#1. Early Colonial Virginia & Late Colonial Virginia, 1600-1763

This page looks at the best of Early Colonial and Late Colonial history relating to Virginia. In a general way, the years 1600 to 1763 include events before the 18th century American Revolution. Larger sepia-font titles are found in Virginia survey histories used in university graduate history courses:

Virginius Dabney, Virginia: The New Dominion, a history from 1607 to the present (1983)
Peter Wallenstein, Cradle of America: A history of Virginia (2008)
Ronald L. Heinemann, Old Dominion, New Commonwealth: A history of Virginia, 1607-2007 (2008)
Brent Tarter, Virginians and their histories (available 2020)

Smaller black-font titles are taken from reviews by scholarly journals, both geographically focused and history-period focused:

We make Virginia history accessible: top reviews read, best links to buy. The Virginia Historian may earn a small commission for a link to any Amazon products or services from this website. Your purchase of a book via TVH contributes on average $1.30 to help support this platform.

Colonial Virginia Maps and Mapping

Mapping Virginia

William C. Wooldridge wrote Mapping Virginia: From the Age of Exploration to the Civil War in 2012. It is available from University of Virginia Press, at Kindle, and online. Buy “Mapping Virginia” on Amazon here.

This atlas of 301 maps are owned by the Virginia Cartographical Society collected over forty years. It presents not only the charts of navigation and orienteering, but historically, the “idea of Virginia”.

The maps are generally organized by time period, such as John Smith’s Chesapeake, The Revolution in Virginia, and the Civil War. They are also regional presentations of the Big Bay and later, The Back Parts of Virginia.

Early Colonial Virginia - Southeast Early Maps

Early Colonial Virginia - Virginia in Maps

Early Colonial Virginia - Virginia.mapping

Buy “Mapping Virginia” on Amazon here. See also Vincent Virga Virginia: Mapping the Old Dominion State Through History: Rare and Unusual Maps From the Library of Congress (2009), and Marianne M. McKee and Richard W. Stephenson, editors Virginia in Maps: Four Centuries of Settlement, Growth, and Development (2000), and William P. Cumming Southeast in Early Maps (1998-3d edition).

New Map of Empire

Max Edelson wrote The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America Before Independence in 2017. It is available from the Harvard University Press, and online new and used. Reviewed in the Journal American History (Summer) and Journal of Southern History (Spring).

Following the successful conclusion of the Seven Year’s War in 1763, British America ran from Hudson Bay to the Florida Keys, from the Atlantic Coast to the Mississippi River, and the empire stretched to the West Indies islands. King George III called upon his Board of Trade and Plantations to map long held possessions and newly acquired territory along with the indigenous nations within its European claims.

The “new vision of empire” allowed Britain to control land distribution and settlement. The maps were detailed, scaled to military purposes that captured the essentials of colonial spaces, including navigation, agricultural potential, and commercial prospects. They were tools of imperial control, but they also threatened the colonists as the primary agents of empire, and the North American colonists would rebel. Over two hundred maps are available for study and classroom use at www.Mapscholar.org/empire .

Buy “The New Map of Empire” on Amazon here.

Sea Venture

Kieran Doherty wrote Sea Venture: Shipwreck, Survival, and the Salvation of the First English Colony in the New World in 2007. It is available new online.

It contains useful information about period sea travel in the early 17^th century, and an outline of Bermuda and Jamestown colonization.

To buy “Sea Venture” at Amazon, click here.

The River Where America Began

Bob Deans wrote The River Where America Began: A Journey Along the James in 2007. It is available at Rowman and Littlefield, on Kindle and online new and used.

Deans is a national newspaper correspondent covering the history of the James River beginning with its geological beginnings, primarily in the colonial period, ending with seventy pages taking the story to 1865.

He makes specialist historians available to the general reader, such as Edmund S. Morgan, Ira Berlin, James Horn, Anthony S. Parent Jr., and Helen C. Rountree. The Powhatans, Jamestown, the Virginia dynasty and prominent Virginians in the Civil War all get discussion.

To buy “The River Where America Began” at Amazon, click here.

The True Geography of Our Country

Joel Kovarski wrote The True Geography of Our Country: Jefferson’s Cartographic Vision in 2014. It is available from University of Virginia Press, at Kindle, and online. Buy “True Geography of Our Country” on Amazon here.

Geography and maps were central to many of Jefferson’s most treasured ambitions. These included locating the U.S. capital on the Potomac at Washington DC, to organizing official state and national surveys, and exploration of the American West. Jefferson was an early prophet of Manifest Destiny before the term was coined, insisting that Nature had traced “no geographical line” limiting an individual’s pursuit of happiness.

Closer to home, they informed his Notes on the State of Virginia, decorating Monticello, and stocking his library shelves. Jefferson came to mapping early on, the grandson and the son of the notable Peter Jefferson, both surveyors; first schooled by John Staples, a surveyor, and then attending both the Rev. James Maury’s Latin School and classes with William Small at William and Mary, both with instruction in elements of surveying. Even with a small format, the illustrations are of high quality, and the legends and notations on the maps included can be read with a magnifying glass.

Buy “True Geography of Our Country” on Amazon here. See also William C. Wooldridge Mapping Virginia: From the Age of Exploration to the Civil War (2012), and Vincent Virga and Emilee Hines Virginia: Mapping the Old Dominion State through History: Rare and Unusual Maps from the Library of Congress (2009), Margaret Beck Pritchard Degrees of Latitude: Mapping Colonial America (2002), Donald Jackson Thomas Jefferson and the Stony Mountains: Exploring the West from Monticello by Donald Dean Jackson (2002), and Guy Meriwether Benson Lewis and Clark: The Maps of Exploration, 1507-1814 (2002).

Powhatan Virginia, 1500-1763

Although the Algonquins including Powhatans migrate into the Chesapeake region earlier than 1500, the Powhatan capital is moved to Werowocomoco by the Chief “Powhatan” (Wahunsenacawh) at the end of that century. He begins expanding the Powhatan reach beyond the villages of his father’s rule to become the paramount chieftain in the region. It was this expansive governance by “Emperor Powhatan” that the English settlers encountered on the arrival to their “New World”.

Powhatan Landscape

Martin D. Gallivan wrote The Powhatan Landscape: An Archaeological History of the Algonquian Chesapeake in 2016. It is now available online new.

Powhatan the cheiftan appears in the next-to-last chapter. This book is about tying the pre-colonial past and the immigration of the Algonquin Powhatans into the Chesapeake region (Tsenacomacoh) to the onset of the Euro-American world. Early beginnings around 500 B.C.E. brought lasting place names chosen from the vantage of a canoe, the forager-fishers of the coastal estuary system occupied a “waterscape”.

Algonquin speakers migrated into the region about 200 C.E., bringing a reorientation of Native American culture toward the estuaries and an expanded agriculture. Those of the Chickahominy River Basin never fully became a part of the Powhatans who developed a paramount chieftain style of colonial rule over many adjacent tribes.

Chief “Powhatan” (Wahunsenacawh) at the end of the 1500s moved the Powhatan capital to the sacred site of Werowocomoco. When the English arrived at Jamestown in 1607, he sought to incorporate the English into his trading polity as he had with others previously. Learn more to buy “Powhatan Landscape” at Amazon.com.

Commoners, Tribute and Chiefs

Stephen R. Potter wrote Commoners, Tribute, and Chiefs; The Development of Algonquian Culture in the Potomac Valley in 1993. It is available at the University of Virginia Press and online new and used.

The Algonquins settling in the Northern Neck of Virginia along the Potomac River about 200 C.E. were called Chicacoans. They lived in modern Northumberland County between the Piscataway (Conoy) paramount chiefdom centered at modern Washington DC, and the expanding Powhatan paramount chiefdom centered in the Lower Peninsula on the James River. Potter describes the pre-contact Potomac River Valley of Late Woodland Native American culture, and then turns to integrate it with an account of the rise of complex societies. Intimidation, warfare and tribute to paramount chiefs were important elements to building more complex societies after 1500.

The narrative of pre-contact environment, technologies and social framework is followed by an explanation of the complex interactions occurring between native and European cultures following 1607 contact. The earlier developments among pre-contact groups set the expectations for the natives about how to relate to the newcomers from across the Atlantic. Learn more to buy “Commoners, Tribute and Chiefs” at Amazon.com.

Nature and History in the Potomac Country

James D. Rice wrote Nature and History in the Potomac Country: From Hunter-Gatherers to the Age of Jefferson in 2009. It is now available on Kindle and online new and used.

The “Little Ice Age” in the 1500s to 1700s found themselves in a middle zone between the Iroquois hunters to the north and Cherokee farmers to the south. Complex and ever-changing alliances and conflicts developed not only among native groups but then on their arrival, among various European groups of Catholic, Puritan and Anglican, among Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

Not until the 1700s did Europeans attempt substantial settlement above the Fall Line into the Piedmont, when Virginia and Maryland encouraged the non-English Swiss, Germans and Scots to settle as a frontier buffer against Indian attacks. Learn more to buy “Nature and History in the Potomac Country” at Amazon.com.

A Cold Welcome

Sam White wrote A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America in 2017. It is available at the Harvard University Press, on Kindle and online new and used. Reviewed in the William and Mary Quarterly.

This environmental history synthesizes historical research, archeology and climate science. Following 1607 whether in Santa Fe, Quebec or Jamestown, the Europeans walked into a Little Ice Age in North America that hampered their acclimation and fostered violent encounters among the Native peoples as well as with the new comers.

Under stress of colder temperatures, drought and increased hurricane activity, Natives faced an onset of scarcity with the Hurons driving Iroquoian-speaking tribes south out of the Saint Lawrence Valley, for instance. The maize dependent Algonquin-Powhatans adopted new political arrangements that were at once more hierarchical and centralized. The inherently violent process of European colonization was magnified when Native traders would not exchange sufficient foodstuffs in trade to supply colonist needs. The extreme weather and its scarcities worsened Native conditions related to conflict, disease and famine of the period.

To buy “A Cold Welcome” on Amazon, click here.

Before and After Jamestown

Helen C. Rountree and E. Randolph Turner III wrote Before and After Jamestown: Virginia’s Powhatans and Their Predecessors in 2002. It is available online new in paperback.

Anthropologist Helen C. Rountree and archaeologist E. Randolph Turner III collaborated in writing a general history of Virginia’s Powhatan Indians from 900 C.E. to the late twentieth century. Their habitat centered on an area one hundred miles-square, south of the Potomac River and east of modern I-95 to the Atlantic Ocean. Their cultural history is described in their housing, furnishings, dress, diet, occupations, warfare and religion.

The history of the tribe’s conquest by the English and its population decline from 25,000 to modern 1,500 enrolled members is a poignant one. Early English diplomatic contacts with great politeness were misconstrued as agreement, and subsequent Indian attacks took the English by surprise.

Following their conquest, the Powhatan in the 19^th and 20^th century struggled against racism and in the late 20^th century they were determined to achieve official tribal recognition. Learn more to buy “Before and After Jamestown” at Amazon.com.

Indian and European Contacts in Context

Dennis B. Blanton and Julia A. King edited Indian and European Contacts in Context: The Mid-Atlantic Region in 2004. It is available from the University Press of Florida and online new and used.

This book seeks to place Indians and their culture as significant participants in the English colonial Mid-Atlantic using insights from archaeological studies. The essays reflect a wide range of insight into the contact period, from fur trade to pottery, from erection of Virginia’s Middle Plantation Palisade in 1634 to everyday contact between Indians and Europeans in households, from considerations of climate to tribal preserves within English colonial settlement.

There are discussions of new theoretical approaches and systems, as well as essays using traditional evidentiary sources of historical record. Overall the emphasis is on innovative approaches to the study of the early contact period.

To buy “Indian and European Contacts in Context” at Amazon, click here.

Wild by Nature

Andrea L. Smalley wrote Wild by Nature: North American Animals Confront Colonization in 2017. It is available at the Johns Hopkins University Press, on Kindle and online new and used. Reviewed in the William and Mary Quarterly and the Southwestern Historical Quarterly.

This environmental history of America’s wildlife integrates ecology, legal and economic history, focusing on indigenous American wildlife in the South. Initial frontier colonialism was extractive, drawing on wildlife as an exploitable resource for immediate profit. Settler colonialism required the removal of wildlife to create space for expansive staple crop agriculture and domesticated animal husbandry.

The relationships between settlers, Native Americans and the marketed wildlife spans the history of beaver, wolves, fish, white-tailed deer and bison. Colonial authorities varied policy over time. Following Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, Indian claims to territorial property were rejected. By 1800 treaties recognized Indian territory and their right to its deer hunting. With the loss of a sustaining deer population, legal theory led to Indian Removal and Indian Wars in the 1800s.

To buy “Wild by Nature” on Amazon, click here.

Nature and History in the Potomac Country

James D. Rice wrote Nature and History in the Potomac Country: From Hunter-Gatherers to the Age of Jefferson in 2009. Available from the Johns Hopkins University Press, Kindle and online new and used. A TVH top 300 pick for Virginia history.

Rice studies both Native American and European economies, land use patterns and conceptions of the natural world. The narrative encompasses geological time, sociopolitical and economic developments, and historic moments for both natives and European settlers. With the introduction of agriculture, natives moved upland from the tidewater towards better soils. The “Little Ice Age” in the 1500s to 1700s found themselves in a middle zone between the Iroquois hunters to the north and Cherokee farmers to the south.

Complex and ever-changing alliances and conflicts developed not only among native groups but then on their arrival, among various European groups of Catholic, Puritan and Anglican, among Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia. Not until the 1700s did Europeans attempt substantial settlement above the Fall Line into the Piedmont, when Virginia and Maryland encouraged the non-English Swiss, Germans and Scots to settle as a frontier buffer against Indian attacks.

To buy “Nature and History in the Potomac Country” on Amazon, click here.

Deadly Politics of Giving

Seth Mallios wrote The Deadly Politics of Giving: Exchange and Violence at Ajacan, Roanoke and Jamestown in 2006. It is available from the University of Alabama Press, on Kindle and online new in paperback.

This anthropological history of Algonquin, Spanish and English gift exchange in the early contact period of the Spanish Jesuits on the Roanoke River in North Carolina and the English in the Chesapeake region at Roanoke and Jamestown. Mallios attributes the violence on both sides as a consequence of unwitting violations of each other’s cultural norms.

To Algonquins, gifts to Europeans created an obligation for reciprocity and mutual allegiance. To Europeans, gifts were either taken as something-for-nothing tribute, or a commodities exchange related to acquiring impersonal wealth. When Europeans traded with other tribes, the aggrieved tribe would withhold food or strike in retribution. When Natives sought “forced reciprocity” by stealing tools or weapons, the Europeans would strike.

To buy “Deadly Politics of Giving” at Amazon, click here.

New Worlds of Violence

Matthew Jennings wrote New Worlds of Violence: Cultures and Conquests in the Early American Southeast in 2011. It is available from Oxford University Press, and online. Buy “New Worlds of Violence” on Amazon here.

In this survey of mid- to late colonial “cultures of violence”, Jennings studies the settlement of North America as a conquest by Europeans, focusing on the southeastern seaboard from Florida to Virginia. He begins with the Mississippian chiefdoms of the Eastern Woodlands, the author uses archaeological and ethnohistorical sources to describe the Native American culture of violence 500-1500. Ancient purposes ranged from low-scale warfare for prisoners or vengeance to pitched battles to subjugate tributary tribes or destroy ritual icons.

The Spanish culture of violence was forged in its Reconquista holy war against Islam on the Iberian Peninsula for territory and wealth, including the 1565 destruction of a French outpost at Fort Caroline now Jacksonville, Florida.

A “significant turning point” in the history of the American Southeast came with the arrival of the English to South Carolina in 1670. The English used a culture of violence developed in their conquest and colonization of Ireland to acquire land and to exploit the labor of Native Americans and African slaves for profit. The Yamasee and Creek Indians escalated their cultural violence to supply other Native Americans as slaves to the English. They in turn made war on the slave catching tribes in the Yamasee War of 1715, but the English established a second colony in the region in Georgia in the 1730s. African slaves imported from the Congo revolted in the 1739 Stono Uprising. By 1740 the balance of power in the region tipped permanently towards the emergent English plantation society.

Early Colonial Virginia - Barbarians and Brothers

Early Colonial Virginia - Invention of the Creek Natiobn

Early Colonial Virginia - Transformation of the Southeast Indians

Buy “New Worlds of Violence” on Amazon here. See also Wayne E. Lee Barbarians and Brothers: Anglo-American Warfare, 1500-1865 (2011), Steven C. Hahn The Invention of the Creek Nation, 1679-1763 (2004) and Charles Hudson The Transformation of the Southeastern Indians, 1540-1760 (2008).

Powhatan Indians of Virginia

Helen C. Rountree wrote The Powhatan Indians of Virginia: Their Traditional Culture in 1989. It is now available on Kindle and online new and used.

Roundtree describes Powhatan culture as it existed at the emergence of English colonization between 1607 and 1610. It includes the familiar such as housing, clothing, weapons and ornaments, as well as cultural practices, social structure, and descriptions of legal, political, military and religious life.

The Powhatan Indians occupied the middle of a cultural spectrum along the east coast, just as they lived in a natural environment that was “middle ground” in its climate and ecology. While Rountree’s focus is on the Powhatan, it is inevitable that much is revealed about the early English settlers at Jamestown.

Learn more to buy “Powhatan Indians” at Amazon.com. *Rountree, Helen C., and Thomas E. Davidson, Eastern Shore Indians of Virginia and Maryland (1997). It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Eastern Shore Indians” at Amazon.com.

Powhatan Lords

Margaret Holmes Williamson wrote Powhatan Lords of Life and Death: Command and Consent in Seventeenth-Century Virginia in 2003. It is now available on Kindle and online new and used.

Williamson examines the dual sovereignty among the Powhatan Indians from the perspective of socio-political and religious organization. Among them was a reciprocal relationship between power and authority; they were not equal to one another, but reciprocal, each was dependent upon the other for legitimacy.

Mundane werowance war chiefs and cockarouses peace councilors were complemented by spriritual quiyoughcosough priests and shamans. Most adults among the Powhatan attained some status in the community for both religious authority and political power, the right to say what was to be done, and the ability to act on what is authorized. In understanding Powhatan hierarchies, neither power and force, nor power and authority were necessarily the same thing.

Interpretations from17^thcentury English accounts of the Powhatan must be interpreted from an understanding of the English author’s culture. Learn more to buy “Powhatan Lords” at Amazon.com.

The True Story of Pocahontas

Linwood “Little Bear” Custalow and Angela L. Daniel “Silver Star” wrote The True Story of Pocahontas: The Other Side of the Story in 2007. It is available on Kindle and online in paperback new and used.

The descendant of Mattaponi chiefs and a William and Mary anthropologist teamed up to present the “Mattaponi sacred oral history” of Pocahontas. It asserts that “Powhatan” Wahunsenaca was the Don Luis who encountered the Spanish in the 1560s and 1570s. Pocahontas played no role in John Smith becoming a Powhatan werowance.

She had a native son by her first husband before the English killed him, and her English rape during captivity produced a second son before her marriage to John Rolfe. Pocahontas was said to be murdered by Jamestown colonists administering a poison that took effect only after her transit to England.

The review in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography describes the book as “flawed”, cautioning that its publication coincided with the contemporary controversy over the King William Reservoir dam along the Mattaponi River.

To buy “True Story” at Amazon, click here.

Pocahontas, Little Wanton

Neil Rennie wrote Pocahontas, Little Wanton: Myth, Life, and Afterlife in 2007. Available from the Quaritch Press and online new and used.

Here Rennie both recounts what is reliably known about Pocahontas’s life, and he explains the iterative changes in written accounts over the last three centuries. John Smith’s accounts in 1608, 1612, and 1624 are progressively embroidered with elements of a medieval romance. Other contemporary Englishmen wrote accounts of Pocahontas. A short section describes reliable historical information of her biography.

Not much was written about Pocahontas until a century after Smith’s death. Then nineteenth century southern writers began to imagine details of English colonial origins predating New England’s. Authors, playwrights and painters then continued to create impressions of the Algonquin “princess” to serve the audiences of their time.

To buy “Pocahontas, Little Wanton” on Amazon, click here.

The First Way of War

John Grenier wrote The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607-1814 in 2005. It is available from the Cambridge University Press, on Kindle and online new and used.

This book is a military history that surveys the development of war making by Americans from Jamestown to the War of 1812. Two principle elements are considered, first the development of unlimited war, and second the routine use of irregular warfare. Over time attacks on non-combatants, villages and agricultural resources were accepted, then legitimized and finally encouraged.

The first hundred years developed the use of scalp bounties and ranger units in the English colonial defeat of several powerful eastern tribes. By the mid 1700s Seven Years’ War, British imperial policy integrated irregular warfare and unlimited war. The Americans continued the tradition on its frontier during the Revolution as did the British. The unlimited warfare continued in the American frontier wars in the Ohio Valley, Great Lakes and southern Appalachian Plateau.

To buy “First Way of War” at Amazon, click here.

*Warren R. Hofstra edited Cultures in Conflict: The Seven Years’ War in North America in 2007, reprinted in 2013. Available at Rowman and Littlefield, on Kindle and online new and used. Previously reviewed at TheVirginiaHistorian.com in the top 300 texts from survey histories used in university courses. See also titles in “Wars in Virginia” in the colonial era here. To buy “Cultures in Conflict” at Amazon, click here.

Anglo-Native Virginia

Kristalyn Marie Shefveland wrote Anglo-Native Virginia: Trade, Conversion, and Indian Slavery in the Old Dominion in 2016. It is available from the University of Georgia Press, on Kindle and online new and used. Reviewed in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography.

The Algonquin tributary system of trade was codified by the Virginia Colony by the 1646 Treaty of Peace with Necotowance. The subsequent flourishing trade in the period from 1646 to 1722 led to the transformation of Jamestown and its surrounds from an outpost of empire to a frontier model for English society and imperialism, reaching throughout the Piedmont and into the southwestern coastal plain.

The Byrd and Steggs families and Powhatan Opechancanough and Pamunkey “Queen” Cockacoekse in particular emerged as key figures in diplomacy and trade, conversion and the development of Indian slavery that expanded Virginia colonial plantations and established political, economic, racial and class distinctions that would extend for three centuries.

Unlicensed settler violence against Native communities and resentment against the emerging colonial elites let to Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676. After its collapse, the Treaty of Middle Plantation in 1677 was meant to protect the land rights of nine trading tributary Native signatories of southeast Virginia. But the outlawed Indian slave trade continued and land encroachment continued, as did efforts at religious conversion. When the Tuscaroras of North Carolina went to war under similar provocation, the Virginia tributary system was tested; a renewed 1722 peace treaty with the Virginia tribes failed to guarantee peace in the future.

Buy the “Anglo-Native Virginia” on Amazon here.

White People, Indians and Highlanders

Colin G. Calloway wrote White People, Indians, and Highlanders: Tribal Peoples and Colonial Encounters in Scotland and America in 2008. It is available from the Oxford University Press, on Kindle and online new and used.

Scots Highlanders and Amerindians of the 1600s were both tribal peoples living on the edge of cosmopolitan European empire. As Highlanders moved in large numbers into North America, voluntarily and in forced removals following their defeat in total war, they found themselves and English Amerindian allies fighting on the same side, making exchanges in northern fur and southern deer trade, and intermarrying creating multigenerational “Gaelinds” spanning cultures.

The two tribal peoples could also come into conflict, especially as the Highlanders displaced from ancestral lands sought to acquire holdings on the English colonial frontier that infringed on Native hunting grounds. Highlanders were seen as “natural warriors” and placed on the English frontier as a buffer to Amerindian war parties.

To buy “White People, Indians and Highlanders” at Amazon, click here.

Brothers Among Nations

Cynthia Van Zandt wrote Brothers Among Nations: The Pursuit of Intercultural Alliances in Early America, 1580-1660 in 2008. It is available from the Oxford University Press, on Kindle and online new and used.

Intercultural alliances were forged by English settlers in the first half of the 17^th century from the Chesapeake to New England. During early stages when colonists were especially dependent on Indian aid, native priorities disproportionately shaped alliances between settlers among Europeans, among Indians and among Africans. The Susquehannocks in particular were allied with the Huron and in establishing trade with French, Dutch, Swedes and English, systematically sought allies against their Iroquois enemies.

Isaac Allerton, the son of a trader in New Netherlands relocated to Virginia to expand the family business participated in the initial assaults on the Susquehannocks that precipitated Bacon’s Rebellion. To buy “Brothers Among Nations” at Amazon, click here.

Indian Slavery in Colonial America

Alan Gallay editied Indian Slavery in Colonial America in 2009. It is now available from the University of Nebraska Press and online new and used. Indian slavery was an important element of North American Indian culture, whether those without kin, or those in a coerced labor force.

Indian slavery was important in the 1600s English colonies first as a labor force, then their sale became an important source of capitalization for enlarged plantations that were subsequently worked by slaves of African descent.

1600s Indian slavery in Virginia was everywhere, and contesting control of that Indian trade in slaves was a primary cause of Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676. By the 1680s, large planters substantially shifted to Africa for their slave labor. Learn more to buy “Indian Slavery” at Amazon.com.

The Indian Slave Trade

Alan Gallay wrote The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717 in 2002. It is now available on Kindle and online new in paperback. This is a comprehensive description of the Carolina’s Indian slave system. The tribes attacked for captives to be used in resale for the slave trade severely impacted those subject to the raids. The English made it illegal to enslave an Indian ally, but sought to weaken the allied tribes of the Spanish and French. As many as 51,000 Indian slaves were exported from 1670-1715 from Charles Town, meaning South Carolina exported more slaves during this period than it imported. The sale of Indian slaves capitalized ever-larger plantation holdings. The collapse of the Mississippi chiefdoms led to new alliances of self-defense oriented to the English so that they would not become targets of English slave raids. Learn more to buy “Indian Slave Trade” at Amazon.com.

The Westo Indians

Eric E. Browne wrote The Westo: Slave Traders of the Early Colonial South in 2005. It is now available on Kindle and online new in paperback. The Westos Indians began among the Iroquois in Erie country. They left subsequent to the Beaver Wars among the Iroquois, Hurons and French.

They migrated through Virginia and eventually settled near the Savannah River around 1660. Their the use of aggressive Iroquois tactics, firearms and connections with the English in a slave trade enabled them to dominate the southeast Indian world outside those tribes under English protection.

They prospered until the Westo War of 1680 when they were dispersed by the English-Shawnee alliance. Learn more to buy “The Westo” at Amazon.com.

Indian Captive, Indian King

Timothy J. Shannon wrote Indian Captive, Indian King: Peter Williamson in America and Britain in 2018. Reviewed in the William and Mary Quarterly. It is available from HarvardUniversity Press, at Kindle, and online. Buy “Indian Captive, Indian King” onAmazon here.

In this book, Timothy Shannon offers a description of the social and laboring context of colonial American indenture, the issues of imperial-Native American relations in the British Empire, and British coffeehouse political culture.

Peter Williamson’s life is examined before and after Williamson’s autobiographical “French and Indian Cruelty” (1757). It is a tale of an entrepreneur and self-made man who rises from a kidnapped teen indenture in colonial America, to a noteworthy contributor to British politics and literature of the empire following the French and Indian, or Seven Years’ War.

After his indenture, Williamson served as a British soldier in the North American colonies, and on his return to Aberdeen following discharge, he published a sensational description of a capture and escape from Delaware Indians he described as barbaric torturers and cannibals. On winning a suit against Scottish magistrates questioning the account, Williamson invested the proceeds in a printing business and two Edinburgh coffeehouses.

From this new-found middle class platform, Williamson published pamphlets that influenced British perceptions of American Indians, and “IndianPeter” held forth based on his credentials to support compulsory British colonial militia service, centralizing imperial rule in the colonies, and retaining Canada as a British province following the 1763 peace.

Buy “Indian Captive, Indian King” on Amazon here. See also Troy Bickham Savages within the Empire: Representations of American Indians inEighteenth-Century Britain (2006), Jenny Hale Pulsipher Swindler Sachem: The American Indian Who Sold His Birthright, Dropped Out of Harvard, and Conned the King of England (2018).

Setting All the Captives Free

Ian K. Steele wrote Setting All the Captives Free: Capture, Adjustments, and Recollection in Allegheny Country in 2013. It is available from McGill-Queen’s University Press, at Kindle, and online. Buy “Setting All the Captives Free” on Amazon here.

In this study of captivity narratives among all sides during the Seven Years’ War, Steele accounts initial battles and skirmishes, the various terms and conditions of captivity, among Indian tribes, French and English soldiers, and various colonial militias. His description then extends to the diplomatic and cultural mechanics of attaining captives freedom, and the problematic readjustment among returnees.

Native groups and nations, and colonial troops all took hostages during the peacetime leading up to the imperial war for various local negotiations and exchanges. Once the French and Indian War began in earnest, Indian raids expanded on trails, forts, farms and traders. Captivity experiences were fraught with terror, but sometimes led to adoption, while escapes and forced returns could have several meanings. “Redemptions” among white returnees were sometimes another captivity forced on individuals whose identities had changed culturally to Native American.

Buy “Setting All the Captives Free” on Amazon here. See also Daniel Ingram Indians and British Outposts in Eighteenth-Century America (2012, 2014), Alan Taylor The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (2007).

Political and Economic Virginia, 1600-1763

Virginia’s political history emphasizes decision making for the common life of the community, including legislative, executive, judicial, economic and military elements.

Early Colonial Policy, 1600-1676

The Early Colonial period for Virginia dates from early efforts to establish Roanoke the lost colony, to Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676. Both British colonial policy towards Virginia and Virginian domestic policy change dramatically in response to the uprising of freed indentures and blacks.

For God, King and People

Alexander B. Haskell wrote For God, King, and People: Forging Commonwealth Bonds in Renaissance Virginia in 2017. It is available from the University of North Carolina Press, on Kindle and online new and used. Reviewed in the Journal American History.

The Virginia colonizers of 1607 operated within the English Renaissance, a deeply providential age very unlike the later modern development of entrepreneurialism. Initially the intent of both investors and venturers was to create a divinely inspired commonwealth based on moral philosophy and secular participation. But their vision of independence was compromised by Crown and Parliament who saw Virginia as a mere province of empire.

The realities of mere existence in the Virginia environs compromised the humanist ideal, then led to disillusionment. The resulting debate both among Virginia settlers and among English colonial sponsors led to debates over whether God wanted English rule to reach across the Atlantic, and if so, how it was to happen. Haskell shows the increasing religious skepticism was a development that led to the rise of secular conceptions of state power to control ongoing colonial affairs, instead of supposing that they were the initiating impulse in an anachronistic commercialism.

Buy the “For God, King and People” on Amazon here.

The Atlantic World and Virginia

The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550-1624 (2007, 2017) was edited by Peter C. Mancall. It is a collection of eighteen essays from several disciplines focusing on early colonial period developments in Virginia and the Chesapeake Bay.

The relationships and contests with the 1600s English outpost are placed in context with developments in Native America, Europe, Africa and the Caribbean. The first part is devoted to the Native American setting among the Chesapeake Algonquins, especially the Powhatan menace.

Part two looks into Africa and the Atlantic focusing on slave trade and resistance to it on that continent. Part three investigates the European models from the Spanish and the French, closely inspecting Caribbean examples.

Part four explores the intellectual currents for and about British colonization in the New World. Part five telescopes onto Virginia and the Atlantic World. Learn more to buy “The Atlantic World and Virginia” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.

Advancing Empire

L. H. Roper wrote Advancing Empire: English Interests and Overseas Expansion, 1613-1688 in 2017. It is available from the Cambridge University Press, on Kindle and online new and used. Reviewed in The William and Mary Quarterly Summer 2018.

Throughout the 1600s, commercial networks created by private interests sought profit in a global outreach of colonization, and the integrated trade with far flung English interests was enmeshed with their use of the African slave trade for labor. Their administrative practice provided the substance of colonial governance this entire period. The state’s interest was primarily one of securing additional revenues as circumstances of foreign wars required.

The purely “reactive role” of the state allowed for delegation of extraordinary powers for both trade and governance. While the self-interested merchants and their aristocratic investors were shaped by their Puritan, anti-Spanish Catholic, anti-Dutch merchant, and pro-slavery beliefs, there was no underlying imperial ideology framing their activity and no state-sponsored colonial administration. Rather than a century of upheaval for overseas commerce, Roper stresses continuity. Even some of the “interloping” new merchants had previously participated in other legally sanctioned monopoly corporations.

Buy “Advancing Empire” on Amazon here.

The Web of Empire

Alison Games wrote The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560-1660 in 2008. Available from the Oxford University Press, Kindle and online new and used. It is a companion volume to her earlier volume, “Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World”.

The British impulse to overseas empire in the Americas was not only a process of military conquest and political domination. It was also a cultural expression with dynamic interplay between imperial center and colonial periphery. The English cosmopolitan elites of aristocratic travelers, merchants, professional soldiers, second sons, and clergy set off for far-flung business or adventure.

During the Stuarts and Cromwell’s Commonwealth, they sortied out into Ireland, the Muslim Mediterranean, from South Asia and India to “failed” colonies such as Madagascar. Virginia was transformed from a failure to “successful”. Initially modeled after the Mediterranean outposts, Virginia had forty percent of its investors as shareholders in other English overseas enterprises.

The notable shortage of food growing expertise among the venturers led to the early starving times and the English attempts to accommodate with local populations with friendships and intermarriage failed at the Anglo-Powhatan War of 1622-32. Then a paradigm shift occurred from a shareholder colony of trade and commerce to a state-sponsored colony of settlement and expansion. It led to success with an agricultural model of colonial self-sufficiency, cash crop exports and belligerent expansion against indigenous populations.

To buy “The Web of Empire” on Amazon, click here.

A Cold Welcome

To buy “A Cold Welcome” on Amazon, click here.

Nature and History in the Potomac Country

With the introduction of agriculture, natives moved upland from the tidewater towards better soils. The “Little Ice Age” in the 1500s to 1700s found themselves in a middle zone between the Iroquois hunters to the north and Cherokee farmers to the south.

To buy “Nature and History in the Potomac Country” on Amazon, click here.

Sea Venture

Kieran Doherty wrote Sea Venture: Shipwreck, Survival, and the Salvation of the First English Colony in the New World in 2007. It is available new online.

It contains useful information about period sea travel in the early 17^th century, and an outline of Bermuda and Jamestown colonization.

To buy “Sea Venture” at Amazon, click here.

A Kingdom Strange

James Horn wrote A Kingdom Strange: The Brief and Tragic History of the Lost Colony of Roanoke in 2010. It is available from the Basic Books Press, on eTextbook and online new and used, a companion volume to his 2005 book, “A Land as God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America.

In this reassessment of Elizabethan objectives in the Americas, Horn places the quest for a western water route to Asia at the center of English colonial ambitions. This, and the hoped-for precious metals akin to the Spanish bonanza in South America.

Horn recounts the maneuverings of Sir Walter Raleigh at Queen Elizabeth’s court, belligerent competition between Protestant and Catholic nations, perilous Atlantic Ocean crossings and the disappearance of just over one hundred colonists at Roanoke Island. The tantalizing vision of a navigable passage to Asia via the Chesapeake Bay was amplified by Powhatan Wahunsonacock’s reports of Roanoke Colony survivors in the interior.

To buy “A Kingdom Strange” on Amazon, click here.

A Tale of Two Colonies

Virginia Bernhard wrote A Tale of Two Colonies: What Really Happened in Virginia and Bermuda? 2011. It is available from University of Missouri Press, at Kindle, and online. Buy “A Tale of Two Colonies” on Amazon here.

In this comparative study of English American colonization in the early 1600s, Bernhard alternates between Bermuda and Virginia. While both began with proprietary companies of investors, Bermuda’s history immediately found prosperity through a more orderly settlement, self-reliant subsistence, and early development of a tobacco cash crop with the help of African expertise. But Virginia’s repeatedly fell towards ruin, compounding high death rates, administrative mismanagement and Powhatan conflicts.

Both colonies were under surveillance by Spanish spies highlighting the era’s Protestant-Catholic antagonisms, and both were influenced in their colonial management by imperial meddling from competing factions within the Virginia Company. The last two chapters address “The Confluence of Three Cultures” in both places, among English, Indian and African natives. To do that, Bernhard tries to explicitly balance the self-serving conflicting narratives of various self-serving rivals.

Early Colonial Virginia - In the Eye of All Trade

Early Colonial Virginia - The Shipwreck that saved Jamestown

Buy “A Tale of Two Colonies” on Amazon here. See also Michael J. Jarvis In the Eye of All Trade: Bermuda, Bermudians, and the Maritime Atlantic World, 1680-1783 (2012), and Lorri Glover The Shipwreck That Saved Jamestown: The Sea Venture Castaways and the Fate of America (2009).

Planting an Empire

Jean B. and J. Elliott Russo wrote Planting an Empire: The Early Chesapeake in British North America in 2012. It is available from John Hopkins University Press, at Kindle, and online. Buy “Planting an Empire” on Amazon here.

The two British American colonies studied in “Planting an Empire” are the Chesapeake Bay settlements in Virginia and Maryland. Throughout the 1600s and 1700s, the two neighbors shared more in common than their different origins might otherwise suggest, and these connections of social and economic development gradually drew them together after some early territorial disputes.

Common Algonquin connections among Native Americans of the Chesapeake Bay predated the English “first families”, and the common geography and tobacco culture evolved into a similar slave-holding economy in both Maryland and Virginia. The Russos end their book with an essay on sources arranged topically.

Early Colonial Virginia - Magistrates and Pioneers

Early Colonial Virginia - A Little Parliament

Buy “Planting an Empire” on Amazon here. See also Warren M. Billings Magistrates and Pioneers: Essays in the History of American Law (2011) and his Little Parliament: The Virginia General Assembly in the Seventeenth Century (2004).

A Briefe and True Report

Thomas Hariot edited A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia: the 1590 Theodor de Bry Latin edition, in facsimile form, accompanied by the modernized English text, in 2007. It is available on Kindle and online new and used.

This is a scholarly explication of how Europeans gained support for colonization efforts in the New World. After Sir Walter Raleigh’s forays along Virginia’s shores in the 1580s, adventurers and investors sought to establish military bases to support English privateers.

Expeditions carried scientists, naturalists, cartographers and artists to describe potential sites for colonization. They used visuals of North American plants, animals and the Algonquins they met to report what they knew, or what they wanted others to believe. Chief among these were the hand-tinted engravings of John Whites watercolors, included in this reproduction. The Roanoke venture is described as well as the context of the Latin edition among the English, French and German editions published in the same year.

To buy “A Briefe and True Report” at Amazon, click here.

*James Horn wrote A Land as God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America in 2005. Previously reviewed as a Bibliography Top 300 title at TheVirginiaHistorian.com. To buy “A Land as God Made It” at Amazon, click here.

*Helen C. Rountree wrote Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown in 2005. Previously reviewed as a Bibliography Top 300 title at TheVirginiaHistorian.com. To buy “Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough” at Amazon, click here.

Order and Civility

Debra Meyers and Melanie Perreault edited Order and Civility in the Early Modern Chesapeake in 2014. It is available from Lexington Books, at Kindle, and online. Buy “Order and Civility” on Amazon here.

In this volume of ten essays on early Maryland and Virginia, several aspects of social control in the colonies are examined. The first section looks at religion, gender and social deviance. The second addresses the complex labor systems made up of settlers, slaves and convict labor. The last group of essays examines the formation of provincial legal systems in the Chesapeake at variance from the mother country.

The reviewer at the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography found the volume wanting overall, despite a good essay on Maryland colonial law regarding indentured servants and slaver by Jeffrey K. Sawyer. See three alternative titles on related subject matter below.

Early Colonial Virginia - The Backcountry Brides

Early Colonial Virginia - Colonial Chesapeake.New

Buy “Order and Civility” on Amazon here. See also Angela K. Couch and Debra E. Marvin The Backcountry Brides Collection: Eight 18^th Century Women Seek Love on Colonial America’s Frontier (2018), Warren M. Billings Magistrates and Pioneers: Essays in the History of American Law (2011), and Debra Meyers and Melanie Perreault, editors, Colonial Chesapeake: New Perspectives (2006).

Ireland in the Virginia Sea

Audrey Horn wrote Ireland in the Virginian Sea: Colonialism in the British Atlantic in 2013. It is available from University of North Carolina Press, at Kindle, and online. Buy “Ireland in the Virginia Sea” on Amazon here.

In this study of the Atlantic community in the early 1600s, Horn uses archaeological and archival evidence to establish material, social and commercial interactions between both early English Virginia settlers with Algonquin-Powhatans, and their connections with Ireland’s Gaelic population and English settlers there.

And while many of the first expeditions in Virginia were soldiered by veterans of the Elizabethan wars in Ireland, Virginia and Ireland were “competitive, contemporary ventures”. King James I required London investment companies that had underwritten Virginia after its 1609 Charter, to also invest in the joint-stock Irish Society colonizing Ireland, thus drawing funds away from Virginia during a period of dire supply shortages.

Early Colonial Virginia - Atlantic Virginia

Early Colonial Virginia - Selling Empire

Buy “Ireland in the Virginia Sea” on Amazon here. See also April Lee Hatfield Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century (2004), Mark G. Hanna Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740 (2015), and Jonathan Eacott Selling Empire: India in the Making of Britain and America 1600-1830 (2016).

White People, Indians and Highlanders

To buy “White People, Indians and Highlanders” at Amazon, click here.

Early Modern Virginia

Douglas Bradburn and John C. Coombs edited Early Modern Virginia: Reconsidering the Old Dominion in 2011. It is available from Oxford University Press, at Kindle, and online. Buy “Early Modern Virginia” on Amazon here.

“Early Modern” relates to the larger Atlantic world of the 1600s, versus a “colonial” reference to English settlements alone. Research into the early Virginia has lagged behind Maryland due to document losses from fires and military campaigns.

In these nine essays on 1600s Virginia, along with introduction and conclusion by the editors, the focus is on Virginia’s differences: material culture and household relationships, societal deference, defiance and religion, the transforming rise of slavery replacing indenture. Religion was central to the origins of Virginia as it was for New Englanders; it was central to English expansion anywhere in the 1500s and 1600s.

Commercial relationships evolved with various merchants including English, Algonquin, Dutch and Spanish. Native American identity changed in the Rappahannock Valley as they were surrounded by new English settlement. Court cases illuminate the ways indentured women could form “household alliances” to challenge head-of-household control.

Virginians could be deferential or defiant depending on the social or legal context. Early slaveholding procurement and practice varied from its origins over time. In the Tidewater, there could be steady development despite the vagarities of Virginia Company supply and early Native American assaults. The essays suggest further exploration of 1600s Virginia and the Chesapeake to broaden the historiography of the era.

Early Colonial Virginia - American slavery, American freedom

Early Colonial Virginia - Virginia's Western Visions

Early Colonial Virginia - Facing East From Indian Country

Buy “Early Modern Virginia” on Amazon here. See also Edmund S. Morgan American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (2013), L. Scott Philyaw Virginia’s Western Visions: Political and Cultural Expansion (2004), Daniel K. Richter Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (2003) and Michelle LeMaster and Bradford J. Wood Creating and Contesting Carolina: Proprietary Era Histories (2013).

A Tale of Two Colonies

Virginia Bernhard wrote A Tale of Two Colonies: What Really Happened in Virginia and Bermuda? in 2011. It is now available from the University of Missouri Press and on Kindle.

It is an unhappy tale of the initial English attempts at colonizing Virginia and Bermuda between the 1580s and 1620s. Bernhard includes life histories of the first administrators, the veterans of English mercenary warfare in the Netherlands and privateer raiding of the Spanish in the Caribbean.

At several points between 1607 and 1623, Jamestown nearly suffered the fate of Roanoke due to administrative disasters. In Virginia there developed a maroon culture of European and African runaways with indigenous peoples in subsistence societies removed from official colonization.

To enclose the colonial economy, a boom and bust cycle of settlement developed which depended on the racialization of the Virginia colony. It brought forced labor on the African descendants, encroaching small farming by freed indentures on the Indian frontier who policed runaways, and consolidation of their frontier settlement farms by the large slave-holding landholders. Learn more to buy “A Tale of Two Colonies” at Amazon.com.

Wild by Nature

To buy “Wild by Nature” on Amazon, click here.

The Empire Reformed

Owen Stanwood wrote The Empire Reformed: English America in the Age of the Glorious Revolution in 2011. It is available from University of Philadelphia Press, at Kindle, and online. Buy “The Empire Reformed” on Amazon here.

The British Empire as it developed under the Stuarts following the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603 was a colonization effort by for-profit corporations and proprietorships that were meant to preclude New World domination by Spain and France, and to contribute to the Crown’s personal finances. The British North American colonies independence from Parliament developed increased autonomy during Cromwell’s Interregnum. The Protestant settlers in North America feared neighboring Catholic imperial outposts, and the Stuart Restoration of a Catholic monarch led to widespread fears of Catholic-inspired conspiracies.

But after the Glorious Revolution, they became convinced that Britain’s new Protestant rulers could protect them from Catholic French and Spanish designs on their territorial land grants. They yielded local corporate and proprietary autonomy to a re-invigorated imperial authority under William and Mary.

The harbinger of the new system in the New World was cemented with the administration of Richard Coote as governor of New York, Massachusetts Bay, and New Hampshire 1698-1701. Stanwood uses an epilog on the forty-year career of Francis Nicholson to explain how much the British colonial system changes, as he was appointed Governor of the Dominion of New England 1688-1689, Maryland 1694-1698, Virginia 1698-1705, Nova Scotia 1712-1715, and South Carolina 1721-1725.

Early Colonial Virginia - Protestant Empire

Early Colonial Virginia - Rethinking America

Early Colonial Virginia - Catholic and English

Buy “The Empire Reformed” on Amazon here. See also Carla Gardina Pestana Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World (2009), and John M. Murrin Rethinking America: From Empire to Republic (2018), and John D. Krugler English and Catholic: The Lords Baltimore in the Seventeenth Century (2008).

The Southern Colonies in the 17^th Century

The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 1607-1689 (1949, 1970, 2015) by Wesley Frank Craven is the first volume in LSUs History of the South. Initially identifying themselves as British, American colonists in the Chesapeake and Carolina gradually developed attitudes and traditions that could be distinguished as Southern only after a later consciousness arose.

Craven studies the social, economic and political development of the British imperial cash crop economy. He emphasizes British imperial expansion during this era as the interests of the first English adventurers were superseded by colonial planters. Center stage shows the contributions of geographers and propagandists Richard Hakluyt, older and younger, Captain John Smith’s governance, Sir Edwin Sandys settlement program, and Nathaniel Bacon’s Rebellion over Indian policy.

The imperial context is established with chapters on European imperial rivalry, the effects of the English Puritan Revolt, its Civil War, Interregnum and Restoration, and the Glorious Revolution with its English Bill of Rights and parliamentary supremacy that brought greater stability. Learn more to buy “The Southern Colonies” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.

Colonial Virginia

Colonial Virginia: A History (1986) by Warren M Billings, John E. Selby, Thad W. Tate covers both Early Colonial and Late Colonial periods, with an afterward assessment of the Revolution.

While overall a political history, attention is also paid to Indians, women, servants, yeomen and slaves. The unifying theme is the emergence of Virginia’s planter elite, including complications.

Billings describes most of the 17^th century, an evolution from boomtown charter generations to the emergence of a dominating white planter class, from ambitious adventurers exploiting dependent indentured servants, to large planters with slaves.

Selby outlines the developments of the middle period to 1750 with the demographic reliance on slave labor for the tobacco cash crop to ensure material prosperity and a measure of independence from the British imperial order based on the insularity of the county courts and development of General Assembly privileges, the Golden Age of Colonial Virginia.

Thad W. Tate analyses the Late Colonial period studied to 1780, with its decay of social deference and persistent instability of the tobacco economy. National American leaders arose from among the Virginians to challenge the loss of colonial prerogatives and English rights, calling on a commitment to liberty and equality that would eventually undermine slavery in the new country. Within a decade of the Revolution, Virginia lost its larger vision, the Tidewater economy collapsed and the state found itself in a cultural backwater. Learn more to buy “Colonial Virginia” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.

The Old Dominion in the 17^th Century

The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: A Documentary History, 1606-1689 (1975, 2007) by Warren M. Billings introduces each section of the 200 collected documents with interpretive essays that alone might serve as a short history of Virginia from 1606 to 1689.

Critical development of local independent governance in the county courts is explained, the political foundation of Virginia’s colonial Golden Age.

Measured and orderly development under Governors Wyatt and Berkeley are contrasted with two major upheavals in the thrusting out of Governor Harvey and Bacon’s Rebellion.

Essays also lead in sections on indentured servants, chattel slavery and Indian-European relations. Learn more to buy “The Old Dominion in the 17^th Century” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.

The Chesapeake in the 17^th Century

The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on Anglo-American Society (1979) by Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman, eds. addresses colonial social life and family in Virginia and Maryland.

Evidence indicates that the high death rate in Jamestown came not from food shortages, but from water contamination in the James River. In the early settlement years there was a pervasiveness of parental death, with half of all children losing one or both parents by age thirteen.

Immigrants to Virginia were initially displaced in their home counties in England without intent to cross the Atlantic, and when they arrived, their settlement patterns were influenced by colony-wide social and economic needs.

In part due to mortality rates, leadership elites were English-born until the 1680s. By 1700, they were substantially Virginia-born “creoles, who replaced a primary interest in England and Empire with local colonial economic, social and political development. Learn more to buy “The Old Dominion in the 17^th Century” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.

Early Modern Virginia – 17^th Century

Early Modern Virginia: Reconsidering the Old Dominion (2011) by Douglas Bradburn highlights Virginia’s unique characteristics and history within the 17^th century Chesapeake society in a collection of essays.

It explores the origins of slavery and the experience of women indentured servants. Contributors document that the often slighted religious context of 1600s Virginia society was akin to New England’s, and they study the Virginian colonist social deference and defiance that were “flip sides of the same conceptual coin.”

Persistence and continuity are found in Dutch commercial influence and the development of Middle Plantation (later Williamsburg), as well imperial developments in the slave trade. Learn more to buy “Early Modern Virginia” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.

Atlantic Virginia

Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century (2007) was written by April Lee Hatfield.

The Atlantic world of early colonial Virginia was not an isolated self-reliant outpost. It was enmeshed in a web of maritime connections not only to England, but also to other English colonies in New England and the Caribbean. It connected to other Europeans and their colonies especially New Netherlands and the Caribbean.

Virginia was also tethered to the received land trade routes of the Algonquin and Powhatan Indians for commerce and expansion and prosperity. Without established port centers, the dispersed great plantations and colony-sponsored landings were directly accessible to shipmasters from the Atlantic and Caribbean. These included English, Dutch, French and Spanish from Europe, Africa, North and South America.

While the lower Tidewater traded tobacco with England, in the Eastern Shore and elsewhere in Virginia, most trade was export grains and provisions to other colonies. Networks of families and faith made profitable trade connections across colonial and national divisions. Barbados became a principle source of slave labor after 1650, and slave codes in Virginia, South Carolina and Jamaica followed Barbados as a model. Learn more to buy “Atlantic Virginia” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.

A Land as God Made It

James Horn wrote A Land as God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America in 2005. It is now available on Kindle and online new and used.

This history of England’s first American colony spans the first efforts at imperial competition with Spain in the 1560s through is dissolution of the Virginia Company in the 1620s. First settlers were greedy, conniving and contentious. The effort at colonization was compromised by political intrigues in England and factionalism among financial backers.

The clashes between natives and newcomers led to fear, suspicion and violence. While the focus is on the English and characters such as John Smith and Pocahontas, administrator Thomas Dale and indentured servant Richard Frethorne, Native Americans appear on nearly every page. The story is one of bloodshed and brutality on both sides, as well as disease, starvation and death. In this beginning period the hardships and reversals suffered by the English led both colonists and onlookers to predict Jamestown’s imminent demise. Learn more to buy “A Land as God Made It” at Amazon.com.

Indians and English

Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (2000)by Karen Ordahl Kupperman shows that early English colonists in America saw the humanity and structure of Eastern Woodland Indians they encountered.

This was in contrast to the stereotypes held by homeland British who were influenced by Tacitus. Kupperman uses the American colonist accounts to give voice to the Native Americans. The story of the meeting of these two cultures was filled with uncertainty and contingency, with both fear and curiosity evident on both sides.

While Europeans introduced epidemic and disruptive forces in native societies, there was considerable variation in cross cultural relationships across time and space. Only as English settlement became permanent did race-based exclusion take hold. Learn more to buy “Indians and English” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.

Indian and European Contacts in Context

Dennis B. Blanton and Julia A. King edited Indian and European Contacts in Context: The Mid-Atlantic Region in 2004. It is available from the University Press of Florida and online new and used.

To buy “Indian and European Contacts in Context” at Amazon, click here.

Deadly Politics of Giving

To buy “Deadly Politics of Giving” at Amazon, click here.

The Jamestown Project

Karen Ordahl Kupperman wrote The Jamestown Project in 2007. It is now available on Kindle and online new and used.

Kupperman’s focus is on what made the Virginia colony work in a way that contemporaneous efforts by the English in Guiana, Ireland, West Indies, Maine and Newfoundland did not. It was Jamestown that provided the model for subsequent English colonization efforts beginning with Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay.

The elements of that success following the turbulent beginnings from 1607 to 1618 at the Great Charter authored by Sir Edwin Sandys were based on the insight that colonists would not work for investor’s profit, they required a stake in the colony’s success. The Jamestown Project found a profitable commodity in tobacco, representative government, public taxation and social stability with the introduction of women and families. Learn more to buy “Jamestown Project” at Amazon.com.

Savage Kingdom

Benjamin Woolley wrote Savage Kingdom: The True Story of Jamestown, and the Settlement of America in 2007. It is available on ebook from Harper Perennial Publishers and online new and used.

Wooley who is a British writer, provides details on the ways Jamestown and its sponsoring Virginia Company were enmeshed in the political affairs of Parliament and empire. The stories of Jacobean court politics, company factionalism and Spanish intrigues are laced with accounts of London plays and the “Sirenaical” intellectuals who met at the Mermaid Tavern.

The account ends with the 1622 massacre that triggered Virginia becoming a royal colony. To buy “Savage Kingd0m” at Amazon, click here.

*William M. Kelson wrote Jamestown: The Buried Truth in 2006. Previously reviewed as a Bibliography 300 title at TheVirginiaHistorian.com.

Jamestown and the New World

Dennis Montgomery compiled 1607: Jamestown and the New World in 2007. It is available at Rowman and Littlefield, on Kindle and online new and used.

Montgomery frames the accounts of Jamestown between 1607 and 1705. All of the twenty-seven articles first appeared in Colonial Williamsburg between 1990 and 2007.

Biographical sketches describe King James I, Captain John Smith, Sir George Somers, the Reverend Robert Hunt, John Clarke (also of the Mayflower), Dr. John Pott, and John Martin a councilor who outlived them all.

Pocahontas is featured in three articles, as is one for Chanco who alerted Jamestown of the 1622 attack. There is also a piece on memory addressing the “Historical Rivalry” between Jamestown and Plymouth. The popular history is made up of contributions from serious scholars and it is well illustrated with maps, prints, portraits and staged photographs of historic re-enactors in costume pursuing period activities such as hunting and fishing. To buy “Jamestown and the New World” at Amazon, click here.

*James C. Kelly and Barbara Clark Smith wrote Jamestown, Quebec, Santa Fe: Three North American Beginnings in 2007. Previously reviewed as a Bibliography 300 title at TheVirginiaHistorian.com.Available on line new and used at Amazon here.

*Kim Sloan wrote A New World: England’s First View of America in 2007. Available on line new and used at Amazon here.

*Peter C. Mancall edited The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550-1624 in 2007. Previously reviewed as a Bibliography 300 title at TheVirginiaHistorian.com. Available online new and used at Amazon here.

Jamestown: The Buried Truth

William M. Kelso wrote Jamestown: The Buried Truth, 2d ed., rev. in 2017. It is now available at the University of Virginia Press and on Kindle.

Author archaeologist William Kelso began unearthing the actual foundations of the 1607 Jamestown fort in 1994; the site was not underwater in the James River as had been so long supposed. Church, barracks, gates and walls all emerged at the hand of exploring shovels. Not only was there evidence of starving time consumption of dogs, cats, rats and mice, the bones of a Bermudian cahow bird were found.

Archeological evidence requires some rethinking about Indian-English relations, because of found Indian tools, fragments of unfinished arrowheads and Indian cooking vessels. Only half of the fort is excavated, and there are half a million artifacts to analyze. Not only the fort is rediscovered, so are outbuildings constructed later in the 1600s. Learn more to buy “Jamestown” at Amazon.com.

Jamestown, the Truth Revealed

William M. Kelso wrote Jamestown, the Truth Revealed in 2017. It is available from the University of Virginia Press, on Kindle and online new and used. Reviewed in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography.

This book serves as an update to initial findings reported in Kelso’s “Jamestown: The Buried Truth”, previously reviewed at TVH. Kelso and collaborators in the Jamestown Rediscovery archaeological investigation re-estimated the location of Fort Jamestown that was believed to have been washed away by the James River, then found it in excavation. They also uncovered the first church where four Jamestown leaders were buried, the Factory, the Metalworking shop, and Governor’s Row during the term of Samuel Argall (1580-1626) who saved the colony from the “starving times”.

The James Fort excavations have uncovered palisade walls, bulwarks, interior buildings, a well, a warehouse, and several pits. Other substantial dumpsites give archeologists insights into the settlers’ lives and deaths, and evidence of relationships with the neighboring Powhatan Indians. The venturers both sought to reinvent the life back home and to find new ways to make the settlement profitable. Captain Bartholomew Gosnold seems to have been properly buried with ceremony outside the fort walls. But Jane may have succumbed during the “starving times”, whose remains were dumped in a cellar pit. The specter of grim settlement failure seems to inform the layers of excavation amid the buried bones of its butchered dogs.

Buy the “Jamestown, the Truth Revealed” on Amazon here.

Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma

Camilla Townsend wrote Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma: An American Portrait in 2004. It is now available on Kindle and new in paperback.

Townsend reimagines the encounter between Pocahontas and the settling English in terms of Powhatan marital strategies of diplomacy. The book begins with a survey of Powhatan Algonquin culture, proceeds to English contact and Pocahontas’ engagement with the English, then the Powhatan uprisings of 1622 and 1624, and finally the end of the Powhatan Paramount Chiefdom in the mid 1600s.

While the Powhatan were curious about the newcomers and willing to trade food, technology and ideas, the English were consumed with self-promotion that made them contentious among themselves and with the natives. They certainly meant to disposes the Powhatan of their lands adjacent to Jamestown to the Fall Line in order to provide enough acreage to make themselves in the image of English lords of the manor. Learn more to buy “Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma” at Amazon.com.

Colonial Chesapeake: New Perspectives

Debra Meyers and Melanie Perreault edited Colonial Chesapeake: New Perspectives in 2006. It is available from Lexington Books, on Kindle and online new in paperback.

This collection of nine essays on the social history of the colonial Chesapeake in its Atlantic context explores ethnic, race, class, and gender aspects of the colonial story. These early experiments in English North American colonization created significant cultural, intellectual and social norms that shaped the diverse world of subsequent settlement. The essays are supplemented with companion documents.

Two historiographic models are framed in the editor introductions. The first characterizes Virginia and Maryland colonies as highly exploitive, socially conflicted and marked by rampant individualism amidst unstable political and religious institutions. The second model alternatively interprets an adaptive colonial English society of evolving economic, social and political stability.

To buy “Colonial Chesapeake” at Amazon, click here.

Epidemics and Enslavement

Paul Kelton wrote Epidemics and Enslavement: Biological Catastrophe in the Native Southeast, 1492-1715 in 2007. It is available at the University of Nebraska Press, and online new and used.

This book is an inquiry into a particular time, place, disease and community associated with the Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1696-1700. The deadliest of European diseases were not easily introduced into Native American society. Smallpox normally completed its contagion cycle during the Atlantic crossing. Endemic native warfare in the 1500s and 1600s limited contact between groups, creating large uninhabited quarantine zones outside the exception of the Spanish Catholic mission system.

English colonialism in the Southeast began changing the vectors of disease in Native American communities, first by the 1650s Virginia deerskin trade stretching into the Carolinas, then via the far-flung trade in Native slaves captured in intra-Indian wars after 1675. The chain of infection ran from the James River to the Gulf Coast, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi Valley. When small pox struck Virginia in 1696, it spread throughout the Southeast. The English colonists did not give the Native communities an opportunity to recover from a series of aftershocks.

To buy “Epidemics and Enslavement” at Amazon, click here.

Late Colonial Policy, 1676-1763

Late Colonial Virginia dates between Bacons’s Rebellion and the end of the imperial French and Indian War (Seven Years’ War). British imperial efforts to pay for the successful war from North American colonial revenues brought about the American Revolution.

Tobacco Coast

Tobacco Coast: A Maritime History of Chesapeake Bay in the Colonial Era (1984) by Arthur Pierce Middleton studies the middle colonial period emphasizing 1660 to 1763 to show how the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries shaped the development of Virginia and Maryland.

Navigable streams and tobacco cultivation led to rapid increase of wealth and population, limiting impulse for commercial centers other than the shipbuilding port cities of Norfolk and Baltimore.

Threats to shipping from activity by Spanish, Dutch, French and pirates were ineffectively countered by colonial privateers until the British navy convoy system was established in 1707, the dawning of Virginia’s colonial Golden Age.

Most of the British born commerce was for tobacco, amounting to half of continental American trade. American capital in colonial vessels traded mainly for grains destined for South European and foreign West Indies colonies was carried on by1,200 colonial mariners.

Attention is paid to the British and African trade in European emigrants and slaves, as well as the two-fifths British export trade arriving in the Chesapeake. Learn more to buy “Tobacco Coast” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.

A Little Parliament

A Little Parliament: The Virginia General Assembly in the Seventeenth Century (2004) by Warren M. Billings describes how the Virginia Assembly worked in the 1600s, from its founding under the Virginia Company until the Virginia Capital moved from Jamestown to Williamsburg.

The first part is a history of the General Assembly, the second features a collective biography of major office holders, governors, councilors, speakers, and clerks. The third section describes how the major actors worked together or arrayed in conflict.

From the 1640s when Governor Berkeley established a bicameral legislature in the General Assembly until the mid 1670s, the Assembly grew in power to “supreme” rule, then it declined.

This book places its resurgence in the 1770s in historical context to better explain the development of Virginian political leadership so influential in American history from 1765 to 1825. Learn more to buy “A Little Parliament” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.

Esteemed Bookes of Lawe

Warren M. Billings and Brent Tartar edited “Esteemed Bookes of Lawe” and the Legal Culture of Early Virginia in 2017. It is available at the University of Virginia Press, on Kindle and online new and used. Reviewed in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography.

This volume on the legal culture of early colonial Virginia is a collection of seven essays mining the book collecting found in the lawyers of the period. For instance, Tarter writes of how the Virginia Council in Williamsburg assembled its own reference library, providing the means for those making the annual pilgrimage to the capital to track how English law was modified by incorporating legislation and judicial precedent among the various courts of law.

The commonly held books held among Virginia’s lawyers in turn influenced the ways practitioners of the legal profession were trained up in the law. The intellectual history of early America is made up of both an English culture transmitted into the Virginia colony, and a supplemental native-grown legal literature that defined a distinctive local culture.

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The Transformation of Virginia

The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (1983) by Rys Isaac is an ethnographic and social history focusing on the gentry, a rebelling yeomanry yet including Afro-Americans in the religious revivals.

There was a confluence in the Late Colonial period of colonial elite objecting to imperial rule, and a popular rise of religious dissent challenging the earlier colonial hierarchical order. With the increase of evangelical congregations among Presbyterians (1740s), Methodists (1750s) and Baptists (1770s), the Anglican Church of England came under siege, undermining the previous deferential order.

With that increasingly compromised pillar of hierarchal society, in a way Virginia elites were able to reassert their leadership in the American Revolution at the courthouse by challenging British dominion. Part III, the “Afterview” of transformation, relates political and religious history, explaining the two competing communities of faith as evangelical yeomanry and aristocratic elites. Virginia’s response to the social disorder resulting in the eventual disestablishment of the Church of England. Learn more to buy “Transformation of Virginia” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.

Sir William Berkeley

Sir William Berkeley and the Forging of Colonial Virginia (2004) by Warren M. Billings describes the central political figure in Virginia history for twenty-five years between the 1640s and 1670s.

Its political culture became more decentralized by delegating powers to county magistrates. It became more independent of empire by making the General Assembly a bi-cameral legislature with its own elected Speaker and Clerk, unlike the British Parliament.

Berkeley’s failure of leadership surrounding the events of Bacon’s Rebellion and afterwards led to closer scrutiny of Virginia’s affairs and an increase in imperial control. But the political evolution of the General Assembly in Virginia during Berkeley’s tenure established precedent into the 1700s and beyond. Learn more to buy “Sir William Berkeley” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.

Gentlemen and Freeholders

Gentlemen and Freeholders: Electoral Politics in Colonial Virginia (2000) by John Gilman Kolp is a political study of the most personal levels of colonial Virginia, the county, parish and neighborhood.

The House of Burgesses was the only election with a direct voice for property holders qualifying for the franchise. There were variations in nomination procedures, campaigning and polling methods among the counties.

Kolp divides counties between categories of competitive elections, intermittently competitive, and noncompetitive electoral politics. He plays down social deference to elites to explain smaller freeholders voted more frequently that the elites.

Their numbers fluctuated from 75% of free white males in western Berkeley County to about 50% in Tidewater James City and Richmond Counties, to 25% in Fairfax. Their turnout also fluctuated based on local issues.

Disputes among competitive elections related to competing planter families, local issues such as establishing a new parish, and persistent factions among the yeomanry freeholders that showed elements of political proto-parties. While voter turnout increased during this period, contested elections declined, in part due to voter support of their Burgesses’ defiance of the British Crown from 1765 onward. Learn more to buy “Gentlemen and Freeholders” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.

Foul Means

Anthony S. Parent, Jr. wrote Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660–1740 in 2003. It is available on Kindle and online new in paperback.

Parent argues that racial slavery came as an innovation in the royal colony of Virginia by “deliberate, odious and foul” means authored by a small, closely held planter class. They grabbed Indian and farmer-debtor lands, substituted black slaves for white indentured laborers, thwarted attempts at land reform and perpetuated their gains by entailed estates.

Slaves resisted most dramatically in the Chesapeake rebellion of 1730, whites in the bi-racial Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676.

The institution of slavery exacerbated class and racial conflict, it did not end social strife. Slave unrest and violence became endemic in Virginia, perpetuating endless planter fears of slave flight, insurrection and domestic violence. Learn more to buy “Foul Means” from Amazon.com.

In the Absence of Towns

Charles J. Farmer wrote In the Absence of Towns: Settlement and Country Trade in Southside Virginia, 1730–1800 in 1993. It is now available online new in paperback.

Farmer reconstructs the settlement patterns of the ten counties established by 1800 in the piedmont region of Virginia south of Petersburg and Richmond. From early settlement in 1730 to 1760, it became the leading tobacco producing region in Virginia, a wealthy area of plantation agriculture and slavery.

The region was dotted by country stores located on plantations and at ferry crossings. The high-value export commodity that was tobacco brought about the absence of towns as manufacturing and service activities were depressed among self-reliant plantations of slaves who generated relatively little demand for goods or services.

Detailed accounts of the country store and its trade describe the market areas of James Murdoch store in Halifax County and Edward Dromgoole’s store in Brunswick County. Learn more to buy “In the Absence of Towns” from Amazon.com.

Backcountry Towns of Colonial Virginia

Christopher E. Hendricks wrote The Backcountry Towns of Colonial Virginia in 2006. It is available from University of Tennessee Press and online in hardcover and paperback.

Hendricks studies twenty-five towns founded before the Revolution in Virginia west of the Fall Line in the Piedmont and Southside, extending north into the Great Valley and west into Kentucky’s fortified settlements.

These “planned communities” contributed to expanded European settlement and the rapid expansion of colonial Virginia, most often as seats of new county government. Early speculator towns east of the Blue Ridge in tobacco country amidst navigable waterways tended to fail.

But to the west, wars, especially the French and Indian War, stimulated the growth of towns as havens of safety and centers of military and civilian markets. There they provided services for long distance trade and centralization for staple distribution west of the early colonial Tidewater.

To buy “Backcountry Towns” at Amazon, click here.

A Place in Time

A Place in time: Middlesex County, Virginia, 1650-1750 (1984) by Darrett B. and Anita H. Rutman reconstructs life in colonial Middlesex County, Virginia.

Early on, frontier society gave modest opportunity to ex-servants. Then after the 1670s, those social structures were disrupted with the introduction of slavery to comprise the large scale planters’ tobacco labor force. And finally, a more hierarchal class society developed in the 1700s.

Early society was structured in concentric circles, providing for a dispersed population. Friends and relatives lived in neighborhoods, these centered about parishes, and parishes centered on county courts and administration.

A half a century later as the 1700s began, counties began to be divided as tangential circles within each county, marked by class relationships and economic activity. Urban centers were set apart from circles of poor farmers and middling planters, who were in turn set apart from the slave populations centered on the great plantations of large planters. These had little interaction compared to earlier times. Learn more to buy “A Place in Time” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.

Gentry and Common Folk

Albert H. Tillson, Jr. wrote Gentry and Common Folk: Political Culture on a Virginia Frontier, 1740–1789 in 1991. It is now available at the University Press of Kentucky and online new and used.

Tillson concentrates on the Upper Valley of Virginia south of Augusta County and the in-migration of the Scotch-Irish to populate it. The colonial era when compared to republican times was an age of moral order with a deferential political culture.

The elites accommodated ordinary settlers by personally financing frontier forts and negotiating instances of desertion from imperial Indian wars, indiscipline within militia ranks and violence against “friendly” Indians.

While the Valley’s elite was successful in re-creating a gentry culture similar to that of eastern Virginia, it was not as deferential as the eastern. Despite continuing gentry class power, there came to be “a strikingly more republican ethos by 1789”. But it was spared the disorder of western Pennsylvania and the Carolinas. Learn more to buy “Gentry and Common Folk” from Amazon.com.

Diversity and Accommodation

Michael J. Puglisi edited Diversity and Accommodation: Essays on the Cultural Composition of the Virginia Frontier in 1997. It is now available from the University of Tennessee Press and online used.

Non-English ethnics settling in the Valley of Virginia between the Potomac and the James Rivers and in southwestern Virginia’s Roanoke Valley and New River Valley, generally engaged in trade, lived as neighbors and learned to tolerate their differences in town life.

Local leaders were appointed to preserve and extend eastern Virginia hierarchies regardless of the gentry’s ethnicity. Initially ethnics protected their separate identities through religious practice, inheritance and marriage patterns.

But Scots-Irish and the Germans in Virginia, especially compared to settlement in Pennsylvania or western Maryland, grew more dispersed and their ethnic ties became more tenuous by learning English and marrying across ethnic lines.

African American slaves were sometimes the first pioneers on the Indian frontier making clearings for farms and establishing trade with Native Americans. Learn more to buy “Diversity and Accommodatilon” from Amazon.com.

The Virginia Germans

Klaus Wust wrote The Virginia Germans in 1969. It is now available online new in paperback.

Despite the small Amish and Mennonite groups who persist, no large distinctive German groups exist in Virginia. The Prussian glassblowers of Jamestown were few. In the 1730s the Germans settling in the Valley and upper Piedmont had effectively merged into the Anglo-Saxon culture by 1800. A second wave of “New Germans” settling in the 1830s around Richmond were thoroughly Americanized by the First World War.

The 1730s influx of Germans from Pennsylvania, Maryland, German principalities, Switzerland or French Alsace were welcomed as a buffer on the frontier from Indian attacks which developed in a fury between 1753 and 1758.

Pockets of “little Germany” persisted until English became the daily and church language of frontier settlers. Germans became important as farmers and craftsmen. They were important both as gunsmiths and militia, but also notable in their exemption from militia laws as Dunkers and Mennonites. Learn more to buy “The Virginia Germans” from Amazon.com.

The Planting of New Virginia

Warren Hofstra wrote The Planting of New Virginia: Settlement and Landscape in the Shenandoah Valley in 2004. It is now available from the John Hopkins University Press and online new and used.

This study has a dual focus on both regional settlement and British Empire. First was the “open-country neighborhood” of scattered yeoman farmers beginning in the 1730s. Frederick County is established around Winchester in 1743 and others followed at the behest of Governor Spotswood to counter French imperial encroachment, inter-Indian warfare and Indian-settler warfare, and hostile maroon colonies of escaped slaves.

The military trade brought a commercial economy of production and consumption that ranged from the trans-Appalachian West across the entire Atlantic region. By the end of the Seven Year’s War, local farmers shipped flour to markets in Alexandria, Baltimore and Philadelphia. Indian trade declined, new roads connecting farms to mills and mills to town shops were built.

A rural middle class developed in the Valley. All was not peaceful and placid; Dutch and Irish residents of Winchester flung riots against one another twice a year on their opposing holidays. Learn more to buy “The Planting of New Virginia” from Amazon.com.

William Parks

A. Franklin Parks wrote William Parks: The Colonial Printer in the Transatlantic World of the Eighteenth Century in 2012. It is available from the Pennsylvania State University Press, at Kindle, and online. Buy “William Parks” on Amazon here.

In this book history-as-biography, A.F. Parks narrates the life and career of William Parks from apprenticeship in Worcestershire, Hereford, Reading and London, England, and his subsequent success as an official printer first in a proprietor colony at Annapolis, then in a royal colony at Williamsburg.

While influenced by political and religious pressure from his official patrons, he also promoted private advertising and encouraged literary culture in colonial society.

Parks defended the freedom of the press, printed opposing political and economic views, and published the writings of deists and religious evangelicals alongside Church of England doctrine. The colonial American entrepreneur combined official colonial job printing, book and pamphlet publishing, journalism and newspaper publishing of the Maryland Gazette and the Virginia Gazette. He imported books from Britain and Europe, and founded a Virginia paper mill.

Buy “William Parks” on Amazon here. See also Lawrence C. Wroth The Colonial Printer (1995), Isaiah Thomas History of Printing in America: With a Biography of Printers & an Account of Newspapers (1820,1988), Hugh Amory and David D. Hall, editors A History of the Book in America: volume 1: the Colonial Book in the Atlantic World (2009), and Dennis C. Landis European Americana: A Chronological Guide to Works Printed in Europe Relating to the Americas, 1493-1776 in six volumes (1980- ).

Patrick Henry

Thomas S. Kidd wrote Patrick Henry: First Among Patriots in 2011. It is available from Basic Books, at Kindle, and online. Buy “Patrick Henry” on Amazon here.

In this brief popular history, Kidd writes a detailed account of Patrick Henry’s personal and public life. He synthesizes previous scholarship, and draws conclusions similar to those of Henry Mayer in his Son of Thunder (see below).

Kidd expands the basic material somewhat by including several important primary documents from Henry’s correspondence, draft speeches, newspapers, and contemporaries including one from Daniel Boone usually unreported in Henry’s biographers.

The author seeks to reconcile Henry’s “Liberty or Death” speech at the 1775 Virginia Convention with his opposition to the proposed U.S. Constitution of 1788. Kidd’s explanation is that Henry held a sustained conviction that governance through the local community in the evangelical Protestant church and in the county’s neighborhood jury was a better guarantee of citizen liberty than remote sovereigns at a distance.

Late Colonial Virginia - The Mind of Patrick Henry

Late Colonial Virginia - Patrick Henry in the Making

Late Colonial Virginia - The Other Founders

Late Colonial Virginia - Age of Infidels

Buy “Patrick Henry” on Amazon here. See also Henry Mayer A Son of Thunder: Patrick Henry and the American Republic (1986, 2018), Kevin J. Hayes The Mind of a Patriot: Patrick Henry and the World of Ideas (2008), Saul Cornell The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788-1828 (1999), Robert Douthat Meade Patrick Henry in the Making (1957), and Eric R. Schlereth An Age of Infidels: The Politics of Religious Controversy in the Early United States (2018).

The Trouble with Tea

Jane T. Merritt wrote The Trouble with Tea: The Politics of Global Consumption in the Eighteenth Century Global Economy in 2017. Reviewed in the Journal of American History. It is available from theJohns Hopkins University Press, at Kindle, and online. Buy “The Trouble withTea” on Amazon here.

British colonial commodities developed global economic importance in cod and sugar, madeira and rum. As a part of continued imperial expansion and diversification, by the 1700s the British chartered East India Company developed a strategy to monopolize the entire Asian export tea supply.

Even though worldwide consumption rose exponentially, oversupply and the costs of its near-term trade expansion into Bengal brought the commercial behemoth to the verge of bankruptcy.

But the East India Company, which flew an ensign of alternating red and white stripes, ensured its continued existence by making itself “too big to fail”. It provided substantial incomes to official political investors, and out-sized revenues to the British government. Parliament’s accommodating response to the company’s financial crisis was to initiate imperial oversight, but at the same time to allow the Indian Ocean-based company to distribute tea directly into the North American colonies without going through mercantile middlemen.

Tightening British imperial enforcement of trade threatened to cut off American black market supplies that themselves had evolved to bypass London tea merchants. But despite the market disruptions associated with American patriot boycotts and the Continental Congress with their Revolutionary War, under the new U.S. Constitution, Congress allowed American merchants to re-establish a tea trade with the East India Company monopolists. By the 1790s, American trade amounted to about two-million pounds of tea annually, valued at half of all their China trade.

Buy “The Trouble with Tea” on Amazon here. See also John E.Crowley, Richard L. Bushman The American Farmer in the Eighteenth Century: A Social and Cultural History (2018), and Allen Greer Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires and Land in Early Modern NorthAmerica (2018).

The Dividing Line Histories

Kevin Joel Berland edited The Dividing Line Histories of William Byrd II of Westover in 2013. It is available from University of North Carolina Press, at Kindle, and online. Buy “The Dividing Line Histories” on Amazon here.

This book discusses and explains an important primary source describing an 1728 surveying expedition. Berland supplies biographies on Byrds companions, weather reports and political issues of the day. The author thoroughly analyses the differences of the manuscripts held by the American Philosophical Society and the Westover Manuscript held by the Virginia Historical Society. They are not only adventure tales, but serious works of literature.

The canon of early Virginia writing also includes The Voyages of John Smith — see Helen C. Rountree John Smith’s Chesapeake Voyages, 1607-1609 (2007), John Lederer’s Discoveries — see William Talbot The Discoveries of John Lederer, in three several marches from Virginia… (2015), Robert Beverley’s History and Present State of Virginia (1971,2018) — see also Robert Beverley and Susan Scott Parrish The History and Present State of Virginia: with an introduction (2013), and Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia — see also Doug Good editor Notes on the State of Virginia in Contemporary Language (2015).

Early Colonial Virginia - On the Sources of Patriarchal Rage

Early Colonial Virginia - Commonplace Book of William Byrd II

Early Colonial Virginia - Where the Cherry Tree Grew

Buy “The Dividing Line Histories” on Amazon here. See also Kenneth A. Lockridge On the Sources of Patriarchal Rage: The Commonplace Books of William Byrd and Thomas Jefferson and the Gendering Power in the Eighteenth Century (1994), Kevin Joel Berland The Commonplace Book of William Byrd II of Westover (2001), Philip Levy Where the Cherry Tree Grew: The Story of Ferry Farm, George Washington’s Boyhood Home (2013).

Frontiersman: Daniel Boone

Meredith Mason Brown wrote Frontiersman: Daniel Boone and the Making of America in 2008. Available from the Louisiana State University Press, Kindle and online new and used.

Daniel Boone was a skilled frontiersman with remarkable charisma that enabled him to survey lands and promote settlement through personal, business and political connections. In spite of personal debt, he was able to open up settlement across western Virginia and into the farthest reaches of its transmontane territorial claims.

Brown attempts to relate Boone’s biography by telling both the familiar mythological stories of romance, but in a context of historical fact that realistically identifies some of his shortcomings and failures.

Boone was chiefly loyal to his extended family and the local community of the Boonsborough frontier settlement. There was a roiling mix of conflicting loyalties in the early settlement in the Mississippi River Valley among Virginia colonial aspirations of self-government, countervailing international claims and looming military threat from Shawnee, Cherokee, British and Spanish in the region.

Although a staunch supporter of the United States, Boone tactically trimmed his actions at various times, such as when he promised the British to try to persuade Boonsborough to surrender in the Revolution while an officer in the Virginia militia. When displaced from his leadership role in Kentucky by new migration, plantation development and commercial growth, he later served as a Spanish official in Missouri while that territory was still claimed by the Spanish Empire. Nevertheless he was instrumental in ushering in the migrations of hundreds of thousands into the Mississippi Valley of the United States western claims before the Louisiana Purchase.

To buy “Frontiersman: Daniel Boone” on Amazon, click here.

The Townshend Moment

Patrick Griffin wrote The Townshend Moment: The Making of Empire and Revolution in the Eighteenth Century in 2017. It is available at the Yale University Press, on Kindle and online new and used. Reviewed in the William and Mary Quarterly.

This book studies the lives of two brothers, George Townshend (1724-1807) and Charles Townshend (1725-1767). Both were prominently involved in British imperial politics in the run up to the American Revolution. Their education they were conventional eighteenth century gentlemen, and they conventionally used their family connections to secure appointments in imperial government.

Charles gained a place in the Board of Trade and Plantations at a time of increasing mercantilism in Britain’s commercial empire. He became a champion of metropolitan sovereignty and the necessity of imperial reform among the colonies. George’s military career was marked by contentious wrangling that brought it to an end until he was awarded the post of lord lieutenancy of Ireland. There he pursued a campaign to break regional authority independence of London’s imperial direction.

Charles career was capped as chancellor of the exchequer where he became acting prime minister during the absences of William Pitt. He authored the controversial Townshend Duties and died soon thereafter. The legacy of both brothers lasting influence was in their stimulating resentment and opposition in Ireland and North America.

To buy “The Townshend Moment” on Amazon, click here.

Courthouses of Early Virginia

Carl R. Lounsbury wrote The Courthouses of Early Virginia: An Architectural History in 2005. It is available from the University of Virginia Press and online new and used.

Lounsbury considers Virginia county court complexes from 1650 through the early 1815. He does so in their legal, political and social contexts, first looking at the coordination of magistrates and builders to design the courthouses, briefly discussing Virginia law and punishment, then treating the jails, clerks’ offices and nearby taverns. Courthouses were central to the town development, and after a 1662 statute, included stocks, pillory and whipping post.

The courthouse locations were often isolated, situated for their geographic centrality within county boundaries, in contrast to the location of parish churches treated in Dell Upton’s “Holy Things and Profane: Anglican Parish Churches in Colonial Virginia”. Early courthouses adopted the ecclesiastical styles of compass windows and arched ceilings, and after 1725 a distinctive front of English arcade became common.

To buy “Courthouses of Early Virginia” at Amazon, click here.

Social History in Virginia, 1600-1763

The social history of Virginia spanning the Early and Late Colonial periods is one of transplanting English society to the New World, incorporating dissenting English and other Europeans, and adding the element of a race-based slave population of Africans and their descendants.

Colonial Chesapeake Society

Colonial Chesapeake Society (1991) edited by Lois Green Carr, Philip D. Morgan and Jean B. Russo is a collection of essays on the social history of the Chesapeake region in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. Seven of them relate to Virginia.. The central theme is the speed of cultural formation, deemphasizing colonial chaos and instability noted elsewhere. Community networks in the Chesapeake facilitated by religious affiliations rather than village centers, slave labor replacing free whites and blacks in the economy, important continuing Indian relations and fur trade, waves of European immigration and artisan craftsmen, and even the evolving diet to include more beef are all discussed. Learn more to buy “Colonial Chesapeake Society” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.

Albion’s Seed

David Hackett Fischer wrote Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989). It is now available online new in paperback and on MP3 CD.

Virginia was the direct beneficiary of two of Fisher’s four British folkways. One of those was the second, related to immigrants from the southern and southwestern England from the 1640s to the 1670s in the Tidewater, comprised of a few cavaliers and many indentured servants. The other was the fourth, related to immigrants from the borders of North Britain and Ulster into the Appalachian backcountry between 1675 and 1700.

Though all four shared the English language, Protestant religion and a British sense of liberty, the Puritans of East Anglia sought an ordered liberty, the cavaliers of Wessex an hierarchal, hegemonic liberty, the Quakers of the North Midlands a reciprocal liberty and the Presbyterians of the borders a natural liberty.

Not only were their intellectual traditions distinctive, their family ways, food ways and death ways were different, as were their buildings, dress and speech. Fisher posits a connection between the slaveholding traditions of ancient Wessex and the introduction of African slavery in the Tidewater following the in-migration of the cavaliers.

Learn more to buy “Albion’s Seed” from Amazon.com.

Planting an Empire

Albion’s Seed

David Hackett Fischer wrote Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989). It is now available online new in paperback and on MP3 CD. Virginia was the direct beneficiary of two of Fisher’s four British folkways. One of those was the second, related to immigrants from the southern and southwestern England from the 1640s to the 1670s in the Tidewater, comprised of a few cavaliers and many indentured servants. The other was the fourth, related to immigrants from the borders of North Britain and Ulster into the Appalachian backcountry between 1675 and 1700. Though all four shared the English language, Protestant religion and a British sense of liberty, the Puritans of East Anglia sought an ordered liberty, the cavaliers of Wessex an hierarchal, hegemonic liberty, the Quakers of the North Midlands a reciprocal liberty and the Presbyterians of the borders a natural liberty. Not only were their intellectual traditions distinctive, their family ways, food ways and death ways were different, as were their buildings, dress and speech. Fisher posits a connection between the slaveholding traditions of ancient Wessex and the introduction of African slavery in the Tidewater following the in-migration of the cavaliers. Learn more to buy “Albion’s Seed” from Amazon.com.

Adapting to a New World

James P. P. Horn wrote Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake in 1994. It is now available on Kindle and online new in paperback. This book focuses on the 1600s Chesapeake society of Lower Norfolk and Lancaster, Virginia and St. Mary’s City, Maryland. They were English societies and cultures overseas, rooted in two divergent English cultures found near the immigrant port of Bristol in the west of England wood and pastureland and from a mixed economy found southeast of London in the east. A gentry formed among the immigrant generation that dominated county governance though they were less wealthy than their homeland counterparts. As tobacco prices rose, farmers large and small expanded land holdings, imported more indentured servants and planted more cash crop. Brevity of marriage and frequency of death more closely resembled native England than the New England experience. While religion was comparatively marginalized, the society was not significantly more disorderly than contemporary England. Learn more to buy “Adapting to a New World” at Amazon.com.

Formation of a Society on Virginia’s Eastern Shore

James R. Perry wrote The Formation of a Society on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1615–1655 in 1990. It is now available at the University of North Carolina Press, on Kindle and online new and used. Perry explicates the ways that early migrants to the Eastern Shore who became its landowners forged a social cohesion at the local level that incorporated newcomers into the customs and culture of the region. The land was first settled in parcels adjacent to previous immigrants, newcomers settled near kinsmen, the local folkways were absorbed by several years indenture before acquiring land, and the early landowners formed a ruling gentry. The high mortality of the times brought remarriages and a rapid proliferation of kinship ties that were useful in economic exchanges as well as politically. Neighbors became godparents and executors of local estates. Institutions that might have unified the entire peninsula such as the militia, church or courts, all failed to overcome the localized influence of the northern communities that led to the creation of Accomack County out of Northampton County following the Northampton Protest of 1652. Learn more to buy “Formation of a Society” at Amazon.com.

Tobacco and Slaves

Allan Kulikoff wrote Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800 in 1986. It is now available on Kindle and online new in paperback. Kulikoff explores the formation of the slave-plantation society in the Colonial Chesapeake from settlement through the presidential election of Thomas Jefferson. There is a three pronged genesis of an emerging nineteenth century South where a planter dominated social structure regenerates itself at each stage of frontier expansion. While kinship ties with yeomanry mitigated extreme class divisions, the gentry dominated, whether spendthrift tidewater barons on exhausted lands, or new land investors in the Piedmont. At the same time, with increased longevity and fewer imported Africans, African Americans developed their own domestic culture, especially on larger and mid-sized plantations accounting for perhaps 70% of the enslaved population. Learn more to buy “Tobacco and Slaves” from Amazon.com.

Motives of Honor, Pleasure and Profit

Walsh, Lorena S. Motives of Honor, Pleasure, & Profit: Plantation Management in the Colonial Chesapeake, 1607–1763 in 2010. It is now available from the University of North Carolina Press and online new and used. Walsh details the early 1600s cultivation of tobacco by small and mid-sized farmers with indentured servants through the 1670s transition to hereditary African slavery to the large plantation consolidations of land grabbing and political power that reached a culmination in the “golden age” of Virginia tobacco gentry that lasted from 1730 into the 1760s. The largest business expenditure for planters was labor supervision and management by overseers. They learned to improve profits by penning tobacco fields for livestock fertilization and diversifying both crops and markets. The workday for slaves in growing seasons was extended from ten hours a day to fifteen hours a day. Learn more to buy “Motives of Honor, Pleasure and Profit” from Amazon.com.

Tobacco Culture

Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of Revolution (1985, 2009) by T. H. Breen looks at planter and British tobacco consignment merchants correspondence, Including Landon Carter and Willand concludes there was “a major cultural crisis” among Virginia’s elites on the eve of the American Revolution. All planters big and small operated by the same rules and assumptions, developing important social cohesion in Virginia society and politics. An important element was the extensive credit allowed by the big planters to the smaller. After 1750, recurring financial crises restricted the British credit allowed to the big planters, placing increased pressure on them because they would not call the small planters debt. Some large planters became “farmers” planting wheat for export and most adopted “Country idioms” which became anti-commercial, asserting local rights and independence, and blaming a conspiracy of the Crown’s ministers for economic conditions. Learn more to buy “Tobacco Culture” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.

A Topping People

Emory G. Evans wrote A Topping People: The Rise and Decline of Virginia’s Old Political Elite, 1680-1790 in 2009. It is available from the University of Virginia Press, on Kindle and online new and used. A TVH top 300 pick for Virginia history.

Evans follows the emergence of twenty-one families prominently dominating the royal governor’s Council of State, then charts their decline due to “improvidence and incompetence” through the Revolutionary period, bringing about a new set of economic and political leadership.

Using Governor William Berkeley’s appointive powers in the mid-1600s to garner additional mercantile and county posts that allowed them to control Virginia society and economy. They extended to themselves large landholdings and used primogeniture, entail and intermarriage to ensure continued special treatment.

The families that once gained most of their wealth in commerce increasingly yielded economic control to Scottish factors trading with the expanding Virginia interior, and by the 1730s had become extravagant planters. Governor William Gooch and House of Burgesses Speaker John Randolph shifted power to the lower house under smaller planter control. The families of the Topping People could not sustain their dominance with western land speculation, and these led the Revolution.

To buy “A Topping People” on Amazon, click here.

Where the Cherry Tree Grew

Philip Levy wrote Where the Cherry Tree Grew: The Story of Ferry Farm, George Washington’s Boyhood Home in 2013. It is available from St. Martin’s Press, at Kindle, and online. Buy “Where the Cherry Tree Grew” on Amazon here. This book is a comprehensive history of the Ferry Farm of Washington’s childhood at the Fall Line of the Rappahannock River. In it, Levy examines the physical and ideological roots of the colonial surveyor, Continental commander, and national Founder. With a profound sense of place that was uniquely colonial Tidewater Virginia, Levy, an archeological historian, focuses on the place rather than the man following a decade’s long excavation at Washington’s boyhood home. The author interprets the value of the 500,000 artifacts uncovered using extensive documentary research. The romanticism of Parson Weem’s cherry tree is briefly addressed, then a more serious examination of American memory, history construction, and celebratory commemoration follows for most of the book, exploring the twentieth century’s interest in everything that Washington visited, touched, or slept in.

Buy “Where the Cherry Tree Grew” on Amazon here. See also Katherine Egner, and Philip Levy George Washington Written Upon the Land: Nature, Memory, Myth, and Landscape (2015), and Edward G. Lengel Inventing George Washington: America’s Founder, in Myth and Memory (2011).

The Lives in Objects

Jessica Yirush Stern wrote The Lives in Objects: Native Americans, British Colonists, and Cultures of Labor and Exchange in the Southeast in 2017. It is available at the University of North Carolina Press, on Kindle and online new and used. Reviewed in the William and Mary Quarterly and the Journal of Southern History.

This book examines the economic and political relationships between British colonists and American Indians in the Southeast in the late colonial period between the 1660s and the 1760s. Natives and colonists cooperated, collaborated and adapted their political economy to one another. Individual choices were made in both markets and individual choices.

Backwoods commerce of the Indian trade was conducted by individual chiefs, company factors, native and colonial hunters, deerskin and leather dressers, traders and merchants. For instance, John Evans kept a careful account of day to day commercial travel from southern Virginia to South Carolina. Trade reached from colonial port cities to Devonshire and London.

To buy “The Lives in Objects” on Amazon, click here.

In the Looking Glass

Rebecca K. Shrum wrote In the Looking Glass: Mirrors and Identity in Early America in 2017. Reviewed in theJournal of Southern History. It is available from the Johns Hopkins University Press, at Kindle, and online. Buy “In the Looking Glass” on Amazon here.

Material objects shaped colonial identity, perhaps none so strikingly as the mirror. Across the 1600s and 1700s, mirror technology improved in the Atlantic world trading exchanges. Rather than use mirrors for magic or ritual, European men in the 1600s and 1700s used the mirror to establish their modernity of enlightenment and rationality.

Shrum traces how mirrors were acquired and by whom, then examines the uses of those mirrors by European men and women, as well as contemporary Native Americans and African Americans. She describes the mirror as important to forming a white racial identity among the Europeans, especially men. Yet she documents several variant meanings found in mirror use among colonial women, Native Americans and African Americans.

Buy “In the Looking Glass” on Amazon here.

The Portrait and the Book

Megan Walsh wrote The Portrait and the Book: Illustration and Literary Culture in Early America in 2017. It is available from the University of Virginia Press, on eTextbook and online new and used. Reviewed in The William and Mary Quarterly Summer 2018.

The influence of book illustration on American literary culture begins in colonial times with imported illustrated books, often with one portrait frontispiece. Authors and printers used visual cues to reflect the text and to shape the reader’s approach in autobiographies, poetry and novels. Walsh uses Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography with its depiction of Franklin as a rustic in a coonskin cap. Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects had a frontispiece of the author seated by a tea table.

At the founding, seduction novels were the most popular genre of fiction in the United States. American editions featured alternative illustrations to make the heroine more accessible to readers. In Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), the British edition seated the protagonist in a parlor while the American frontispiece featured her outsized, alone and out of doors. In books and periodicals the portraits of national figures contributed to the growth of a national political culture and helped define the nation.

Buy “The Portrait and the Book” on Amazon here.

Face Value

Cary Carson wrote Face Value: The Consumer Revolution and the Colonizing of America in 2017. It is available from the University of Virginia Press, on Kindle and online new and used. Reviewed in The William and Mary Quarterly Summer 2018.

In colonial America, before the advent of the industrial revolution, there was a revolution in consumption that created a demand for mass produced goods. Even some of the poorer sort of consumers had made ‘necessities’ that their fathers had called ‘decencies’ and their grandfathers, ‘luxuries’. Culturally, shops and homes were not only destinations in an existing supply-chain, they were also a market where items were evaluated for utility and fashion.

The emergency of a native gentry increase demand, but so did the increasing internal migration. Less stable societies developed material measures to evaluate newcomers. A cultural language related to consumer goods emerged in appearance and behavior to communicate status. In stable societies, those well acquainted with one another have different standards of living related to their familial folkways. But in community formation among newcomers, there was a self-fashioning by adopting life styles, uniting likeminded people of similar aspirations to affirm their similarities by consumer consumption including clothing, eating utensils and furnishings.

Buy “Face Value” on Amazon here.

Political Gastronomy

Michael A. LaCombe wrote Political Gastronomy: Food and Authority in the English Atlantic World in 2012. It is available from University of Pennsylvania Press, at Kindle, and online. Buy “Political Gastronomy” on Amazon here.

Both English colonists and their neighboring tribes exchanged food as expressions of political power. Internally, food production and distribution by English leaders reflected on their fitness for governance. On the Native American’s part, willingness to exchange food was an important factor in establishing their superiority, especially in times of settler hunger. And foods marked the material culture of the English at dinners and celebrations and of the Native Americans status in their use of venison requiring reciprocation.

LaCombe touches on the early English Atlantic settings from 1570 to 1650 in Plymouth and Jamestown, Roanoke, Massachusetts Bay, and Bermuda. Food exchanges and communal meals were a part of diplomacy, status, and hospitality. Wedding invitations were issued by both sides, as well as celebratory dinners, and meals shared by leaders. Food was the common purchase used in seating arrangement and refusals to attend. One-way dispensing of food hospitality from Natives to English was interpreted as “tribute” from subordinates, while that from English to Natives was reported to mother country officials and investors as “liberal giving” by generous rulers.

Early Colonial Virginia - Defining Culinary Authority

Buy “Political Gastronomy” on Amazon here. See also Jennifer J. Davis Defining Culinary Authority: The Transformation of Cooking in France, 1650-1830 (2013).

Prodigy Houses of Virginia

Barbara Burlison Mooney wrote Prodigy Houses of Virginia: Architecture and the Native Elite in 2008. Available from the University of Virginia Press and online new and used. A TVH top 300 pick for Virginia history.

This book studies a group of twenty-five “prodigy houses” built in the extravagant Elizabethan manner between 1720 and 1770, many as surviving structures, some as archeological digs. Wealthy planters invested in homes marked by architectural distinction to maintain the prestige that they had secured in offices, titles and privileges. Wealth and kinship provided access to transatlantic trends in design and ornamentation.

Mooney also explores the female agency born of family use of the dowries that privileged eighteenth century women brought into their marriages. They influenced and directed financing, designing, building and furnishing elite houses of dynastic unions. In an era of fragmentary architectural drawings, the partnership between patron and skilled slave artisan was crucial.

To buy “Prodigy Houses” on Amazon, click here.

The Chesapeake House

Cary Carson and Carl R. Lounsbury edited The Chesapeake House: Architectural Investigations by Colonial Williamsburg in 2013. It is available from University of North Carolina Press, at Kindle, and online. Buy “The Chesapeake House” on Amazon here.

This book is a compendium of knowledge gained by historians, archaeologists, and curators at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation from their fieldwork study of 1600s Jamestown, Virginia, and St. Mary’s City, Maryland. In a socioeconomic, multidisciplinary narrative, it explores the relationship between people and their domestic buildings, including rich and poor, native and immigrant, free and slave.

Chapters address migration and economic history, townhouses and country houses, slave quarters and agricultural buildings, along with building design, craftsmanship, materials, hardware and finishes, ornamentation and interior furnishing.

Early Colonial Virginia - Material Witnesses

Early Colonial Virginia - Glossary of Early Southern Architecture

Buy “The Chesapeake House” on Amazon here. See also Camille Wells Material Witnesses: Domestic Architecture and Plantation Landscapes in Early Virginia (2018), and Carl R. Lounsbury An Illustrated Glossary of Early Southern Architecture and Landscape (1999).

Kitchens, Smokehouses, and Privies

Michael Olmert wrote Kitchens, Smokehouses, and Privies: Outbuildings and the Architecture of Daily Life in the Eighteenth-Century Mid-Atlantic in 2009. Available from the Cornell University Press, Kindle and online new and used.

Domestic comfort of the mid-Atlantic upper class included a variety of out buildings, including kitchens, laundries, privies, offices, smokehouses, dovecotes, dairies, and ice houses. Most examples in this book are from Williamsburg, although they are supplemented with those from Tidewater, the Piedmont, Annapolis and New Jersey. Changes in gender roles are documented, in the dairy case from women to men with the coming of industrialization.

Olmert describes the architecture of the buildings, along with their function and social significance. While many were square, there were also hexagonal and octagonal structures to suit different purposes. The various processing in each structure is chronicled, such as the prompt cooling of dairy milk for wholesome butter and cheese. The dovecote was used for eggs, squab meat, feathers and fertilizer.

To buy “Kitchens, Smokehouses, and Privies” on Amazon, click here.

Gender in Virginia, 1600-1763

The roles of men and women throughout Virginian colonial times diverges both from the culture of the English homeland, but also from the contemporary evolution of roles and patriarchy developing in the New England colonies.

Prodigy Houses of Virginia

Barbara Burlison Mooney wrote Prodigy Houses of Virginia: Architecture and the Native Elite in 2008. It is now available from the University of Virginia Press and online new and used. This book studies a group of twenty-five “prodigy houses” built in the extravagant Elizabethan manner between 1720 and 1770, many as surviving structures, some as archeological digs. Wealthy planters invested in homes marked by architectural distinction to maintain the prestige that they had secured in offices, titles and privileges. Wealth and kinship provided access to transatlantic trends in design and ornamentation. Mooney also explores the female agency born of family use of the dowries that privileged eighteenth century women brought into their marriages. They influenced and directed financing, designing, building and furnishing elite houses of dynastic unions. In an era of fragmentary architectural drawings, the partnership between patron and skilled slave artisan was crucial. Learn more to buy “Prodigy Houses of Virginia” from Amazon.com.

Good Wives, Nasty Wenches and Anxious Patriarchs

Good Wives, Nasty Wenches and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race and Power in Colonial Virginia (1996) by Kathleen M. Brown argues that by mid 1600s, Virginians had used gender to construct race and hereditary slavery, but that it was not until the 1700s that the colony had a fully patriarchal society emerged, which she illustrates with the Carter and Byrd families. As an indicator of the social change in perceptions of women, Brown notes that white servant women in the17th century might be termed “nasty wenches” when they violated social standards, but by the 18^th, the term applied only to black women. Initially many servant women, good wives and daughters labored alongside English men in the tobacco fields; by 1668 white women were no longer taxable on an estate as laborers, but black women, slave and free, were. Although the book centers on questions of gender while interpreting the period, white male Virginians are also analyzed, especially following Bacon’s Rebellion, in the confluence of guns and masculinity, property and democracy. By the 1750s, Virginia’s hierarchal elite objected to any threat by the British Empire to reduce them to the dependent status of women, children or slaves. Learn more to buy “Good Wives, Nasty Wenches” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.

Anne Orthwood’s Bastard

John Ruston Pagan wrote Anne Orthwood’s Bastard: Sex and Law in Early Virginia in 2003. It is available on Kindle and online new in paperback. This book explores the transfer and adaptation of English law to the 1600s settler society of the Chesapeake. It spans four court cases related to indentured Anne Orthwood and her illegitimate child. A new master sued for lost labor damages and won. In a separate case, the father was cleared of responsibility, then sued for fornication after Anne’s death and had to pay child support to the new master. Finally the son Jasper had to sue another master for his freedom after his twenty-first birthday. Bacon’s Rebellion was a defining moment in Virginia’s development, bending the English law to male privilege and racial solidarity. Although challenged both by English authorities and local freemen, the Northumberland County justices of the peace served the interests of the tobacco growing, labor hungry and increasingly slave-owning gentry. The English doctrine of caveat emptor buyer beware came to be administered as caveat venditor seller beware. Learn more to buy “Anne Orthwood’s Bastard” at Amazon.com.

Brabbling Women

Terri L. Snyder wrote Brabbling Women: Disorderly Speech and the Law in Early Virginia in 2003. It is now available on Kindle and online new in paperback. Some women of the 1600s sought an empowered place in the political community and family by use of ungoverned, unauthorized speech in public and in court to challenge patriarchal power and social conventions. There were sometimes surprisingly effective, both at contributing to the 1676 Bacon’s Rebellion and the 1682 Tobacco Cutting Riots and at revealing domestic abuses and vindicating their honor. Snyder extends her discussion into the 1700s by noting that women generally became less outspoken than their forbearers, but they remained a “nettlesome presence” in the private spheres of parlor and household. The scope of this study encompasses not only the wealthy, but also middling status women, widows, the poor and the lowly slaves and free blacks. These women included both servants and slaves in the colonial household. Learn more to buy “Brabbling Women” from Amazon.com.

Within Her Power

Linda L. Sturtz wrote Within Her Power: Propertied Women in Colonial Virginia in 2002. It is now available on Kindle and online new in paperback. It is an examination of women’s legal status in colonial Virginia. In the New World, the English Common Law of Blackstone was not uniformly enforced. Virginia women had extensive involvement in family businesses including 500-acre farms and warehousing, especially related to the Atlantic trade networks. Virginia colonial women had access to cash, commerce and the courts. They protected inheritance for their children when deserted. They acquired power of attorney and in widowhood ran taverns. The Virginian equity courts were significant in maintaining legal protections for women that were not afforded them in New England. Nevertheless in the predominant patriarchal colonial structures, the Virginia woman was more a means to transfer property than an agent in control of property. Two legislative efforts by the Virginia Assembly to increase women’s economic privileges were vetoed by the king’s Privy Council. Learn more to buy “Within Her Power” from Amazon.com.

We Have Raised All of You

Katy Simpson Smith wrote We Have Raised All of You: Motherhood in the South, 1750-1835 in 2013. It is available from Louisiana State University Press, at Kindle, and online. Buy “We Have Raised All of You” on Amazon here. In this study of motherhood and place, Smith notes that over this 85 year period, women among white, black and Native Americans in the early South found their most powerful self expression in motherhood. Women of all backgrounds found helpmates to assist in their child-rearing among a network of other women, including across ethnic lines, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes coerced. They influenced their children, families, communities, and even nations, and yet were in some political and economic sense, powerless as well. All three Southern mothers fulfilled roles of “teachers” to their children and “sufferers” in their families and communities. Despite challenges to the women and the care of their children from husbands, neighbors and by law, Smith found Southern motherhood among all three races an active, strong, “potent” institution by women who were “instigators of change”.

Buy “We Have Raised All of You” on Amazon here. See also Charlene M. Boyer Lewis Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte: An American Aristocrat in the Early Republic (2012), Sandra Slater and Fay A. Yarbrough, editors, Gender and Sexuality in Indigenous North America, 1400-1850 (2010), and Anthony E. Kaye Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South (2009).

Claiming the Pen

Catherine Kerrison wrote Claiming the Pen: Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American South in 2006. It is available from the Cornell University Press, on Kindle, and online new and used.

Elite Southern women in the colonial South lagged behind contemporaries in England and New England in literary intellectual development. Although expected to read the Bible and male-authored prescriptive sermons and conduct literature that emphasized Eve’s transgressions and the need for female obedience to male guidance by fathers and brothers, husbands and sons. Boys were taught to fashion pens, girls were not; they were not instructed in writing.

During the Great Awakening, Baptists and Methodists granted women a measure of “selfhood” that expanded among women elites of Enlightenment households and more generally in the early republic. After 1750 the Southern women increasingly turned to novels, where females as central figures with active roles of authority could protect themselves from male predators. The novels themselves urged women to expand their education. They responded by writing journals, memoirs and advice literature.

Unlike the English and New England women invested in economic authority in the household, the Southern women stressed moral authority and self-discipline over family members and initiated benevolent movements in political society.

To buy “Claiming the Pen” at Amazon, click here.

Religious Virginia, 1600-1763

In colonial Virginia, the established faith is Anglican, Church of England. But considerations of large numbers of dissident settlers and the need to extend the gentry hierarchy west into frontier settlements of Scots and Germans led to accommodation and tolerance. There were faith traditions both to include and to exclude Indians and African-Americans.

The Baptism of Virginia

Rebecca Goetz wrote The Baptism of Virginia: How Christianity Created Race in 2012. It is now available from the John Hopkins Press in paperback, on Kindle and online new and used. Ango-Virginians began the 1600s practicing policies founded on the belief in the universality of the Christian religion and the superiority of their Protestant practice of it. The English themselves had once been heathen who then became converts and practitioners of its civilization. Many clergy such as Morgan Godwyn continued to advocate for education and baptism for both Native and African Americans. But by 1700 a vast majority of Anglo-Virginians saw both as “hereditary heathens” who were incompetent to receive baptism. Especially Catholic slaves from the Congo successfully sued for their freedom from 1640 into the 1660s. The Virginia planters successfully enacted a statute in 1667 that specified that baptism did not alter the condition of hereditary enslavement. Other Anglo-Atlantic colonies such as Barbados and Bermuda enacted similar statutes. As a part of the exclusion of people of color, other Protestants such as the Presbyterians came to be legally tolerated. Learn more to buy “The Baptism of Virginia” from Amazon.com.

A Blessed Company

John K. Nelson wrote _{A Blessed Company: Parishes, Parsons, and Parishioners in Anglican Virginia, 1690–1776} in 2001. It is now available from the University of North Carolina Press, on Kindle and online new and used. In colonial Virginia there was a comparable religiosity to the contemporary communities of Puritans and Quakers. Virginian settlers adapted the institutions of the Church of England to a dispersed population that embraced various dissenters; as many as half were active participants. Vestries had greater administrative control in their congregations than in the mother country, and these included lay readers conducting services among the two to eight congregations in each parish whom the parson served in rotation. The sermon as a vehicle to preach the biblical gospel was central to congregational worship. The Church of England institutions of the parish-county governance mixed today’s categories of “civil” and “religious”. County court jurisdiction extended to ecclesiastical matters. Vestries provided for the poor, bound out orphans, and recruited labor for maintaining the roads, as well as appointed tobacco inspectors and processed the boundaries of landowner farms every four years. All freed inhabitants were enrolled in each Anglican parish, all heads of household paid the substantial parish levy twice that of county taxes, including all resident dissenters, and all free Virginians were married in the Anglican church. Learn more to buy “A Blessed Company” from Amazon.com.

A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith

Lauren F. Winner wrote A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith: Anglican Religious Practice in the Elite Households of Eighteenth-Century Virginia in 2010. It is now available at the Yale University Press and online new and used. Winner blends religious and material culture studies with 1700s Virginia history, focusing on the Byrd, Carter, Washington, Mason and Randolph families. The religious faith of the gentry was comforting and cheering, largely assuring and optimistic, assuming an afterlife without speculation about personal destruction in hell. Its rituals were polite and decorous, but Winner documents acts of defiance among the expressions of women’s faith. Family faith was practiced in the homes of the gentry of these wealthy, intermarried slave holders as well in neighborhood churches. Parsons accommodated the elite with in-home baptisms, marriages and burials at family plots. There was a confluence of religious ceremony, family lineage and worldly status, such as the use of a silver monteith bowl emblazoned with the family crest and monogrammed with GM for George Mason. It was used for both chilling wine goblets and family baptisms. Learn more to buy “A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith” from Amazon.com.

Ulster to America

Warren R. Hofstra wrote Ulster to America: The Scots-Irish Migration Experience, 1680-1830 in 2011. It is available from University of Tennessee Press, at Kindle, and online. Buy “Ulster to America” on Amazon here. This collection of essays of social history book-ends with general discussions of Scots-Irish in 1700s back country America. Articles focus on Scots-Irish communities, the immigrant networks of families, churches and schools, and th eir economic and political connections with English Baptist, German, and Native American neighbors. They are distributed across time and space with Pennsylvania and Delaware in the 1720s, Virginia in the 1730-1760s, the North Carolina and Kentucky in the last quarter of the century. Unlike some treatments attributing a strain of anti-authoritarianism in the Scots-Irish, they were characteristically “politically moderate” among their merchants, bookmen, and clergy. They sought to bridge diverse community divisions while aspiring to personal and economic independence.

Buy “Ulster to America” on Amazon here. See also James G. Leyburn The Scotch-Irish: A Social History (1989), Patrick Griffin The People with No Name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World (2001), Barry Vann Rediscovering the South’s Celtic Heritage (2004), Daniel B. Thorp A Moravian Community in Colonial North Carolina: Pluralism on the Southern Frontier (1989), and Jim Webb Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America (2005).

Quakers Living the Lion’s Mouth

A. Glenn Crothers wrote Quakers Living in the Lion’s Mouth: The Society of Friends in Northern Virginia, 1730-1865 in 2012. It is available from University Press of Florida, at Kindle, and online. Buy “Quakers Living the Lion’s Mouth” on Amazon here. In this latest title from the University Press of Florida’s “Southern Dissent” series, Crothers traces the Quaker migration from Pennsylvania into Virginia beginning in the 1730s. There they thrived economically by employing a strategy of mixed-grain farming in the northern Valley, northern Virginia, and in the Dismal Swamp Tidewater. They became respectable in their prosperity, but their pacifism made them political outsiders compounded by continued connections to their northern-based denominations. Active state-led repression in the Revolution and in the War of 1812 was sparked by suspicions that Virginia’s Quakers aided runaway slaves and otherwise aided the British. Following the Revolution, their numbers declined by out-migration to the free-soil Midwest and through doctrinal schisms. Those remaining such as Samuel Janney contributed to the growth of Virginia’s middle class, promoted infrastructure, schools, and agricultural improvements. They stressed the superiority of free labor over slave, and advocated a gradual acceptance of freed slaves.

Late Colonial Virginia - The South vs The South

Buy “Quakers Living the Lion’s Mouth” on Amazon here. See also William Freehling The South vs. The South (2001), Steve Longenecker Shenandoah Religion: Outsiders and the Mainstream, 1716-1865 (2002).

The Baptism of Early Virginia

Rebecca Anne Goetz wrote The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race in 2012. It is available from Johns Hopkins University Press, at Kindle, and online. Buy “The Baptism of Early Virginia” on Amazon here.

Although once downplayed in Virginia’s history, religion helped to create racial categories in the English Atlantic when the early ideal of an Anglo-Indian Christian commonwealth pairing evangelism and exploitation failed.

At the beginning of the 1600s, English promoters of North American colonization held a Protestant anti-Catholicism that meant to not only find New World riches and empire comparable to Spain’s, but also to create converts among the Native Americans to the Anglican Gospel. Africans who at first numbered Catholics as well as animists, were also potential converts. After all, the Britons had been savages who converted to Christianity and civility. But by century’s end, the vast majority of resident white Virginians believed that Indians, Africans, and their descendants, whether slave or free, were seen as “hereditary heathens”.

Following the Powhatan assault on Jamestown in 1622, Virginia began found non-whites as increasingly unworthy of becoming Christians. Limiting sexual contact between races and denying the seven-year end-of-service associated with baptism and Common Law was suspended by degrees. At the same time, white dissenters in related Presbyterian, Quaker, and Methodist sects were more readily accepted within the commonwealth’s domain. Some continued with a vision of conversion for “all nations”, including imperial officials, Anglican missionaries, Methodists, and Baptists, freedmen and enslaved who linked Christianity with freedom. Virginia’s version of hereditary heathen doctrine was subsequently adopted in Bermuda and Barbados.

Early Colonial Virginia - Damned Souls in a Tobacco...

Early Colonial Virginia - Christian Slavery

Early Colonial Virginia - Mastering Christianity

Early Colonial Virginia - Christian Ritual and ... slave societies

Early Colonial Virginia - Wandering Souls

Buy “The Baptism of Early Virginia” on Amazon here. See also Edward L. Bond Of Damned Souls in a Tobacco Colony: Religion in Seventeenth-Century Virginia (2000), Katharine Gerbner Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (2018), Travis Glasson Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World (2017), Nicholas Beasley Christian Ritual and the Creation of British Slave Societies, 1650-1780 (2010), and S. Scott Rohrer Wandering Souls: Protestant Migrations in America, 1630-1865 (2010).

Virginians Reborn

Jewel L. Spangler wrote Virginians Reborn: Anglican Monopoly, Evangelical Dissent, and the Rise of the Baptists in the Late Eighteenth Century in 2008. It is available from the University of Virginia Press and online new and used.

In this study of Fauquier, Lunenburg and Southampton Counties of the Piedmont, eighteenth-century Baptists emerge and ascend in the Virginia social order for a number of logistical reasons. The Anglican Church establishment was in crisis, providing a limited supply of ministers. Presbyterians initiated filling the weak spots and introducing evangelical dissent. Baptists both confirmed the gentry-dominated milieu in various roles of public service and challenged the prevailing patriarchy with an expansive egalitarianism extending to men and women and blacks. Baptists mobilized scores of ministers. They were especially countercultural in their suspension of social hierarchies during conversion and revivals, and they required even elite white males to submit to church discipline.

Following the Revolution where Baptists support established their credentials as solid citizens, personal conversion more frequently followed family or social ties, without disrupting other kinship groups as before, and Virginia society generally accepted the concept of greater white male equality with the republican ideology. Baptists and non-Baptists found common ground in asserting “uncontested governance of their own households.”

To buy “Virginians Reborn” at Amazon, click here.

A Blessed Company

In colonial Virginia there was a comparable religiosity to the contemporary communities of Puritans and Quakers. Virginian settlers adapted the institutions of the Church of England to a dispersed population that embraced various dissenters; as many as half were active participants. Vestries had greater administrative control in their congregations than in the mother country, and these included lay readers conducting services among the two to eight congregations in each parish whom the parson served in rotation. The sermon as a vehicle to preach the biblical gospel was central to congregational worship.

The Church of England institutions of the parish-county governance mixed today’s categories of “civil” and “religious”. County court jurisdiction extended to ecclesiastical matters. Vestries provided for the poor, bound out orphans, and recruited labor for maintaining the roads, as well as appointed tobacco inspectors and processed the boundaries of landowner farms every four years. All freed inhabitants were enrolled in each Anglican parish, all heads of household paid the substantial parish levy twice that of county taxes, including all resident dissenters, and all free Virginians were married in the Anglican church.

Learn more to buy “A Blessed Company” from Amazon.com.

*Rozbicki, Michal J. The Complete Colonial Gentleman: Cultural Legitimacy in Plantation America (1998). It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Complete Colonial Gentleman” from Amazon.com.

A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith

Winner blends religious and material culture studies with 1700s Virginia history, focusing on the Byrd, Carter, Washington, Mason and Randolph families. The religious faith of the gentry was comforting and cheering, largely assuring and optimistic, assuming an afterlife without speculation about personal destruction in hell. Its rituals were polite and decorous, but Winner documents acts of defiance among the expressions of women’s faith.

Family faith was practiced in the homes of the gentry of these wealthy, intermarried slave holders as well in neighborhood churches. Parsons accommodated the elite with in-home baptisms, marriages and burials at family plots. There was a confluence of religious ceremony, family lineage and worldly status, such as the use of a silver monteith bowl emblazoned with the family crest and monogrammed with GM for George Mason. It was used for both chilling wine goblets and family baptisms.

Learn more to buy “A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith” from Amazon.com.

The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian

John Fea wrote The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian and the Rural Enlightenment in Early America in 2008. Available from the University of Pennsylvania Press, Kindle and online new and used.

This biography is of Philip Vickers Fithian, the tutor for Robert Carter 1773-74 who is an often-cited diarist of colonial tidewater Virginia and backcountry Pennsylvania. His “way of improvement” was a self-conscious embrace of Enlightenment ideals as an ordained Presbyterian minister educated under John Witherspoon at the College of New Jersey (Princeton). In Virginia, Fithian occupied a middle ground theologically, missing the more fervent sermons of his Presbyterian home, but sharing the Anglican suspicion of the Baptist threat to Anglican social order.

The dairy disclosed internal conflict in a young man of letters in a rural colonial setting, between rational thought of a scientific age versus emotional evangelicalism, between self control versus passion, and between local attachments versus transatlantic cosmopolitanism. Fea’s book also shares details of daily colonial life across a spectrum from middling farm life to theological college to grand plantation estates. Fithian courted Elizabeth Beatty, chose the patriot side in the Revolution, and died shortly after becoming a chaplain.

To buy “The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian” on Amazon, click here.

From Jamestown to Jefferson

Paul Rasor and Richard E. Bond edited From Jamestown to Jefferson: The Evolution of Religious Freedom in Virginia in 2011. It is available from the University of Virginia Press and online new and used.

This is a collection of six essays that emphasizes the actual practice of religion in Virginia. The Virginia landscape evolved from religous establishment to toleration and from diversity to pluralism. The Anglican laity conducted services when they were without clergy, developing a congregational texture in Virginia’s Anglican services, relying on church seasons, the Book of Common Prayer and folk customs. Church attendance for minister-led communion, marriages and baptisms was substantial. Doctrinally, salvation was ambiguously a mixture of both faith and works.

The proliferation of Protestant faiths and their popular growth cumulatively weakened the Anglican establishment in Virginia. In the face of both legal harassment and extralegal violence, Presbyterians stayed within the bounds of the Act of Toleration (1690) with a pragmatic strategy that moderated any conflict with Anglican authority, and their dissenting faith gradually expanded. Separate Baptists and to a lesser degree Quakers pressed for rights beyond state-licensed toleration, insisting on a “domestic liberty of conscience” including women and blacks.

At the Revolution, an alliance of evangelicals and rationalists ended Anglican civil and ecclesiastical dominance in the state. Although it took some time to fully disentangle the successor Episcopal Church from its privileged glebes and so forth, there was a persistent notion that morality and civil order were inseparable from a Christian religious faith, that religion was necessary for good morals, and good morals were necessary for good government.

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African American Virginia, 1600-1763

For the first two generations of Africans and their children in colonial Virginia, they were able to meet the white English as equals under the Common Law. But following Bacon’s Rebellion, a permanent, race-based slavery was imposed on Africans and their descendants.

Many Thousands Gone

Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (2000) was written by Ira Berlin. He traces the evolution of American slavery in both time from 1619 to 1800 and space in the Chesapeake, to the North, and to the south in the Carolina Low Country and Lower Mississippi Valley Louisiana. Focusing on the slave rather than the slave-holder, he emphasizes African-American self-agency, even though under duress of slavery or constrained by racial limits in freedom. Berlin’s study of slavery as a labor system emphasizes it as a negotiated relationship of testing and bargaining. For the first half-century, “charter generations” were African-Americans who were mixed race Atlantic Creoles and Christian, European-named sailors, artisans and slaves. They lived in “societies with slaves”, where they made significant early contributions to community survival and development. “Plantation generations” where characterized in North America beginning in the late 1600s by massive importation of slaves directly from Africa with new degrading legal regimes depriving blacks of rights and effecting stricter labor regimentation in the great cash crop plantations of sugar and tobacco. A “Democratic Revolution” was the religious, intellectual, political and military opposition to slavery of the American, French and Haitian Revolutions. The results were contradictory; in the American South, slavery became more entrenched. The “Cotton Revolution” gave new life to slavery that had seemed to be in decline. The book ends with the large-scale relocation of slaves to the United States’ Gulf Coast states and widespread Christianization of slaves in the Second Great Awakening. The African-American experience was varied, building cultures of semi-African traditions and creole autonomous lifestyle apart from slaveholders. Slavery was a profoundly human institution, and its associated “race” a product of history. In the introductory essay, “Making Slavery, Making Race”, Berlin posits that slavery had more to do with the cultural creation of “race”, though the concepts transformed each other over time. In the concluding essay, “Making Race, Making Slavery”, Berlin reveals the later, more pernicious racism assigning blacks to an unchangeable inferiority attributed to nature. Learn more to buy “Many Thousands Gone” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com. *Mitchell, Robert D. Commercialism and Frontier: Perspectives on the Early Shenandoah Valley (1977). It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “Commercialism and Frontier” from Amazon.com. *Mitchell, Robert D., ed. Appalachian Frontiers: Settlement, Society and Development in the Preindustrial Era (1991). It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “Appalachian Frontiers” from Amazon.com.

American Slavery, American Freedom

American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (2003) by Edmund S. Morgan focuses on the Early Colonial period for two thirds of the book, 1607-1720. It integrates the social, intellectual, political and economic concerns of Virginia under the English Stuarts. The early society especially took advantage of lower classes, red, white and black. The social order was deferential but fragile, exploitive but fearful. Problems of poor leadership, corrupt government and high taxes are repeatedly addressed by recourse to abusive labor practices. This central theme describes the change from English indentured servitude to African black slavery as central to the Virginia colonial history. Unlike persistent early turmoil, slavery brings a certain social peace to white Virginia in a common cause of racism. A key paradox that Morgan sets out to explore is how the largest of the slave states in the new nation became a principle source of leadership and ideology for freedom in the American Revolution. In a last chapter, the author looks backwards in an essay on republicanism in the United States. Learn more to buy “American Slavery, American Freedom” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com. *Bond, Edward L. Damned Souls in a Tobacco Colony: Religion in Seventeenth-Century Virginia (2000). It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Damned Souls” at Amazon.com. *Kukla, Jon. Political Institutions in Virginia, 1619–1660 (1989). It is out of print but may be found in your central library or by interlibrary loan as a published dissertation.

Myne Owne Ground

“Myne Owne Ground”: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1640-1676 (1980, 2004) by T.H. Breen and Stephen Innes explores mid-1600s Northampton County on Virginia’s Eastern Shore in its slavery, freedom and race relations. In the harsh context of exploitive frontier plantation life, a group of blacks established themselves as free people during the onset of slave labor replacing indentured servitude. By extraordinary hard work, they bought themselves and their families out of bondage and assimilated as “black Englishmen” into the larger society. For two generations they were able to meet whites as equals, whether as free peasantry, or as small landowners such as the Johnson, Harmon or Payne families. Economic status rather than race was the determining factor in early colonial society. However, following the great planter reaction to Bacon’s Rebellion, the status of free blacks deteriorated after the mid-1670s. The importation of “unacculturated” African slave labor in large numbers brought hardening racial barriers. Learn more to buy “Myne Owne Ground” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.

Race and Class in Colonial Virginia

Race and Class in Colonial Virginia: Indians, Englishmen, and Africans on the Eastern Shore during the Seventeenth Century (1993) by Joseph Douglas Deal examines the “triracial encounter” there. Native Americans contributed food, farming expertise, cleared fields and a sustained lucrative fur trade. Next considered are the English indentured servants, and the development of a planter elite. Forty years into Virginia’s history, planters in the Eastern Shore began holding blacks as slaves for life, though some continued to secure freedom by manumission and self-purchase. As the labor force of the slave population increased, the “social space” free blacks had claimed for themselves in the charter generations shrank substantially. Free blacks often could find individual success only by migrating to more hospitable regions. Learn more to buy “Race and Class in Colonial Virginia” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.

Slave Counterpoint

Philip Morgan wrote Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry in 1998. It is now available as an eTextbook and online new in paperback. Morgan studies two centers of black life in North America from 1670 to 1800 containing nearly three-quarters of the black population in 1776. The Chesapeake and Lowcountry cultivated different staple crops, tobacco leading to more material prosperity among slaves, rice leading to a more definitive culture. Both places were influenced by complex interactions among masters and blacks, blacks and “plain” whites, both socially and economically. The interior lives of slaves developed a vibrant culture distinct from both European and African cultures. While circumscribed by slavery, whether patriarchal or paternal, Morgan sees the creation of a coherent culture the most significant achievement in resisting slavery due to its breadth, depth and persistence. Learn more to buy “Slave Counterpoint” from Amazon.com.

From Calabar to Carter’s Grove

Lorena S. Walsh wrote From Calabar to Carter’s Grove: The History of a Virginia Slave Community in 1997. It is now available online new and used. This is a multigenerational study of African American community building under the restrictions of slavery for over 150 years. It illuminates the intersection of African, English, and Creole society from the 1660s to 1830 when the families being traced are dispersed. The Burwell family was heirs to Nathaniel Bacon’s estate of ninety slaves. They kept slave families in tact by entailing slaves to the land they worked, so as estate was passed from son to son, the community remained intact. By the mid-1700s, the slaves had been removed to Carter’s Grove of King Carter fame, and their number was increased by 1720 purchases of African slaves out of the Nigerian port of Calabar. These newcomers were embraced by the African American creole plantation society. They included members from at least three language groups of the Niger River delta, the Bight of Biafra and Angola. Walsh analyzes the transformations of their migration, plantation integration and conversion to Christianity. Learn more to buy “From Calabar to Carter’s Grove” from Amazon.com. *Davis, Richard Beale. Intellectual Life in the Colonial South, 1585–1763, 3 vols. (1978). It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Intellectual Life” from Amazon.com.

Freedom’s Debt: The Royal African Company

William A. Pettigrew wrote Freedom’s Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1672-1752 2013. It is available from University of North Carolina Press, at Kindle, and online. Buy “Freedom’s Debt” on Amazon here. Prior to Britain’s Glorious Revolution in 1689 bringing William and Mary to the throne, a decade before, the Royal African Company had secured an exclusive charter to open slave trade in Africa to promote and protect a national interest in the face of competitive Dutch and Spanish enterprises. But following the new order, with the ascendency of Parliament there was greater national participation in debates about how the economic framework of empire would set out. New interest groups arose, including prospective competitors to the stockholders of the Royal African Company, and their allied Chesapeake tobacco merchants who wanted more influence in the slave-trading marketplace. They sought an economic order that promoted free trade and competition, arguing that British freedom guaranteed property rights, and these included the ownership and free trade of slaves. When the old charter granted by monarchy required renewal in Parliament, the Royal African Company lost its monopoly, and succumbed to its rivals by 1752.

Buy “Freedom’s Debt” on Amazon here. See also Michael Guasco Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World (2014), and Hugh Thomas The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade. 1440-1870 (1999).

Slaves and Englishmen

Michael Guasco wrote Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World in 2014. It is available from University of Pennsylvania Press, at Kindle, and online. Buy “Slaves and Englishmen” on Amazon here. English thinking about Africans and slavery began in the century before the ir explorations and settlement of the 1660s, based on the Bible and classic texts. Englishmen in the 1500s were held in captivity as slaves by both Catholic and Muslim powers. A mutual hatred of the Spanish grounded in contemporary conflicts led to alliances among English and Africans, and English pre-plantation slavery in the Americas included a mixed exploitation of Indians, Africans and deported Irish. Guasco traces evolving attitudes and beliefs about African slavery by investigating travel narratives, pulpit sermons, polemical works and colonial propaganda to develop various political, religious and intellectual points of view held in Elizabethan England.

Buy “Slaves and Englishmen” on Amazon here. See also Daina Ramey Berry The Price for their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation (2017), Edward E. Andrews Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World (2013), and Sowande M. Mustakeem Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage (2016).

Homicide Justified

Andrew T. Fede wrote Homicide Justified: The Legality of Killing Slaves in the United States and the Atlantic World in 2017. It is available from the University of Georgia Press, on Kindle and online new and used. Reviewed in the Journal of Southern History, Summer 2018.

In this book, Fede makes a comprehensive overview of slave killing in the British North American colonies that would become the United States, and extends his study into their subsequent state history. He concludes that meaningful protection of slave lives by legal sanctions would have had too great a social cost, and so it was unfeasible.

Beginning with a brief synopsis of slave killing in ancient Rome, Medieval Europe and the British Caribbean, the examples demonstrate that slave owners in what would become the United States were seldom prosecuted, rarely convicted, and usually escaped any severe punishment. Convicted owners were mostly fined, given short term incarcerations, pardoned, or released by mob action. Whites who were not of the slave owning class were punished for slave killing.

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Stamped from the Beginning

Ibram X. Kendi wrote Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America in 2016. It is available from the Hachette Book Group, on Kindle and online new and used. Reviewed in the Journal of Southern History, Summer 2018.

The Aristotelian view of a human hierarchy with Greeks on top and all other cultures inferior was assimilated into British North American education at the inception of Harvard (1636), the College of William and Mary (1693) and Yale (1701). Aristotle’s contemporary Alkidamas was in contrast, egalitarian by accepting that all men were created with liberty, and none should be a slave. The ancient historian Heroditus found no cultural inferiority among Africans.

While most European slaves were Slavs in the early 1400s, in 1444 Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal adopted the Muslim practice of selling enslaved Africans, and his paid biographer wrote a justification of the practice in 1453 based on an assertion of African inferiority. Kendi explores how the same racist ideas were reasserted in the time of Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. DuBois, and Angela Davis.

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Wars in Virginia, 1600-1763

Colonial wars in Virginia include conflict with Native-Americans, pirates, the French and their allies, and in civil war within Virginia. They include the colonial government acting as agents of the British empire, County militias acting on their own without authority, and Virginia Assembly acting on its own authority. Virginia’s history of wars includes not only chronologies of campaigns and their battles, but also the cultural contexts of soldiering and the impact of war on society.

The Barbarous Years

The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 (2012) by Bernard Bailyn spends about a third of its length on the Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland. The others covered are the Middle Colonies of New Netherland and New Sweden, and New England of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. All faced difficult formative years, achieving stability only after “barbarous” bloody wars displacing native peoples. By 1664 the eastern Atlantic coastal world of Native Americans had been disrupted, transformed and distorted. Violence and chaos was endemic within the European settlements up until that time; established colonists behaved brutally towards newcomer indentured servants, slaves and Native Americans. Virginians were particularly noted for their ferocity expanding inland, spearheaded by the Hammerour mercenaries who had been hardened in the Dutch Wars. Learn more to buy “The Barbarous Years” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.

Dominion and Civility

Dominion and Civility: English Imperialism and Native America, 1585-1685 (1999) by Michael Leroy Oberg is a comparative history of the Chesapeake and New England, England homeland and North American imperial “frontier” of the eastern seaboard, English versus French, Dutch and Spanish empires. While “metropolitan” England sought domination, Christianization and trade with native populations, Oberg explains how both Virginia and Massachusetts developed a policy of “exclusion”. The conflicting goals to “civilize” Indians, deliver a profit for sponsors, and maintain security from European and native threats, could not all be met. There are two chapters specifically on Virginia relating wars with the Tidewater Powhatans and Bacon’s Rebellion in the Piedmont. Over the first hundred years of English colonization, the frontier impulse to settle and expand overcame the metropolitan vision of commercial outposts of regulated exchange. Indians were attached to their cultural heritage even in the throws of epidemics reducing their populations. Virginian soldiery transferred from the Irish wars of conquest developed a frontier attitude that insisted on physical security from the wars of 1609-1614, 1622-1632 and 1644-1646. Learn more to buy “Dominion and Civility” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.

Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough

Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown (2006) by Helen C. Rountree tells the story of three important Native-Americans from the Indian point of view of the “Real People” as the Algonquin Powhatans called themselves. The anthropologist vetted her narrative among members of Virginia tribes before publication. The first chapters address the Powhatan lifestyle, government and leadership systems, the featured three members of the chiefly family, and the politics of expanding the Powhatan Confederacy. Rountree then describes the impact of European arrival and the lives of her three subjects, Powhatan the peace chief, Pocahontas his daughter and wife of colonist John Rolfe, and Opechancanough the war chief. War ultimately failed the Indians even while taking more lives, because the English had an expanding, replaceable population and the natives did not. Learn more to buy “Pocahontas, Powhatan and Opechancanough” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.

Tales from a Revolution

Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America (2013) by James D. Rice narrates the outbreak of frontier hostilities with the Susquehannock Indians, Bacon’s mobilization of militias for further Indian war, and the full scale civil war that developed in colonial Virginia. Rice places emphasis on the early colonial conflict between wealthy planters trading with friendly Indians and poor settlers at risk under unfriendly Indian attack. Colonial leaders trying to strike a balance between the two failed. Though royal Governor Berkeley put down Bacon’s Rebellion, tensions remained, manifesting themselves in Josias Fendall’s 1681 uprising, tobacco-cutting riots in 1682, and Coode’s Rebellion in 1689. The tale weaves elements of Indian war and rebellion with wider narratives of provincial and imperial transformation in the by the mid-colonial era. Wealthy and poor English bridged their social division in a new social order of Indian exclusion, white supremacy and African slaves. Learn more to buy “Tales from a Revolution” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.

Wiseman’s Book of Record

Michael Leroy Oberg edited Samuel Wiseman’s Book of Record: The Official Account of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia, 1676-1677 in 2005, reprinted in 2009. It is available at Lexington Books and online new and used.

An appalled King Charles II formed a royal commission of three to investigate the events surrounding Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia and its aftermath in 1677. It depicts the dangers of indiscriminate war with Native Americans, the political and military crisis of internal rebellion, Governor Berkeley’s repressive efforts to restore order, and the deteriorating relationship between the revengeful Berkeley and the Commissioners seeking to restore royal governance, satisfy the grievances of rebelling colonists and conclude an Indian peace.

The commission was authorized to issue warrants, indictments and pardons. There were gaping differences between perceptions held by the Governor versus his enemies, and these were formally documented in “The Commissioners’ Narrative”. Thirteen petitions of grievances against the royal governor are documented from various county courts across the colony. “The Treaty of Middle Plantation” meant to restore peace with the regions Amerindians is included along with the facsimiles of the signs made by Indian kings and queens.

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*Warren M. Billings edited The Papers of Sir William Berkeley, 1605-1677 in 2007. Published by the Library of Virginia, it is no longer in print, but may be found in your central library or on interlibrary loan. To buy “Papers of Sir William Berkeley” at Amazon, click here.

The First Way of War

John Grenier wrote The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607-1814 in 2005. It is available from the Cambridge University Press, on Kindle and online new and used.

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White People, Indians and Highlanders

To buy “White People, Indians and Highlanders” at Amazon, click here.

Brothers Among Nations

Far-flung events were connected due to inter-colonial communications. Indian conflict in one arena could effect the fundamental attitudes and approaches of colonists to their neighbors in another. On the other hand, Susquehannocks influenced conflicts surrounding Virginia and Maryland’s Kent Island, New Netherland’s Peach War, the fall of New Sweden and Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia. Isaac Allerton, the son of a trader in New Netherlands relocated to Virginia to expand the family business participated in the initial assaults on the Susquehannocks that precipitated Bacon’s Rebellion.

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The Divided Dominion

The Divided Dominion: Social Conflict and Indian Hatred in Early Virginia (2015) by Ethan A. Schmidt reconstructs moments of diplomacy on both sides during the early Colonial period and their mutual misunderstandings that led to the violence of the three Anglo-Powhatan Wars of 1609, 1622 and 1644. The book traces incidents of ferocious violence from militias defying their commanders that was characteristic of the 1600s English and Europeans, to the evolution of a colonial permissiveness endorsing Indian killing not only for retribution but for land acquisition. Schmidt places Virginia colonial Indian policy debates at the center of Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, the division between elite planters benefitting from Indian trade and frontier non-elite colonists who suffered attacks from unfriendly natives. Bacon’s forces were indiscriminate in their attacks to ruin or annihilate Native Americans whether treaty friendlies, raiding parties or settled farmers. Learn more to buy “The Divided Dominion” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.

Golden Age of Piracy

The Golden Age of Piracy (1969) by Hugh F. Rankin shows that after pirates of the 1600s lost their base for operations in the Caribbean, the favorite haven for English pirates shifted to the Virginia and Carolina coasts. The types of men, their origins and motivation are reported, as well as articles of agreement among themselves, and descriptions of their ships and their harbors. Edward Teach (Blackbeard), Stede Bonnet, Mary Read and Ann Bonny are featured along with the Virginia colonial armed response under Governors Nicholson, Spotswood and Gooch. Governmental policy towards pirates varied, and during periods of amnesty, pirates who reformed amounted to hundreds of new settlers for the colonies. Virginia was noted as the most aggressive opponent of buccaneering, perhaps because they had the most to loose. The last year pirates played a significant role impacting Virginia commercial life was 1717. Learn more to buy “The Golden Age of Piracy” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.

Pirates on the Chesapeake

Pirates on the Chesapeake: Being a True History of Pirates, Picaroons, and Raiders on Chesapeake Bay, 1610-1807 (1985, 2008) by Donald G. Shomette looks at the Virginia and Maryland response to both pirates and government sponsored privateers raiding in the Chesapeake Bay. The two colonies and early nation states had small treasuries, few patrol vessels and thinly populated coastal regions. Royal Navy guardships were of assistance while they were on station, although they could not negotiate shallow waters. Colonial Virginia fought back with Governors Nicholson and Spotswood adding coastal forts, militia and small patrol vessels, augmented with regulars on land and sea. Officials in other colonies were complicit in sustaining the pirate reach into the Chesapeake. British raiders had effect in the American Revolution. The last raider of the book was less a French privateer in 1807, than a Baltimore pirate. Learn more to buy “Pirates on the Chesapeake” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.

Crucible of War

Crucible of War: the Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 (2007) Fred Anderson is military history with emphasis on political, economic, social and cultural elements of an 18^th century world war. It spanned eastern North America, Europe, the Caribbean and briefly West Africa and India. The British triumphed with a Prussian alliance in Europe, worldwide sea power, treating American colonists as allies for military and financial support, and winning Native-American tribes away from the French. In the aftermath, the British squandered the goodwill of victory among their North American allies by threatening customary freedoms, leading to Pontiac’s Rebellion and the colonial Stamp Act resistance. North America’s “French and Indian War” did not foretell nor did it necessitate the American Revolution, but it was an “indispensible precursor” to the colonists imagining themselves apart from the British Empire protecting them in conflicts with the French prior to 1754. Learn more to buy “Crucible of War” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.

The Old Dominion at War

The Old Dominion at War: Society, Politics and Warfare in Late Colonial Virginia (1991) by James Titus explains a great deal about mid and lower social strata in the 1750s. For the first half of the French and Indian War, the Virginia Assembly sought to fight with regiments filled men “drawn largely from the mud-sill of provincial society”. Attempts to coerce them into an effective fighting force failed. However, with cash and land bounties, and a “contract” limited service, then the common people of Virginia enlisted and fought comparably to those in Massachusetts. Learn more to buy “The Old Dominion at War” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.

A Very Mutinous People

Noeleen McIlvenna wrote A Very Mutinous People: The Struggle for North Carolina, 1660-1713 in 2009. It is available from the University of North Carolina Press, on Kindle and online new and used.

This study centers on the northeastern settlement of early North Carolina settlement in the Albemarle region adjacent the Virginia. The early migrants of dissenting Levellers, runaway servants, Quakers and debtors from Virginia held principles of equality without customary deference to traditional social divisions.

The spreading English settlements combined rebellious activity against their lord proprietors and Quaker “honest and peaceful dealings” with Native Americans. In the Tuscarora War, natives attacked newcomer planters encroaching on their lands without agreed to payment. In McIlvenna’s narrative, a sort of “Quaker-Leveller republic” of small farmers and artisans emerged including “Indians, Negros and women” who waged a kind of perpetual English Revolution with limits on land holdings, debtor protections and civil marriage.

Sometimes resistance led to violence as in Culpeper’s rebellion in 1677 immediately following Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia. Afterwards planters emulating Virginian and South Carolinians introduced large-scale African slavery, established the Anglican Church, defeated Thomas Cary’s rebellion in 1711, and removed the Tuscarora Indians after 1715.

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Breaking the Backcountry

Matthew C. Ward wrote Breaking the Backcountry: The Seven Years’ War in Virginia and Pennsylvania, 1754–1765 in 2003. It is now available at the University of Pittsburgh Press, on Kindle and online new and used. This social and military history describes how French, English and Indian territorial ambitions clashed in the 1750s. Britain’s initial offensive failed, and thousands of Pennsylvanian and Virginians settlers were driven from a large region adjacent the Ohio Valley. In 1758 Americans negotiated the Treaty of Easton foreswearing future Native-American incursions. British and American forces then conquered Canada, but their unhappy Indian policy brought about Pontiac’s Rebellion which led to Parliament’s 1763 guarantee of the earlier 1758 promises. But its Indian policy reversed American rights or privileges and caused the American Revolution. The Indian frontier of the British Empire was bleak even in peacetime. When Indian raids began, they opened up deep divisions within backcountry society. Enforcement of social order broke down, there was rioting in an Augusta County election in 1755 and Virginia’s resident Lieutenant Governor Robert Dinwiddie sought to replace justices of the peace who had not maintained civilian authority. Draft orders were ignored, Virginia’s Regiment suffered desertions. Under the duress of war local gentry were required to listen to the poorer settlers who were now called upon to fill the militias. Learn more to buy “Breaking the Backcountry” from Amazon.com.

Cultures in Conflict

Warren R. Hofstra edited Cultures in Conflict: The Seven Years’ War in North America in 2007. It is now available on Kindle and online new in paperback. This volume features seven essays on culture-related topics of the Seven Years’ War, or French and Indian War. It focuses on the British, French, Indians, Canadians and Anglo-American colonists. There is dispute among historians whether American colonial participation was more a patriotic expression of British Empire against Catholic French expansion, or the prelude to the American Revolution due to colonial resistance against centralizing British imperial controls. The essays on Native Americans contrast the experience of the cultural resiliency and maturity of the Iroquois Confederacy and the cultural instability of the Ohio Country Indians. The Iroquois pan-Indian confederacy survived the war relatively unharmed, while the struggling Ohio Indians fell victim to disastrous wartime decisions, increasing material dependence on Europeans and political infighting. Learn more to buy “Cultures in Conflict” from Amazon.com.

Anglo-Native Virginia

Buy the “Anglo-Native Virginia” on Amazon here.

Dunmore’s War

Dunmore’s War: The Last Conflict of America’s Colonial Era (2017) by Glenn F. Williams analyzes diplomatic and military events of the late 1760s and early 1770s on the frontier where Augusta County Virginia and Westmoreland County Pennsylvania overlapped. Though the violence of the French and Indian War and Pontiac’s Rebellion had subsided, the Shawnee had no say in the dispositions of their lands made by Iroquois negotiators. Amidst rival colonial militias, overlapping settler land transactions and legal disputes among the English, the Shawnee began raiding. Williams informs us of the cultural traditions that led to initiating war and its conduct, the evolution of the Virginia militia system by the outbreak of hostilities and Shawnee tactics. The Virginia colony under the direction of its royal Governor Lord Dunmore in 1774 fought a limited war for defensive objectives, securing a frontier peace at the onset of the First Continental Congress. Learn more to buy “Dunmore’s War” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com. *Gleach, Frederic W. Powhatan’s World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures (1997). It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Powhatan’s World” at Amazon.com. *Keith Egloff and Deborah Woodward wrote First People: The Early Indians of Virginia, 2d ed. in 2006. It is now available online new in paperback. Learn more to buy “First People” at Amazon.com. *Gallivan, Martin D. James River Chiefdoms: The Rise of Social Inequality in the Chesapeake (2003). Learn more to buy “James River Chiefdoms” at Amazon.com. *Rozbicki, Michal J. The Complete Colonial Gentleman: Cultural Legitimacy in Plantation America (1998). It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Complete Colonial Gentleman” from Amazon.com.

Dunmore’s New World

James Corbett wrote Dunmore’s New World: The Extraordinary Life of a Royal Governor in Revolutionary America—with Jacobites, Counterfeiters, Land Schemes, Shipwrecks, Scalping, Indian Politics, Runaway Slaves, and Two Illegal Royal Weddings in 2013. It is available from University of Virginia Press, at Kindle, and online. Buy “Dunmore’s New World” on Amazon here. Governor John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, is best known as the author of Virginia’s Lord Dunmore’s War with the Shawnee in 1774, and slave emancipation at the outbreak of the Revolution. But his career spans important imperial developments throughout the mid-1700s as the English Governor of New York, Virginia, and the Bahamas. In this first biography of Dunmore in seventy years, Corbett describes the career of a of a landless Scots family with divided royal loyalties, a sometime army officer and Member of Parliament, a “man of average ability and extraordinary confidence”. The Earl of Dunmore had no entitled income, yet in an English kingdom allocating power by heredity, had repeated posts as Governor to important colonies. His flaws led him to be known by contemporaries as selfish, incompetent, unscrupulous, and a drunkard and womanizer. In each of his New World posts, Dunmore’s terms were marked by aggressive initiatives to develop local power bases at odds with the imperial ministry in London. In Virginia he sought to amass landholdings for himself, Governor’s Council members and frontier settlers by leveraging inconsistent royal restrictions, conflicting treaties with Native Americans, and rivalries with colonies holding overlapping charters. On his return to England, Dunmore could not validate the two illegal weddings of his daughter to the son of George III, nor could he legitimatize their two children.

Buy “Dunmore’s New World” on Amazon here. See also Marry Ferrari, Colin G. Calloway The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation (2018), Reuben Gold Thwaites Documentary History of Dunmore’s War, 1774 (2015), and Bendan McConville The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688-1776 (2014).

Never Come to Peace Again

David Dixon wrote Never Come to Peace Again: Pontiac’s Uprising and the Fate of the British Empire in North America in 2005, reprinted in 2014. It is available from the University of Oklahoma Press, on Kindle and online new and used.

Immediately following the formal peace ending the French and Indian War, Pontiac’s War provided yet another instance of the British Empire’s failure to protect American frontier settlers. Frontiersmen sought to take initiatives on their own, leading to the support for the American Revolution by the interior colonial settlement.

Pontiac’s Uprising was also an effort by former allies of the French to preserve a “last sanctuary” for the Delaware, Shawnee and Mingo in the Ohio River valley. The personal magnetism and leadership of Pontiac is highlighted and Dixon draws a distinction between the policy of British Commander in Chief, Major General Jeffrey Amherst and British superintendent of Indian affairs, Sir William Johnson.

To buy “Never Come to Peace Again” at Amazon, click here.

New Worlds of Violence

Braddock’s March

Thomas E. Crocker wrote Braddock’s March: How the Man Sent to Seize a Continent Changed American History in 2009. It is available from Westholme Publishing, on Kindle and online new and used.

During Seven Year’s War, Britain’s campaign in 1775 against the French and Indians contested the their claims to the North American continent. This book relates the military and political dimensions in the day-to-day affairs of logistics, administration and the business of fighting by British Major General Edward Braddock. Braddock and other British military leaders began with a meeting in the Alexandria, Virginia home of John Carlyle, a prominent member of the Ohio Company land speculators.

They convened the Carlyle House Congress with the colonial royal governors of Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia. The colonial Governors’ reluctance to fully fund British military actions in North America framed later controversies enflamed by recuperative financial measures like the Stamp Act and the meeting prefigured the Continental Congress.

In the summer of 1775, Braddock marched northwest from Alexandria, to capture Fort Duquesne (later Pittsburgh) with a combined force of British Regulars and Virginian militia numbering 1,400. They crossed the Alleghany Mountains only to be met at the Monongahela River by a smaller force of French and Indians on July 9 and there at the Forks of the Ohio, suffered a disastrous defeat losing two-thirds killed or wounded. Braddock was killed, but George Washington survived to continue his professional campaign for a regular British officer’s commission and modeled his own Virginia Regiment on Braddock’s organization. Subsequently, Washington applied British Army organizational skills in his efforts to train and professionalize Continental forces.

The campaign was a training ground for some of the future patriot leadership in the Continental Army. They included George Washington as well as patriot rivals Horatio Gates and Charles Lee. Thomas Gage, Massachusetts Governor 1774-1775 participated, as well as Daniel Morgan of riflemen sharpshooters and frontiersman Daniel Boone.

To buy “Braddock’s March” on Amazon, click here.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Colonial Virginia Maps and Mapping

Mapping Virginia

New Map of Empire

Sea Venture

The River Where America Began

The True Geography of Our Country

Powhatan Virginia, 1500-1763

Powhatan Landscape

Commoners, Tribute and Chiefs

Nature and History in the Potomac Country

A Cold Welcome

Before and After Jamestown

Indian and European Contacts in Context

Wild by Nature

Nature and History in the Potomac Country

Deadly Politics of Giving

New Worlds of Violence

Powhatan Indians of Virginia

Powhatan Lords

The True Story of Pocahontas

Pocahontas, Little Wanton

The First Way of War

Anglo-Native Virginia

White People, Indians and Highlanders

Brothers Among Nations

Indian Slavery in Colonial America

The Indian Slave Trade

The Westo Indians

Indian Captive, Indian King

Setting All the Captives Free

Political and Economic Virginia, 1600-1763

Early Colonial Policy, 1600-1676

For God, King and People

The Atlantic World and Virginia

Advancing Empire

The Web of Empire

A Cold Welcome

Nature and History in the Potomac Country

Sea Venture

A Kingdom Strange

A Tale of Two Colonies

Planting an Empire

A Briefe and True Report

Order and Civility

Ireland in the Virginia Sea

White People, Indians and Highlanders

Early Modern Virginia

A Tale of Two Colonies

Wild by Nature

The Empire Reformed

The Southern Colonies in the 17th Century

Colonial Virginia

The Old Dominion in the 17th Century

The Chesapeake in the 17th Century

Early Modern Virginia – 17th Century

Atlantic Virginia

A Land as God Made It

Indians and English

Indian and European Contacts in Context

Deadly Politics of Giving

The Jamestown Project

Savage Kingdom

Jamestown and the New World

Jamestown: The Buried Truth

Jamestown, the Truth Revealed

Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma

Colonial Chesapeake: New Perspectives

Epidemics and Enslavement

Late Colonial Policy, 1676-1763

Tobacco Coast

A Little Parliament

Esteemed Bookes of Lawe

The Transformation of Virginia

Sir William Berkeley

Gentlemen and Freeholders

Foul Means

In the Absence of Towns

Backcountry Towns of Colonial Virginia

A Place in Time

The Southern Colonies in the 17^th Century

The Old Dominion in the 17^th Century

The Chesapeake in the 17^th Century

Early Modern Virginia – 17^th Century