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    Virginians at Home: Family Life in the Eighteenth Century
    Virginians at Home: Family Life in the Eighteenth Century
    Virginians at Home: Family Life in the Eighteenth Century
    Ebook117 pages2 hours

    Virginians at Home: Family Life in the Eighteenth Century

    By Prof. Edmund S. Morgan

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    About this ebook

    First published in 1952, this is historian Edmund S. Morgan’s second book on family life in the American colonies. An informative, well-researched and well written book, Morgan sketches the day-to-day life of colonial Virginians. From the planters of the Tidewater to the Scotch-Irish and German farmers in the Shenandoah Valley, he explores such matters as childhood, marriage, servants and slaves, homes, and holidays in the complex society of eighteenth-century Virginia.

    An entertaining and enlightening book that allows the reader to glimpse into the world of 18th Century family life.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPapamoa Press
    Release dateJun 28, 2017
    ISBN9781787204676
    Virginians at Home: Family Life in the Eighteenth Century
    Author

    Prof. Edmund S. Morgan

    Edmund Sears Morgan (January 17, 1916 - July 8, 2013) was an American historian and eminent authority on early American history. He was Emeritus Professor of History at Yale University, where he taught from 1955 to 1986, specializing in American colonial history, with some attention to English history. His topics included Puritanism, political ideas, the American Revolution, slavery, historiography, family life, and numerous notables such as Benjamin Franklin. Born in Minnesota, his family moved from Washington, D.C. to Arlington, Massachusetts in 1925, where his father became a professor at Harvard Law School. Morgan attended Harvard University, where he received his bachelor’s degree in American civilization (history and literature) in 1937 and his Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization in 1942. During WWII he trained as a machinist at the MIT Radiation Laboratory and then taught history at Brown University from 1946-1955 before becoming a professor at Yale University, where he directed some 60 PhD dissertations in colonial history before retiring in 1986. He earned numerous awards, including the Yale Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa’s William Clyde DeVane Medal for outstanding teaching and scholarship in 1971, the Douglass Adair Memorial Award for scholarship in early American history in 1972, and the Distinguished Scholar Award of the American Historical Association in 1986. He also won numerous fellowships and garnered a number of honorary degrees and named lectureships. He became a Sterling Professor (one of Yale’s highest distinctions) in 1965. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal by U.S. President Bill Clinton in 2000. He won a Pulitzer Prize “for a creative and deeply influential body of work as an American historian that spans the last half century” in 2006. He was honoured with a gold medal for lifetime achievement by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2008.

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      Book preview

      Virginians at Home - Prof. Edmund S. Morgan

      This edition is published by Papamoa Press – www.pp-publishing.com

      To join our mailing list for new titles or for issues with our books – papamoapress@gmail.com

      Or on Facebook

      Text originally published in 1952 under the same title.

      © Papamoa Press 2017, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

      Publisher’s Note

      Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

      We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

      VIRGINIANS AT HOME:

      FAMILY LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

      BY

      EDMUND S. MORGAN

      Williamsburg in America Series

      II

      The second in a series of popular histories of Williamsburg and Tidewater Virginia in the eighteenth century.

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      Contents

      TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

      ILLUSTRATIONS 4

      INTRODUCTION 5

      I — GROWING UP 9

      2 — GETTING MARRIED 23

      3 — SERVANTS AND SLAVES 38

      4 — HOUSES AND HOLIDAYS 53

      A NOTE ON THE SOURCES 68

      REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 69

      ILLUSTRATIONS

      Members of the Page family of Rosewell

      An English schoolmaster

      A family group

      The proper approach to a lady

      A view of the Shenandoah Valley

      A lady dressing fish

      Tight Lacing, or Fashion before Ease

      A view of Westover

      The blacksmith

      The Old Plantation

      Charles Calvert with a slave boy

      The End of the Fox Hunt

      Bruton Parish Church, Williamsburg

      Cabin in the Piedmont

      The ruins of Rosewell

      Virginians at Home

      INTRODUCTION

      Virginia in 1776 had grown and changed in many ways since her founding in 1607. She was no longer a small settlement huddled around a swampy little town; rich plantations lined the banks of her rivers for a hundred miles into the interior, until the first waterfalls interrupted navigation. The planters maintained their own wharves, and ocean-going ships moved up and down the rivers collecting tobacco for English and European smokers and bringing back in return the English manufactures which helped to make life in the Virginia Tidewater a provincial counterpart of life in England.

      Beyond the Tidewater rose the Virginia Piedmont, gentle, rolling slopes which were already covered with farms and plantations. Here there were no convenient waterways to connect the settlers directly with England. The tobacco and wheat grown in the Piedmont had to be carted laboriously over rough roads to reach the ships which would carry them to market. Life was not as easy as in the Tidewater. Settlers were more isolated from each other, and had to rely more on themselves than the planters who could step aboard a ship and travel from their own doorsteps to any place in the world.

      Even more isolated was the Shenandoah Valley, which lay beyond the Great Blue Ridge. The Valley had been settled for the most part, not by the Englishmen who occupied the Tidewater and Piedmont, but by German and Scotch-Irish farmers who had moved down from Pennsylvania and who still sent their products back to Philadelphia and Baltimore to market. They did not build great plantations, but then not all Virginians in the Tide-water and Piedmont were great planters either. For every planter with his gang of slave laborers there were many small farmers. They were Virginians too; so were the slaves who worked on the plantations, and the servants who were earning their freedom, and the merchants and artisans of Fredericksburg and Norfolk. Even the shift-less lubbers along the Carolina border were Virginians, although fastidious gentlemen like William Byrd of West-over did not like to recognize them as such,

      In other words Virginia was not only a vast territory, but a place where, in the course of a history almost as long as that of independent America today, a complex society had already developed. Some Virginians were so poor that they did not even have a roof to cover them. Others were surrounded by servants and slaves who provided them with every luxury. At the top of the social scale stood the great planter, owner of a mansion on one of Virginia’s noble rivers, where he lived with his family and his entourage of servants; owner also of other plantations which he entrusted to the direction of overseers; member of the House of Burgesses, or perhaps of the Governor’s Council; owner of a house in Williamsburg, where he and his family lived during fashionable Publick Times when the legislature was in session. Between this man and the farmer in the Valley there was a wide gulf in wealth, in education, and in occupation, but they were both a part of the same society, and both joined in fighting a war for their independence.

      When that war was over, Virginia had changed. She was still able to provide great statesmen for the new nation, but at home her prosperity was gone, and although she eventually recovered it in part, she never again presented the unique pattern of colonial times. The following pages are an attempt to reconstruct some of that pattern, to show what life was like in the homes of eighteenth-century Virginia.

      The woodcuts reproduced throughout this book and on the dust jacket are from A Little Pretty Pocketbook, published by Isaiah Thomas at Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1787, and are used through the courtesy of the Reserve Division of the New York Public Library.

      I — GROWING UP

      An infant coming into the world in Virginia during the eighteenth century had a good deal more reason to cry about it than one who arrives in any part of the United States today. Not that he found himself among unfriendly or indifferent people. His parents would love him as much as any modern parents could, but since they knew nothing of modern medicine and sanitation, they were by our standards woefully unprepared to care for him. They knew nothing about germs and viruses or how to fight them. Their baby would have to take his chances against diphtheria, diarrhea, and a host of other terrors, and his chances were not very good. The parents would often be more of a hindrance than a help. They might very well aggravate an illness by administering some potion which today nobody in his right mind would think of drinking himself, let alone giving to a sick child. Infancy, in fact, was so dangerous a condition in the eighteenth century that relatively few children survived. It was common for a father and mother to see most of their children die before they were able to walk or talk.

      If, however, a child lived through the first few years, he could look out on a world which had its faults but which might well afford him a long and happy life. Much would depend, of course, on how he had chosen his parents. If he was so unfortunate as to have a mother with a black skin, life had little in store for him: he would probably have to spend it working for somebody else. He might be taught to expect nothing more, but he would always have beside him the example of other children with a happier fate who automatically received everything that he had lost before he was born. If, on the other hand, he had free parents who lived in a cabin on the frontier, he would grow up to the tune of hard work, but he would see his work bring rewards, and he would enjoy the kind of childhood which with all its dangers and excitements has become the envy of modern boys and girls to whom it is denied. If, finally, he had the good luck to have parents who owned a great plantation or a good house in Williamsburg, he might look forward to everything

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