USA > Virginia > City of Hampton > City of Hampton > Early history of Elizabeth City County, Virginia, 1607-1783 > Part 4
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VII
MAKING A LIVING
How long it is since tobacco has been grown in Elizabeth City County no one can say, but it is so very long a time that there are still old timers, well versed in their county's tradition, who will swear that tobacco was never grown there. Nevertheless it was the staple of the county as of all Virginia in Colonial days, and the basis of the currency, notes being issued against tobacco placed on de- posit in the warehouse. The county taxes were levied in
tobacco only until 1720. After that time 1
it was usually made optional with the individual taxpayer whether he paid his tithes in pounds of tobacco or in English pence; but the levies were still being reckoned in tobacco for some years after the close of the Revolutionary War.
Yet to learn much of anything about the individual tobacco plantations is difficult. There are actually only individual two such personat references in the Colonial records now ex- 2 tant. One is in the will of Thomas Wythe made in in 1694. He left his son Thomas four hogsheads of "sweet scented tobac- co containing 600 rootes" to be put in the hands of his brother until the boy became sixteen. In the meantime con- signments of tobacco were to be shipped yearly to England. The other is an inventory of tobacco brands of the county made in 1695. 3
William Mallory of the Poquoson district was the most considerable planter, his produce for
1. Court Records, Nevember 7,8 1729.
2. Ibid, September 18, 1694.
3. Ibid, August 3, 1695.
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that year being valued at 370/19/2. He is mentioned as "im- porting" this amount of tobacco in the ship Barnard. The phrase "importing" may be interpreted to mean that he had shipped it around from Back River to deposit it in the Hampton warehouse for inspection as required by law, and the brands recorded must have been the trademarks burnt into the hogsheads to identify the produce of the several planters.
That tobacco was being produced in the county throughout the eighteenth century is indicated by the mention of payments to town constables and others "for viewing the 4
tobacco fields" and the fact that keeping the tobacco ware- house in repair was a public project as much on the minds of the justices as the upkeep of the courthouse or the public 5 wharf. In 1730 it stood on a Mr. Miles' lot. This was un- questionably the warehouse that was flooded by the hurricane of 1749, the county's most sensational convulsion of nature until the famous hurricane of 1933. After the catastrophe the burgesses made good the losses of those planters whose product had been damaged in this primitive species of bank failure by paying them out of public funds at the rate of 0/16/8 per hundred pounds. The list of the planters thus reimbursed tells us something about who was going in for 6 tobacco planting at that date: William Westwood had lost twenty-four hogsheads; Charles Turnbull eighteen; Mary Tabb one, and Priscilla Curle three.
4. Court Records, November 23, 1737.
5. Hening, Statutes at Large, IV, 266.
6. Ibid, VI, 236.
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This disaster having demonstrated the inadequacy of the old warehouse, the tobacco inspectors temporarily rented 7 a building from Alexander Kennedy at 7 L a year , and the justices ordered the sheriff to sell the land on which the old one had stood, "the same being subject to being over- 8 A more suitable piece of land on
flowed with high tides. "
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waterfront was bought from Wilson Curle for 25 L. Henry Allen undertook the construction of the new warehouse for 10 71/15/0 and turned it over to the county in 1753.
That Elizabeth City County ever went in for large scale production of cotton, the great staple of the South in the next era, is improbable. There is just one mention
of cotton in the records. John Weymouth's will of 1791 itemizes 216 pounds of cotton at threepence per pound.
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Aside from the tobacco fields the county was given over to peach and apple orchards, corn and wheat fields, and pasture lands, for the wills amply demonstrate that the plan- ters raised all kinds of livestock. There is evidence that some of them made something of the tall pine woods that set off their fields, for in 1753 the justices added to the duties of the inspectors of pork, beef and flour, the inspection of 12 tar, pitch and turpentine. in the main their estates were not overly large, not of baronial extent at least; after all there were only eighteen square miles to the county.
7. Court Records, March 16, 1752. 8. Ibid, April 8, 1751.
9. Ibid, July 7, 1752.
19. Ibid, August 8, 1752.
11. Deeds and Wills, Volume 34, January 27, 1791.
12. Court Records, August 8, 1753.
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The planters of old Hampton, though some of them came of ancient lineage, and all of them owned slaves, were funda- mentally just a group of all round farmers.
Since the planters had corn to grind, it was natural that the earliest of Hampton's infant industries was the grist mill. The first mention of such a mill is in a note about a grist and saw mill established at the head of Back River about 1689 by a Yankee named Isaac Molyn. 13 Molyn had
come from New England for this purpose along with a Negro woman named Tona, and three workmen. The Frenchman, Bertram Servant, had paid the passage to Hampton and the keep there of this crew, and was therefore given by the justices the right to manage the mills until he got his money back.
Later when Molyn regained control of his mill he went in for some sharp practice, if one can believe the curious and rather confused story an ex-employee told the jus-
14 tices about in 1692. According to this employee the mill was capable of grinding Indian corn into as fine a meal as wheat, but Molyn had cursed him for doing so, and had fin- ally sold his good grindstones out of the county. Molyn was at that time managing the mill single handed except for the help of Tona.
Applications "for leave to build a mill" came to the justices nearly every year. Their procedure in such a
Court Records, November 18, 1689.
13. 14. Ibid, April, 1692.
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case is illustrated by their action on the petition of Samuel Tomkins to build one at Finches' Dam near the boun- 15
dary of York County in 1729. The sheriff, Robert Armis- tead, who himself had a mill at Back River, was ordered to summon a jury of twelve freeholders in the Finches' Dam neighborhood to examine all the lands on both sides of the mill run that might be affected. Ultimately Tomkins was granted his petition on payment of ten shillings damages to ane John Patrick.
In the days when the Virginia burgesses, egged on by their majesties William and Mary and later Queen Anne, were trying to cause towns to spring up in their dominion by legislative incantation, they were also trying to pro- mote infant industries whose infancy was to be prolonged two centuries. Just one faint echo of all that effort can be heard in the surviving Hampton records. In 1696 Walter Bayley, who had come into the county with his wife, three 16 children and four Negro slaves two years before was
awarded 400 pounds of tobacco at the county levy "for en- couragement in making ye prime piece of lynen cloth 22 1 yards. " 17 There is no evidence, however, that Mr. Bayley, thus encouraged, went on with the textile industry. Spinning and weaving was left to the patient hands of the housewives who provided what was necessary without applause from the House of Burgesses of the county courthouse.
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15. Court Records, October 3, 26, 1729.
16. Ibid, March 18, 1694/5.
17. Ibid, November 28, 1696.
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Every trade required for a self-sustaining communi- ty was practiced in Hampton. Apprentices were bound to learn the trades of sawyer, carpenter, shoemaker, and the 18 "art and mistery of a cooper". Scattered through the indentures of 1726, 1727 one finds references to John Ry- land, glazier, John Smith, blacksmith, John Henry Rombrough, joiner, John Middleton, carpenter, Benjamin Rolfe, shipwright. It is a matter of tradition that Hampton was in. those days a thriving shipbuilding center, though tradition cautiously adds that the ships in question were probably pretty small craft. There was a goldsmith up at Mill Creek, whose ad- vertisement in the Virginia Gazette of Jun 2, 1738, indi- cates that barter was customary in the county's simple economy. "Samuel Galt makes and mends all sorts of clocks and watches, gold, silver and jewellers work, also billiard balls and dice for cash gold or silver, tobacco, pork, wheat or corn either at his own house on Mill Creek near 19 Hampton, or Mr. John McDowell's in Hampton."
The importance of shipping to Hampton has al- ready been discussed, and the important merchant Alexander Mckenzie has been mentioned elsewhere. It may be also reasonably supposed that many of the lesser county folk of the period supported themselves by fishing. The Kecoughtans had done so, and today the throngs of white oyster boats in the river, and the wharves of the "crab factories" on its
18. Court Records, September 17, 1718.
19. Quoted in the William and Mary Quarterly, IX,2, p. 122.
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shores are among the picturesque sights of the community. But the only actual evidence that Hampton was a fishing village back in the 1700's, so far as the records are con- cerned, is an occasional reference to a pair of "oister tongs" in sundry wills.
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VIII
THE BONDSMEN
1.
The Indentured Servants
Henry Irwin, who made something of a stir in Hamp- ton in the first three decades of the eighteenth century, must have been a trying person to have around. Judging him from his appearance in the records, he was self-important and irascible. Not only did he precipitate a community row when he succeeded in getting Governor Spotswood to oust the county clerk, as has been recounted, but he subsequently got himself involved in numerous lawsuits, was once threatened by an irate fellow citizen, and what is more, his servants apparently ran away from him at every opportunity.
Too much perhaps can be made of the last point. Servants ran away, in defiance of their solemn bond, from some of the best people in the community, Thomas Wythe for instance. Nevertheless one had a sneaking sympathy with the servants that ran away from Henry Irwin. But if he had been a harsh master, they had their revenge when in 1728 he became insolvent. Then a year later, thanks to this bank- ruptcy, an incident occurred startling to those unfamiliar with the institution of the indentured servant. In order to raise money to satisfy claims on his estate by Francis Mal- lory and John King, the court ordered his three remaining 1 servants sold at public outcry.
The picture, novel to modern readers, of free born
1. Court Records, January 29, 1727/28, February 21, 1728/29.
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white men being auctioned off at "public outcry" for the re- mainder of their terms of service suggests the auction block of slavery, and raises the question of to what extent the lot of the indentured servant resembled that of the slave. Both systems were attempts to solve the labor problem of the new world, the slaves gradually supplanting the servants, because their life servitude brought more profit to the mas- ter than the temporary bondage of the others. But while the white man's servitude lasted it was in its superficial aspects at least much like that of the Negro's.
Much of the interest of the records of the early eighteenth century lies in the picture they present of the transition from the use of white bonded labor to slavery. Negro slaves, to be sure, were common in Elizabeth City County in the late seventeenth century, and by the beginning of the eighteenth it is possible that they already outnumbered the white servants. But for a time in that period the balance seems to have been nearly even; then about 1750 the indentured servant as such disappears from Hampton en- tirely, though two modified phases of that system, the ap- prenticing of youths and the binding out of children, remain common as late as the Civil War.
That servants were still being bought off masters of ships is indicated by an entry of July 18, 1694, recording
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John Smith's purchase of a servant named Thomas Best from Captain Parsons in the York River. Best's indenture suggests the close similarity between the servant and the apprentice, and emphasizes the fact that the former's duties were hardly ever domestic. it provided that he was to serve seven years "to learn ye art and trade of a smith, to be paid a com- pleate sett of smith's tools with corn and cloathes according to custom" at the end of his service.
In November, 1728, there is an interesting record of a fraudulent sale. John Butterworth had bought of John West a woman servant only to find that the latter, one Mary Gorman, was subject to a warrent"by hue and cry from North Carolina for the murther of her bastard child." A jury ordered West to pay Butterworth damages of seven pounds, five shillings. 2
There is even record of one convict servant in Hamp- ton, Eliza Gleadon. According to Bruce most convict ser- vants had been transported for trivial offenses or were mere political prisoners. Eliza Gleadon, however, was apparently a more definitely undesirable sort, for in December, 1749, she was charged with felony and imprisoned pending trial in Williamsburg. 3
The years of service were stipulated in the in- denture, but they could be increased if the servant com- mitted any offense against society or his master, or even if
2. Court Records, November 21, 1728.
3. Ibid, December 26, 1749.
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he suffered a serious illness. A twelfthmonth was added the term of Joshua Curle's maidservant to compensate her master for the 500 pounds of tobacco he had paid the church wardens 4 who had presented her at court for having a bastard child. Eleven weeks were added the term of George Hudson, a servant of John Borland, when in 1721 he was jailed for threatening to burn the town. Two of the weeks were to make up for the one he had spent in jail, and ninewere to repay his master 5
for the cost of the court proceedings.
Running away, or "eloping" as the records express it, was the most common cause of increased servitude. If a master tired of his servant, he could sell him for the rest of his term, but if a servant tired of his master, he could not walk out on him, though he frequently did so. When he was captured after such a walkout, his term was increased at the rate of two days for every one that he had been absent, plus one and a half months for every hundredweight of tobac- co spent by his master in retrieving him. Thus, though William Welch had fled the service of Henry Irwin only two days in November, 1724, he was sentenced to serve ten months extra for the 700 pounds of tobacco Irwin had spent in "taking him up". 6 John Dillon, who had been brought back to Irwin in June of the same year after two years and two months of absence, was ordered to serve out his term with
Similar cases
the addition of four years and four months. 7 4. Court Records, June 16, 1731.
5. Ibid, June 21, 1721.
6. Ibid, November 18, 1724.
7. Ibid, April 22, 1785 June 16, 1724.
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a bound.
If it seems not unjust that a servant should give double time for running away, it does seem strange to read that the same June court that increased John Dillon's term also added a year to Michael Whiton's for no reason except that his master, Samuel Sweny, had got him "cured of a cer- tain distemper." Apparently the servant's health during service was considered his own lookout rather than his mas- ter's responsibility, for in April, 1725, William Rupall was ordered to serve Lowry Irwin two and a half years ad- ditional "in consideration that the said Irwin do cure him of a sore leg. " 8
As has been said in connection with Henry Irwin, servants were like slaves a definite property to be dis- posed of with any other part of the estate at something resembling a public auction. There is record of such a transferring of property in 1727 when it was provided that Anne Bayley serve John Henry Rambough "the remainder of the time she was to serve John Middleton, who is going out of the Colony. " 9 It is even true that public restrictions were put on servants similar to those put on slaves. One of the complaints against Sarah Brian, suspected of a felony in 1735, was that she "keeps a disorderly house
10 and deals with servants."
There were, however, vital respects in which the
8. Court Records, April 22, 1725.
9. Ibid, November 16, 1727.
10. See page 4 4, Note 18.
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status of a servant was totally unlike that of a slave. Like any other white inhabitant he was entitled to trial before the General Court at Williamsburg for serious offenses, where- as the slave was tried an executed in the county. And more important still they could complain by petition to the county court of mistreatment at the hands of their masters. It is significant that in the whole history of Hampton prior to emancipation there is only one record of a complaint to the justices in behalf of a slave, and that involved public property, the neglected Negro woman attached to the Eaton 11 School in 1694. On the other hand there are many records of servants who brought abusive or neglectful masters to account in court.
Damages of forty shillings were awarded Benjamin Aldridge in 1725, when after his return from an "elopment" he complained of being "strip'd and whip'd" by his master, Samuel Sweny. 12 Elizabeth Haroty was freed in 1716 from a master who had beaten her and had refused to give her "dyet sufficient for a white servant", and was sent back to a 13 former master in North Carolina. Bryan Penny was in 1728 or- dered to take proper care of Mary Saxton, who was in 14 danger of losing a leg through lack of nursing. Anne Gad- bury was in 1726 protected by the sheriff from the abuse of her master and mistress, who were bonded to keep the
11. See page 6 1.
12. Court Records, April 22, 1725.
13. Ibid, June 20, 1716.
14. Ibid, November July 17, 1728.
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peace against her and ordered to "find her in warm apparel. " And most important difference of all, the longest bondage ended at last, and the servant collected his wage and departed his master's house into freedom. The wages, set by law, were nevertheless varied by private agreement. Where one took three pounds Sterling, another accepted "two shirts, a pair of shoes and stockings and a jacket waistcoat in lieu of what the law allows." Henry Irwin didn't want to pay Robert Howard anything when his time was up in 1724, but Howard took the case to court and was awarded ten bushelds of Indian corn, thirty shillings in goods and money, and 16 a musket worth twenty shillings. Poor Robert Scarf, servant of John Smith, deceased ferryman, may not have got anything. He was, to be sure, awarded "what the law allows" out of the estate, but with the dubious proviso "if he (the executor) 17 has so much remaining in his hands.
Indentured servitude, especially in the early days, was as honorable as apprenticeship. Fiske points out the significance of the fact that one of Elizabeth City County's early burgesses, William Worlich, had been a servant brought to the Colony in 1622. That, however, was in the beginning. By the eighteenth century the institution was growing out of its usefulness. Quite likely there was resent- ment at the similarity of the servant's lot to that of the slave; the phrasing of Elizabeth Haroty's complaint hints
15. Court Records, November 15, 1726.
16. Ibid, July 15, 1724.
17. Ibid, March 18, 1723/4.
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at such a feeling. And certainly the large number of runa- ways suggests a widespread impatience with the constraints of the bondsman's life. The local records contain material not only about runaways from Hampton, abut about fleeing servants from the uttermost parts of Virginia who had been captured in Hampton where they had hoped to find refuge on a ship bound out of the Colony.
In any case, by the middle of the century the in- dentured white servant as such is rarely heard of and the Negro slave has become securely established as the economic basis of society.
2. The Slaves
At the same time that the Negro slaves were in- voluntarily displacing the indentured servants as the laborers of the county, they were also supplanting another type of laborer of whom less has been heard, the Indian servant.
Exactly how many Indian servants or slaves there were in early Elizabeth City county it is impossible to determine. At least seven are specifically mentioned in the records between 1693 and 1728. Unquestionably there were more earlier, when Hampton was closer to the frontier. But even so they were probably never numerous, for it is
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on record that the Indian never took kindly to bondage in a land which had once been all his own.
The Indian's status was rather uncertain. The
first reference to an Indian is in the inventory of the es- tate of William Marshall in March, 1693, where in a list of nine Negro slaves there is included an item "one Indian woman if a slave for life at 25/0/0." That is the only direct mention of an Indian slave, though later references to an "Indian woman belonging" to William Smelt are nearly as ambiguous. 18 Usually, however, the Indian is named as a servant.
In 1716 occurs a petition for freedom on the part of Thomas, an Indian servant belonging to Major William Armistead, which clears up the matter at least as far as Thomas is con- cerned. Having demonstrated to the court that he had been sold to his master for thirty-one years and that he had ful- filled his term, he was set free. 19 Inasmuch as a white in- dentured servant was never bound for more than seven years, however greatly his term might later be increased for various causes, this suggests that the status of the Indian was analogous to that of the mulatto child of a white woman, who could also be bound to a thirty year term.
The last appearance of an Indian in the records is the girl Marcellina, attached to the estate of John Dudley, who was ordered sold at a public outcry to satisfy a claim on 20 the estate for 17/17/4 After that time the planters de-
18. Court Records, November 16, 1715.
19. Ibid, March 25, 1715/16. 20. Ibid, December 18, 1728.
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pended wholly on the Negro for labor, a dependence which was to bring undreamed of disaster upon Hampton.
That tragedy was still nearly a century and a half in the future, however, and if there were any in pre-Revolu- tionary Hampton who saw it coming, they didn't put their views on record. The Negro slave had become indispensable. Unlike the white or Indian servant he was in bondage for life, with no irritating if's about it, and he and his increase could be handed down from one generation to another. And if he happened to be not needed on one's own property for a time, there were always planters eager to hire him out, usually at the rate of three pounds Sterling a year.
The money value of the Negro slave rose consider- ably in the course of the century. The prices of the nine slaves mentioned in the Marshall inventory of 1693 vary from a nineteen shilling estimate of "one old decrepid Negroo woman" to twenty-five pounds apiece for two able bodied men, and twenty-five and twenty pounds respectively for two women. In 1725 the justices certified that James, a Negro 21
condemned to be hanged for theft was worth forty pounds and another condemned in 1748 was certified at forty-five 22 pounds. In 1761 the price set on Will, accused of trying to poison his master, was eighty pounds. 23 These va liuations of condemned slaves were made by the justices for the bene- fit of the master, who could apply to the Assembly for com- pensation.
21. Court Records, November 12, 1725.
22. Ibid, June 21, 1748.
23. Ibid, October 31, 1761.
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If a Negro were worth good money in his prime, and could be hired out by the year to his master's profit, it was also true that in sickness, or in feeble old age when his estimated value dwindled to the price of a few yards of dimity, he remained his master's responsibility. In the years 1791, 1792, John King, administrator of Francis Mallory's estate, took in 370/3/6 from the hiring out of the Negroes, but that sum was far from being clear profit; his faithfully kept accounts are full of items of expenditures for "tea and sugar for Judah very sick", quarts of molasses for "three sick wenches and children", "one bottle of wine for Abraham sick. " 24
In this the slave was probably better off than some indentured servants who served extra time for being cured of a distemper by their masters, and were presently turned into the world on their own with no assurance that if they fared badly they would be cared for in old age.
Not all the Negroes in eighteenth century Hampton were enslaved, however, and even in bondage there were grades of freedom. Joane, the Negro attached to the Eaton school in 1696 was virtually self-supporting. In November of that year the justices declared her levy-free because of her age, and allowed her whatever she could make in raising tobacco and corn for her own use. 25
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