Historiographic background
During the early 20th century, the historiography of the Chesapeake colonies was dominated by the Cavalier myth. Studies focused exclusively on the white planter elite who were portrayed as both the descendants of English Cavaliers and the progenitors of the Virginia dynasty that controlled the first fifty years of post-Revolutionary American politics. Much attention was given to the families of prominent Virginian statesmen George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. Challenges to the Cavalier myth and its influence on the historiography appeared in Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker's Torchbearer of the Revolution: The Story of Bacon's Rebellion and Its Leaders (1940), Wesley Frank Craven's The Southern Colonies in the Seventheenth Century, 1607–1689 (1949), and Carl Bridenbaugh's Myths and Realities: Societies of the Colonial South (1952). [3] [4]
Despite revision of the traditional historiography, African American slaves and women remained in the periphery of studies of the Chesapeake until the 1960s. Winthrop D. Jordan's White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (1968) offered the first interpretation of the roles of women and slaves in the Chesapeake colonies. Since the 1960s, scholars have produced broad examinations of colonial Chesapeake society. Gerald W. Mullin's Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (1972), Edmund S. Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (1975), Lois G. Carr and Lorena S. Walsh's article "The Planter's Wife: The Experience of White Women in Seventeenth-Century Maryland" (1977) printed in the William and Mary Quarterly, Rhys Isaac's The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (1982), and Jan Lewis's The Pursuit of Happiness: Family and Values in Jefferson's Virginia (1983) and Kathleen D. Brown's Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (1996) offer analyses of women, slaves, and poorer whites in the Chesapeake. [5]
Along with social and cultural histories, historians of the Chesapeake continued to study the relationships between politics and the economy that drew the Chesapeake colonies into the Revolution. Ronald Hoffman's A Spirit of Dissension: Economics, Politics, and the Revolution in Maryland (1973), Paul G. E. Clemens's The Atlantic Economy and Colonial Maryland's Eastern Shore: From Tobacco to Grain (1980), Gloria L. Main's Tobacco Colony: Life in Early Maryland, 1650-1720 (1982), and Isaac's Transformation of Virginia forward diverse interpretations of the connections between politics, economy, and revolution and the changes they elicited. [6] Out of this historiographic milieu, Allan Kulikoff produced Tobacco and Slaves in an attempt to synthesize the disparate interpretations and analyses with his own research of the Chesapeake.
Kulikoff's argument
In Tobacco and Slaves, Kulikoff states that there have been two tendencies among modern historians of the Chesapeake. Scholars either stress the importance of economic and demographic patterns of development in the 17th century or the political and cultural transformations in the 18th century. "Both groups," asserts Kulikoff, "tend to slight the significance of the half-century before the Revolution." "In contrast," insists Kulikoff, "the kind of familial, class, and race relations found in the antebellum South first developed in the Chesapeake region between 1720 and 1770." [6] In this period, Kulikoff argues that three structural changes led to the creation of a racial caste system: a decline in opportunity for social mobility for whites, the beginnings of natural increase among whites, and the rise of chattel slavery. [7] These changes encouraged the formation of classes through efforts by the gentry to "mak[e] slaves efficient workers and devis[e] a ruling class ideology." [8]
Kulikoff analyzes the consequences of these structural shifts for white and black residents of the Chesapeake. White inhabitants experienced the creation of patriarchial families, the evolution of kinship networks, and the formation of the gentry and yeoman classes. Slaves, on the other hand, witnessed the development of black communities, the creation of extended families and eventually kinship networks, and finally the development of a new racial etiquette that governed the relationship between master and slave. [9]
The Thirteen Colonies, also known as the Thirteen British Colonies or the Thirteen American Colonies, were a group of British colonies on the Atlantic coast of North America founded in the 17th and 18th centuries. The American Enlightenment led these colonies to the American Revolutionary War. They declared independence as the United States of America in July 1776, which was achieved by 1783 under the Treaty of Paris.
Bacon's Rebellion was an armed rebellion held by Virginia settlers that took place from 1676 to 1677. It was led by Nathaniel Bacon against Colonial Governor William Berkeley, after Berkeley refused Bacon's request to drive Native American Indians out of Virginia. Thousands of Virginians from all classes and races rose up in arms against Berkeley, chasing him from Jamestown and ultimately torching the settlement. The rebellion was first suppressed by a few armed merchant ships from London whose captains sided with Berkeley and the loyalists. Government forces arrived soon after and spent several years defeating pockets of resistance and reforming the colonial government to be once more under direct Crown control.
When the Colony of Virginia was originally chartered in 1584 and established in 1585, the colony lasted for 3 attempts totaling 6 years. In 1590 the colony was abandoned. But nearly 20 years later, the colony was re-settled not far north of the original site. The 2nd charter was issued in 1606 and settled in 1607. It was the first enduring English colony in North America. It followed failed attempts at settlement on Newfoundland by Sir Humphrey Gilbert in 1583 and the Roanoke Colony by Sir Walter Raleigh in the late 1580s.
The colonial history of the United States covers the history of European colonization of North America from the early 17th century until the incorporation of the Thirteen Colonies into the United States after the Revolutionary War. In the late 16th century, England, Kingdom of France, Spanish Empire, and the Dutch Republic launched major colonization expeditions in North America. The death rate was very high among early immigrants, and some early attempts disappeared altogether, such as the English Lost Colony of Roanoke. Nevertheless, successful colonies were established within several decades.
The Province of Maryland was an English and later British colony in North America that existed from 1632 until 1776, when it joined the other twelve of the Thirteen Colonies in rebellion against Great Britain and became the U.S. state of Maryland. Its first settlement and capital was St. Mary's City, in the southern end of St. Mary's County, which is a peninsula in the Chesapeake Bay and is also bordered by four tidal rivers.
The slave codes were laws relating to slavery and enslaved people, specifically regarding the Atlantic slave trade and chattel slavery in the Americas.
The history of the Southern United States spans back thousands of years to the first evidence of human occupation. The Paleo-Indians were the first peoples to inhabit the Americas and what would become the Southern United States. By the time Europeans arrived in the 15th century, the region was inhabited by the Mississippian people, well known for their mound building cultures. European history in the region would begin with the earliest days of the exploration and colonization of North America. The countries of Spain, France, and England eventually explored and claimed parts of what is now the Southern United States, and the cultural influences of each can still be seen in the region today. In the centuries since, the history of the Southern United States has recorded a large number of important events, including the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the American Civil War, the expansion and then ending of slavery in the U.S., the First Great Migration, the Second Great Migration, the Jim Crow era, the American Civil Rights Movement, the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, and the economic and population transformation of the South during the mid-to-late 20th century. Following World War II, industrialization and economic growth further gained speed across the South. Since the late 20th century, the South has seen the arrival of many migrants from other U.S. regions, as well as different international immigrant groups.
The written history of Virginia begins with documentation by the first Spanish explorers to reach the area in the 16th century, when it was occupied chiefly by Algonquian, Iroquoian, and Siouan peoples. In 1607, English colonization began in present day Virginia with Jamestown, which would become the first permanent English settlement in North America.
The tobacco colonies were those that lined the sea-level coastal region of English North America known as Tidewater, extending from a small part of Delaware south through Maryland and Virginia into the Albemarle Sound region of North Carolina. During the seventeenth century, the European demand for tobacco increased more than tenfold. This increased demand called for a greater supply of tobacco, and as a result, tobacco became the staple crop of the Chesapeake Bay Region.
Partus sequitur ventrem was a legal doctrine passed in colonial Virginia in 1662 and other English crown colonies in the Americas which defined the legal status of children born there; the doctrine mandated that children of slave mothers would inherit the legal status of their mothers. As such, children of enslaved women would be born into slavery. The legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem was derived from Roman civil law, specifically the portions concerning slavery and personal property (chattels), as well as the common law of personal property.
The Chesapeake Colonies were the Colony and Dominion of Virginia, later the Commonwealth of Virginia, and Province of Maryland, later Maryland, both colonies located in British America and centered on the Chesapeake Bay. Settlements of the Chesapeake region grew slowly due to diseases such as malaria. Most of these settlers were male immigrants from England who died soon after their arrival. Due to the majority of men, eligible women did not remain single for long. The native-born population eventually became immune to the Chesapeake diseases and these colonies were able to continue through all the hardships.
The history of commercial tobacco production in the United States dates back to the 17th century when the first commercial crop was planted. The industry originated in the production of tobacco for British pipes and snuff. See Tobacco in the American colonies. In late 18th century there was an increase in demand for tobacco in the United States, where the demand for tobacco in the form of cigars and chewing tobacco increased. In the late 19th century production shifted to the manufactured cigarette.
During the British colonization of North America, the Thirteen Colonies provided England with much needed money and resources. However, the culture of the Southern and Chesapeake Colonies was different from that of the Northern and Middle Colonies and from that of their common British colonial power.
Tobacco cultivation and exports formed an essential component of the American colonial economy. It was distinct from rice, wheat, cotton and other cash crops in terms of agricultural demands, trade, slave labor, and plantation culture. Many influential American revolutionaries, including Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, owned tobacco plantations, and were hurt by debt to British tobacco merchants shortly before the American Revolution. For the later period see History of commercial tobacco in the United States.
Slavery in Maryland lasted over 200 years, from its beginnings in 1642 when the first Africans were brought as slaves to St. Mary's City, to its end after the Civil War. While Maryland developed similarly to neighboring Virginia, slavery declined here as an institution earlier, and it had the largest free black population by 1860 of any state. The early settlements and population centers of the province tended to cluster around the rivers and other waterways that empty into the Chesapeake Bay. Maryland planters cultivated tobacco as the chief commodity crop, as the market for cash crops was strong in Europe. Tobacco was labor-intensive in both cultivation and processing, and planters struggled to manage workers as tobacco prices declined in the late 17th century, even as farms became larger and more efficient. At first, indentured servants from England supplied much of the necessary labor but, as their economy improved at home, fewer made passage to the colonies. Maryland colonists turned to importing indentured and enslaved Africans to satisfy the labor demand.
Slavery in Virginia began with the capture and enslavement of Native Americans during the early days of the English Colony of Virginia and through the late eighteenth century. They primarily worked in tobacco fields. Africans were first brought to colonial Virginia in 1619, when 20 Africans from present-day Angola arrived in Virginia aboard the ship The White Lion.
The American gentry were rich landowning members of the American upper class in the colonial South.
Maryland's colonial economic history is marked by a heavy reliance on the tobacco crop. Though it would remain a slave state until the end of the Civil War, it was not until the 1700s that labor began to drive agricultural production in the colony. The colonial-era would also see Maryland begin early industrialization and urbanization, experiment with different monetary systems, and make efforts to diversify its economy.
The John H. Dunning Prize is a biennial book prize awarded by the American Historical Association for the best book in history related to the United States. The prize was established in 1929, and is regarded as one of the most prestigious national honors in American historical writing. Currently, only the author's first or second book is eligible. Laureates include Oscar Handlin, John Higham, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and Gordon Wood. The Dunning Prize has been shared five times, most recently in 1993. No award was made in 1937.
The planter class was a racial and socioeconomic caste which emerged in the Americas during European colonization in the early modern period. Members of the caste, most of whom were settlers of European descent, consisted of individuals who owned or were financially connected to plantations, large-scale farms devoted to the production of cash crops in high demand across Euro-American markets. These plantations were operated by the forced labour of slaves and indentured servants and typically existed in tropical climates, where the soil was fertile enough to handle the intensity of plantation agriculture. Cash crops produced on plantations owned by the planter class included tobacco, sugarcane, cotton, indigo, coffee, tea, cocoa, sisal, oil seeds, oil palms, hemp, rubber trees and fruits. In North America, the planter class formed part of the American gentry.
