Vol. 130 No. 3 VIRGINIA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY & BIOGRAPHY PUBLISHED QUARTERLY BY THE VIRGINIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY 2022
Charles H. Ford, Norfolk State University
Jennifer L. Ritterhouse, George Mason University
Editor of the Virginia Magazine of History & Biography Karen
EDITORIAL STAFF
Barton A. Myers, Washington and Lee University
Editorial Assistant VIRGINIA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY & BIOGRAPHY 2022 Virginia Magazine of History & Biography (ISSN 0042-6636) is published quarterly by the Virginia Historical Society, 428 N Arthur Ashe Boulevard, Richmond, Virginia 23220 • © Virginia Historical Society 2022 • Printed on acid-free paper by Sheridan, Hanover, Pennsylvania • Library subscriptions are $50 ($60 international). For information about subscriptions, call 804.342.9692 • For all editorial matters, see VirginiaHistory.org/research/research-resources/virginia-magazine-history-and-biography • Periodicals postage paid at Richmond, Virginia, and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Elizabeth Darling, Manager of Membership & Annual Giving • P.O. Box 7311 • Richmond, VA PUBLISHED23221-0311QUARTERLY BY THE VIRGINIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD
Graham T. Dozier, Virginius Dabney Wormald,
Carolyn Eastman, Virginia Commonwealth University
Kevin R. C. Gutzman, Western Connecticut State University
Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie, Howard University
Whitney Martinko, Villanova University
Gregory D. Smithers, Virginia Commonwealth University
FRONT COVER: Detail from a map, Virginia and Maryland as It is Planted and Inhabited This Present Year (1670) by Augustine Herrman (c. 1621–1686), that shows land identified as “Scharburghs Gargaphia” and “Arcadia,” both of which were owned by Anne Toft. (Library of Congress FACING) PAGE: A broadside, published in Boston in 1774, of the text of the Continental Association, which called for a ban on imports from Britain. (Library of Congress)
Eric Burin, University of North Dakota
VIRGINIA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY & BIOGRAPHY Vol. 130 No. 3 172CONTENTSCollecting Debts: Virginia Merchants, the Continental Association, and the Meetings of November 1774 James R. Fichter 218 “Mrs. Ann” and “The Colonel”: Anne Toft, Edmund Scarburgh II, and the Limits of Gendered Power on the Seventeenth-Century Eastern Shore John G. Kolp 253 BOOKS RECEIVED
VIRGINIA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY & BIOGRAPHY VOL. 130 NO. 3
James R. Fichter is an associate professor of European and American studies at the University of Hong Kong.
Continental Association, and the Meetings of November 1774 n November 1774, as many as 500 of Virginia’s merchants gathered at a meeting of merchants and signed the Continental Association, agreeing to its ban on imports from Britain, on exports to Britain, and on the consumption of British goods. Virginia had several gatherings that November. These linked events were the culmination of Virginia’s economic response to the imperial crisis. As such, they point to a core question in Revolutionary historiography: what was the role of merchants in the American Revolution?
JAMES R. VirginiaCollectingFICHTERDebtsMerchants,the
The November meetings and the subsequent association facilitated merchant support for the Revolution in Virginia. Merchants aided implementation of the trading provisions of the Association, which were important to the Revolution’s success. This is counterintuitive. Colonial historians tend to assume that consumers’ withdrawal from the market came at merchants’ expense. Historian T. H. Breen’s study of revolutionary-era consumption is a seminal example. We also see Virginia planters supporting the Association out of economic self-interest to avoid paying debt to merchants, a reading that prioritizes merchant-planter conflict. Thus, Woody Holton, in the most important analysis of the Virginia nonexportation movement in a generation, argues that planters used nonexport to increase the price of their tobacco at merchants’ expense. Merchant-planter conflict certainly existed. But the zero-sum logic of planter-merchant antagonism does not explain why so many merchants joined the Association, and it overlooks how merchants could benefit from, or minimize their losses with, I
174 • Virginia Magazine rising tobacco prices. Some merchants did benefit, a point made by Scottish historian T. M. Devine. This article contributes to long-standing economic interpretations of the American Revolution and of the Revolution in Virginia by explaining the financial reasons that pushed the Commonwealth’s merchants to join the common cause.1
This article examines the meetings of November 1774, the Association, and the merchant response. Virginia historians have been unaware of these meetings, yet the November meetings were crucial to the Association’s success in Virginia. The next two sections will establish who, among the
Some caveats: It is unclear how much of the Association’s structural benefits to merchants were intended, or even understood, by the men who created them. And some merchants accepted the Association because of politics, not money. Yet, the predominant merchant response to the Association was driven not by planter-merchant or Patriot-Tory conflict, but by merchants’ tolerance of risk. Some merchants saw opportunity in the Association, others saw danger. The former had assumed greater risk in the past by issuing more credit to planters. They took risks in 1774 and 1775, too, speculating that tobacco price increases would help recover loans. The more cautious merchants had taken on less risk in the past, having issued less credit to planters, and, fearing the imperial crisis would imperil commerce, withdrew from trade to avoid risk. This latter group broadly disliked the Association. Yet, they fulfilled its nonimport and nonexport rules by stopping trade.2 Lending is the missing piece in our understanding of merchants and the Association. Virginia’s merchants were lenders, selling imports on credit against planters’ future payment in tobacco. By stopping imports on 1 December 1774, nearly a year before stopping exports on 10 September 1775, it is commonly understood that the Association provided political cover for planters to reduce consumption. Yet, we have overlooked what this meant for merchants: merchant-lenders could cease issuing new loans for the sale of consumer goods while still collecting the tobacco that paid off old loans. Rising tobacco prices benefited merchants by increasing the value of planters’ loan payments. When imports ceased and tobacco prices rose, who were the main beneficiaries: the planters who reduced consumption and paid down debt, or the merchant-lenders who reduced leverage and got paid?3
Subsequent sections examine the closure of Virginia’s courts (which affected debt repayment), merchants’ response to the Association, and rising tobacco prices
1774, Virginians gathered for one of the most consequential of Williamsburg’s Public Times, when court days, legislative sessions, and merchant meetings occurred almost simultaneously. A meeting of merchants had been called for 25 October. The House of Burgesses was called, but did not sit, on 3 November 1774. A “considerable Number” of burgesses remained in town, as well as some councillors. Governor Dunmore and the radical frontier burgesses were absent because of the Indian war on the Ohio. In their absence, Virginia’s continental congressmen arrived and addressed the gathered merchants and burgesses about the Continental Association. This was the first meeting of merchants since the Virginia and Continental Associations had been announced. Patriots needed merchants to support their Association, and the November meeting was the crucial occasion for it. Patriots got that support, with between 400 and 500 merchants presenting a “voluntarily” signed copy of the Continental Association to Peyton Randolph and other congressmen on 9 November 1774, after which the merchants, congressmen, burgesses, and councillors went home.4
Virginia’s continental congressmen also came to proclaim the Continental Association to the burgesses. At least four congressmen reached Williamsburg: Benjamin Harrison, Richard Bland, Peyton Randolph, and Edmund Pendleton. Patrick Henry probably did as well. Randolph, Bland, and Harrison left Philadelphia early, specifically “in order,” according to Silas Deane, “to meet the House of Burgesses of Virginia.” This was coordinated with George Washington, who stayed behind to sign Randolph’s, Bland’s, and Harrison’s names in their absence. In Williamsburg, the congressmen gave the Continental Association to the editors of the Virginia Gazette. This appeared on 3 November, a timely intervention with the merchants.5
Virginia Merchants and the Continental Association • 175 colony’s political and mercantile classes, attended the meetings of November 1774 and how Virginia’s merchants came to sign the Association.
Finally, this article will consider whether the gathering of November 1774 might usefully be considered one of Virginia’s Revolutionary ConIventions.NNOVEMBER
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176 • Virginia Magazine
Some sources, without naming specific attendees, suggest the number of delegates may have been substantial. Nicholas indicated that additional burgesses came upon news of Randolph’s arrival (he was speaker of the House of Burgesses), holding two “Meetings of the Delegates” between 4 and 7 November. These meetings seem to have assumed some governing authority, deliberating over a shipment of tea reaching York on John Norton’s Virginia. Emphasizing the Williamsburg meetings’ propriety and legitimacy, Nicholas indicated they observed “the proper Rules” of legislative procedure and held votes. James Parker concurred that the delegates “talked over” the tea. The meetings were politically significant enough for the York and Gloucester committees to try to consult “the Meeting of sevPeyton Randolph (1721–1775) was speaker of the House of Burgesses, chair of several Virginia Conventions, and president of the First Continental Congress. These multiple roles allowed Randolph to gather burgesses in Williamsburg, convene them in a convention (or convention-like meeting), and then address them on behalf of Congress. (Virginia Museum of History & Culture, 1858.6)
It is unclear how many other burgesses attended (the congressmen were burgesses themselves). Some, such as Archibald Cary, Robert Carter Nicholas, and Robert Munford III, can be placed at Williamsburg with certainty. Thomas Nelson, Jr., may have attended. Dudley Digges is given as attending. At least one Nansemond delegate probably attended. Councillor Thomas Nelson, Sr., was present.6
On 10 November, Nelson prorogued the assembly until February. By then, news had reached Williamsburg of the Battle of Point Pleasant (10 October). Dunmore followed his victory by going to the Ohio interior and would “not be expected for some time,” leaving no reason to keep the burgesses in Williamsburg. But by then the merchants had signed the Association. Dunmore returned later, popular from his Indian war. Had Dunmore attended the session in Williamsburg with a successful Indian war to his credit, or had he simply not sent Foy so that Nelson could have dismissed the burgesses earlier, the congressmen would have had a smaller audience of burgesses and, in all likelihood, a smaller gathering of merchants, too.9
William Allason arrived on 25 October and left on the twenty-ninth, finding the meeting “so inconsiderable, & the prospect of doing Business there so distant” that he did not want to spend “what little money I had a chance of receiving” from debtors on lodging. Others stayed. A twelve-man quorum of the meeting’s twenty-eight-member Committee of Trade was likely pres-
Virginia Merchants and the Continental Association • 177 eral Members of the House of Burgesses in Williamsburg” before destroying Norton’s tea.7
THE MEETING OF MERCHANTS—a sort of Chamber of Commerce—had been created in 1769 to organize for the Townshend Act boycotts. Responding to the Association was core to the meeting’s raison d’être, but the merchants had trouble with timely attendance, and few came at first.
It was Governor Dunmore who accidentally ensured delegates came. He had gone west to confront restive Indians. Thinking he could resolve the affair peaceably, he dispatched his aide, Capt. Edward Foy, to Williamsburg, with orders that Foy and Dunmore meet in Williamsburg on 1 November.
Normally, in the governor’s absence, Thomas Nelson, Sr., president of the Governor’s Council, would have postponed the assembly by several months. Instead, he waited until 3 November, the day the legislature was to sit, to postpone it to the seventh. On the seventh he postponed it again to the tenth. Short, last-minute postponements kept the delegates in town, probably because Nelson thought the governor was, as Parker explained, “daily expected.” Foy’s arrival, at Dunmore’s behest, is the only reason Nelson could have expected this.8
There was conflict between the gathered merchants and burgesses. Samuel Inglis’s second- or third-hand account, the one usually cited, described 1) the threat of tar and feathers being used to “get everyone [among the merchants to] sign the association,” and 2) violence threatened against merchants who violated it, with merchants Warwick and Wallace singled out for a recent importation of tea. Norfolk merchant Henry Fleming, an eyewitness, wrote, “There was a pole erected upon the parade in Wmsburg when I was there with a Brush a Bag of Feathers & a Tar Barrel at its foot by order of the Burgesses to intimidate such as would dare to broach a sentiment contrary to what is calld the liberties of America, Hanging, Drowning, Ducking, Taring & Feathering, Beating to death & Gouging was threatened . . . many us’d very ill [to get merchants to sign the Association].” An “Occasional Committee” led by Archibald Cary, drove
178 • Virginia Magazine ent, gathering the larger meeting in response to Randolph, Bland, and Harrison’s arrival on the thirtieth.10 Seventy-two merchants had agreed to attend this meeting. James Robinson thought that by 1 November half that number had arrived; more probably came later. Perhaps the Virginia Gazette’s count of 400 to 500 attendees was exaggerated; a few hundred probably came. Yet, only a few can be placed with certainty: Neil Jamieson, Henry Fleming, Charles Yates, Archibald Ritchie, William Allason, Samuel Inglis, Anthony Warwick, Michael Wallace, James Robinson, William Henderson, Alexander Diach, a Mr. Hanson and a Mr. Farr, and last but not least, Andrew Sprowle, who, as the Virginia Gazette recalled, “At the head of all the merchants . . . voluntarily signed the Continental Association in November 1774, at a General Assembly of the representatives of the people of this colony, then convened at Williamsburg.”11
At the meeting, merchants caught up on politics and business, set rates of exchange, and collected debts from other merchants—pressing issues given that the last meeting, scheduled for April, had been canceled. Merchants would want to know how others would respond to the Association, meet with burgesses and congressmen, and perhaps form a collective response. The politics of the merchants diverged in the years ahead: Sprowle and Jamieson would become Loyalists, Yates would become a Patriot. In 1774 such divisions were unmade, and merchant politics remained situational.12
Virginia Merchants and the Continental Association • 179
(
)
“The Alternative of Williams-burg,” 1775, by Philip Dawe. Often mistakenly associated with the convention of August 1774, the image’s depiction of a pole holding tar and feathers and the appearance of merchants signing the Association suggest Dawe was most likely portraying the events of November 1774. Library of Congress
heretofore-forgotten
180 • Virginia Magazine these threats, singling out Warwick and Wallace. Nicholas, along with Randolph, Pendleton, “& Some others,” intervened. Munford, according to Parker, pointed out that “such proceedings were more arbitrary than any the Americans were complaining of.” Nicholas was genuinely concerned that irregular proceedings not end-run the meeting of delegates, though others may have found Cary’s aggressive posture a useful foil. In the end, the other Patriots used Cary to get Warwick and Wallace to agree to surrender their tea. Parker thought Pendleton’s group showed little “moderation”—for in one key point they agreed with Cary: the Association would not be a boycott to which individuals subscribed, but would be binding on all, like law, whether the merchants signed it or not. The Association operated like “the American Constitution.” Its bans on legal trade with Britain (as opposed to any controls on smuggling or home consumption) would be relatively easy to police, since legal trade was already policed by His Majesty’s customs officers when it passed through customs houses in Virginia. As George Washington explained, customs houses provided public and “authentick Lists” of trade with Britain. All Patriots had to do was check those lists to see that legal trade had stopped. This removed the main reason for merchants not to sign the Association. If it was to be effectively enforced whether they signed it or not, abstaining had no business purpose. Why stick their necks out?13In 1770, Cary had played a similar role. Before the assembly had met in October 1770, Cary “waited on most of the principall Merchts. about the head of James River,” telling them that the “Gent[leme]n of the Assembly” would issue a “genteel” invitation to the merchants to “Join in an Association.” If they were not “all Consenting to it,” “the Militia would be Raised to shut up their Stores,” or “attempts would be made to prevent people from paying there [sic] debts.” Parker thought “all the merchants above became advocates for the Association,” because of this. Cary’s “peremptory disposition” (he was nicknamed “the old bruiser”) suggests he took to the role.14The York and Gloucester committees provided a second “stick”: they destroyed Norton’s tea on the Virginia (a symbolic gesture) and (more meaningfully) forbade its master from loading tobacco. Norton lost out on hundreds of hogsheads of tobacco, costing him dearly. The announcement
To be sure, court closure crimped lenders by design. It was, Harry Piper explained, meant to make British merchants “distressed” enough to be “active in getting the [Coercive] Acts Repealed.” “Our Courts of Justice are all shut up, and really the situation of the Trading people is at this time truly distressing,” wrote William Reynolds in July. Closing courts was “Evil” and there was “no probability of collecting any debts and no Trade to support our familys,” he wrote. “I am really at a loss to know what plan I shall adopt.” Fleming lamented in January 1775 that with “no means left to compel the sorry rascals to pay their just debts,” he got “not one farthing” from
Virginia Merchants and the Continental Association • 181 that Norton would get no tobacco came while the meeting of merchants sat, likely having considerable effect. If Norton, perhaps the most well-connected merchant trading to Virginia from Britain, was to be denied a cargo (and, therefore, the ability to collect debts), no merchant could expect to be spared. All the more reason to sign.15
The main difference between signers and nonsigners was not politics, but whether they could collect outstanding debts. The Association’s signatories did not sign freely in any meaningful sense, but what mixture of principle, coercion, and inducement led them to sign is unclear.17
ONE REASON MERCHANTS SIGNED the Association was the closure of Virginia’s courts. Court closure stopped debt collection cases, a precondition for nonexport (if planters stopped selling tobacco but still owed money, they risked creditors pursuing them in court). But court closure was not simply a pro-planter/anti-merchant measure. It did not wipe out debts or allow default. It functioned like an indefinite bank holiday, protecting all borrowers, including merchants.18
“Carrots” followed: signatories could profit from delayed nonexport, collecting tobacco while nonsigning rivals were shunned. A sufficiently repentant Norton was allowed to receive tobacco in 1775, and other parties chartered his vessels to take 300 hogsheads more. Signing the relatively “moderate” Association might also protect merchants from radical local committees. In mid-November, Fleming reported the Association was “subscribd to by the Merchts in Virginia (at least by every one I know).” This was a change from the previous month, when “not one British Storekeeper” had signed the (broadly similar) Virginia Association.16
182 • Virginia Magazine some debtors, who acted like “haughty dons at present happily serene from justice.” Thomas Jett found “not a shilling of Money to be collected.”19
Fleming blamed court closure. Yates agreed, thinking it “in vain to suppose those who have delayed & evaded for Ten Years, will under such circumstances be prevailed on to pay” without courts. But we might ask, if he had already waited ten years, what good had the courts been?20 Court closures protected debtors from their collectors. This included merchant debtors. Some merchants were net debtors and others net creditors, but most merchants both lent and borrowed money. Reynolds could not recover debts, but he would not have to pay, either. Closure would “of course prevent our paying those whom we owe,” he wrote George Norton— whom he owed. William Allason concurred: without a “Court of Justice by which Debts can be recovered,” it was “out of the Power of many [merchants] to make the remittances they wou’d wish.” In Norfolk, Henry Fleming reported several merchant houses owed him, but “they are all Committee men & to act in Character[.] [T]hey generaly think it a duty the[y] owe to America to withhold payment from Great Britain to compel the British to espouse their cause.” Borrowers’ inability to meet obligations constrained lenders’ ability to meet theirs. Merchant-lenders paid what and when they could. William Allason “determined . . . to make all the payments in my power to those to whom [I am] indebted, & for that end will spare no Pains to make my Collection as large as possible.” Reynolds was equally pained. “Believe me,” he wrote John Norton, “it gives me as much uneasiness to have been so short in my Remittances to you as it can possibly have occasioned you, I have depended on the fairest promises of those who have dealt with me & they have most cruelly disappointed me, & now, as the Courts are shut up . . . I cou’d not depend on collecting £150.” But Allason would try anyway, and Reynolds promised to discharge his debt as
Henry Fleming described two men at the Williamsburg meeting who “on Friday evening last promis’d me payment next day” but “step’d out” the next morning “without biding Good bye.” None of the debtors on Fleming’s list “were at Court.” Another merchant described getting “no pay[men]t” for goods he sold “to a person he has dealt with many years & who never disapointed him before.” Most people had not paid “a single shilling” or paid “very little,” “in short the times are realy shocking.”
Virginia Merchants and the Continental Association • 183 he collected tobacco. Court closure hurt these men, but it also protected them by letting them delay their own debt payments until they could pay.21
It fell to the General Court’s lawyers to shut the court. They could, like Thomas Jefferson, stop appearing before the bar. Jefferson had argued in May that the General Court should shut, and he subsequently gave up his practice before that bar. But he did not organize a collective response, and by passing his cases to Edmund Randolph, Jefferson ensured they could proceed.25
Patriots in the House of Burgesses deflected blame for the court closure onto Governor Dunmore. The Fee Act, which funded the courts, needed to be renewed in May 1774. But in the House of Burgesses, Richard Henry Lee delayed considering renewal until after the house responded to the Coercive Acts, which response got Dunmore to dissolve the assembly with the Fee Act unrenewed. The Fee Act’s expiry defunded county courts, closing off the main avenue for debt collection.22 But the act’s effect on the General Court was unclear. That court had original jurisdiction over cases if the property involved reached 2,000 pounds of tobacco or £10 sterling. Its justices were the governor’s councillors, and it was overseen by the governor. It could be expected to be unsympathetic to the Association. If it sat, larger borrowers might be exposed. The General Court solicited opinions on whether it should close in response to the Fee Act’s nonrenewal. Edmund Pendleton, among the select few who argued before the General Court, argued the court could still function, which it did in spring 1774. In June, Pendleton assured Thomas Adams the General Court would sit again for its next session in October.23
By July, Pendleton began to think the court should not sit. When General Court Justice Ralph Wormeley asked him to reaffirm his support, Pendleton replied that he would like the court open but, sadly, “A great Majority . . . think the Courts of Justice should not proceed.” Pendleton asked Wormeley to keep his supposed support for the court a secret because it was unpopular—this way he could keep in the graces of both the “great Majority” and the judge before whom he might argue future cases. Wormeley saw through it. “This paragraph plainly points out the game, that this complacent casuist means to play,” he wrote.24
184 • Virginia Magazine
The court’s remaining lawyers organized a strike to stop debt cases. Two Virginia congressmen were among the General Court bar: Edmund Pendleton and Patrick Henry. With Congress in session, they could not also attend court. An anonymous Patriot, writing in the Virginia Gazette, discouraged Virginians from attending court. In Pendleton’s and Henry’s absence the remaining “gentlemen of the general-court-bar” would not proceed, because they had no time to take over their colleagues’ cases, and a court session would “add much to the uneasiness of the present times.” The writer discouraged witnesses from attending. “It is therefore presumable that there will be no trials at the next General Court” for debt. This effort may have been encouraged by the example of Maryland lawyers who had already refused to appear before their bar that May. Soon enough, this evolved into a strike. When General Court judges sat on 10 October, they “determined not to proceed on the trial or to any other business.” Thomas Adams explained that “the General Court could not proceed to Business for want of two of our principal Counsel, (to wit) Mr. Pendleton & Mr. Henry who Educated at Eton and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, Ralph Wormeley V (1744–1806) was set to preside at the General Court in late 1774 until collective action by the lawyers admitted to that bar prevented the court form sitting. (Virginia Museum of History & Culture, 1951.22)
Virginia Merchants and the Continental Association • 185 were then at Philadelphia as Delegates . . . and the other Lawyers out of Respect to them & the Errand they were on refused to come to the Bar,” with the exception of Attorney General John Randolph. The court thus heard only criminal cases. Dunmore confirmed “a majority of His Majesty’s Council” would have sat as judges to “perform their duty, yet the lawyers have absolutely refused to attend nor indeed would the people allow them to attend or evidences to appear.” This required organization among the lawyers who argued before the General Court, including George Wythe, Thomson Mason, James Mercer, and Edmund Randolph, in addition to Pendleton and Henry. Attention has focused on the closure of the county courts, yet it was the General Court’s closure in October, organized by these men, that truly stopped debt collection.26
It was unclear the strike would work. The announcement in the Virginia Gazette was unofficial and unsigned. No one knew whom it represented. Some plaintiffs showed up anyway. James Allan expected payment at the General Court in October. Fredericksburg merchant Charles Yates hoped Edmund Pendleton (1721–1803), burgess, congressman, and attorney before the General Court bar, helped close that court for debt collection in 1774. Based on an image painted about 1800, this portrait shows Pendleton older than he was in 1774. (Virginia Museum of History & Culture, 1851.2)
The Associations motivated Virginians to keep courts closed. Yates claimed it was “the general Opinion” of “leading” burgesses that debt collection would stop while the Association was in effect. Fleming reported that because “Burgesses met at the same time with the Merchants in Wmsburg” he was able to converse with “several” burgesses—it is unclear whom— “upon the subject of the renewal of the Fee Bill.” “I had always for answer that they hoped no member of the house would be bold enough to propose [renewing] it. For their parts they were resolved to oppose it if any one shou’d make the motion.” The burgesses explained “it wou’d be absurd in them to establish or renew the Fee Bill & hold Courts to oblige the planters &c to pay their debts to the people in Britain or Factors here at the same time they Associate to stop all exportations to Britain after the 1st Sepr 1775 . . . when [only] by the exportation of their produce” are they “enabled to pay their debts.” Because they could not expect to export much longer, the only other way to pay their debts would be to liquidate their plantations.28
The General Court was expected to remain shut. Opening required passing a new Fee Act, which Yates doubted the assembly would do, even if Dunmore brought himself to call a session. The March 1775 convention confirmed that “lawyers, suitors, and witnesses, ought not to attend the prosecution or defence of civil suits at the next General Court.” This, as Thomas Adams noted, “shut up our Courts” longer and deemed anyone who brought suit a Loyalist.29
the court would put him in charge of collecting Perkins & Co debts. But he, like London merchant James Russell, found himself unable to collect because the General Court “does no business.”27
186 • Virginia Magazine
The economic consequences of court closure were threefold. First, as Henry Fleming noted, it protected the post-September 1775 nonexport provision of the Association. Second, it constrained lending and therefore limited the increase in imports before the Association took effect. Court closure was why Fleming reported, “We now refuse farther Cr[edit] to 9/10th of our Customers & absolutely deny it to any new [customers] however fair their credit may be.” He continued with cash sales as best he could, though the colony had a cash shortage. Across the thirteen colonies, imports from Britain in 1774 increased 31 percent from 1773 as importers stocked up in anticipation of the boycott. But the Chesapeake saw a muted 17 percent
THE COURT CLOSURES AND ASSOCIATION were not about evading debts. Borrowers wanted to repay—for honor, business relationships, or to achieve financial independence. William Anderson sent three hogsheads of tobacco to John Norton in August 1775, which, “when added to some money I have directed Mr. Gist to pay you” and a £150 bill, “I hope will about square the Yards with us.” William Reynolds likewise hoped that the delay in nonexportation would allow Virginians “to pay off or at any rate lessen our debts in England.” Rather than shipping tobacco to England for sale, William Duval used it to pay his Virginia debts.31
Virginia Merchants and the Continental Association • 187 increase in imports as merchant-lenders weighed the appeal of going into a boycott with a stock of goods against the hazard of selling that stock on credit without courts. Third, by diverting creditors from the courts, court closure forced creditors to buy tobacco to recover their loans, thereby supporting the tobacco price.30
Many historians—progressive, neo-progressive and otherwise—have seen the Association as a way for planters to welch on debts. James Parker agreed, thinking “the Glasgow factors seem to be great objects of [Congress’s] resentment” and targets of the Association. He thought the reason “is plain, to them they owe the Money.”32
This privileging of merchant-planter conflict overlooks that merchants and large planters overlapped. Yorktown Patriot Thomas Nelson, Jr., was both. Merchant William Allason owned a plantation. Merchant and planter families intermarried: James Parker and William Aitchison married Margaret and Rebecca Ellegood. John Norton’s son John Hatley Norton married Sally Nicholas, daughter of treasurer Robert Carter Nicholas. The Nortons owned Virginia farms. The Lee family included both Virginia planters and a London merchant. The Patriotic practice of paying debts with tobacco exports in 1775 grew from this interrelationship, benefiting merchant and planter and implying an expectation of continued commercial relations with Britain, in which context paying down debt made sense. Debt abrogation, on the other hand, made sense in the context of war and independence—contexts that were lacking in 1774. Planter-merchant correspondence does not support T. H. Breen’s assessment that their relationship had “gone sour” by 1774. And his argument that “[t]o achieve personal
debt, planters “had to break with the economic and political system” and “declare their independence from the merchants of Great Britain,” overlooks that continued relationship in 1774 and 1775.33
188 • Virginia independence”Magazinefrom
The planters’ nonimportation measure benefited merchants. Effective 1 December 1774, it stopped them from issuing more bad debt. Nonimportation and the related nonconsumption provision of the Association (effective 1 March 1775) stopped importers’ sales but, because most imports were sold on credit, in Virginia nonimport effectively stopped merchant lending. Glasgow merchant William Cuninghame instructed his factors to sign any association that included nonimportation—because it would curtail lending to unreliable planters while continued exports would draw debt down. “We hope they will thereby be enabled to pay off part of their debt to Britain during such an agreement,” he wrote, instructing factors in Virginia to “adhere” to the Association. A merchant-lender, scared off new loans by court closure, could now disguise cautious nonlending as Patriotic nonimportation. This element of the Association’s appeal was probably unintentional. Most Virginia planters and burgesses conceived of nonimport as punishing British merchants by depriving them of sales, not helping them cease the issuance of bad loans.35 But nonimport did make it easier for merchants to refuse loans. London merchant Duncan Campbell withdrew from Virginia sales and lending
Indeed, financial independence from Britain would take far longer than political independence to achieve. Though the Association contained many economic measures—it regulated trade, urged “frugality,” encouraged local manufacturing and self-sufficiency, promoted sheep breeding, and regulated prices—it made no mention of debt. It certainly did not abrogate it. Perhaps there was a logic to this. The cycle of farm life meant that future planters would need financing. Abrogation would make that borrowing hard and costly, whether it came from British, French, or Dutch firms. Efforts toward planter frugality might thus be read as deleveraging in expectation of a continued need for borrowing. And well they did. As late as 1792, planter and U.S. customs collector William Heth could tell Alexander Hamilton that the trade of Virginia was still “carried on chiefly with foreign [British] capital.” Whatever conflict existed between planters and merchants, both needed a modus vivendi 34
COURT CLOSURES AND DELAYED NONEXPORT increased tobacco prices. Cuninghame & Co General Superintendent James Robinson thought this was by design, arguing “the August convention” adopting the Virginia Association arose “as much from the low price tobacco then bore as from the spirit of patriotism.” Anticipated supply constraints (future nonexportation) and rising demand for tobacco as a means of loan repayment pushed up price. Though merchants paid more for planters’ tobacco, this was not always a win-lose situation. Merchants might benefit; when tobacco was credited against outstanding planter debts, rising tobacco prices meant merchants collected more debt. Even factors who bought tobacco from planters
Virginia Merchants and the Continental Association • 189 entirely (but not from collecting payments of Virginia tobacco). When Thomas Dorsey sent in tobacco and then asked for a new loan, Campbell explained that tobacco was “for the purpose of discharging some old arrears,” and not the basis of a new loan, a position many merchants had previously been afraid to take. When John Dickson asked Campbell for an advance on his consignment, Campbell capped the loan at £1,000 sterling. Campbell was a Londoner whose main trade was in government convicts. His aversion to new loans stopped his sales and shipments to Virginia as well as Patriotism would have. The “situation in America obliges me to be very circumspect in my Engagements,” he explained, favoring “Caution.” Henry Fleming had little left to lose by complying with nonimport and nonconsumption—his sales has already fallen to £150 sterling a month after he cut back on lending with the court closure—and in exchange for compliance, he could continue to export tobacco in 1775.36
Fleming, local agent of a Whitehaven, England, firm, and Campbell, in London, did not share Virginian William Reynolds’s Patriotism. Reynolds supported the Association out of his political principles, and he further claimed that “almost every American has signed.” John Hayley Norton signed as well. Charles Yates likewise canceled his orders from Britain and “acceded most cheerfully” to the Association because he hoped it would resolve conflict with Britain. Whether they were true Patriots or true Britons, all these men did the same self-interested thing: they stopped new loans and new shipments to America in 1774 while continuing to take tobacco to Britain in 1775.37
Delayed nonexport was understood as accommodating merchants. The indentured servant John Harrower noted the delay, “during which time any that are indebted to Great Britain may pay up their ballances.” The ultimate ban on exports was, explained William Reynolds, “far from being agreeable to my way of thinking, tho’ I do hope the time given being so long as twelve months may prevent any inconvenience to the Merch[an]ts.” Indeed, compared to an immediate nonexport, delayed nonexport could look good. Reynolds, who attended the August 1774 convention, was “fearfull they wou’d resolve against Exporting to take place immediately” and relieved when Virginians agreed to delay. Fearing Congress would not delay, Harry Piper “dread[ed] the consequences.” Immediate nonexport was again rumored in May 1775.39
Some thought nonexport should have been delayed further. Fleming thought Congress should allow “3 years Exportation instead of one, when it is a Notorious Fact it wou’d take so much to pay their debts.” Glaswegian merchants “think it hard that our countrymen should stop exportation until they get [all] their debts paid and in truth I cannot help joining with them,” wrote Gustavus Brown Wallace. But, getting a third of their debts paid via the Association was more than what the merchants had managed on their own or through the courts. Such comments suggest the question was not whether nonexport benefited debt holders, but how much.40 Shutting courts and delaying nonexport helped debtors pay on their terms. Already in 1773 planters had found no one to buy their land. A wave
190 • Virginia Magazine in cash could see it sold on a rising European market. Other merchants, like John Norton, took tobacco on consignment and sold it in Britain on commission. Higher prices meant more commission and more revenue at sale to pay off planter debts. In Virginia, collecting payments in the present, even if in tobacco, could be better than waiting for courts to reopen. In 1775, planters’ frugality reduced their consumption as they paid down debt. This “carrot” helped keep merchants on the side, making them less interested in the clandestine sale of banned goods (which was harder for Patriots to police than British imports). The Association thus fits poorly into a framework of farmer-lender or farmer-merchant antagonism. By appealing to merchants’ wallets, not just their hearts, Virginia Patriots induced even conservative merchants to comply.38
Virginia Merchants and the Continental Association • 191 of adverse court judgments may have otherwise flooded the real estate market, making land similarly useless to pay debts in 1775. Without nonexport, tobacco was expected to remain cheap. Court closures and the Association, in contrast, preserved land values and inflated crop prices. It makes no more sense to consider these pro-planter/anti-merchant measures than it does to consider a Great Depression–era bank holiday anti-bank. The Association and court closures rescued Virginia’s financial system. The Robinson affair, the 1770 boycott’s disruption to trade, the British credit crisis of 1772, planters’ inability to sell land in 1773, and the low price of tobacco in 1773 left lenders overextended and borrowers unable to make payments. Overlending, as much as overborrowing, was the problem. Fleming’s idea that it would have taken three years of tobacco sales to pay off outstanding loans begs the question: why had merchants lent so much in the first place?41
Virginia merchants had competed for tobacco by offering planters overgenerous loans to buy goods. Lenders feared a refusal to extend further credit would send planters (and their tobacco) to competitors. Issuing bad loans to attract trade was bad business. Colony-wide, it amounted to systemic economic failure, for which asset price inflation was the only systemic solution.42Some disagreed. William Allason thought nonexport would “lay the trading People here . . . under many inconveniences” because merchants could not collect enough to make all their remittances to Britain. This was partly why Campbell and others stopped issuing loans. Risk-averse merchant-lenders saw tobacco as a dangerous speculation, given recent price rises. Henry Fleming, representing the Norfolk end of a Whitehaven firm, thought trade too risky to continue. Unless Parliament repealed the Coercive Acts, “our property at least must be very precarious.” He recommended Whitehaven “charter no Ship” to take tobacco in spring 1775 and “send no more Goods to . . . America.” Meanwhile, he would settle Whitehaven’s business “on this side of the Water as soon as possible.” Nonimport meant that “no advantage can be made by fr[eight] outward” to the colonies—a vessel sailing from Britain to Virginia would have to go in ballast—“nor do I imagine there will be much demand for Shiping,” from Virginia to Britain, “as Comod[ities] of all kinds are likely to be high,” and he did not think that Virginia price increases would carry over to British
Aggressive merchant-lenders like John Norton & Sons or Cuninghame & Co found in the Association a chance to collect large debts. Norton had roughly £40,000 to collect. He did not collect all, and in September 1775 decided he was better off exiting Virginia trade. “Were times to alter . . . I shou’d not be fond of ingaging too much in that branch of Business,” he wrote. Examining a “List of Ballances due to us in Virginia,” he lamented, “they are not diminished so much as might be expected” by tobacco exports. And yet they were more diminished than they would have been if the trade by which those balances accumulated had continued as usual. Cuninghame & Co did not recover all, either, and in 1784 still had £94,000 to collect. Cuninghame sent at least six vessels to Virginia to take on tobacco in the summer of 1775 and chastised his factors for “not making extensive [enough] purchases of tobacco.” Glasgow traders estimated their collective unrecovered debt at £1.3 million, though this may have been a self-servingly high number. Still, partial collection pared losses, and Norton and Cuninghame could sell their tobacco in Britain at a profit, while leaving
192 • Virginia Magazine markets. Merchants who engaged in bilateral trade may well have “faced ruin if they could not land British goods,” as one Norfolk historian has suggested. But ships could still arrive via Europe or the foreign Caribbean, and all those inflating assets still needed to be shipped to Britain. This was not worth the risk for Fleming, who, because he had issued only a few thousand pounds of loans, had less to recover.43
Merchants who sought to exit trade focused in late 1774 and 1775 on collecting debts and remitting to Britain. Fleming focused on collecting “ready Cash which shall be remitted in Bill as soon as possible.” Allason and others acted similarly. Most debts were small (under $100), and a trickle of funds flowed to Britain. Yet it was not possible for Fleming to take payment only in money. There was not enough of it. In November 1774, Fleming advised his partners that he was sending £200 sterling worth of gold and silver dollars, another £360 in bills of exchange, but also, despite his concerns, 100 hogsheads of tobacco. Bills, sterling, gold, silver, and tobacco—all were assets. Indeed, “remittance” refers to sending money or goods. What mattered was not what one sent, but how much and when. Indeed, tobacco now might even be better than the promise of cash later, particularly when rumors circulated that Congress might stop cash remittances, too.44
Virginia Merchants and the Continental Association • 193 their claims for outstanding debt undiminished (some of which was collected in the 1790s). T. M. Devine’s study of Glasgow tobacco merchants argues that “boom prices for tobacco probably more than compensated most merchants for their outstanding American debt.” Certainly, compared to 1777, when Virginia law allowed debt to be paid in rapidly depreciating currency and prevented British subjects from bringing suit, buying tobacco in 1775 turned out to be a great deal.45
Despite contrasting mindsets, cautious Campbell and Fleming and aggressive Cuninghame and Norton pursued broadly similar strategies: they stopped issuing new loans and tried to collect on outstanding ones, ultimately taking as much in goods, bills of exchange, and money as they could get. Cuninghame’s and Norton’s correspondence are as full, in 1774 and 1775, of remittances as Fleming’s; none turned down cash or tobacco. The main difference was in whether a merchant took in tobacco solely as a way to collect debts, or whether he engaged in further speculation, a business that was nonpartisan. Even Tory merchants like Samuel Inglis speculated in tobacco, Robert Munford’s bill of exchange, dated 28 February 1776, paid £1919 1s 9d to the Glasgow firm William Cuninghame & Co, demonstrating the continued financial ties between Virginia and Britain after promulgation of the Continental Association in 1774. (Virginia Museum of History & Culture, Mss2 M9237a1)
194 • Virginia Magazine buying up everything in Nansemond in early 1775 before Cuninghame’s factors could get to it. Britons all and not a Patriot among them, Cuninghame, Norton, Campbell, and Fleming complied with the Association out of self-interest.46 Merchants paid for tobacco by crediting it against planters’ debts, but sometimes they bought it “for money.” The shortage of circulating currency made this difficult for individual merchants (though, across the economy planters who received cash likely paid it out again to other merchants). Money was “exceedingly scarce in Virginia,” James Robinson reported. He suspected that, as a result of the Association, planters would keep their tobacco in the warehouses, demanding high cash prices, despite their being “in general so very considerably in debt.” Merchants paid cash when they had to, but, when selling imported goods (permitted until March 1, 1775) countered by demanding payment in tobacco.47
TOBACCO PRICES ROSE CONSIDERABLY between 1773 and 1777 (and beyond), providing the reflationary cycle merchants and planters needed.
The shortage of Virginia currency increased the value of Virginia pounds against sterling. One hundred pounds sterling bought 135 Virginia pounds at the November 1774 merchants’ meeting, but only 115 by June 1775. Strengthening Virginia money did not clearly benefit merchants or planters at the other’s expense. If tobacco paid off sterling loans, falling sterling meant that merchants got more debt paid off. On the other hand, merchants who bought tobacco with Virginia money paid more (in sterling) for it, and planters’ sales of tobacco on consignment in Britain yielded sterling that converted poorly back to Virginia money. The collapse of Virginia and continental money beginning in late 1776 meant this window of strong Virginia money was brief.48
Although British price currents are hard to come by, prices of Virginia tobacco on the Amsterdam exchange are revealing. Between January 1774 and December 1775, when the last exports leaving Virginia in September 1775 reached market, tobacco prices in Amsterdam jumped 42 percent, from 0.19 to 0.27 guilders per Amsterdam pound. It was in the 93 percent increase in tobacco prices from 0.27 to 0.52 guilders per Amsterdam pound in 1776 and 1777, however, where the real money was to be made.49
Virginia Merchants and the Continental Association • 195
196 • Virginia Magazine Market participants, as always, did not forecast prices well. Yet even early price rises, such as the 21 percent jump in the Dutch price from 0.19 to 0.23 guilders per Amsterdam pound over the course of 1774, were welcome for merchants and planters scarred by years of low prices. The tobacco market of early 1774 had been “very disagreeable” wrote Duncan Campbell. The “situation the Tobacco Markets were in” meant he could sell Virginia planters’ tobacco only at low prices. Reynolds found he had lost money on each hogshead of tobacco sold in London. Rising prices in the second half of the year gave him hope that he could recover. Roger Jones also hoped the tobacco he sent to London would “get to a good Market” in 1774 and “make amends for the exceeding low price” he had received previously.51 According to Thomas Jett, a “violent frost” “destroyed” a “great part” of the tobacco planted in May 1774 and limited that year’s harvest. Campbell agreed the frost would give the market “a favourable turn.” Merchants agreed that the 1774 crop “will be a very short one,” and that, because of the Association, tobacco curing would stop after 1775, and so prices rose further.52In response to the Association, merchants bought up tobacco and drove up prices further. “Tob[acc]o is now very scarce & dear,” Fleming wrote in October. “Tobacco is looking up here,” wrote William Carr. The Association also raised prices of wheat and, by early 1775, tar. Some commodities, like beeswax and beaver skins, were simply “not to be had.” But the Chesapeake’s prominence in the tobacco market enabled Virginia merchants to pass tobacco prices on to Europe in a way they could not with other commodities, for which Europeans had a broader range of alternative suppliers. This made price increases for goods besides tobacco brief. Woolsey and Salmon saw the price of Baltimore flour fall nearly 40 percent between October 1774 and September 1775. “Embargo, 9/10,” they explained in their ledger. Meanwhile, tobacco prices still skyrocketed.53 What did rising tobacco prices mean? Fleming thought the prices of late 1774 dauntingly high, complaining, “Planters so saucy now they’ll have their price or not pay their debts” at all (a backhanded way of saying that when they did sell high, they paid off debt). Others saw an opportunity. Fleming’s high price was another merchant’s rising one. Buyers are never happy to buy at a price peak, but they can be happy to buy high if they think
Eventually, even the bullish Lee grew concerned. Thinking Virginia tobacco prices might reach 25/ or 30/, he worried that such prices were fraught with “much risk” unless they could be certain of a decent price in London, “which I doubt much of, as a great deal will undoubtedly be grown in Europe the next summer.” (Tobacco grew on the Rhine, French Flanders, and elsewhere, but European tobacco often needed to be blended with Chesapeake for sale.) Despite the possibility of other suppliers, the main risk was political. As Campbell explained, “Our Tobacco Markets have some time since taken a sudden and unexpected favourable turn owing . . . to buyers on a speculation of the continuance of the unhappy disputes between the Colonies and mother Country.” As soon as the colonial disputes were “accommodated,” however, prices could fall. Campbell tried to call the top of the market in April 1775, noting that London tobacco prices had already “dropt” a bit and that the speculators had “glutted” foreign markets.55
Virginia Merchants and the Continental Association • 197 they are buying in a rising market and can sell higher later. “[I]f Americans will persevere” in nonexport, tobacco would continue to rise, thought William Lee in London. Hearing of the tragedy of the Peggy Stewart, Lee wrote the destroyed vessel’s owner, Anthony Stewart, recommending he “by all means . . . purchase immediately 1000 or 1500” hogsheads of tobacco, “by which you will make a fortune. You will say, perhaps, where is the money to do this? I will tell you”—he should draw a bill on Lee for it and consign the tobacco to him for sale. Lee’s offer was risky. If prices fell, Stewart would likely be ruined and Lee unpaid. But Lee wanted more tobacco to speculate in. Other agents were already “purchasing all they can lay their hands on.” Do not shy away from rising prices—as Campbell and Fleming had—wrote Lee. “The price should not be the least obstacle; give what others do without hesitation,” he wrote Stewart, “provided you are clear of the firmness &c., of the Americans, on which head your judgment may be directed by observing what quantity of tobacco is planted.” It is unclear whether Stewart, a budding Loyalist, ever pursued the budding Patriot Lee’s offer, though Lee hoped to send a vessel to collect Virginia tobacco in early 1775. In 1775, Lee worried that London was facing a tobacco shortage. Rumor was the French tobacco monopoly had bought 6,000 hogsheads in Glasgow. While “[w]e have here” only 4,500 hogsheads left.54
If the colonists gave up their Association or if Parliament repealed the Coercive Acts, prices would fall. This was the risk for tobacco buyers in spring 1775. Fearing this, Virginian Harry Piper stopped buying up tobacco ahead of a vessel’s arrival. Better to wait until it reached Virginia, lest it bring news of repeal of the Coercive Acts with it.56 But accommodation never happened. News of armed combat pushed prices up further, although rumors of “the ports being shut up”—either by the Royal Navy or by an early imposition of nonexport by Congress—prevented a large rise. Thomas Adams wrote to Britain in April 1775, worrying, “your Men of War are to line our Coast to prevent our Trading elsewhere.”
198 • Virginia CampbellMagazinewasright.
“We were Apprehensive” Congress would stop exports any day, Moses Robertson wrote. Only the reassurance offered by Speaker Peyton Randolph on his return to Williamsburg in May 1775 “relieved our Anxiety.” Exports “Will be Open” until 10 September. Assured “there is no probability” of ports shutting, Cuninghame & Co bought more tobacco. One agent wrote, “I make no doubt of our purchase being as large as we imagined.”57 Prices rose again. One Virginian thought the tobacco he shipped to Britain that summer would get “a very good price” because “a Reconciliation, (by Concessions from your Parliamt.) is not likely to happen.” In August, Archibald Ritchie expected “higher sales for [tobacco] than I ever had, for depend on it there will not be one Ounce shipt after the 10th next month until these unhappy disputes between Great Britain & the Colonys are settled.” William Lee thought the London price would “rise” in the six months after colonial exports ceased, “as there is not the most distant appearance of the American affairs being amicably or justly settled by the pres[en]t administration.” Lee took advantage of this, selling Virginia tobacco in London as late as April 1776. By this point, Lee was as much a political agent for the colonies in London as a commercial agent for Virginia tobacco. Nonexport was favorable to both roles.58 As prices jumped, some tobacco holders stayed for the next rally. Harry Piper found smallholders “will not part with their Tobo” for any price he was willing to offer. William Reynolds reported “Tobo is scarce” and the price had risen “very rapidly,” with factors for firms like Cuninghame & Co “buying all they can at the high price of 27/6.” Selling tobacco in Virginia— and locking in the price—appealed to many planters who might have
Virginia Merchants and the Continental Association • 199 shipped to Britain on consignment in the past. The “very high Price of Tobo Has Induced many of Your Friends” to sell for cash, Moses Robertson explained to John Norton, rather than ship on consignment. Nevertheless, Robertson eventually got some. Piper finally bought from William Carr, who only sold at 20/ on condition Piper give him an additional 5/ “if prices rise” further. Reynolds thought, “This price is very high,” but he could not “get it lower, indeed, he was very indifferent about selling at that price, & says he would rather Ship” it on consignment to London. “I should still have Postponed purchasing but I find the Tob[acc]o is almost all sold.” Gustavus Brown Wallace reported from Glasgow that tobacco was “high at present and it is thought will sell much higher next year,” a sentiment which must have given Cuninghame confidence he could sell. One factor in this leg of the rally was the June 1775 merchant meeting, which met in the second half of the month, providing new exchange rates and a venue for tobacco holders to sell—many of whom had been holding out for the highest possible price.59As much as tensions and war increased tobacco prices, many market participants wanted calm. William Reynolds hoped “matters will be accommodated” in 1774 before the Association took effect. “The disturbance arising on your side of the water makes every trader here uneasy,” Duncan Campbell wrote that summer. “I wish sincerly some speedy and Conciliating measures may take place let them come from what quarter they may.” After news of war, Virginian William Clayton wrote, “I hope in God the Affair will in some short Time be settled that Business may again go on in its Old way to the Satisfaction of both Countrys.” Virginia merchants did not love the Association. They preferred peace and unencumbered trade. But the above sentiments left unstated a distasteful truth: if conflict was unavoidable, they stood to do better with the Association than without it. Conservatives in particular found their hearts and wallets pulled in conflicting directions. The Association was a least-bad alternative, especially for merchants who conceived of the matter not as whether trade would stop in 1774, but what kind of cessation of trade it would be. Just as some merchants joined the committees that enforced the Association in 1775 to alleviate its worst effects, so they signed the Association in 1774 because it was better than any alternative.60
Voluminous exports now occurred in the context of rising prices. The prospect of no tobacco exports in 1776 kept 1775 prices high. This was driven by the Association’s ban on tobacco exports after September 1775, by Parliaments’ Prohibitory Act, which banned all Virginia trade in 1776, and by the limited amount of tobacco planted in 1775 (available for export in 1776).The riskiest strategy for merchants was wholesale violation of the Association, which some Norfolk-area merchants attempted in the brief window between Governor Dunmore’s victory at Kemp’s Landing and his defeat at Great Bridge (November–December 1775). John Brown sent staves to Jamaica and ordered new imports “by the first opportunity.” Robert Shedden thought merchants would import again. “Depend upon it,” he wrote to Glasgow, “You will never have such another opportunity to make money by dry-goods in this country . . . bring as many as you can get credit for”—as much as £20,000 worth. Andrew Sprowle recommended importing if the vessel were “protected by man of war.” These men gambled that, without Associational price controls, they could raise prices on imports to engross the remaining Virginia tobacco. This was an aggressive gamble on British military success. The subsequent Patriot burning of Norfolk and seizure of Loyal merchants’ property settled it. By contrast, merchants who ceased imports and focused on tobacco collection in 1775 could make themselves seem presentable to whomever won the war.62 Mixed evidence suggests reduced, but still notable, tobacco planting in 1775. Richard Randolph promised his lenders that he was “endeavouring as much as ever for a Crop of Tobacco” in 1775 in hopes nonexport would be called off. Moses Robertson reported the “fine Prospect for Another Crop on the Ground (if it should please God an Accomodation Shoud take place).”
Tobacco exports were massive in 1775—some of the largest in Virginia history, capping five years of bumper exports. To carry it off, every bit of shipping counted. Vessel space previously used to store staves and hoops was given over to tobacco. In nearby Annapolis, customs records show more vessels departing in June 1775 than June 1774—with arrivals in June 1775 coming either in ballast or with Association-compliant foreign Caribbean imports so as to take advantage of ongoing Chesapeake tobacco exports.61
200 • Virginia Magazine
Robert Donald thought small planters were “making great preparations for
Virginia Merchants and the Continental Association • 201 another Crop of Tobacco.” The Virginia Association had “recommend[ed] it to the inhabitants of this colony to refrain from the cultivation of tobacco” in 1775, a provision that helped push up prices, though James Robinson thought the crop was “as much as usual. . . . Some of the principal gentlemen . . . may decline raising tobacco,” but most still planted. On the other hand, Harry Piper pointed to the general “want of [tobacco] Plants.” Even “if the Acts should be Repealed, or by any other means the Trade be continued, we shall have so little Planted,” tobacco prices would remain high. William Wilkinson agreed the “inhabitants have given out the planting of Tobo.”63Still-larger tobacco price gains occurred in 1776 and 1777, accruing to speculators, or to planters who sold in 1776. Despite record exports in 1775, some tobacco remained for export in 1776. Moses Robertson reported, “There will be I think from what I have Seen at the Warehouses much old Tobo. left in the Country,” in 1776. To this one can add the 1775 plantings. The war, the Prohibitory Act, and independence meant the only way this tobacco could reach Britain would be as (perhaps collusive) prizes. And so, Virginia shipped tobacco to France (the ultimate destination of most of the tobacco Virginia had previously sent to Britain) beginning in 1775 and the Netherlands by 1777 via scattered public and private shippers, profiting merchant middlemen. One cargo reaching France had been traded in Santo Domingo, another was transshipped through Philadelphia. One cargo making Nantes in 1777 was sent by the State of Virginia. Firms in Britain might still profit in 1776. Cuninghame & Co could release tobacco bought in 1775 on the market in 1776 and 1777 as prices rose. Firms that did so realized, according to Devine, “massive windfall gains.” Virginians who consigned tobacco to John Norton or William Lee and saw it sold in 1776 may have come out ahead, too. But British-based merchants were left out of the new tobacco trade with Continental Europe. Meanwhile, rising prices and the difficulties of wartime trade continued to link the purses of many American-based merchants and planters—if they could get cargoes to market, both would profit. By supporting merchants as lenders in 1774, the Association, quite unintentionally, made it more likely they would aid the Revolution as smugglers in 1776.64
THE EVENTS OF NOVEMBER 1774 benefited planters and merchants. But what was the November gathering? Was the November 1774 meeting of delegates a convention? It certainly used the language of conventions.
202 • Virginia Magazine
Peyton Randolph, speaker of the House of Burgesses, served as “Moderator,” and burgesses “assembled” as “Delegates of the People of Virginia.” This mirrored the August convention at which Randolph was “moderator” for “delegates of the freeholders of Virginia” and the March 1775 convention when Randolph was “president” of assembled “delegates.”65“Delegate”
vaguely implied attendance at a legislature, a convention, or perhaps something else. To call someone a “delegate” was to not call him a burgess, echoing the indeterminate role of continental congressmen (also “delegates”). “Convention” was another fluid term—often interchanged
William Cuninghame of Lainshaw (1731–1799), a tobacco “lord,” was the major owner in Cuninghame & Co. He began building this Glasgow mansion in 1777, suggesting nonexportation did not overly impair his profits. The structure subsequently housed the Glasgow branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland, depicted here. The double front staircases were added at this time, otherwise the exterior remained largely as it was in Cuninghame’s time. It later housed Glasgow’s Royal Exchange and now houses Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art. (Glasgow Delineated in Its Institutions, Manufactures, and Commerce with a Map of the City . . . [Glasgow, Scot., 1827])
Virginia Merchants and the Continental Association • 203 with “congress.” The conventions of 1774–75 were protean and undefined. Attendees jumped between conventions and legislative sessions. “Convention” evoked parliaments that assembled without the Crown calling them: notably the English Convention Parliaments of 1660 and 1689. These extraordinary assemblies restored Charles II and deposed James II, restoring balance between Parliament and the Crown. The English conventions of 1660 and 1689, unlike the colonial conventions and congresses of the 1770s, did not create long-running shadow governments contesting legitimacy. After their constitutional duty was completed, they yielded to normal parliamentary activity. This is a useful way to think of the 1774 meetings—supplements, not replacements, for the House of Burgesses. The unofficial nature of such meetings makes pinning down what counts as a convention tricky. “Convention” at its most literal, like “congress,” “assembly,” or “meeting,” just meant a gathering. If a convention was an unsanctioned gathering of legislators, then the November 1774 meeting was exactlyThethat.66meeting of delegates seemed like the un-sat assembly session. Parker even mistakenly thought the “Assembly met” in November 1774. The York committee termed the gathering a “Meeting of several Members of the House of Burgesses”—not a legislative session, but not quite something else. The Gloucester County committee wrote similarly. Both waited for “the Determination of the Meeting” at Williamsburg before acting against Norton’s tea—suggesting the meeting was authoritative. That meeting also met the condition set by the August convention for future conventions: that either Randolph or Nicholas convene it.67 One could argue the November meeting was not a “proper” convention. It published no minutes and never called itself a convention (though neither did the August 1774 convention). The March 1775 convention approved the acts of the First Continental Congress, suggesting that the November meeting had not (or was not substantial enough to do so). Richard Henry Lee did not think the November meeting constituted a convention. “Hitherto we have had no Colony Congress,” he wrote John Adams in February 1775. His language—“hitherto”—suggested he did not consider the August gathering a convention, either, though historians do. In November 1774, legislators had come for a meeting of the House of
An analogy to the other protean gathering of legislators in 1774 is instructive. On 26 May 1774, Dunmore dissolved the House of Burgesses. Delegates relocated to the Raleigh Tavern where, on the twenty-seventh, eighty-nine out of the 103 men who had just served as burgesses signed an “Association.” This document recommended an intercolonial Congress but, out of “tender regard for the interests of our fellow subjects, the merchants, and manufacturers of Great Britain,” no boycott. Then on the thirtieth, responding to news from the Boston and Philadelphia committees, Randolph gathered twenty-five attendees still in the Williamsburg area. They asked the full body of delegates to return to town on 1 August to reconsider a boycott. Scholars have long been aware of the May events. We consider these events “meetings,” not “conventions,” but in terms of Revolutionary history and governance, we grant that they were as significant as the conventions.69Whether or not we should consider it a convention, the November meeting was as significant as one. It asserted power. It implemented the Association, an act of Revolutionary governance. It secured merchant signatures, sending merchants home with permission to export tobacco because they had signed and published the merchants’ claims in the Virginia Gazette. Local Patriots could then ask other merchants to join the document advertised in the Gazette, from which rival merchants benefited. Delegates also debated Norton’s case for two days. Not intervening in the York and Gloucester committees’ tea party shielded delegates from direct involvement in criminal acts, sent the message that favored men would not be exempted, and encouraged merchants to sign the Association. What seemed like inaction regarding Norton was, in effect, a decision to let the York and Gloucester committees proceed. The meeting also ensured Warwick and Wallace were dealt with regularly and left open the options of a return to regular legislative order or a consolidation of revolutionary power in later conventions. Different conventions had distinct roles in Revolutionary Virginia. So did the November meeting, which focused Patriot efforts on an economic response to Parliament.70
204 • Virginia Magazine Burgesses, and only when denied this did they carry on as a meeting of delegates. They had not intended to form a convention, and notice of a convention had not been given in advance.68
Virginia Merchants and the Continental Association 205
The main reason November 1774 is overlooked is tradition. There are five canonical conventions in Virginia Revolutionary history, in August 1774, March 1775, July–August 1775, December 1775, and May–July 1776, a chronology set in 1904. W. F. Dunaway referred to the “Convention of August 1, 1774,” which by 1907 was renamed the “first Virginia Convention,” with the conventions soon ordered First through Fifth. This canon and these ordinal numbers were twentieth-century impositions. The August convention did not consider itself first: in August delegates returned to Williamsburg after their May meeting. Nor did the March 1775 gathering call itself “second. ” The March gathering called itself “ a convention,” disambiguated by date. The five-convention framework has prevented us from seeing colony-wide Revolutionary gatherings between these dates. The term “convention” may also mislead modern readers into expecting a specific sort of meeting, whereas the natures of the May, August, and November gatherings in 1774 were undefined and protean, even to participants. This befits a revolution. We therefore need a more plastic sense of what meetings mattered than the rigid five-convention framework allows.71
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The absence of frontier delegates enabled this focus on trade. Frontier radicals did not prioritize commercial boycotts. None of the early 1775 resolves from the western counties of Fincastle, Botetourt, Augusta, or Pittsylvania specifically mentioned nonexport. Nor did the Fort Gower Resolves, made by some of Dunmore’s frontier militia officers. Frontier Patriots did not temporize; Fincastle’s committee promised to “strictly and invariably adhere” to Congress’s resolutions and defend their privileges “at the expense of our lives.” The Botetourt committee was willing to give “life” in combat for “LIBERTY.” Such claims resonated with Patrick Henry’s (perhaps apocryphal) cry for “liberty or death.” But in less market-oriented settlements, a militia was a better political tool than a boycott.72
Frontier delegates were an important bloc: of the ten delegates from Augusta, Botetourt, Fincastle, Hampshire, and Pittsylvania, nine missed the August and November 1774 meetings because of Dunmore’s War. The counties sent delegates to a March 1775 convention that voted to raise a militia by a narrow 65–60 majority. Western delegates provided a majority for raising a militia over those wanting to limit action to boycotts. It was Tidewater Patriots who preferred to give nonimport and nonexport time to
206 • Virginia Magazine work, lest militias undermine the boycott, and frontier delegates’ absence in August and November 1774 had unintentionally facilitated this. Yet, Congress’s delay of nonexport to September 1775 meant that it had done little harm to merchants in Britain by the March 1775 convention, which coincided with rising militancy across the colony. It is unlikely that the frontier delegates would have opposed boycotts had they been at Williamsburg in November 1774. But they might have emphasized other things, and been less tolerant of delayed nonexportation, which, though blunting the boycott’s economic effect in Britain, maintained a broad political unity among Virginia elites—merchant-lender and planter-debtor alike. If you have a hammer, every problem is a nail. For the western delegates, the militia was their hammer; for planters, the boycott was.73
NOT EVERY MERCHANT BENEFITED from the Association, but some did, or at least might have mitigated losses. Delayed nonexport, coupled with court closures and nonimport, aided debt collection and inflated asset prices. The meeting of November 1774 pursued a trade- rather than a combat-centric response to the imperial crisis, one that, in its effects on imperial policy, was quickly eclipsed by the war in 1775, even as the delayed nonexport provision had yet to take effect. Measured by its effect on imperial policy, or the British elections of 1774, the Association was a failure. But as a way to ensure a “common cause” among Virginian elites it was a success. The Association’s ability to suit both planter-debtor and merchant-lender economic interests via delayed nonexport was crucial. Whether or not the November 1774 meeting was a “convention,” it fulfilled the function of one.74
4. Virginia Gazette (Purdie & Dixon), 3 Nov. 1774 and 10 Nov. 1774 (the authorial voice of these Gazette quotations is unclear); James H. Soltow, “The Role of Williamsburg in the Virginia Economy, 1750–1775,” WMQ 15, ser. 3 (1958): 469–70; James H. Soltow, The Economic Role of Williamsburg (Charlottesville, Va., 1956), 8–9; Virginia Gazette (Purdie & Dixon), 30 June 1774. Merchant meetings initially gathered in January, April, July, and October before settling on April and late October. Court sat in April, June, October, and December. The assembly met at roughly the same time. On calling but not seating the burgesses, see James R. Fichter, “The Mystery of the ‘Alternative of Williams-Burg,’” Journal of the American Revolution, https://allthingsliberty.com/ 2019/04/the-mystery-of-the-alternative-of-williams-burg/ (accessed 18 Mar. 2022) and John Pendleton Kennedy, Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, 1773–1776: Including the Records of the Committee of Correspondence (Richmond, Va., 1905), 165–68. Dunmore secured a treaty on 19 October 1774 and was en route to Williamsburg, reaching the town on 4 December (Reuben
1. T. H. Breen, “‘Baubles of Britain’: The American and Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century,” Past & Present 119 (1988): 73–104; T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York, 2004). Economics touches upon many studies of the Revolution in Virginia, but studies that focused on merchants include Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution, 1763–1776 (1918; New York, 1957); Emory G. Evans, “Planter Indebtedness and the Coming of the Revolution in Virginia,” William and Mary Quarterly (cited hereafter as WMQ) 19, ser. 3 (1962): 511–33; Jacob M. Price, Capital and Credit in British Overseas Trade: The View from the Chesapeake, 1770–1776 (Cambridge, Mass., 1980); T. H. Breen, Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1985); Bruce A. Ragsdale, A Planters’ Republic: The Search for Economic Independence in Revolutionary Virginia (Madison, Wisc., 1996); and Holton, Forced Founders. T. M. Devine argues that Glaswegian firms benefited from the Continental Association and American Revolution in The Tobacco Lords: A Study of the Tobacco Merchants of Glasgow and Their Trading Activities, c. 1740–90 (Edinburgh, Scot.,1975), 109–47.
. . .
ResearchNOTESfor this essay was funded by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council, General Research Fund grant 17615318. The author would like to thank Woody Holton, Brent Tarter, Rebecca Goetz, and the reviewers of this journal for reading earlier versions of this article, as well as Mary Beth Norton for early stimulating discussions. Xiao Wenquan provided research assistance. In this essay, “planter” means all plantation owners, not just the smallholders referred to by Woody Holton in Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves & the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1999).
2. William Lee’s suggestion to his brother, Congressman Richard Henry Lee, that merchants were “your enemies” but could be turned “thro’ [self-]interest to take an active part in your favor by stopping both exports and imports,” may have envisioned the Association as a way to coerce merchants or a way for planters to align interests with them (William Lee to Richard Henry Lee, 10 Sept. 1774, in Worthington C. Ford, ed., Letters of William Lee: Sheriff and Alderman of London, Commercial Agent of the Continental Congress in France, and Minister to the Courts of Vienna and Berlin, 1766–1783 (3 vols.; Brooklyn, 1891), 1:96.
Virginia Merchants and the Continental Association • 207
3. The tendency to see planter frugality in the Association, but not merchant income, is common. For one example, see Albert H. Tillson, Jr., Accommodating Revolutions: Virginia’s Northern Neck in an Era of Transformations, 1760–1810 (Charlottesville, Va., 2010), 185–89.
208 • Virginia Magazine Gold Thwaites and Louise Phelps Kellogg, eds., Documentary History of Dunmore’s War, 1774; Compiled from the Draper Manuscripts in the Library of the Wisconsin Historical Society . . . [Madison, Wisc., 1905], 307n24). Parts of this story are put together in David John Mays, Edmund Pendleton 1721–1803: A Biography (2 vols.; Cambridge, Mass., 1952), 1:297; Dale Benson, “Wealth and Power in Virginia, 1774–1776: A Study of the Organization of Revolt” (Ph.D. diss., University of Maine, 1970), 164–66; Thomas M. Costa, “Economic Development and Political Authority: Norfolk, Virginia Merchant-Magistrates, 1736–1800” (Ph.D. diss., College of William & Mary, 1991), 227–28; Ragsdale, A Planters’ Republic, 228; and Fichter, “Alternative of Williams-Burg.”
6. Fichter, “Alternative of Williams-Burg”; Robert L. Scribner et al, eds., Revolutionary Virginia: The Road to Independence (7 vols.; Charlottesville, Va., 1973–83), 2:164n1 (cited hereafter as RevVa). A Nansemond committeeman followed merchants Anthony Warwick and Michael Wallace to Williamsburg. This was probably Benjamin Baker or Lemuel Riddick (the Nansemond burgesses), who would have had reason to go anyway (Kennedy, Journals of the House of Burgesses, 67). It is impossible to confirm most legislators’ location, as papers for most do not survive. Having “heard nothing of the Governors return,” Washington thought the chances of the assembly’s sitting “doubtful” and stayed home, but he knew Randolph, Bland, and Harrison would represent Congress in his stead (George Washington to John Tayloe, 31 Oct. 1774, in W. W. Abbot et al, eds., Papers of George Washington: Colonial Series [10 vols.; Charlottesville, Va., 1982–95], 10:175).
7. Virginia Gazette (Purdie & Dixon), 15 Dec. 1774; James Parker to Charles Steuart, 27 Nov. 1774, Charles Steuart Papers, Misc. Reel 3703 f 287, Library of Virginia, Richmond (cited hereafter as LVA); Virginia Gazette (Purdie & Dixon), 24 Nov. 1774; RevVa, 2:163–64. Writing as “A Real Associator,” Nicholas mentioned addressing two “Meetings of the Delegates” on the York tea. These have been interpreted as the York and Gloucester committees, but Nicholas referred to county committees as county committees. “Meetings of the Delegates” referred to the legislators assembled at Williamsburg. Nicholas also abstained from voting, which made sense in the Williamsburg meeting, not the county meetings, from which he would not need to abstain. Nicholas spoke up for two “Gentlemen,” probably Warwick and Wallace (see below), further plac-
5. Paul H. Smith and Ronald M. Gephart, eds., Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774–1789 (26 vols.; Washington, D.C., 1976–2000), 1:245 (cited hereafter as LDC). Pendleton and Henry seem to have left Philadelphia on 22 October, reaching Williamsburg on the twenty-eighth. Randolph, Bland, and Harrison followed two days later (Virginia Gazette [Purdie & Dixon], 27 Oct. 1774 [item dated 28 Oct.]; Mays, Edmund Pendleton, 1:297). Whether Henry simply traveled with Pendleton or participated at Williamsburg is unclear. Henry was involved in the Hanover County committee by 12 November. Biographers have assumed nothing happened in Williamsburg (William Wirt Henry, ed., Patrick Henry: Life, Correspondence, and Speeches [3 vols.; New York, 1891], 2:249–50; Robert Chester Daetweiler, Richard Bland and the Origins of the Revolution in Virginia [Yorktown, Va., 1981], 51; Howard W. Smith, Benjamin Harrison and the American Revolution [Williamsburg, Va., 1978], 28). Richard Henry Lee’s whereabouts are unclear (Lee Family Digital Archive, https://leefamilyarchive.org/family-papers/letters/letters-17001800 [accessed 6 Apr. 2022]; James Curtis Ballagh, ed., The Letters of Richard Henry Lee, 1762–1794 [2 vols.; New York: Macmillan, 1911–14], 1:126). Virginia Gazette (Purdie & Dixon), 3 Nov. 1774; Virginia Gazette (Pinckney), 4 Nov. 1774; Robert Chester Daetweiler, “Richard Bland: Conservator of Self-Government in Eighteenth-Century Virginia” (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1968), 235; Mays, Edmund Pendleton, 1:296. The Association’s appearance in the Gazette preceded the arrival of the official Philadelphia printing.
10. William Allason to Thomas B. Martin, 14 Nov. 1774, William Allason Letterbook, 1770–1789, 331–32, LVA; William Allason to Andrew Sprowle, 11 Nov. 1774, ibid., 331; William Allason to Archibald Ritchie, 23 Nov. 1774, ibid., 334; D. R. Anderson, “Important Letters from the Papers of William Allason, Merchant, of Falmouth, Virginia” Richmond College Historical Papers 2 (June 1917): 146; Soltow, Economic Role, 8–9, 132–35; Virginia Gazette (Rind), 26 Nov. 1772 ; Virginia Gazette (Purdie & Dixon), 26 Nov. 1772. Robinson grumbled, “We are again dupes to an obligation which . . . is not paid much regard” (T. M. Devine, ed., A Scottish Firm in Virginia, 1767–1777: W. Cuninghame and Co. [Edinburgh, Scot., 1984], 164); Virginia Gazette (Purdie & Dixon), 30 June 1774; Mays, Edmund Pendleton, 1:351n3. The Gazette’s count appears in Virginia Gazette (Purdie & Dixon), 10 Nov. 1774.
11. Thomas Irving to Neil Jamieson & Co, 3 Nov. 1774, Papers of Neil Jamieson, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (cited hereafter as LC); Henry Fleming to Fisher & Bragg, 17 Nov. 1774, British Records Relating to America in Microform, Papers of Henry Fleming, 1772–1795, in the Cumbria Record Office Carlisle (microfilm; Yorkshire, Eng.) (cited hereafter as PHF); Charles Yates Letterbook, 1773–1783, 110–12, in Papers of Robert Carter, 1722–1783, University of Virginia Special Collections (cited hereafter as UVA); William Allason to Archibald Ritchie, 11 Nov. 1774, William Allason Letterbook, 1770–1789, 330; Costa, “Economic development,” 227; James Parker to Charles Steuart, 27 Nov. 1774, Charles Steuart Papers, f287; Catherine S. Crary, The Price of Loyalty: Tory Writings from the Revolutionary Era (New York, 1973), 58; Devine, ed., Scottish Firm, 166; Virginia Gazette (Purdie), 29 Dec. 1775. Robinson and Henderson were Cuninghame factors (Devine, ed., Scottish Firm, 164, 168). Sprowle had led the merchant meeting since its formation, including during the 1770 boycott (Kennedy, Journals of the House of Burgesses, xxvi–xxxi). “The Association in Williamsburg, in 1770,” Virginia Historical Register and Literary Note Book 3 (Jan 1850): 22. Sprowle was later caught ordering goods from Britain. Virginia Gazette (Purdie), 22, 29 Dec. 1775. By 1776 he was denounced as a Tory, his goods seized, and home destroyed (Charles Lee to Virginia Committee of Safety, 4 May 1776, Virginia Committee of Safety, General Correspondence 1775–1776, Misc. Reel 620, LVA). Seeking to recover property, his widow later claimed he had been a Patriot. Julian P. Boyd et al, eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (43 vols.; Princeton, N.J., 1950– ), 8:243–44, 259–60, 329–30, 364. No Norton was at the meeting of merchants, nor was John Prentis, because they were involved with the tea at York. Virginia Gazette (Purdie & Dixon), 15 Dec. 1774.
12. Mason, ed., John Norton and Sons, 371; Jacob M. Price, “Introduction,” PHF; Charles Yates Letterbook, 110–12; William Allason to Thomas B. Martin, 10 Oct. 1774, William Allason
Virginia Merchants and the Continental Association • 209 ing this at Williamsburg. The dates of these meetings must be between the tea’s arrival on 4 November (Frances Norton Mason, ed., John Norton and Sons: Merchants of London and Virginia [1937; Newton Abbott, Eng., 1968], 368) and its destruction on the seventh.
9. Virginia Gazette (Pinkney), 10 Nov. 1774; James Corbett David, Dunmore’s New World (Charlottesville, Va., 2013), 84–89; Virginia Gazette (Purdie & Dixon), 10 Nov. 1774. News announcing the battle was datelined Culpeper, Virginia, 8 November.
8. Glenn F. Williams, Dunmore’s War: The Last Conflict of America’s Colonial Era (Yardley, Pa., 2017), 244; Kennedy, Journals of the House of Burgesses, 166–68; James Parker to Charles Steuart, 1 Nov. 1774 addendum to 26 Oct. 1774, Charles Steuart Papers, f274. William Allason spotted Foy on the road between Falmouth and Williamsburg sometime between 29 October and 11 November (William Allason to Thomas B. Martin, 14 Nov. 1774, Letterbook, 1770–1789, reel 389, 331–32, William Allason Records, 1722–1847, LVA). Foy left for England in late June 1775 (Jon Kukla, Patrick Henry: Champion of Liberty [New York, 2017], 186).
. . .
16. Henry Fleming to Fisher & Bragg, 17 Nov. 1774, PHF; Henry Fleming to Samuel Martin, 1 Oct. 1774, PHF; James Parker to Charles Steuart, 27 Nov. and 28 Dec. 1774, Steuart Papers, f301, 287; Charles Yates to Gale Fearon & Co., Dec. 2, 1774, Charles Yates Letterbook, 121. By June 1775, Moses Robertson thought the Virginia affair had “blown Over” (Mason, ed., Norton and Sons, 380–81). The Virginia Association served as a model for the Continental Association. It banned imports beginning November 1774 and exports beginning August 1775, a month earlier than the Continental Association. Merchants may have wanted to wait and see how the Continental Association turned out before signing either document.
17. Virginia Gazette (Purdie & Dixon), 10 Nov. 1774; Fichter, “Alternative of Williams-Burg.”
19. Evans, “Planter Indebtedness,” 528; William Reynolds to Samuel Rogers, 12 July 1774, and William Reynolds to George F. Norton, 18 Aug. 1774, William Reynolds Letterbook, 1771–1779, William Reynolds Papers, 1771–1796, LOC; Henry Fleming to Fisher & Bragg, 2 and 28 Jan. 1775, PHF; Thomas Jett to John Backhouse, 21 Dec. 1774, Jerdone Family Papers, series 6, box 16, Swem Library, College of William & Mary.
14. James Parker to Charles Steuart, 2 Aug. 1770, as cited in Soltow, Economic Role, 138; Fairfax Harrison, The Virginia Carys (New York, 1919), 92.
13. Costa, “Economic Development,” 227; Henry Fleming to Fisher & Bragg, 17 Nov. 1774, PHF; James Parker to Charles Steuart, 27 Nov. 1774, Charles Steuart Papers, f287; Virginia Gazette (Purdie & Dixon), 15 Dec. 1774; James Parker to Charles Steuart, 27 Nov. 1774, Charles Steuart Papers, f287; James Parker to Charles Steuart, 6 Dec. 1774, Charles Steuart Papers, f291; James Parker to Charles Steuart, 27 Nov. 1774, Charles Steuart Papers, f288; George Washington to Richard Henry Lee, 9 Aug. 1774, Papers of the Lee Family, 1750–1809, UVA. Inglis relayed what he saw to his father-in-law, William Aitchison, who described this to his business partner, James Parker. Parker wrote to Charles Steuart. Usually, Parker is cited. Costa cites Aitchison’s description. One of Robert Carter Nicholas’s sons, a comptroller of customs, denounced Warwick and Wallace as well. The son was probably George Nicholas (Jeffrey A. Zemler, A Family for the Time: Robert Carter Nicholas, George Nicholas, and the Critical First Decades of the United States [Mechanicsburg, PA, 2020], 21). For the Association as a political organizing campaign, see David Ammerman, In the Common Cause: American Response to the Coercive Acts of 1774 (Charlottesville, Va., 1974). For the Association and the emergence of congressional power, see Jerrilyn Greene Marston, King and Congress: The Transfer of Political Legitimacy, 1774–1776 (Princeton, N.J., 1987). On coercion, Benjamin H. Irvin, “Tar, Feathers, and the Enemies of American Liberties, 1768–1776,” The New England Quarterly 76 (2003): 197–238; Barbara Clark Smith, The Freedoms We Lost: Consent and Resistance in Revolutionary America (New York, 2010).
18. George M. Curtis III, “The Role of the Courts in the Making of the Revolution in Virginia,” in James Kirby Martin, ed., The Human Dimensions of Nation Making: Essays on Colonial and Revolutionary America (Madison, Wisc., 1976), 123.
210 • Virginia Magazine Letterbooks, 1757–1793, reel 1371, William Allason Records, 1722–1847, LVA.
15. Gloucester even denied Norton tobacco on future shipments, “Until satisfactory Concessions are made” (RevVa, 2:163–66). Robert Carter Nicholas and William Reynolds attempted to defend Norton, but failed. Ragsdale, Planters’ Republic, 224–25; Virginia Gazette (Purdie & Dixon), 8 Dec. 1774, supplement 15 Dec. 1774; Mason, ed., Norton and Sons, 368. Though the county resolves were only published in the Virginia Gazette (Purdie & Dixon) on 24 Nov. 1774, the Gloucester and York County committees determined to stop Norton from loading tea on 7 and 9 November, respectively.
24. Edmund Pendleton to Ralph Wormeley, 28 July 1774, Papers of Ralph Wormeley, 1773–1802, UVA; Jonathan H. Poston, “Ralph Wormeley V of Rosegill: A Deposed Virginia Aristocrat, 1774–1781,” (M.A. diss., College of William & Mary, 1979), 36–37.
23. William Waller Hening, The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature, in the year 1619 . . . (13 vols.; Richmond, 1809–23), 6:328; Mays, Edmund Pendleton, 1:244–45; A. G. Roeber, Faithful Magistrates and Republican Lawyers: Creators of Virginia Legal Culture, 1680–1810 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1981), 160; Thomas Adams to Thomas Hill, 22 June 1774, Thomas Adams Papers, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond (cited hereafter as VHS). The county courts remained open for nondebt matters. The General Court also had appellant jurisdiction over county courts. Borrowers did use the General Court’s languor to delay. Roger Atkinson warned Samuel Pleasants, “It may be many years before you can recover a Debt in ye General Court. You will Succeed much sooner in ye County” (Roger Atkinson to Samuel Pleasants, 20 Mar. 1774, Letterbook of Roger Atkinson, 1769–1776, Account Books and Papers of the Atkinson Family, UVA). The General Court was so backlogged that some common law cases open in 1767 were unresolved in 1774 (Frank L. Dewey, “William and Mary Bicentennial Commemoration: New Light on the General Court of Colonial Virginia,” William & Mary Law Review 21, no. 1 (1979), 4, 10).
26. Mays, Edmund Pendleton, 1:343n96 (Mays cites Virginia Gazette [Rind], 8 Sept. 1774); Holton, Forced Founders 117, 119n31; Virginia Gazette (Pinkney), 13 Oct. 1774; Thomas Adams to Thomas Hill, n.d. [17 Nov 1774?], Thomas Adams Papers (emphasis added in quotation); Governor Dunmore to Lord Dartmouth, 24 Dec. 1774, in K. G. Davies, ed., Documents of the American Revolution, 1770–1773 (21 vols.; Shannon, Irl., 1972–81), 8:266 (emphasis added in quotation). Malone suggests Mercer quit in 1773, but his appearance in 1774 would nevertheless have caused the strikers difficulty (Malone, Jefferson the Virginian, 123–24). Richard Bland argued before the General Court, but his activity was so minor that, though he was among the Virginia delegates to Philadelphia, he was not counted among the “principal counsel” absent (Dewey, “New Light on the General Court,” 3–4). A lack of attorneys was especially problematic for a court where some judges lacked legal education (Hugh F. Rankin, “The General Court of Colonial Virginia: Its Jurisdiction and Personnel,” VMHB 70 [1962]: 145). The common practice of each side hiring two attorneys meant that Pendleton’s and Henry’s prolific practices touched on many, perhaps most,
25. John J. Reardon, Edmund Randolph: A Biography (New York, 1974), 15; John M. Hemphill II, “Edmund Randolph Assumes Thomas Jefferson’s Practice,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography (cited hereafter as VMHB) 67 (1959): 170–71. Why Jefferson gave up his practice is unknown. He resigned on 11 August 1774. He had cases through the spring 1774 session of the court (“Memorandum Books, 1774,” National Archives, Founders Online, https://founders. archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/02-01-02-0008 [accessed 18 Apr. 2022]). Jefferson later said that the Revolution ended his career as a lawyer (Dumas Malone, Jefferson the Virginian [Boston, 1948], 192–93).
21. William Reynolds to George Norton, 3 Jun. 1774, Reynolds Letterbook; Henry Fleming to Fisher & Bragg, 22 Mar. 1775, PHF; William Allason to Robert Allason, 8 Dec. 1774, Allason Letterbook, 1770–1789, 335; William Reynolds to John Norton, n.d. [between 18 Aug. and 9 Oct. 1774], Reynolds Letterbook.
20. Henry Fleming to Fischer & Bragg, 17 Nov. 1774, PHF; Charles Yates to John Lewthwaite, 5 Dec. 1774, Charles Yates Letterbook, 123.
Virginia Merchants and the Continental Association • 211
22. Mays, Edmund Pendleton, 1:246; Holton, Forced Founders, 118–19.
33. Emory Evans, Thomas Nelson of Yorktown: Revolutionary Virginian (Charlottesville, 1975); Edith E. B. Thomson, “A Scottish Merchant in Falmouth in the Eighteenth Century,” VMHB 39 (1931): 110; Sarah Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (New York, 2009), 153; Samuel M. Rosenblatt, “Merchant-Planter Relations in the Tobacco Consignment Trade: John Norton and Robert Carter Nicholas,” VMHB 72 (1964): 455; Breen, Tobacco Culture, xxvii, 31, 203. Breen was not aware of the events of November 1774.
34. “The Articles of Association,” Yale Law School, The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy , https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/contcong_10-20-74.asp (accessed 18 Apr. 2022); Mira Wilkins, The History of Foreign Investment in the United States to 1914 (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 40. British traders returned to Virginia after the war and “engross the greatest share of our trade,” Patrick Henry lamented to Thomas Jefferson in 1785 (Devine, Tobacco Lords, 162). Presumably, these merchants accomplished this by, as before, extending loans. Indeed, the French Revolution, and the collapse of the French tobacco monopoly, may have done more to hurt British intermediaries in America than the American Revolution.
29. Thomas Adams to Thomas Hill, 22 June 1774, Thomas Adams Papers; William Reynolds to George Norton, 3 June 1774, Reynolds Letterbook; Charles Yates to John Hardy, ? Dec. 1774, Charles Yates Letterbook, 111–12; “The Proceedings of the Convention of Delegates for the Counties and Corporations in the Colony of Virginia Held at Richmond Town, in the County of Henrico, on the 20th of March 1775” (Williamsburg, 1775), 10; Thomas Adams to Robert Withers, 6 Apr. 1775, Thomas Adams Papers. The convention’s language echoed the notice in the Virginia Gazette from the previous year.
35. Ragsdale, Planters’ Republic, 213; Abbot et al, eds., Papers of George Washington: Colonial Series, 10:96, 116; Devine, Tobacco Lords, 87, 104.
36. Duncan Campbell to Thomas Dorsey, n.d. [1775], Duncan Campbell Letterbooks (microfilm; Marlborough, Eng.), 385; Duncan Campbell to John Dickson, 17 Nov. 1774, ibid., 346; Jane Sheppard, “Publisher’s Note,” ibid; Henry Fleming to Samuel Martin, 1 Oct. 1774, PHF. Campbell exited Virginia trade and clung to his business in convicts. He oversaw the Thames prison hulks after 1776 and later supplied prisoners to the First, Second and Third Fleets, making him a founding father of Australia.
27. Charles Yates to John Duncan, 11 Oct. 1774, Charles Yates Letterbook, 109–12. Yates was in Williamsburg between 5 and 12 November 1774 (William Carr to James Russell, 10 Dec. 1774, Letters from William Carr to James Russell, 1774, LVA).
28. Charles Yates to John Hardy, ? Dec. 1774, Charles Yates Letterbook, 111–12; Henry Fleming to Fischer & Bragg, 17 Nov. 1774, PHF.
31. Evans, “Planter Indebtedness” 521, 530–31; William Anderson to John Norton & Sons, 17 Aug. 1775, John Norton and Sons Papers, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation; William Reynolds to John Norton, 6 Aug. 1774, Reynolds Letterbook; William Duval to John Norton, 3 Aug. 1775, John Norton and Sons Papers, folder 102.
32. James Parker to Charles Steuart, 26 Oct. 1774, Steuart Papers, f274.
30. Henry Fleming to Samuel Martin, 1 Oct. 1774, PHF; CUST 17/2, 25, 29, and CUST 17/3, 22, 32, British National Archives, Kew, England; Schlesinger, Colonial Merchants; James R. Fichter, “Tea’s Party: The Revolutionary Politics of a Consumer Good, 1773–1776” (Ithaca, N.Y.), chap. 5 (forthcoming).
212 • Virginia Magazine cases before the court.
37. William Reynolds to George F. Norton, 18 Aug. 1774, Reynolds Letterbook; Charles Yates to Gale Fearon & Co., 2 Dec. 1774, Charles Yates Letterbook, 120. The Jerdones were among many who stopped importing (Thomas Jett to William Perkins, 10 Dec. 1774, Jerdone Papers, series 6, box 16).
Debt suits resumed in 1783 (Roeber, Faithful Magistrates, 171, 177). After the war, if British merchant-lenders lost property in Virginia, they could claim lost colonial assets with the British government’s American Loyalist Claims Commission (which paid out roughly a third of claim values), pursue debtors in court, and, after 1795, seek compensation from the U.S. government via article six of Jay’s Treaty. They could also, after 1789, sue in federal court (Devine, Tobacco Lords,
45. Mason, Norton & Sons, 387–89; Devine, ed., Scottish Firm, 188, 196; Evans, “Planter Indebtedness,” 512; Devine, Tobacco Lords, 114–19 (quotation 119). Norton went as far as to buy up the debts and assets of Perkins, Buchanan, and Brown in late 1774 for 5,400 Virginia pounds (Thomas Jett to unknown, 10 Dec. 1774, Jerdone Papers, series 6, box 16). Debts outstanding to Cuninghame appear to include Virginia and Maryland (Evans, “Planter Indebtedness,” 518). Cuninghame & Co brought their 1773 account back to Virginia in 1798, seeking to recover in court twenty-five-year-old debts (William Cuninghame & Co, 1770–1798, misc. reel 4237, LVA).
41. Evans, “Planter Indebtedness,” 525. 42. Ibid., 522; Samuel M. Rosenblatt, “The Significance of Credit in the Tobacco Consignment Trade: A Study of John Norton and Sons, 1768–1775,” WMQ 19, ser. 3 (1962): 385.
40. Henry Fleming to Fisher & Bragg, 17 Nov. 1774, PHF; Gustavus Brown Wallace to Michael Wallace, 15 May 1775, Papers of the Wallace Family 1750–1888, MSS 38-150, box 1, UVA.
Virginia Merchants and the Continental Association • 213
43. William Allason to Robert Allason, 8 Dec. 1774, Allason Letter Book, 1770–1789, 335; Henry Fleming to Fisher & Bragg, 17 Nov. 1774, PHF; Thomas J. Wertenbaker, Norfolk: Historic Southern Port (1931; Durham, N.C., 1962), 51. Harry Piper wanted a taste of the tobacco market, but he recommended his correspondents send only one vessel (Harry Piper to Dixon and Littledale, 6 June 1775, Piper Letterbook, 334–35). Fleming recorded £3,700, which was not repaid to him by the 1790s (Jacob M. Price, “Introduction,” PHF).
44. Henry Fleming to Turners & Woodcock, 16 Jan. 1775, PHF; Evans, “Planter Indebtedness,” 518; Henry Fleming to Fisher & Bragg, 17 Nov. 1774, PHF; “Remittance,” Oxford English Dictionary Online, https://www.oed.com/ (cited hereafter as OED). As Campbell wrote from London, “If remittances from America are to be withheld it will I must own be inconvenient for me to extend my advances [loans] from hence” (Duncan Campbell to William Brockingbrough, 15 July 1774, Campbell Letterbooks, 288). As it turned out, remittances continued even after nonexportation took effect. Planter, burgess, and Patriot Robert Munford remitted £1,919 to Cuninghame & Co in February 1776 with a bill of exchange (Robert Munford to William Cuninghame & Co of Glasgow, Bill of Exchange, VMHC).
38. Holton, Forced Founders, 113, 120; Devine, ed., Scottish Firm, 188; Devine, Tobacco Lords, 39.82. Edward Miles Riley, ed., The Journal of John Harrower: An Indentured Servant in the Colony of Virginia, 1773–1776 (New York, 1963), 75; William Reynolds to George F. Norton, 18 Aug. 1774, and William Reynolds to John Norton, 6 Aug. 1774, Reynolds Letterbook; Harry Piper to Samuel Martin, 26 Oct. 1774, Harry Piper Letterbook, 1767–1776, 307; Items Relating to Alexandria, VA, Mss 2981-a v.1., UVA; John Likly to James Robinson, 23 May 1775, Cuninghame & Co Papers, 1753–1863, VHS.
214 • Virginia Magazine 46.157–89).Devine, ed., Scottish Firm, 175.
54. Henry Fleming to Fisher & Bragg, 17 Nov. 1774, PHF; William Lee to Anthony Stewart, 5 Jan. 1775, in Ford, ed., Letters of William Lee, 1:107–8; William Lee to John Ballendine & Co, 6 Mar. 1775, in Ford, ed., Letters of William Lee, 1:145–46; William Lee to Francis Lightfoot Lee, 25 Feb. 1775, in Ford, ed., Letters of William Lee, 1:125. This short-term loan issued in London to buy tobacco should be differentiated from the multiyear loans issued in Virginia to finance the sale of goods.
52.LOC.Thomas
48. Devine, ed., Scottish Firm, 165, 181, 201; Soltow, Economic Role, 117; John J. McCusker, How Much Is That in Real Money? A Historical Commodity Price Index for Use as a Deflator of Money Values in the Economy of the United States (Worcester, Mass., 2001), 70. The high price of tobacco in Virginia and the “lowness of Exchange” discouraged some. William Reynolds worried that sterling sales of tobacco in Britain would convert poorly back to Virginia currency (William Reynolds to Farrel & Jones, 10 July 1775, Reynolds Letterbook).
47. Ibid., 167, 178, 181; Robinson to Cuninghame, 8 Jan. 1775, ibid., 170. Planters saw preMarch 1775 tobacco sales as a way to fund new purchases as well settle old debts.
49. Most tobacco sent to Britain was reexported to Europe, making the Amsterdam exchange particularly important. For Dutch prices here and below, see N. W. Posthumus, Nederlandsche Prijsgeschiedenis (Leiden, Neth., 1943); Rutgers University, Medieval and Early Modern Data Bank, http://www2.scc.rutgers.edu/memdb/search_form_postpr.php (accessed 18 Apr. 2022). Prices would remain high throughout the war, fluctuating from 0.46 to 0.76 guilders per Amsterdam pound between 1778 and 1782, before collapsing to 0.33 in 1783 and back to the mid-to-low 0.20s thereafter. The Amsterdam pound weighed 494 grams, compared to the 453-gram English 50.pound.“Virginia Tabaksbladen” in Posthumus, Nederlandsche Prijsgeschiedenis
51. Duncan Campbell to Charles Grimes, 15 July 1774, and Duncan Campbell to John Tayloe, 15 July 1774, Campbell Letterbooks, 285–86; William Reynolds to George F. Norton, 3 June and 9 Oct. 1774, Reynolds Letterbook; Jones to Mr. Molle, ? July 1774, Roger Jones Family Papers, Jett to Samuel Gist, 6 May 1774, Jerdone Papers, series 6, box 16; Duncan Campbell to John Tayloe, 15 July 1774, Campbell Letterbooks, 285; Thomas Jett to Samuel Gist, 28 Aug. 1774, and Thomas Jett to Robert Maxwell, 28 Aug. 1774, Jerdone Papers, series 6, box 16.
55. William Lee to John Ballendine & Co, 6 Mar. 1775, in Ford, ed., Letters of William Lee,
53. Henry Fleming to Samuel Martin, 1 Oct. 1774, PHF; William Carr to James Russell, 10 Dec. 1774, Russell Papers; Henry Fleming to Fisher & Bragg, 17 Nov. 1774, and 10 Mar. 1775, PHF; Victor S. Clark, History of Manufactures in the United States, 1607–1860 (Washington, D.C., 1916), 598–99, citing Woolsey and Salmon, Mercantile Letter Book, 1774–1784, LOC. “Virginia” tobacco was the only North American commodity to be specifically identified by place of origin in Posthumus’s price study. The flour price fell from 16s 6d per hundredweight in October 1774 to 10s 6d in September 1775. Though mid-Atlantic and European flour prices moved together, at least roughly, throughout 1773 and the first half of 1774, North American prices began to diverge starkly from their European counterparts by 1775. For New York and Philadelphia prices, see Arthur Harrison Cole, Wholesale Commodity Prices in the United States, 1700–1861: Statistical Supplement (Cambridge, Mass., 1938), 66–71.
64. Mason, ed., Norton and Sons, 381–82; Price, France and the Chesapeake, 681, 717; Marion M. A. Huibrechts, “Swampin’ Guns and Stabbing Irons: The Austrian Netherlands, Liege Arms and the American Revolution (1770–1783)” (Ph.D. diss., Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium,
Virginia Merchants and the Continental Association • 215 1:145–46; Jacob M. Price, France and the Chesapeake: A History of the French Tobacco Monopoly, 1674–1791, and of Its Relationship to the British and American Tobacco Trades (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1973), 485–90, 494–95, 719–20; Duncan Campbell to Burgess Ball, 10 Apr. 1775, Campbell Letterbooks, 371–72; Duncan Campbell to John Tayloe, 10 Apr. 1775, Campbell Letterbooks, 56.377–78.Harry Piper to Dixon and Littledale, 7 Apr. 1775, Piper Letterbook, 327.
57. John Likly to James Robinson, 23 May 1775, Cuninghame & Co Papers; Harry Piper to Dixon and Littledale, 10 May 1775, Piper Letterbook, 331; Thomas Adams to Robert Withers, 6 Apr. 1775, Thomas Adams Papers; Moses Robertson to John Norton & Sons, 12 Jun. 1775, in Mason, ed., Norton and Sons, 380–81, 386–87; John J. Reardon, Peyton Randolph, 1721–1775: One Who Presided (Durham, N.C., 1982), 62; Kennedy, ed., Journals of the House of Burgesses, 171; John Likly to James Robinson, 23 May 1775, Cuninghame & Co Papers. Parliament banned Virginia exports effective January 1776. The earlier Trade Act, effective 20 July 1775, limited Virginia’s trade to Ireland, Great Britain, and the British West Indies.
59. Harry Piper to Dixon and Littledale, 10 May 1775, Piper Letterbook, 332; William Reynolds to John Norton and Sons, 16 May 1775, Reynolds Letterbook; Mason, ed., Norton and Sons, 380–82; Harry Piper to Dixon and Littledale, 6 Jun 1775, Piper Letterbook, 334–35; Gustavus Brown Wallace to Michael Wallace, 15 May 1775, Papers of the Wallace Family; Devine, ed., Scottish Firm, 195, 201–2.
60. William Reynolds to George F. Norton, 18 Aug. 1774, Reynolds Letterbooks; Duncan Campbell to Richard Nicholas Colden, 4 Aug. 1774, Campbell Letterbooks, 291–92; William Clayton to John Norton, 2 Jun. 1775, Norton and Sons Papers, folder 102.
58. Jonathan Hart to John Norton and Son, 16 Aug. 1775, in Mason, ed., Norton and Sons, 384–85; Archibald Richie to John Norton and Son, 16 Aug. 1775, in ibid., 385–86; William Lee to John Andrew Meyer, 1 Sept. 1775, and William Lee to William Hicks, 9 Sept. 1775, William Lee Letterbooks, 1769–1795, MSS 882, UVA; William Lee Letterbooks, passim; Edmund Jennings Lee, Lees of Virginia, 1642–1892: Biographical and Genealogical Sketches of the Descendants of Colonel Richard Lee, 237–38; Ford, ed., Letters of William Lee, 1:204.
62. John Brown to William Brown, 21 Nov. 1775, in Virginia Gazette (Purdie), 29 Dec. 1775; Robert Shedden to J. Shedden, 20 Nov. 1775, in Virginia Gazette (Purdie), 22 Dec. 1775; Virginia Gazette (Purdie), 29 Dec. 1775.
61. Holton, Forced Founder, 127; Jacob M. Price, Capital and Credit in British Overseas Trade: The View from the Chesapeake, 1770–1776 (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), 162; Port of Entry Book, SE 711 pdf, 220, 228–29, 304, 314–15, Maryland State Archives; Devine, Tobacco Lords, 108.
63. Evans, “Planter Indebtedness,” 532; Mason, ed., Norton and Sons, 381–82; Robert Donald to Patrick Hunter, 18 Apr. 1775, in Mays, Edmund Pendleton, 2:354n; “The Association of the Virginia Convention; August 1–6, 1774,” Avalon Project, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/assoc_of_va_conv_1774.asp (accessed 18 Apr. 2022); James Robinson to William Cuninghame & Co., 31 Mar. 1775, in Devine, ed., Scottish Firm, 177; Harry Piper to Dixon and Littledale, 6 Jun. 1775, Piper Letterbook, 334–35; William Wilkinson to John Norton, 10 Jun. 1775, Norton and Sons Papers, folder 102. The Continental Association had no such provision.
216 • Virginia Magazine 2009), 232–33, 235; Elizabeth Miles Nuxoll, Congress and the Munitions Merchants. The Secret Committee of Trade during the American Revolution, 1775–1777 (New York, 1985), 135; Price, France and the Chesapeake, 705–7, 714–15; Ford, ed., Letters of William Lee, 1:216–19; Devine, Tobacco Lords, 111. By contrast, Lee worried there was no old tobacco left to ship out (William Lee to John Ballendine & Co, 6 Mar. 1775, in Ford, ed., Letters of William Lee, 1:145–46).
68. Daetweiler, Richard Bland, 51; “Proceedings of the Convention,” 6; Richard Henry Lee to Samuel Adams, 4 Feb. 1775, in Ballagh, ed., Letters of Richard Henry Lee, 1:127. The only document emanating from the August convention was its announcement of the Virginia Association in Virginia Gazette (Purdie & Dixon), 11 Aug. 1774. When Hezekiah Niles republished the Virginia Association in 1822, he did not mention a “convention,” either (Hezekiah Niles, Principles and Acts of the Revolution in America . . . [n.p., 1822], 198). Dunaway added the term, “convention” (see note 71).
70. Michael A. McDonnell, “Popular Mobilization and Political Culture in Revolutionary Virginia: The Failure of the Minutemen and the Revolution from Below,” Journal of American History 85 (1998): 946–81.
69. RevVa, 1:97–102.
67. James Parker to Charles Steuart, 27 Nov. 1774, Steuart Papers, f287 (emphasis added); RevVa, 2:163–64. The August convention allowed the moderator to reconvene the “several delegates of this colony at such time and place as he may judge proper” (“Association of the Virginia Convention”).
Congress’s Secret Committee contracted in early 1777 to sell 5,000 hogsheads of tobacco to the French farmers-general with partial payment in advance. It struggled to fill the contract. It was hard to provide tobacco at a previously agreed price when rising prices for tobacco, insurance, and shipping allowed others to bid more for supplies. The Chesapeake also suffered from a shortage of shipping, because many of the vessels that had previously loaded tobacco had been British-owned. On the war years generally, see Price, France and the Chesapeake, 681–727. Price indicates some exports to Britain may have continued as collusive prizes.
71. W. F. Dunaway, Jr., “The Virginia Conventions of the Revolution,” Virginia Law Register 10 (1904): 567–86 (quotation on 570); “Williamsburg—The Old Colonial Capital,” WMQ 16, ser. 1 (1907): 41, 43; “Proceedings of the Convention.” For use of the standard convention framework, see McDonnell, Politics of War, 44n40.
65. Virginia Gazette (Purdie & Dixon), 10 Nov. 1774; “Association of the Virginia Convention”; “Proceedings of the Convention,” 1, 5. The Virginia Committee of Correspondence (set up by the House of Burgesses) termed the August convention as a “Meeting” of the “Delegates from the different Counties in this Colony, composed of the Representatives of the People” (Kennedy, Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, 140).
72. Fincastle County Committee, 20 Jan. 1775, Virginia Gazette (Purdie), 10 Feb. 1775, in Revolutionary Virginia, 2:254–56; “The Freeholders of Botetourt,” Virginia Gazette (Dixon & Hunter), 11 Mar. 1775; Thad Tate, “The Fincastle Resolutions: Southwest Virginia’s
66. Kennedy, Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, 190–91; Smith, Benjamin Harrison, 32; McDonnell, Politics of War, 44n40. The use of “delegate” in 1776, as in “House of Delegates,” may have derived from the term’s protean usage in 1774, although neighboring Maryland had a House of Delegates in the colonial era. “Convention,” OED (definition 5a). “Congress” was also a contested term.
Virginia Merchants and the Continental Association • 217 Commitment,” Journal of the Roanoke Valley Historical Society 9, no. 2 (1975): 25. William Christian, Fincastle delegate to the March 1775 convention, and militia commander at Point Pleasant, had married Henry’s sister and may have communicated with him.
73. Tate, “Fincastle Resolutions,” 24; Thwaites and Kellogg, eds., Documentary History of Dunmore’s War, 430; Albert H. Tillson, Jr., Gentry and Common Folk: Political Culture on a Virginia Frontier, 1740–1789 (Lexington, Ky., 1991), 79; Thomas Speed, The Political Club, Danville, Kentucky, 1786–1790 (Louisville, 1894), 57; Jim Glanville, “The Fincastle Resolutions” Smithfield Review 14 (2010): 69–119; James Parker to Charles Steuart, 6 Apr. 1775, in Steuart Papers as reprinted in “Letters from Virginia 1774–1781,” The Magazine of History with Notes and Queries 3 (Jan.–June 1906): 158; Smith, Benjamin Harrison, 29; RevVa, 1:220–21; At a Convention of Delegates for the Counties and Corporations in the Colony of Virginia at the Town of Richmond, 1–5. Augusta’s Samuel McDowell was one such absentee. Of the frontier delegates to the March 1775 convention, only James Mercer is known to have attended the August 1774 convention.
74. Evans, “Planter Indebtedness,” 532; Ammerman, Common Cause; Robert Parkinson, In the Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2016).
VIRGINIA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY & BIOGRAPHY VOL. 130 NO. 3
John G. Kolp is adjunct professor of history at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, and professor of history (retired), U.S. Naval Academy.
JOHN G. KOLP “Mrs. Ann” and “The Colonel” Anne Toft, Edmund Scarburgh II, and the Limits of Gendered Power on the Seventeenth-Century Eastern Shoren1660, a young woman identified as “Mrs. Ann Toft,” aged seventeen, mysteriously appeared on the Eastern Shore of Virginia and, in conjunction with one of the most powerful and notorious of the early settlers, Edmund Scarburgh II, began patenting large quantities of land at a rate unequaled by any person in the region. She acquired white and Indian servants, represented her own and Scarburgh’s business interests, and in a few years was one of the richest individuals—and the richest woman—on the entire Eastern Shore. She had personal connections with the governor of Connecticut and the lieutenant governor of Nevis and, in 1671, she was the only person singled out by name in a report to the Council of Foreign Plantations in London encouraging settlement in Jamaica, where Toft already owned land. During these years, she also settled at a remote plantation named Gargaphia and, with apparently no husband, produced three daughters with the somewhat unusual names of Arcadia, Attalanta, and Annabella. When Scarburgh died in 1671, Toft quickly married Daniel Jenifer, a Maryland planter, and together they managed her vast holdings, secured excellent marriages for her daughters, and produced a son with the equally unusual name of Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer. As a married woman, she appeared less and less in the records and died in 1687. Her great-grandson, who carried her son’s unusual name, represented Maryland at the U.S. Constitutional Convention. I
220 • Virginia Magazine
Anne (or Ann) Toft’s eleven-year stint as an unmarried land speculator, entrepreneur, and international trader, as well as her apparent long-term sexual relationship with one of Virginia’s most prominent planters, certainly raises questions about the extent and limits of female power. At the same time, the activities of her business partner and probable paramour, Edmund Scarburgh II, also forces consideration of the extent and limits of male power. Edmund arrived in Virginia as a seventeen-year-old in 1635. A marriage about the same time produced five or six children born between 1639 and 1649. Upon arrival, he took over his late father’s modest estate and immediately began his own land acquisition program, which netted him at least 34,000 acres on both sides of the Chesapeake Bay by the time he and Anne began their business and personal relationship. He bought and sold a dozen or more ships while establishing an active trading network throughout the Atlantic. In doing so, he challenged every avenue of political and economic power, from county courts to governors to Privy Councils, and possibly the king himself. He captured ships, refused to pay his bills, organized his own extra-legal military units, raided Indian settlements at will, and questioned the morality of Anglican priests. In short, he did whatever he pleased whenever he pleased for thirty-five years. Taken together, it would appear that Toft and Scarburgh tested the boundaries of gendered power at everyLayingturn.1out the details of their interconnected lives allows us to ask how Anne Toft and Edmund Scarburgh fit into the legal, moral, and customary climate of Virginia’s Eastern Shore in the middle decades of the seventeenth century. Or, to put it another way, were they a couple who actually bucked societal expectations, or did such expectations or norms not really apply to them? To some, seventeenth-century Virginia and especially the Eastern Shore represented a “brutal, selfish, grasping,” and unruly world in which English law and custom were largely ignored. Moreover, studies of local politics on the Eastern Shore in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries suggest a highly contentious political climate out of sync with most of the Old Dominion. In other words, men, and possibly women, in this particular place at this particular time crafted economic, political, and moral systems to fit their precarious and unpredictable lives in ways that often flew in the face of their English heritage. Yet, not all historians agree. We also
We do know that coverture appears fully fleshed out in Blackstone’s Commentaries in the 1760s, and we know that a century earlier the Lawes and Resolutions of Womens Rights (1632) hints at similar definitions of women’s place in English society, but what of the mid-seventeenth-century world of Anne Toft and Edmund Scarburgh? Several studies of the gendered nature of early American society suggest, for example, that the strictest application of coverture did not come into play until sometime in the eighteenth century. Some date the change to about the time of the American
Overlaying and intersecting this debate are gender expectations. How were men and women supposed to behave, and did they in fact act as specified by law and custom? English law proscribed such behaviors especially in regard to women under the doctrine of coverture, which affirmed that once married, a woman was totally subsumed or “covered” under her husband’s person. As a feme covert, a woman had almost no legal status, did not control property she brought to the marriage, and her husband had full rights to all incomes and wages she earned as his wife. Although a married woman’s rights were few, technically she was entitled to the use of one-third of her husband’s estate following his death—her dower rights—and might have a prenuptial agreement protecting some of her own property. On the male side, coverture meant that married men could rule over wives in all things, but they also had to protect their dependents and were accountable to the outside world for the family’s behavior and actions. To the contrary, a single adult woman whether unmarried or widowed was considered a feme sole, a woman alone, and could buy and sell property and engage in contracts and other business and legal transactions. They were, in the words of one historian, “women who acted like men.” Although, theoretically, these proscriptive definitions had been embedded in English law for centuries, it is uncertain exactly how rigorously they were applied to seventeenth-century Virginia, or specifically to Virginia’s Eastern Shore.3
The Limits of Gendered Power on the Eastern Shore have before us more recent studies demonstrating that English law, particularly in regard to sexual and moral behavior, was strictly enforced in this part of Virginia from the earliest days of settlement. According to this argument, this may have been an unsettled world, but justices and county courts nonetheless attempted to create an English society that paid homage to the laws and customs of the mother country.2
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Revolution, while others see evidence as early as 1700; some use inheritance patterns, the making of wills, and the appearance of women in court as markers, while others measure change within the confines of popular literature, the commercial activities of men and women, and gendered distinctions between the concepts of public and private. A few see the presence of non-English cultures, like the Dutch or even Native American, as determinants of local behaviors and customs during the earliest periods of settlement.
Anne Toft and Edmund Scarburgh, both as partners and as separate individuals, have not gone unnoticed by historians. Major events in Scarburgh’s life appeared throughout an early history of the Eastern Shore in 1911, but there was no mention of Toft. Likewise, in 1940, Susie Ames noted Toft’s remarkable land accumulations, but made only brief reference to her business interactions with Scarburgh. By 1951, however, detailed research by Eastern Shore historian Ralph Whitelaw revealed many business connections between the two, but refused to offer an opinion of their personal relationship, calling it “an unsolved problem.” At issue was the paternity of Anne’s daughters. An early reference to Toft, for example, assumed her three daughters came from her later relationship and marriage with Maryland planter Daniel Jenifer. Though a 1969 book review concluded Toft was Scarburgh’s mistress, it was not until about 2000 that genealogical websites concurred, although some outraged Scarburgh descendants assumed it was because Anne was a “youthful . . . vivacious . . . hussy.”
Finally, a recent Eastern Shore podcast simply assumed an intimate relationship between Anne and Edmund, calling them “one of the New World’s most notorious power couples.”5
222 • Virginia Magazine
Although Anne Toft and her controversial partner have piqued the interest of a few historians and genealogists, little attention has been paid to the broader context of their relationship. Carefully reconstructing what we know of their lives offers suggestive clues about feme sole entrepreneurship,
Finally, a recent analysis posits the interaction between gender and social status as key to understanding the accepted behaviors of men and women in early American society. Whatever the exact timing and whatever the yardstick of behavior, there is a sense that during some part of the colonial period, local legal necessities and customary practices modified the actual technicalities of English law.4
The Limits of Gendered Power on the Eastern Shore economic success, the application of English moral law, the dynamics of social class, and the legal and behavioral limits of both male and female power on Virginia’s Eastern Shore in the mid-seventeenth century.
Following in the footsteps of their Iberian predecessors, they established new footholds in what are now Virginia, Massachusetts, New York, Maryland, Rhode Island, Delaware, Quebec, Guiana, South Africa, Australia, Indonesia, India, and Sri Lanka. Soon they wanted more than these primitive beachheads and began chasing the Portuguese and Spaniards out of their long-held possessions. In the Americas, they named or renamed their outposts Jamestown, Plymouth, Boston, New Amsterdam, Fort Orange, Fort Christina, New Stockholm, St. Mary’s City, Mauritsstad, and Montreal to reflect national sovereignty and possession. By the time of Anne Toft’s birth in the early 1640s, many of these outposts had been established. Others would follow during her formative years. When she reached her mid-twenties, several had changed hands, giving her additional opportunities for migration and settlement. Though opportunities to escape northwestern Europe expanded substantially as she grew to adulthood, something propelled her into the wider Atlantic world.
Though the surname Toft is Scandinavian in origin and may date to the ninth-century Danish invasions of England, the English version of the name came to be concentrated in the county of Surrey and especially around the village of Godalming. Here, Tofts had existed for centuries working primarily in the woolen trades that were prevalent in this area. If, as we suspect, Toft was her birth surname, then she is very likely the “Anne Tauft” born in April or May 1642 as the last of ten children of Humphrey and Mary Toft.
Her mother died when she was fifteen months old, and she was probably raised by her father. He died when she was fifteen, which could have easily triggered the desire to leave her home village and make her own way in the world.6
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ANNE TOFT WAS PART OF AN INCREASING SWIRL OF HUMANITY moving out of northwest Europe in the mid-seventeenth century to colonies and outposts in North America, South America, the Caribbean, the tip of Africa, and the southern and eastern rims of Asia. Her fellow travelers of English, Dutch, French, and Swedish origins were relatively new to this process.
224 • Virginia MigrationMagazinetonearby
London and emigration to Virginia would have been quite normal for her and many of her neighbors. The area around London, including Surrey County, provided a significant percentage of the immigrants to the Chesapeake in the middle decades of the seventeenth century. If Anne made the voyage to Virginia from London about 1659 or 1660, her companions on the journey would have been overwhelmingly male; less than 20 percent were women. And if she came as a free woman rather than an indentured servant, she would have been even rarer—threequarters of all immigrants in this time period were unfree. Whatever her reasons and whatever her status, she arrived at the tail end of a several-decade boom in migration to Virginia. Perhaps as many as 40,000 immigrants had come from England since the 1640s, mostly lured by visions of a better life in the booming tobacco colony. Free individuals hoped to obtain land immediately and begin growing the lucrative crop; indentured servants first had to endure four to five years of hard labor, but they too dreamed of one day owning land and improving their lives through tobacco farming.7
Single women coming to the Chesapeake had a mixed set of dreams and hopes. If they were an indentured servant like the ill-fated Anne Orthwood, they hoped to leave behind the shame of their illegitimate birth and find a suitable husband in a land where men outnumbered women as much as six to one. On the other hand, if they came as an independent adult woman, as Margaret Brent did when she emigrated to Maryland in 1638, they hoped for a level of religious freedom and economic opportunity denied them as Catholics in England. Whether free or unfree, the rarity of women gave Map of Surrey County, England, showing the village of Godalming and proximity to London, which was about forty miles away.
(
Detail from Robert Wilkinson, The British Isles, 1812)
The Limits of Gendered Power on the Eastern Shore them distinct advantages as potential housekeepers, wives, and sexual partners. But what of Anne Toft? What did she hope to gain in Virginia?8
ANNE TOFT’S ARRIVAL IN VIRGINIA and her initial status and title are uncertain. But whether free or unfree, our Anne is probably the “Ann Toft” or “An Toft” who appeared on headright claims in both Gloucester and Westmoreland counties in 1666. This might indicate that she arrived initially on the western side of the Chesapeake Bay, but a headright—which gave the holder the right to patent fifty acres of land—could be bought, sold, and traded and might show up almost anywhere in the colony.9
We can imagine several ways in which Anne assumed the title. To begin with, it is entirely possible she presented herself as “Mrs. Ann Toft” that first day in court, and perhaps her manner, dress, and speech did not suggest otherwise. In this case, we have to assume Anne understood the term “Mrs.” conveyed the status of a single woman with the legal power to act as an independent person—a feme sole—with the ability to buy and sell property, appear in court on her own behalf, and legally do as she pleased without the permission or intervention of an adult male. Whether Anne possessed such an understanding of the law is not known, but we do know that some illiterate lower class women in Accomack did. On the other hand, she might have encountered a “Mrs.” role model, an older adult woman—in England,
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The use of “Mrs.” as a form of address held alternative meanings in the seventeenth century. Though it came in the nineteenth century to signify a married or widowed adult woman, earlier it signified a woman who commanded employees or servants, or a woman with special business skills respected by the community. We do know that there were a few other independent women on the Eastern Shore at this time who owned land and headed households; many but not all were given the title “Mrs.” Thus, our Anne may have been called a “Mrs.” by her neighbors out of admiration and deference, with little regard to her present or former marital status. Clearly, after a few years on the Eastern Shore, as we will see, this meaning fit Anne perfectly but, somehow at her very first appearance at the age of seventeen, she had already become a “Mrs.”10
We also do not know how or when Anne appropriated the title of “Mrs.”
It is also possible that Scarburgh encouraged her to present herself in this manner. With his English education and considerable knowledge of the law, he may have helped Anne understand that they could carry on a relationship combining intimacy and business to the mutual benefit of both parties. Scarburgh would acquire a young lover and a business partner, while Anne would have a wealthy and powerful benefactor who could help her achieve independent financial status—without marriage—in the new colony of Virginia. Though we cannot be certain who initiated the partnership and how the title “Mrs.” came about, Anne’s later entrepreneurial activities sugAnne Toft’s first land patent dated 3 November 1660 for 800 acres. (Library of Virginia)
226 • Virginia Magazine on the passage to Virginia, or once she arrived in the Old Dominion—who was acting in just such a capacity.11
Finally, if she was accompanied in court by her new partner, Edmund Scarburgh, a wealthy and widely known planter, then the county clerk who recorded all proceedings would have had no reason to doubt the designation.
Another possibility is that the purpose of her first appearance in court made everyone assume she was already a “Mrs.” She presented sixteen headright claims and asked to be granted 800 acres of land, not in conjunction with a husband, father, or brother, but in her own right. Certainly, other men had presented larger claims to the court, but the vast majority were much smaller, so her 800 acres would have been impressive.
HOWEVER ANNE AND EDMUND INITIALLY CONNECTED and whatever the precise nature of their relationship over a decade, the record of her business activities seems entirely to Anne’s benefit. There is every indication that Scarburgh hoped for financial success from their joint and separate business deals, but it seems absolutely clear that in many ways he took most of the risk and Toft derived most of the benefit. It is also the case that Anne often acted alone or in conjunction with other men besides Scarburgh. Whether by chance or design, her economic success in this brief time period was nothing short of phenomenal. It began with the accumulation of vast quantities of land. Although the first recorded transaction between Toft and Scarburgh did not occur until 1662, he may have been behind her first official action on the Eastern Shore in 1660, when she presented sixteen headright claims and patented 800 acres of land on the bayside of what is now Accomack County. Many of her subsequent patents may have been possible because Scarburgh obtained headright certificates for her, but that is unclear. Headrights provided the key to land patenting, and it is entirely possible that Anne, somehow, acquired the necessary certificates on her own. In 1663, she patented 1,200 acres; in 1664, 4,000, including what became her home plantation of Gargaphia. Anne added another 2,350 in 1665; 7,800 in 1666; 5,400 acres in 1667; and 6,000 in 1669. But patenting was not her only method of land acquisition. In 1668, Scarburgh and his wife Mary sold 2,850 acres to Toft, and the next year she purchased another 3,000 acres from Edmund for 9,101 pounds of Nevis sugar and 708 pounds of indigo. Though some of these transactions may have included the reissue of earlier patents, Anne Toft accumulated at least 20,000 and possibly as much as 30,000 acres of land in Virginia in the 1660s. No other individual on the Eastern Shore acquired so much land so fast; even Edmund Scarburgh needed thirty-five years to accumulate an estimated 34,000 acres on both sides of Chesapeake Bay.12Her acquisition of Gargaphia is a perfect example of the difficulties in understanding the relationship between Toft and Scarburgh. There is strong
The Limits of Gendered Power on the Eastern Shore • 227 gest she was at least an equal and perhaps the controlling partner in the relationship. She was indeed a “Mrs.” in every sense of the word.
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Anne Toft’s 1669 land patents for 2,000 and 2,200 acres, respectively, with headright names, presented on 16 March 1669. (Library of Virginia)
evidence, for example, that her home plantation originally belonged to Scarburgh and that he used several methods to transfer it to her. Yet, a few years later they signed a formal business deal allowing Edmund to use some of this land for salt making, tanning, and shoemaking, but at the same time clarifying that he had no other rights to the property than those enterprises stated in the agreement. She also bought a colt from him in 1662, and in 1668 and 1669, as noted above, she formally purchased from him several large parcels near Gargaphia.13 But this was not the end of Toft’s land deals; she also patented 6,850 acres in a section of Maryland just north of Accomack County, Virginia.
Her official partner in these transactions was Randall Revell, an Eastern Shore planter who operated on both sides of the Virginia/Maryland border. Revell was an older planter (born 1614) who may have been a relative by marriage to Edmund Scarburgh. The exact purpose of the Toft/Revell partnership is not completely clear; in 1667, she appointed an attorney to represent her in Maryland and to transfer 3,000 of these acres to Revell’s wife and two daughters. It appears that Revell struck a deal with Anne to accumulate the land in her name, keep half, and as part of some kind of estate planning scheme, transfer land back to his heirs at a later date. Yet, in addition to keeping 3,800 acres for her own use, Toft along with Revell also retained the rights to the “royall mynes”—some kind of mining operation— on the land she transferred to the Revell women.14 International trading activities also set Toft apart from nearly all other women on the Eastern Shore, although this was a common activity for the largest male planters. Sometime before 1666, Toft made an agreement with Robert Risdon, the master of a fishing vessel, to catch and transport fish to the West Indies. Risdon and a servant received wages from both Toft and Scarburgh for their work, but documents suggest that only Anne received Detail of a map of the Eastern Shore showing “Scharburghs Gargaphia” and “Arcadia.”
• 229
Although the mapmaker knew both Toft and Scarburgh, “Gargaphia,” which may have been Scarburgh’s initially, was officially Toft’s by 1664. Similarly, a much smaller area around Anne’s plantation was indeed called “Arcadia,” but nothing as large as that shown on the map. The double tree line crossing the peninsula represents the boundary between Virginia and Maryland. (Augustine Herrman, Virginia and Maryland as It Is Planted and Inhabited This Present Year [1670] [London, 1673])
The Limits of Gendered Power on the Eastern Shore
ON 6 JUNE 1671, Andrew Orgill, an English merchant with considerable experience in the West Indies trade, reported to the Council for Foreign Plantations in London that Jamaica was at the precipice of an economic boom if only settlement could be encouraged. There were, he said, 1,500 to 1,600 New Englanders ready to move to the island, as well as 150 Virginians. And to clinch the argument to this important governmental body that advised the king’s own Privy Council, Orgill suggested that “Mrs. Anne Toft” was ready to move to Jamaica as well. No other potential settler is mentioned by name, and there is no indication that Orgill ever met Toft, but somehow he believed that inserting her name in a plea to the English government would carry enough weight that it might help encourage action from Charles II and his advisers.16 Jamaica had originally been settled by the Spanish, but in 1655 Admiral William Penn and English forces invaded the island and forced the governor to surrender. Although it would take another five years for all Spaniards to give in to English rule, by 1660 it had become a royal colony, offering generous land grants to anyone interested in moving there and bringing servants, slaves, and others with them. When it appeared that Gov. Thomas Modyford might not be continued in office, Orgill and other merchants tried several petitions, including the report noted above, to encourage his
230 • Virginia Magazine profit from the proceeds. Toft and Risdon may have had another agreement a few years later, because they appeared in court in 1669 to ask for assistance in settling accounts related to shipments to the island of Nevis. Though Scarburgh’s name is not formally associated with this complicated legal action, as a justice of the court, he excused himself from the discussion of this particular case, suggesting that he was somehow still working with Toft in these trading activities. Yet, some of Scarburgh’s transactions turned the tables and placed him in the forefront and Toft in the background as the helper. On at least two occasions, Anne acted as Scarburgh’s agent, receiving and signing for goods being shipped to the Eastern Shore possibly from Dutch points of origin. Finally, Anne sometimes operated completely alone, as she did in April 1671 when she made an agreement with Jan Cornelisse of Rotterdam to manage a cargo of forty-two hogsheads and fourteen barrels of tobacco outward bound to Galway, Ireland, on the ship St. Nicholas.15
reappointment, which they hoped would bring prosperity to merchants like themselves and other investors in overseas trade. Settlement did continue with more than 7,000 whites and 9,000 slaves by 1673. Orgill himself later settled in Jamaica, became a representative to the colonial assembly, and eventually received appointment to the Council, which directly advised the governor.17When writing his report in 1671, Andrew Orgill had every right to believe that Toft might indeed be planning to settle in Jamaica. During the flurry of land grants in the late 1660s, she patented 4,000 acres in St. Elizabeth’s Parish on the south side of the island. According to headright regulations, she would have needed formal documentation indicating that she had paid the costs to transport more than 130 individuals to Jamaica. Although headright claims were often duplicated and misused, we do know that Toft actually had some slaves and perhaps other workers in Jamaica a yearToft’slater.18acquisition of land in Jamaica could have been directed toward several goals, including a pure investment opportunity or possibly part of a A map of Jamaica showing St. Elizabeth’s Precinct (Parish), where Toft acquired 4,000 acres in the 1660s. (“Map of Jamaica According to a Survey Made in the Year 1670,” from Edward Long, The History of Jamaica, Volume 1 [1774])
The Limits of Gendered Power on the Eastern Shore • 231
232 • Virginia Magazine careful plan for her “post-Scarburgh” life. The English conquest of the island and the subsequent decade of speculative land grants could have proved irresistible for Scarburgh and Toft. Neither had any trouble coming up with headright certificates, and thus paying an agent to file the necessary paperwork with the government of Jamaica may have been a risk and cost that promised substantial future returns. Another possibility is that by the late 1660s, Toft began planning her life after Scarburgh departed the scene, either through his actual death or when his life of scheming and extralegal behavior finally caught up with him. In this case, a move to a large plantation in Jamaica might have removed her from possible entanglements with his estate and freed her to start a new life in another English colony.
In the end, Scarburgh died and Toft quickly took another path to continued financial security by marrying Daniel Jenifer and staying on the Eastern Shore. She even made some money on the Caribbean investment: in 1672, the Scarburgh estate agreed to pay Anne and Daniel £1,000 English money to relinquish all claims to the land and slaves in Jamaica. The estate sent an agent to file the appropriate documents with the Jamaican government, her former slaves were brought back to Virginia, and the land itself reverted to the king for future distribution to another investor. She did well and probably never left her home plantation.19
Anne Toft’s trans-Atlantic notoriety seems remarkable, but by 1671, her entrepreneurial activities included landownership in Virginia, Maryland, and Jamaica, as well as cargoes of fish, tobacco, and possibly other goods she had shipped to the Caribbean and Ireland. In addition, in 1666, Toft appointed Connecticut governor John Winthrop, Jr., her attorney to help recover her half of goods in the ship Virginia Merchant (Providence), which was owned by Dutch merchant Simon Overzee. Presumably, the ship was in New York where Winthrop had extensive connections, but exactly how she knew the governor is unclear. Likewise, when the same ship and its cargo became entangled in another complicated business deal in 1668 on the island of Nevis, the Accomack Court sought the assistance of James Russell, the lieutenant governor of the colony, who was, somehow, an acquaintance of Toft’s. Taken together, these intercolonial activities and connections may have indeed made her an imperial “player” and a full-blown “citizen” of the vast English empire.20
Although this physical assault may have contributed to Scarburgh’s death a year later, the verbal assault by the Moores probably caused much immediate pain to both he and Anne. The altercation at Gargaphia had begun when Moore suddenly and without provocation declared that Scarburgh was “an old rogue and old dog” and that “he would work no more for Scarburgh’s whores and bastards.” The colonel took exception to the remarks, asked several people to assist him in detaining the Moores, and the physical assault and court case resulted. Though all witnesses appear to have been servants of either Scarburgh or Toft and therefore might be counted upon to keep these scurrilous remarks to themselves, formal prosecution of the case demanded they testify in open court to what they saw and heard. Their verbal testimonies were given before five justices of the peace— all prominent members of the county community—and written down for posterity by the clerk of court. It is possible that other members of the community witnessed these official proceedings as well.22
The Limits of Gendered Power on the Shore 1670, Accomack County Court convened a special session at Anne Toft’s plantation, Gargaphia, to take testimony and make judgment regarding an incident that had occurred there two days earlier. Colonel Edmund Scarburgh, a justice of the court, did not attend because he was the aggrieved party in this special court case. A variety of witnesses came forward, and all agreed that Martin Moore and his wife Margaret had physically assaulted Scarburgh, causing severe and perhaps permanent damage. No one disputed their guilt. Martin received thirty-six lashes and paid all court costs, while Margaret posted a bond for future good behavior. The assault was certainly extreme, but perhaps not out of character; Moore and his wife had a reputation for quarrels, fighting, and foul language and had been in court many times before. Moore had also had a major disagreement with Scarburgh a year earlier regarding his contractual obligations to produce a certain quantity of curried leather on an agreed timetable.21
Eastern
Although Scarburgh remained at home this day nursing his wounds, Anne Toft was probably at court or nearby. She may have even witnessed the original remarks, but to hear them in an official county court may have been a severe blow to her as well. It had been a decade since she first arrived on the Eastern Shore and, however she came to be there and whatever the actual nature of her relationship to Scarburgh, a scandalous and accusatory version
• 233 ON 10 MAY
234 • Virginia Magazine of what had been going on at Gargaphia for ten years was now a matter of public record. Moore’s remarks suggested that she was a “whore” and that she and Scarburgh had committed fornication and adultery; his remarks also suggested that she was guilty of producing bastard children. These were serious Fornicationaccusations.was generally defined as sexual intercourse outside the bonds of marriage. It was a moral offense in both England and Virginia, punishable by ecclesiastical courts in the mother country and by civilian courts in the colonies. The act offended the Church and God, and punishment in the form of some type of penance brought the offender back into the Christian fold. The penance prescribed in England and occasionally used in Virginia demanded that the guilty party appear before the congregation on Sunday and ask for forgiveness while dressed in a white sheet. In Virginia, a 1658 statute also demanded that both male and female offenders pay the parish 500 pounds of tobacco. Further, Scarburgh could be considered an adulterer: he had a wife, Mary, of more than thirty years, and five or six children. Adultery was a far more serious offense than simple fornication; in the 1650s under the Commonwealth government in England, it carried the death penalty, although such extreme sentences rarely occurred. If Martin Moore’s ill-timed outburst held true, Scarburgh and Toft had openly defied English moral law for a decade.23 But this was not the end of their potential transgressions. According to Moore, there were “bastards” at Gargaphia. Indeed, in the past decade Anne had given birth to three daughters who, unless a husband was present, would be considered bastards. A child born out of wedlock not only indicated sinful behavior on the part of the parents, but it brought “shame and disgrace” to the child as well. As “the son of nobody,” a bastard became an undesirable marriage partner and had fewer inheritance rights than those of legitimate birth. Although perhaps a quarter of English brides were pregnant on their wedding day, only 1 or 2 percent of births were to unwed mothers. Being labeled a “bastard” had permanent social and legal consequences that could impact an individual’s entire life. Martin Moore’s accusations suggested that Anne Toft had knowingly doomed her offspring to a life of misery and shame.24
There seems little doubt that Scarburgh fathered Anne’s daughters. No other significant male figure appeared in Anne’s life during the 1660s, nor did a “Mr. Toft” seem to be around, and there is plenty of evidence that Scarburgh was a frequent visitor to Toft’s remote plantation. In addition, both the name of Anne’s plantation and the names of her daughters suggest highly educated parents with considerable knowledge of history, literature, and ancient mythology. Though Anne may well have been a bright and resourceful woman, the only thing we know for certain of her educational background is that she could read and write. We know a good deal more aboutEdmundScarburgh.Scarburgh
The Limits of Gendered Power on the Eastern Shore • 235
II received a formal education in England, which included history, Greek and Latin literature, and some introduction to the law. By 1664, Anne Toft’s home plantation bore the name “Gargaphia,” which seems to derive from the Greek place name “Gargaphie,” a secluded valley where the goddess Diana relaxed and bathed with her nymphs. Anne’s Gargaphia was initially secluded as well, being some distance from the nearest neighbors. Her firstborn was Arcadia, presumably named after Sir Philip Sydney’s 1590 play, Arcadia, which remained popular throughout the seventeenth century. A parcel of land and a creek near Anne’s plantation also bore the name Arcadia. Attalanta appears to have been born next, and her name derives from a figure in Greek literature abandoned at birth and raised by a bear, and who competed athletically with men. The final daughter, Annabella, likely took her name from Annabella Stewart (about 1433–1509), the youngest daughter of King James I of Scotland. Scarburgh was a staunch royalist and extremely loyal to the Stuart (Stewart) dynasty. Although Anne’s knowledge of Western culture remains obscure, it seems likely that Scarburgh played some role in naming the girls; he even referred to Arcadia as his “God-daughter” in 1668.25 If, indeed, Scarburgh was the father of Anne’s three daughters, then most of the Accomack community already knew or suspected the details of their long-term affair. The repetition and recording of Martin Moore’s remarks in a public forum simply confirmed common knowledge. What is remarkable is that this is the first and only reference to the ten-year relationship in the official records of the period. It may have been rumored or the subject of private gossip throughout Accomack, but it crept into the
County courts normally impaneled grand juries each year to investigate and present all “Drunkes, Adulterers, and Bastard Bearers, Extortioners,” etc. Once presented, the court heard testimony and judged or dismissed cases. Married couples who produced a child in less than nine months after marriage were sometimes accused of fornication, but most cases involved an unmarried couple. During the three-year period from January 1667 to January 1670, for example, the Accomack County Court charged seventythree different individuals with fornication. Charges normally occurred when an unmarried woman became noticeably pregnant, or after the birth of an illegitimate child. Both a man and a woman were usually accused, but in some cases the man could not be identified. Several men and women received multiple citations during this brief time period. The court only dismissed a handful of cases; most resulted in a fine of 500 pounds of tobacco, but a few received twenty to thirty lashes if no one agreed to pay the fine. Servants were easy prosecution targets.26 In general, servants could not marry until they completed their indenture, because masters felt marriage and future children detracted from a man’s, and especially a woman’s, ability to perform at the highest level. In addition, bastard children placed a substantial financial burden on masters as well as the local Anglican parish, which, under the English Poor Law, had a moral and legal responsibility to take care of such offspring. For these reasons, suppressing and punishing transgressing servants became a top priority for county courts, which were both made up of and represented the planter interests of the community. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that servants received the vast majority of charges. And because servants occupied the lowest rung on the societal ladder, they had no social or economic power to help them deflect sex-related accusations.27 Although servants felt the brunt of the fornication and bastard-bearing charges, county courts did not hesitate to prosecute individuals with some status within the community. In 1667, for example, Charles Holden, an upand-coming lawyer, was accused of fathering the child of a woman then married to another man. The court dismissed this case. On the other hand,
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county records only this one time. The county court named and prosecuted numerous fornicators, adulterers, and bastard-bearers during the 1660s, but no one officially accused Toft and Scarburgh of such activity.
the court twice accused William Onoughton, a significant landowner, of fornication. He admitted his guilt and paid a fine for the second offense. The courts also charged two very high-ranking individuals on the Eastern Shore during these years: William Spencer of Northampton and Hugh Yeo of Accomack. Spencer, a county justice, was charged and confessed to having a child with his current wife before their marriage. He paid the customary 1,000 pounds tobacco fine and continued to serve as a county justice for another four years. The case of Col. Hugh Yeo is even more extraordinary because he served both as a county justice and a member of the House of Burgesses. During his tenure in the latter office, the court charged Ann Morfee with having a bastard child, and she named Yeo as the father. Though a woman’s testimony usually held sway in such matters, Yeo denied the charges, which placed the court in a somewhat awkward position, forcing them to seek advice from the government in Jamestown. A ruling from the Virginia colonial secretary instructed the county court to proceed as normal, but the case languished, and Yeo continued to serve in the House of Burgesses.28Although elite members of the community may have been given special treatment when accused of fornication and bastard bearing, the court did not hesitate to charge them as it did servants and others at the bottom of the social ladder. Thus, we are left to wonder why neither Anne Toft nor Edmund Scarburgh faced such accusations. Were they simply too important, too powerful, to bring before the law? Scarburgh certainly wielded substantial political and economic power on the Virginia Eastern Shore, and he had done so for some time. Following his arrival in 1635, Edmund accumulated nearly 20,000 acres in Accomack and Northampton counties and possibly as many as 14,000 on the western side of the bay. He acquired additional land in Maryland, raised livestock, and started tanning, shoe-, and salt-making enterprises. He owned a dozen or more ships during his lifetime, trading with England, Sweden, and the Netherlands in the Old World and New Amsterdam, New Sweden, Nevis, and Jamaica in the New World. In 1643, he joined the Northampton County Court, represented that county in the House of Burgesses, and briefly served as the speaker of that body.
The Limits of Gendered Power on the Eastern Shore • 237
His career and activities also suggest that he often did as he pleased, with little thought to the consequences. A number of these actions involved the vague border between Maryland and Virginia and the Native Americans still inhabiting the area. In Scarburgh’s view, this disputed territory was his to exploit, and native tribes in the area represented an obstacle to the accumulation of large quantities of land. Problems began in 1649, when Scarburgh transferred the center of his expanding empire farther north into what would eventually become the separate Virginia county of Accomack. Two years later, acting against direct orders from the government at Jamestown, Edmund took fifty men and attacked the home village of the queen of the Pocamoke Indians, killing several and taking a number of prisoners. His actions caused a general uprising among the Native inhabitants and resulted in the deaths of white settlers. The governor arrested Scarburgh and his men and they went on trial in Jamestown, but the verdict is unclear. Within a few months, Edmund was back doing business as usual on the Eastern Shore. In 1659, he got permission from the governor to attack the Assateague Indians along the Maryland/Virginia border, and two years later received a commission from Maryland to manage the settlement of lands on that side of the border. In 1663, Scarburgh helped draft Virginia legislation settling the boundary between the two colonies and secured an appointment to the commission to manage the disputed land. Yet, this was not enough; he remained nervous about lands he had already patented in the area and took it upon himself, once again, to organize a military unit to attack Native groups. When called before the government in Jamestown to explain his illegal actions, he developed a lengthy written justification that the authorities apparently accepted.29 Scarburgh expected to get his way in all things, including conflicts with individuals outside of Virginia, and that in turn brought attention from the English government. In 1651, he captured what he thought was a Dutch ship, but one actually owned by a New Englander. When he refused to give back the English ship, the vessel’s owner appealed directly to Oliver Cromwell and the Council in London; the case was not settled for another three years. In 1653, he was disbarred from all offices in the colony for his continued loyalty to the Stuarts during the Commonwealth period and for his involvement in a taxation protest, the Northampton Resolves, the previ-
238 • Virginia Magazine
The Limits of Gendered Power on the Eastern Shore • 239 ous year. To escape further punishment, he turned over some of his land to a son, sold four of his ships, and disappeared from the Eastern Shore for about six months. A year later he returned to Virginia and appeared before the Council in Jamestown, which cleared him of all charges. Sometime in the 1660s, Daniel Farvacks (Fairfax) of London delivered £700 of goods to Scarburgh in Virginia, but apparently received no payment. By 1667, Farvacks had appealed directly to the Privy Council in London for help, and they in turn ordered Governor Berkeley to settle the matter. Although Scarburgh agreed to a repayment plan by early 1670, he apparently procrastinated, and eventually the Duke of York and the king himself were asked to intervene. Edmund died in 1671, but the debt was still being discussed in palace circles fourteen years later in 1685.30 His modus operandi also included personal attacks and vendettas. During much of the 1640s, he had a running dispute with Obedience Robbins, another powerful planter and fellow court justice in Northampton County. In fact, at least part of the reason Scarburgh began moving his operations northward in 1649 was to distance himself from Robbins. But Robbins would not let him alone and initiated the proceedings in 1651 against Scarburgh for capturing the New England ship. Scarburgh struck back in 1656 and publicly accused Robbins’s cousin, the Rev. Thomas Teackle, of fornication and of planning to poison him. Teackle sued Scarburgh for defaming and discrediting his reputation, and the case went to Jamestown for adjudication with unknown results. Eventually, the county court gave Teackle a vote of confidence and restored him to his Anglican pulpit.31
All in all, Edmund Scarburgh seems to have jousted at every windmill in his path to success, confronting fellow justices, Anglican ministers, governors, dukes, and even the king himself. A man with this sense of his own power and invincibility could easily have imagined that English moral codes presented no barrier to forbidden sexual relations. He may have thought he and Anne were above the law. But their boldness did not stop here. Though the two wealthy planters apparently engaged in adultery and bastard bearing, both helped punish others for the same crime. Among the more than 100 people accused of such offenses in the 1660s, seven were servants belonging to Anne Toft and four belonged to Scarburgh. Masters rarely accused their servants, but the normal
ANNE TOFT AND EDMUND SCARBURGH lived in a world of English law and custom that carefully defined what men and women should do. Scarburgh spent thirty-six years on the Eastern Shore doing much as he pleased in his business, political, and social dealings. As an adult male landowner, this was his purview. He could buy and sell land; engage in a variety of business enterprises; supervise the work of family members, servants, and slaves; hold parish, county, and provincial offices; and in general live the life of an independent gentlemen. If the laws of coverture were fully operative, then Scarburgh’s wife Mary could do none of these things because she was a feme covert, a woman covered or subsumed in her husband’s person. Only in rare exceptions could she act alone; she was a dependent person. On the other hand, Anne Toft, as an unmarried or widowed adult woman, a feme sole, could not hold a public office or a military commission, but she could aspire
Or in another case, Miles Gray impregnated Anne’s servant Hannah Leach and had to pay Toft 1,500 pounds of tobacco as compensation for the lost labor. The first case cost Anne Toft 1,000 pounds of tobacco, but she got a total of five more years of service out of the offenders; in the second incident, Toft received a direct payment for their criminal activity. Perhaps the crowning incident occurred in March 1667, when Anne and Edmund were actually involved in extracting a fornication confession from one of Anne’s female servants. Scarburgh, as a justice of the court, presided at the inquisition while Toft served as one of four principal witnesses to the proceedings. To our modern sensibilities, the brashness here is breathtaking, but it may not have been to Anne and Edmund nor to the community at large.32
240 • Virginia Magazine
legal process of identifying offenders, bringing them to court, and awarding punishment usually involved owners in some way. The punishment of servants could vary, but in general they received fines of 500 pounds of tobacco each or twenty to thirty lashes. In 1667, for example, two of Scarburgh’s servants, William Abchurch and Mary Scading, received lashes. Men’s lashes were doubled as compensation for the costs of supporting the child. Though a few servants received corporal punishment, most masters stepped forward at the last minute and paid the fines for their servants. That same year, Anne Toft paid the fines for her servants, Nicholas Millechop and Mary Barton, but she also got three and two years, respectively, added to their indentures.
Anne Toft did much better. By using or accepting the title “Mrs.,” which implied respectability, she could operate as an independent woman, buying and selling land, going to court on her own, engaging in various business enterprises, and functioning as the head of a large plantation household. As a feme sole, her accomplishments were staggering. Not only did she accumulate up to 30,000 acres in Virginia, more than 6,000 in Maryland, and another 4,000 in Jamaica, but she also built the largest plantation house-
The Limits of Gendered Power on the Eastern Shore • 241 to almost everything else if she had the financial resources and business skills to manage her property. But independent status for men and women like Toft and Scarburgh might imply that they operated within the law; neither did so. Both pushed the limits of gendered power. Edmund eventually suffered for his actions; Anne did not. Scarburgh had bullied and blustered his way through life, getting almost everything he wanted by whatever means. But in the last year of his life, his world imploded. The downward spiral began in 1670 with the verbal and physical assault by Martin Moore and his wife. It probably caused lasting damage to his health and brought his long-term affair with Anne Toft out in the open. Several months later, inexplicably, he once again decided to clear out the remaining Indians along the Virginia/Maryland border and organized a military raid that apparently included murdering, whipping, and capturing young children, as well as burning Indians alive. In the fall, the governor ordered his arrest; he was brought to Jamestown, jailed without bail, and held for trial by the governor and Council sitting as the highest court in the colony. Although he fought and won the bail issue, the trial apparently did not go well, and he was stripped of all public offices, including his position as county justice and the very lucrative job as surveyor-general of Virginia, which he had held for fifteen years. This humiliating demotion caused so many long-simmering complaints against him to flood into Jamestown, the governor ordered that only debt-related cases would be accepted. The long-standing Farvacks case that had been an embarrassment to Governor Berkeley now came before the Jamestown Court, forcing Scarburgh into a repayment agreement. With his political power gone and creditors lurking about the courts, he died of natural causes six months later in May 1671. He had pushed and often exceeded the legal limits of male power; in the end, it caught up with him.33
242 • Virginia Magazine hold on the Virginia Eastern Shore with forty-five persons in 1670, including adult white servants, Black and Indian servants, and enslaved as well as free workers. Scarburgh’s plantation staff was half that number. Moreover, at the time of Scarburgh’s death, Toft had a variety of sources of income, including pending payments for cargoes she had shipped to Ireland and Nevis. Though her accumulations represented the upper limits of female economic power, they were, as far as we can tell, all within the law.34
Her behavioral and moral activities were another matter. Here she exceeded the legal limits of female power, and this, too, seems unprecedented for seventeenth-century Virginia. Literally hundreds of men and women came before the Accomack and Northampton county courts in the 1660s and received fines or corporal punishment for sexual intercourse outside of marriage and for producing bastard children, but both she and Scarburgh avoided such charges. Was it his economic and political power that shielded them from legal action, or was their power together insurmountable? Clearly, as wealthy white elites, they were likely accorded deference and respect simply based on their rank at the top of county society. There is also little doubt that his bullying may have intimidated the middling planters who populated grand juries and kept his fellow justices at bay. But as Scarburgh lost political power in late 1670 and became immersed in debt, could the courts continue to look the other away? And if their economic and political power together could not be challenged, what would happen when Scarburgh died?35 With Scarburgh gone, Anne Toft might have remained single and continued as before. She certainly had her own economic power base at Gargaphia with more than forty servants and slaves producing tobacco and other items for shipment overseas. And if, as it appears, this economic base affirmed her superior status within the community, her position at the top of the economic structure held just as much sway as did his and, therefore, shielded her just as much as it did him from the normally proscribed punishments for immoral behavior. Status, in a word, could easily erase gender distinctions, especially for women at the very pinnacle of local society.36
Status also comes into play if we ask whether their behavior disrupted the local community. If Anne’s illegitimate daughters did not have to be supported by the local parish, as the bastard children of many lower class women did, then her long-term affair presented no financial harm to society.
And from a point of view of morality, if bringing charges against them would have been more disruptive than beneficial to the local community, grand juries may have simply ignored their misconduct. Moreover, community opinion may have been offended by the actions of servants, but not the actions of the wealthiest elite. Status is absolutely critical here, but so, too, is the overall tranquility of local society.37
The Limits of Gendered Power on the Eastern Shore
In the end, however, we can only speculate about Anne’s possible future as a feme sole because she did not remain single. She married Maryland planter Daniel Jenifer just a few months after Edmund Scarburgh died. But what did each hope to gain from the marriage? Jenifer emigrated from London about 1662, patented land on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and served as clerk of the Maryland provincial court and later as a representative to the assembly of that colony. He had a brief marriage to a widow, but they had no children. His first official appearance in Virginia came in April 1671 when he was given power of attorney for Charles Scarburgh, a cousin and sometime-antagonist of Edmund. It is possible that Anne and Daniel met at this time. For Jenifer, Anne would have been a desirable wife. They were close to the same age, he had been recently widowed, had no children or heirs, and Anne’s enormous land and business holdings would have immediately placed him at the top of Accomack society. For Anne, a respectable planter may have been just the extra buffer she needed to dodge future accusations of fornication and bastard bearing. If her status diminished even partially with Scarburgh gone, then marriage offered a final layer of protection. Jenifer could also act as guardian and father to Anne’s three daughters, and he could provide help and guidance to Anne in managing her financial resources. She could also have a legal lover; her moral behavior would move back inside the law.38 But at the same time, Anne would technically give up much if the legal doctrine of coverture was in full force. We think it was, at least on the surface, as the limited court appearances of Scarburgh’s wife Mary and other married Accomack women seem to indicate. Thus Anne, as the wife of Daniel Jenifer, would be a feme covert, a legal inferior to her husband and officially under his complete control. By custom, a husband should consult his wife and obtain her signature when selling land or goods she brought to the marriage, but in reality, a husband often did what he wanted with a
• 243
Successful planters and traders, like Toft, operated in a broad Atlantic world that included mainland and Caribbean colonies as well as England and
244 • Virginia Magazine wife’s property and possessions. By marrying Daniel Jenifer, Anne would be placing her future and the future of her daughters in someone else’s hands.
The independent female power she had wielded for a decade would legally come to an end. She was taking a huge risk, but it appears to have paid off.39
Anne and Daniel Jenifer lived as man and wife for sixteen years and, by all accounts, had a successful union that benefited both parties. Daniel moved to Anne’s plantation, Gargaphia, and that became their base of operation. During the first few years, they consolidated Anne’s holdings, sold various parcels, and received clear title to properties that some thought were part of Scarburgh’s estate. They disposed of the land in Jamaica and secured payment for goods Anne had shipped overseas as a single woman. A year after their marriage, Anne delivered a son they named Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer (1672–1730). He received a sizable inheritance from his parents, married twice, and produced a son, Daniel Jenifer, who became a medical doctor. Anne’s daughters had successful lives as well. Although the custom of primogeniture might have given preference to their son or to the eldest daughter, the Jenifers worked to provide equal shares for the three girls. This may have been Anne’s idea; about the time their son arrived, Anne and Daniel went to court and formally divided a 5,000-acre section equally between the daughters. They also added a stipulation that each daughter must not marry without their permission before the age of seventeen or their inheritance in land, livestock, and servants would be substantially reduced. The daughters apparently followed their parents’ wishes and, in 1686, the Jenifers formally transferred 1,666 acres to each. Attalanta and Annabella each married twice; the latter’s first husband was a member of the Lee family. Arcadia married and had two sons; late in life she teamed up with her half-brother and took possession of what is now Smith Island in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay.40
Anne Toft cannot be considered typical, but her life can illustrate the upper limits of female economic achievement, perhaps at a level that has not before been demonstrated for seventeenth-century Virginia. Her story also reminds us that despite the apparent isolation of the Eastern Shore, it was far more integrated into the global economy than the rest of Virginia.
Mrs. Anne Toft Jenifer died in 1687 at the age of forty-five. She had benefited from excesses in both male and female power, and she had witnessed the consequences when that power collapsed. Although she lived the last years of her life in a legally circumscribed version of gendered power, her eleven-year record of accomplishments as a feme sole would lead us to imagine that much of that power continued undiminished under the blanket of coverture.
245
The Limits of Gendered Power on the Eastern Shore • Ireland. Moreover, her long-term intimate relationship with Scarburgh, as well as her participation in the policing of the sexual behavior of servants, offer clues into the uneven application of moral law by local county courts.
Finally, her life took place in a new, frontier-like society, where the parameters of social, political, legal, and economic activity had not yet solidified. Gender, status, moral law, and perhaps coverture remained in flux.41
246 • Virginia Magazine
Eighteenth-Century
1. Toft’s first name appears in Northampton and Accomack court records as either “Ann” or “Anne” and on rare occasions as “An” or just “Mrs. Ann” with no last name. “Anne” is used throughout this article unless otherwise noted. That Anne was seventeen in 1660 is inferred from the 1663 court statement, “Mrs. Anne Tofft, aged twenty years” (Accomack Court Orders 1663–1666, 46a–b, Library of Virginia [cited hereafter as ACO]). Here, we use the most common form of Edmund’s last name, “Scarburgh,” although “Scarborough” and “Scarborrow” appear in local records as well. He sometimes appears as “The Colonel” or just “Col. Scarburgh.” There is some controversy over the identity of Scarburgh’s wife, but she was very likely Mary Littleton, born about 1610 in England, and married to Edmund in the mid-1630s, possibly just before or just after Edmund emigrated to Virginia. She was probably literate because she signed her own name in court documents (see “Descendants of Edmund Scarburgh” from Cynthia McDaniel, Ghotes of Virginia, http://www.esva.net/ghotes/scarb/scarb.htm [accessed 26 May 2022]). Mary’s date of birth is corroborated in local records which give her approximate age (ACO 1671–1673, 13; ACO 1673–1676, 300). For one of the most comprehensive examinations of seventeenth-century gendered power, see Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (New York, 1996), passim.
2. T. H. Breen’s article, “Looking Out for Number One: Conflicting Cultural Values in Early Seventeenth-Century Virginia,” South Atlantic Quarterly 78 (1979): 342–60, makes one of the initial claims that Virginia society in general was abnormal, a “variant of Jacobean culture” (quotation, 342). Scarburgh is specifically held up as an example of “hard-driving, grasping individuals” who were “competitive, materialistic, frequently truculent,” and “fiercely independent” (see T. H. Breen and Stephen Innes, “Myne Owne Ground”: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1640–1676 [New York, 1980], 48–51 [quotations, 48]). The contentious nature of Eastern Shore politics is examined in John G. Kolp, Gentlemen and Freeholders: Electoral Politics in Colonial Virginia (Baltimore, 1998), 83–114. The most recent alternative view, that Eastern Shore courts rigorously upheld moral and sexual codes, is forcefully advanced in John Ruston Pagan, Anne Orthwood’s Bastard: Sex and Law in Early Virginia (New York, 2004), passim.
3. Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996), 125, 335. For eighteenth-century developments, see Joan R. Gundersen and Gwen Victor Gampel, “Married Women’s Legal Status in New York and Virginia,” WMQ 3rd series, 39 (1982): 114–34; Vivian Bruce Conger, The Widow’s Might: Widowhood and Gender in Early British America (New York, 2009), 14. An annotated bibliographic summary of scholarship on coverture is found in Claudia Zaher, “When a Woman’s Marital Status Determined Her Legal Status: A Research Guide on the Common Law Doctrine of Coverture,” Law Library Journal 94 (2002): 459–86.
TheNOTESauthor presented earlier versions of this article at “A World of Citizens: Women, History, and the Vision of Linda Kerber,” 5–6 October 2012, Iowa City, Iowa, and The Virginia Forum, 23 March 2013, Ashland, Virginia. Comments by participants at both conferences were extremely encouraging. The Naval Academy Research Council supported preliminary work on this project. More recently, the Tredway Library at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, provided valuable assistance. Additional comments by Ruth Kolp and two anonymous reviewers have been especially useful.
The Limits of Gendered Power on the Eastern Shore • 247
4. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (4 vols.; London, 1765–1770), 1:430; The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights or The Lawes Provision for Women (London, 1632), 51–52, and passim; Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers, 62–63. Kathleen Brown dates the tightening of coverture law after 1680 (see Good Wives, 287–90), while Gundersen and Gampel date the change to post-1750 (see “Married Women’s Legal Status,”133–34). Possible Dutch influence on the behavior of women and men on the Eastern Shore is discussed in April Lee Hatfield, “Dutch and New Netherland Merchants in the Seventeenth-Century English Chesapeake,” in Peter A. Coclanis, ed., The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Organization, Operation, Practice, and Personnel (Columbia, S.C., 2005), 217. The importance of female economic activity throughout the colonial period is discussed in Linda L. Sturtz, Within Her Power: Propertied Women in Colonial Virginia (New York, 2002). The similarities and differences between married and unmarried women is also explored in Sturtz, Within Her Power; Conger, The Widow’s Might; and in Linda E. Speth, “‘More than her “Thirds”’: Wives and Widows in Colonial Virginia,” in Speth and Alison Duncan Hirsch, Women, Family, and Community in Colonial America: Two Perspectives (New York, 1983), 5–41. The notion that social rank trumps gender in the seventeenth century is argued in Mary Beth Norton, Separated by Their Sex: Women in Public and Private in the Colonial Atlantic World (Ithaca, N.Y., 2011). On the other hand, Terri L. Snyder argues that both rank and gender are equally important, especially in regard to lower and middling rank women (see her “‘To Seeke for Justice’: Gender, Servitude, and Household Governance in the Early Modern Chesapeake,” in Douglas Bradburn and John C. Coombs, eds., Early Modern Virginia: Reconsidering the Old Dominion [Charlottesville, Va., 2011], 128–57). See also, Terri L. Snyder, “‘Rich Widows Are the Best Commodity This Country Affords’: Gender Relations and the Rehabilitation of Patriarchy in Virginia, 1660–1700” (Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 1992), pas5.sim. Jennings Cropper Wise, Ye Kingdome of Accawmacke, Or, The Eastern Shore of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century (Richmond, 1911), 367, and passim; Susie M. Ames, Studies of the Eastern Shore in the Seventeenth Century (Richmond, 1940), 24–25, 28–30, 133–34; Ralph T. Whitelaw, Virginia’s Eastern Shore: A History of Northampton and Accomack Counties (2 vols.; 1951; Camden, Maine, 1989), 1:624–35, and passim, 2:1149–53; Timothy Field Beard, review of Lucy Ames Edwards and Nannie Ames Mears, Ames, Mears, and Allied Lines (Accomack, Va., 1967), Virginia Magazine of History and Biography (cited hereafter as VMHB) 77 (1969): 482–83; “Descendants of Edmund Scarburgh”; Steve Smith, “Chapter 13: Colonial Edmund Scarburgh, Bad Guy,” Tree of Life blog, http://smithtree.info/home.php/colonel-edmund-Scarburgh-bad-guy/ (accessed 20 Feb. 2020); Dana Kester-McCabe, “Edmund Scarburgh & Ann Toft,” Delmarva Almanac, 10 Dec. 2016, 6.2022]).that(accessedhttp://delmarva-almanac.com/index.php/content/article/edmund_Scarburgh_ann_toft/26May2022).ThemostrecentlyrevisedWikipediaarticleonScarburghalsoassumesToftwashismistress(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Scarborough[accessed26MayH.E.Malden,ed., The Victoria History of the County of Surrey (4 vols.; London, 1902–12), 2:345–46, 352. Although Anne’s birth register used Tauft, Toft was much more common for her siblings and her parents (Henry C. Malden, ed., The Parish Registers of Godalming, Surrey Co. [London, 1904], 265, 280 [quotation, 92]). As further evidence that this may indeed be the correct Anne Toft, we do know that in 1667, Anne acquired a fourteen-year-old Indian servant, Wickepeason, whom she renamed, coincidentally, “Humphrey” (ACO 1666–1670, 33b). Years later in 1679, “Humphrey Toft” was living alone in Accomack County (ACO 1678–1682, 65).
248 • Virginia Magazine
12. Whitelaw, Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 2:954, 957, 1141, 1150, 1192; Northampton Record Book, 1657–1666, 121, LVA. For another record of the transaction, see Land Office Patents No. 4, 1655–1664, 458, LVA. In 1662, Gov. William Berkeley verified the patent and noted that it resulted from a deed from the Native leader, Tappatiapon (see Northampton Deed Book 9, 72, LVA; ACO, 1663–1666, 2b, 80b, 115b; ACO, 1666–1670, 16a, 53a, 118–19; Ames, Studies of the Eastern Shore, 24–25).
9. One could present a headright claim for fifty acres for each individual brought into the colony, whether a free person, an indentured servant, or enslaved. Though the law provided for only one certificate per person entering Virginia, duplicate certificates were common and difficult to prevent. The headright system is summarized in Darrett B. and Anita H. Rutman, A Place in Time: Middlesex County, Virginia, 1650–1750 (New York, 1984), 258n18. Gloucester and Westmoreland headright claims are found in Virginia Patent Book 5, 475, 616, Library of Virginia (cited hereafter as LVA). Anne also claimed herself on a patent for 2,000 acres in 1669 (ACO 1666–1670, 118–19).
7.cited.David
VMHB 105 (1997): 19. See also, Snyder, “Rich Widows,” 33.
Exploration of the Accomack records has been facilitated by the use of JoAnn Riley McKey, comp., Accomack County, Virginia, Court Order Abstracts (23 vols.; Bowie, Md., 1996–2012) (cited hereafter as ACO Abstracts). The original county records have been consulted in most cases and are so
Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York, 1989), 216–29; James Horn, “‘To Parts Beyond the Sea’: Free Emigration to the Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century,” in Ida Altman and James Horn, “To Make America”: European Emigration in the Early Modern Period (Berkeley, Calif., 1991), 89.
10. Amy Louise Erickson, “Mistresses and Marriage: or, a Short History of the Mrs.,” Working Papers (2012), Department of Economic and Social History at the University of Recourse,11.1670s).tothe(accessedhttp://www.econsoc.hist.cam.ac.uk/docs/CWPESH%20number%208%20July%202012.pdfCambridge,26May2022).Accomackwomenwhoweregiventhetitle“Mrs.”tendedtocommandlargestfemale-headedhouseholds,whilethosewiththesmallesthouseholdswereoftenreferredjustbytheirfirstandlastnameandwithoutthetitle(seetithablelistsinACOfor1660sandIrminaWawrzyczek,“TheWomenofAccomackVersusHenrySmith:Gender,LegalandtheSocialOrderinSeventeenth-CenturyVirginia,”
13. Whitelaw, Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 2:1151. Toft’s Gargaphia was likely located several miles east of the present town of Gargatha along Gargatha Landing Road and about where it crosses VA 679 today. Thus, the original plantation complex would have had access to several creeks leading
8. Pagan, Anne Orthwood’s Bastard, passim. The sex ratio varied by time and place; in nearby Maryland it may have been about three to one, but even that made women a rare and desirable commodity and gave them some leverage in behavior and in selecting male partners (see Lois Green Carr and Lorena S. Walsh, “The Planter’s Wife: The Experience of White Women in SeventeenthCentury Maryland,” WMQ 3rd Series, 34 [1977]: 542–71). For Brent, see Lois Green Carr, Margaret Brent: A Brief History, Maryland State Archives, https://msa.maryland.gov/msa/ speccol/sc3500/sc3520/002100/002177/html/mbrent2.html (accessed 26 May 2022); and Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers, 281–87.
16. W. Noel Salisbury, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, 9: America and West Indies, 1675–1676, and Addenda, 1574–1674 (1893; Liechtenstein, Neth., 1964), 521–22. Although Scarburgh died about two weeks before the 6 June letter, Orgill probably had no knowledge of the death. One source places Scarburgh’s death on 23 May 1671 (see “Col. Edmund Scarborough,” FamilySearch, https://ancestors.familysearch.org/en/L13Y-CG8/col.-edmund-scarburgh-ii-16171671 [accessed 26 May 2022]).
The Limits of Gendered Power on the Eastern Shore • 249 directly to the Atlantic Ocean (ibid., 2:1143, 1149; Google Earth, Hall14.2022]).iYKJAmsb0LGwps0QBGpb0LGwps0wBn-Flwv-7A1QCGpV4_qwydUwAThhYjU1OWMyZWJlNDBiGYIRRZJq5kJAIdZiAV1F5lLAKgxHYXJnYXRoYSwgVkEYASABI00000001h,44.99503411t,0r/data=CncaTRJHCiUweDg5Yjk3ZGM5ZjkyMDJhZDc6MHgzMsearch/Gargatha,+VA/@37.79381613,-75.58178474,9.13674148a,3423.00730989d,35y,0.https://earth.google.com/web/[accessed26MayForthe“royalmines”quotation,seeSomersetCountyCourtProceedings,1665–1668,inJ.Pleasants,ed., Proceedings of the County Courts of Kent (1648–1676), Talbot (1662–1674), and Somerset (1665–1668) Counties (Baltimore, 1937), 680–81. The earliest patent occurred in November 1662, with further action in 1663 and 1665. In the last patent, they added to the headright list the names of Anthony and Mary Johnson, well-known Eastern Shore free Blacks (see Clayton Torrence, Old Somerset on the Eastern Shore of Maryland [1935; Baltimore, 1966], 27, 76, 307, 474; Ross M. Kimmel, “Free Blacks in Seventeenth Century Maryland,” Maryland Historical Magazine 71 (1976): 23; Whitelaw, Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1:625, 2:1388). Some years earlier, Revell promoted trade between the Eastern Shore and the Swedish/Dutch colony along Delaware Bay (see Willem Beeckman to Petrus Stuyvesant, 30 June 1660, in Charles T. Gehring, ed., Delaware Papers [Dutch Period]: A Collection of Documents Pertaining to the Regulation of Affairs on the South River of New Netherlands, 1648–1664 [Baltimore, 1981], 205).
17. Richard Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (New York, 1973), 152–55; Calendar of State Papers, Colonial 8, 129; Acts of Privy Council of England, Colonial Series (London, 1908), 1:647, 2:811; Calendar of State Papers, Colonial 10,
15. The importance of international trade to the Eastern Shore economy is emphasized in April Hatfield, Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia, 2007), 1, 5. Trading by Toft and Scarburgh offer important examples (see ibid., 57, 101, 265n88, 265n90). The only other female trader in the area was the Dutch immigrant Anna Varlett Hack (Boot) (see ibid., 98–101). During the heyday of Toft’s trading activities in the 1660s, Charles II’s Navigation Acts forbade commerce with the Dutch, although both Virginia and Dutch merchants devised numerous methods to continue trading (see Victor Enthoven and Wim Klooster, “The Rise and Fall of the Virginia-Dutch Connection in the Seventeenth Century,” in Bradburn and Coombs, eds., Early Modern Virginia, 107, 111–12). On 15 January 1666, Toft authorized Risdon to set sail on the Virginia Merchant (sometimes called the Providence of Garnsey) to unload the catch (possibly in Nevis) and to return to Virginia. He may have returned by June 1666, because that is when their agreement was formally recorded (see ACO 1663–1666, 122a). The second case, involving a ketch named Providence, is noted in ACO 1666–1670, 94–95. Toft’s actions as agent for Scarburgh surface in documents related to his estate; one shipment was worth 3,133 guilders 2 1/2 stivers, the other 468 lbs. tobacco (see ACO 1671–1673, 100). In March 1673, the court clarified that the 1671 tobacco shipment belonged to Toft and had nothing to do with the estate of the late Edmund Scarburgh (see ACO 1671–1673, 187–93).
Pagan, Anne Orthwood’s Bastard, 7, 11–12, 121, 183n15; Brown, Good Wives, 75–104, 187–94; James Horn, Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994), 431.
20. ACO 1666–1670, 94–95; Hatfield, “Dutch and New Netherland Merchants,” 217. Toft’s connections to major intercolonial “players” is further strengthened when we note that Simon Overzee (Symon Ooverzee) was not only a merchant but also a resident of the Dutch colony on Delaware Bay and had acted as a host to delegations from New Amsterdam in 1659/60 trying to work out boundary disputes with Maryland (see Augustine Herrman, “Journal of the Dutch Embassy to Maryland [1659?],” in Charles T. Gehring, ed., Delaware Papers [Dutch Period]: A Collection of Documents Pertaining to the Regulation of Affairs on the South River of New Netherlands, 1648–1664 [Baltimore, 1981], 215–18, 222).
18. Jamaica headright claims were worth thirty acres per person (see Dunn, Sugar and Slaves,154–55); Whitelaw, Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 2:1152; Calendar of State Papers, Colonial 7, 382. Though the English government in the early 1660s offered ten free acres to any single woman willing to move to Jamaica, Toft’s enormous 4,000 acres appear to have been accumulated through headrights. However, the offer, which was apparently circulated in Virginia, might have piqued Toft’s curiosity and led to her subsequent acquisition a few years later (see Walker, Jamaica Ladies, 32).
19. ACO 1671–1673, 187–93; Calendar of State Papers, Colonial 7, 382.
22. Quotations come from several witnesses who all reported similar remarks by Moore. According to sworn testimonies, the Moores threatened Scarburgh with a knife, threw him to the ground several times, and eventually hit him with a wooden lantern (see ACO 1666–1670, 191–23.93).
21. ACO 1666–1670, 191–93; Whitelaw, Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1:632, 2:1151; ACO Abstracts, 1666–1670, 93, 95–98, 103, 131, 143, 162, 185, 195.
250 • Virginia Magazine 55–56, 146–47, 286–89. Although primarily focusing on the eighteenth century, a recent book also offers brief material on Jamaica in the 1660s and 1670s (see Christine Walker, Jamaica Ladies: Female Slaveholding and the Creation of Britain’s Atlantic Empire [Chapel Hill, N.C., 2020], esp. 16, 28, 32–34).
24. Pagan, Anne Orthwood’s Bastard, 11–13 (quotations, 13). The exact dates of birth of the three daughters are unknown, but several later court documents and the approximate dates of marriage of the daughters suggest they were born in the 1660s (see Whitelaw, Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 25.2:1150).Edmund Scarburgh II was born in England in late 1617, possibly on 2 October 1617 (see FamilySearch: https://ancestors.familysearch.org/en/L13Y-CG8/col.-edmund-scarburgh-ii-16171671 [accessed 27 May 2022]). His father, Edmund Scarburgh I, came to the Eastern Shore about 1621, leaving son Edmund in England to be formally educated. The first Edmund served in the General Assemblies of 1630, 1632, and 1633 and became a justice of the Accomack Court in 1632. When the elder Edmund died in 1635, his son moved to Virginia to take over his father’s business and land interests (see Susie Ames, ed., County Court Records of Accomack-Northampton, Virginia 1640–1645 [Charlottesville, Va., 1973], xv; Whitelaw, Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1:625, 2:1141, 1150; Cynthia Miller Leonard, comp., The General Assembly of Virginia, July 30,1619–January 11, 1978: A Biographical Register of Members [Richmond, 1978], 9, 10, 12). For classical references, see Ovid, Metamorphoses 3:138–64 (translated by Anthony S. Kline), https://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/
33. Whitelaw, Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1:633–34. Scarburgh died intestate, so his family and creditors spent the next decade or more sorting out his vast and complex financial affairs (see Billings, Little Parliament, 168–69; Whitelaw, Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1:635; Calendar State Papers, Colonial 7, 187).
31. Because the records do not survive, the actions by the governor and Council in Jamestown in this and other cases during this period are unknown (see Whitelaw, Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1:177, 32.640–41.ACO 1666–1670, 21a, 34b, 37a, 37b, 38b–39a, 54b, 64b, 184.
30. Elizabeth S. Haight, “The Northampton Protest of 1652: A Petition to the General Assembly from the Inhabitants of Virginia’s Eastern Shore,” American Journal of Legal History 28 (1984): 364–75; Whitelaw, Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1:177, 627, 629–31; Warren M. Billings, A Little Parliament: The Virginia General Assembly in the Seventeenth Century (Richmond, 2004), 126, 168–69; H. R. McIlwaine and John Pendleton Kennedy, eds., Journals of the House of Burgesses 1619–1658/59 (Richmond, 1905), 90–91; Calendar of State Papers, Colonial 9, 88–89; Calendar of State Papers, Colonial 5, 623, 625; Calendar of State Papers, Colonial 7, 64, 70, 187, 220, 234–36.
26. Pagan, Anne Orthwood’s Bastard, 118 (quotation). Fornication charges compiled from ACO Abstracts 1666–1670
The Limits of Gendered Power on the Eastern Shore • 251
trans/Metamorph3.htm#Bkthree138 (accessed 27 May 2022); “Atalanta,” Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Atalanta (accessed 27 May 2022); Ernest Hatch Wilkins, “Arcadia in America,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 101 (1957): 25–26.
27. Pagan, Anne Orthwood’s Bastard, 122.
34. Stratton Nottingham, ed., Accomack County, Virginia: Certificates and Rights, 1663–1709, and Tithables, 1663–1695 (Bowie, Md., 1993). The inclusion of Indian workers, either servants or enslaved, further demonstrates that Toft operated much like other large planters, male or female. Toft’s purchase of four Indian boys in 1667 provides evidence for Kristalyn Maire Shefveland’s “The Many Faces of Native Bonded Labor in Colonial Virginia,” Native South 7 (2014): 75. It has been argued that Anne Toft’s extraordinary economic accomplishments were because of the example of a Dutch woman, Anna Varlett Hack, who lived nearby and engaged in independent commercial activities as a married woman. Although it is true that the Dutch did not follow the English concept of feme covert, there is no evidence of interaction between Toft and Hack. Toft did have dealings with several Dutch merchants, and it is entirely possible that they were more accustomed to trading with women than English merchants operating on the Eastern Shore (see Hatfield, “Dutch and New Netherland Merchants,” 217).
28. ACO 1666–1670, 8a, 12a, 18a, 23a, 26b, 34b, 54b, 58a; ACO 1671–1673, passim; ACO 1663–1666, 25a–25b; Pagan, Anne Orthwood’s Bastard, 53; Leonard, comp., General Assembly of Virginia, 37; Whitelaw, Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1:146, 428–29, 478, 720; ACO Abstracts 1666–1670, xix.
35. Alexander B. Haskell, “Deference, Defiance, and the Language of Office in Seventeenth-
29. Whitelaw, Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1:31, 33, 618, 622, 628–29, 631, 2:1386–87, 1414–18. Scarburgh or his Accomack associates may have even tried to blame some of the Indian reprisals on the Dutch colony in Delaware Bay (see, Herrman, “Journal of the Dutch Embassy to Maryland,” 222).
40. Papenfuse, ed., Biographical Dictionary of Maryland Legislature, 2:483–84; ACO 1671–1673, 126–27; Torrence, Old Somerset, 381; Whitelaw, Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 2:1278, 1351, 1354, 1358. According to historian Carol Shammas, early American married women owned very little, but actually had remarkable control over marital assets. This probably describes Anne Toft after her marriage to Jenifer in 1671 (see Shammas, “Early American Women and Control over Capital,” in Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds., Women in the Age of the American Revolution (Charlottesville, Va., 1989), 136.
Tabulations for the present article confirm gender equality before 1670.
38. Edward C. Papenfuse, ed., Biographical Dictionary of Maryland Legislature, 1635–1789 (2 vols.; Baltimore, 1979–85), 2:483; Debbie Hopper, ed., Abstracts of Chancery Court Records in Maryland, 1669–1782 (Westminster, Md., 1996), 8; “Historical and Genealogical Notes and Queries,” VMHB 17 (1909): 322. Despite being a Roman Catholic, Jenifer seems to have operated unhindered as justice of the peace and later sheriff of Accomack, perhaps because of Toft’s, and now his, economic power and status (Whitelaw, Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 2:1403).
39. ACO 1663–1666, ACO 1666–1670, ACO 1671–1673, passim. Anne’s court appearances also diminish substantially after her marriage to Jenifer (see ACO 1671–1682, passim).
36. Norton, in Founding Mothers and Fathers, 18, prefers to use the term “rank” instead of “status”; see also, Norton, Separated by Their Sex, passim.
37. Haskell, “Language of Office in Seventeenth-Century Virginia,” 176–77; Terri L. Snyder, “To Seeke for Justice,” 130, 139n33; Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers, 18–21.
252 • Virginia Magazine Century Virginia,” in Bradburn and Coombs, eds., Early Modern Virginia, passim.
41. Coincidental to Scarburgh’s death and Anne’s marriage to Jenifer, about 1670–71, some historians see a turning point in the way Virginians viewed sexual crimes. According to some studies, before 1670, women and men on Virginia’s Eastern Shore had a kind of gender equality when it came to accusations of illicit relationships. Both sexes came before county courts at about the same rate. After 1670, however, courts charged women at a much higher rate than men, a trend that accelerated as the century wore on, pointing toward a general diminishing and devaluing of women’s legal and customary standing in society (see, Pagan, Anne Orthwood’s Bastard, 125–29).
Books Received Abandoned Virginia: The Forgotten Commonwealth • Joel Handwerk • Mount Pleasant, S.C.: Arcadia Publishing, 2021 • 96 pp. • $23.99 Animal Histories of the Civil War Era • Edited by Earl J. Hess • Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022 • x, 270 pp. • $45.00 Black Suffering: Silent Pain, Hidden Hope • James Henry Harris • Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 2020 • xii, 250 pp. • $24.99 Bloody Flag of Anarchy: Unionism in South Carolina during the Nullification Crisis • Brian C. Neumann • Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022 • xii, 216 pp. • $45.00 Borderland Blacks: Two Cities in the Niagara Region during the Final Decades of Slavery • dann j. Broyld • Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022 • xiv, 296 pp. • $45.00 Degrees of Equality: Abolitionist Colleges and the Politics of Race • John Frederick Bell • Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022 • xii, 298 pp. • $45.00 Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution • Mary Sarah Bilder • Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2022 • xiv, 344 pp. • $29.50 Haunting Poe: His Afterlife in Richmond and Beyond • Christopher P. Semtner • Charleston, S.C.: The History Press, 2022 • 142 pp. • $21.99 A History Lover’s Guide to Alexandria and South Fairfax County • Laura A. Macaluso • Charleston, S.C.: The History Press, 2022 • 190 pp. • $21.99 Invisible Wounds: Mental Illness and Civil War Soldiers • Dillon J. Carroll • Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021 • xiv, 324 pp. • $45.00 The Left-Armed Corps: Writings by Amputee Civil War Veterans • Edited by Allison M. Johnson • Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022 • xii, 392 pp. • $90.00 cloth; $40.00 paper VIRGINIA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY & BIOGRAPHY VOL. 130 NO. 3
254 • Virginia Magazine Lifting Every Voice: My Journey from Segregated Roanoke to the Corridors of Power • William B. Robertson with Becky Hatcher Crabtree • Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2022 • xviii, 198 pp. • $29.95 Lincoln’s Unfinished Work: The New Birth of Freedom from Generation to Generation • Edited by Orville Vernon Burton and Peter Eisenstadt • Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022 • viii, 436 pp. • $49.95 Morristown: The Darkest Winter of the Revolutionary War and the Plot to Kidnap George Washington • William Hazelgrove • Guilford, Conn.: Lyons Press, 2021 • xvi, 248 pp. • $31.95 Notes on the Story of Virginia: An Annotated Edition • Thomas Jefferson, edited with an introduction and notes by Robert Pierce Forbes • New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2022 • lx, 348 pp. • $20.00 Remaking Virginia Politics • Paul Goldman • Charleston, S.C.: The History Press, 2022 • 160 pp. • $21.99 Stephen A. Swails: Black Freedom Fighter in the Civil War and Reconstruction • Gordon C. Rhea • Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021 • xvi, 190 pp. • $29.95 True Blue: White Unionists in the Deep South during the Civil War and Reconstruction • Clayton J. Butler • Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022 • x, 228 pp. • $45.00
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