The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675
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The growing dangers were all around him. The Dutch pastors were required to preach in English, and the new appointees were more Anglicized and cooperative with the Crown officials than their staunch predecessors had been. In the months when Leisler was struggling with the Van Rensselaer affair, the governor issued a new loyalty oath to be signed by all. When the entire Dutch merchant leadership, led by Steenwyck, rose in protest demanding the rights they had been given at the surrender, Andros jailed them all, convicted them, in a court of English officials, of promoting rebellion, and seized all their property. With no hope of appeal or redress, the Dutch leaders eventually capitulated, but at the cost of one-third of their property. Their trial left deep scars in the Dutch community and such fears of biased English juries that they withdrew from the official courts whenever they could and sought justice among themselves in the consistory of their Reformed church.29
There was no settled pattern of life in New York, only a slow and at times contentious process by which the mixed multitude of the Dutch years, soon to be supplemented by Huguenots and German Pietists, grew into a new community dominated by the English. Slowly and persistently English laws, language, and institutions were beginning to penetrate the lives of the minor ethnic groups and to press against the majority Dutch who clung to their inherited ways. The consolidation of economic interests and kinship among the major merchant families, Dutch and English, tended to weaken ethnic differences, as did the shared interest of the most successful merchants in establishing great estates on the Hudson, suitable properties for landed gentlemen of whatever ethnic origin and excellent soils for valuable grain production. Philipse lived to see his tenants—one hundred or more—on his 90,000-acre manor, Philipsburg, loading his sloops with grain for bolting in Manhattan and shipment overseas as flour. By 1700 his 200-square-mile estate had acquired two baronial neighbors to the north: the Hudson River estate of the American-born Dutchman Stephanus van Cortlandt and that of the recently arrived Scotsman Robert Livingston, whose marriage into the Schuyler and Van Rensselaer families was a notable event in ethnic relations.30
In the land to the south—the Chesapeake region, stretching from the Delaware River south to the James and from the Atlantic coast to the Piedmont—the distinctive social order that had been forming took on, in the post-Restoration era, not steadily and peacefully but haltingly and contentiously, its permanent characteristics. Though still fluid in composition, it was deeply hierarchical in structure. At the base of the free population, in the immediate post-Restoration period, was a restive underclass of freedmen. Of the fortunes and misfortunes of this fast-growing part of the free population in Virginia—the most powerless of the Europeans, the most viciously exploited, and the most combative—Edmund Morgan has written eloquently. Most were rootless, impoverished, and faced with a grim fact of life. Land, which they sought above all else, continued to rise in price as the population grew, as established households expanded and spread across the land, and as large-scale land speculation became increasingly common.
The freedmen of Virginia, Morgan writes, were bound to be “losers.” To the relatively secure, ambitious small and middle-level planters seeking to expand their holdings, as well as to the rising gentry, the freedmen, land poor and desperate, became competitors and constituted a threat that the planters sought to contain. Through their representatives in the House of Burgesses, the planters passed laws that extended, by all sorts of devices, the length of servants’ bondage; imposed penalties for idleness and bastardry; and granted loans that tied the freedmen in webs of debt. In desperation, the newly released servants either moved west to poor lands often directly exposed to Indian threats or drifted footloose from county to county in search of security. Commonly they simply bowed to the immediate pressures and became tenants, often of the planters who had been their masters and who were now their landlords and creditors. In 1642 more than half of Maryland’s freedmen were tenants, and they were often indebted. For a man alone, Morgan writes, “whose next year’s crop would be the result only of his own labor, debt might be a road back to servitude.” Often those who did manage to get an edge on the system and acquire a piece of land found that their plot was located so far from a river or navigable stream that marketing a crop was especially difficult and expensive.31
But while the industrious, prospering small and middle-level planters were beset by threats from the freedmen—those “terrible young men,” Morgan calls them, capable of all kinds of incivility, from thievery to tax dodging and support of servant uprisings—the gentry class was forming in large part from among the recently arrived claimants to established properties (the Byrds, the Masons, the Carters, the Blands), together with the successful survivors of the pioneering generations who had money to invest and the desire to build substantial estates. Prominent by the 1670s, they were firmly in control of county affairs as local magistrates and major entrepreneurs, with influence in the colony’s government through their deputies in the House of Burgesses. Some—but only a few—had ties to the highest circle, the Governor’s Council, and to the newly arrived royal officials responsible for tax collection, customs regulations, and the management of land grants. Loosely associated, they formed a dominant political and economic group, the Green Spring faction, named after Berkeley’s plantation, bound together by patronage, shared interests, and above all, kinship.
So Thomas Ludwell, Berkeley’s cousin, became the colony’s secretary of state; he was succeeded by his brother Philip, who would marry Berkeley’s widow. Lady Berkeley, in turn, the second cousin of Thomas Lord Culpeper, who would become governor in 1675 (but who arrived, temporarily, only in 1680), was the sister of Alexander Culpeper, whom Berkeley appointed surveyor general, a post he held for twenty-three years while resident in England and exercised through deputies. William Byrd’s growing affluence was in large part the result of his officeholding, which derived from his wife’s connections with Lady Berkeley.
Officials, often in tandem with the new gentry, scoured the land for properties to reserve for future use, including territory beyond the Indian treaty line, which Berkeley fervently sought to preserve. Clashes with the aggressive Susquehannocks were looming possibilities; clashes with the resident small planters were inevitable. The most notorious and complex struggle was over the disposition of the Northern Neck, the vast domain between the Rappahannock and Potomac rivers, at least one million acres. In 1649 the exiled Charles II had granted that princely territory to a group of his supporters, despite the fact—no doubt ignorant of the fact—that much of it had already been patented by prescient speculators. By 1653 there were approximately thirteen hundred people at work on the land; by 1674 they would be close to six thousand. The immensely tangled legal struggle that resulted between the new proprietors—among whom were Berkeley’s brother and brother-in-law, his wife’s cousin Thomas Lord Culpeper, and her father, Thomas Culpeper—and the resident planters and earlier speculators would drag on well into the eighteenth century. And it was further complicated by the king’s grant in 1674 of all of Virginia’s remaining public lands for thirty-one years to two loyal friends, one of them the ubiquitous Thomas Lord Culpeper.32
The Northern Neck controversy was only the most famous of the struggles created by the great wave of land speculation that was leading to the patenting and hence removing from the market of great swaths of otherwise accessible land in expectation of lucrative rents and sales at elevated prices.
By the 1650s most of the valuable land in the lower James, York, and Rappahannock river areas had been patented, and much of it brought under cultivation. Speculators had begun patenting land along the Potomac River, where several new counties had been quickly formed. By 1660 thirty individuals held patents for one hundred thousand acres along the Potomac. At the same time the inland areas of the York and Rappahannock rivers were being reserved, and plots in the range of ten to fifteen thousand acres were being patented on the Eastern Shore. The years 1650–75 were the boom period of Che
sapeake land speculation. In that quarter century Virginians patented 2,350,000 acres, only small portions of which were being farmed.33
Of the speculators, the most flamboyant and high-flying were the new Crown officials and their associates among the rising gentry. And it was they, consistent with their avaricious land dealings, who led the way to the profoundly consequential transformation of the labor force. The widespread adoption of slavery in the post-Restoration years, as the key force in tobacco production, completed the transformation of the Chesapeake world. It had been widely understood, well before 1650, that in the long run slaves were more profitable laborers than servants. Planters in Maryland and Virginia knew as well as Emmanuel Downing in Massachusetts that it was cheaper to maintain twenty “Moores” than one English servant.
But only in the long run. Slaves were expensive—a healthy adult male was priced at about £23 at midcentury—and required at least a modicum of lifelong care. Ordinary planters could seldom afford them and could not easily include them within the family structure of their farms. But increasingly slaves appear in the records of the more affluent, and by 1675, as the result of hundreds of private, unrecorded decisions, they became common on the region’s plantations. The change was rapid. By the 1650s slaves could be found almost everywhere on the larger plantations on the lower James and York rivers, often working side by side with servants; by the 1660s, 15 percent of York County’s population was black. By 1670 over half of the estates in both Virginia and Maryland had slaves, and thereafter their importation boomed, not uniformly across the region but differentially, according to affluence and influence. The councilors and officials took the lead, Lorena Walsh writes, in buying slaves, “followed by burgesses and other county-level officeholders.… Overall, officeholders controlled between two-thirds and three-quarters of enslaved bondpeople.” Two-thirds of all officeholders in both Virginia and Maryland owned slaves, while only 6 percent of nonofficeholding planters did. The majority of the tobacco producers rarely owned any. So the rich and politically powerful grew more powerful and more expansive. The record of the growth and distribution in the ownership of slaves reflects the emergence of a racist, patriarchal culture. But in the 1670s it was newly formed, strange, uncertain, and taut with inner tensions.34
By 1675 the stress lines in Chesapeake society had become clear. A restive, footloose, unsettled population of land-hungry former servants exposed to Indian assaults pressed against an established population of small-scale planters and farmers active in the local courts and, through their deputies, in the Burgesses. They in turn were sensitive to pressure from increasingly aggressive gentry families intent on creating great estates that required demanding personal management. The most successful of the newly risen gentry collaborated, when they could, with the powerful and erratic Crown officials, none of whom were native to the land, few of whom spent much time in the land, and all of whom took office for the profits that might result. And feverish land speculation was driving up land values, to the spectacular benefit of some but for many a keen sense of real and relative deprivation.
With opportunities apparently—and distractingly—everywhere, with so much more that might be gained, discontents became heated and stirrings became explosive. A sudden destructive event could threaten the entire structure of social and political authority.
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Thus, in the barbarous years of the British and Dutch conquest of North America, commercial ambitions, the search for religious perfectionism, environmental circumstances, and the great flow of migrants, free and unfree, from Europe and Africa, had combined to produce variant ways of life, different from what had been known before. There were resemblances to earlier, familiar lifestyles, and most settlers clung, at times desperately, to what they had known and remembered. But physical circumstances and the constant mingling of peoples of varied backgrounds forced to live together created new cultural worlds. The emergent Chesapeake gentry might yearn for the stable structure of English county life and attempt to imitate it, but lacking a permanent and reliable tenancy, which was the economic foundation of the English landowning aristocracy, even the most affluent of the planters found themselves bound down to the personal management of dusty tobacco fields, responsible for a burdensome and worrisome labor force, and dependent on unpredictable incomes. Village life in nonconformist New England bore resemblances to what had been known before, but the culture of post-utopian Puritanism was unique in its pious austerity, its access to what seemed to be infinite quantities of land, and the extraordinary fecundity of its population. And the human complexity of the town on Manhattan was something new even for the residents of the cosmopolitan cities of the Netherlands, in the multiplicity of the town’s ethnic groups, in its polylingualism, in the variety of its religious confessions, and in its jarring dissonance between society and the state.
BUT THESE COASTAL SETTLEMENTS, scattered from Maine to Carolina, were not isolated from the greater world. Just as in the years before the arrival of the Europeans, the native Americans living in the same coastal territory had vital ties to far distant, powerful networks of communities deep in the interior north and west, so now the British Americans were bound to intricate networks in the far exterior south and east—to the Atlantic complex, the first “hemispheric ‘community,’ ” David Eltis writes, in human history.35
The Atlantic, transnational dimensions of their lives had been pervasive from the start, but it broadened out, as Carla Pestana has written, into the Atlantic community in the tumultuous decades of England’s Civil War and Interregnum. Decisions in Amsterdam and Rotterdam had sent small fleets of trading vessels to the Chesapeake, especially in the Civil War years, to profit from the marketing of the almost unmanageably large tobacco crop. (Exports rose from 365,000 pounds annually in the early years to 17.6 million in 1672.) Dutchmen had formed close personal ties with leading planters and stationed their own middlemen in Virginia to collect goods for rapid loading and shipping. When the navigation laws forced the Dutch out of the direct trade, their contacts had survived in other forms, especially in the coastal trade and in the hugely successful smuggling operations that became a basic component of the entire Atlantic economy. After 1664 major English merchants took over much of the tobacco trade, trans-shipping great quantities of the plant to the seemingly insatiable European markets, whose intricate movements, driven by remote political and economic forces, could shape and reshape the Chesapeake economy. (One group of powerful English merchants probed the vast Russian tobacco market; others negotiated entry into the French state monopoly.) But the trade was open to all, and when tobacco prices fell, many of London’s and the outports’ small traders, retailers, and ship captains flocked to the trade of North America and the West Indies. At least 1,304 individual traders are known to have participated in the Virginia trade, almost all of whom were involved in three or fewer voyages. And as their ships and boats moved slowly into the waterways to locate and trade with the scattered planters, social connections soon developed. As April Hatfield has explained in rich detail, it took weeks to dispose of the inbound cargoes and more weeks to gather the necessary consignments of tobacco. During those weeks and months the supercargoes, ship masters, and crews, drawn from far different parts of the Atlantic world, mingled with the planters, brought word of things abroad, formed friendships and useful associations, and helped overcome the Virginians’ isolation. So constant were these sojourns of mariners from abroad, so frequent were these dockside transactions, that the Chesapeake colonies can be said to have developed, Hatfield writes, a “pervasive maritime culture,” contributing “to the creation of an Atlantic world that was of necessity international, not fractured into national bailiwicks.” And what can be said of the social history of Chesapeake commerce can be said in even greater detail of the elaborate trading systems of the north.36
By the 1660s transnational, intersecting Atlantic trading networks, which were the primary sources of west European economic growth, had long since link
ed New York, Boston, their satellite towns, and the Chesapeake ports to western Europe, West Africa, the Wine Islands, the West Indies, and ports on the Hispanic-American mainland. By the 1670s the tangles of the overlapping trade routes were too intricate, too volatile, and too often extemporized to be described in clear, schematic form. New England merchants were carrying fish from the coastal waters and the Grand Banks to ports in Spain and the Caribbean islands, often together with provisions and cattle from their farms, and returning, legally or illegally, with sugar for trans-shipment and for the local production of molasses and rum, the profits paying in complex ways for European goods imported in constant flows. New York progressed far beyond its earlier role as a producer and marketer of furs and grain. Its many middle-level merchants (two-thirds of the 112 identifiable wholesale merchants in 1664) swarmed into the North American coastal ports north and south, trading the produce of the colony’s hinterlands for tobacco, sugar, and other exotic goods. At the same time New York’s great merchants, in all sorts of high-level transactions, roamed the distant ports of Europe, West Africa, and mainland Hispanic America, maintaining, despite political obstacles, their profitable contacts with the broad reaches of the Dutch-Atlantic trading network. They had grown rich in this Atlantic system. Philipse, in the post-Restoration era, built on his earlier successes to create a commercial empire beyond most colonists’ imagining. In addition to his manor on the Hudson, he owned houses and warehouses in New York, scores of slaves and tenants, “mills, cattle, and sloops … and at least four solely owned ships for the external trade.” A few other formerly Dutch merchants followed, but rather far behind—Steenwyck, for example, with an estate of £15,841, Loockermans, worth 520,000 guilders. All the major merchants prospered by transnational ties, legal and illegal, maintaining affiliations not only with English creditors and suppliers but with the credit, supplies, and contacts of the Low Country’s Atlantic trading patriciate.37