Eighteenth-century Chesapeake Research Articles

Thinking Atlantically: a conversation with Philip D. Morgan

Although he may never have set out to become an expert in the field of Atlantic history, Philip D. Morgan, Harry C. Black Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, is today one of the leading specialists on the history of the Atlantic world. His most recent edited collections – Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (Oxford University Press, 2009; co-edited with Jack P. Greene) and The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World (Oxford University Press, 2011; co-edited with Nicholas Canny) – are incisive contributions toward bringing cohesion and definition to a historical subdiscipline whose contours have been in dispute ever since Jacques Godechot and Robert Roswell Palmer staked a claim to the field more than nearly 60 years ago, if not long before. A prize for his article on Caribbean slavery and livestock in the William and Mary Quarterly in 1995 was a meek harbinger for the veritable cascade of prizes and honors he won after publishing his magnum opus several years later: Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (University of North Carolina Press, 1998), a thorough and painstakingly researched study of plantation life that compared the Chesapeake region with its Carolinian counterpart, was awarded the coveted Bancroft Prize, Frederick Douglass Prize, and two other prizes from the American Historical Association, amongst other national and international recognition. Since then he has co-edited numerous volumes with the field's leading scholars and has continued to deal with central questions related to the Atlantic, including labor, slavery and the economics of plantation life, resistance and power, migration, and geography. His current project on the contours of the Caribbean and its historical formation as a distinct oceanic space will continue to probe many of the themes Morgan has grappled with since these earlier works, expanding no doubt on others. Over a series of conversations between Vancouver and Baltimore, Paris and New Orleans, Phil Morgan and I discussed his early interest in Atlantic history, his ideas about future directions for the field, and the rationale behind his most recent publications, certain to affect the course of the discipline in the short, medium, and long terms.

An empire of regions: a brief history of Colonial British America

List of Maps and Tables Acknowledgements A Note on Usage Preface Introduction: Many and Varied New Worlds 1. Europe in the Age of Exploration: The Portuguese and Spanish Empires 2. The French and Dutch in North America and the Caribbean Melting Pot 3. The English Colonies in Mainland North America Before 1650 4. The Growth of New England and the Chesapeake: 1650-1700 5. The English Civil War, the Restoration, and the First British Empire in America 6. Transition: Imperial Wars and British Politics 1689-1748 7. The Regions of Colonial America: Northern Society and Politics in the Eighteenth Century 8. The Regions of Colonial America: Society and Politics in the Eighteenth Century Chesapeake and the South 9. Christian America and the Great Awakening 10. The New Empire and the Revolt of the Colonies, 1748-1776 General Reference Bibliography Index

Costly Signaling and Gendered Social Strategies among Slaves in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake: An Archaeological Perspective

Evolutionary approaches to agency offer some of the most promising frameworks for identifying individual agents and their archaeological correlates. Agency theory calls attention to the individual as the fundamental feature of human relations, and evolutionary theory provides historically situated models that allow archaeologists to precisely investigate the complex behavioral strategies that underlie artifact patterns. The following paper offers one such model. Using data from 41 slave-site occupations from eighteenth-century Virginia, I explore how and why enslaved African Americans actively participated in the burgeoning "consumer revolution" that swept across the early modern Atlantic World. Artifact patterning suggests that the acquisition and display of costly imported goods functioned as a form of communication for slaves in both public and private venues. The data show that enslaved women and men used several different consumption strategies to solidify social and economic relationships within precarious and rapidly changing environments. Signaling theory, derived from evolutionary theory, illuminates the contextual factors that structured slaves’ consumer choices and provides a model for understanding their choices as the result of dynamic and mutually beneficial behaviors.

Globalization, Creolization, and the Not-So-Peculiar Institution

IT HAS BECOME A CLICHE TO PROCLAIM THE NEED TO INTERNATIONALIZE the study of the United States. Well-funded conferences, special issues of prestigious journals, and countless panels at professional meetings have been devoted to discussions of how to overcome the self-perceived provincialism of American historians. I have joined in the parade of historians who have participated in these events. Like most academic fashions, this one is a response, at least in large part, to perceived shifts in the world in which we live--in this case to demographic, political, cultural, and economic transformations that come together under the rubric of globalization. Also like most academic fads, this one has inspired some scholars to do wonderful work, explicating, for example, the way a single crop and its markets can link people's fates across regions, nations, and continents or the way that innovations in journalistic practices helped create a smaller world. (1) This trend has also inspired its share of flashy but superficial scholarship that disguises old ideas by giving them new labels. Historians of slavery and historians of colonial British America can, perhaps, be forgiven for wondering what the globalizing fuss is all about. Through no particular virtues or insights of their own, they have long had to address many questions through transnational approaches. That is in part because scholars of colonial British America are inherently pulled into two distinct national historiographies--that of Great Britain and that of the United States. Scholars of slavery have found themselves in an analogous position as they have attempted to conceptualize the relationships between Old World heritages and New World realities. Atlantic approaches to the history of slavery in the Americas reach back to W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, Melville J. Herskovits, and Eric Williams, so it is hardly surprising that the first formal program in Atlantic history and culture at an American university emerged during the 1970s out of the collaboration of historical anthropologists of Afro-Caribbean experiences and historians of the early modern societies that bordered the Atlantic. (2) By the 1970s, then, historians of slavery in colonial British America were being pushed by intellectual traditions and institutional forces to understand the institution of slavery and the experiences of those victimized by it in transnational contexts that included Africa, Europe, and non-English speaking societies in the Americas. If, as a result, the rage for globalizing perspectives did not hit them with the same force that it hit other practitioners of U.S. history, it has nonetheless helped foster important, though subtler, shifts in the field. As it happens, this can be traced with unusual chronological precision, because of a coincidence in timing. Almost ten years ago Philip D. Morgan published Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry, and Ira Berlin published Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Each book represents the culmination of over twenty years of work by one of the most respected historians of American slavery. Both are constructed around questions rooted in the historiography of the United States, and both build on the preceding decade's enormous flowering of local studies of slavery in colonial North America. Both books work within the main currents of the field that their authors had helped to shape by taking Atlantic approaches to colonial slavery. Together they all but swept the major professional book prizes in American history in 1998, and together they can be understood to have brought to fruition a generation of scholarship on slavery in colonial North America. (3) Many Thousands Gone is a synthetic work that seeks to bring interpretive order to the mass of information about colonial slavery that had accumulated from the mid-1970s--when books by Peter H. …

Gender and the Structure of Planter Households in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake: Harford County, Maryland, in 1776

This study analyzes gender and headship in the eighteenth-century Chesapeake using data from a unique census gathered in Maryland in 1776. The data are organized around individual planter-households and permit us to address important evidence related to female headship and the status of planter wives. In the eighteenth century, the household served as the center of production and reproduction. Control over household labor and resources translated into status and power or it signaled the very real risk of poverty. In this study, we examine four types of female headship and the economic status of their households in eighteenth-century Chesapeake. The first group is white adult women. Analyzing the household demographic structure of both white female and male headed-household provided clues to the circumstances surrounding their headship and the independence headship brought to a limited number of white females. Comparing patterns of wealth holding in the form of land and slaves helped to assess the extent to which white female heads faced a high risk of poverty. The second group of interest is free black female heads and their experience revealed the role that race played in eighteenth-century headship. To what extent did the experiences of free blacks mirror or differ from those of white householders? A further section discusses headship among never-married males and females who controlled twenty-two percent of the plantations in Harford County, Maryland. The final group that deserves our attention is the planter wives. Studying the productive and reproductive experiences of the planter wife will shed light on the extent they, as "co-heads," shared an informal equality with their husbands in plantation management.

Struggling with Robert E. Lee

In a recent essay on Anton Chekhov published in The New Yorker, Janet Malcolm asserted that letters and journals we leave behind and the impressions we have made on our contemporaries are the mere husk of the kernel of our essential life. When we die, the kernel is buried with us. This is the horror and pity of death and the reason for the inescapable triviality of biography. As a biographer, I agree with Malcolm in some absolute sense. Writers are capable of capturing only part of experience, though you don't have to be a raving postmodernist to dispute her essentialism: after all, the power is always in the most creative possible telling of a particular version consistent with the data, even if the book offers only one of several possible stories. Malcolm is talking about the unknowable soul--the kernel of our essential life--that good writers can only infer and never recapture in toto. But that is the challenge, and that is where imagination comes into play. Like novelists, memoirists, and historians of all stripes, biographers have fragments, sometimes lots of them, sometimes fewer, with which they must do their best to construct the richest, most complex, and at the same time most truthful, rather than true, story. Lives do have themes. People who wrote letters or diaries or novels or tracts, or for that matter military orders, attempted to convey, or sometimes to deny, the urgent underlying issues of their lives. And biographers do their best to uncover those issues through their quest for theme and form, bringing to bear their own experiences and self-knowledge on their subjects. For this task they need two fundamental analytical perspectives. The first is skepticism, about their own values and the predominant values of their culture, tied to an innate questioning of their subject's professions. The second, detachment, is golden. Special pleading--the bane of biography--corrupts the authorial voice. But so does coldness. The detached author at the same time must try to move onto the ground of the subject, be sensitive to the otherness of the subject's terrain, and yet find sympathetic if critical (even self-critical) connection with the subject. On the issue of empathy I consider myself a method biographer: that is, I try to utilize parts of my personality that bear some resemblance to the subject of my work in order to humanize my text. This was not such a stretch in the case of William T. Sherman because he had a voluble, angry, comic, manic-depressive personality of which mine is a very pale partial version. A vivid, compulsive, and rarely self-censoring fellow writer, Sherman almost handed me his complexities. Now I have just finished a book on Robert E. Lee, about as opposite a personality to Sherman as one might ever encounter, someone who kept the entire world at great distance and his feelings so guarded that even he did not appear to know their contents very well. Three years ago, after sitting for six weeks or so in the marvelous Virginia Historical Society manuscript reading room in Richmond reading Lee's close to the vest, deeply ritualized, and endlessly didactic prose, I phoned my wife and asked her, with a certain desperation, how I could ever write about such a reserved and conventional eighteenth-century Chesapeake gentleman. Sherman had been enough like me that I could find connections, I told her, but Lee ...? Relax, Santa reassured me. With Lee you get to explore your repressed side. Unapparent though it may be to my friends, I of course contain that side too, and so Santa was quite correct in reassuring me that I could find such inner resources to draw upon, qualities even more embarrassing and harder to acknowledge than my blustering ones. Three years later, I believe I have made some inroads into Lee's iconic and aloof personality through discussion of his religiosity, his desire to control, his passion for battle, and his professions and actions on race, class, and gender, quite typical for a Virginia aristocrat of his generation; all these qualities are filtered through parts of my own sensibility, the less than forthcoming ones, that rage for order rather than expression and that I am keen to keep tightly wrapped rather than exposed in print and at conferences. …

New Views of Slavery: Using Recent Historical Work to Promote Critical Thinking about the "Peculiar Institution"

Most students do not enter college-level history classes knowing much about the history of slavery and race relations. As James Loewen pointed out in his book Lies My Teacher Told Me, most K-12 history textbooks and classes avoid controversy and therefore steer clear of discussions of slavery and its impact on American history. However, a complex and detailed knowledge of slavery is required to understand the history of North American colonization, the development of America's economy, the secession of the South from the union, and the subsequent Civil War. Additionally, students need to understand that slavery was not a unified, static, unchanging institution: The nature of slavery varied depending on the time and geographic region examined. In this article, I discuss the difficulties of teaching about slavery, then describe how recent scholarship paints a more complex view of slavery than is usually presented in secondary and college textbooks. I discuss how teachers can integrate this new research into their classroom with a pair of exercises I have developed for a college survey class. The three books I discuss below have all won acclaim for their groundbreaking research and interpretation: Philip D. Morgan's, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-century Chesapeake and

Slavery and the Politics of Taxation in the Early United States

Slavery and the Politics of Taxation in the Early United States

New Directions in the Study of Slavery

Book Review| July 01 2000 New Directions in the Study of Slavery Masters, Slaves, and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740-1790, Robert Olwell.Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry, Philip D. Morgan.Jews, Slaves and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight, Eli Faber. Russell R. Menard Russell R. Menard Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Ethnic History (2000) 19 (4): 82–84. https://doi.org/10.2307/27502615 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Russell R. Menard; New Directions in the Study of Slavery. Journal of American Ethnic History 1 July 2000; 19 (4): 82–84. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/27502615 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of American Ethnic History Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2000 Immigration and Ethnic History Society2000 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry.

Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry.

Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry. By Philip D. Morgan (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1998) 703 pp. $49.95 cloth $21.95 paper

<i>Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry</i>. By Philip D. Morgan (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1998) 703 pp. $49.95 cloth $21.95 paper

:Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry . By Philip D. Morgan ( Chapel Hill , University of North Carolina Press , 1998 ) 703 pp. $49.95 cloth $21.95 paper

:Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry . By Philip D. Morgan ( Chapel Hill , University of North Carolina Press , 1998 ) 703 pp. $49.95 cloth $21.95 paper

Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry. Philip D. Morgan

<i>Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry</i>. Philip D. Morgan

Slave counterpoint: black culture in the eighteenth-century Chesapeake and Lowcountry

Slave counterpoint: black culture in the eighteenth-century Chesapeake and Lowcountry

From Calabar to Carter's Grove: the history of a Virginia slave community

Colonial Williamsburg is known internationally for the history it teaches to visitors to the restored capital of eighteenth-century Virginia. Research undertaken by Williamsburg historians, archaeologists, art and architecture historians, curators, and other staff members stands behind the educational programs. book is the first of a series grounded in that research and devoted to major themes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Chesapeake culture. This is an unusual and particularly valuable approach to early black history. Walsh effectively uses diverse records and artifacts, along with the ever-growing secondary literature on plantation slavery, to construct a dynamic view of change over time and across generations. She argues convincingly that one can analyze the experience of discrete groups of slaves using interconnected local records and resources. -- Peter H. Wood, Duke University In From Calabar to Carter's Grove, Lorena S. Walsh has done what conventional wisdom has deemed nearly impossible: she has assembled a substantial history of a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Virginia slave community. Detailed, multigenerational histories of small slave groups can seldom be reconstructed for the antebellum era, except for a few unusual plantations where extraordinarily good records survive. The laborers originally belonging to tidewater's aristocratic Burwell family were, as Walsh discovered, a diverse group of Virginia-born slaves, newly enslaved Africans, and, for a time, white indentured servants. Over the years this slave community shifted and grew, frequently altered by the marriages, deaths, and estate settlements of their owners and augmented by their owngrowing families. Yet during these two centuries the majority of the Burwell slaves remained in or near tidewater Virginia. Walsh's analysis of existing plantation records, artifacts, and ruins has generated a clear and frequently detailed picture of these slaves, including lists of popular forenames and accounts of illnesses, childbirths, and escape attempts. However, as the author is first to admit, this book does not -- and based on the available evidence, cannot -- offer portraits of individual slaves; it is instead a collective portrait of the group, offering details of their African origins, slave histories, and daily hardships. Enhanced with maps, drawings, and photographs, From Calabar to Carter's Grove is an innovative study that paves the way for similar research on other slave communities. volume will be invaluable not only to historians but to anyone with an interest in antebellum or African-American history.

The archaeology of vision in eighteenth-century Chesapeake gardens

Abstract During the eighteenth century, travelers throughout America's mid-Atlantic region often recorded in diaries and letters the scenery they observed on their journeys. As they rode inland along the river valleys or followed roads connecting coastal ports, these writers repeatedly used specific terms to capture their experience of sight in the landscape. This vocabulary of vision—view, vista, eminence, situation, prospect—appears in descriptions of both the natural landscape and the estates of the colonial planter-gentry. Describing Gov. John Howard's garden in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1794, Thomas Twining wrote:

Convict Runaways in Maryland, 1745–1775

That the newspaper press in the eighteenth-century Chesapeake colonies was chock-full of advertisements for runaway convicts is a clear indication of the significance of transportation to America in that period. The existence of convicts in Virginia and Maryland stemmed from the provisions of the Transportation Act passed by the British parliament in 1718. This stated that felons found guilty of non-capital crimes against property could be transported to America for seven years while the smaller number of criminals convicted on capital charges could have their death sentence commuted to banishment for either fourteen years or life. Between 1718 and 1775, when the traffic ended with the approach of war, more than 90 percent of the 50,000 convicts shipped across the Atlantic from the British Isles were sold by contractors to settlers in the Chesapeake, where there was a continuous demand for cheap, white, bonded labour. Though many convicts were people who had resorted to petty, theft in hard times rather than habitual criminals, they were often viewed with jaundiced eyes in the Chesapeake as purveyors of crime, disease and corruption. They also had to endure, along with slaves and indentured servants, the everyday reality of lower-class life in colonial America: the exploitation of unfree labour. It is therefore not surprising that many convicts, like other dependent labourers, tried to free themselves from bondage by escaping from their owners.

Nurserymen and seed dealers in the eighteenth-century Chesapeake

Abstract Abstract Before the Revolution, colonial Chesapeake gardeners looked to England for instruction books on how to garden as well as for many seeds and plants themselves, which they often ordered through British agents in trade for tobacco or other goods. While English gardening books continued to dominate the American market until the early nineteenth century, the sale of seeds and plants changed dramatically in the Chesapeake as a result of the war. The Revolution and the growth of urban economies gave rise to new commercial gardening ventures, nurseries and seed stores, operated by professional gardeners who initially imported and then grew their own seed and plant stock. These professional artisans also retained staffs to lay out and maintain the gardens of others under contract. Contemporary newspaper notices, advertising catalogues, and estate inventories accurately reflect the plant stock and services offered by these establishments. Chesapeake gardeners, who had traditionally traded seeds and plants with neighbors and friends on both sides of the Atlantic, began to patronize capitalistic seed merchants and nurserymen. These businessmen aggressively advertised their wares to a public increasingly concerned with the status of the ornamental in addition to the utilitarian aspects of their gardens. Leisure time was growing in the new nation, and the gentry as well as their less wealthy neighbors could now find the time to indulge in an avocation such as pleasure gardening.

A late eighteenth-century ‘tour’ of Baltimore gardens

Abstract House and garden tours are not a twentieth-century phenomenon. Eighteenth-century Chesapeake gentry and artisans alike enjoyed viewing gardens on their journeys and in their neighbourhoods and often took the measure of the man by the gardens he planned. Even an Annapolis clockmaker strolling the streets of his hometown jotted notes in his journal about his neighbors' gardens.1

Gardening books in eighteenth-century Maryland

Abstract The eighteenth-century Maryland gardening gentry were bound to England for most planting materials and guidance. Pleasure gardeners ordered their horticultural instruction books as well as seeds, plants, tools, and often gardeners themselves from the mother country before the Revolution. Despite wide discrepancies in both soil and climate among the colonies themselves and certainly between these ‘new’ lands and mother England, gentlemen up and down the Atlantic depended on English gardening publications until well after the Revolution. The English garden books that dominated the American market until the early nineteenth century, however inadequate and misleading their planting instructions, remain as valuable tools for reconstructing not only plant materials recommended but also methods used in designing and laying out elements of eighteenth-century Chesapeake gardens.