to yo’ digestion, besides bein’ suh, a mark of bad breedin’.14

Southern food ways were also special in another way. Feasting was an important part of the culture of Virginia—more so than in Massachusetts. The people of New England did a good deal of heavy eating and drinking from time to time, particularly after the death of a neighbor or townsman. But feasts in Virginia happened very frequently—at weddings and christenings, at Christmas and Easter, the return of a family member or the visit of an interesting stranger—and they were very much more festive.

A Virginia feast could be staged on short notice, or no notice at all. A French traveler in the seventeenth century was present at one impromptu occasion in the year 1686, when twenty mounted cavaliers suddenly descended on William Fitzhugh’s plantation, and a feast was instantly improvised for them: “We rode twenty strong to Colonel Fichous [Fitzhugh’s],” he wrote, “but he has such a large establishment that he did not mind. We were all of us provided with beds, one for two men. He treated us royally, there was good wine and all kinds of beverages, so that there was a great deal of carousing. He had sent for three fiddlers, a jester and a tight-rope dancer, an acrobat who tumbled around, and they gave us all the entertainment one could wish.”15

These feasts occurred among both rich and poor—sometimes rich and poor together. A funeral feast would bring together everyone in the neighborhood. “Planters drank to the memory of the poorest man,” Gloria Main writes, “when his estate could foot the bill.”16 Slaves were allowed special feast days after Easter and Christmas. Easter Monday was a day of wild celebration in black communities, a custom that continued for two centuries, even into the Chesapeake childhood of this historian. These customs of feasting had long been traditional in the south and west of England, even among families of modest means. On harvest homes and holy days, the usual fare of bread, soup, lard and garden greens yielded to “boiled beef, bacon, puddings, apple pie, hot cakes and ale” even in laborers’ cottages.17

All of these various customs of feasting, dining and cooking were fully established in Virginia by the late seventeenth century. They became the basis of inherited food ways which still flourished in the Chesapeake during this historian’s youth, and set that region apart from other cultures in British America.

Image Virginia Dress Ways:
Cavalier Ideas of Clothing and Rank

 

This culture was also highly distinctive in its habits of dress. “These Virginians are a very gentle, well-dressed people, and look perhaps more at a man’s outside than his inside,” a writer observed in the year 1737. From the beginning, Chesapeake elites tended to dress more opulently than did the builders of Massachusetts Bay Colony. The tone was set by the gentry of southern England, whose costume was designed to display their riches and refinement, their freedom from manual labor, and their dominion over others.1

The costume of this elite was made of fragile fabrics, perishable colors, and some of the more impractical designs that human ingenuity has been able to invent. An example was the wardrobe of Sir Walter Raleigh, who walked, or rather teetered, through a world of filth and woe in a costume that consisted of red high heels, white silk hose, a white satin doublet embroidered with pearls, a necklace of great pearls, a starched white ruff, and lace cuffs so broad as to bury his hands in fluffy clouds of extravagant finery. His outfit was completed by a jaunty plume of ostrich feathers that bobbed above his beaver hat, and precious stones in high profusion. The jewels that Raleigh wore on one occasion were said to be worth £30,000—more than the capital assets of some American colonies.

High fashions of this sort were never static. The “traditional” world of the seventeenth century was as changeable in that respect as our “modern” society would be. Fashions whirled constantly from one generation to another—even from one season to the next. In the reign of James I, when political conditions were dangerously unstable throughout Europe, gentlemen wore quilted doublets and breeches for protection against a dagger’s thrust. This cloth armor was encrusted with precious stones, and trimmed with ribbons, and interwoven with gold and silver thread.2

During the reign of Charles I, fashions changed again. Opulence was increasingly displayed in many layers of dress. Outer coats were cut and slashed to expose intricate underwear that had consumed many hours in the making. Contempt for labor was expressed in a fad for gossamer gloves so fragile that the slightest effort would ruin them. Wealth was displayed by necklaces, brooches and even earrings for men. Charles I went to the scaffold in 1649 with a huge tear-shaped pearl in his ear.

The costume of country laborers was very different—an expression of poverty, dependency and incessant toil. Farm workers

Image

Slashed sleeves were merely one of many methods of conspicuous display in the dress ways of Stuart England and seventeenth-century Virginia. Slashes were designed to reveal undergarments of extravagant beauty, and to make a show of wealth and rank. The Puritan founders of New England did not approve of them. The General Court of Massachusetts forbade men and women of all conditions to “make or buy any slashed clothes, other than one slash in each sleeve and another in the back.” Further, the magistrates also ordered that heavily slashed garments acquired before the prohibition should be discarded. They insisted that “men and women shall have liberty to wear out such apparel as they now are provided of except the immoderate great sleeves and slashed apparel.” Attitudes were very different in Virginia. Excess was prohibited in the poor, and the first assembly assessed people according to apparel. But elaborate costumes were thought to honor their wearers, and were encouraged in the elite, who followed the latest London fashions with close attention.

dressed in worn and tattered garments which had been patched in the parti-colored cloth that harlequins and clowns took as their inspiration; the word “clown” was a synonym for a rustic laborer in the seventeenth century. Other workers dressed in rough leather garments, crudely stitched together with rawhide thongs. Many wore long frocks and loose baggy trousers of coarse cloth. Some had nothing to wear but filthy rags; there are descriptions of laborers who were unable to attend church because they lacked clothing to cover their nakedness.

Still another sort of dependency appeared in the costume of servants and apprentices. In the seventeenth century, English servants and apprentices commonly wore blue. “Blue cloaks in winter, blue coats in summer,” wrote Alice Morse Earle, “Blue was not precisely a livery; it was their color, the badge of their condition of life, as black is now a parson’s.”3

Virginians copied most of these customs, but introduced some important differences. Extremes of dress became rather more muted in the New World. No gentleman of Virginia ever contrived to be quite as elegant as Sir Walter Raleigh. At the other extreme, many planters insisted that their slaves were better clothed than the laboring poor of England.

But distinctions of dress by rank and condition were carefully preserved in Virginia. The elite copied the styles of the southern gentry as best they could. Thomas Warner, a mechant who died in Virginia circa 1630, left “a pair of silk stockings, a pair of black hose, a pair of red slippers, a sea green scarf edged with gold lace, a felt hat, a black beaver, a doublet of black camlet, a gold belt and sword.” This was not the sort of outfit which commonly appeared in New England. Wills and inventories tell us that the first gentlemen of Virginia strutted through the muddy streets of Jamestown and Williamsburg in gaudy costumes which for opulence and display much exceeded those in Massachusetts.

The servants and “commons” of Virginia, on the other hand, tended to dress in doublets of canvas and frieze rather than the leather and kerseys of New England. Black slaves were dressed not in African costumes—which were actively suppressed and even forbidden outright—but in the ordinary costume of country laborers throughout the south and west of England.

Costume thus covered a broader range in Virginia than in Massachusetts. But by comparison with England both colonies showed a middling tendency. From an early date, Virginia gentlemen often complained that social distinctions of dress were not sufficiently respected in the colony. John Pory wrote home of a cowkeeper in Jamestown who went to church in “fresh flaming silk,” and a collier’s wife who wore a “rough beaver hat with fair pearl hatband, and a silken suit.”

To deal with this problem, Virginia enacted sumptuary laws which had a different purpose from the dress codes of New England. Their primary object was not to restrain display, but to support a spirit of social inequality. In the eighteenth century, these sumptuary laws were not actively enforced by the courts of Virginia. But sumptuary customs played a stronger role in regulating patterns of dress according to rank. Ladies, for example, wore cloaks of red camlet, a fine strong cloth of silk and camel’s hair. The color, cut and fabric of this garment was reserved for people of high estate. Philip Fithian in 1773 wrote, “ … almost every lady wears a red cloak, and when they ride out they tie a white handkerchief over their head and face, so that when I first came to Virginia I was distressed whenever I saw a lady, for I thought she had the toothache!” Ladies also wore riding masks when abroad, as if in purdah.4

In the early eighteenth century the social distinction between gentlemen and “simple men” expressed itself in almost every imaginable article of apparel: hats versus caps, coats versus jackets, breeches versus trousers, silk stockings versus worsted, red heels versus black heels. In chilly weather, high-born Virginia gentlemen carried great fur muffs which demonstrated their freedom from manual labor. They continued to pierce their ears for pearls or elegant black earstrings, and adorned their persons with silver buckles, snakeskin garters, gold buttons, lace cross clothes, and silver hatbands. Men of lower orders wore none of these things.5

The gentry also displayed their standing by wearing swords—a custom which continued among Virginians into the late eighteenth century.6 As late as 1733, gentlemen of Virginia were said to be “naked” when they went in public without their swords.7

They appear not to have gone naked in this sense very often. Some owned special black or purple sword belts to be worn in mourning.8

Horses were used not only for transportation but also as part of costume by an elite which thought of itself as an equestrian order. Hugh Jones wrote, “I have known some to spend the morning in ranging several miles in the woods to find and catch their horses, only to ride two or three miles to church, or to the court house, or to a horse race, where they generally appoint to meet on business.”9

Gentlemen also made much display of coats of arms. Planters made major efforts to obtain the sanction of the College of Heralds in London, and displayed their arms on silver, books, buildings, furniture, and rings. The Fitzhughs trained one of their slaves to work as a silver engraver.10 Gentlemen also had family colors, which were displayed with much ceremony. When they could afford to do so, they dressed their house slaves in livery. George Washington’s slaves were gorgeous in the family livery of white coats, scarlet facings, scarlet waistcoats and cheap trimmings called “livery lace”—the same colors as the Washington arms. Well into the nineteenth century, the Tylers kept a barge crew of black slaves dressed in dashing blue uniforms of the family color, their broad collars embroidered with their master’s initials.

In all of these many ways, the costume of Virginia closely resembled that of southwestern England, both in style and social function. Elites in the Chesapeake attended carefully to changing fashions in the mother country. A visitor in 1732 observed that the great planters “dressed mostly as in England and affected London dress.”11 A few grudging concessions were made to the American climate. In the summer, gentlemen of Virginia dressed in white holland, and ladies wore “thin silk or linen.”12 But English tastes remained strong in the Chesapeake, just as they had done in New England in very different ways. Despite many attempts at historical revision, the old images of the Roundhead and cavalier had a solid foundation in sartorial fact—complete even to the legendary “gauntlet and glove.”