Baltimore’s injunction against reliance on tobacco—echoed by Cornwallis (“I came not hither for toe plant … this stincking weede of America”)—was ignored. Within a decade tobacco had become the major crop (100,000 pounds of the leaf were said to have been marketed in 1639), and it was the money of account as well, though almost anything of value—livestock, servants, beaver, and Indian “peake” (wampum)—was also common tender. Almost everyone was a planter, even if they had other skills. Combinations such as merchant-planter, mariner-planter, or carpenter-planter appear regularly in the early court records, as do such occupational references as “repairer of tobacco houses,” “seller of tobacco,” “tobacco shipper,” and “tobacco inspector.”31
To support this still primitive tobacco economy, everyone lived by borrowing, even when they were creditors. Giles Brent, the manor lord of Kent Fort Manor, owed, at various times, his sister Margaret, Edward Packer, Calvert, and the considerable sum of 10,000 weight tobacco (roughly £42 sterling) to Lord Baltimore. He paid off the £110 sterling he owed his sister by giving her all his lands, goods, cattle, chattels, and servants and all the debts owed him. Trading, borrowing, lending, and sharing were necessary for survival. Many, if not most, of the court cases in this early period are concerned with debts not paid. Some involved three or more parties. John Wortley paid John Dandy the 42 pounds of tobacco that John Robinson owed Dandy, and when Robinson died, his estate owed Wortley.
Property transactions—sales, subdivisions, leases, and rentals of still largely wild land—also crowded the pages of the first court records in tangles of complex dealings, as tracts were patented, surveyed, added to, divided, abandoned, and reissued to others. Everyone wanted a piece of land to grow tobacco and corn. Desperate efforts were made to identify boundaries and secure ownership. The manorial lord Thomas Gerard, one of his tenants testified, bought and sold land “without survey by instruments, bounding by guess from heads of creeks to heads of creeks or other parts … sometimes by paths, some times mentioning courses & distances and sometimes not.”32
Thus, typically, the land claims of the twenty-nine-year-old Thomas Adams. Born in the village of Bodenham, Herefordshire—lush meadowland on the Welsh border whose parcels of ownership had been defined for centuries33—he had migrated to London where he became a bookkeeper for Cloberry & Co., the backers of the Kent Island settlement, and then migrated to that outpost at the head of Chesapeake Bay. There he became the company’s storekeeper, an Indian trader, and a local public official. Having brought with him to Maryland five servants, in 1640 he claimed and received one thousand acres called “Prior’s Manor”—whose boundaries he defined as, on the west, “Prior’s Creek,” on the south, Chesapeake Bay, and on the north, a line drawn from the head of Prior’s Creek to “Adams’ Bite.”
Such vague and ephemeral designations became sources of controversy as the land claims and grants multiplied, were sold, inherited, and divided, and as the original boundary markers shifted or disappeared. So Giles Basha claimed a parcel called “Peare’s Plantation,” bounded by Oyster Creek, Chesapeake Bay, and a line drawn from “Basha’s Branch of Oyster Creek to the north of the dwelling house to the Bay.” The land claims of the Brent family form an archive in themselves. Giles Brent may have received none of the land he had hoped for from his marriage to the Piscataway “princess,” renamed Mary, but having brought over eleven servants, he claimed three thousand-acre plots plus two town plots in St. Mary’s City, the boundaries of which he attempted to describe by such markers as “St. Mary’s Forest.” Seemingly permanent physical features were favored—“the northern point of St. Inigo’s Creek,” “St. George’s Island.” But how firm a designation was “a swamp in St. George’s River called Key Swamp” or “a line from the head of Weston’s Creek to David’s well” or “a creek called Stent’s branch”? The boundary lines in one sector of Gerard’s manor were such a tangle that the district was called Bedlam’s Neck. Everything, even the all-important property claims, was transitory, shifting, and insecure.
If property claims were imprecise and ephemeral, even less secure were community structures and social cohesion. How could it have been otherwise with a population drawn across the Atlantic from all over England and from several foreign countries and then scattered over open, uncultivated fields in groups few of whose members had prior attachments to each other? Some were driven by dire need, some sponsored by corporate and personal agencies. Cloberry & Co. sent ninety-three indentured servants to Kent Island, in addition to agents, wage laborers, and independent settlers.34 Thirty-six settlers in Maryland before 1645 were listed as having imported servants to the colony, but some of the sponsors operated rather blindly from afar. The bizarre, passionate Catholic convert Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland—cantankerous, fearsomely learned, and argumentative, a lady, the Earl of Clarendon wrote, “of a most masculine understanding,” whose stubborn adherence to Catholicism endangered the political career of her Protestant husband—managed to sponsor the transportation of five servants to her co-religionists’ colony.35
Drawn from such scattered sources, the settlers shared no distinctive geographical subculture, and they were all equally alien to the environment they faced. St. Mary’s few hundred settlers can be traced back to villages in Gloucestershire, Kent, Essex, and Yorkshire, mingling with others from Newcastle, London, and Portugal. St. Michael’s inhabitants, even fewer in number, came from Cumberland, Norfolk, Devonshire, Northumberland, Lancashire, Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire, and Ireland. Kent Island had people from London and fourteen English counties living together with Frenchmen, Irishmen, Welshmen, mulattoes, and (in very small numbers) blacks.
While most of the settlers had no choice but to become farmworkers, they claimed a great variety of vocational skills. Among the population of St. Mary’s County, there were approximately thirty different occupations. Those living at St. Mary’s City included mariner-merchants, a “licentiate in physick,” three barber-surgeons, a glover-skindresser, a surveyor, a boatwright, builders of all kinds (carpenter, sawyer, brickmaker, etc.), and a midwife. Elsewhere there were seamen, millwrights, attorneys, coopers, millers, and laundresses. The inhabitants of Kent Island listed twenty-eight different occupations. It took a wrenching adjustment for these artisans, craftsmen, and urban service workers to survive in the still-experimental, unformed, tobacco and aboriginal trading world.
Everything was awkward, skewed, unlikely. Households, as they formed and reformed, were often strange in composition. Heavily male, they were frequently not familiar family clusters but work groups of recently arrived young men, many of whom lived in small quartering houses—“outhouses”: barracks, in effect. Not uncommon were households of “mates”—men who formed partnerships with one another to work a leasehold, and who held property in common and worked for equal shares. Thus Henry Bishop, John Bryant, and Joseph Edlow jointly leased land in 1637 and shared a house at Mattapany. Each legally owned a one-third share of the house and crops. Living with them were Bryant’s wife and his servant, Elias Beach. Within the year, Bryant was killed by a tree he was felling, and the mateship broke up. Bishop moved across the Patuxent River to St. Leonard’s and set up another mateship with Simon Demibiel (who had recently left another joint venture) and Leonard Leonardson. Edlow moved south of the Patuxent area to St. Mary’s Township and set up a mateship with Christopher Martin.36
By 1642 most of the original indentured servants, whose terms of service were limited to four or five years, had gained their freedom and were trying to establish themselves as independent farmers, claiming land of their own. A few, in these early years, made the transition to independence easily and successfully, some spectacularly. Thus Daniel Clocker, an illiterate seventeen-year-old son of Westmoreland miners, drifted into London where in 1636 he was taken up as one of Cornwallis’s indentured servants. Having survived his service in the colony, he used his freedom dues to buy an initial parcel of land, married one of Margaret Brent’s servan
ts, raised five children, and prospered as a small householder and justice of the peace. He died possessed of movables worth £71 sterling and a freehold of 230 acres. More successful was Cuthbert Fenwick, also brought to Maryland as a servant by Thomas Cornwallis. Freed after four years of service and immediately referred to as “gentleman,” he married Cornwallis’s daughter, became his overseer, steward, and attorney, held numerous public offices, played a major role in provincial politics, and died the lord of a two-thousand-acre manor. Among his possessions were six blacks who had come to him as part of a marriage settlement. Similarly Henry Adams, one of Lady Falkland’s indentees, became a planter, merchant, judge, and legislator; his property at his death, forty-seven years after his arrival, totalled £569 sterling, and included eight hundred acres, five servants, one slave, and twenty-eight books.37
Such successes were rare. For most, servitude and the transition to freedom and independence were struggles, profusely documented in the records of the first provincial court. As in Virginia, servants were bought and sold, pledged as security on debts, even risked in gambling—something, an observer noted, not done even by “Turk or Barbarian, and not becoming Christians.” Their worth was closely calculated, upon sale or in estate inventories. In Justinian Snow’s inventory, his servant Samuel Barrett was valued at eight hundred pounds of tobacco (about £6.6 sterling); one of Lady Falkland’s transportees was priced at one thousand pounds; Edward Westbee was bought for four milk cows; John Cockshott’s inventory included a maidservant worth seven hundred pounds of tobacco. Contracts were flexible. Some servants earned wages (and like Robert Edwards and Rowland Vaughan sued for overdue payment; the one claimed his master owed him “1 breeding sow,” the other eleven hundred pounds of tobacco). Some struck extraordinary bargains. The bricklayer Cornelius Canedy extracted from Thomas Gerard for three years of service not only the usual food, clothes, and lodging but, as freedom dues, “200 acres of land … with a sufficient house upon the same of twenty-five foot long and sixteen foot wide, two cowes or heifers with calfe, two sowes with pigg, two goats with kid, five barrells of corne, a bed fill’d with feathers or flocks, a pillow, and one rugg, two dishes, one pott, and six spoons.” Thomas Todd bought out his indenture with John Lewger by providing fifty deerskins each year for three years. William Naufin’s relation to his master, the romantic Robert Wintour, was strange. Wintour recorded that he brought Naufin to Maryland “to keepe him company, and to breed him up at schoole.” Another unusual contract recorded in the Maryland court was that of Anne Fletcher. The arrangement she had with Edmund Plowden, proprietor of his own failed colony, “New Albion,” adjacent to Maryland, committed her to revocable service, “from yeare to yeare,” as a “waitingmaid” to Plowden’s wife and daughters, with wages of £4 a year in commodities; if she disliked the country she could quit Plowden’s service at year’s end but would be obliged to pay for her return passage. A few, like Robert Cooper, were given special rewards: “a cow calf because he had been a good servant.” Some argued about the terms of their servitude: John Genallis refused to work on Saturday afternoons; Humphrey Chaplin insisted that he was bound for four not five years and to prove it took his master to court. Servitude—its flexible forms, its conditions, personnel, problems, and benefits—was a pervasive condition of life in the nascent colony.38
The recruitment of labor was a dynamic process, and the resulting demographic situation was inherently unstable. A steady state required more than a one-for-one replacement of freed servants, since many of the increasing number of former indentees themselves soon needed one or more servants. While efforts to keep up a flow of English servants under indentures succeeded through the first generation, search for a more reliable and permanent labor force was inevitable. Within a decade there were signs of an interest in supplanting the free, transient labor force with involuntary permanent workers, but it would be many years before there would be an overwhelming demand for slaves, however defined, or the resources to purchase them in significant numbers, or a reliable system for importing them.39
5
By the end of the first decade of settlement, the colony, its European society still in disarray, was primitive—it would be described as primitive for years to come. Its population of some three to four hundred Europeans in 1642 was growing only slowly, and internal divisions within that population were beginning to appear. Within a decade of the first arrivals, the animosities became abrasive, then deadly. By the early 1640s, the scattered community, small as it was, was being torn apart by bitter disputes that could be resolved only by absolute victory and absolute defeat. These internal struggles within a fragile European outpost at the edge of a boundless aboriginal world threatened the survival not only of Baltimore’s chartered proprietorship but of the physical existence of his colony. The turmoil completed the disarray of the hoped-for social order begun by the jarring circumstances of migration and resettlement.
THE JESUITS, whom Baltimore had deliberately recruited,40 proved to be an especially bitter and unexpected source of disorder. Their benevolent and initially supportive ambitions created a potentially deadly contradiction in the colony’s goals and procedures.
The priests—especially the learned Father Andrew White—had served Baltimore well. They had shared in the fashioning of the colony and had been leaders in the initial explorations and settlement decisions of 1634. Once the colony was under way, they looked forward to launching one of the greatest conquests of paganism in the history of Christianity. They would conduct, with their passion, discipline, and energy, a veritable crusade, a sweeping harvest of souls, radiating out from what they imagined would be “a semi-autonomous Catholic community of English colonists and Indians living on Jesuit-owned manorial estates governed by ecclesiastical courts and exempt from the taxation and much of the jurisdiction of the civil government.”41
Things began well. The Mattapanian Indians, hoping for military support, gave the Jesuits a site on the southern border with the aggressive Susquehannocks. With their storehouse secure at that northern location, the Jesuits awaited reinforcements from home and permission from the governor to penetrate the Indians’ world. The former they never adequately received, and the latter was slow in coming.
At no time during the eleven years during which the Jesuits were active in Maryland were there more than five priests on the scene. Though the fame of the colony and its missionary ambitions spread throughout the Order’s European centers, and though at least twenty-three priests at the Jesuit college at Liège fervently sought permission to join their brethren in distant Maryland, only eleven priests and three assistants (“coadjutors”) were ever sent to the colony; eight died there (of yellow fever, of untreated abcesses, of Indian violence, of a gunshot accident), and four left quickly. Some were men of exceptional ability: the learned White, his two successors as head of the mission (Thomas Copley, an able businessman and estate manager, and the “prudent” and experienced Ferdinand Poulton). And there was also the young Roger Rigbie, a gifted linguist and scholar. But some were not considered to be capable of handling the work. And the entire venture was caught up in the cross-currents of religious politics in England and the global demands on the Order’s available personnel.42
Nor was the governor immediately supportive. For four years he kept the Jesuits from venturing into the Indians’ lands, fearful of the eastward spread of diseases said to be afflicting the tribes, fearful even more of stirring up Indian attacks that might threaten the settlements, and hopeful that the Jesuits might usefully devote themselves to converting some of the colony’s Protestant heretics.43 Finally, in 1638, permission to visit the natives was granted. While Copley kept charge of the Order’s headquarters at St. Mary’s, the others moved out into the fertile fields of the benighted: Altham to Kent Island, Poulton to Mattapany and its surroundings, and White 120 miles north to the Piscataway village of the “emperor” Kittamaquund, whose conversion, they were sure, would open the spiritual floodgates.
&n
bsp; Though White failed in his first effort at conversion of the nearby “King of Patuxent” (such, he explained, were “the inscrutable judgments of God”), he appeared to succeed with the ruling tayac of Piscataway. For that uneasy leader, suffering nightmares after murdering his brother in a struggle for dominance, had dreamed that White and Altham, whom he remembered from their exploratory visit of 1634, would bring him peace of mind. And in another dream he had seen White in the company of a beautiful god “surpassing the snow in whiteness,” in contrast to an image of “a most hideous demon” in company with the threatening Protestant trader Justinian Snow. These premonitions and insights, reinforced by White’s providential cure of the tayac’s “serious disease” by application of “a certain powder … mixed with holy water,” convinced the chief of the “errors of their former life.” Thus illuminated by “the light of Heaven,” the tayac, who insisted that White live with him in his “palace,” forthwith exchanged his furs and skins for European clothes, put away his concubines, abstained from meat as instructed, forswore all worldly goods in favor of “knowledge of the only true God,” began the study of English, and instructed, first his wife and two daughters, then “a convention of other rulers,” to cast aside the “stones and herbs” they had formerly worshipped (symbolically flinging a stone aside and kicking it with his foot) and “embrace the profession and practice of Christianity,” which alone would save one’s “immortal soul … from eternal death.”
Such a conversion, reinforced by vivid tales of other miraculous interventions by the Holy Spirit in the Indians’ lives, proved to the Jesuits beyond any doubt that these Indians, though of all the people on earth the most “abject in appearance,” had souls “for which a ransom has been paid by Christ, and which are no less precious than those of the most cultivated Europeans.” Yes, they had vices, “though not so many, considering the darkness of their ignorance, their barbarism, and their unrestrained and wandering mode of life”; but they were willing to accept the concept of one Superior Being and are “readily swayed by reason, nor do they obstinately withhold their assent from the truth when it is placed distinctly before them.”
The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 Page 18