Early Colonial Virginia is classically marked out between 1607-1689 in “The Southern Colonies in the 17th Century”, with Virginia center stage as the largest colony along with the study of Maryland and Carolina. “Indians and English” treats the encounter between the two cultures. “The Old Dominion in the 17th Century” uses interpretive essays to introduce each chapter’s collection of documents.
“The Chesapeake in the 17th Century” notes the replacement of English born elites of Virginia by the native born “creoles” who focused on colony rather than empire. “Planting an Empire” extends the period of social history study into mid 1700s. “Good Wives, Nasty Wenches” argues that gender played an important part in the creation of racial attitudes and slavery.
“Myne Owne Ground” and “Race and Class in Colonial Virginia” are local social histories of Virginia’s Eastern Shore.
The Southern Colonies in the 17th 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 He emphasizes British imperial expansion during this era as the interests of the first English adventurers were superseded by colonial planters.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.
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.
The Old Dominion in the 17th 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 17th Century” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.
The Chesapeake in the 17th 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 17th Century” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.
Planting an Empire
Planting an Empire: The Early Chesapeake in British North America (2012) by Jean B. Russo is a more recent social history of Virginia and Maryland. The two are treated together because social characteristics in common drew them together socially and economically, despite the colonial political division.
The Chesapeake as a social entity began with pre-European connections among the “first families” of Native-Americans. Among European settlers, both the great and not-so-great are introduced to describe the evolution eclipsing the indentured servant cultivation of tobacco with a slave based economy. The epilogue addresses the run up to Independence. Learn more to buy “Planting an Empire” for your bookshelf at 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 18th, 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.
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.