The Development of Slavery and Slave Society in Early Colonial Virginia

W&M ScholarWorks Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects 2004 Building "the machine": The development of slavery and slave society in early colonial Virginia John C. Coombs College of William & Mary - Arts & Sciences Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd Part of the African History Commons, and the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Coombs, John C., "Building "the machine": The development of slavery and slave society in early colonial Virginia" (2004). Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects. Paper 1539623434. https://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21220/s2-xgrm-ar15 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. BUILDING “THE MACHINE”: THE DEVELOPMENT OF SLAVERY AND SLAVE SOCIETY IN EARLY COLONIAL VIRGINIA A Dissertation Presented to The Faculty of the Department of History The College of William and Mary in Virginia In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by John C. Coombs 2003 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. APPROVAL SHEET This dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doetor of Philosophy John C. Coombs Approved, October 2003 A'cuh James L. Axtell, Chair Lis \y Thad W. JTate James P. Whittenburi AgycttA.<5 ■ lOeJhrC\ Lorena S. Walsh Colonial Williamsburg Foundation 11 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. For K e lly 111 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Table of Contents page Acknowledgments V Preface vii List of Charts, Figures, and Tables xi Abstract xii Chapter 1 Servants: The Original Mudsills 2 Chapter 2 “Seaven, Eight, Nine, or Ten in a Sloope” 33 Chapter 3 “The Substantiall Planters Have of Those Negro Slaves’ 69 Chapter 4 The Anglicization of Afro-Virginia 100 Chapter 5 “The Negroes to Serve For Ever” 138 Chapter 6 From Dwelling House to Great House 180 Chapter 7 “Confirmed by the Name of New Guinea” 211 Bibliography 251 Vita 282 IV Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Acknowledgements I am grateful to many people for helping me with this dissertation. Throughout the process of completing my research, I was greatly aided by staff members at the Library of Virginia, Swem Library at the College of William and Mary, the Barbados Archives, the Virginia Historical Society, and the University of Virginia’s Alderman Library. In particular, Sheila Brown at Swem has helped me through more difficulties than I care to remember, and the dry humor of Chris Kolbe at the Library of Virginia made the seemingly endless months I spent reading county court books not only endurable but pleasurable. Jerry Handler of the Virginia Center for the Humanities and Alan Moss of the University of the West Indies were instrumental in facilitating my research trip to Barbados. Others have been generous in sharing their own work. Edmund Berkeley, Jr. supplied me with his transcriptions of the letters and diaries of Robert “King” Carter, while Jean B. Russo and Lois Green Carr granted me access to the Historic St. Mary’s City Commission’s database files of Virginia and Maryland inventories. Cary Carson of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation allowed me to use his drawings of Rich Neck, Arlington, and the John Page house. In all three cases, my requests for assistance were met with abundant kindness and generosity. Special thanks are also due to Marley Brown of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation’s Department of Archaeological Research. From my first days as an apprentice in the summer field school program run jointly by the foundation and William and Mary, he has encouraged my interest in historical archaeology and provided me with numerous opportunities to gain practical experience in excavating sites. Julie King of the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory has been equally supportive, and listened with patience and enthusiasm as I worked out my ideas about plantation homelots in the early Chesapeake. I am even more greatly indebted to the members of my committee. As he has with so many others, James Whittenburg sparked my interest in historical archaeology, and he has been ever ready with a kind word and willing ear. Lorena Walsh has encouraged my efforts from the very beginning of this project and offered invaluable help, advice, and criticism as I struggled to complete it. Thad Tate introduced me to Chesapeake history and has been an essential mentor throughout my time in Williamsburg. I have never ceased to benefit from our acquaintance since the first day I knocked on his door. I will never be able to repay what I owe James Axtell. If I have any worth as an historian, it is because I was fortimate enough to pursue my graduate studies and write this dissertation under his direction. Philip Levy and David Muraea are much more than colleagues. My relationship with them has sustained me throughout my years in graduate school, and I consider them Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. both intellectual partners and close friends. Almost all of the ideas put forward in this work have benefited in some way from our innumerable discussions about early Virginia. My family, both Coombses and Pritchetts, have never faltered in offering their support and encouragement, for which I am deeply grateful. Thanks above all to Kelly Coombs, my partner in all things. I was only able to complete this dissertation because of the support and love she has always given me, and it is therefore to her that it is dedicated. VI Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Preface “I have my flocks and my herds, my bondsmen and bondswomen, and every soart of trade amongst my own servants,” William Byrd II wrote an English correspondent in 1726, “so that I live in a kind of independence of everyone, but Providence.” Byrd’s words conjure up images of an idyllic agrarian utopia. But he quickly admitted that “a great deal of trouble” also filled his days. The demands of growing tobacco for an ever-competitive market required a great deal of attention, and he constantly strove “to keep all my people to their duty, to set all the springs in motion, and to make every one draw his equal share to carry the machine forward.”’ The slave-based plantation “machine” that Byrd referred to in this oft-quoted passage has attracted a great deal of interest over the past thirty years. The literature on slavery in the colonial Chesapeake has expanded accordingly, with scholars compiling abundant information on everything from importation rates and work routines to dietary practices and runaway patterns. However, a surprisingly small amount of this work has addressed developments in early Virginia. Historians have instead devoted their energies either to the better documented eighteenth century or to exploiting the more complete collection of seventeenth-century records available north of the Potomac in Maryland. As a result, apart from a limited number of essays and a few book-length studies on the growth of racism and free blacks on the Eastern Shore, the story of slavery’s initial growth in Virginia has remained a largely untold tale. This dissertation attempts to help fill that gap by examining the course of events between 1630 and 1730. These were the critical decades when Virginia’s planters converted from using white servants as their primary source of bound labor to relying almost exclusively on African slaves. At the beginning of the period there were no more than a handful of blacks in the entire colony, while at its end in some eounties six out of every ten colonists were of African descent. Historians have, of course, long been aware of this pivotal transformation and called attention to its importance. Some have even offered interpretations to explain why it occurred. But remarkably, a detailed analysis of how it happened does not exist, nor by extension have scholars ever fully considered the repercussions of what one might call the “process of conversion.” In all fairness, the African presence in the colony was insubstantial throughout much of the seventeenth century. By the 1670s blacks still comprised only a small percentage of the total population. However, in Virginia’s case the aggregate figures are somewhat deceiving, for the slave population was heavily concentrated on the estates of a relatively small circle of wealthy planters. Members of the gentry invested in black labor more aggressively than their less financially fortunate competitors, and by the middle decades of the century some had acquired sizable quantities of slaves. Indeed, as early as the 1660s, when the typical Chesapeake planter still only employed servants, on many elite plantations blacks made up nearly half of the workforce, and in ' William Byrd to Charles Boyle, Earl of Orrery, 5 July 1726, in Marion Tinling, ed.. The Correspondence o f the Three William Byrds o f Westover, Virginia 1684-1776, 2 vols. (Charlottesville, 1977), 1: 355. Vll Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. some cases were numerous enough to comprise a considerable majority. The gentry’s early turn to slavery had, 1 argue, a profound effect on the development of the plantation “machine.” From a socio-economic perspective, it was instrumental in facilitating the rise of Virginia’s great families. As Bernard Bailyn has observed, the middle decades of the seventeenth century marked the arrival of such influential clans as the Lees, Carters, Byrds, and Fitzhughs.

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