Virginia, the Birthplace of American Slavery

An 18th Century Slave Cabin in Northern Virginia

The population of England rose from three million in 1500 to four-and-one half million in 1650 without any corresponding growth in the capacity of the island’s economy to support the people. Colonization efforts were, among other things, an effort to alleviate demographic pressures in England.

At first, Virginia absorbed the new immigrants and appeared to be successfully creating a New World community on the English model. An emerging planter class, speculating in land, however, constrained access to good land in Virginia by the many.

The development of slavery in Virginia set the pattern for the development of slavery throughout the South and laid the foundations for the development of race relations in America.

In the late summer of 1619 a storm beaten Dutch ship (possibly a pirate ship) appeared in the harbor at Jamestown.  The ship had nothing to trade except twenty Africans recently taken from a Spanish vessel.  An exchange for food was made and the Dutch ship sailed away.  It is not clear if the Africans were considered slaves or indentured servants by the English settlers. There was no precedence in England for enslaving a class of people for life and making that status inevitable.  It is clear, however, that by 1640, at least one African had been declared a slave. This African was ordered by the court "to serve his said master or his assigns for the time of his natural life here or elsewhere."

Although blacks were held in hereditary servitude long before Virginia laws specifically recognized slavery, a large number of Virginia’s blacks worked as servants for a limited term or otherwise earned their freedom just like whites.  White and black servants worked together in the fields, shared the same punishments, the same food, and the same living quarters.  The most remarkable evidence of a racially open society comes from the records of Northampton County.  These records indicate that some twenty nine per cent of the county’s blacks were free and that a least two of these, Francis Payne and Anthony Johnson were planters (Johnson even becoming a slave owner himself). 

During the second half of the 17th century, the British economy improved and the supply of British indentured servants declined as poor Britons had better economic opportunities at home.  To lure cheap labor to America, terms of indentures became fixed and shorter.  By the 1670s Virginia had a large number of restless and relatively poor white men (most of them former indentured servants) threatening the established order of the wealthy and propertied.  A popular revolt in 1676, the so called Bacon’s Rebellion, led Virginia planters to begin importing black slaves in large numbers in preference to the more expensive and politically restive white indentured servants. 

The increasingly high price of free labor was incompatible with the profitable running of plantations. The landowners turned to slave labor, encouraging the first massive introduction of slaves from Africa in 1698.  The new labor force was more controllable because blacks, as a group, were not normally thought to be naturally guaranteed the “rights of Englishmen” accorded to white freemen.  In short, the system was to be based purely on force, and Virginia’s laws soon reflected this.

The need for long term forcible control of a large slave population (some 40% of the population of Virginia by the late 1700s) was an unintended consequence of short term decisions made by many individual for their own immediate economic gain.  From sometime ambivalent views about dark-skinned people held by Virginia’s whites, racism quickly developed as a buttress to the economic institution of slavery.

Hidden History of Northern Virginia

Read about the Rebel blockade of the Potomac River, the imprisonment of German POWs at super-secret Fort Hunt during World War II and the building of the Pentagon on the same site and in the same configuration as Civil War, era Fort Runyon. Meet Annandale's "bunny man," who inspired one of the country's wildest and scariest urban legends; learn about the slaves in Alexandria's notorious slave pens; and witness suffragists being dragged from the White House lawn and imprisoned in the Occoquan workhouse. 

Secrets of Early America 1607-1816

These are the often overlooked stories of early America. Stories such as the roots of racism in America, famous murders that rocked the colonies, the scandalous doings of some of the most famous of the Founding Fathers, the first Emancipation Proclamation that got revoked, and stories of several notorious generals who have been swept under history’s rug.

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Murders in Colonial America

Violence and murder between masters and slaves in colonial America was not a one way street. Blacks sometimes found ways of quietly settling the score with cruel masters. The most common forms of black resistance were arson, poisoning and running away. Poisoning was especially terrifying to slave owners. The closeness of house servants to their masters, for whom they cooked and washed in the very house where the master slept, made the threat of poisoning terrifying. Nor was this fear groundless.

In 1737, a case of poisoning in Orange County, Virginia, involved the murder of a master by a slave named Peter. The slave Peter was not only executed for the crime but subsequently, had his head cut off and displayed on a pole at the courthouse building, “to deter others from doing the Like.” Nine years after this, in January 1746, also in Orange County, a female slave named Eve was convicted of attempting to kill her master Peter Mountague by poisoning. Mountague suffered severe illness from August through December 1745 before recovering (and living until at least 1771). Although Montague recovered, Eve was convicted of poisoning him and was sentenced to death. The sentence was medieval. She was condemned to be burnt alive, a sentence carried out shortly after her trial. The case of Eve was considered particularly diabolical because she put the poison in Mountague’s milk. Virtually one hundred percent of the slaves living in central Virginia at the time were from eastern Nigeria, and were genetically predisposed to be lactose intolerant. No slaves would be drinking milk, there could be no unintended victims when milk was poisoned, only slave masters and their kin were in mortal danger. This was a calculated and premeditated attempt at murder stemming from deep hatred. The records of colonial Virginia document the trial of 180 slaves tried for poisoning.

Murder in Colonial Virginia

A quick historical look at murder most foul in the Virginia of colonial times and the early Republic. Behind the facade of graceful mansions and quaint cobblestone streets evil lurks.

Treasure Legends of Virginia

The history of Virginia told through treasure tales about pirates, Indians, Revolutionary War heroes and Civil War raiders. The full text of the famous Beale Treasure cipher is included along with some sixty other legends. 

Gifts for Dogs

The Puritans and Sex

Sex was essential to the Puritan’s notion of a healthy marriage.  Refusal to engage in sexual relations with one’s spouse could lead to a disciplinary hearing at the local church or judicial prosecution. James Mattock was excommunicated by the Boston congregation in 1640 for having, among other things, “denied conjugal fellowship unto his wife for the space of two years together.” John Williams of Plymouth Colony was summoned to court for “refusing to perform marriage duty towards (his wife) according to the law of God and man.”

The Puritans believed that both sexes should experience “delight” during sexual intercourse. According to the medical and marital advice literature of the time, procreation could not occur without female orgasm, which required that the woman become sexually aroused.  A popular marital guide of the time admonished men that,  “When the husband cometh into the wife’s chamber he must entertain her with all kind of dalliance, wanton behavior, and allurements to venery.” New England courts upheld the view that women had a right to expect “content and satisfaction” in bed; he who failed to provide it was judged “deficient in performing the duty of a husband.” Colonial Americans generally wore their shirts and shifts or more during sex. Full nudity was uncommon until much after the colonial period.

In New England, where the Puritans had defined marriage as a civil contract, secular law had provided for divorce as early as the seventeenth century.  Marriages could be ended if either party failed to meet the obligations of the contract.  Adultery, impotence, desertion, or conviction for serious crimes were all grounds for divorce.  Additionally, wives could obtain a divorce on the grounds of non-support.

Male inability to provide sexual satisfaction initially constituted grounds for divorce in New England. New Haven’s divorce statute described marital sex as “due benevolence.” It allowed a wife to divorce her husband if he proved unable “to perform or afford the same,” regardless of whether she was “fit to bear children.” A man who proved incapable of providing “that corporal communion which is reciprocally due between husband and wife” was considered nothing more than a “pretended husband.” Abstention from marital sex, wrote Edward Taylor, “denies all relief in wedlock unto human necessity” and would tempt those who lacked “the gift of continency” to engage in illicit unions. Conjugal intercourse, then, constituted a bulwark against sexual sin and chaos.

Love, Sex, and Marriage in Colonial America 1607-1800

A brief look at love, sex, and marriage in colonial America and the early republic.

Love, Sex, and Marriage in the Civil War

A brief look at love, sex, and marriage in the Civil War. The book covers courtship, marriage, birth control and pregnancy, divorce, slavery and the impact of the war on social customs.

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Vice in Colonial Philadelphia

Independence Hall, Philadelphia

When we think of the America of colonial times and the days of the early Republic, we seldom think of the word vice.  And yet behind the façade of graceful mansions and quaint cobblestone streets, vice lurked.  As early l720, when Benjamin Franklin first came to Philadelphia, the atmosphere of that city was already both permissive and hazardous. Franklin later wrote “that hard-to-be-governed passion of youth had hurried me frequently into intrigues.”  One of these intrigues resulted in an illegitimate son, whom Franklin subsequently raised.  Not all illegitimate children were so lucky. Out-of-wedlock births had become, as one contemporary put it, “extremely common in Philadelphia.” Unwed pregnancies often left poor women on the street fending for themselves.  Some turned to prostitution.  Readily available in taverns and brothels or outside in thoroughfares and byways, these “ladies of pleasure” were so numerous, observed a visitor to the city, “that they flooded the streets at night.”

The price of sexual freedom was often very high.  Venereal disease was rampant.  In Philadelphia, for example, a significant number of those admitted to the almshouse (9% of the men and 16 % of the women) were described in the register as “venereal,” “highly venereal,” or “eaten up with the venereal disease.” Infected men and women arrived at the almshouse gate because they were too sick to support themselves.

Love, Sex, and Marriage in Colonial America 1607-1800

Murder in ColonialVirginia

A quick historical look at murder most foul in the Virginia of colonial times and the early Republic. Behind the facade of graceful mansions and quaint cobblestone streets evil lurks.

Sex Crimes in Colonial America

Adultery:  Adultery was a serious offense. The Puritans defined adultery as sex between a married woman and any man other than her husband.  A married man who strayed was only guilty of fornication. Adultery was punishable by death in seventeenth-century New England. New England courts would not convict, however, unless the evidence fully satisfied the standards of the law.  Courts could only convict if sex, specifically defined as intercourse, was verified by confession or the testimony of two witnesses.  Since there were few instances of transgressors being caught “in blazing offence” by two witnesses simultaneously those accused of adultery were rarely executed.  New England courts often found individuals accused of adultery “not guilty according to indictment” but nonetheless “guilty of lascivious, gross, and foul actions tending to adultery.”  The guilty were punished by a whipping, a fine, or having to wear (or be branded with) the letter “A.” By the eighteenth century the male involved in an adulterous affair could be prosecuted for abduction; a woman was not considered to have the power to consent—even to illicit sexual relations.

Bestiality:   Bestiality was a capital offense.  Some of those accused of bestiality came under suspicion after neighbors complained of the birth of animals with features similar to those of the defendant. One Thomas Hogg was accused of having sex with a sow after the birth of a piglet with features resembling his own. Hogg had frequently offended his neighbors by wearing torn breeches that left his genitals visible, “seeming thereby to endeavor the corrupting of others.” Hogg was also reputed to be a liar and a thief.  Hogg denied having carnal knowledge of pigs, and since there were no actual witnesses to his having been sexually intimate with animals, he was acquitted of bestiality.  He was, however, whipped for “his filthiness, lying, and pilfering,” and ordered to “be kept with a mean diet and hard labour, that his lusts may not be fed.”

Fornication.  The large numbers of indentured servants flooding into the colonies were forbidden to marry without the permission of their masters.  This consent was practically never given, because any resulting pregnancy would deprive the master of the woman’s work for which he had paid. Not surprisingly, the birth rate of illegitimate children among female indentured servants was much higher than that found among free women. In seventeenth-century Virginia the penalty for a female indentured servant having an illegitimate child was an extension of service for two years or a fine of two thousand pounds of tobacco. If the child was fathered by a black man, the penalty was a public whipping and another full term of indentured servitude.

Incest: Men convicted of incest were condemned to wear the letter “I” stitched to their clothing for the rest of their lives. The label was a public humiliation that served to protect the community but also to remind both the criminal and his neighbors of the heinous nature of the crime.  Jonathan Fairbanks of Massachusetts was punished in this way.  He was sentenced to be whipped with twenty lashes, to stand at the gallows for one hour, and to wear an “I” for the rest of is life.

Love, Sex,and Marriage in Colonial America 1607-1800

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“Bundling” in New England courtship

Despite the best efforts of the clergy, European travelers during the second half of the eighteenth century often commented on the widespread custom of “bundling” in the northern and middle colonies among the rural and “lower people”. Andrew Burnaby, a young Englishman who toured Massachusetts in 1759, wrote about the custom, “At their usual time the old couple retire to bed, leaving the young ones to settle matters as they can, who, after having sat up as long as they think proper, get into bed together also, but without pulling off their undergarments, in order to prevent scandal.”

Johann Schoepf, who toured the region in 1783, assured his readers that “the young woman’s good name is in no ways impaired.” Visits took place neither “by stealth” nor only after the young couple was “actually betrothed”: “on the contrary, the parents are advised, and these meetings happen when the pair is enamored and merely wish to know each other better.”

European visitors were amazed by the openness with which young men and women spent the night together. “I have entered several bedchambers,” wrote Alexander Berthier, “where I have found bundling couples, who are not disturbed and continue to give each other all the honest tokens of their love.”  The degree of intimacy enjoyed during these nocturnal meetings must have varied from one couple to the next.  Although couples were supposed to keep their clothes on and to abstain from sex, the record indicates a significant number of early babies among the firstborn children of these couples after marriage. Often a couple was forced to confess their sin publicly in church before their baby could be baptized.

Love, Sex, and Marriage in Colonial America

A brief look at love, sex, and marriage in colonial America and the early republic.

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Colonial America mystery writer Andrew Mills

Interview with mystery writer Andrew Mills, author of the Archibald Mercer Colonial Detective series.  Archibald Mercer, America's first detective, solves crimes in colonial and Revolutionary era America.  Books in the series include: (1) The Female Stranger, (2) The Stolen Sash,(3) The Gambler's Debt, (4) The Stolen Election, and (5) The Burning Palace.

The Colonial Detective Mystery Series

Gays in Colonial America

Link to: Love, Sex, and Marriage in Colonial America

Following Biblical teachings, a sexual act that involved two human beings “of the same sex” was defined as a crime in colonial America. Legal codes focused much more specifically on male sex than did clerical pronouncements. Although a capital crime, standards of proof were high making conviction difficult even if juries were so inclined, which they seldom were in capital cases. Colonial newspapers published accounts about the arrests results from the anti-sodomy campaigns begun in the early decades of the eighteenth century as part of London’s “Reformation of Manners” movement. Newspapers also reported on the anti-sodomy campaigns in the Netherlands, where as many as two hundred and fifty men were prosecuted and some two dozen executed. On only two known occasions did women appear before New England courts on charges of “unclean” behavior with each other. In 1642 Eliza Johnson was whipped and fined by an Essex County quarterly court for unnatural “practices betwixt her and another maid.” Two other women from Yarmouth, Massachusetts were prosecuted for “leude behaviour each with other upon a bed.” A New Haven law of 1655 included sex between women as a capital offense. The law did not specify how sex between women was to be defined or proven.


Many New Englanders were committed to informal moral stewardship through surveillance of their neighbors. The layout of New England’s towns and villages facilitated “watchfulness”. Families generally owned a dwelling in town and a plot of land outside removed from the houses. Houses were built around the meetinghouse and close to one another. Farming lots were long, narrow strips which allowed town folk to work side by side. The god fearing had no need for privacy, only sinners had something to hide. The regime of constant neighborly surveillance led to a constant flow of information about people’s behavior that sometimes led to formal proceedings for a whole range of sexual behavior.

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The Death of Ambrose Madison: A Colonial Murder Mystery

In February 1732, thirty six year old Ambrose Madison, the grandfather of future U.S. President James Madison, brought his wife, Frances and his three children, to an estate called Mount Pleasant (now known as Montpelier). Six months later, Ambrose Madison was dead. In the early summer, Ambrose fell ill. Poisoning was suspected. Like most poisoning victims during this period, the poison did not kill him outright, but caused enough internal damage that he lingered near death for weeks, finally dying in late August. Madison left what was regarded at the time as a “considerable estate” including “ten negro men, five negro women, and fourteen children”, along with cattle, hogs, sheep, horses, twelve books and four silver tea spoons.


Did Ambrose Madison die of accidental poisoning or was he murdered? His death marked a milestone in the annals of Virginia crime for it occasioned the first known conviction of slaves for the use of poison against their master.

Link to: Murder in Colonial Virginia

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The Female Stranger (Archibald Mercer Colonial Detective Series)

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Marriage in Early America

The first permanent English colony in North America was established at Jamestown, Virginia on May 14, 1607 by the Virginia Company of London. The party consisted of 104 men who came to America not to settle but to become rich. Within a short time it became apparent to the colony’s sponsors that their great venture in the New World was in danger of being wrecked, “…on the shoals of dissolute, irresponsible, manhood.” It was not until the fall of 1608 that “the first gentlewoman and woman-servant” arrived. The gentlewoman was already married to colonist Thomas Forrest; the servant, Ann Burrus, would soon marry John Laydon, the first marriage to be solemnized in Virginia. More women crossed the Atlantic to Virginia and Maryland in the next several years, but they remained relatively few in number. By 1619, the Virginia House of Burgesses, petitioning that wives as well as husbands be eligible for grants of free land, argued that in a new colony, “it is not known whether man or woman be the most necessary.”

The Virginia Company’s London recruiters began searching for women of marriageable age, offering free passage to Virginia and trousseaus for girls of good reputation. New husbands reimbursed the company with 120 pounds of good leaf tobacco when they married. The first shipment of ninety “tobacco brides” arrived in Jamestown in the spring of 1620. The youngest was Jane Dier, aged fifteen. The oldest was Alice Burges, aged twenty-eight.

Some over eager British merchants, hired to provide the colonies with wives simply kidnapped any young woman who came to hand. In October 1618, a warrant was issued for one Owen Evans, who was kidnapping young women from their villages and sending them off to be sold in Virginia as indentured servants. As time went on, most of the single women who came to the Chesapeake Bay colonies voluntarily sold themselves as indentured servants. They re-paid the cost of their passage with a term of four or five years in service. At the end, the women were supposed to receive food, clothing, and tools to give them a start in life, then emerge into a world filled with wife-hungry young men and take their pick.


 

Link to: Love, Sex, and Marriage in Colonial America

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