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

by Bernard Bailyn

  THE “PLUNDERING TIME” of the mid-1640s, though brief, was one of the most barbarous passages in Maryland’s history. The turmoil was in part the result of personal animosities among adventurers freed from normal social constraints, and in part a reflection and extension of the political upheaval of England’s Civil War. But it was also, and in large part, an expression of the resistance of the ordinary Protestant planters to the colony’s Catholic establishment and to the manorial system that the first Lord Baltimore had so carefully designed.

  It began with the bombast of a violently tempestuous thirty-threeyear-old mariner and tobacco trader, Richard Ingle—a “mad Captain” to officials in the Admiralty—who had been shipping goods to and from the Chesapeake for a decade. In 1642, as the conflict between Parliamentary and royalist forces was rising to a climax in England, Ingle, anchored at a port in Virginia, declared himself a fervent Parliamentarian, denounced all royalists as “rattleheads,” and threatened local officials who protested with a poleax and cutlass. Avoiding arrest, he visited several Maryland ports repeating his abuse of the king and his government. A year later he was back in Maryland, even more passionate in his political fervor, reportedly refusing in the name of Parliament to disembark when ordered to do so, declaring that King Charles was no king, and threatening to cut off the head of anyone who tried to board his ship. Charged with treason by the acting governor, Giles Brent, he arranged for a postponement of his trial and returned to England, only to reappear with a letter of marque permitting him to seize vessels hostile to Parliament. By then he had cast himself as the savior of Maryland’s Protestants in their struggle “against the said tyrannicall governor, and Papists, and malignants his adherents,” who, he declared, intended “to execute a tyrannicall power against the Protestants and such as adhered to the Parlyament, and to presse wicked oathes uppon them, and to endeavuor their extirpation.”57

  Using his letter of marque as a general license to prey on royalists anywhere, he mobilized a gang of “most rascally fellows” in Virginia and prepared to invade Maryland, probably in alliance with Claiborne. That frustrated and vengeful entrepreneur judged the time was ripe for him to recover his control of Kent Island and his extensive properties there. Late in 1644 he gathered a ragtag contingent of “troops” and returned to the island expecting to raise a popular insurrection of Protestants against the proprietor and to restore his assets. In this he failed, succeeding only in creating great confusion among the people living on the island and forcing Governor Calvert, who had returned to the colony, to respond by mobilizing his own troop of soldiers to restore order.

  The colony was clearly under threat, and in February the threat was fully realized. Sailing up the Chesapeake to Maryland’s northern shore, Ingle seized a large Dutch trading vessel as personal booty and set about plundering the colony. Ruthless and violent, he drew to his side as he swept through the colony a motley crowd of the discontented. Most were obscure, identifiable only as names scattered through the records. Some were disreputable: the illiterate Thomas Bradnox, for example, himself a former servant, notorious for his vicious treatment of servants, who became known as “captain of the rebels,” and Thomas Sturman, a cooper sent over by Claiborne’s backers, distinguished by his remarkable zeal in ransacking houses. But some were quite respectable—ambitious planters, Protestants all, seeking greater security and autonomy within a Catholic colony: Thomas Baldridge, for example, who though originally a servant, had served under Calvert as assemblyman, sheriff, coroner, and lieutenant in the militia before becoming “captain and commander” of the rebels; and most notably Nathaniel Pope. Arriving as a freeman, Pope bought Calvert’s house and transformed it into an inn and the site for the Assembly’s meetings; from this connection he drew subsidies and opportunities for profit, which he fully exploited. “Pope’s fort” became the main rebel stronghold and Pope himself the respected face of the Protestant resistance.58

  Picking up such followers as he moved into the colony, Ingle aimed to seize St. Mary’s City but turned first to Cornwallis’s recently built and well-fortified Cross House, the finest dwelling in the colony, which, he said, he was obliged to confiscate lest it be used as a royalist fort against him. Though Cornwallis had been his business partner and friend, Ingle looted the house of everything of value, down to the hardware on the doors and windows, reducing it to “a most pitifull ruines, spoiled and defaced,” which he used as a warehouse for his plundered goods and a holding station for captured Catholics. (Cornwallis would later value the loss and damage at £2,623.) After pillaging farm after farm and confiscating whole storehouses of tobacco, Ingle turned to the Brents’ property, on Kent Island and elsewhere, ransacked it thoroughly (Giles Brent would estimate the loss at £1,254), burned the books (“them Papist divells”), and arrested Brent himself in the name of Parliament, along with Lewger and other Catholic leaders, all of whom he took back with him to England as prisoners. Fathers White and Copley he transported in chains. Meanwhile his gangs tore into the Catholics’ manor houses, such as they were, and seized whatever of value they could lay their hands on. Ingle usually kept for himself the tobacco and whatever silver plate he found, leaving the rest to his followers. The Jesuits were particular targets. All of their substantial property was confiscated—cattle, furnishings, linens, books, ceremonial objects, and luxury items of gold and silver. As the raids continued, many of the settlers in the affected areas fled across the Potomac for refuge in Virginia, while Ingle began compiling charges against his victims to use at home as justification for his looting.59

  Ingle’s personal rampage was brief; he left for England in 1645. But the rebellion wore on, and the damage deepened, leaving a trail of ravaged and stolen property, disordered lives, and social disarray. Ingle had not meant to destroy the colony nor to plunder every farm and household. His main goal had been to make a killing in trade, licit or illicit, and to profit from the political upheaval. So he was selective in his raids in Maryland, targeting Catholics and anyone he could describe as a royalist. As a result the damage in the colony went deeper than simply the loss of property and social disorder. The raids gave expression to the resentments of indentured servants, debtors, and tenants seeking independence from manorial landowners; they weakened the authority of the manor lords; and they threw the legitimacy of Baltimore’s proprietorship into question.

  By the late summer of 1645 Calvert was in Virginia raising an invasion force while a makeshift group of Protestants claimed to be governing Maryland, and a petition was circulating in England for the annulment of Baltimore’s charter. There, first in the admiralty courts, then in the civil courts, Ingle’s fortunes were thrown into confusion. His claims for the ownership of the property he had looted were met by effective counterclaims, his petitions by counterpetitions. Nothing worked in his favor. The Dutch ship was returned to its owners; his prisoners were freed (though Father White languished in prison for a time); his loot was declared illegal; and he ended up defending himself against the Catholics’ countersuits. At the same time Baltimore, in an adroit political and legal campaign, managed to retain the legal control of his great proprietorship.

  It was left to Calvert, however, encouraged and instructed by his brother, Lord Baltimore, to begin the colony’s restoration. Despite the fact that many of Maryland’s militiamen had sympathized with the rebels and refused to support the government, Calvert gradually reassembled a small but reliable armed force to supplement the troops he had gathered in Virginia. After issuing a general pardon for all who submitted to Baltimore’s authority, he mollified dissidents on Kent Island as well as on the mainland, co-opted the popularly elected provincial Assembly, and moved quickly to make up the demographic losses. But the basis of any true recovery lay in resolving the religious conflict that had been so viciously and deliberately exacerbated by Ingle. So Calvert did what he could to temper the “ill-governed zeale” of the most passionate Catholics, criminalizing their “offensive & indiscrete speech,” appointed Prot
estants, not Catholic manor lords, to a new ruling Council, guaranteed the Assembly freedom to speak and debate as before, and on his deathbed enacted Baltimore’s risky appointment of William Stone to the governorship.

  A Protestant Virginia planter connected to the Parliamentary forces in England, son of an influential London merchant close to the Puritan leaders, and in minor ways an associate of both Claiborne and Ingle, Stone swore an oath, on taking office, not to molest Catholics and to recruit new settlers to the colony. At that point Baltimore, in an effort to secure his control of the colony and maintain peace and order in the future, took two major steps. He devised a series of oaths requiring all officeholders, Protestant and Catholic, to attest their loyalty to the Crown, to agree not to molest any Christian in the practice of religion, and to pledge fealty to himself as the colony’s proprietor. And in addition, “for the more quiett and peaceable government of this province,” he issued his famous Act Concerning Religion.60

  That document was radical in the context of the time since it protected “conscience in matters of religion” and the free right to worship, and urged people of differing confessions to live together in peace under the same government and avoid using inflammatory terms like “heritick, scismatick, idolator, puritan,…prespiterian, popish prest,…jesuited papist, Lutheran, Calvenist, anabaptist, brownist … sepa[ra]tist, or any other.” Yet in a larger sense the act was conservative. Its toleration was limited to trinitarian Christians (the Maryland Assembly added clauses mandating death to those who denied the trinity) and it in no way stated the principle of the separation of church and state or of total freedom of religious thought. A pragmatic effort to allow people of different Christian confessions to live together in peace, the act, which extended Baltimore’s original instruction on freedom of religion, explicitly acknowledged the Puritans’ dominance in England and the Protestant majority in Maryland while protecting the colony’s Catholics.61

  Consistent with Baltimore’s views of toleration and the urgency to increase the colony’s population, he sent a delegation to Boston—which the Jesuits denounced as the seat of the “most bigoted” sectarians—to solicit prospective farmers for his province. In this he was unsuccessful, but five years later, in 1648, Governor Stone, in the same spirit, invited the Bennetts’ community of Puritans, long settled on the Nansemond River in Virginia but now harassed by the Anglican regime of that colony, to migrate to Maryland as a body and take up residence there. Well connected to important Puritan merchants in England and devoted to creating their own ideal community free from “the wild boar” of corruption that would “destroy the Lord’s vineyard”—a Jerusalem free of all those foul influences that would pollute “the waters of the Sanctuary”—most of these Chesapeake Puritans, devoted to living and expanding the godly life, took up residence at a remote spot on the Severn River some seventy miles north of St. Mary’s City. There they formed a self-governing community of several hundred—perhaps six hundred—souls, which they called Providence. Industrious, well-organized, and competent, they quickly and systematically staked out their land claims and plunged into the colony’s politics. They were determined to set the world right, especially in this papal enclave, and promptly sent seven burgesses to the Assembly, one of whom would soon become speaker.

  But if Baltimore and his deputies thought that a Protestant governor, loyalty oaths, a toleration act, a Protestant majority in the Assembly and Council, and an influential Puritan enclave would save the colony from further trouble in England, they were badly mistaken. The Council of State in England included Maryland in its declaration of 1649 asserting Parliament’s authority over England’s dominions beyond the seas, and it created a commission to “reduce” any authorities that resisted.62

  Most active among the commissioners in Maryland were the leader of the Providence Puritans, Richard Bennett, and the ubiquitous William Claiborne, still determined to recover Kent Island and the trading empire he had created. When Stone insisted on maintaining the proprietor’s authority on the island, the commissioners, in the name of the Commonwealth of England, promptly dismissed him and his Council from office, replaced them with Puritans, and led the Assembly in repealing the Act Concerning Religion, disfranchising all Catholics and denying them freedom of worship.

  Stone, reinforced by word from England that Baltimore’s chartered rights had been vindicated, resisted and mobilized his army of some 250 men. His efforts at persuasion and negotiation, as he moved north, failed. When his men were asked to show their authorization, a Commonwealth pamphleteer sardonically reported, “They would in a proud bravado clap their hands on their swords and say, Here is a commission.” They approached the Puritan headquarters on the Severn on March 25, 1655, the writer continued, shouting “Come ye rogues, roundheaded dogs” to hastily gathered Puritan troops, who were “crying to the Lord of Hosts and King of Sion for counsel, strength, and courage.” When the order was given to the Puritan troops, “In the name of God, fall on; God is our strength,” the pamphleteer continued, the Marylanders replied “Hey for Saint Maries.” Each side accused the other of firing the first fatal shot. The outcome was perhaps determined, as some alleged, by the “glorious presence of the Lord of Hosts manifested in and towards his poor oppressed people,” since an armed merchantman from New England suddenly appeared on the Severn and blocked Stone’s retreat from direct enemy fire. Surrounded and fired on from three sides, his troops were quickly subdued and taken prisoner, their arms and supplies seized. About fifty men were said to have been killed or wounded in the action.

  If, as Bennett’s Puritans proclaimed, God was “the onely worker of this victory and deliverance,” He was not a very merciful victor. Stone’s men had surrendered upon promise of quarter, but ten were immediately condemned to death and four were actually executed. William Lewis, the Catholic zealot whose “indiscrete speech” Calvert had sought to temper, was “shot to death … in cold bloud,” Stone’s wife reported to Baltimore, “the like barbarous act was never done amongst Christians.” The others were saved, it was said, only by “the incessant petitioning and begging of some good women … some being sav’d just as they were leading out to execution.” Stone himself survived only as a result of the pleas of “the enemies owne souldiers.” But his property and that of all the leading proprietary men was sequestered. Loyalty oaths were repudiated and plunder followed. The houses of the few surviving Jesuits were ransacked, the priests themselves forced to flee to a miserable exile in Anglican Virginia, and property throughout the colony was confiscated. The upheaval continued until in 1657 Baltimore, maneuvering in the swirling politics of Cromwellian England, was able to recover his province from the Puritan insurrectionists who had ruled the colony in the name of a vengeful God.63

  THE “PLUNDERING TIME” and the battle with and triumph of the Puritans had devastating effects. Property, just beginning to be developed and cultivated, had been destroyed; savage animosities had exploded with deadly results; the entire basis of the struggling colony—political, legal, and social—had been undermined. Baltimore’s hoped-for manorial aristocracy, already eroded before 1645, had largely disappeared. Some of the manor lords had died and had not been replaced; some had fled the turmoil of Ingle’s rebellion; some had become ordinary farmers. Most of the designated manors had proved to be ragged tobacco farms, short on labor and capital and indistinguishable from other tobacco farms that were multiplying along the river banks and the interior waterways. By 1652 the lands of even the most successful manor, Thomas Gerard’s St. Clement’s, were being sold off in small freeholds instead of being held for eventual leasing, and current leaseholders began purchasing their farms.64

  There was no security or firmly established way of life. The future was entirely unpredictable. The possibility that a concerted Indian attack, like that of 1622 in Virginia, would destroy the outnumbered Europeans and reduce their farms to rubble was real. Baltimore had regained his legal title to the colony, but his political and ideological op
ponents in England and the irredentist Virginians, led by the relentless Claiborne, were still active. There was no way of anticipating whether the flow of immigrants, necessary for the development of the economy, would continue. And if there were immigrants, who would they be? Not Catholics, surely; most likely that “scumme of the people … vagrants and runnewayes … debauched, idle, lazie squanderers, jaylbirds, and the like”—precisely those Wintour had so feared and condemned.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Chesapeake’s New World

  1

  WELL BEFORE 1660, when Lord Baltimore had recovered full possession of his proprietary colony and when the most tumultuous conflicts in that colony had subsided, a pattern of life had begun to emerge throughout the Chesapeake lands different from what had been known before, far different from what the original sponsors had hoped for and designed. The most powerful propulsions were created by the knowledge, spreading throughout the British archipelago, that after all the barbarism of the initial settlements, planters—even small and middle-level planters—in the Chesapeake region were beginning to pile profit upon profit by growing tobacco; that there, and throughout the North American coastal region, land was available for private ownership and cultivation; and that the value of the land, even undeveloped land, was rising as settlement expanded. The result was rapid population growth.

  In the late 1640s and the years that followed, newcomers arrived by the hundreds, then by the thousands—eight to nine thousand per decade in the 1630s and 1640s. Prominent among them, attracted by the region’s widely publicized profitability, were free, independent migrants who arrived with family, one or two servants, and some small savings. They came from slightly higher levels of society than most of the indentees and were more likely to have skills, useful connections, and some small capital to rebuild their lives. Some had social pretensions. Of a sample of over four hundred such free émigrés, almost a third claimed gentry status, and 27 percent claimed to be “merchants” of one sort or another. But these were not equivalents to the aristocrats and gentry of the earliest years of settlement, for whom Virginia had been a scientific curiosity and its founding an adventure or a patriotic challenge to the claims of rival powers. These free, uncommitted emigrants, outnumbered by indentured servants by three or four to one, were impelled by the same search for security as were the servants. They too were willing to risk resettlement and labor in the tobacco world to avoid material and social decline.1