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

by Bernard Bailyn

  But God, he believed, worked in wonderful ways. Establishing a Christian mission in Maryland had the further advantage, he wrote, of enlarging Charles I’s overseas “empire and dominions,” a goal Baltimore strongly and loyally endorsed; and beyond that, the colony would serve the more mundane interests of those ordinary people who “are not so noble-minded” as to seek mainly “great and glorious” satisfactions but are drawn by “pleasure, wealth, and honour.” So that lower as well as higher inducements might not be wanting, God had provided great potential wealth in Maryland, which men of ordinary inclinations might, while serving higher ends, gainfully exploit. There was abundant timber, all sorts of minerals, an infinity of fish and animals, and rich farming land that might be possessed by smallholders as well as by magnates, and there were vast beaver supplies, which in the previous year alone, he wrote, had yielded a profit of £10,000.13

  There was in all of this a tone of benevolence blended with opportunism which Baltimore and his colleagues would soon amplify in a series of pamphlets explaining and promoting his nascent colony. From the start the whole enterprise was loftily conceptualized and personalized to benefit Baltimore himself and his embattled Catholic community. He knew there would be protests against the project, and in 1633 he issued a paper to identify and refute all the possible objections. An easy exodus of Catholics would not, he argued, frustrate England’s efforts to convert them to Protestantism; his charter would not imply the toleration of Catholics in England; such an exodus would not deprive the Crown of penal revenues; it would not drain wealth from England; nor would a Catholic colony attract foreign Catholics likely to threaten Protestant Virginia and New England or support the colonies’ separation from England. Nothing he could think of was left to chance, least of all the social order he hoped would emerge as the colony developed.14

  Other colonizers would project innovative ideas onto what they took to be the American tabula rasa—new designs, conceptual beacons lighting the way forward out of a dark past. But Baltimore’s social views were idealistic in a different way. They were nostalgic and regressive, hearkening back to the fading world in which Catholicism had flourished, a world of rentier landlords with servants and tenants, societies of legal privilege and ordained disparities of wealth—a social order whose hierarchical structure would secure all people in their rightful, functional places. The manor, consistent with the values and visions of a premodern culture, would in his imagining be the institutional foundation of the new-old order—a way of “raising some nobility” from among the manor lords, who would receive political appointments, titles of honor, and “no small share in the profits of trade”—presumably the profits of the joint-stock company he created to exploit the fur trade. To anyone willing to join the first settlement at his own expense and bring with him five able men, he offered a manor of two thousand acres with full judicial powers (“courts leet and baron”) and “all such royalties and privileges as are usually belonging to mannors in England,” and in addition ten acres of town land for each person transported in the capital city he planned. Later the requirement would rise to ten accompanying men, then twenty. And for those lesser folk who brought only themselves and their immediate families, including servants, there would be rights to one hundred acres for each adult and fifty acres for every child. Servants, it was assumed, and tenants to work the land would be drawn from those who came with no resources of their own. And Baltimore’s own profits would be assured by annual rents he would charge on the lands he so generously granted.15

  All of this was broadcast discreetly to the country at large. But to his brother Leonard, who would serve as the resident governor of the colony, and to the two commissioners he appointed to serve with Leonard to rule the colony, he gave more specific instructions. The first of his fifteen orders went straight to the religious question, and to Baltimore’s determination to make Maryland not a Catholic colony but a colony safe for Catholics. Protestants, he commanded, were to be given no offense that might be a cause for complaint in either Virginia or England. And to that end the commissioners were to see to it that

  all acts of Romane Catholique religion [were] to be done as privately as may be, and that they instruct all the Romane Catholiques to be silent upon all occasions of discourse concerning matters of religion; and that [they] treate the Protestants with as much mildness and favor as justice will permitt.

  The commissioners were to gather information on any plots against Baltimore’s charter and regime. They were to avoid initial contact with Virginia, but they were to make respectful diplomatic overtures both to that colony generally and to William Claiborne, on Kent Island, specifically. Though Claiborne was considered a trespasser on Baltimore’s land, he was to be left alone for at least a year while the situation was carefully canvassed. At the first settlement, located at some “healthfull and fruitfull” place, the commissioners were to read out Baltimore’s legal rights and declare his interest in converting the natives to Christianity and in augmenting His Majesty’s “empire and dominions in those parts of the world by reducing them under the subjection of the crowne.” They were to assist the settlers to “reape the fruites of their charges,” and begin planning the layout of a town and adjoining manors and farmlands.

  His colony would be no random scattering of settlements, as in Virginia, no sprawl of isolated plantations, farms, and houses, dangerously exposed to Indian attacks. Streets were to be laid out carefully in a fortified town, with houses “neere adjoyning one to an other,” and surveys made for the controlled distribution of farmland, with special care in reserving a proper proportion of the land for Baltimore himself. The first plantings were to be for a “sufficient quantity of corne and other provision of victuall” and for nothing else until the necessary subsistence crops were raised. Militia duty was to be required, and the possibilities of various industries scouted out. Above all, the government was “to do justice to every man without partiality,” avoid all conflict with Virginia, and inform Baltimore of every development, large and small.16

  Thus was the colony planned, and thus, with elaboration, was it promoted. Recruitment tracts—seven, in one form or other, in the 1630s, several of them written at least in part by Father Andrew White—emphasizing the opportunities in Maryland, in terms calculated to appeal to wide segments of the English population eager for independent settlement on the land, were printed and discreetly distributed. But the most remarkable and expansive treatise on the lure of Maryland’s prospects circulated in manuscript.

  THAT DOCUMENT IS extraordinarily revealing. It expresses at once the fierce nationalism that impelled England’s colonial expansion; the idyllic aspirations of the deprived younger sons of gentry families in considering the benefits of overseas settlements; the peculiar problems of the Catholic gentry denied access to established institutions; the intense moralism of English attitudes to the American natives; and above all the passion of ordinary householders for a stake in the land. Its image of felicity in the Atlantic west would haunt the imagination of the relatively deprived English gentry for generations.

  The manuscript, a romantic, self-consciously literary essay (“But soft, ’tis not my purpose …”) in the form of a letter to a friend contemplating emigration, was written by Robert Wintour, grandson of the Earl of Worcester and of an Elizabethan admiral who had fought with Drake, a younger son of a prosperous Gloucestershire Catholic family, and brother of the queen’s secretary. Catholics all, connected by marriage to the Calvert family, they were much involved in what Wintour called the “Maryland designe.” Two of his younger brothers were among the colony’s first settlers. Through them and others Wintour kept in close touch with the colony’s fortunes during the first few years and was able to sketch a vividly enticing image of its future.

  Why should one remove to the New World generally, Wintour asked, and to Maryland specifically? To study men, he wrote, “as God and nature made them, morally good,” people without the sins of “deceipt, pride, avarice, am
bition, or (of all vices, the mother) sloth.” Besides satisfying “all manner of curiosities” and probing “unknowen secretts,” one would serve God nobly by contributing to the “conversion and civilizing [of] those barbarous heathens that live like beasts without the light of faith.” Maryland’s aim, as opposed to Virginia’s, was not “to extirpate and destroy” the natives (who he believed were “no lesse witty and discoursive” than Europeans) but “to civilize, cherish and preserve to eternity their manners, bodies, and soules.”

  Where can witt and worth be more truely exprest then in conquering nations to enrich them, subduing people to make them men, subjecting wild savages to make them free, taking nothing from them but barbarous nakednes and in counterchange adorning them with decent civility?

  In joining the Maryland settlement, Wintour wrote, one would also be serving the king and state, by enlarging “our Soverraigne’s dominions adding … much to the honor profitt and strength of his State and Realmes.” It grieved his soul, he wrote, to hear England abused by those who complain of unemployment and can think of nothing else to do with themselves but in desperation to serve as mercenaries to foreign princes. “Shall the brave Englishman, the noble Brittain be the drudge to … those insulting strang[er]s (to whom he must crouch and fawne to gett his beggerly pay)”? England was “the garden of the earth … the flower of kingdomes for power and ma[jes]tie, the envy of countries for freeborne nurslings, the terror of nations for untamed spirits, the magazine of the world for trade and commerce.” And so, “peopling o[u]r new colonies [is]…more laudable in it selfe, more convenient for our country, and every way more worthy and becoming a true English heart then any forreine service.” By peopling Baltimore’s new colony, England’s sons could gain for themselves the name that so honored their ancient ancestors, “founders of a nation.”

  And then, Wintour explained to his friend, there were the material rewards. In Maryland it would be possible to achieve “a quiett life sweetned with ease and plenty,” in secure possession of a “compotent estate … answerable to [one’s] birth and calling.” And he described in detail the good things of life that would in time become available in Maryland—all those benefits of life that people like himself should have had in England but didn’t: “ground of our owne … our owne beefe and mutton … venison out of our owne parke[,] a partridge, a pheasant, and a cock taken in o[u]r owne Mannor … with a good fire in the great chamber” attended by half a dozen “blew coates [servants]…to bring up our meate upon Sondaies.” And the gentleman settler would find “wholesome and fatt gardenage … a dainty river at his foote … delightfull walkes on every side … halfe a dozen or halfe a score gentlemen, his freinds and partners … to accompany him in his sports and consummate his felicity … nothing to doe but to be merry and grow fatt, eate, drinke, & recreate, and give God thanks.”

  How could all this be achieved? Everything would depend on the servants one could recruit. Of an investment of £500, £300 would cover the expenses of fifteen “able labouring men” whose transportation would guarantee land grants of no less than three thousand acres. Some of that land—fertile, healthful, and fit “for our English bodies”—could nicely be turned into a deer park, while the rest would provide, within the space of a mere two years, ample crops of all kinds, the profits of which could support the importation of more servants, who would produce more crops, which would make possible more servants, and so forth in an ever-ascending scale. The land would be so abundant that one could provide for the eventual homesteads of the servants once they were freed from service, and they, working their plots, would produce an income for the landowner in the form of rents.

  Surely, he wrote, this was far better than remaining in England, where land was misused and scarce, where the countryside was overwhelmed with “loyterers and wasters” who “pester the earth and but few employed to convert it to best use,” and where much of the land was consigned to “great men’s sports or excesse.” In Maryland land was abundant, and as the Jesuit Thomas Copley was soon to write, “nothinge is wanting but people. Let [Maryland] be peopled and it shall not yeeld to the most flourishing country for profitt and pleasure.” And beyond all of that, there was the tolerant colonial government of Lord Baltimore, in which settlers could worship as they pleased; each freeholder would have a voice in an assembly; the leadership would be comprised of men of high birth, education, and wealth; and the servant population would be made up not, as elsewhere in the colonies, of “the scumme of the people, taken up promiscuously, as vagrants and runnewayes from their m[aste]rs, debauched, idle, lazie squanderers, jaylbirds, and the like,” but of decent fellow countrymen, tenants of known landowners, loyal servants happy to share in their masters’ fortunes, admitted to the colony only on “good recommenda[ti]ons and knowledge of them to be free from any taints.”

  How much of this Wintour himself believed cannot be known. But he must have been convinced of at least some of his imaginings because he emigrated to Maryland in 1637 with seven (not the recommended fifteen) servants and with personal property appropriate for the genteel life he anticipated. In Maryland he did indeed become a landowner and also a councilor, justice of the peace, and assemblyman. But he died within two years, leaving behind not a deer park, pheasants, and “fatt gardenage,” but a complicated balance of assets and debts calculated in pounds of tobacco, an assortment of farm tools and equipment, and the remains of the finery he had so hopefully brought with him from England: seven suits of clothes, a gold ring, “an old silver belt,” a small library, a painting, a parcel of printed pictures, and a dozen napkins.17

  3

  Such men as Wintour, younger sons of well-placed Catholic families, often with wives and children, began to arrive in the colony with the first shipment, on the Ark and the Dove in 1634. How many passengers those vessels carried is not precisely known—contemporaries said 200 to 300; modern estimates vary from 148 to 175. These were small vessels—the Ark a ship of 360 tons, the Dove a mere pinnace of 60 tons. With equipment, supplies, and animals, together with their human freight, they were dangerously overloaded, and shipboard relations, under those conditions, were exceedingly complex. For the passenger group reflected Baltimore’s reliance both on the Catholic gentry and on the English working-class population, who together formed the basis of the community that would initially emerge. When the expedition left Cowes for Maryland, it included seventeen “Gentlemen of Fashion,” most of them Catholic, among whom were at least eight younger sons of peers, knights, or members of Parliament. Investors in the overall settlement project, they brought with them, besides their own servants, farm equipment, supplies, and some of the finery of their gentle way of life. The rest of the passengers, most of them Protestants, were indentured or paid servants, one of them black, one a Portuguese mulatto, some artisans, and a few independent farmers. Two Jesuit priests—Andrew White and John Altham—and a lay brother completed the shipboard list. Sharply divided between gentry and laborers, most of whom were indentured servants, the first settling group conformed reasonably well to Calvert’s social expectations.18

  They arrived at the Potomac River on March 3, 1634, after a difficult three-month voyage via the West Indies and a surprisingly amicable stopover in Virginia. The landscape that met them, 180 miles north of the James River, was significantly different from what the Virginians had found on the malarial shores to the south. The well-traveled Father White reported in his enthusiastic Briefe Relation (1634) that the Potomac “is the sweetest and greatest river I have seene, so that the Thames is but a little finger to it.” It ran, near its mouth, between terraced banks that stepped down in stages from about forty feet; and behind the shores lay woods—of oak, cedar, pine, cypress, elm, ash, and poplar. Successive burnings had long since cleared out the forest undergrowth, together with the more flammable trees, and had created small meadows, parks, and corridors leading inland, through which, White wrote, “a coach and fower horses may travale without molestation.” The terraced shoreline—
“noe marshes or swampes … but solid firme ground”—seemed fertile. One could imagine a rich agriculture developing in this well-watered land.

  These first impressions were confirmed as the settlers began a slow reconnaissance of the Potomac estuary. After celebrating mass on Blackistone’s Island and erecting a “great cross which we had hewn from a tree … as a trophy to Christ the Saviour, while the litany of the Holy Cross was chaunted humbly, on our bended knees, with great emotion of soul,” they moved inland. They were determined, for both religious and commercial purposes, to avoid the catastrophe in race relations that the Virginians had endured and to engage constructively with the strange native peoples. In this, in their first encounters, they largely succeeded, in part due to the excellent guide they had to lead them into this mysterious world, in part due to the peculiar configuration of forces among the Potomac Indians—the local Piscataways and Patuxents desperate for defensive alliances against the aggressive Susquehannocks and Iroquois—and in part due to the Jesuits’ boundless zeal, their rhapsodic joy in embracing this vast missionary field and the possibility it offered of bringing untold multitudes of pagans to the altar of Christ.19

  Rumors, spread by the Virginians, had already reached the natives, who had long been familiar with European explorers and settlers, warning them that a force of vengeful Spaniards was about to invade their land; but Calvert’s shrewdly acquired guide to the Indians’ world helped ease the settlers’ entry. Henry Fleete, son of a Kentish landowner and barrister with connections to the Virginia Company, had arrived in Virginia in 1621. Two years later he had been captured by the Potomac Indians and had spent five years with them, learning their language (which he claimed he knew better “than mine own”), their lore, and the details of intertribal relations. In England after his release, he had acquired backers (perhaps associated with the Kent Island venture) for a deep exploration of the fur supplies in the Potomac region. In 1631–32, when Baltimore was negotiating for his charter, Fleete was exploring every creek and inlet and Indian settlement along the Potomac waterway, voyaging with a small team on flatboats and pinnaces as far west as the site of the present District of Columbia and soaking up all the information he could find on the natives, the sources of furs and food supplies, and the possibilities of bringing both out into the European markets. When Calvert’s vessels appeared, Fleete was working at several bartering centers in what was legally Maryland territory. Both a rival and an associate of Claiborne, he was brought into the Maryland project by the promise of manorial lands and trading rights. He led Calvert’s party on an inspection of the lands he knew so well at the mouth of the Potomac and, cautiously, on a slow voyage up into that river, to come to terms with the natives.20