In time, through successive revisions and expansions of the early laws of servitude in the two colonies, such confusions, ambiguities, and anomalies would be eliminated. Both colonies outlawed conversion to Christianity as grounds for manumission (Virginia as early as 1667), encouraged mating among slaves but did not recognize blacks’ marriages as legal and banished whites who married blacks, restricted slaves’ movements without passes, mandated the automatic expulsion of newly freed slaves, relieved masters of the charge of felony whose “correction” of a slave ended in the slave’s death, limited slaves’ access to arms and legal processes, and after “peculiar contortions,” William Wiecek writes, “in efforts to make a human being into a vendible thing,” settled on the compromise of “chattel personal.”27
In the end, in both colonies, though with less rigor in Maryland, the ultimate logic of chattel slavery was reached. Slavery would be, and would remain, a condition of unqualified, total, lifelong servitude, a form of bondage that would apply only to blacks and mulattoes, and to all blacks and mulattoes, except the very few who were legally free; and it would be heritable through matrilineal lines. Slaves would be chattel in the eyes of the law, to be dealt with, disposed of, as such, and any limitations in that status would only be matters of personal indulgence, the law being universally and fully enforced by constabulary authority where it existed, by vigilantism, by brute power.
There was logic but no prior design in the development of this barbarous system of human debasement, nor had it been inherited or borrowed from abroad. It had been devised in the course of three generations by ambitious planters and merchants in the Chesapeake colonies desperate for profits, familiar with human degradation, and freed from moral scruples by their deep, pervasive racism.
4
This Chesapeake upper class, an incipient gentry or aristocracy, grew quickly in the middle years of the century as the tobacco industry expanded and with it successful claims to large parcels of land. The dominant planters—dominant in the political as well as the economic life of the Chesapeake colonies—were, and would remain, a loose association of large-scale landowners and tobacco producers, not a tightly bound oligarchy with consolidated interests. Originally a small group, it emerged from two quite different sources: from among the more successful of the local, resident tobacco farmers aspiring to greater affluence, some of whom had arrived as children and servants in the 1620s, and from groups of new arrivals in the tempestuous 1640s and the three decades that followed, immigrants who carried with them more elevated statuses, better funding, and connections that would serve them well.
The former—the successful locals: Spencer, Wood, Menefie, Utie—having fought their way up step by step in difficult circumstances after the initial convulsions of settlement, and having survived Indian wars and disease, had slowly added to their property, with the help of their merchant associates, to build substantial estates, and had found their way into public office to protect their interests. By the 1640s their personal presence was fading: Menefie died in 1647, Utie in 1640; but their properties descended as substantial estates to the following generation. Adam Thoroughgood, the vicar’s son who had begun as a servant, was able to pass on an estate of some six thousand acres. So too William Spencer, once a “yeoman” with a farm of only twelve acres, bequeathed, as “Wm Spencer, Gent.,” over 3,500 acres to heirs who would remain in Virginia’s ruling gentry. Maryland was no different. There too a small group, like Clocker and Fenwick, worked their way out of servitude to achieve affluence and public authority by dint of hard work, shrewd dealings, and luck.28
Thus the survivors and local successes of the first generations of Chesapeake planters who had emerged from within the abrasions of the earlier migrations and had managed, in crude ways, to establish a measure of economic and political control, had passed on their properties and their statuses to successors, who would become part of a more stable society than their predecessors had known. It was a society shaped by the style of a new wave of immigrants of the middle years of the century, more affluent than the earlier, self-made planters, more sophisticated, closer to the currents of life in metropolitan Britain, and closer too to the cosmopolitan structures of the greater Atlantic world.
IN VIRGINIA the character of the new generation of leaders was anticipated by the arrival in 1642 of Sir William Berkeley as governor. Though more distinguished in social status and family connections than those of the middle class, gentry, and lesser nobility who would soon follow, Berkeley exemplified their condition in two respects. Like many of them, he had prior family connections with the colony which he hoped to exploit, and he was a younger son of a prominent family cast off by primogeniture from inheriting a major part of the family’s fortune and position and forced to fend for himself.
Berkeley’s father, Sir Maurice, had been a substantial investor in the Virginia Company and had played an active role in its politics. His five sons, of whom William was the fourth, grew up surrounded by talk of overseas ventures and investments and in contact with men who were personally involved in colonial settlements. Like the other original investors in the defunct Virginia Company, Sir Maurice retained the hope that something could still be retrieved from his stake in the colony, and his awareness of that distant world, if not his material hopes, was passed on to his sons. While the eldest, Charles, inherited the family estate, young William was forced to cast about for a suitable career. He acquired a fashionable education at Oxford, spent two leisurely years in legal studies at the Inns of Court, traveled in Europe for three years, and then accepted a fellowship at Merton College. But though highly literate, he found academic life, even for one of his social standing, which freed him from pedestrian duties, too isolated and routine, and he turned to the royal court for employment and for a path to security and prominence.
A well-educated, stylish, dilettantish young man, one of Lord Falkland’s circle of litterateurs and wits, Berkeley fitted in well enough with the sophisticated life of the court. He attended to his duties as a gentleman of the king’s Privy Chamber, tried his hand at fashionable playwriting (his scripts notable for their “scrappy cadences,…flashes of wit, [and] the pungent turn of phrase”), and served as an envoy abroad. But as his fate was increasingly linked to that of the king, his insecurities grew with the rebellious mood of the nation, and he was disappointed in his failure to achieve the prominence he sought. The Scots’ invasion and the political turmoil in London that culminated in Parliament’s challenge to Crown authority unsettled him, and after Strafford’s execution in May 1641, he looked for ways of escape and renewal. He considered an appointment as envoy to Constantinople but dropped that when he heard of the possibility of the governorship of Virginia. Not that that post was vacant: the incumbent, Sir Francis Wyatt, was a competent and experienced governor; but the position was within the control of Berkeley’s supporters at court. Once alerted he moved quickly. Mobilizing all of his family’s influence at court, especially that of his eldest brother, Sir Charles Berkeley, who was close to the king, and with the additional support of both Lord Falkland and Edward Hyde, the future Earl of Clarendon, whom he had known at the Inns of Court, he was able to buy Wyatt off and secure the appointment. The transaction was formalized in July 1641. Shortly thereafter, accompanied by some three dozen servants, he sailed off to Virginia, and in March 1642 he took up his post in the colony.29
In the years that followed—years that at home saw the successful rebellion against the monarchy, the suppression and dispersal of Crown adherents, the triumphs and turmoils of the Commonwealth, and then the restoration of the monarchy and of England’s prosperity—Virginia became a refuge for a small but influential group of royalists and a land of opportunity for members of substantial families and others with funds to invest and connections to exploit. Berkeley, dismayed by the state of the colony, quickly became an active promoter of the migration of displaced royalists and ambitious younger sons. “Industriously,” his friend Lord Clarendon would later rec
all in his History of the Rebellion, Berkeley “invited many gentlemen and others thither, as to a place of security” that could be defended against Parliament’s forces and where they could live plentifully. As a result, “many persons of condition, and good officers in the war … transported themselves, with all the estate they had been able to preserve.” In fact, Clarendon wrote, so confident was Berkeley that Virginia would be a secure refuge that “he writ to the King almost inviting him thither, as to a place that wanted nothing.” Berkeley’s confidence was misplaced; Parliament’s forces quickly took control of the colony. But Virginia, perhaps because of Berkeley, continued to be thought of by some as “the onely citty of refuge left in his Majesties dominions … for distressed Cavallers,” and a few of the most exposed royalists did arrive and settled in promising circumstances.30
Sir William Berkeley (illustration credit 7.1)
Lady Frances Culpeper Stephens Berkeley Ludwell, thirty-one years younger than he (illustration credit 7.2)
They were a strange, rather disreputable lot, flamboyantly active for a time but no founders of a distinct “royalist” culture. They came from all over the realm—from Yorkshire, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, Kent, Sussex, and Gloucestershire—and their interests were as diverse as their geographical origins. What distinguished them from others of the upper gentry or aristocracy was not their culture or lifestyle or folkways but their politics, their active loyalty to the Crown in a time of crisis, and their opportunistic escape to Virginia.31
Sir Thomas Lunsford was perhaps the most vivid personality among them. He had been imprisoned for the attempted murder of a neighbor in Sussex, had led royal troops against the Scots (boasting of having personally shot two mutineers), and had been dismissed as lieutenant of the Tower of London on Parliament’s charge that he was an indebted, quarrelsome desperado contemplating a popish coup. Defeated after fighting for the Crown in several engagements, he fled to Holland, where in 1649 he managed to get a pass for himself and his family to settle in Virginia. With a reputation for sadistic violence, described by his own cousin as an outlaw given to “lewdness and dissoluteness” and proud of being known as a “swaggering ruffian,” Lunsford no doubt found his appointment as the lieutenant-general of Virginia’s militia a soft assignment, but it was a major position if in a minor province, and he wasted no time in taking advantage of it. Granted over three thousand acres of good tobacco land, he promptly married Ralph Wormeley’s niece, the widow of the colony’s influential secretary, Richard Kempe, and thus secured a connection with a prosperous, long-settled family. The connections would be further strengthened when Lunsford’s daughter married Ralph Wormeley II, whose mother-in-law was his first cousin and whose wife therefore was his cousin once removed.32
This kind of kinship clustering was typical of the small royalist group that gathered around Berkeley. Sir Henry Chicheley, Lieutenant Colonel of Horse in Cambridgeshire, having given security that he would do nothing prejudicial to the Commonwealth government, arrived in Virginia in 1650. Within a year he had married Ralph Wormeley I’s widow and had taken over her 5,200-acre estate, Rosegill, on the Rappahannock River, which became a center of the colony’s higher social life. In time Chicheley would serve twice as governor and earn the description by his successor as governor, the courtier Lord Thomas Culpeper (himself a venal, profiteering adventurer, whose cousin Frances Culpeper married Berkeley), as “that lumpe, that masse of dulnesse, that worse than nothing.”33
Chicheley had not seemed so dull or lumpish when he was first noticed in Virginia by another well-placed royalist, Maj. Henry Norwood, Berkeley’s cousin, who had fought for the king at Bristol and Worcester and then fled England “as from a place,” he wrote, “infected with the plague … to travel any where to shun so hot a contagion.” The voyage of the Virginia Merchant, carrying him and numerous other royalist refugees, including the Majors Francis Moryson, Richard Fox, and Francis Lovelace, had been a horrendous nightmare: devastating storms, shipwreck, starvation, and possibly cannibalism. Arrived finally at the Chesapeake’s Eastern Shore, Norwood made his way to the York River settlements and there came on the “feasting and carousing” at Ralph Wormeley’s house, where he found “intimate acquaintance[s],” among them, besides Lunsford and Chicheley, Sir Philip Honeywood, a cavalry major disgraced with his chief, Prince Rupert, after the surrender of Bristol, and Col. Robert Hammond, former captain and governor of the Isle of Wight.34
How many royalists, strictly speaking—that is, Crown adherents active in defense of the king who had been forced into exile—removed to Virginia is not known; a rough estimate of “a couple of hundred” is probably high; and many of the most prominent, like Norwood, Hammond, Honeywood, and Lovelace, returned to Europe quickly, to serve in the entourage of the exiled Charles II, eventually in the Restoration court. Of those who remained, only a dozen or so became prominent and had some influence on the colony’s public life, its reputation, and its social aspirations.35
In time their distinction as royalists of the rebellion years blurred into the more general pattern of the lives of the numerous sons and other relatives of substantial merchant and gentry families who appeared in the Chesapeake colonies in the same middle years of the seventeenth century. Some had royalist leanings, but their fortunes were not shaped by politics; nor had they been forced to emigrate. They had material interests in mind, the kind of interests that Berkeley appealed to repeatedly in person when in England, in correspondence, and in promotional publications.
False, he wrote in a memo prepared for the Council on Foreign Plantations in 1662, was the charge that only “those of the meanest quality and corruptest lives” had settled in Virginia. Its population, he said, included “men of as good families as any subjects in England,” and he listed the sonorous names of the earliest years (Percys, Wests, Throgmortons) and of later times (Wyatts, Chicheleys, Morysons, Kempes). The colony was subject to many burdens, especially the unfortunate reliance on tobacco as its sole profitable product, which Berkeley appealed to the Privy Council to overcome by a policy of economic diversification. But the potential was there for great wealth in raw materials (“iron, lead, pitch, tar, masts, timber”) and commodities easily produced (“flax, hemp, silk, wheat, barley, oats, rice, cotton”). It was a perfect place, he wrote, in words almost identical to those of Baltimore and Robert Wintour, for “indigent younger brothers whom the peculiar policy of this nation condemned to poverty or war.” Now there was no need for them to suffer, “for a small summe of money will enable a younger brother to erect a flourishing family in a new world, and adde more strength, wealth, and honour to his native country then thousands did before, that dyed forgotten and unrewarded in an unjust war.”36
It was to this appeal, whether delivered by Berkeley or circulated by word of mouth among knowledgeable families, especially those with earlier ties to the Chesapeake colonies, that a cohort of ambitious young men responded in the middle years of the century. Whatever their political leanings, they all saw opportunities opening before them. In time—and shortly—they combined with the successful planters of earlier years and the royalist notables who remained in the colony to create a dominant establishment that would persist, to secure its control in the eighteenth century.
Such were the Blands, whose investments in the colony dated back to 1618, three of whose sons emigrated in the 1640s and 1650s to extract what profits they could from the family’s potential assets. Lewis Burwell arrived in the late 1640s to exploit his father’s early subscription to the company. The first William Byrd arrived somewhat later, around 1670, to assume the Virginia properties of his mother’s family, the Steggs, which dated back to the early days of the company. The Diggeses’ interests stemmed from Sir Dudley Digges’s and his two sons’ investments, but it would be a third son, Edward, who, emigrating in 1650, established the American branch of the family. Similarly, the first of the Masons arrived in 1652 to claim assets then thirty-two years old. So too, in the ten or fifteen years eith
er side of 1650, came the first of the Lees, the Carters, the Beverleys, the Ludwells, the Washingtons, and, a few years later, that ambitious draper’s son, William Fitzhugh.37
The advent of similar groups in Maryland was delayed by the turmoil of the “plundering time.” When that struggle subsided, the recruitment of a new gentry leadership resumed with the arrival of newcomers, fewer but no less ambitious than the new gentry of Virginia and equally able to create close networks of local kin. They too maintained close ties with England and the broadening structure of its Atlantic connections.
The Neale family’s history threaded through the fabric of Maryland’s emerging society. Col. James Neale, of a Catholic royalist family, had been among Maryland’s first settlers; in the 1630s he had marked out Wollaston Manor, named after the family’s home in Northamptonshire, on a grant of two thousand acres adjoining the Potomac River. Upon Charles I’s death, he returned to England and joined the exiled court of Charles II, which he served as ambassador to Spain and Portugal, while his wife attended the queen, Henrietta Maria. At the Restoration the family, which now included several children, among them the twelve-year-old Henrietta Maria Neale, returned to the colony. At nineteen, Henrietta Maria, said to be the queen’s goddaughter, began the series of marriages that would form a web among the new, scattered Maryland gentry and that conveys vividly the melding of religious confessions in this nascent, pragmatically tolerant colony.
Though a devout Catholic all her life, Henrietta Maria married first Richard Bennet II, the son of the Puritan leader who had fled Anglican Virginia to lead the settlement at Providence, and brought up their two children as Catholics. Her second marriage, four years later, was to a land-rich Anglican, Philemon Lloyd. The couple’s nine children were raised as Protestants, and eventually, together with the Bennett children, they formed a frontier dynasty in their marriages to prominent families, Catholic and Protestant. Henrietta Maria Neale Bennett Lloyd (“Madam Lloyd” in her later years) died rich, or at least land rich. Among her bequests was a gift of over eight hundred acres to the Catholic Church in Maryland.38
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