There were several change drivers that affected the economic development strategies of the period. The more important dynamics included: (1) settlement of the Piedmont by the planter oligopoly with concomitant extension of the tobacco economy and culture, and the start of a new non-royalist young cohort with its own perspective on the dominant political culture, and how to adapt to change pressures.(2) deterioration in tobacco economics that compelled the planter oligopoly to adjust its “business plan” by diversifying both agricultural commodities and revenue sources; (3) a sustained series of ethnic migrations into Virginia’s Appalachian highlands and Shenandoah Valley, migrations which offered both opportunities and threats; (4) cohort generational change within the planter oligopoly that fractured its internal coherence, and created political-ideological-cultural groupings within the overall planter-oligopoly;
The period begins with the settlement of the Piedmont and the arrival of royal (lieutenant) governor Alexander Spotswood. In the Piedmont we see the founding of Virginia’s first sizable towns/cities, Richmond for example, and the origin of what proved to be a key division within the planter oligopoly: development of a “Northern Neck” faction, and a domestic/royalist Tidewater faction. Virginia during this period, 1676-1710, was characterized by the “four i’s”: immigration of royalist elites continued; with population increasing dramatically; integration of Royalists with mother England; intermarriage of Royalists with English and domestic elites; and indentured servant transition to black slavery.
the Piedmont Settlement
Governor William Berkeley opened up Virginia’s Piedmont, by securing a tentative peace with resident Indian tribes and setting up a series of forts/settlements into which he placed a number of his royalist recruited elites on brand new plantations secured through Berkeley’s land grants. Chief among them proved to be William Byrd I whom we shall discuss as our case study in the settlement of the Piedmont.
The multi-state Piedmont runs from Pennsylvania’s northern borders (Philadelphia marks its eastern PA border), along the edges of the Appalachians through Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, ending in northern Alabama. Its eastern borders typically begin at the Fall Line of each state. It is beautiful country, wooded, alternating flat terrain with low-rolling hills and lots of valleys, moderately fertile with versatile soils, back-dropped by the Appalachians–the Blue Ridge in Virginia. With elevations higher than the coastal Tidewater, its climate was considerably healthier, not swampy, and more comfortable temperatures. The Piedmont was Indian country even after Berkeley’s peace treaty,. Berkeley personally set up several, notably Fort Henry forts along his Fall Line–forts that sometimes developed into contemporary recognizable cities such as Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Petersburg. Fort Henry, for example, is today’s Petersburg. Beyond these cities, heading west until we encounter the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains is the Virginia Piedmont plateau.
Its first white settlers were freed or run-away indentured servants/households, who simply squatted on what was the coastal Tidewater’s western periphery. Few in number, they forged a meager subsistence, and dodged Indian raids. Crisscrossed by rivers such as the James, Appomattox, Potomac, and Rappahannock that flowed through the Tidewater to the sea, it was natural that in time, given site conquest from the Native Americans, that the great planter families would simply follow the river’s path from their coastline plantations, over the Fall Line and into the Piedmont. In some cases, however, it worked in reverse, as newly planted royalist recruits set up plantations at the Fall Line and expanded in both directions.
The first of these was William Byrd I, a son of a royalist gentry-goldsmith, (1652-1704), came to Virginia about 1670 invited a relative. He was awarded acreage under Berkeley’s royalist attraction program (about 1,800-3,000 acres) at the falls of the James River. Byrd’s grant was part of Berkeley’s strategy to locate royalist plantations at colony’s edge to set up a barrier to further Indian raiding. Byrd acquired a further 7,500 acres on the condition he recruit 250 settlers (and tax-payers), he also took over Berkeley’s Fort Charles, a frontier fort and major Indian trading post. In his earliest years in Virginia Byrd I was less a tobacco planter than an Indian fur trader, and despite his use of Berkeley’s attraction program, he took sides against Berkeley in Bacon’s Rebellion. In his written materials, Byrd I referred to himself as a “forester”, which someone more ingracious might translate into a frontiersman. His support for Bacon was prompted by Berkeley’s unwillingness to pacify Indian tribes and stop raiding, both of which were impediments to Byrd I’s budding trading enterprise.
He married into the family of another royalist cavalier, and his children intermarried with other royalist families (Beverley, Bland, and Carters). For more than a third of a century he sent agents, explorers and traders into the Piedmont (and beyond into North and South Carolina), trading rum, guns, ammunition, cloth and kettles, for furs, deerskins, herbs, and whatever made a profit. It is said his pack trains consisted of hundreds of horses to carry the goods. He established a tobacco plantation, built his manor house–and arriving during the transition from indentured servants to black slaves, he took up an active business in importing both. In Byrd I we can see that depending on their location, Berkeley’s royalist elite imports, were also “entrepreneurs” and adventurers. Intermarriage, as much as anything, provided him his identity as a bone-fide Virginia planter/oligarch and his wealth took care of the rest. Combining frontiersman skills and perspective, he also possessed a considerable business acumen, and a Rolodex of family and British contacts.
With Berkeley’s victory over Bacon, Byrd I crossed over to join Berkeley, and turned to politics, entering the Burgesses in 1677. Appointed by the next royal Governor, he entered the Council of State in 1683, later serving as Virginia’s auditor-receiver general, the colony’s chief collector of taxes. In the political chaos that became Virginia’s colony-level government after Berkeley, Byrd 1 served three terms as Virginia’s “president” or acting governor.
Byrd could have perceived himself either as an English landed gentleman … or as a successful colonial merchant. … Byrd underwrote the importation of servants and slaves, both to labor in his own fields and resale … Over a period of three decades he gained title to over 30,000 acres … more than half amassed through the headright system, and a third coming from the importation of slaves… Landing areas along the James River at his plantations … enabled Byrd to operate warehouses and stores that served lesser planters in the interior. In the absence of towns, landing areas functioned as small trading centers… Byrd was an original trustee of the college of William and Mary…. Byrd founded one of the great families of colonial Virginia, but his family life was not typical for a seventeenth century planter … His first son spent more of his early life in England than Virginia … he died in 1704 [1]
His son, William II, cemented the family’s dominance over the economy, Virginia’s settlement, and its politics. Returning to Virginia upon his father’s death in 1705, he was appointed to the Council of State in 1709–serving on that body to his death in 1744. A surveyor by training, he established the boundaries between Virginia and North Carolina, and founded the town of Richmond at the Fall Line of the James River in 1733. An extensive writer, and historian, Byrd II, unlike his father, lived the stereotypical life of Virginia’s planter class.
His “manor” was his personal domain, and literally its residents were in his mind his property, whether they were free, indentured, or slave. He led settlement of Virginia’s “southside region”, and established there a network of families and plantation over which he presided as almost a baron. The region was so remote, however, Byrd II, although he owned in excess of 105,000 acres, could find few buyers–and so he wound up selling and leasing it to a new generation of migrants that were pouring in–the Scots-Irish, who he labeled as “the Goths and Vandals of old”. Byrd II, unwillingly it seems, took advantage of new ethnic migrants that were coming into Virginia from the Great Wagon Road–dispossessing the former indentured servants who squatted there [2].
Settlement of the Piedmont was a gradual affair, as evidenced by one the career of one of its little known but impactful settler, Peter Jefferson. Virginia born in 1708 of a ship’s captain, trained as a surveyor Peter was an early settler in the western Piedmont, an original settler in Albermarle County. He married well into the Randolph family, and established his Shadwell plantation in 1741-2. Thomas, his third child and first son was born at Shadwell in 1743. He seemingly had well-deserved local reputation as an Indian fighter, historian Virginius Dabney characterizes him as a powerful and rugged frontiersman … of intellectual breath and curiosity”; Joseph Ellis describes him as a “moderately successful planter, with a local reputation for physical strength and a flair for adventure as an explorer and surveyor of western lands” [3]. Jefferson died early in 1757, owning sixty slaves at the time. Peter Jefferson overlapped William Byrd II, and their life’s activities support our assertion that Virginia’s Piedmont settlement consumed more time than most reader’s are aware; it was still in progress as late as the mid 1750’s.
In testimony to the rough and tumble that was western Piedmont as late as the 1750’s was Governor Gooch’s hiring of Peter Jefferson and Joshua Fry to survey the Shenandoah and prepare the first known map of the Great Wagon Road–prompting increased migration into that area. This map-making was related to Jefferson and Fry’s leadership position in the incorporation of the Loyal Land Development Company, a rival of the more famous Ohio Land Development Company, in 1749 (discussed in the next module). Along with its incorporation, the Loyal Land Company was awarded a land grant of 800,000 acres. Fry and Jefferson clearly had their eye of on the Shenandoah Valley and the opportunities opening up with Pennsylvania’s German and Scots Irish in-migration.
It also evidences the distinctiveness of Piedmont’s planter class from the more traditional Tidewater coastal geographies. In this distinction we may see a potential yawning gap between George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. A generation apart, these two Virginia elites did not share the same version of the Tidewater political culture, not did they arise from similar European roots. The former was part of Berkeley’s Royalist political culture, and the latter a scion of a near frontiersman made planter-plantation owner. The mantle of economic and political success attained by the first generation Piedmont plantation entrepreneurs was transferred to their offspring, and accepted by coastal Tidewater elites. Usually lumped together, with little fanfare or notice, we can see how temporal-generational change modifies a political culture. Thomas Jefferson was not a chip off Peter Jefferson’s block, Thomas values, lifestyle, and life experience was not similar to his father’s.
In micro, this was the pattern followed by a number of prominent Piedmont planter families. The Randolphs followed Byrds along the James, as well, as did Jefferson’s great grand-father (Peter’s father)–moving interior into the Piedmont to the Appomattox Rivers. Their descendants moved further west into the edge of the Piedmont, into today’s Albemarle County, home of Monticello.
Thus over a series of generations each river network was settled by a planter and gentry households-families. The process was made possible by the admission of these families into the Governor’s Royal Council, which retained the power to make land grants of its choosing. Almost all of this settlement occurred in the aftermath of Berkeley and Bacon’s Rebellion, a period in which Crown control by the Royal Governor was bitterly resisted by the Royal Council, the Burgesses and the planter aristocracy. Land grants administration and the incremental settlement of the Piedmont fell between the colonial policy cracks in the period after the Glorious Restoration (1688). This lack of interest by London was a function of its mercantilist trade focus, and it will be little surprise that when London’s interest finally was triggered, it was on the taxing of the region’s agricultural exports, and the propensity of Piedmont plantation owners to “smuggle” their workforce [indentured servants] with their own network of ship owners.
Pushback from the Crown--Only in the mid to late 1690’s did London, through its new Board of Trade, begin to look at Virginia land grants and settlement. Crown policy focused on religious toleration, promoting/regulating colonial trade, securing the defense of its colonial perimeters from hostile Indian and European incursions, establishing a postal system and new institutions such as a reformed Board of Trade (led during much of this period by philosopher John Locke), its Vice-Admiralty. The Crown and the Board of Trade had little sympathy for the headright system, and the virtual monopoly enjoyed by the Council of State over land grants and tobacco export.
In 1698, John Locke in the Board of Trade began a formal investigation. The findings of a report, “the Present State of Virginia” “described a fraudulent land system that retarded both tobacco production and the peopling of the colony“–the root cause of which was “fraud was rife in land policy … [causing] land hoarding’. Locke’s efforts to clean this up were too little, too late as “the gentry had already established themselves as a permanent powerful landholding elite capable of obstructing Crown policy. … A hierarchy of place–a patriarchy was … permanent through control over land and tobacco production in the hands of a small elite. Government officials owned 60 percent of all landholdings over 2,000 acres” [4]. Simply put, as we discovered with the institutionalization of slavery, by the first decade of the 18th century (1700) the hegemony of a tobacco plantation export economic base, and the ability of Virginia’s domestic elites to counter the authority of the Crown and taking advantage of Virginia distance and isolation from London, and Jamestown lack of access into both Tidewater and the emerging Piedmont develop a decentralized authority of those elites over the Virginia countryside. Heinemann labels the policy system that had developed in the interim between Berkeley and 1710 as the “Planters Patriarchy” [5].
Hardened over the decades that followed Berkeley, until the arrival of Governor Alexander Spotswood and encompassing the Northern Neck land grant, the original areas inhabited during the Jamestown period along the coast and byways of the many small rivers, channels along the Chesapeake, and the territories opened up by Berkeley (Norfolk area, and an entry into the eastern Petersburg Piedmont), the colony was governed formally by its royally appointed governor, but checked by a Royal Council/upper legislature and a lower House of Burgesses–both of which quickly and easily became dominated by the new royalist family elites.
The clear preference of the latter two legislative bodies was for decentralized, private initiatives, usually driven almost exclusively by one or another of the royalist family groupings and their allies. “Virginia’s planting elite owned not merely a large proportion of arable farmland in the tidewater, but also much of what little urban real estate was in the colony. … The great tidewater families also controlled much undeveloped land on the western frontier of Virginia. … [As a consequence] the frontier [in Virginia] never functioned as an engine of equality; its effect on {Virginia] wealth distribution was to reinforce [the tidewater royalist elite] [6].
One downside to the royalist plantation movement into the western Piedmont was that it activated the old and persistent problem of Native American resistance to white incursion. If that were not sufficient, by 1700 fear of the French who were especially active in geographies accessible from the Mississippi River were at fever pitch. The Nine Years War had just ended in 1697, and the War of Spanish Succession was about to erupt in 1702, when the Burgesses passed an act “For Better Strengthening the Frontiers and Discovering the Approaches of the Enemy” in 1701.
Little noted, this act changed the character of Virginia’s land development and settlement of its western frontiers. The act thought in terms of organized settlement by land development companies, not individual homesteaders. The act permitted land grants from ten to thirty thousand acres, with twenty year tax abatement, to companies only, provisional they would quickly settle these areas with new residents. The idea was to stock these frontier areas with suitable militia soldiers able to resist incursion “by the enemy” and required construction of a fort in the center of the land grant. As a side-thought, in 1705 it was amended to include fifty free acres to settlement of the “upcountry” (Shenandoah) [7].
Fairfax’s Northern Neck.
Of great impact to settlement of Virginia’s western lands was who “controlled” them. The sword of Damocles that dangled over the head of Virginia land control was a 1649 land grant by Charles II to a number of his royalist supporters in the English Civil War (including Berkeley’s brother). The grant totaled over 5.2 million acres, and was called the Northern Neck; it ran in a band from the Chesapeake Bay to the Allegheny–Blue Ridge-northern Shenandoah to the Potomac River in Maryland. It is a substantial portion of what today is Virginia and West Virginia.
Immense by anyone’s standards, the grant required taxes paid by its landowners/renters (quit-rents) to the recipients of the land grants–talk about tax abatement. The Northern Neck grant’s and tax policy’s practical effect was that much of Tidewater and northern Shenandoah Virginia was given economic autonomy from the colony’s government. Within its boundaries a group of aristocratic/gentry’ elite ran their fief as if it were a private empire. It was land grants derived from the Northern Neck that paid for Berkeley’s attraction of royalist elite recruitment program and as we have discovered it was this area which Berkeley was able to post a considerable number of his recruits. The huge mass of land created equally huge and powerful land owners–that exerted considerable impact on Burgess and the Council of State.
By the late 1720’s, however, the vagaries of land inheritance caused title of the land to pass into the hands of the Culpeper family, and then to one man, Thomas Lord Fairfax (in 1719). The Northern Neck grant became one of Virginia’s chief political controversy during the 1730’s and 1740’s. With the Northern Neck in the hands of one individual, the previous tolerant consensus regarding its autonomy eroded quickly, amid a fear of an England-resident outsider with sole discretion or both grants and proceeds. It mattered greatly that Fairfax’s grandfather had commanded a Puritan Army that overthrew Charles I. He was not a Royalist, but a Parliamentarian–a skeleton in the family closet that will matter greatly during the American Revolution–which BTW our Thomas Fairfax will live to see.
Byrd II petitioned the English Privy Council challenging Fairfax’s claim which included alerting the Council that the quit-rents from the Northern Neck “is about as much Land as at present pays Quit rents to his Majesty in all the rest of Virginia“[8]. That commenced “the war of the maps” in which each party commissioned surveying and map making of the immense, hostile area, and submitted them to the judgment of the Privy Council. In any event, the settlement of Virginia’s western lands became a serious agenda item form policy-makers and private elites during the interlude. The House of Burgesses approved on its own, several land grants involving Fairfax lands as early as 1722. Fairfax (residing in England), fought back in 1929, launching a formal complaint which eventually fell to the British Board of Trade to arbitrate.
The matter was not resolved until 1746, in Fairfax’s favor–although the Burgesses-approved transactions were declared valid as well. Payment of taxes to Fairfax was, however, reconfirmed. Returning from England Fairfax hired his neighbor to formally survey his holdings, sixteen year old George Washington. Fairfax, in fact, was responsible for Washington’s training as a surveyor–and biographers suggest Fairfax became Washington’s surrogate father and certainly mentor-adviser. They would be business associates as well. To help resolve claim settlement and make land sales more secure, Governor Gooch in 1749 hired two surveyors, Joshua Fry and frontiersmen-plantation owner, Peter Jefferson to properly survey the western lands of the Northern Neck.
In any event, Fairfax who had never stepped foot in America, lived off the quitrents, and hired a Virginia plantation owner, Robert Carter to manage affairs in Virginia. When German Shenandoah immigration gathered momentum, Lord Fairfax and his manager, Robert Carter, embraced it, offering (for its place and time) flexible leases that so long as quitrents were paid, left the lessor much autonomy over land use and lacking a term clause conveyed considerable security to the lessor as well, encouraging improvements made at lessor expense. In this way, German homestead, yeoman farming took root (sorry). Fairfax-Carter provided land grants to jump-start settlements, and on occasion land grants for community facilities. By the end of the decade, however, a massive legal struggle had developed among certain of the Royalist Families and the colony of Virginia–led can coordinated by the Byrd family.
Carter did so well, when he died (1732) he was reputed to own 1,000 slaves and was Virginia’s wealthiest man. Fairfax read Carter’s obit (I am not making this up), and realized what a gold mine this property was. He packed his bags, set off for Virginia and settled in between 1735 and 1737. Fairfax was required to revisit London in the mid-1740’s to bring the legal dispute which had lingered for the better part of fifteen years to a resolution. He successfully secured his claim through the Privy Council. On his return in 1745, he constructed his new estate in Clark County, and in 1748 hired young George Washington to survey his Shenandoah holdings. Settling in, in the style to which he had been accustomed, Fairfax set up estates/manors for himself and family members in several areas of his grant. He never married, and today is under attack for his possible relationships with Black slave women.
In the course of his long life [Fairfax]. a circle formed around him. Lord Fairfax’s drawing room became a school of manners for young gentlemen of the Northern Neck–among them many Washingtons, Lees, Marshalls (including John of Supreme Court fame, and his descendant, George of WWII distinction) and others who shared a distinctive set of beliefs. The Northern Neck [gave] the culture of Virginia a special meaning. On this frontier there was little of democracy and none of equality, but a strong tradition of service character, right conduct, and the rule of law. … A cultural tradition was planted by Lord Fairfax at Greenway Court [his estate. It took root in the fertile soil of the Northern Neck and flowered in the careers of George Washington in the Revolution … the Northern Neck was the cradle of their culture, and Lord Fairfaxs was its founding father [9].
One wonders if George Washington’s and John Marshall’s distinctive and long-lasting affiliation with the post-Revolutionary Federalist Party–and in particular their willingness to embrace a strong national government and a national, not state perspective, may derive from this cultural tradition. Washington’s as a land developer, did not principally focus on his home state, but rather extended to its western {West Virginia] lands–and lands in other states (Pennsylvania and New York). Washington (and Marshall’s) willingness to also not only embrace, but take leadership in the building of developmental transportation infrastructure to access their western trans-Appalachian interior–which separated them from many Virginia Tidewater adherents–may also be traced to Fairfax’s influence? In any case, this arrangement with Fairfax persisted through 1775 when Lord Fairfax, protected by George Washington among others (despite his Loyalist inclinations), retained title to his land until the Virginia Act of 1779. The 88 year-old Fairfax died in 1781 on one of his estates.
Footnotes
[1] https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/byrd_william_ca_1652-1704#start_entry
[2] David Hackett Fischer and James C. Kelly, Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement (University of Virginia Press, 2000), p. 88ff
[3] Virginius Dabney, Virginia: the New Dominion (University Press of Virginia, p. 1971), p. 93; Joseph Ellis, American Spinx (Vintage, 1998), p.30
[4] James Blair, Henry Hartwell, and Edward Chilton”the Present State of Virginia“, 1697
[5] Ronald j. Heinemann, John G. Kolk, Anthony S. Parent Jr., and William G. Shade, Old Dominion, New Commonwealth (University of Virginia Press, 2007), pp. 60-2
[6] Ronald j. Heinemann, John G. Kolk, Anthony S. Parent Jr., and William G. Shade, Old Dominion, New Commonwealth (University of Virginia Press, 2007), pp. 60-2
[7] Ronald j. Heinemann, John G. Kolk, Anthony S. Parent Jr., and William G. Shade, Old Dominion, New Commonwealth (University of Virginia Press, 2007), pp. 60-2
[8] David Hackett-Fischer and James C. Kelly, Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement (University of Virginia Press, 2000), pp. 85-6.
[9] David Hackett-Fischer and James C. Kelly, Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement, pp. 86-7
Ron W. Coan 