Dedicated to H.R.W.
_PREFACE_
Forty-seven years have passed since this volume was first published;
in that time a mass of source material has been made available to the
historian and numerous books on early Virginia history have been
published. But I believe that its main theses have not been shaken.
The old belief that the Virginia aristocracy had its origin in a
migration of Cavaliers after the defeat of the royalists in the
British Civil War has been relegated to the sphere of myths. It is
widely recognized that the leading Virginia families--the Carters, the
Ludwells, the Burwells, the Custises, the Lees, the Washingtons--were
shaped chiefly by conditions within the colony and by renewed contact
with Great Britain.
That the Virginia aristocracy was not part of the English aristocracy
transplanted in the colony is supported by contemporaneous evidence.
When Nathaniel Bacon, the rebel, the son of an English squire,
expressed surprise when Governor Berkeley appointed him to the Council
of State, Sir William replied: "When I had the first knowledge of you
I intended you and do now again all the services that are in my power
to serve, for gentlemen of your quality come very rarely into the
country, and therefore when they do come were used by me with all
respect."
Bacon was equally frank. "Consider ... the nature and quality of the
men in power ... as to their education, extraction, and learning, as
to their reputation for honor and honesty, see and consider whether
here, as in England, you can perceive men advanced for their noble
qualifications...."
Governor Francis Nicholson ridiculed the pretensions of the leading
planters to distinguished lineage. "This generation know too well from
whence they come," he wrote in a letter to the Lords of Trade, in
March 1703, "and the ordinary sort of planters that have land of their
own, though not much, look upon themselves to be as good as the best
of them, for he knows, at least has heard, from whence these mighty
Dons derive their originals ... and that he or his ancestors were
their equals if not superiors."
On the other side of the Potomac Henry Callister was frank in refuting
the similar claims of wealthy Marylanders. "Some of the proudest
families here vaunt themselves of a pedigree, at the same time they
know not their grandfather's name. I never knew a good honest
Marylander that was not got by a merchant."
That many prominent families in Virginia also were founded by
merchants is attested by the fact that they continued to be traders
after they came to the colony. "In every river here are from ten to
thirty men who by trade and industry have gotten very competent
estates," wrote Colonel Robert Quary in 1763. "These gentlemen take
care to supply the poorer sort with provisions, goods, and
necessities, and are sure to keep them always in debt, and so
dependent on them. Out of this number are chosen her Majesty's
Council, the Assembly, the justices, and other officers of the
government."
Hartwell, Blair, and Chilton, in their _The Present State of Virginia
and the College_, written in 1697, divide the people into three
classes--planters, tradesmen, and merchants. "The merchants live
best," they said. But though profits were large, their business was
carried on in the face of great difficulties. The tobacco they bought
from the small planters had to be carted or rolled to the landings and
put on board their sloops and shallops for transfer to the merchant
ships; they had to sell imported goods on credit; often there were
long delays in loading the ships.
Some of the most influential men in Virginia were importers of
servants and slaves. Among them were William Claiborne, Peter Ashton,
Isaac Allerton, Giles Brent, Joseph Bridger, Thomas Milner, Henry
Hartwell, and Robert Beverley.
The distinguished historian, Lyon Gardiner Tyler, in _Tyler's
Magazine_, Volume I, says that "Virginia owes much to the London
firms, because they were continually sending over trusted young agents
... many of whom settled down and founded Virginia families.... The
business of the merchants consisted largely in buying and selling
tobacco and importing settlers and servants, for each of which if
imported at their expense the merchants were entitled to fifty acres
of land. Then there was the usual trade in clothing and articles of
general use."
Though the Virginian who acquired a degree of wealth was no
aristocrat, he longed to be one. His grandfather, or his
great-grandfather might have been a younger son of an English squire.
He envied the honor, wealth, and power landholding brought that
ancestor, just as many Virginians today envy the life of the colonial
plantation owner. So when he found himself an extensive landholder, he
thought of himself as an English squire. He too would build a fine
residence, decorate his walls with family portraits, have a formal
garden, accumulate a library, and dress in the latest English fashion.
Virginia in the colonial period was linked to England by government,
commerce, religion, reading, education. The mother country sent over
governors who set the fashion in courtly living. It was the planter's
agent in London or Bristol who usually selected his furniture, his
silverware, his clothing, and often even his books. When on Sunday he
went to church he listened to a minister who had been born and
educated in England. The shelves of his library were lined with books
from England, if he could afford it he sent his son to Oxford or
Cambridge.
When a Virginia planter visited England in the eighteenth century, he
was deeply impressed by the beauty and dignity of the great country
mansions there. As he viewed Longleat, or Blenheim, or Eaton Hall, he
must have resolved that he too would build a stately house on the
banks of the James. If he had never been to England, he might take
down an English book of architecture--Batty Langley's _Treasury of
Designs_, or Abraham Swan's _The British Architect_, or James Gibb's
_A Book of Architecture_--pick out a suitable design and model his
house on it. He might even send to England for an architect, as did
George Mason, when he engaged William Buckland to design beautiful
Gunston Hall. Westover, Carter's Grove, Mount Airy, Kenmore, Brandon,
all bear the stamp of the English Georgian.
If there was any doubt that the Virginia gentlemen followed the latest
English fashions in dress, a glimpse at their portraits would dispel
it. William Byrd II, as he appears in the painting by Sir Godfrey
Kneller would have made a fine figure in any assembly in England; no
English nobleman was better dressed than Robert Carter, of Nomini
Hall, as shown in the Reynolds portrait.
When a Virginian went to England he not only took the opportunity to
replenish his own wardrobe, but was charged by his relatives and
friends to make purchases for them. In a letter to Mrs. Thomas Jones,
in 1727, Mrs. Mary Stith asked: "When you come to London pray favor me
in your choice of a suit of pinners suitably dressed with a crossknot
roll or whatever the fashion requires, with suitable ruffles and
handkerchief." In 1752 Lady Gooch, wife of Governor William Gooch,
while in London bought for Mrs. Thomas Dawson a fashionable laced cap,
a handkerchief, ruffles, a brocade suit, a blue satin petticoat, a
pair of blue satin shoes, and a fashionable silver girdle. But it was
not always necessary to send to England for clothing, for there were
tailors in Virginia who advertised that they could make gentlemen's
suits and dresses for the ladies "in the newest and genteelest
fashions now wore in England." It was a valuable asset for a tailor if
he had just arrived from London.
The Virginians also imitated the English in their outdoor sports. The
fox chase, so dear to the Englishman's heart, was a favorite
amusement. When the crowds gathered around the county courthouse on
court days, they were often diverted from more serious business by
horseraces. And like their English cousins they were fond of
cockfighting, boat racing, and hunting.
The life of the wealthy planter was profoundly influenced by his
reading of English books. He took his religion more from the _Sermons_
of Archbishop Tillotson than from the preaching of the local
clergyman; as a county magistrate he had to know Blackstone and Coke;
he turned to Kip's _English Houses and Gardens_, or John James'
_Theory and Practice of Gardening_, to guide him in laying out his
flower beds and hedges and walks; if he or his wife or a servant
became ill he consulted Lynch's _Guide to Health_; he willingly obeyed
the dictates of Chippendale in furniture.
But despite all the bonds with the mother country he was slowly, but
inevitably, becoming more an American, less an Englishman. It was the
plantation which shaped the daily life of the Virginian and made him
different from the English squire. As he looked out over his wide
acres, his tobacco fields, his pastures, his woodlands, his little
village of servant and slave quarters, tobacco houses, barn, and
stable, he had a sense of responsibility, dignity, pride, and
self-reliance. He must look after the welfare of the men and women and
children under his care, seeing that they were housed, clothed, and
fed, protecting their health, playing the role of benevolent despot.
He had to be agriculturalist, business man, lawyer, builder, even
doctor.
Visitors to the colony were quick to notice the difference between the
Virginian and the Englishman. Hugh Jones, in his _The Present State of
Virginia_ devotes several pages to a description of the colonists.
Andrew Burnaby, who visited Virginia in 1760, thought that the
authority had by the planters over their slaves made them "vain and
imperious.... They are haughty and jealous of their liberties,
impatient of restraint...." Lord Adam Gordon, writing in 1764, gives a
more favorable opinion: "I had an opportunity to see a good deal of
the country and many of the first people in the province and I must
say they far excel in good sense, affability, and ease any set of men
I have yet fallen in with, either in the West Indies or on the
Continent, this, in some degree, may be owing to their being most of
them educated at home (England) but cannot be altogether the cause,
since there are amongst them many gentlemen, and almost all the
ladies, who have never been out of their own province, and yet are as
sensible, conversible, and accomplished as one would wish to meet
with."
In brief, the Virginia aristocracy was the product of three forces,
inheritance, continued contact with the mother country, and local
conditions. Coming largely from the middle class in England, though
with some connections with the squirearchy through younger sons, they
brought with them the English language, English political
institutions, the Anglican Church, English love of liberty. This
inheritance was buttressed by their political and cultural dependence
on the mother country. But it was profoundly affected, even reshaped,
by Virginia itself.
Dr. Samuel Johnson's charge that the Americans were a race of
convicts, if he meant it to be taken seriously, is of course absurd.
It is true that from time to time convicts were sent to the colonies.
This is proved by the protests of the Assemblies and by laws passed to
prohibit their importation. In Virginia there are records in some of
the county courthouses of the crimes committed by these jailbirds. But
they never entered in any appreciable numbers into the population of
the colony, not even of the lowest class. They were never numerous,
the planters considered it a risk to use them, some were forced to
serve as cannon fodder in the colonial wars, others were shunted off
to the frontiers.
The bulk of the immigrants to Virginia were poor men seeking to better
their condition in a new country. Many came as indentured workers, who
placed their signatures to contracts to work for four years in the
tobacco fields in return for their passage across the Atlantic; other
thousands paid their fare in advance and so entered the colony as
freemen. They were not essentially different from the millions who
came to the United States in the nineteenth century. Most of them,
indentured workers and freemen alike, sooner or later acquired small
plantations and became members of a yeoman class. A few acquired
wealth. Many went into the trades to become carpenters, or
bricklayers, or blacksmiths, or coopers, or saddlers, or wheelwrights.
Colonial Virginia has often been pictured as the land of the
aristocratic planter, the owner of thousands of acres and hundreds of
slaves. Scant attention has been paid to the far more numerous middle
class. Yet this class was the backbone of the colony. It is true that
most of the leaders came from the aristocracy, but it was the small
farmer who owned the bulk of the land, produced the larger part of the
tobacco crop, could outvote the aristocrat fifty to one, made up the
rank and file of the army in the colonial wars.
Among the thousands of Englishmen who left their homes to seek their
fortunes in Virginia there were no dukes, no earls, rarely a knight,
or even the son of a knight. They were, most of them, ragged farm
workers, deserters from the manor, ill paid day laborers, yeomen who
had been forced off their land by the enclosures, youthful tradesmen
tempted by the cheapness of land or by the opportunities for commerce,
now and then a lad who had taken a mug of doctored grog and awakened
to find himself a prisoner aboard a tobacco ship. But Virginia claimed
them all, moulded them into her own pattern, made them Virginians.
_Princeton, New Jersey_ THOMAS J. WERTENBAKER
_August, 1957_