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

Page 69

by Bernard Bailyn


  22. Ibid., 58–61. Thus, for example, the peregrinations of the French Protestant Nicholas Martiau, who arrived in Virginia in 1620 as an agent of the Earl of Huntington. After the massacre he moved off, first, west far up the James River, and then, in 1630, north to the York River, where he opened a new area to English settlement and where in 1640 he patented thirteen hundred acres for himself and his household. Jester and Hiden, eds., Adventurers, 417–18. On the palisade of 1634: Philip Levy, “A New Look at an Old Wall,” VMHB, 112 (2004), 226–66.

  23. On the Susquehannock-Claiborne association and the role of the Susquehannocks in the tangled networks of tribal rivalries in trade and war, see Cynthia J. Van Zandt, Brothers Among Nations: The Pursuit of Intercultural Alliances in Early America, 1580–1660 (Oxford, England, 2008), 118ff.

  24. Nathaniel C. Hale, Virginia Venturer: A Historical Biography of William Claiborne 1600–1677 (Richmond, Va., 1951), 101–30, chap. 8; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 121–24.

  CHAPTER 6

  Terra-Maria

  1. R. A. Houston, The Population History of Britain and Ireland, 1500–1750 (London, 1992), 64; E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871 (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 224–28.

  2. R. J. Dickson, Ulster Emigration to Colonial America, 1718–1775 (London, 1966), 3; Ruth Dudley Edwards, An Atlas of Irish History (2nd ed., London, 1981), 172–73; M. Perceval-Maxwell, The Scottish Migration to Ulster in the Reign of James I (London, 1973), 313–14; cf. L. M. Cullen, “Population Trends in Seventeenth-Century Ireland,” Economic and Social Review, 6 (1975), 153–54.

  3. Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York, 1987), chap. 1.

  4. John Bossy, in Alan G. R. Smith, ed., The Reign of James VI and I (New York, 1973), 101–2; and Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (Oxford, England, 1976), chap. 8, esp. 188, 193; Wrigley and Schofield, Population History, table A3.3, 532.

  5. John D. Krugler, English and Catholic: The Lords Baltimore in the Seventeenth Century (Baltimore, Md., 2004), chaps. 2, 3; G. P. V. Akrigg, Jacobean Pageant… (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), 366, 358–59, 170–71; R. J. Lahey, “The Role of Religion in Lord Baltimore’s Colonial Enterprise,” MHM, 72 (1977), 498, quotation at 499n.

  6. Theodore K. Rabb, Enterprise and Empire: Merchant and Gentry Investment in the Expansion of England, 1575–1630 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 259; Krugler, English and Catholic, chap. 4.

  7. Lahey, “Role of Religion,” 495–501; Gillian T. Cell, English Enterprise in Newfoundland, 1577–1660 (Toronto, 1969), 92, 93.

  8. Gillian T. Cell, ed., Newfoundland Discovered … 1610–1630 (London, 1982), 53; Lahey, “Role of Religion,” 505–8.

  9. Krugler, English and Catholic, chap. 4, quotation at 98; Thomas M. Coakley, “George Calvert and Newfoundland: ‘The Sad Face of Winter,’ ” MHM, 71 (1976), 12–15; Cell, English Enterprise, 94, 95; Lahey, “Role of Religion,” 511. “From the middest of October to the middest of May there is a sadd face of wynter upon all this land, both sea and land so frozen for the greatest part of the tyme as they are not penetrable, not plant or vegetable thing appearing out of the earth untill it be about the beginning of May, nor fish in the sea, besides the ayre so intolerable and cold as it is hardly to be endured.” Baltimore to Charles I, Newfoundland, Aug. 19, 1629, quoted in Cell, English Enterprise, 95.

  10. Krugler, English and Catholic, chap. 5, quotation at 106; Lahey, “Role of Religion,” 509; Andrews, Colonial Period, II, 279; Vera F. Rollo, The Proprietorship of Maryland (Lanham, Md., 1989), 37ff.

  11. Wesley F. Craven, The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 1607–1689 ([Baton Rouge, La.], 1949), 189–90; Andrews, Colonial Period, II, 281–83; Krugler, English and Catholic, 125–26.

  12. Russell R. Menard, Economy and Society in Early Colonial Maryland (New York, 1985), 430–31, 25–30; A Declaration of the Lord Baltimore’s Plantation in Mary-land… (London, 1633; facsimile, ed. Lawrence C. Wroth, Baltimore, Md., 1929), 8; Woodstock Letters: A Historical Journal of Jesuit Educational and Missionary Activities, IX (1880), no. 2, 90; no. 3, 168; Krugler, English and Catholic, 112–15, 156. On White, his contributions to the Maryland promotional tracts, and the writings about him, see J. A. Leo Lemay, Men of Letters in Colonial Maryland (Knoxville, Tenn., 1972), 8–27, 349–54.

  13. A Declaration of the State of the Colonie and Affaires in Virginia… (London, 1620), in Peter Force, comp., Tracts and Other Papers Relating Principally to … the Colonies in North America… (Washington, D.C., 1836–46), III, no. 5, 3.

  14. Lawrence C. Wroth, “The Maryland Colonization Tracts,” in William W. Bishop and Andrew Keogh, eds., Essays Offered to Herbert Putnam… (New Haven, Conn., 1929), 539–55; “Objections answered touching Mariland,” in Thomas A. Hughes, History of the Society of Jesus in North America, Colonial and Federal (London and New York, 1907–10), documentary vol. I, 10–15; text vol. I, 257–59.

  15. Craven, Southern Colonies, 191; Menard, Economy and Society, 22–23.

  16. “Instructions 13 Novem: 1633…,” in Clayton C. Hall, ed., Narratives of Early Maryland, 1633–1684 (New York, 1910), 16–23.

  17. “A Short Treatise sett downe in a letter written by R. W. to his worthy freind J.C.R. Concerning the new plantation now erecting … in Maryland” ([London, September 12, 1635] printed in facsimile and transcription by John D. Krugler, Baltimore, 1976, under the title To Live Like Princes), 12, 14–16, 18, 26–31, 33, 34, 37, 38; Thomas Copley to Lord Baltimore, “St. Maries,” April 3, 1638, in John W. Lee, ed., The Calvert Papers (Maryland Historical Society Fund Publication, no. 28, Baltimore, Md., 1889), 161–62. The inventory of Wintour’s estate, Sept. 4, 1638, is in William H. Browne et al., eds., Archives of Maryland (Baltimore, Md., 1883–1972) [hereafter Md. Archives], IV, 85–89. For Wintour’s arrival in Maryland, Jan. 12, 1637, with seven people, including a fifteen-year-old boy, see “Land Notes, 1634–1655,” MHM, 5 (1910), 167. For an extended discussion of Wintour’s “Short Treatise,” see John D. Krugler, English and Catholic, 135ff.

  18. Harry W. Newman, The Flowering of the Maryland Palatinate (Washington, D.C., 1961), 155–58; Menard, Economy and Society, 30–32; Garry W. Stone, “Manorial Maryland,” MHM, 82 (1987), 6; James Axtell, “White Legend: The Jesuit Missions in Maryland,” MHM, 81 (1986), 1. Cornwallis, lamenting his “poore younger brothers fortune,” feared that his expenses in establishing himself in Maryland would impoverish him unless some kind of profits were quickly forthcoming. Lee ed., Calvert Papers, I, 176.

  19. Hall, ed., Narratives, 40; Stone, “Manorial Maryland,” 6–7; Aubrey C. Land, Colonial Maryland (White Plains, N.Y., 1981), 16–21; Woodstock Letters, II (1873), no. 1, 3; J. Frederick Fausz, “Present at the ‘Creation’: The Chesapeake World that Greeted the Maryland Colonists,” MHM, 100, no. 1 (Spring, 2005), 42.

  20. Ibid., 34, 35, 36, 42; Harold S. Bowen, “Henry Fleete,” Northern Neck Historical Magazine, 40 (1990), 4633–34, 4636; Newman, Flowering, 204–9; Henry Fleete, “A Brief Journal of a Voyage…,” in Edward D. Neill, The English Colonization of America During the Seventeenth Century (London, 1871), 237.

  21. Hall, ed., Narratives, 41.

  22. Menard, Economy and Society, 43; Hall, ed., Narratives, 42, 44.

  23. Henry C. Forman, Jamestown and St. Mary’s (Baltimore, Md., 1938), 196–99, 206–7; Stone, “Manorial Maryland,” 6–9, 11; Lois G. Carr, “ ‘The Metropolis of Maryland’…,” MHM, 69 (1974), 124–26; Menard, Economy and Society, 430–31; Lois G. Carr, Russell R. Menard, and Lorena S. Walsh, Robert Cole’s World: Agriculture and Society in Early Maryland (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991), 5, 120ff., 256.

  24. Menard, Economy and Society, 27–29; Newman, Flowering, 188–89, 226–29; Garry W. Stone, “Society, Housing, and Architecture in Early Maryland: John Lewger’s St. John’s” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1982), 155; Lee, ed., Calvert Papers, I, 172. Biographical information not otherwise documented
is taken from Edward Papenfuse et al., A Biographical Dictionary of the Maryland Legislature, 1635–1789 (2 vols., Baltimore, Md., 1979, 1985).

  25. Newman, Flowering, 163. On Lewger: Stone, “Society, Housing, and Architecture,” chap. 2, 92; on Brent and Gerard, in addition to Papenfuse et al., Biographical Dictionary, see Axtell, “White Legend,” 5; and Carr et al., Cole’s World, 5, 119ff. For the Jesuits’ account of the adoption, by Margaret Brent, of the much-loved seven-year-old Indian “princess” “to be washed in the sacred font of baptism; she is beginning to understand the Christian mysteries,” see Woodstock Letters, XI (1882), no. 1, 13; Nuran Çinlar, “ ‘Come Mistress Margarett Brent’: Political Representation, Power, and Authority in Early Maryland,” MHM, 99 (2004), 405–27; Lois C. Green, “Margaret Brent—A Brief History,” manuscript, Maryland State Archives (available online at www.mdarchives.state.md.us).

  26. Baltimore issued some two dozen manors by 1655, only a quarter of which were developed as planned. Donnell M. Owings, “Private Manors: An Edited List,” MHM, 33 (1938), 311ff. The social profile is drawn from a biographical file of 715 settlers (manuscript in author’s possession) compiled from information in Md. Archives, vols. I, III, IV (esp. the tax list of August 1642: I, 142–46), and the Provincial Court records [Judicial and Testamentary], 1637–1650 (IV); “Land Notes, 1634–1655,” in MHM, 5 (1910) and 6 (1911); Papenfuse et al., Biographical Dictionary; Newman, Flowering; Carr et al., Cole’s World; and genealogical material scattered through MHM. On the distribution of property, see Menard, Economy and Society, 60, 61, 65.

  27. Carr et al., Cole’s World, 9; Menard, Economy and Society, 60, 41. Formal land titles were deceptive; of thirty-seven thousand acres patented in St. Mary’s County by 1642, only 5 percent (1,920 acres) were actually improved.

  28. Stone, “Manorial Maryland,” 11; Henry M. Miller, “Archaeology and Town Planning in Early British America,” in Geoff Egan, ed., Old and New Worlds: Historical Post-Medieval Archaeology (Oxford, England, 1999), 75–83; table 9.1.

  29. Stone, Society, Housing, and Architecture, 191; Lee, ed., Calvert Papers, I, 174; and Henry C. Forman, Maryland Architecture: A Short History from 1634 through the Civil War (Cambridge, Md., 1968), 1, 8; Jason D. Moser et al., “Impermanent Architecture in a Less Permanent Town,” Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, 9 (2003), 197–214; Julia A. King, “A Comparative Midden Analysis of a Household and Inn in St. Mary’s City, Maryland,” Historical Archaeology, 22 (1988), 17–20; Md. Archives, IV, 110.

  30. James Horn, Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994), 302–4.

  31. Thomas Cornwallis to Lord Baltimore, “St. Maries,” April 16, 1638, in Lee, ed., Calvert Papers, I, 174, 176; Vertrees J. Wyckoff, Tobacco Regulation in Colonial Maryland (Baltimore, 1936), 49. The following paragraphs on credit and debt, property transactions, and boundaries are drawn from the biographical file, esp. the Provincial Court and land records, cited above, n26.

  32. Carr et al., Cole’s World, 128.

  33. John Bartholomew, ed., Gazetteer of the British Isles (Edinburgh, 1887), 373.

  34. Erich Isaac, “Kent Island, Part I: The Period of Settlement,” MHM, 52 (1957), 104; Stone, “Society, Housing, and Architecture,” 163.

  35. “Land Notes,” MHM, 5 (1910), 167; Kenneth B. Murdock, The Sun at Noon: Three Biographical Sketches (New York, 1939), chap. 2, quotation at 6. Lady Falkland’s shipping servants to Maryland was no doubt part of a broad pattern of benevolence, recounted by one of her daughters in a memoir, The Lady Falkland: Her Life (London, 1861), 19. The devout viscountess, her daughter reported, brought over from Ireland to England more than eight score “beggar children (with which that country swarms)” and distributed them to masters and mistresses who would teach them whatever trades they were capable of learning.

  36. Russell R. Menard, “British Migration to the Chesapeake Colonies in the Seventeenth Century,” in Lois G. Carr et al., eds., Colonial Chesapeake Society (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988), 122; Menard, “Maryland’s ‘Time of Troubles’: Sources of Political Disorder in Early St. Mary’s,” MHM, 76 (1981), 135; Menard, Economy and Society, 56; Stone, “Society, Housing, and Architecture,” 179. For Snow’s “outhouse necessary for servants lodging,” see Md. Archives, IV, 110. On the scarcity of black servants/slaves in the early years, see Menard, Economy and Society, 68; cf. chap. 7.

  37. Lois G. Carr, “From Servant to Freeholder: Daniel Clocker’s Adventure,” MHM, 99 (2004), 287–311; Papenfuse et al., Biographical Dictionary, I, 319, 98; Newman, Flowering, 200–3; “Land Notes,” MHM, 5 (1910), 167; Menard, Economy and Society, 67, 72, 58; Menard, “From Servant to Freeholder…,” WMQ, 30 (1973), 47–48, and that essay in general for the remarkable rise of the original indentured servants.

  38. David Peterson de Vries, quoted in April Hatfield, Atlantic Virginia (Philadelphia, 2004), 65; Md. Archives, IV, 83, 74, 121, 98, 143, 201, 47, 244, 208, 306, 195. For Canedy’s remarkable contract with Gerrard, see ibid., 214. Three and a half months later Canedy ran off to Virginia, where Gerrard sold his remaining time for “a valuable consideracion.” There apparently he flourished. Nine years later he contracted with Cornwallis to supply sixty thousand bricks for a house he was building on the Potomac. Forman, Jamestown and St. Mary’s, 255.

  39. Thus Lewger to Baltimore, Jan. 5, 1639: “negros I heare of none come in this yeare.” Lee, ed., Calvert Papers, I, 199.

  40. Woodstock Letters, IX, no. 2, 90.

  41. Menard, “Maryland’s ‘Time of Troubles’…,” 127.

  42. Axtell, “White Legend,” 5; Woodstock Letters, IX, no. 2, 74–89; Edwin W. Beitzell, “ ‘Thomas Copley, Gentleman,’ ” MHM, 47 (1952), 209–23; Hughes, Society of Jesus, text vol. I, 423, 472–75. Rigbie’s letter of application to join the Maryland mission is especially fervent. He conceived of the mission not only as “happy and glorious” but “withal hard and humble in regard of the raw state things as yet are in; yet the love of Jesus neither fears labor nor low employments.” He had, he wrote the Provincial of England, “a great desire of this voyage … very much strengthened, this time of holy exercises, both in prayer, Holy Mass, and other occasions which I have taken to deliberate of this point.” Woodstock Letters, IX, no. 2, 78. Rigbie, “who had great influence among the Indians” in part because of his linguistic skills, “died of hardship,” the Jesuits reported, in exile in Virginia in 1646. Woodstock Letters, XV (1886), no. 1, 90.

  43. Hughes, Society of Jesus, text vol. I, 336.

  44. Woodstock Letters, XI, no. 1, 5, 7–12.

  45. Ibid., 12–13; X (1881), no. 3, 220; XI, no. 1, 1, and no. 2, 119; Hughes, Society of Jesus, text vol. I, 480–82; Axtell, “White Legend,” 4.

  46. Woodstock Letters, XI, no. 2, 119–20.

  47. Debra R. Boender, “Our Fires Have Nearly Gone Out: A History of Indian-White Relations on the Colonial Maryland Frontier, 1633–1776” (Ph.D. diss., University of New Mexico, 1988), 61; Bishop Benedict J. Fenwick’s “Brief Account,” in Woodstock Letters, IX, no. 3, 171. Cf. Menard, Economy and Society, 66.

  48. Krugler, English and Catholic, 166–78, quotation at 167; Woodstock Letters, XI, no. 2, 122, 123–27; Hughes, Society of Jesus, text vol. I, 482, 556–59; Andrews, Colonial Period, II, 313.

  49. Md. Archives, III, 191.

  50. Boender, “Indian-White Relations,” 68, 105; Hall, ed., Narratives, 75; James H. Merrell, “Cultural Continuity Among the Piscataway Indians of Colonial Maryland,” WMQ, 36 (1979), 560–61.

  51. Merrell, “Cultural Continuity,” 550–54; J. Frederick Fausz, “Merging and Emerging Worlds: Anglo-Indian Interest Groups and the Development of the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake,” in Carr et al., eds., Colonial Chesapeake Society, 47–48, 57; Fausz, “Profits, Pelts, and Power … 1620–1652,” Maryland Historian, 14 (1983), 18; cf. Fausz, “Present at the ‘Creation,’ ” 29–43.

  52. Boender, “Indian-White Relations,” 137–44, 163, 170–72, 181, 187–88; “Land Notes
,” MHM, 6 (1911), 61; Gene Williamson, Chesapeake Conflict (Bowie, Md., 1955), 27, 110.

  53. Of the many writings on Claiborne (including Nathaniel C. Hale’s romantic Virginia Venturer … William Claiborne, 1600–1677 [Richmond, Va., 1951]), see especially, in this connection, Fausz, “Merging Worlds,” 58ff.; Isaac, “Kent Island,” 104, 106–19; Fausz, “Profits, Pelts, and Power,” 19, 20; and Robert Brewer, Merchants and Devotion: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton, N.J., 1993), 120–24. At the end of his life, still hoping to reclaim his property in Maryland, Claiborne submitted a comprehensive documentary account of his entire struggle with the Calverts and of the grounds for all his claims: Md. Archives, V, 157 ff. On the Susquehannocks, see John Smith’s vivid description in Smith, Works, II, 106: people attired in “Cassacks made of Beares heads and skinnes,” with wolves’ heads “hanging in a chain for a jewell,” and who carried tobacco pipes three-quarters of a yard long with carved ends “sufficient to beat out ones braines.”

  54. Md. Archives, IV, 22; I, 23–24; III, 64–73; V, 187, 191, 219; Raphael Semmes, Captains and Mariners of Early Maryland (Baltimore, Md., 1937), 152–54, 156; Boender, “Indian-White Relations,” 135; Hale, Venturers, 196–97, 200–5; Fausz, “Profits, Pelts, and Power,” 21; Fausz, “Merging Worlds,” 72–73, 75–76; Hall, ed., Narratives, 58, 61.

  55. Boender, “Indian-White Relations,” 95–96, 135–36, 147ff., 169–71, 190–95; Fausz, “Merging Worlds,” 76, 77; Alice L. L. Ferguson and Henry G. Ferguson, The Piscataway Indians of Southern Maryland (Accokeek, Md., 1960), 32–34; Peter Lindeström, Geographia Americae, with An Account of the Delaware Indians … 1654–1656 (Amandus Johnson, trans. and ed., Philadelphia, 1925), 242–44.

  56. Boender, Indian-White Relations, 145–50, 190–92; Fausz, “Merging Worlds,” 78.

 

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