The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675

by Bernard Bailyn

  BUT AS HE and his affluent London affiliates began populating Kent Island 120 miles north of Jamestown, they came into conflict with a new, unexpected influx of migrants to the upper Chesapeake lands, which, unknown to Claiborne, had been officially designated Maryland.

  CHAPTER 6

  Terra-Maria

  1

  IN THE GENERATION after the Virginia Company sent its first settlers to America, England and its relation to the western hemisphere were transformed. Though in the countryside England was still very much a traditional society, the regional growth of trade and industry and the accompanying expansion of the provincial towns, together with the extraordinary growth of London, were creating economic and social innovations throughout the land and stimulating mobility and a propensity to emigrate to a level that had not existed before.

  Increasingly urban and mobile, modernizing in various sectors of life, its most progressive elements enterprising and ambitious, England was far from stable or secure. No one could have predicted the upheaval that would tear the country apart in the 1640s, but social and political strains were visible two decades earlier. Serious economic problems had developed—partly as a result of the volatility of the all-important textile industry, especially in East Anglia and the West Country, which in the 1620s fell into a depression, and partly because of falling wages, high food prices, and disasters like plague, fires, and failed harvests. At the same time religious dissent grew fierce and defiant in the face of official pressure for conformity, and political animosities deepened as court patronage ballooned, generating increasingly bitter opposition. All of these domestic dislocations and discontents played into the emerging world overseas.

  For while economic changes were loosening the ties of thousands to their native roots, propelling them out across the land in search of employment and security, and while the demands of an increasingly intolerant established church were forcing both Protestant and Catholic dissenters to search for escape and refuge, England’s transoceanic possessions were becoming known to increasing numbers of people throughout the realm. The east coasts of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and northern New England had long been familiar to West Country fishermen, and news of developments in the Chesapeake lands and the West Indies had been widely circulated not only officially by the Virginia and Bermuda companies but informally by friends and families of the thousands who had ventured there and by the hundreds who had invested in American land rights and in trade in colonial products. It was well known in nonconformist circles that a contingent of the radical dissenters exiled in the Netherlands had followed Lawne and the Bennetts to America but had ended up not in Virginia but on the shores of Massachusetts, where they had found a safe though spartan refuge for their small conventicle. And the success of the settlements in the West Indies, especially those in Bermuda, challenged the imagination of entrepreneurs who thought seriously of investing in transoceanic trade and were ambitious enough to hope for a share of the profits that were beginning to flow from the sale of American tobacco at home and in the European markets.

  Impelled by discontents and dislocations at home and drawn by opportunities that had suddenly appeared overseas, emigration from the British Isles and resettlement in the colonies became a significant demographic phenomenon in the 1630s.1 The flow of emigration, which would continue with shifting intensities for two centuries, can be seen for what it was, a new and dynamic force in European, American, and African population history. What mattered most was not the emergence of specific English colonies, whose identities had not yet formed, but the beginning of a general westward diaspora of the peoples of the British Isles and their contacts—strange, varied, often bloody—with the indigenous Americans.

  England’s nascent colonies in the west, the products of individual and private group initiatives, formed no coherent unit. But however scattered and unrelated, these settlements created in England a general sense that there existed in the west a vast, largely unknown territorial periphery to which access was possible. These outer lands—barbaric islands and coastal fringes of an unknown continent—seemed to offer strange, dangerous, but promising opportunities. In the years when the Virginia Company’s directors were pouring funds and lives into a failing effort to earn corporate profits from settlements on the James River, they and others were investing also in settlements in Bermuda and in Ireland—especially in Ireland. It was Ireland in fact that was Britain’s fastest-growing colony throughout the early seventeenth century. Large regions in northeastern and southeastern Ireland were seized from their inhabitants, plantations created or resumed, the natives forced west into infertile hill country, and great parcels of land declared open for resettlement by veterans of the Irish wars and migrants from abroad. The result was a burst of westward migration far more powerful than any that lay behind the settlements in the western hemisphere. In the twelve years after 1630, 120,000 Englishmen and Scots are estimated to have migrated to Ireland, double the number of those who went to the West Indies in those years, six times more than went to New England.2

  It was the beginning, in the British Isles, of an extraordinary period of emigration, a demographic phenomenon that would not be matched until the 1760s, when again there was a sense that an entire new world had suddenly been flung open for settlement by land-hungry migrants.3 While in the years of the Virginia Company and the two decades that followed Scottish Presbyterians and Covenanters settled by the thousands in the six counties of Ulster, other English nonconformists, in smaller numbers, settled elsewhere in the farther colonial borderlands: on Providence Island off the coast of Nicaragua and on the shores of southern New England. At the same time, on the upper reaches of Chesapeake Bay another group of English adventurers struggled to found a settlement new in concept and design which would create a distinctive element in North American population history.

  2

  Their sponsors and leaders were Catholics, dissenters on the “right,” a standing challenge to England’s Episcopal establishment. Caught in the great religious struggles of the sixteenth century, they were thought likely to be associated with foreign powers that threatened England’s sovereignty, and they had been forced to withdraw from public life. Subject to penal laws for public profession of their faith, susceptible to charges of treason, their worship necessarily private and their priests hunted and often imprisoned or exiled, England’s and Wales’s sixty thousand Catholic worshippers—approximately 1 percent of the population—were split into several groups, with “the backbone of the community … in the ranks of the armigerous gentry.” They were quietist though active in public life and flexible in adjusting to the complex restrictions they lived under—restrictions that were neither annihilatory nor superficial. They worshipped privately, most often under the protection of gentry and noble families, and they came to accept that the religion of subjects need not be the same as that of rulers and states. They formed a community that was carefully pragmatic, shy of publicity that might imperil the privacy they were allowed, reluctant to break out of the paternalistic protection they enjoyed, geographically scattered, and not easily mobilized as a community.4 That they came to sponsor the resettlement of an area strategically located on the east coast of North America was largely the result of the imagination of a retired public official whose religious commitment was as profound as his entrepreneurial spirit was unbounded.

  GEORGE CALVERT, born into the Catholic gentry of northern Yorkshire, had conformed to the Church of England at least from the age of fourteen, when he entered Oxford University. After his years there, followed by study at the Inns of Court and travel abroad, he became a dutiful and successful public servant. Prominent at the court of James I, he took on more and more responsibilities, ultimately reaching the great office of secretary of state. But, more a reliable bureaucrat than an imaginative statesman, and lacking in the skills of a political infighter, he lost out to more adroit politicians when he stubbornly continued to support the failed diplomatic project of marrying the
Prince of Wales to the Spanish Infanta, which included plans to relieve English Catholics of legal disabilities. In 1625, politically bypassed and isolated, he sold his office and left public service, bearing with him the King’s “princely approbation and … good grace,” the income from the sale of his office, and the parting royal gift of the Irish barony of Baltimore.5

  Once freed from official duties, Calvert, now the Baron Baltimore, openly reclaimed his Catholicism, made contact with Catholic laymen and regular priests, and turned to projects of overseas settlement, with which he had been marginally involved for years. As early as 1609, he had invested in both the Virginia Company, to whose leaders he had family connections, and the East India Company. In 1620 he had bought land in Newfoundland; and in 1622 he had supported the New England Company. At the same time he had received substantial land grants in Ireland, which became his principal residence. Thus associated with overseas enterprises east and west, he turned to the least developed, Newfoundland, which engaged him most actively in the early 1620s. It was there that he began his active career in colonization, and it was there that he developed the ideas that would shape a unique segment of North American population history.6

  In 1621 he sent a small party of settlers, mainly Welshmen, to Ferryland, the harbor of his property in the jutting southeastern promontory of Newfoundland. Despite the forbidding terrain (“nothing but rocks, lakes, or mosses, like bogs”) they erected some buildings, sowed crops, and began the construction of a quarry, a forge, and a salt manufactory. Two years later, in 1623, Calvert received a royal charter for an enlarged territory—a broad band of over two million acres stretching west from the Atlantic coast—which he called the Province of Avalon. Legally a palatinate, the grant gave Calvert vice-regal powers to make his own laws within this domain, consistent with the Crown’s sovereignty. And though the charter required adherence to “God’s holy and true Christian religion,” it omitted any restriction on Roman Catholicism. In 1625, with the colony boasting an English population of one hundred and “a broode of horses, kowes, and other bestial,” Baltimore advertised for “any that will adventure with him, or serve under him.” He appointed a Catholic, Sir Arthur Aston, to head the colony, and allowed a Carmelite priest, Father Simon Stock, to establish in Avalon “a missionary outpost . . . to which priests could venture forth both to convert the Indians and to offset the increasing Puritan presence.” And if a northwest passage through the continent opened up, Father Stock looked forward to using the Ferryland mission as a base for the Church’s penetration of Asia.7

  Aston arrived with a small party of co-religionists; and Baltimore himself, on two trips to the colony, brought with him two secular priests, one of whom remained to establish the first Catholic mission in British America, and then, along with most of his family and another priest, about forty other Roman Catholics—some Irish, some Yorkshire recusants. But by 1629 the outlines of one of the problems that would later beset the Calverts in Maryland became clear. The majority of the settlers proved to be Protestants who had their own preacher and did not share Baltimore’s hopes that the two communions could or should live together peaceably. The Anglican minister was shocked by the open practice of Catholicism on English territory and reported his dismay to the authorities at home.8

  Locked in controversy with “that knave, [the Anglican Rev.] Stourton,” and harassed, in addition, by marauding French men-of-war in the coastal fishing waters, Baltimore faced a bitter winter in which his house became a hospital for fully half the colony. By the spring, he despaired of “this wofull country, where with one intolerable wynter were we almost undone,” and decided to relocate his community to the south, in or near Virginia, where, on “some good large territory” he hoped “to lay my bones.”

  But the Avalon experiment, though a costly failure (an estimated loss of £20,000 to £30,000), had been useful. Baltimore had known from childhood how difficult it was in England for Catholics and Protestants to live together, but he had now learned of further, possibly disastrous, complications when the problem was transferred to fragile settlements in the remote Atlantic borderlands. In addition, he had come to appreciate the extraordinary ambitions and passionate zeal of the Catholic missionaries, especially the regular priests, which, however honorable, could threaten any regime in an era of confessional struggles and of volatile relations with the American natives. Above all, he had learned the necessity, if he was to succeed in establishing a colony safe for Catholics, of somehow transcending the prevailing doctrine of cuius regio, eius religio—for each regime, its own (exclusive) religion. His colonial domain would have to be something different—a regime that tolerated people of all Christian confessions, the government itself committed to none.9

  How necessary this would be became even clearer to him the moment, in 1629, he brought his party from Newfoundland to Virginia, the colony to which he had had connections for twenty years, to seek out a site for his new colony. Fearful of competition and echoing the antipopery of the metropolis, the Virginia authorities under Governor John Pott—the doctor who had prepared the poison for the Indians six years before—denied them entry when, as Catholics, they refused to swear the oath of supremacy.

  Baltimore spent the next two years—his last—at home, maneuvering for a charter for a colony just north of Virginia where he might realize his dreams. He had the favor and support not only of influential courtiers and officials but of Charles I himself. The monarch, who had supported Baltimore’s Newfoundland adventure, remembered favorably his “former services and late indeavors,” though he warned him that men of “your condition and breeding” were fitter for other employments than the framing of new plantations, which commonly had rugged and laborious beginnings and that required greater resources than most private subjects could command. Thus cautioned but supported by the Crown, Baltimore carefully worked his charter through the bureaucracy, but died two months before the legalities were complete. It was left to his dutiful son Cecilius, the second Baron Baltimore, to carry the project through. The young Calvert spent the rest of his life managing the project his father had designed, preserving it through great vicissitudes, struggling and stumbling, failing and recovering, with energy, patience, imagination, and political skill. By the time he died in 1675 he had laid a durable foundation. A Catholic population survived, and his descendants, years later, especially the profligate sixth baron (d. 1771), would inherit wealth from the Maryland palatinate that the first baron could scarcely have imagined.10

  The charter, modeled on the earlier Avalon grant, gave Baltimore a princely territory of ten to twelve million acres stretching north from the Potomac River to the fortieth parallel (thus including what would later be southern Pennsylvania), west to the sources of the Potomac, and including most of the Eastern Shore of Chesapeake Bay. And the proprietor was given the powers of a palatine lord, powers that had not been granted since the fourteenth century, when the Welsh and Scottish marchland jurisdictions had been created. He had absolute power to use or dispose of the land, defend and administer the province, and govern the population, whose legal status, technically, was not that of subjects of the king but tenants of the lord proprietor. Writs were to run in his name, not the king’s. And Baltimore was specifically authorized to create manors, each with its own local governing powers—a provision vital, he believed, for the recruitment of wealthier planters and for the re-creation of the enclaves of privacy that had sheltered Catholics at home. Above all, nothing in the charter prevented Baltimore from recruiting a population of his own choosing, Catholics as well as Protestants, clerics as well as laymen.11

  The entire enterprise depended on population recruitment, and on this Baltimore moved cautiously. While the Crown, in its geopolitical calculations, was particularly interested in creating a buffer between Virginia and the Dutch, who were moving south from the Hudson River area, Baltimore increasingly thought of Maryland not only as a source of profit and achievement for himself and the nation but as a refug
e for Catholics, who were under growing pressure in England. But he knew from the start that he would be dependent on a general population of Protestant farmworkers, artisans, and tenants. And he knew too that the survival of his charter would always be in question, vulnerable as it was to attacks, on the one hand, in England, by antipapists in combination with certain Virginia Company stockholders with claims to northern Chesapeake lands and, on the other hand, in Virginia, by the emerging colonial leaders eager to expand their landholdings and trade. So, carefully and guardedly, he gathered a small party of investors—twenty in all, fifteen of them Catholics, thirteen either members of the Calvert family or close acquaintances—and, discreetly, welcomed prospective emigrants at a recruitment office he set up in London. To help in all his planning, advertising, and recruiting, and especially to help him realize his religious mission in America, he applied to the Jesuit authorities for members of their order to join him in his enterprise. Though few in number, the Jesuits—“the best organized, most numerous, and most militant of England’s priests,” zealous proselytizers led by the “prickly scholar” Father Andrew White—proved to be key figures in the first group of settlers, who arrived in Chesapeake Bay in March 1634.12

  This first of Baltimore’s expeditions to the Chesapeake was the occasion for him to express his hopes and imaginings, his justification and goals in launching a settlement of English people in a distant, exotic world. His aim, he (or Father White) wrote in his initial recruitment leaflet, was, principally, “to bring to Christ [Maryland] and the countreys adjacent, which from the beginning of the world to this day, never knew God.” It would be no intrusion of unwelcome aliens, no subjugation of an unwilling population. For, he wrote, he had studied the accounts of other plantations and explorations, and he knew with a certainty that “the Indians themselves [were] sending farre and nigh for teachers to instruct and baptize them.” He had no doubt that thousands, many thousands, would happily be brought to Christianity. They simply needed the agency, which he hoped to provide.