"Fit Objects of Charity": Community, Race, Faith, and Welfare in Antebellum Lancaster County, Virginia, 1817-1860

Abstract

[T]ruly there are objects in our County which demand consideration, and as such we heartily agree with your worships to support and make [them] as comfortable as possible, and as such we think ought not [they] be placed in a poor house ... [O]thers we think would make greater exertion support, if they knew a poor House was their only asylum. Overseers of Poor Lancaster County, Virginia, June 1817 When Baptist Church in Lancaster County called Jeremiah B. Jeter to its pulpit in 1826, he initially declined. The reasons he later gave his refusal describe state of county: The region was isolated, having in those days ... little intercourse with rest of world.... [T]he malarial disease [was] more or less prevalent every autumn.... The country was in an impoverished and depressed condition.... Many of best and most thrifty settlers ... sold their lands, at greatly reduced prices ... and removed to upper country. The Neck was slowly recovering from evils inflicted upon it by war [of 1812], but it was far from what it was in favored times past. Jeter's impressions of Lancaster's impoverishment were quite accurate. In 1811, only eleven of Virginia's sixty-seven counties paid less in taxes, which were based upon (among other things) value of lots, land, slaves, and livestock. By 1819, though eighteen counties paid less than Lancaster, most were in sparsely populated areas that would become West Virginia. By 1830, only eastern Virginia counties that were deemed poorer in terms of assessment were Middlesex and Warwick. The instability, isolation, and general poverty cited by Jeter characterized Lancaster County's society and economy most residents from early 1800s until early 1840s when steamships finally connected county and rest of northern Neck with Fredericksburg, Baltimore, Boston, and other northern ports.1 Lancaster's society, however, was close-knit, in many ways a closed, corporate, and religious community. The county may well have been isolated from the rest of world, but its citizens were by no means isolated from one another. From 1800 until mid-1850s, county experienced what might be called a golden age in class, social, and economic relations. Perhaps because of its isolation and economic tribulations, a rough equality existed among citizens: men and women, wealthy, poor, and near-poor, free and slave, lived next to one another and mixed comfortably and often in a variety of settings. Nowhere is gemeinshaft of Lancaster better revealed than in attitudes toward and treatment of county's poor. Despite furious debates over welfare and poverty in contemporary America, historians have had curiously little to say about history of poor in America. Studies such as Robert Bremner's From Depths: The Discovery of Poverty in United States and Paul Boyer's Urban Masses and Moral Order in America cast wide nets to study poor, but both historians concentrated on reformist-and often reactionary-attitudes toward poor and poverty in northern urban centers. They paid little attention to antebellum era. More recent studies have shifted attention to colonial and Federalist eras and tightened focus to individual cities, but also located only in North. Only Barbara Bellows has paid substantive attention to poor below Mason-Dixon line, but her work, too, is confined to city.2 Moreover, each of above studies, to a greater or lesser extent, agree with Boyer's explicit thesis that goal of reformers and legislators in America has been to control, not relieve, poor. This may well have been true in northern cities, but a number of reasons same may not hold true in Virginia, especially in rural areas. Virginia's original poor laws unsurprisingly mirrored those of Great Britain. A mere thirty-six years after arrival at Jamestown, in 1642/3, lawmakers felt compelled to pass a law for relief of diverse poore people that [are] . …