This Virginia History Blog introduces Early Colonial Cultures in Virginia by featuring two titles relating the cultural and political interactions of settlers and Algonquin tribes near and far, “Brothers among Nations” and “White People, Indians and Highlanders”. The infrastructure of early settlement is examined in two titles, “Backcountry Towns of Colonial Virginia” and “Courthouses of Early Virginia”. The emergence and ascendance of the Baptists in Virginia is studied in “Virginians Reborn”.
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 17th 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.
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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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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Additional history related to Virginia during this time period can be found at the Table of Contents of TheVirginiaHistorian website on the page for Early and Late Colonial Eras, 1600-1763. Titles are organized by topics related to Powhatan Virginia, Political and Economic Virginia, Social, Gender, Religious, African American and Wars in Virginia.
General surveys of Virginia History can be found at Virginia History Surveys. Other Virginia history divided by topics and time periods can be found at the webpage Books and Reviews.
Note: Insights for these reviews include those available from articles in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, the William and Mary Quarterly, the Journal of the Civil War Era, the Journal of Southern History and the Journal of American History.