Becoming Americans

by Donald Batchelor

  Robert was a short and wiry young man who'd become well known in Middlesex and Gloucester Counties for his racing skills. Many a slower horse had been prodded to be first across the winner's line by Robert. But Robert's occasional losses cost his rash-gambling father dearly, and James Fewox was being sued for debts. More distastefully, word had spread in that county of the harsh, inhuman treatment to his horses. In a rage at loosing his last race in Rappahannock, he had so severely beaten the mare that she was instructed to be slaughtered by the Magistrate.

  Fewox's acts of rage—and others were revealed—were viewed by his friends—some of them gentlemen—with such scorn that he was soon shunned, except by those demanding payment of their winnings. Visiting in Lower Norfolk with George Dawes, he'd met Anne Shaw. The courtship was so swift that the matter of Fewox's moral character had not yet circulated around the Southern Branch and Deep Creek communities. John and Joseph told their mother about Fewox, but she was deaf to criticism of her new cavalier.

  Anne had fought with her two grown sons the night the bans were posted. The court James Fewox paid her—after her years of loneliness and battles to survive and provide for her family—the court the gentleman paid her was hers. She reminded them that they had families of their own to tend to or create, and that she needed a man to provide for her and to help her younger sons get a new start. She still had that responsibility.

  The hard times were over by 1691, and Anne was looking for better days. Nine years after Richard Williams's death, Anne was three years into her third marriage, and her oldest boy, John, was secure and comfortable in Middlesex. Edy was a heartbreak, but Sarah Alice was a valuable widow who could re-marry well and soon. Joseph, with his wife and young daughters, would remain at Deep Creek. The Fewoxes, with Richard, Edward, and Edy, were moving to Carolina.

  Anne's dashing husband had convinced her that her prejudices against the southern colony were unfounded. The administration of the Albemarle section was separated from that of the area near Charles Town and was being called North Carolina, under its own Deputy Governor. Carolina's last governor, Seth Sothel, had been arrested, tried, and banished from public office in the colony. Slowly, the rebellious settlers had calmed, seemingly satisfied with the distant and complaisant Proprietors. Making Fewox more determined to move, he admitted, was the fact that he'd won property there, and wasn't content to live at the Williams's anymore.

  All of Anne's children were at the Fewox farewell from Deep Creek. They were happy for her despite the misgivings they had about her future.

  John was head of the Williams family. He'd turned twenty-one shortly after his mother's marriage to Charles Shaw, coming into his birthright soon thereafter—thanks to Shaw's generosity in purchasing and returning, at his death, the land bought with the promised staves and tar. John's feelings about his mother's Fewox match were mixed. He despised the coarse and disreputable James Fewox but, from the first, John was relieved to be free of the bickering with his mother, and there'd been fewer calls for him to return to the embarrassing poverty of Lower Norfolk from his place and position in Middlesex County. So, at his mother's last entertainment at Deep Creek, John stood elegantly with his brothers and sisters, even when giving a quick glance of loving chastisement to Sarah Alice, whose infant daughter briefly shattered the party with her screams. John's wife, Catherine, stayed close by his side.

  Joseph Williams was twenty-four and apprehensive about being left alone in Deep Creek, managing his and John's property and those acres waiting to be claimed by Richard and Edward at their majority. He had mixed feelings but, above all, he looked forward to the domestic tranquillity that would come in a less crowded house.

  Edy clung to those last hours with her brothers and her widowed babysister. As always, Edy stood with her head slightly tilted so that the hood draped over the side of her face, hiding the most unsightly marks she'd been left with when the pox subsided. Edy was eager to be gone from Deep Creek and the painful memories it held for her. Once, she had plans for a beautiful wedding like her mother's. The scourge of 1686 had killed Edy's fiancée though, and left her— she thought—disfigured. There was an additional, lingering shame: providing a handsome dowry for her had been the deciding factor in her mother's decision to relent and marry old Shaw.

  Eyes not focused on the party's departing hostess were fixed on the young man standing next to Edy, Anne's beloved and distant son, Edward. He was beautiful, with crisp features, and clear blue eyes that caught people off-guard in their intensity. At seventeen, he was lean, fair, and pale. His lifelong frailty often came upon the boy and left him bed-ridden for weeks at a time. Some in the parish looked upon the radiant and seldom-seen young man as a special evidence of God. The young man looked out about the guests. There was no one here whom he would miss in Albemarle except his brothers and Sarah Alice. Still, he wasn't eager to leave home, although he made no argument with his mother.

  Richard was in no hurry, either, to move from land that would be his in six years, but he'd obey his mother until he was twenty-one. More than that, he worried for her safety with James Fewox. James's son, Robert, had said there was reason to be afraid. Still, it was rumored that Robert's own mother had been badly beaten by the father, and Richard was determined to look after his mother. Richard bore his father's name.

  The saddest figure at the farewell party was Sarah Alice, a widowed mother at the age of fifteen. Less than a year earlier she'd stood in the church and taken holy vows. Sister Edy's unspent dowry was used to seal the arranged union of Anne's daughter to Walter Craford, son of their renowned neighbor. It was a glorious marriage for Anne's youngest child; Anne's ambitions in Virginia were complete. But, two months later Sarah Alice's husband was dead from the fever. Nine months after the girl's enchanting wedding, pretty little Sarah Alice bore a child. Guests stared at Sarah Alice, standing alone at times, hiding in her mourning clothes, sobbing with her infant. It had only been a girl.

  Guests to the Fewox farewell flowed from the house—filled with cut flowers and borrowed servants—out into the garden that Anne had loved and cultivated for two decades. Her tulips had stopped blooming years ago—she didn't know why—but roses and dahlias sent from England, along with magnolias and lilies and honeysuckle that grew wild, scented the garden to overpower the salty stench of low tide. A perfumed sister-in-law of Sarah Alice fanned away flies. Sarah Alice dabbed at her eyes before she flicked the feathers of an elaborate fan, and complained of gnats and mosquitoes. She was learning to be grand.

  Although it was a happy occasion, Anne had to console the many of her old friends who cried. The idea of Anne moving to the rogue's harbor of Albemarle was upsetting and strange to them, but most had been married and widowed two or three times, relocating with new husbands. They knew she had no choice, but they were surprised—and almost insulted—that Anne seemed eager! True, Governor Sothel was recently removed, but the proprietary colony remained an unstable home to renegades, thieves, and the unbaptized. There was still no minister in the whole of Albemarle! Anne's friends studied her face and detected a slight frown on the adoring face they'd seen when Anne first looked up at her new husband, three years earlier.

  There'd been words with the oldest sons before guests arrived for the farewell party. Both Richard and Edward were growing eager for Carolina, she suggested to John and Joseph. The younger boys had never gone there with their father. She wanted to be with Fewox, she told them, and she wanted to leave Lower Norfolk. Life was not pleasant here for her anymore. Things were changing too much, too fast. Lower Norfolk was being split into two counties, Norfolk and Princess Anne. And, since King James II had been replaced by the Protestants, King William III and his wife, Queen Mary—eldest daughter of the deposed King James II—Virginia was becoming very quickly taken over by a few of the largest planters: the Byrds, the Lees, the Randolphs, the Taneys, the Harrisons, and some others. Anyway, Deep Creek was not Fewox land. The future was in Carolina.

  "I've done my all for you,"
she'd said. They knew she was referring to her marriage to that awful Shaw, in saving their inheritances by agreeing to wed Shaw in return for his purchase of the acres she'd sold to meet Richard's debts, and Shaw returning it to her sons as was intended by Richard's will. She didn't speak of Fewox's growing disrepute in Lower Norfolk. She still would hear nothing against her husband, although she knew that guests coming to her party were lifelong friends of hers, wanting to wish her well, but glad to say good-riddance to the husband.

  Everybody had liked her first husband.

  On the Monday morning after the Fewox farewell party, John and his wife Catherine said their good-byes and returned to Middlesex. They stopped to lunch in Norfolk Town with Mistress Sayer, a sister of Catherine's mother, Lucie Dean. Even though successive kings refused to recognize the official establishment of the town, the port continued to grow. The field where John had first trained for the militia was now surveyed lots and the site of some homes, warehouses, and taverns. A chapel of ease was very close-by, and a courthouse for the new County of Norfolk was under construction. The courthouse on Broad Creek that John's father had helped build thirty years earlier had fallen into disrepair, and separate courthouses were needed for the now-separate counties of Norfolk and Princess Anne. This exciting growth thrilled John, and he hoped that his home area might one day rise to the stature and prestige of Middlesex County, where he now lived. Maybe then his hundred acres and pathetic manor house would be worth something. To Catherine, raised in the isolated Currituck precinct of Albemarle in Carolina, the whole of Virginia was like what she imagined England to be: brick houses, fine clothes and fine houses, carriages and churches with ministers and ritual. She loved this life, and she tried hard to help John by being modest, yet as stylish as possible. She was pleased to have a relation in the Town—her contribution to the family reputation.

  Catherine had loved young John Williams from the moment she saw him. He'd come first, years earlier, to her father's plantation with his father and brother, scratched, dirty and talking non-stop. The next morning he was gone, but she'd known that he'd be back. John returned often with his father and, after his father died, John and Joseph came to Currituck as small traders of whale oil, or to transport Carolina tobacco to Virginia. Overland trading in tobacco was not against the laws of the Virginia Burgesses since so very little transport of it was possible on the cart path called the Carolina Road. John worked hard, he spoke with confidence of his future to Catherine's father and, eventually —when the Williams family situation was settled—he asked for her hand and was gladly given it by the Dean family. Finally, Catherine's life was beside him with the wealthy Widow Williams of Middlesex.

  When John had felt comfortable with leaving Deep Creek in the hands of Joseph and his mother, he and Catherine had moved to Aunt Mary's, occupying a sleeping-room and private sitting-room that the Widow Williams had added for their comfort. Cousin Thomas was visited each day, but he seldom left his room or bed. On rare occasions Thomas had servants carry him to lie beneath the grape arbor, or to the blooming apple orchard in the spring. In the fall his men would carry him to the casking shed to inhale deeply of the aromatic tobacco. But most of Thomas's life was lived in bed—a fine, imported bed of feathered mattresses and pillows—where he was fed and turned and tended as a baby. He'd never risen from the time he was thrown from the horse and—as Uncle John had told John's father—he'd never been sober since then, either. Thomas would never have children.

  Catherine was confident that she and John would have sons one day. They'd tried, they'd prayed, but she'd not yet conceived. She would, though, and Aunt Mary—surely!—would will her estate to John—her husband's namesake. After all, it was John who had tripled the size of the estate with his wise management, and by advising Aunt Mary on the purchase of nearby estates. John had organized her plantation as strictly as the militia. Aunt Mary's plantation was like the beehive or the ant colony the Williams boys had admired. Life was organized; everyone knew his or her place. John and Joseph and their mother had started that system during the hard years before Anne had married Shaw.

  This was a different world from the sandy, barren outer-banks beaches of Currituck Precinct where she'd played as a girl. She lived a life that, as a child, she'd hardly dreamed of. Her husband was manager of nearly two thousand acres for his aunt. The original part of this plantation was from an inheritance the old woman had been left years ago. Uncle John's confiscated land was never returned to him by any of the king's governor's, even though Uncle John had been openly and fiercely loyal to Sir William Berkeley during Bacon's Rebellion. Aunt Mary bore a grudge for that, though she had benefited from the changes in the world that came with the establishment on the throne of King William and Queen Mary.

  The idea that the king's rights and prerogatives derived directly from God was abolished. The people—landed and wealthy people—could limit those royal rights and prerogatives. They'd done so in overthrowing the Stuart, James II, when he'd perversely insisted on naming his Catholic son as heir to the throne. Protestant England would not have it. The landed gentry in America took note; the colonies would not have capricious rule, either. They demanded, and took, increasing power from the royal governor. After James Town burned again, there was determined talk of a new seat of government for the prosperous colony. A college and new State House and town would be built on land at Middle Plantation. These were heady years for the Empire, for Virginia, and for John and Catherine.

  With the departure of the Fewoxes from Deep Creek, with Richard, Edward and Edy Williams off to Carolina, and with John and Catherine gone, the Williams manor on Deep Creek seemed quiet and empty. Only Joseph, his wife Mary, and two hired men were left to run the plantation, not that the three hundred acres were farmed, now. Increasingly, with the growth of Norfolk Town, demand heightened for staves and tar and shingles. Only food, flax, and tobacco for their own use were cultivated for harvest. To everyone's benefit, Joseph's inlaws, Daniel and Mary Bourne, moved in with them after losing their small plantation in what they'd been led to believe was lower Nansemond County. More and more commonly, vying claimants fought in Virginia and Carolina Courts for land that was claimed by both colonies. Still, no dividing line had been drawn.

  Daniel and Mary Bourne had been children, stolen from the streets of London, who were transported to Virginia as servants. They met and become lovers while bonded to an Isle of Wight County planter in the 1660's. Having been sold as children, they were bound to their master until the age of twenty-four. But, by the time Daniel and Mary were seventeen, they'd determined not to wait the additional seven years for freedom. They stole an Indian's pirogue and escaped to the Swamp. In that misty haven they declared themselves man and wife and survived on nature's bounty, secure from constables and sheriffs and magistrates. The Bourne's were introduced to Richard Williams at Maddog's river landing. Joseph Williams met their daughter there, too—his wild bride-to-be. Daniel Bourne provided a handsome dowry for his beautiful daughter: large bundles of valuable furs and tanned hides. It was a small treasure the swampdwellers offered to secure respectability for their daughter, Mary—named for her mother. It came at a time when marriage to a daughter of Anne Shaw offered respectability, and Anne's son badly needed the handsome dowry.

  From the beginning, Anne had ruled the girl. She reminded her daughterin-law that the Williams manor—even though Anne was married to Charles Shaw—remained for Anne's use—by Richard's will—for the remainder of Anne's life. Two mistresses could not run a household, so Mary was to remember her place as merely the wife of Anne's second son, living in Anne's home. Too, Anne's heritage as the daughter of a Ware mother and a Biggs father grew in importance to her as her living situation diminished. This girl of unwed and runaway parents was fortunate, indeed, to snare her son, Joseph. Even the girl's gift to Anne of her first two grandchildren was given short shrift. When would the girl produce sons? Sons were what the family needed.

  Finally, with her mother-in-law gone,
Mary was mistress of the Deep Creek plantation, and she determined it would be hers—and her own family's— independent of brother-in-law John or the scheming shrew, Anne.

  The Bourne family had valuable connections. The outspoken young bride was quick to remind her husband of this when he dared speak in the condescending tones used by his mother. The population of Norfolk County was growing fast. The number of ships that docked at the port in Norfolk Town kept the many inns and ordinaries full of sailors who plied the Barbados-Virginia trade route. Runaway servants and slaves, and deserters from harsh ship captains still fled to the safety of the Great Swamp. These men and women formed small, hidden communities. They supplied traders like Joseph with furs to barter, and cheaper labor than could be rented or bonded. Joseph could thank Daniel Bourne for that connection.

  So, Joseph's business grew, and after Captain Ingolbreitsen was lost at sea during a harsh storm in late 1693, Joseph merely acquired a new factor for the increasing shingle, stave, and tar trade with Barbados. Life went on, and grew better, at Deep Creek.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Carolina seemed familiar to Anne. Albemarle was made up of fingers—or, necks—of land divided by parallel rivers that flowed into a large body of water. The thin, first finger of Currituck came down—as mostly marsh and dune—from Princess Anne County in Virginia to the Currituck Inlet, bordered by the Atlantic Ocean and the Currituck Sound. Then, a long finger—still Currituck Precinct— bounded to the west by the North River, stuck into the Albemarle Sound; the next precinct—Pasquotank—was bordered by the broad Pasquotank River; then, Perquimans Precinct, bordered by the Little River and by the wide Perquimans River. The westernmost, wide, tooth-shaped peninsula was stopped at the imposing Chowan River. Unlike Virginia's Necks, these waters flowed south; south from—or around—the Great Swamp.