Eighteenth-century British America Research Articles

The Dreadful Word: Speech Crime and Polite Gentlemen in Massachusetts, 1690–1776 by Kristin A. Olbertson

Reviewed by: The Dreadful Word: Speech Crime and Polite Gentlemen in Massachusetts, 1690–1776 by Kristin A. Olbertson Anne Lombard The Dreadful Word: Speech Crime and Polite Gentlemen in Massachusetts, 1690–1776. By Kristin A. Olbertson. Studies in Legal History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 337 pages. Cloth, ebook. Since at least the 1990s, historians have linked the development of gentry class consciousness in the eighteenth-century Anglo-American colonies with a cultural ideal of genteel refinement that had developed earlier in England.1 Most men with property and power in the colonies lacked the genteel or aristocratic birth that had anchored upper-class status in England a century earlier. Instead, elite colonial men based their claims to gentry status on their adoption of upper-class British ideals of behavior, education, and speech. The boundaries between "polite" colonial gentlemen and the "vulgar" (2) lower sorts came to be marked largely by language and culture. In general, historians have treated gentility in eighteenth-century British America as the expression of a particular upper-class culture. Members of the political and social elite acted like gentlemen, presumably impressing one another with their dignity and authority. But what happened when people outside of the elite scoffed or thumbed their noses at the new ideals of politeness? Kristin A. Olbertson, in this deeply researched, provocative, and often brilliant book, The Dreadful Word, argues that in eighteenth-century Massachusetts, genteel codes of behavior were not merely informal norms but were imposed through the law on those who refused to defer to the polite elite. Specifically, politeness was enforced and enacted through the regulation of "impolite" (2) speech and the prosecution of speech crimes such as swearing, cursing, contempt of authority, defamation, and lying. Speech crime prosecutions were not new in the eighteenth-century. The Puritans who first settled the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 made vigorous efforts to regulate ungodly speech and prosecute behavior that was by then tolerated in the English legal system. Criminal prosecutions for swearing, cursing, railing (insulting or mocking someone), singing, making noise in public, lying, and defaming were ubiquitous in the seventeenth century. But scholars have long assumed that after Massachusetts agreed to adhere to the English common law under the Charter of Massachusetts Bay in 1691—the Second Charter—its courts became less concerned with victimless morals offenses and more concerned with crimes of property.2 With [End Page 413] this legal change, scholars have assumed that prosecutions for speech crimes grew rare. In fact, Olbertson shows, speech crime prosecutions remained surprisingly common in Massachusetts from 1691 until the beginning of the American Revolution. In a comprehensive analysis of all surviving records from 1690 to 1776 from the county courts of General Sessions—which met quarterly to hear low-level criminal cases—in addition to justice of the peace records, she has found more than 1,600 cases involving criminal prosecutions for speech crimes. Many of these prosecutions were brought under statutes enacted after 1691 that prohibited swearing, cursing, blaspheming, railing, singing in taverns, lying and defamation, perjury, and spreading false news. Others appear to have been prosecuted under the English common law, as it was understood in Massachusetts. In either case, speech crimes continued to be a significant concern for Massachusetts law long after 1691. For Olbertson, these cases provide a window to observe how the law worked to establish genteel codes of politeness and shore up the authority of the colonial gentry. Following Rhys Isaac, Olbertson argues that courts were public, performative spaces that tutored spectators about proper behavior and demonstrated the difference between virtuous authority and uncivil disruption.3 Local law enforcement in early America was highly participatory; low-level criminal prosecutions were often initiated by individual community members and carried out by justices of the peace and judges who had little or no formal legal training. As a result, proceedings in the lower courts provided a public arena for average colonial Americans to observe and participate in debates about what the law should be, who was entitled to its protections, and who deserved its punishment. Olbertson employs the evidence from these court records in intriguing ways. First, she uses language from grand jury...

Measuring mercantile concentration in eighteenth-century British America: Charleston, 1735–1775

In this article, the authors attempt to advance discussions of mercantile concentration in British North America in the eighteenth century by employing two measurement tools common in the field of industrial organization-concentration ratios and the Hirschman-Herfindahl Index (HHI)—to measure and analyze concentration levels in Charleston, South Carolina between 1735 and 1775. These tools allow for the creation of standardized measures, easing comparisons with other mercantile groups across space and time. The principal results suggest that mercantile concentration levels in Charleston were not high by modern standards, and that concentration may even have declined a bit over the course of this 41-year period. The authors draw on insights from the literature in industrial organization and the new institutional history to explain their findings. In so doing, they suggest that the relatively low levels of concentration were related to and reflected the “open-access order” characteristic of British North America, even in eighteenth-century South Carolina.

About the Authors

Previous articleNext article FreeAbout the AuthorsFull TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreJenny Anger is professor and chair of art history at Grinnell College. She is the author of Paul Klee and the Decorative in Modern Art (2004) and Four Metaphors of Modernism: From Der Sturm to the Société Anonyme (2018). Anger’s long-standing interest in gender and art extends here to an exploration of mental illness.Paisid Aramphongphan earned a Ph.D. in the history of art and architecture from Harvard University, and previously held a Terra Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. His book Horizontal Together: Art, Dance, and Queer Embodiment in 1960s New York is forthcoming (May 2021).David Brody is a professor of design studies at Parsons School of Design at the New School. He is the author of Housekeeping by Design: Hotels and Labor (2016) and Visualizing American Empire: Orientalism and Imperialism in the Philippines (2010), and co-editor of Design Studies: A Reader (2009). He is on the editorial board of American Art.Rhoda Eitel-Porter is the editor of Print Quarterly, based in London. Her master’s thesis was on portraits of women by Otto Dix; her Ph.D. dissertation on Cesare Nebbia was published in 2009. Much of her research focuses on Italian art of the sixteenth century, and American and German art of the twentieth century.Elizabeth S. Hawley is a visiting assistant professor in art history and visual studies at Northeastern University. She received her PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center, and her research on Native and non-Native art in the American Southwest has been supported by the Lunder Institute, Wolfsonian-FIU, and the Pittsburgh Foundation.Jennifer Quick holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University. She was previously Research Curator for the Polaroid Consultant Photographers Collection at the Harvard Business School. Her book manuscript, “Back to the Drawing Board: Ed Ruscha, Art, and Design in the 1960s” is under contract with Yale University Press.Jennifer Van Horn is an associate professor of art history and history at the University of Delaware. She is the author of The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America (2017) and her second book, Portraits of Resistance: Activating Art During Slavery, is due for publication next year.Kristina Wilson is a professor of art history at Clark University and the author of numerous books, articles, and essays on modernist design and modernist fine art practice in the United States. Her book Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Power in Design is due for publication in April 2021. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Art Volume 35, Number 1Spring 2021 Sponsored by the Smithsonian American Art Museum Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/714334 Views: 198 © 2021 by The Smithsonian Institution. All rights reserved. Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America by Jennifer Van Horn

Reviewed by: The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America by Jennifer Van Horn Kate Smith The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America By Jennifer Van Horn. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Through the meanings they hold and the practices they animate, objects are powerful things. By examining a range of objects, from city prospects to portraits, gravestones, dressing tables and prosthetic limbs, Jennifer Van Horn demonstrates how objects were particularly important to eighteenth-century Anglo-American communities as they wrestled with questions of identity and order. Elite White families utilised objects as key means of constructing and asserting themselves as civil people. Focusing on Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Charleston, The Power of Objects convincingly shows how objects were crucial sites in forming specific identities and excluding others, within British America. In crafting these identities, elite White Anglo-Americans responded to aesthetic debates in Britain, but also reacted to what they viewed as "the threatening counterexamples provided by native Americans and African Americans" (21). The assertion of such identities was often fraught, however, because of the contradictory meanings at stake in material things. The Power of Objects provides a compelling account of the complex ways in which elite White communities consistently drew upon material culture to construct their identities and shows the range of cultural references within them. The first half of the book explores how communities of civil people were created and expressed through the production and acquisition of city prospects, portraits and gravestones. The creation of views of cities, such as Philadelphia, provided communities with a means to "assert their civil environs and future prospects" (35). Participation in these projects, which were funded by subscription, allowed civic bonds to be forged and ensured that artists produced a particular view of "their" city. A careful balance was in play then, between including the detail needed to show the development of a city and excluding that which revealed the complexities of city life. Yet, these drawings were engraved and printed in Britain, significantly linking these communities to transatlantic networks. Similarly, artistic transatlantic networks were cultivated through other means, such as in the 1750s, when elite families in Philadelphia commissioned the British portrait painter John Wollaston to create a series of portraits. Wollaston used similar poses, backgrounds and props in each portrait to produce a community of the civil. These portraits were markedly different from others, including those he painted in New York, demonstrating the value patrons placed on creating a visually coherent community. The civilising project embarked on by Anglo-Americans did not end with portraits, however, but rather continued even after death. The gravestone portraits produced for individuals, particularly in Charleston, show a particular response to concerns over rapid bodily decay. These portraits followed the forms of the miniature portrait genre, but, carved in immutable stone by New England carvers, they provided a fixed point of representation to challenge the decay at work beneath the ground. At the same time, the text included on gravestones, and projects to develop graveyards into more ordered, tended spaces, signified a community of the dead that linked to that of the living and contributed to a wider sense of civility. While the civilising project seemed all encompassing, the second half of the book reveals a more subversive and complex set of objects produced for and used by women and men. In Charleston, in the 1760s, it became popular for women of marriageable age to have their portrait painted in a masquerade style. These portraits provided male patrons and viewers with a prompt to consider the mutability of identity and female sitters with a route to empowerment. They were specifically painted at the moment within a woman's lifecycle in which she had power: on the verge of marriage. The portrait underlined her ability to conceal and reveal herself, and to (temporarily) have control. Women's ability to construct a particular identity was also at stake in the dressing tables they used. These items of furniture offered a site in which women could "create" their face, transforming themselves from a private self into a public individual. They contained complex sets of objects which also trained women in...

Van Horn, Jennifer. 2017. The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press

Van Horn, Jennifer. 2017. The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press

The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America, by Jennifer Van Horn

<i>The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America</i>, by Jennifer Van Horn

The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America by Jennifer Van Horn

Reviewed by: The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America by Jennifer Van Horn Gabrielle M. Lanier (bio) The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America. By Jennifer Van Horn. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. xvii, 428. $49.95 cloth; $34.95 paper; $29.99 ebook) Material goods mattered to the elite citizens of eighteenth-century British America. Jennifer Van Horn's book explores how material objects from portraits and dressing tables to gravestones and wooden legs allowed colonists to form aesthetic communities based on shared sensibilities and patronage networks, communicate their identities transatlantically, and develop a civil society. Van Horn draws from a broad range of sources including prints and paintings, artifacts, period documents, and literature. Elites in major colonial port cities "used things to refine themselves and, by so doing, created personas that enabled them to enter into the relationships with one another that constituted civil life. . . . Ultimately, elites' assemblages of artifacts enabled them to extend their local communities outward to forge a collective [End Page 99] identity as a nation of citizens" (pp. 9–10). Just as importantly, these elites were also anxious to distinguish themselves from "the threatening counterexamples provided by Native Americans and African Americans" (p. 21). Drawing her view of the nature and development of civil society from John Locke, Van Horn builds on previous studies of refinement, civil society, and savagery by David Shields, John L. Brooke, Homi Bhabha, Norbert Elias, and Richard Bushman. The book includes an introduction, six chapters, an epilogue, 130 illustrations, and ten plates. The first half of the book focuses on the aesthetic communities created in colonial ports around the mid-eighteenth century; the second half explores these aesthetic communities during the imperial crisis, the Revolution, and afterward. One of the strongest chapters examines the monumental prints of colonial port cities. Urban prospects glorifying the tamed and civilized colonial landscape were partly driven by notions of American inferiority, which were fueled by the frequently republished claims of French naturalist Comte de Buffon, who claimed that indigenous American species were smaller and weaker than their European counterparts due to a dearth of cleared land. Other chapters focus on the portraits that London-trained artist John Wollaston painted in Philadelphia; Charleston's portrait gravestones; images depicting masquerades; women's dressing furniture; and the wooden leg used by American statesman Gouverneur Morris. Van Horn argues that elites in colonial port cities redefined the role of representation to suit their own circumstances, and that Charleston's portrait gravestones helped the dead maintain politeness after they had passed. Later in the century, depictions of masquerades "simultaneously awakened and assuaged anxiety surrounding colonists' temporary suspension in their relationship with Great Britain," and dressing tables, along with tea tables and their equipage, "became part of a constellation of goods that women used to assert their political power in the eighteenth century" (pp. 28, 296). While The Power of Objects is provocative and engagingly written, the author occasionally stretches her evidence to fit her argument. [End Page 100] Gouverneur Morris's prosthesis resembled "a piece of wearable upholstered furniture" that helped camouflage his physical deformity, but it also allowed him to blend into the stylistically similar wooden furniture legs in refined Philadelphia parlors (p. 363). Similarly, the author asserts that the unknown cabinetmaker who crafted this turned wooden prosthesis made a conscious decision to visually connect Morris's artificial limb to high-style furniture, thereby demonstrating his status. More than likely, however, the leg was made by an artisan who simply drew upon the materials and techniques he was most familiar with: those used for making and upholstering furniture (pp. 360–61). Still, these are relatively minor issues in a deeply researched book that is full of wonderful surprises. On balance, Jennifer Van Horn's exploration of material goods in British America remains an important contribution to the literature dealing with the material world. Gabrielle M. Lanier GABRIELLE M. LANIER is professor and interim head of the department of history at James Madison University, where she also directs the public history program. She is the author of The Delaware Valley in the Early Republic: Architecture, Landscape, and Regional Identity (2005...

State of the Field: Material Conclusions

State of the Field:Material Conclusions Kenneth Cohen (bio) Cary Carson. Face Value: The Consumer Revolution and the Colonizing of America. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017. xxv + 312 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $59.50 cloth. $29.50 paper. Zara Anishanslin. Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. 432 pp. Halftones, notes, and index. $45.00 cloth. $26.00 paper. Jennifer Van Horn. The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2017. xvii + 456 pp. Plates, halftones, notes, and index. $49.95 cloth. $34.95 paper. About halfway through his book Face Value: The Consumer Revolution and the Colonizing of America, Cary Carson claims that the French furnishing known as a "buffet" was "almost as foreign as its name was unpronounceable" when it appeared in British America in the early eighteenth century. "Among southern inventory takers," Carson notes, "it often came out 'Boofott' or 'Beaufett' or (was it?) 'Bow-Fatt.' Never mind," he concludes. "Owning one was all that counted" (p. 143). It is hard to believe that Carson first made this witty point almost twenty-five years ago. Face Value is largely a reprint of an epic (and classic) 215-page article published in a 1994 anthology on the eighteenth century "consumer revolution." That the new book's argument is not at all stale is a testament both to Carson's accessible, engaging prose, and to the enduring centrality of two debates over the meaning of consumption among scholars of early American material culture. In fact, the age of Carson's text does nothing to inhibit its ability to converse with two newer works: Zara Anishanslin's Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World, and Jennifer Van Horn's The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century America. Despite some key differences between them, these books work together to take old debates [End Page 3] in such new directions that we might well wonder if it is time to shed the pretensions of the old debates altogether. The first of the old debates centers on "Anglicization," or the degree to which Britain's American colonists strove to re-create the mother country in the New World. The term first appeared in the 1960s and 1970s, when historians John Murrin and Jack Greene, along with archaeologist James Deetz, used it to describe a "transformation" of colonial law and culture between 1690 and 1750. These scholars claimed that colonists lived more like Englishmen only after an initial period marked by greater difference, due to the colonists' overwhelming environmental conditions and limited economic wherewithal. The thesis was subsequently deployed in countless studies, perhaps nowhere as prominently as in the series of articles that led to T.H. Breen's The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (2004), which argued that the American Revolution was in part a response from colonists who felt alienated by imperial regulation after they had consumed their way toward more Anglicized lives.1 Early Americanists who study material culture have been debating Anglicization since its conception, with some questioning it by analyzing patterns in form and ornament that indicate the persistence of regionalism and the willful integration of vernacular local traits with "high-style" English and European elements. Such arguments in favor of creolization over Anglicization translated neatly into the multiple disciplines from which material culture scholars hailed. For example, a generation of art historians have used these patterns to argue that colonial objects reflected colonists' choice not to completely replicate cosmopolitan aesthetics rather than feeble attempts to perfectly copy them, as older art historical scholarship had posited.2 Carson, Anishanslin, and Van Horn issue a fresh set of critiques of Anglicization. Carson's central argument is that the explosion of consumption was not initially driven by technologies of production churning out more and cheaper goods but by a demand which predated and precipitated those technologies. Revealing his roots as an early modernist, Carson sees demand as a result of increasing geographic mobility related to the decline of feudalism...

Face Value: The Consumer Revolution and the Colonizing of America by Cary Carson, and: The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America by Jennifer Van Horne

Face Value: The Consumer Revolution and the Colonizing of America by Cary Carson, and: The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America by Jennifer Van Horne

The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America by Jennifer Van Horn, and: Luxurious Citizens: The Politics of Consumption in Nineteenth-Century America by Joanna Cohen

The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America by Jennifer Van Horn, and: Luxurious Citizens: The Politics of Consumption in Nineteenth-Century America by Joanna Cohen

Towns in Plantation Societies in Eighteenth-Century British America

There is a long-standing historiography that the plantation system of the American South and the British West Indies was inimical to urbanization. If we focus on towns in the Lower South and the West Indies, however, rather than the Chesapeake, we see urbanization as central to plantation development. The slave trade was vital to this urbanization, forming the dynamic trade that allowed for entrepreneurial decision making. It allowed towns like Kingston, Charleston, and Bridgetown to become more than shipping points. They became places of deep linkages between different economic sectors. In addition, they had an independent, autonomous existence in which growth was endogenous and in which people found multiple opportunities for wealth creation and the pursuit of pleasure.

Sugar, Land Markets and the Williams Thesis: Evidence from Jamaica's Property Sales, 1750–1810

The economic-history literature of eighteenth-century British America is rich in its quantitative measures of staple production, output prices and demography, but relatively thin in its analysis of input prices. This paper addresses one aspect of this gap by, for the first time, applying a hedonic regression technique to land sales in Britain's most important colony. The results indicate that land values increased over the course of the late eighteenth century, despite economic challenges such as the American Revolution and a series of punishing hurricanes in the 1780s. The model estimates that values reached their peak in 1800, only to decline during the first decade of the nineteenth century.

Dr. Alexander Hamilton and Provincial America: Expanding the Orbit of Scottish Culture. By Elaine G. Breslaw. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008. xvi, 348 pp. $55.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-3278-4.)

Teachers and students of eighteenth-century British America have long been grateful for the life of Dr. Alexander Hamilton. Born and educated in Edinburgh, Hamilton passed scarcely two decades in Maryland before his early death in 1756 but amply justified his self-characterization as “Loquacious Scribble” by leaving behind an extensive archive. Best known is the journal of his travels through the seaboard colonies in 1744 that, from its first printing in 1907, has furnished scholars with a treasury of pithy comments anatomizing contemporary manners, morals, and beliefs. More recently, we can draw upon Robert Micklus's fine three-volume edition of Hamilton's mock-heroic masterpiece of comic writing, The History of the Ancient and Honourable Tuesday Club (1990), celebrating the exploits of the convivial group Hamilton gathered about him in Annapolis. Yet Hamilton has remained more quoted than celebrated, until now. Elaine G. Breslaw has capped some forty years of studying and editing Hamiltoniana with the first full-scale historical biography of this supremely “clubbable” man. As her subtitle suggests, Breslaw argues for what Hamilton termed his “transmigration” of his native cultural heritage. Four opening chapters build on her own research and on several recent studies of the Scottish Enlightenment and its influence on colonial America to depict Hamilton's origins and education. And, with the young medical graduate brought to America, Breslaw organizes her abundant material in well-crafted thematic chapters given to the multitude of different parts he played—as new immigrant, observant traveler, doctor and medical polemicist, clubman, husband, master mason, musician, and occasional politician. Throughout, she demonstrates a sure command of the abundant materials of Hamilton's life and its Maryland context: especially persuasive are her chapters on his “Clubical Cordiality,” describing how, through his 1745 founding of the Tuesday Club and, three years later, a local Masonic society, Hamilton worked to infuse Annapolis life with the institutions and rituals of genteel sociability and private masculine conviviality he had known in his youth. More speculative are her suggestions that Hamilton ultimately embraced the provincial colonial life he initially lamented and satirized, and that, had he lived into the revolutionary era, he would have inclined to the patriot side, despite his marital and political affiliations with the powerful (and ultimately loyalist) Dulany family. For even to the last, his writings display an effusive, well-nigh frenetic, quality—look, I exist, here in this raw outpost of empire!

From Men of Property to Just Men: Deference, Masculinity, and the Evolution of Political Discourse in Early America

����� ��� Early American historians have written about, argued over, and struggled with the concept of deference for over four decades. Since J. R. Pole initially suggested that the concept of deference might explain some of the paradoxes of early American political culture, many historians have employed the concept. 1 J. G. A. Pocock maintained that eighteenth-century British America was a deferential society, which he defined as a society ‘‘in which the nonelite regard the elite, without too much resentment, as being of a superior status and culture to their own, and consider elite leadership in political matters to be something normal and natural,’’ even while admitting that deference possesses an ‘‘ambiguity which renders it both convenient and problematic.’’ 2 Many historians qualified Pole’s and Pocock’s evaluations but generally followed their lead. Rhys Isaac described a Virginia (pretransformation) deeply invested in deferential attitudes and behaviors. 3 Richard Beeman likewise

Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America

In cities from Boston to Charleston, elite men and women of eighteenth-century British America came together in private venues to script a polite culture. By examining their various 'texts'--conversations, letters, newspapers, and privately circulated manuscripts--David Shields reconstructs the discourse of civility that flourished in and further shaped elite society in British America.

The Rise of the Independent Merchant in the Chesapeake: Baltimore County, 1660-1769

Anyone who takes a hard look at the misery in the Third World today senses that economic is not the same thing as economic development. In colonial and neocolonial economies alike, and development often push in opposite directions. A rapidly expanding export sector can intensify an economy's dependence on a single staple and hamper the diversified development necessary for economic and political prosperity. Thus whether we are studying eighteenth-century Maryland or twentieth-century Bolivia, it is essential to distinguish between quantitative in export-related activities and qualitative development of an infrastructure that can sustain commercial and industrial expansion.' The economy of the Chesapeake region was clearly growing during the colonial period, but was it developing? In an ambitious overview of eighteenth-century British America, James A. Henretta has answered with an emphatic no. The Chesapeake colonies, he suggests, offer a classic case of growth without development, in stark contrast to their dynamic neighbors to the north. The plantation system created numerous and, ultimately, insurmountable obstacles to lasting economic development by discouraging investment in areas essential to both commercial and industrial expansion. A slave work force with little incentive to work hard, an unequal distribution of wealth and income that limited local markets and stunted investment in local manufacturing, a planter elite suspicious of outright profit making, a transportation network tied more to overseas than to home markets, a marketing system that undercut native merchants while increasing de-

Married Women's Legal Status in Eighteenth-Century New York and Virginia

A single woman in eighteenth-century British America possessed same legal, if not political, rights as a single man, but when she married she became a feme covert, thereby undergoing a substantial change in legal status. Historians have disagreed on meaning of coverture in colonial period and in their assessments of legal relationship of wives to husbands and to system of law in general.' English common law dictated major terms of judicial arrangements for feme covert in colonies. While some historians have accepted a literal interpretation of Blackstone's famous dictum that the and wife are one and that one is husband to mean complete unity of spouses under common law, others have rejected this notion.2 The foremost twentieth-century English legal scholars, Sir William Holdsworth, Frederick Pollock, and Frederic William Maitland, have shown that married women often appeared as persons before law in England.3 Our research extends this argument to free white women in eighteenthcentury New York and Virginia. We will demonstrate that matrons in