Patrician and Plebeian Part 1

Patrician and Plebeian.

by Thomas J. Wertenbaker.

_PREFACE_

Forty-seven years have pa.s.sed since this volume was first published; in that time a ma.s.s of source material has been made available to the historian and numerous books on early Virginia history have been published. But I believe that its main theses have not been shaken.

The old belief that the Virginia aristocracy had its origin in a migration of Cavaliers after the defeat of the royalists in the British Civil War has been relegated to the sphere of myths. It is widely recognized that the leading Virginia families--the Carters, the Ludwells, the Burwells, the Custises, the Lees, the Washingtons--were shaped chiefly by conditions within the colony and by renewed contact with Great Britain.

That the Virginia aristocracy was not part of the English aristocracy transplanted in the colony is supported by contemporaneous evidence.

When Nathaniel Bacon, the rebel, the son of an English squire, expressed surprise when Governor Berkeley appointed him to the Council of State, Sir William replied: "When I had the first knowledge of you I intended you and do now again all the services that are in my power to serve, for gentlemen of your quality come very rarely into the country, and therefore when they do come were used by me with all respect."

Bacon was equally frank. "Consider ... the nature and quality of the men in power ... as to their education, extraction, and learning, as to their reputation for honor and honesty, see and consider whether here, as in England, you can perceive men advanced for their n.o.ble qualifications...."

Governor Francis Nicholson ridiculed the pretensions of the leading planters to distinguished lineage. "This generation know too well from whence they come," he wrote in a letter to the Lords of Trade, in March 1703, "and the ordinary sort of planters that have land of their own, though not much, look upon themselves to be as good as the best of them, for he knows, at least has heard, from whence these mighty Dons derive their originals ... and that he or his ancestors were their equals if not superiors."

On the other side of the Potomac Henry Callister was frank in refuting the similar claims of wealthy Marylanders. "Some of the proudest families here vaunt themselves of a pedigree, at the same time they know not their grandfather's name. I never knew a good honest Marylander that was not got by a merchant."

That many prominent families in Virginia also were founded by merchants is attested by the fact that they continued to be traders after they came to the colony. "In every river here are from ten to thirty men who by trade and industry have gotten very competent estates," wrote Colonel Robert Quary in 1763. "These gentlemen take care to supply the poorer sort with provisions, goods, and necessities, and are sure to keep them always in debt, and so dependent on them. Out of this number are chosen her Majesty's Council, the a.s.sembly, the justices, and other officers of the government."

Hartwell, Blair, and Chilton, in their _The Present State of Virginia and the College_, written in 1697, divide the people into three cla.s.ses--planters, tradesmen, and merchants. "The merchants live best," they said. But though profits were large, their business was carried on in the face of great difficulties. The tobacco they bought from the small planters had to be carted or rolled to the landings and put on board their sloops and shallops for transfer to the merchant ships; they had to sell imported goods on credit; often there were long delays in loading the ships.

Some of the most influential men in Virginia were importers of servants and slaves. Among them were William Claiborne, Peter Ashton, Isaac Allerton, Giles Brent, Joseph Bridger, Thomas Milner, Henry Hartwell, and Robert Beverley.

The distinguished historian, Lyon Gardiner Tyler, in _Tyler's Magazine_, Volume I, says that "Virginia owes much to the London firms, because they were continually sending over trusted young agents ... many of whom settled down and founded Virginia families.... The business of the merchants consisted largely in buying and selling tobacco and importing settlers and servants, for each of which if imported at their expense the merchants were ent.i.tled to fifty acres of land. Then there was the usual trade in clothing and articles of general use."

Though the Virginian who acquired a degree of wealth was no aristocrat, he longed to be one. His grandfather, or his great-grandfather might have been a younger son of an English squire.

He envied the honor, wealth, and power landholding brought that ancestor, just as many Virginians today envy the life of the colonial plantation owner. So when he found himself an extensive landholder, he thought of himself as an English squire. He too would build a fine residence, decorate his walls with family portraits, have a formal garden, acc.u.mulate a library, and dress in the latest English fashion.

Virginia in the colonial period was linked to England by government, commerce, religion, reading, education. The mother country sent over governors who set the fashion in courtly living. It was the planter's agent in London or Bristol who usually selected his furniture, his silverware, his clothing, and often even his books. When on Sunday he went to church he listened to a minister who had been born and educated in England. The shelves of his library were lined with books from England, if he could afford it he sent his son to Oxford or Cambridge.

When a Virginia planter visited England in the eighteenth century, he was deeply impressed by the beauty and dignity of the great country mansions there. As he viewed Longleat, or Blenheim, or Eaton Hall, he must have resolved that he too would build a stately house on the banks of the James. If he had never been to England, he might take down an English book of architecture--Batty Langley's _Treasury of Designs_, or Abraham Swan's _The British Architect_, or James Gibb's _A Book of Architecture_--pick out a suitable design and model his house on it. He might even send to England for an architect, as did George Mason, when he engaged William Buckland to design beautiful Gunston Hall. Westover, Carter's Grove, Mount Airy, Kenmore, Brandon, all bear the stamp of the English Georgian.

If there was any doubt that the Virginia gentlemen followed the latest English fashions in dress, a glimpse at their portraits would dispel it. William Byrd II, as he appears in the painting by Sir G.o.dfrey Kneller would have made a fine figure in any a.s.sembly in England; no English n.o.bleman was better dressed than Robert Carter, of Nomini Hall, as shown in the Reynolds portrait.

When a Virginian went to England he not only took the opportunity to replenish his own wardrobe, but was charged by his relatives and friends to make purchases for them. In a letter to Mrs. Thomas Jones, in 1727, Mrs. Mary St.i.th asked: "When you come to London pray favor me in your choice of a suit of pinners suitably dressed with a crossknot roll or whatever the fashion requires, with suitable ruffles and handkerchief." In 1752 Lady Gooch, wife of Governor William Gooch, while in London bought for Mrs. Thomas Dawson a fashionable laced cap, a handkerchief, ruffles, a brocade suit, a blue satin petticoat, a pair of blue satin shoes, and a fashionable silver girdle. But it was not always necessary to send to England for clothing, for there were tailors in Virginia who advertised that they could make gentlemen's suits and dresses for the ladies "in the newest and genteelest fashions now wore in England." It was a valuable a.s.set for a tailor if he had just arrived from London.

The Virginians also imitated the English in their outdoor sports. The fox chase, so dear to the Englishman's heart, was a favorite amus.e.m.e.nt. When the crowds gathered around the county courthouse on court days, they were often diverted from more serious business by horseraces. And like their English cousins they were fond of c.o.c.kfighting, boat racing, and hunting.

The life of the wealthy planter was profoundly influenced by his reading of English books. He took his religion more from the _Sermons_ of Archbishop Tillotson than from the preaching of the local clergyman; as a county magistrate he had to know Blackstone and c.o.ke; he turned to Kip's _English Houses and Gardens_, or John James'

_Theory and Practice of Gardening_, to guide him in laying out his flower beds and hedges and walks; if he or his wife or a servant became ill he consulted Lynch's _Guide to Health_; he willingly obeyed the dictates of Chippendale in furniture.

But despite all the bonds with the mother country he was slowly, but inevitably, becoming more an American, less an Englishman. It was the plantation which shaped the daily life of the Virginian and made him different from the English squire. As he looked out over his wide acres, his tobacco fields, his pastures, his woodlands, his little village of servant and slave quarters, tobacco houses, barn, and stable, he had a sense of responsibility, dignity, pride, and self-reliance. He must look after the welfare of the men and women and children under his care, seeing that they were housed, clothed, and fed, protecting their health, playing the role of benevolent despot.

He had to be agriculturalist, business man, lawyer, builder, even doctor.

Visitors to the colony were quick to notice the difference between the Virginian and the Englishman. Hugh Jones, in his _The Present State of Virginia_ devotes several pages to a description of the colonists.

Andrew Burnaby, who visited Virginia in 1760, thought that the authority had by the planters over their slaves made them "vain and imperious.... They are haughty and jealous of their liberties, impatient of restraint...." Lord Adam Gordon, writing in 1764, gives a more favorable opinion: "I had an opportunity to see a good deal of the country and many of the first people in the province and I must say they far excel in good sense, affability, and ease any set of men I have yet fallen in with, either in the West Indies or on the Continent, this, in some degree, may be owing to their being most of them educated at home (England) but cannot be altogether the cause, since there are amongst them many gentlemen, and almost all the ladies, who have never been out of their own province, and yet are as sensible, conversible, and accomplished as one would wish to meet with."

In brief, the Virginia aristocracy was the product of three forces, inheritance, continued contact with the mother country, and local conditions. Coming largely from the middle cla.s.s in England, though with some connections with the squirearchy through younger sons, they brought with them the English language, English political inst.i.tutions, the Anglican Church, English love of liberty. This inheritance was b.u.t.tressed by their political and cultural dependence on the mother country. But it was profoundly affected, even reshaped, by Virginia itself.

Dr. Samuel Johnson's charge that the Americans were a race of convicts, if he meant it to be taken seriously, is of course absurd.

It is true that from time to time convicts were sent to the colonies.

This is proved by the protests of the a.s.semblies and by laws pa.s.sed to prohibit their importation. In Virginia there are records in some of the county courthouses of the crimes committed by these jailbirds. But they never entered in any appreciable numbers into the population of the colony, not even of the lowest cla.s.s. They were never numerous, the planters considered it a risk to use them, some were forced to serve as cannon fodder in the colonial wars, others were shunted off to the frontiers.

The bulk of the immigrants to Virginia were poor men seeking to better their condition in a new country. Many came as indentured workers, who placed their signatures to contracts to work for four years in the tobacco fields in return for their pa.s.sage across the Atlantic; other thousands paid their fare in advance and so entered the colony as freemen. They were not essentially different from the millions who came to the United States in the nineteenth century. Most of them, indentured workers and freemen alike, sooner or later acquired small plantations and became members of a yeoman cla.s.s. A few acquired wealth. Many went into the trades to become carpenters, or bricklayers, or blacksmiths, or coopers, or saddlers, or wheelwrights.

Colonial Virginia has often been pictured as the land of the aristocratic planter, the owner of thousands of acres and hundreds of slaves. Scant attention has been paid to the far more numerous middle cla.s.s. Yet this cla.s.s was the backbone of the colony. It is true that most of the leaders came from the aristocracy, but it was the small farmer who owned the bulk of the land, produced the larger part of the tobacco crop, could outvote the aristocrat fifty to one, made up the rank and file of the army in the colonial wars.

Among the thousands of Englishmen who left their homes to seek their fortunes in Virginia there were no dukes, no earls, rarely a knight, or even the son of a knight. They were, most of them, ragged farm workers, deserters from the manor, ill paid day laborers, yeomen who had been forced off their land by the enclosures, youthful tradesmen tempted by the cheapness of land or by the opportunities for commerce, now and then a lad who had taken a mug of doctored grog and awakened to find himself a prisoner aboard a tobacco ship. But Virginia claimed them all, moulded them into her own pattern, made them Virginians.

_Princeton, New Jersey_ THOMAS J. WERTENBAKER _August, 1957_

PART ONE

THE ARISTOCRACY

The aristocratic character of Virginia society was the result of development within the colony. It proceeded from economic, political and social causes. On its economic side it was built up by the system of large plantations, by the necessity for indentured or slave labor, by the direct trade with England; politically it was engendered by the lack of a vigorous middle cla.s.s in the first half of the 17th century, and was sustained by the method of appointment to office; on its social side it was fostered by the increasing wealth of the planters and by the ideal of the English gentleman.

It will be necessary, in explaining this development, to determine the origin of the men that composed this aristocracy; for it will be impossible to understand the action of the forces which prevailed in Virginia during the colonial period unless we have a knowledge of the material upon which they worked. Much error has prevailed upon this subject. It was for years the general belief, and is still the belief of many, that the wealthy families, whose culture, elegance and power added such l.u.s.ter to Virginia in the 18th century, were the descendants of cavalier or aristocratic settlers. It was so easy to account for the n.o.ble nature of a Randolph, a Lee or a Mason by n.o.bleness of descent, that careful investigation was considered unnecessary, and heredity was accepted as a sufficient explanation of the existence and characteristics of the Virginia aristocracy.

We shall attempt to show that this view is erroneous. Recent investigation in Virginia history has made it possible to determine with some degree of accuracy the origin of the aristocracy. Yet the mixed character of the settlers, and the long period of time over which immigration to the colony continued make the problem difficult of accurate solution, and the chances of error innumerable. Out of the ma.s.s of evidence, however, three facts may be established beyond controversy, that but few men of high social rank in England established families in Virginia; that the larger part of the aristocracy of the colony came directly from merchant ancestors; that the leading planters of the 17th century were mercantile in instinct and unlike the English aristocrat of the same period.

Much confusion has resulted from the a.s.sumption, so common with Southern writers, that the English Cavaliers were all of distinguished lineage or of high social rank. The word "Cavalier," as used at the time of Charles I, denoted not a cast, or a distinct cla.s.s of people, but a political party. It is true that the majority of the gentry supported the king in the civil war, and that the main reliance of Parliament lay in the small landowners and the merchants, but there were many men of humble origin that fought with the royalist party and many aristocrats that joined the party of the people. Amongst the enemies of the king were the Earls of Bedford, Warwick, Manchester and Ess.e.x, while many leaders of the Roundheads such as Pym, Cromwell and Hampden were of gentle blood. Thus the fact that a man was Cavalier or Roundhead proved nothing as to his social rank or his lineage.[1]

No less misleading has been the conception that in Great Britain there existed during the 17th century distinct orders of society, similar to those of France or Spain at the same period. Many have imagined the English n.o.bility a cla.s.s sharply and definitely separated from the commonalty, and forming a distinct upper stratum of society.

In point of fact no sharp line of social demarkation can be drawn between the peerage and the common people. For in England, even in the days of the Plantagenets, the younger sons of the n.o.bles did not succeed to their fathers' rank, but sank to the gentry cla.s.s, or at most became "knights." They usually married beneath the rank of their fathers and thus formed a link binding the n.o.bility to the commons of the country. Often the sons and brothers of earls were sent to Parliament as representatives of the shires, and as such sat side by side with shopkeepers and artisans from the towns. It is this circ.u.mstance that explains why so many middle-cla.s.s Englishmen of the present day can trace back their lineage to the greatest and n.o.blest houses of the kingdom. The healthy political development which has been such a blessing to the English nation is due in no small measure to the lack of anything like caste in British society.

These facts help to explain much in the origin of the Virginia aristocracy that has only too often been misunderstood. They make evident the error of presuming that many persons of gentle blood came to Virginia because there was an immigration of so called Cavaliers, or because certain families in the colony could trace back their ancestry to n.o.ble English houses.

Immigration to Virginia during the seventeen years after the founding of Jamestown was different in character from that of any succeeding period. The London Company in its efforts to send to the colony desirable settlers induced a number of men of good family and education to venture across the ocean to seek their fortunes in the New World. Since the Company numbered among its stockholders some of the greatest n.o.blemen of the time, it could easily arouse in the influential social cla.s.ses extraordinary interest in Virginia. It is due largely to this fact that among the first settlers are to be found so many that are ent.i.tled to be called gentlemen.

Moreover, the true nature of the task that confronted the immigrants to the wilds of America was little understood in England at this time.

Those unhappy gentlemen that sailed upon the Discovery, the G.o.dspeed and the Susan Constant hoped to find in Virginia another Mexico or Peru and to gain there wealth as great as had fallen to the lot of Cortez or of Pizarro. Had they known that the riches of the land they were approaching could be obtained only by long years of toil and sweat, of danger and hardship, they would hardly have left their homes in England. That the First Supply took with them a perfumer and six tailors shows how utterly unsuited they were to the task of planting a new colony. Many, doubtless, were men of ruined fortune, who sought to find in the New World a rapid road to wealth. When it became known in England that gold mines were not to be found in Virginia and that wealth could be had only by the sweat of the brow, these spendthrift gentlemen ceased coming to the colony.

It is true, however, that the proportion of those officially termed "gentlemen" that sailed with the early expeditions to Jamestown is surprisingly large. Of the settlers of 1607, out of one hundred and five men, thirty-five were called gentlemen.[2] The First Supply, which arrived in 1608, contained thirty-three gentlemen out of one hundred and twenty persons.[3] Captain John Smith declared these men were worthless in character, more fitted "to spoyle a commonwealth than to begin or maintain one," and that those that came with them as "laborers" were really footmen in attendance upon their masters. In the Second Supply came twenty-eight gentlemen in a total company of seventy.[4] The conduct of those of the Third Supply shows them to have been similar in character to their predecessors. Smith calls them a "lewd company," among them "many unruly gallants packed thither by their friends to escape il destinies."[5] These men, however, made practically no imprint upon the character of the population of the colony; for by far the larger part of them perished miserably within a few months after their arrival. Of the five hundred persons alive in Virginia in October, 1609, all but sixty had died by May of the following year.[6]

As years went by, this influx of dissipated gentlemen began to wane.

It could not be concealed in England that the early settlers had perished of starvation, disease and the tomahawk, and those that had been led to believe that Virginia was an Eldorado, turned with a shudder from the true picture of suffering and death told them by those that returned from the colony. Moreover, the London Company soon learned that no profit was to be expected from a colony settled by dissipated gentlemen, and began to send over persons more suited for the rough tasks of clearing woods, building huts and planting corn.

Their immigrant vessels were now filled with laborers, artisans, tradesmen, apprentices and indentured servants. It is doubtless true that occasionally gentlemen continued to arrive in Virginia even during the last years of the Company's rule, yet their number must have been very small indeed. When, in 1624, James I took from the London Company its charter, the colony contained few others than indentured servants and freemen of humble origin and means. In 1623 several of the planters, in answering charges that had been brought against the colony by a certain Captain Nathaniel Butler, said that the inhabitants were chiefly laboring men.[7]

With the downfall of the London Company one influence which had tended to send to Virginia persons of good social standing ceased to exist.

The personal interest of those n.o.blemen that had owned stock in the enterprise was no longer exerted to obtain a desirable cla.s.s of settlers, and economic forces alone now determined the character of those that established themselves in Virginia. During the remainder of the 17th century it was the profit that could be obtained from the planting of tobacco that brought the most desirable cla.s.s of settlers to the colony. It is true, however, that dissipated and spendthrift gentlemen still came over at times, seeking in Virginia a refuge from creditors, or expecting amid the unsettled conditions of a new country to obtain license for their excesses. It was this element of the population, doubtless, that the Dutch, trader De Vries referred to when he a.s.serted that some of the planters were inveterate gamblers, even staking their servants.[8] Such a character was Captain Stone, whom De Vries met at the home of Governor Harvey. This man was related to families of good standing in England, but strutted, was lewd, swore horribly and was guilty of shameless carousals wherever he went. While in New Amsterdam he entered upon a drinking bout with Governor Von Twiller, and stole a vessel of Plymouth. In Ma.s.sachusetts he called Roger Ludlow a just a.s.s, and later, having been detected in other crimes, was forced to flee from the colony. Beyond doubt men similar to Stone were to be found in Virginia during the first half of the 17th century, but they became rarer and rarer as time went on.[9]

How few men of good social standing there were in the colony in this period is shown by the number of important positions filled by uneducated persons of humble origin and rank. The evidence is conclusive that on many occasions indentured servants that had served their term of bondage and had acquired property were elected by the people to represent them in the House of Burgesses. This is notably true of the first half of the 17th century, when the government was largely in the hands of a few leading planters, and when pressure from above could influence elections very decidedly. Had there been many men of ability or rank to select from, these Plebeians would never have found a place in the a.s.sembly of the colony. The author of Virginia's Cure stated that the burgesses were "usually such as went over as servants thither," and although this is doubtless an exaggeration, it shows that there must have been in the a.s.semblies many men of humble extraction. In the case of some of the burgesses, it has been shown definitely that they came to Virginia as servants.