by Gail Collins
Pocahontas was the one Native American woman who had a starring role in the colonists’ version of seventeenth-century history, although she suffers from having had her story told only from the point of view of Englishmen. Captain John Smith and the other early Virginia settlers tended to look upon her as a sort of colonial groupie, eager to befriend the Europeans and to become as much like them as possible. But they may have misread her entirely. Pocahontas was a member of her people’s nobility, and while she obviously enjoyed the company of the new white-skinned arrivals, her actions may have been dictated more by diplomacy than affection. Her father, Powhatan, was a powerful chief of a confederacy of Algonquin tribes, an aggressive warrior who was one of the suspects in the destruction of Roanoke. Pocahontas was his favorite daughter. She first visited Jamestown when she was ten, and she became a familiar figure in the tiny, struggling colony. She was certainly a good and useful friend. Her help in getting the Indians to provide food to the starving and feckless colonists was, Smith wrote, the salvation of the settlement. When Powhatan ordered Smith beheaded for venturing too far into his territory, Pocahontas raced in and put her head next to his on the chopping block and successfully begged for mercy.
The young Indian girl may have done all this simply because she liked Smith and the other Englishmen, or it may have all been part of Powhatan’s attempts to control the relationship between his tribe and the newcomers. Some historians think the beheading drama was staged to put Smith in Powhatan’s debt. Certainly Pocahontas understood the frictions between the whites and her own people—at one point, the English seized her and held her as hostage. Her marriage to the English leader John Rolfe cemented peace between the colonists and Powhatan’s confederacy for the rest of her life. Both husband and wife may have seen their union as diplomatic, rather than romantic. Rolfe wrote a letter to his superiors justifying the marriage “for the good of this plantation.” The bride-to-be did not confide her own feelings to anyone who had the power to write them down, but she was said to have already been married to a man from her own tribe. Later, she went with Rolfe and their young son to England in what we would today call a public relations tour, aimed at encouraging more investment in Virginia. She had her portrait painted wearing English clothes, satisfied all the nobility’s curiosity to see a “noble savage,” and was presented at court and reunited with her old friend John Smith. Before she could return home she died, probably of pneumonia. She was only about twenty years old.
“IT IS NOT KNOWEN WHETHER
MAN OR WOMAN BE THE MOST NECESSARY”
Almost every unmarried Englishwoman who emigrated to the Chesapeake must have dreamed of duplicating Temperance Flowerdew’s or Joan Pierce’s luck. There wasn’t much prospect of finding a good, upwardly mobile mate back home, where England was changing from a rather backward agricultural country to a mercantile giant and dislocating hundreds of thousands of rural workers in the process. Very few available men could support a family. In fact, there seemed to be very few men around, period—the country was still recovering from a plague that had mysteriously killed far more men than women. Of the many sales pitches offered by the colonies, none struck home with women more than the prospects of finding a suitable spouse. “If any Maid or single Woman have a desire to go over, they will think themselves in the Golden Age, when Men paid a Dowry for their Wives; for if they be but civil, and under 50 years of Age, some honest Man or other will purchase them for their Wives,” promised one promoter. (An even more enthusiastic propagandist announced that the women of North Carolina were terrifically fertile “and many Women from other Places who have been long Married and without Children, have remov’d to Carolina, and become joyfull Mothers.”)
The recruiters preferred not to mention certain details. Even after the food shortages ended, the Chesapeake was a death trap. The brackish water, mosquito-laden swamps, and steamy weather killed most people during their first year. Those who survived often suffered from weakness or periodic fits as an aftermath of their exposure to malaria. At least 6,000 people came to Virginia between 1607 and 1624; by 1625, only 1,200 survivors were still there. But the colonies’ sponsors were desperate to get females, by hook or by crook—their ventures were in danger of being wrecked on the shoals of dissolute, irresponsible young manhood. In 1619, the Virginia House of Burgesses, petitioning that wives as well as husbands be eligible for grants of free land, argued that in a new plantation, “it is not knowen whether man or woman be the most necessary.” London recruiters began searching for marriageable women, offering free passage and trousseaus for girls of good reputation and a sense of adventure. When they married, their new husbands had to reimburse the company with 120 pounds of good leaf tobacco. The first shipment of ninety “tobacco brides” arrived in Jamestown in the spring of 1620. The youngest, Jane Dier, was fifteen or sixteen when she left England. Allice Burges, at twenty-eight, was one of the oldest and said to be skillful in the art of brewing beer—important in a place where the water was generally undrinkable. Cicely Bray was from one of the best families, of a rank that required her to be addressed as “Mistress” rather than the more plebian “goodwife.” But all the brides were respectable women, mostly the offspring of middle-class tradesmen who had died, leaving them with no male protectors. All of them provided references, attesting to their honesty, sobriety, and past behavior. Anne Richards was “a woman of an honest [life] and conversation…and so is and ever hathe bynne esteemed,” wrote one of her parish elders.
We don’t know which tobacco brides won the golden ring and became a contented farm wife or a prosperous plantation mistress. Only a few of their disasters made it into history. Some of the women, including Cicely Bray, were killed in an Indian attack in 1622, when 347 settlers lost their lives. Examining the site of that massacre, modern archaeologists were puzzled to discover the skeleton of one woman with an iron band around her head that apparently had protected her from scalping. Women in England, they later deduced, used those bands to fasten a roll of cloth under their hair, to make their hairdo look fuller. Perhaps she was a tobacco bride, still trying to maintain her old standards of fashion.
Some British contractors, hired to provide the colonies with wives and female servants, simply went out and grabbed whatever warm bodies they could find, shoved them into a boat and set sail. In October 1618, a warrant was issued in England for one Owen Evans, who was kidnapping young women from their villages and sending them off to be sold in Bermuda and Virginia as indentured servants. “His undue proceedings breed such terror to the poor maidens as 40 of them fled out of one parish into such obscure and remote places as their parents and masters can yet have no news what is become of them,” reported a correspondent to King James I. The danger of being dragged off to America against one’s will figured prominently in the popular literature of seventeenth-century England—playwrights found the shanghai artists, or “spirits,” a handy deus ex machina for eliminating characters midplot. Parents sometimes pursued the spirits’ vessels down the Thames, where they ransomed their kidnapped children before they disappeared forever. The law didn’t seem to do much to dissuade the abductions. In 1680, a woman named Ann Servant confessed to attacking Alice Flax, a young maiden, putting her on board a ship and selling her in Virginia. Servant was fined a little over 13 shillings. In the coinage of the era, that was enough to buy a dozen lobsters or pints of ale, but hardly the value Alice Flax would have put on her liberty.
Besides wanting to populate the new colonies, the English government was also eager to get rid of its more undesirable citizens, who were overloading the urban jails. Some convicts were involuntarily deported; others were given the choice between a long jail term and life as an indentured servant across the ocean. Sarah Wilson, a former lady’s maid in the court of Queen Charlotte, was found guilty of stealing a jewel in the royal palace. She was undoubtedly relieved when her death sentence was reduced to transportation to Maryland. There, she escaped from her masters and made her way to South Caroli
na where she introduced herself as Queen Charlotte’s sister, Princess Susanna Carolina Matilda. Wilson happily sold royal preferments to the gullible colonists until she was undone by advertisements by her Maryland master, seeking the return of his runaway servant.
France sent a raft of convicts to its colony in Louisiana, some of them women who shared Sarah Wilson’s spirit. “The wenches in crossing Paris sang as though without care, and hailed passers-by, inviting them to come along on a voyage to the Mississippi,” wrote a French diarist who watched 300 female prisoners, each with a yellow bow in her hair, riding off to the port. The French female convicts were all expected to enthusiastically embrace careers as farmwives in the rough, steamy colony, a transmutation that was easier said than done. Even the women who arrived in New Orleans as the French equivalent of tobacco brides were unhappy and demanded to go home. (Good Parisians, they complained endlessly about the quality of the local food.) One of the commissioners of the colony in the 1720s, after listing the problems the women had caused him, hopefully suggested that they might be shipped off to marry into the hostile Indian tribes.
Most of the single women who came to the southern colonies, however, voluntarily sold themselves as indentured servants. They paid the cost of their passage with a term of four or five years in service. At the end, they were supposed to receive food, clothing, and tools to give them a start in life, then emerge into a world filled with wife-hungry young men and take their pick. That really did happen in many cases. Some women were even luckier and married their employers, or they met men with enough resources to purchase their freedom for them. But many others had fatally bad luck. A quarter of the indentured servants died before they gained their freedom. Those who lived often got pregnant before their term of service was up—a study in one Maryland county showed that 20 percent of the women who arrived as servants during the second half of the seventeenth century wound up in court for bearing illegitimate children. Some of them must have been seduced or raped by the master of the house, but they were still punished as if they had chosen freely. Their service was extended to repay their master for the labor lost to childbearing, and if a mother was still under indenture by the time the baby was weaned, her child was bound out as a servant, even though still a toddler. The legislature reasoned that servants who were impregnated by their employers could not be allowed to go free because “it might probably induce such loose persons to lay all their bastards to their masters.”
The court records reveal terrible stories of women found “beaten to a jelly” or infected with fatal cases of syphilis by rapacious masters. A Maryland couple, Captain and Mistress Bradnox, were infamous for their treatment of servants. When one of them, Thomas Watson, died from an apparent beating, another servant, Sarah Taylor, testified in court that she had seen Thomas confined without food and water and forced to drink his own urine. Sarah’s outspokenness did not endear her to the Bradnoxes, who beat her with a knotted rope. When she ran away and took shelter with a sympathetic local planter, the county commissioners made her benefactor ask Captain Bradnox’s forgiveness in open court, and Sarah was required to apologize to her master and mistress on her knees. But Sarah’s story went on, through more beatings and assaults, until she finally appeared in court, asking for protection and showing the commissioners her scars. A witness testified he had seen the captain hit Sarah with a stool when he found her reading, crying, “You dissembling jade, what do you with a book in your hand?” The court decided to free Sarah from service for her own safety. We can only hope she cleared out of the county fast, because Mrs. Bradnox contested the decision to the governor, who compelled each of the merciful justices to pay her 220 pounds of tobacco. It’s not likely they showed similar charity in the future.
An indentured servant’s fortune depended very much on who her master and mistress were, and canny émigrés opted for a system that allowed them to travel to America first and then barter with prospective employers for a contract that would repay the ship’s captain for their passage. But even women who managed to avoid getting tied to psychopaths or sex criminals must have found the work harder than they anticipated. “What we unfortunat English People suffer here is beyond the probability of you in England to Conceive,” moaned Elizabeth Springs, one of the few indentured servants who was able to read and write, in a letter to her family. “Let it suffice that I one of the unhappy Number, am toiling almost Day and Night…what rest we get is to rap ourselves up in a Blanket and ly upon the Ground, this is the deplorable Condition your poor Betty endures.”
“PERFORM THE MOST MANFUL
EXERCISES AS WELL AS MOST MEN”
The women who did survive in the early southern colonies found themselves in a place where the old gender rules had been, if not abolished, at least temporarily suspended due to emergency conditions. It was a raw country, and the first generations of colonial women did things that their granddaughters would have found unthinkable. A “modest Gentlewoman” named Alice Proctor ignored officials’ urging that she abandon her home during Indian raids and move to the safety of Jamestown. She stuck to her farmhouse until worried neighbors threatened to burn the place down. Well-born women labored like field hands and made their way through the roadless countryside on horseback or by waterway. “Many of the Women are very handy in Canoes, and will manage them with great Dexterity and Skill, which they become accustomed to in this watry Country,” reported a traveler in 1700. William Byrd described an acquaintance who lived on the Virginia frontier as “a very civil woman” who could nonetheless “carry a gunn in the woods and kill deer, turkeys…shoot down wild cattle, catch and tye hoggs…and perform the most manful exercises as well as most men in these parts.”
Almost everyone lived on a farm—the whole point of the colonial dream was to get your own land and grow a profitable cash crop like tobacco. The English believed that fieldwork was a man’s task, but the colonies were desperately short on labor, and young planters expected their wives to labor alongside them in the fields. The farms were almost all isolated, surrounded by endless forests, down winding waterways without any real roads to connect them. Plantation owners were forced to be away from home for long periods of time on business, and they often depended on their wives, or even daughters, to drain swamps, tend cattle, cultivate the tobacco, and otherwise manage things while they were gone.
The dissolution of the normal boundaries between women’s work and men’s allowed some women to operate with an independence the nation would never really see again until the twentieth century. One of the most spectacular examples was Margaret Brent, who virtually ran the colony of Maryland during a period of crisis. Margaret, her sister Mary, and two brothers arrived in Maryland in 1638. The still-tiny colony was a haven for Catholics, the Brents’ religion. It’s possible that Margaret and Mary had embraced some form of lay sisterhood. They never married, which was practically unheard of in a land of woman-starved bachelors.
Virtually all the colonial women wanted to marry, but when they did, they were automatically stripped of their legal rights. A wife’s possessions became her husband’s, and she was unable to do business on her own, sue, borrow money, or sign contracts. (“The husband and wife are one, and the husband is that one,” said Sir William Blackstone, the eminent English jurist.) But as unmarried women, the Brent sisters could own and manage their own property. Margaret had a letter from Lord Baltimore, the proprietor of the colony, granting them land in their own names. They established a home on a seventy-acre plot they named Sisters’ Freehold in what is now southern Maryland, next to the estate of their brother Giles. The colony was still very young, with about 400 settlers, most of them tenant farmers or laborers who worked on the estates of a few wealthy landowners like the Brents.
Margaret became an active businesswoman, who specialized in lending money to newly arrived settlers. When her debtors failed to meet their obligations, she was quick to go to court to demand payment. Between 1642 and 1650, she was recorded as a party in 134 sui
ts, mainly as plaintiff—representing herself in court and winning most of her cases. She became a close friend of Governor Leonard Calvert, the brother of Lord Baltimore, and the two became coguardians of the young daughter of the chief of the Piscataway Indians. Margaret later permitted her brother Giles to marry the girl, who was only eleven years old, an act that made Giles’s political opponents wary, and which certainly raises questions about whether Margaret was really looking after her ward’s best interests.
Nothing Margaret wrote has survived, and we have no portraits of her. (Her contemporaries remembered her as a large woman with red hair.) Her great moment in American history came in 1645, when Maryland was drawn into the civil war being carried out in England between the forces of Charles I and the Puritan Parliament. Protestant mercenaries raided the lands of the Catholic settlers, and one of them sailed off to London with Giles Brent as a prisoner. It must have been a traumatic time for Margaret and Mary—their brother had been kidnapped and Governor Calvert eventually fled, leaving the remaining settlers at the mercy of the mercenaries. The colonists who stayed behind called it the “plundering time.” The European population of Maryland dropped to under 100.
