That initial encounter with the Potomac Indians, which introduced the relative ease in race relations that would follow, comes to us first through the eyes of Father White, determined to reach sympathetically into the souls of the pagan people. In A Briefe Relation, sent home two months after the Ark arrived, he wrote of the governor’s decision to pay his respects to the tribal “Emperour” at Piscataway, 120 miles upriver. The goodwill of this dominant figure, it was assumed, would pave the way with the other, lesser chiefs. The aim would be to convince this headman of their sincere intention “to teach them a divine doctrine, whereby to lead them to heaven,” and also to enrich them with the “ornaments” of European culture.
They stopped along the way, however, at “Patomacke towne,” halfway up the river. There Father Altham delivered the first of the Jesuits’ sermons to the Indians, firmly informing the local chief of “his [religious] errours in part, which he seemed to acknowledge,” though, White had to admit, they did not really get far on religion, probably, he thought, because the interpreter was a Protestant. They finally reached the “Emperour” at Piscataway, eased his fears and those of his “500 bowmen,” convinced him of their good intentions, and extracted from him “leave to us to sett downe where we pleased.”21
They found an even warmer reception downriver when, under Fleete’s and some local Indians’ guidance, they selected a choice spot for their settlement—the site of one of Fleete’s makeshift trading posts, on the elevated shores of a tributary stream, St. Mary’s River, close to the mouth of the Potomac. The resident Indians, the Yoacomacos, were already planning to abandon the site, with its village and cleared fields, and willingly gave the English the whole region in exchange for a supply of axes, hoes, and cloth. White never doubted what was happening. God, he explained, was disposing things to the advantage of those who were bringing “the light of his holy law to these distressed, poore infidels.” He had seen to it that, just at the right moment, the belligerent Susquehannock tribes had threatened to exterminate the local tribes, causing them to fear for their lives and, “like lambes, [to] yeeld themselves, glad of our company, giveing us houses, land, and liveings for a trifle. Digitus dei est hic.”
Thus encouraged by the finger of God, White was endlessly intrigued by his benign charges, and he carefully described his impressions. Their appearance, he said, was utterly bizarre. Their body paint was weird, the cut of their hair was outlandish, they wore necklaces of eagles’ claws and “the teeth of beasts,” their clothes were made of skins and furs; and he noted their strange weapons and their skill in using them, their houses, diet, conjugal habits, and taciturnity; above all, their dark, barbarous, pagan worship. He had to confess that after a month of contact with them he had not quite penetrated their spiritual life, but his confidence persisted: once these people became Christians, “they would doubtlesse be a vertuous and renowned nation.”22
4
So, on the well-watered open area above St. Mary’s River, Baltimore’s party dug in. While still living aboard the anchored vessels, they threw together a square moated fort, which quickly became a two-and-a-half-mile-long palisaded village. From the “rough habitations” that were hastily built within the walls, farmworkers walked out to a “crazy quilt of plots” in the cleared fields the Indians had left behind. This open-field farming around a nuclear settlement lasted for three growing seasons. Then, in 1637, when the settlers felt secure in their immediate environment, when they had inspected the land for miles around, and when the leadership had drawn up the information needed for the distribution of manorial and headright land, the dispersal began.
The major adventurers blocked out manors southeast of the town. Together with Governor Calvert they claimed fifteen thousand acres and set aside five thousand adjacent acres for later manorial sites. At the same time the Jesuits, seeking to engage the Indians directly, moved nine miles north and established three manors close to the Indian villages along the Patuxent River, which ran parallel to the lower Potomac. There, on land given them by the Patuxent “King” Maquacomen, they opened their first missions and built the storehouse for their entire conversion enterprise. Others were moving north too—the merchant Justinian Snow, whose Snow Hill Manor, just north of St. Mary’s Town, was surveyed at six thousand acres; and Richard Garnett, whose St. Richard’s Manor, abutting the Jesuits at Mattapany, was his reward for transporting himself, his wife, four children, and two servants. Meanwhile Fleete, followed by lesser claimants including three of his brothers and a number of freed indentured servants, turned west, to open a four-thousand-acre manor across St. Mary’s River. A scattering of raw farms was marked out beyond Fleete’s property, west along the north shore of the Potomac, culminating in Dr. Thomas Gerard’s St. Clement’s Manor, which would ultimately stretch across fourteen thousand acres on the neck of land between the Wicomico River and St. Clement’s Bay.23
By the early 1640s, less than a decade after the arrival of the first settlers, the outer fringes of the lower Potomac were transformed. Crude farms and temporary habitations—little more than huts—appeared here and there over much of the wedge of land between the Potomac and Patuxent rivers as they sloped into Chesapeake Bay and through a twenty-mile stretch of the lower Potomac’s north shore. Nowhere were there significant concentrations of people. Vessels bearing newcomers were arriving frequently at the docks at St. Mary’s, though not in numbers approaching those that had been drawn to Virginia in Sandys’s years.
BALTIMORE’S RECRUITMENT CAMPAIGN, always subdued and weakly financed, had limited though significant results. The small group of Catholic gentlemen who had helped Baltimore organize and launch the project had no large population of mobile co-religionists to draw into the colony as indentured servants, tenants, or freeholders. And neither the mobile, unemployed population that did exist nor restless Protestants of higher status were eager to flock to a Catholic enterprise, especially when conditions in Virginia and the Caribbean were thought to be improving. There was no hope for public support for a Catholic venture in the form of lotteries or municipal mobilization of the poor, and appeals could not be broadcast from the pulpit. Still, slowly, in small numbers, highly placed venturers continued to arrive in the 1630s and early 1640s, bringing with them indentured servants and wage laborers. They claimed manors or lesser properties on the basis of headrights, and, amid increasing contention, joined in the governance of the colony and its economic development.
The original seventeen “Gentlemen of Fashion” aboard the Ark and the Dove had been led not only by the proprietor’s brother Leonard but also by his counselors Thomas Cornwallis and Jerome Hawley. Both, like Governor Calvert, were Catholics, well-educated younger sons, and affluent. Cornwallis, son of a member of Parliament and grandson of the ambassador to Spain who was also treasurer for the Prince of Wales, was related by marriage to the Calverts and had invested heavily in the Dove and in the colony’s commercial joint stock. Describing himself as in “good consiens a real Catholick,” he brought with him twelve servants, quickly established a manor which he called Cornwallis’s Cross, laid claim to several others, and became a major tobacco producer, Indian trader, merchant, soldier, and politician. He also became one of the main importers of laborers. Between 1643 and 1657 he brought over at least seventy-one servants. Hawley, brother of the governor of Barbados and himself formerly an official at the court of the queen, fared less well. Owner of two of the first Maryland manors—St. Jerome and St. Helen—he died in Maryland after an office-seeking trip to England, in 1638.24
Other adventurers of similar background followed these first settlers, seeking the glowing benefits that Wintour and the colony’s official promoters had so vividly described. John Lewger had been a college mate of the future Lord Baltimore at Oxford. With three degrees from that university, he had become an Anglican priest, then converted to Catholicism and as a consequence lost his teaching and preaching offices. In 1637 he emigrated to the colony with his family and seven servants. Commissioned
by Baltimore as the colony’s secretary, he quickly brought over other servants—twenty-seven in all—acquired other offices, received two manorial grants (one of which, St. John’s, has been the subject of meticulous archaeological reconstruction), and became a leading official and politician.
The Brent family, arriving in 1638—four siblings: Giles and Fulke, Margaret and Mary—were adult children of the sheriff of Gloucestershire, friends if not relatives of the Calverts, well educated and ambitious. They brought with them gentry status, some wealth, excellent connections, and enough servants to entitle them to numerous large land grants. Both brothers quickly became councilors and acquired major estates. Giles, lord of the Fort Kent Manor, soon married (reputedly with an eye to future land grants) the daughter of the Piscataway “emperor,” who had been sent to live with the English at the age of seven. He would serve as acting governor at a critical time. His sister, the spinster Margaret, would prove to be one of the most remarkable women of the era. Fiercely litigious in protecting her rights and unusually successful in innumerable lawsuits, she owned and managed properties throughout the colony and served as both executor of Governor Calvert’s estate and as Lord Baltimore’s attorney in the colony. In these capacities it fell to her to face the demands of Calvert’s soldiers for pay they had been denied. When the soldiers’ anger seemed to threaten the colony’s existence, she appeared at the Assembly with the remarkable demand that she be given two votes, one for herself and one as Lord Baltimore’s legal representative, hoping that with her influence the Assembly would vote the soldiers’ pay. But there were impassible limits, even on this chaotic frontier, to women’s public roles, and when her demand was rejected, she promptly sold off not only all of Leonard Calvert’s property to pay the soldiers but also the movable property of his brother, the absent proprietor, Lord Baltimore.
Baltimore’s fury at this unauthorized move at his expense drove the Brent family across the bay to Virginia, though they maintained property and family connections in Maryland. But as the Assembly officially acknowledged, no one but Margaret could have managed the chaotic situation, commanding as she did the respect of all for her tough business and diplomatic skills and the civility due a woman. She deserved, they wrote to the proprietor, “favour and thanks” rather than “bitter invectives.” She had saved the colony not only for his family but for a number of ambitious immigrants eager to establish themselves as gentry in this area of the Chesapeake tobacco lands.
Thomas Gerard, lord of St. Clement’s manor, also arrived in 1638, with his family and five servants: by 1648 he had imported forty more servants, whose headrights became the basis of the claim to his manorial estate. Similarly affluent and well connected among the first settlers were John Boteler, nephew of the governor of Bermuda and Providence Island; William Braithwaite, a Calvert relation, grandson of the chief clerk of His Majesty’s Rolls; and John Langford, son of the paymaster of the Royal Navy and personal agent of Lord Baltimore. But these leaders of the earliest years were drawn from a very small segment of the English gentry, and they were never numerous. Some, like William Blount and Col. Francis Trafford, left the colony within a year of their arrival, and those who remained left few traces. By 1638, twelve of the seventeen original Gentlemen of Fashion were dead, and of the remaining five, none left known descendants.25
Yet, by the end of the first decade, Baltimore might well have felt, in respect to social organization, that he had at least some grounds for satisfaction. A social profile of some seven hundred individuals whose names appear in Maryland’s first provincial court papers suggests a traditional hierarchical order. The colony was dominated by six or seven manorial lords, foremost among whom were Governor Calvert, Cornwallis, Gerard, and Lewger. This small Catholic elite owned most of the property and, with the Jesuits, had imported 60 percent of the bound laborers, who for the terms of their indentures had been their servants. The top 10 percent of landowners in St. Mary’s County owned 69 percent of the patented land; 79 percent of all freemen owned no land, hence were tenants, wage laborers, and sharecroppers.26
But in fact there was no traditional manorial regime, or anything close to it. Only one estate, St. Clement’s, functioned as a proper manor “worked by tenants and governed by manorial arrangements,” and it soon succumbed to the general pressures. Beneath the hierarchical structure of formal land titles lay a frontier world of great confusion.27 It was a jumble, a scramble, of people drawn from a miscellany of English sources, shifting constantly in their locations and personal relations, living in crude encampments only beginning to be developed into respectable farms, seizing, legally or not, whatever land they could claim.
Baltimore had expected the capital site, St. Mary’s City, to be a comfortable fortified community with a proper residence for himself, a chapel, regular streets, and houses built “one by another” in a “decent and uniform” manner. And indeed there is evidence that the town had originally been designed as a “Baroque planned city,” so conceived by the colony’s councilors, who as Catholics had of necessity been educated in Europe and were familiar with its urban designs. In fact the “city” proved to be a five-mile riverside sprawl of small, half-cultivated farms with no urban character. By 1641 the original palisade walls, beginning to rot, were being torn down. The official fur trade was only a limited success, and the manorial lords turned out to be, not social and juridical eminences presiding loftily over a stable, respectful population of tenants, but hustling, labor-poor tobacco planters and frontier land developers living in conditions not very different from that of the ordinary farmers.28
The first dwellings in the early years were small and crude, much like the “thatch roofed huts set on crotches and raftered with a covering of brush” that had been built earlier on Kent Island. The settlers inside the original fort at St. Mary’s lived in what remained of shelters left by the Indians and their own crude “cottages.” These were “earth-fast” buildings, structures built by driving thick posts into the ground and forming walls between them with wattle and daub. The thatched roofs were tied down with ropes; the chimneys were made of timber, also filled with wattle and daub, hence highly flammable. Most windows were covered with wax paper, cloth, or shutters. As to size, the typical huts varied from ten to fifteen feet square.
The first attempt to build more durable housing was made by Thomas Cornwallis, who in 1638, hoping “toe encourage others toe follow my example, for hithertoe wee live in cottages,” built a sawn timber framed house one and a half stories high, with a cellar and brick chimneys. But even such medieval-style English dwellings, though more substantial than the common huts, remained small and crude through most of the century. Nor were the houses of the wealthy very large or comfortable during the first two decades. Probably the largest house in the 1630s was that of Lewger, built around 1638. It measured fifty-two by twenty feet and had a stone foundation and a central chimney that divided the house into two large rooms: a hall where meals were prepared and eaten and where all domestic activity took place; and a parlor for sleeping and more formal events. The garret of the wood-framed house, one and a half stories high, was used to store corn. Lewger’s “large” house was the only place spacious enough to hold all the members of the legislature, which met here regularly during the 1640s. Similarly, Justinian Snow’s house at Snow Hill, built around 1639, had a wooden floor, a corn loft, a closet, brick chimneys, and framed glass casement windows, but the roof was so fragile, it was quickly blown off in the first storm.29
Falling roofs notwithstanding, these more substantial houses were improvements over the first crude cottages. In these second-phase constructions, riven clapboards replaced wattle-and-daub walls, and wooden shingles replaced thatch. Some of the floors were of wooden planks, and the buildings were almost twice the length of the original cottages. But even these improved dwellings were small, averaging sixteen by twenty feet. They had at most two rooms and a loft and were furnished simply, with a bed or more commonly a mattress of some sort l
aid on the floor, a few rugs or mats, a chest or two, some kitchenware (kettles, skillets, pots, spoons, bowls, and linens) and the necessary farm tools (axes, hoes, sieves, saws, spades, pails, hammers, and rakes). Though later the houses of the wealthy became more elaborate, most people continued to live in these small two-room, hall-and-parlor houses. There were advantages, though, in these easily constructed, impermanent “wooden boxes” where mobility and uncertainty were common and where most of people’s energy was spent raising tobacco.30
The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 Page 17