The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on Anglo-American Society

Bys: Tate, Thad W. and Ammerman, David L.

Book Overview

The rediscovery of the early Chesapeake, emigration, and marriage and family are three of the essay topics. Other subjects include environment, disease, and mortality; immigration and opportunity; parental death in a particular county; settlement patterns; political stability and the emergence of a native elite; and English-born and Creole elites in turn-of-the-century Virginia. While the essays individually exemplify a number of distinct themes and methodological approaches to the subject, as a whole they provide a remarkable comprehensive overview of the progression in the seventeenth century from a predominantly emigrant society, subsisting under conditions of great instability and high mortality, to a largely native-born population that had achieved a notable degree of political and social stability.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393009564
• ISBN13: 9780393009569
• Release Date: January 1980
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.67 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.7" x 0.8" x 5.0"

Customer Reviews

The launching pad

Right in the middle of the period covered by these essays, back "home," Thomas Hobbes was writing that his ancestors and those of the colonists in Maryland and Virginia had lived lives that were "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." In the first century of European penetration of the Chesapeake country, they remained poor and short -- very, very short. The essays in this volume reflect a conference in 1974, which the editors claim marked a revival of interest in the 17th century (as compared with the 18th century) in the southern colonies, and an early turn to the use of social statistics for this area and period. Also, the first book-length effort to consider the Chesapeake country as a unit, rather than as two political divisions. They are certainly right about popular interest. The early `70s saw a boom in tourism interest in Williamsburg (18th century), but almost nothing at Jamestown. But the essays do not particularly deliver when it comes to a comprehensive look at the "Chesapeake country." Only one really does that, a revisionist interpretation of mortality at Jamestown by Carville Earle, who persuasively identifies the culprits are typhoid, dysentery and salt poisoning; and the environmental factor as low summer flows in the estuarine rivers, which allowed the mixing zone of salt and fresh water to push inland -- and centered right on Jamestown. The Indians, allegedly, had learned not to concentrate near this "oligohaline" zone but to disperse throughout the countryside in small groups. However that may be, the colonists in the Chesapeake were lucky to survive even one summer, and the ones who did live lived barely half as long as the English in New England. This had powerful social effects, explored in other essays, of which the most interesting is by Darrett and Anita Rutman. They explore how early deaths of parents, followed by quick remarriages, led to a society full of orphans. It was unusual for a child to attain his or her majority with both parents living, and households were mixed with the children of two, three and more marriages. Often, the older children would have no blood connection with the youngest. A lack of family ties (given even without a high death rate) forced civic institutions to take over the care and education of children, or at least to supervise them. Essays by David Jordan and Carole Shammas explore how, when life settled down, the creoles rather quickly decided to look to their own affairs, unlike colonials in most other places, and set up social, economic and political institutions that led, in another three generations, to the most profound political revolution of all time.

Landmark Essays on the Colonial Chesapeake

This collection of nine essays, edited by Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman, examine various aspects of the development of Anglo-American culture in the Chesapeake colonies, Maryland and Virginia. The studies provide a detailed and informative consideration of life in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake.The scholars writing in this volume have published various works on the colonial Chesapeake. James Horn, who authored the essay on servant emigration to the Chesapeake, has written Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake. Lorena S. Walsh, who herein examines marriage and family life in colonial Maryland, has written From Calabar to Carter's Grove: The History of a Virginia Slave Community. Darrett B. and Anita H. Rutman provide a startling and compelling portrait of family fragmentation and reformation due to early parental death and successive remarriage. The two also cowrote the study, A Place in Time: Middlesex County, Virginia, 1650-1750, a detailed reconstruction of life in a Virginia county, for masters and farmers and servants and slaves.The emergence of an American-born elite is considered in Virginia by Carole Shammas, author of Inheritance in America, and in Maryland by David W. Jordan, author of Foundations of Representative Government in Maryland, 1632-1715. Carville V. Earle, author of Evolution of a Tidewater Settlement System, presents a study of disease and death rates in early Virginia. Kevin P. Kelly studies the dispersed settlement patterns in Surry County, Virginia. Kelly authored The Economic and Social Development of Seventeenth-Century Surry County, Virginia. Lois Green Carr and Russell R. Menard, who have authrored and edited a number of studies on the Chesapeake, present in this book a study of the economic opportunities of freed indentured servants in Maryland. The essays presented in this work should interest anyone researching Chesapeake history or Southern genealogy. Africans and African-Americans were present in Virginia from early in the seventeenth century, but the essays herein concentrate on the early Anglo-American presence. The book by Rutman and Rutman, as well as the work by Walsh, should be consulted for African-American life in the early Chesapeake. See also Wesley Frank Craven, White, Red, and Black: The Seventeenth-Century Virginian. White, Red, and Black is a tremendous but succinct study of the white, Indian and African presence in early colonial Virginia. Gerald Mullin, Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia, as well as works by Mechal Sobel, illuminate black colonial experience in a later period.