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Image Virginia Rank Ways: A System of Extended Orders

Virginia’s wealth ways developed within a system of stratification, which is not easily translated into the social language of a later age. Even in its own time, it was commonly described in metaphorical terms—which may still be the best way to approach it. In the year 1699, for example, an English landowner named Richard Newdigate explained his idea of society by a metaphor that came readily to the mind of a country gentleman. Society, he wrote, was like the landscape of his native Warwickshire. The common people were the grass that grew in the fields. The nobles and gentry were the trees that shaded the grass. And the clergy were the cherries that hung from the trees.1

That curious image was not unique to its author. Many similar metaphors of social stratification were carried outward to the Chesapeake by English emigrants in the seventeenth century. These ideas were similar in some respects to those that went to

Massachusetts. Both Anglo-American cultures preserved many forms of inequality which had existed in the mother country. Neither had modern class systems in which rank was determined by riches. In those respects, Virginia and Massachusetts were the same.

In other ways, however, these two ranking systems were different. New England, as we have seen, had a truncated system of social orders. The Virginians, on the other hand, extended the full array of English social orders, and reinforced them. There was much discussion of this ranking system among English country gentlemen during the period when Virginia was founded. Most described it as a hierarchy of “orders” and “degrees.” In the year 1630 one observer who signed himself “Thomas Westcote, Gent.” wrote that in Devon “there are (as I conceive it) but four degrees of difference.” He labeled them “1. nobility or gentility; 2. yeomanry and husbandmen; 3. merchants; 4. day laborers and hirelings.”2 Others offered more elaborate descriptions. Camden in his Britannia, and Dugdale in his Diary, enumerated no fewer than six ranks of “esquires” alone, plus many shadings of “gentility.” The authors of these various taxonomies differed in many details. In particular, country gentlemen were never very clear about the proper place of merchants in the scheme of things. Thomas Westcote ranked them below the “husbandmen” who were his tenant farmers; but others put them closer to the top; and some set them to the side in another social dimension altogether. Despite these differences, nearly everyone agreed on the fundamental fact that rural England was a layered society of high complexity—a hierarchy of orders and estates.3

Many twentieth-century historians have tried to translate these social orders into materialist terms. But most conceptions of social rank in the seventeenth century were not materialist. Westcote, for example, wrote that gentlemen and nobles were “not only such as by descent from ancient and worthy parentage are so, but those also as by their own proper virtues, valiant actions, travels, learning and other good deserts, have been and are by their sovereign advanced thereto.”4 In the same vein, William Harrison wrote that “gentlemen be those whom their race and blood, or at least their virtues, do make noble and known.” In both England and Virginia gentility was normally defined in terms of ancient and worthy descent, virtue and valor, reputation and fame. Most of all, gentility was a matter of honor.5

This ranking system was more rigid than a modern class system. In the twentieth century, status changes instantly with one’s material possessions; in consequence, many studies find that social mobility (in small steps) is a common and even normal part of the ranking system. In a world of social orders movement was more constrained in some respects, and less so in others. But status was also more brittle, and more easily shattered—by loss of honor for example.

All of these characteristics were carried to Virginia. In the period from 1650 to 1775, few men in that colony succeeded in rising above the social order in which they were born. Many servants became freemen, but comparatively few rose to the rank of freeholder. Further, historian Martin Quitt finds that “not a single indentured servant who arrived after 1640 appears to have won a seat in the assembly before 1706.” Further, Quitt also discovered that “apparently none of the burgesses from 1660 to 1706 was descended from indentured servants who emigrated after 1640.” Virginia’s social system had been more fluid before the arrival of Governor Berkeley. But by 1676, the rigidity of social orders was very great. It was exceptionally difficult to cross the great divide that separated “common folk” and “gentle folk” in that colony.6

The psychological cement of this system was a culture of subordination which modern historians call deference. Country gentlemen in England and Virginia normally expected a display of social deference from their inferiors, and by and large they received it. “Everybody offered me abundance of respect,” William Byrd entered in his diary on more than one occasion.7 Gentlefolk and common folk agreed on the fundamental fact that social deference was normal in Virginia. The classical account, often quoted by historians, is the autobiography of Devereux Jarrett, who was born in the lowest order. “We were accustomed to look upon, what were called gentle folks, as beings of a superior order,” he remembered. “For my part, I was quite shy of them, and kept off at a humble distance.”8

This relationship created intense feelings of anxiety and fear among the “common folk,” in a manner that is not easy for people of another world to understand. A clergyman named James Ireland remembered an encounter with a Virginia gentleman: “When I viewed him riding up, I never beheld such a display of pride in any man. … arising his deportment, attitude and gesture; he rode a lofty elegant horse … his countenance appeared as bold and daring as satan himself.”9

Social rank in Virginia was an extended hierarchy of deferential relationships. Even the greatest planters were conscious of a rank above them, which was occupied by the King himself and the royal family. Distant as the sovereign may have been, the gentry of Virginia thought much about him. William Byrd even dreamed about imaginary intimacies with members of the royal family, as did many English-speaking people in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century. “I … dreamed the King’s daughter was in love with me,” he wrote in his diary on one occasion—a common fantasy in the minds of seventeenth-century Englishmen, who were obsessed with the feelings of those above them.10

Just as the gentlemen of Virginia deferred to their King, so the yeomanry were expected to defer to gentlemen, servants were required to defer to their yeoman masters, and African slaves were compelled to submit themselves to Europeans of every social rank. These rules were generally obeyed in Virginia. Acts of criminal violence, for example, were rarely committed on people of higher rank by social inferiors.

Deference also had a reciprocal posture called condescension—a word which has radically changed its meaning in the past two hundred years. To condescend in the seventeenth and eighteenth

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The iconography of deference in Royalist England appears in a self-portrait by the court painter Anthony Van Dyck. This work had a very different purpose from self-portraiture in our own time. Van Dyck sought to celebrate a spirit of subordination, obligation and deference in his hierarchical world. The artist’s right hand points to an enormous sunflower, while his left hand fingers a heavy gold chain. In Thynne’s Emblems and Epigrams presented to Sir Thomas Egerton the sunflower was made to represent the bond between king and people, for “just as the sunflower turns to the sun for strength and sustenance, so the subject turns toward his monarch.” The same symbol also appeared in The Mirror of Majestie (1618), where the courtier is compared to a sunflower, “waiting upon the sonne of his Majestie” (Brown, Van Dyck, 147). Another symbol of obligation was Van Dyck’s golden chain, which had been given to him by Charles I, together with a portrait medallion of the king. These hierarchical relationships were thought to exist not merely between the king and his loyal subjects, but between superiors and inferiors of every rank.

centuries was to treat an inferior with kindness, decency and respect. The gentlefolk of Virginia were taught to “condescend” in this special sense, and many of them tried to do so. St. George Tucker recalled that in colonial Virginia “the rich rode in Coaches, or Chariots, or on fine horses, but they never failed to pull off their hats to a poor man whom they met, and generally appeared to me to shake hands with every man in a Court-yard, or a Church-yard.” Gentlemen and ladies were taught to “condescend” graciously to their inferiors in this manner.11

But not all of them learned to do so. The social reality was sometimes very far from this ideal. The darker side of deference was a common attitude of contempt for the poor and weak and unlucky. This was a world without pity. Charles Woodmason described an encounter in the low country of South Carolina with the vestrymen of St. Mark’s parish—many of whom were transplanted tidewater Virginians:

When I first came over, they advis’d me to marry—a circumstance I am wholly unfit for, as being both old and impotent for many years past, ’thro a fall received from an horse, and a kick received in the scrotum. … I told our vestry my unfitness, which they laughed at as a joke.12

In all of these respects, Virginia’s system of stratification was very similar to that in the south and west of England. In another way, however, the rank ways of that colony were profoundly different from those of the mother country. To the English system of social orders, Virginians added the even more rigid category of race slavery. Sir William Berkeley himself played a major role in its development. He tried first to establish an Indian slave trade. In 1666, he wrote:

I think it is necessary to destroy all these northern Indians. … ’Twill be a great terror and example and instruction to all other Indians … it may be done without charge, for the women and children will defray it.13

When these efforts failed, Berkeley encouraged the development of African slavery. It is important to remember the timing of its appearance. Slavery came late to Virginia. The first Africans appeared in the colony as early as 1619; a census of 1625 enumerated 23 blacks.14 But when Sir William Berkeley first arrived, there were fewer Africans in the Chesapeake than in New England or New Netherlands. Their legal status remained very unclear. The concept of chattel slavery was defined very gradually in a series of statutes through the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Several of the major statutes were probably written by Sir William Berkeley himself.15

The development of slavery in Virginia was a complex process—one that cannot be explained simply by an economic imperative. A system of plantation agriculture resting upon slave labor was not the only road to riches for Virginia’s royalist elite. With a little imagination, one may discern a road not taken in southern history. In purely material terms, Virginia might have flourished as did her northern neighbors, solely by complex speculations in land and trade, and by an expansive system of freehold farming. But Virginia’s ruling elite had other aims in mind. For its social purposes, it required an underclass that would remain firmly fixed in its condition of subordination. The culture of the English countryside could not be reproduced in the New World without this rural proletariat. In short, slavery in Virginia had a cultural imperative. Bertram Wyatt-Brown writes, “ … the South was not founded to create slavery; slavery was recruited to perpetuate the South.”16

But this solution created another set of problems. The harsh reality of slavery undercut the cultural ideal that it was meant to serve. The result was an elaborate set of subterfuges, in which Virginia planters tried to convince themselves, if no one else, that their peculiar system was little different from that which had existed in rural England. As early as 1727, William Byrd II wrote to the Earl of Orrery, “Our poor negroes are freemen in comparison of the slaves who till your ungenerous soil; at least if slavery consists in scarcity, and hard work.”17

Other subterfuges were also resorted to. A slave was rarely called a slave in the American south by his master. Slaves were referred to as “my people,” “my hands,” “my workers,” almost anything but “my slaves.” They were made to dress like English farm workers, to play English folk games, to speak an English country dialect, and to observe the ordinary rituals of English life in a charade that Virginia planters organized with great care.

In the end, these fictions failed to convince even their creators. William Byrd, in a more candid mood, confessed to the Earl of Egmont in 1736 that slavery was a great evil. It was typical of him (and others of his rank) to believe that it was hateful not so much because of its effect on the slave but because of what it did to their masters. “They blow up the pride, and ruin the industry of our white people,” he wrote, “ … another unhappy effect of my negroes is the necessity of being severe.”18

William Byrd, in company with many large planters, came to favor a parliamentary prohibition of the slave trade. But this was after his status as a country gentleman was secure. If slavery was not quite what Virginians really wanted, it carried them closer to their conservative utopia than any alternative which lay within reach.19

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