Saturday, April 1, 2023

Savages, Slaves and Soap Operas: Re-telling A Mythical Historyi

Savages, Slaves and Soap Operas: Re-telling A Mythical Historyi

In the early 17th century, Jordan's Point, a promontory on the tidal James River in Prince George County, Virginia, was the location of a plantation village known as Beggars Bush or Jordan's Journey. Both documents and archaeology suggest that Samuel Jordan had someone living on his property perhaps as early as 1620, but there is no doubt that the village as we now know it grew rapidly in the weeks following March 22nd, 1622, when Opechancanough, king of Pamunkey and paramount chief of all the Powhatan tribes, led a well-planned attack on the Virginia colony, leaving 346 dead and 17 more dying of the wounds they received that morning. In recounting the event and its aftermath two years later, Captain John Smith reported that Master Samuel Jordan had gathered about him many survivors, fortified in his plantation, and continued to live in the heart of the Weyanokes "in despight of the enemie." ii

 

I have called Jordan's Journey a village, because the term current in the 1620sÑplantationÑdoesn't quite convey the nature of the place or the relationships among its inhabitants. In February of 1623/24 there were 42 people living at Jordan's Journey, and 8 more who had died there during the year. Inexplicably, Samuel Jordan isn't among those counted in the so-called list Òof the living and the dead,Ó as it is called (*), so if we count him, there were at least 51 persons in the village that year.

The following year, upon the dissolution of the Virginia Company of London and the launching of Virginia as a royal colony, a much more remarkable document was produced. This is known as the muster of 1624/25 (*), and it's a peerless source. It enumerates all the persons living in Virginia by household, by muster, and by settlement or plantation, along with their provisions, weaponry, and stock. In January of 1624/25 there were 56 persons living at Jordan's Journey, and 2 more who had died that year. When we compare the names on the two lists and exclude duplicates, we can conclude that a total of 75 persons lived at the settlement sometime between 1623 and 1625. The muster reported 22 dwelling houses in the village, the same number that was reported for Jamestown.

The village probably looked a little something like the Vintners settlement at Balleague in Ulster, Northern Island, as it appeared in 1622 (Figures 3.2 and 3.3). At the head of the village plan lay the master's fortified manor house compound, a combination of public and private space wherein church services were held, court was convened, and the public business of the community was conducted. Extending from a gate in the fort there was probably a lane which defined the town commons, and another road to the landing on the river. Along the main lane were fourteen more individual houselots: croft, toft and yard complexes of individual tenants and their servants. Some or all of these were also enclosed within defensive palisades. Of the fifteen compounds that made up the village, archaeological studies have uncovered four or, perhaps, five.

Norman Barka (*) has recently published a very valuable analysis of the Virginia muster, extending earlier demographic work by Irene Hecht (*). The muster lists 28 settlements, all but one on the James River. Barka has ranked these on 14 quantifiable attributes, such as population, number of households, number of servants, frequencies of armor, weapons, domestic animals, stores of foodstuffs, etc. He then summed the ranks and ranked the results. This provides some overall rank score which is hard to name, but which is intuitively sensible. Jordan's Journey ranked fourth among the 28 settlements. The village was divided into 15 households and was headed, at that time, by Mr. William Farrar and Mrs. Cicely Jordan. Farrar and his tenants and servants were among the survivors brought to Jordan's Journey after the massacre, and following Samuel Jordan's death in 1623, Farrar and Cicely Jordan cohabited and, eventually, married.

The household muster of Mr. Farrar and Mrs. Jordan is the census of the Jordan-Farrar compound (Figures 3.4 and 3.5), the fortified manor house complex (or Òbawn,Ó to use the Ulster term); that is, the site we call 44PG302. Within this fort lived Mr. Farrar, age 31, and Mrs. Jordan, age 24, three children, and 10 servants, all males mostly between the ages of 21 and 26. William and Cicely had 5 houses, 2 boats, 16 neat cattle, 20 poultry, 200 bushels of corn, 200 pounds of fish, 14 pounds of gunpowder, 300 pounds of lead, 11 Òfixt pieces,Ó and 12 Òcoats of male.Ó

The census takerÑprobably Mr. Farrar himselfÑwalked out the gate of his fort and down the lane, encountering the houses and palisaded compounds of his tenants, where the various muster-masters passed muster. First he met Thomas Palmer who lived with his wife Joane, her 11-yr.-old daughter, Priscilla, and Richard English, an 11-year-old servant. The Palmers had 2 houses and reasonably good provisions and weaponry.

Next came the Fishers, Robert and Katherine and their year-old daughter ÒSisly,Ó probably named for their mistress. The Fishers had a maid servant, aged 30, named Idye Halliers. They also had two houses. One of these households was probably that which we excavated at 44PG307, another fortified compound just a couple hundred yards from the Jordan-Farrar fort (Figure 3.6). This was also a very rich site, with two moderately large houses and four additional buildings.

Farrar's walk would have taken him to the households of 6 more nuclear families. He also would have visited the house of Christopher Safford and his partner, John Gibbs, and their servant, Henery Lane; and that of John Davies and his partner, William Emerson, and their servants, William Popleton and Eustice Downes. Richard Milton, Thomas Ironmonger, Thomas Cawsey and Joseph Bull all lived alone. The last palisade he would have crossed would have taken him to the riverside home of Nathaniel and Thomasine Cawsey, whose compound I believe to be represented by the site 44PG300, excavated by Jay Harrison.

In all, the people of Jordan's Journey had, at the time of the muster, 22 houses, 44 armors, 41 firearms, 263 domestic animals including fowl, 112.5 barrels of corn and 1 and 1/4 tons of dried or pickled fish. As you will see, that's not the whole story. The archaeological sites of Jordan's Journey have proven to be extraordinary in every dimension. The saga of Jordan's Journey began long before January of 1624 and the tale of its discovery, excavation, and interpretation could outlast the lifetime of the community itself.

***

There is oneÑand only oneÑstory about Jordan's Journey which has inscribed itself into the collective memory of popular history in Virginia, a place where people know their place, as often as not, through the narrative devices of popular history. It frames Cicely Jordan as the subject of Virginia's first breach-of-promise suit, and it goes something like this.iii Cicely Jordan was widowed in 1623 when her husband, Samuel, died of unknown causes. She was left with two young children and she was pregnant with a third. Sober storytellers speak of the scarcity of women in early Virginia, and the more colorful speculate on Cicely's charms, when they introduce the Reverend Grivel Pooley. Pooley entered a suit against Mrs. Jordan in June of 1623, scarce months after Samuel's death, contending that she was living infamously with William Farrar, even though she was betrothed to Pooley.

To the court Captain Isaac Madison testified that, just a few days after Samuel's death, Pooley had asked him to serve as a go-between and announce his, that is Reverend Pooley's, request for a marriage to Mrs. Jordan. Madison testified, ÒMrs. Jordan replied that she would as willingly have him as any other, but she would not marry any man until she was deliveredÓ [that is, until her baby was born].

Pooley took that as a Òyes.Ó A little later Pooley, along with Captain Madison, sat drinking toasts with Cicely Jordan and, after an uncertain number of rounds, he lifted his glass and declared that he took Cicely Òto be my wedded wife.Ó Captain Madison, at the trial, could not recall if Mrs. Jordan had consented, but she apparently kissed the Reverend and drank a few more toasts with him. The court could not decide the matter and deferred it to England but, after a time, with Cicely continuing to live openly with William Farrar, and even having been witnessed publicly kissing him, Pooley withdrew his suit. A year later, testimony in an unrelated matter suggested that Samuel Jordan had had another lover, and that fact had caused considerable tension between he and Cicely.

Thus Jordan's Journey has entered into our historical mythos as a frontier Peyton Place. Life in early 17th-century Virginia was a tawdry soap opera which, through all the estrangement of the ages, was not so different from our own. History, so this old story goes, is but a change of scenery, and had Samuel and Cicely Jordan, Grivel Pooley and William Farrar lived in our own time, this story of the rich and famous would be as familiar to us as anything we might read while waiting in the grocery store check-out line. So why do we study the cultures of the past? Inquiring minds want to know.

***

The fruits of archaeological workÑwhether they be written materials, museum interpretations, oral presentations to colleagues or civic groups, or minor wisdoms incorporated into classroom lecturesÑare representations of other ways of life. ÒArchaeography,Ó if I may borrow Deetz's term, shares this with historiography and ethnography. We archaeologists inscribe history in the present. At first blush, our burden may seem less than that of the ethnographer, whose representations of present-day “others” clearly have potential present-day consequences. But we share with historians another, equally grave, and perhaps even more complex responsibility, for the representations of historical archaeology are always about Òus,Ó a poorly formed, emergent ÒusÓ which needs to remain in qualifying quotation marks. If historical archaeology is Òthe archaeology of us,Ó then the ÒusÓ we are representing most certainly has present consequence. What happened in the past isn't really very important, except, as Foucault (*) incisively put it, as the history of the present. In asking Òwho do they think they were?ÓÑthe people of Jordan's Journey, that isÑI am seeking to illuminate who we think we are. Early 17th-century Virginia is rather poorly represented in contemporary texts, and most of these, historians have noted, were written by community leaders or company shareholders often looking to put a finer face on the state of the nascent colony than others might have ventured. Nonetheless, there are some interesting texts and, taken with archaeological evidence, they represent the early colony rather well.

Major excavation projects typically lead to new interpretations of the past. At the very least, they offer new stories to tell about the past: stories which may contradict established narratives or which may challenge conventional wisdoms. In the following pages I look at the archaeology of Jordan’s Journey, and especially of the fortified manor house complex known as the Jordan-Farrar Site (44PG302), and I suggest some new stories that might be told of a Virginia past that has assumed the proportions of myth.

Let me take as a given that identity is Òinter-referential,Ó to use George Marcus's term. It is formed largely in interaction with others. Who individuals at Jordan's Journey thought they were, surely varied with regard to those around them. The most exuberantly interpreted site of this period to date is Martin's Hundred, and No‘l Hume's picture of life in that settlement owes much to the sensationalism evoked by images of the deadly 1622 massacre. The exhibits of Martin's Hundred on display at the Rockerfeller * Museum at the site on the James River outside Williamsburg make powerful use of these graphic depictions of the 1622 massacre created by artist Richard Schlect. These images of burning buildings, scalpings, of families butchered at their breakfast tables by murderous Indians weilding shovels as weapons, are familiar to those who have followed the story of archaeology at Martin's Hundred in two National Geographic articles (*), two edition of No‘l Hume's masterful book (*), and a popular documentary film of the excavations (*).

The dominating images are of maniacal Indians butchering women and children, of the man whose face was reconstructed by forensic wizardry, but who died apparently from a blow with his own shovel, and, perhaps most poignantly, of ÒGranny,Ó found naked, apparently dead of exposure in a trash pit, her clothes left lying in front of her house and her hair-roll pulled back to offer her murderer a scalplock. These images are clearly painted through masterful wordsmanship by No‘l Hume, detailed and expressive watercolors by Schlect, and museum exhibits of the highest caliber. They evoke a frontier of hard-working Christians bravely eeking out an existence in an impossibly hostile and foreign land. But all was lost in the vicious attack.

Let's look at the relationship between Indians and colonists from some other angles. In 1619 John Pory, secretary of the colony, natural historian, and explorer, wrote a letter to Sir Dudley Carleton, ambassador to the Netherlands.

...there be many grounds here cleared by the Indians to our handes, which being much worne out will bear no more of their corn...but of our grain of all sorts it will bear abundance. We had this year a plentiful crop of English wheat...In July last so soon as we reaped this self-sowen wheat, we sett Indian corn upon the same ground, which is come up in great abundance; and so by this means we are to enjoy two crops in one year off one and the same field (*).

For Pory, the successful crop of English wheat was owed to fields cleared by Indians, and the bountiful double crop, virtually unheard of in England, was due to the rotation of English and Indian corns. A little further along he writes:

All our riches for the present doe consist in Tobacco, wherein one man by his own labor hath in one yeare raised to himself the value of 200 l sterling; and another by the means of six servants hath cleared at one crop a thousand pound English. These be true, yet indeed rare examples, yet possible to be done by others. Our principal wealth (I should have said) consisteth in servants: But these are chardgeable (sic) to be furnished with armes, apparel and bedding and for their transportation and casual [expenses], both at sea, and for their first year commonly on land also: But if they escape, they prove very hardy, and sound able men (*).

Tobacco, of course, was an Indian gift transformed by Pory's colleague, John Rolfe, into the cash crop of Virginia. For the decade between 1620 and 1630, many more men would meet, and exceed, Pory's examples of riches gained through tobacco cultivation. It is interesting to note that Pory felt that wealth was to be measured in servants, and that that was a double-edged sword, for servants were expensive, and fragile commodities. By the phrase Òif they escapeÓ Pory meant, Òif they survive.Ó Tyler points out that there were 1000 English in Virginia at Easter of 1619. Over the next three years a total of 3570 people immigrated to Virginia, and yet, the day before the massacre, there were only 1240. The massacre killed about 360 people, but nearly ten times that many had succumbed to other causes. Surely, a few had returned to England, but most had died of disease and hardships which had nothing to do with Indians.

Our excavations at the Jordan-Farrar site presented us with some tantalizing observations. Among the most abundant coursewares in many colonial features were sherds of the Gaston and Roanoke ceramics made by the Weyanokes and other Powhatans (Figure 3.6). Of course, this is to be expected. Jordan's Journey was planted in an Indian town site, and the ground was liberally peppered with Indian garbage. Nonetheless, when we look at Native American artifacts from very early colonial featuresÑthose associated with setting up the community, such as the lower fill in the sawpit (Figure 3.7)Ñwe find mixtures of protohistoric materials with earlier Woodland and Archaic materials in abundance. When we look at Native American materials in colonial occupation fills, such as the trash layer on top of the sawpit, we find a statistically significant greater proportion of Weyanoke ceramics, including the plain smoothed shell-tempered wares that seem to be prototypes for Colono-Indian ceramics found ubiquitously on later Virginia plantation and town sites. This suggests that colonists received Indian pots from sale or trade transactions, and used them as utensils.

Perhaps the pots arrived at the site filled with corn, for despite John Pory's optimism about the crops, many Virginians during the tobacco boom of the 1620s devoted all their effort to the cash crop. The council letters of Virginia contain a note saying that Governor Francis Wyatt was sent with instructions (and I quote):

for the conversion of the Salvages; the suppressing of planting Tobacco, and planting of Corne; not depending continually to be supplied by the Salvages, but in case of necessity to trade with them, whome long ere this, it hath been promised should have been fed and redressed by the English, not the English by them... (Smith p 436*)

The excellent faunal assemblages from the sites contain lots of deer bones (*faunal report) (Figure 3.8). Wild animals were clearly important in the early 17th century diet, as Henry Miller (*) has demonstrated, but who at Jordan's Journey was a proficient deer hunter? Deer, in England, were the prerogative of the aristocracy. Jay Anderson (*) points out that their abundance in Virginia symbolized Virginia's cornucopia-like richness. I suspect that most of the servants at Jordan's Journey were taken from the ranks of the urban unemployed and apprentices of London. Even if they included some cottagers of the countryside who may have known the use of a goose gun, they would have risked hanging to shoot a deer in the old country. The question remains: who were the hunters?

John Smith, in 1624 (*p346), wrote

...I have much admired to heare of the incredible pleasure, profit and plenty the Plantation doth abound in, and yet it hath oft amazed me to understand how strangely the Salvages hath been taught the use of our arms, and imploied in hunting and fowling with our fowling peeces; and our men rooting in the ground about tobacco like swine.

Later Smith was questioned concerning his opinion about the cause of the massacre, and he wrote, comparing Virginia under the martial law days when he was there, versus the boom days a decade later.

In my time, though Captaine Nuport furnished [the Indians] with swords by truck, and many fugitives did the like, and some Peeces [firearms] they got accidentally...it was death to him that should shew a Salvage the use of a Peece. Since [that time], I understand, they became so good shott, they were employed for Fowlers and Huntsmen by the English. (*Tyler p400)

Samuel Jordan was elected to represent Charles City in the first representative assembly in English America. He and five other men sat with Governor Yeardly in Jamestown and made laws for the colony, including this act:

As touching the instruction of drawing some of the better disposed of the Indians to converse with our people and to live and labour among them, the Assembly...thinke it fitte to enjoin, least to counsel those of the Colony, neither utterly to reject them nor yet to drawe them to come in. But in case they will of themselves come voluntarily to places well peopled, there to do service in killing of Deere, fishing, beatting of Corne and other workes, that five or six may be admitted into every such place...Provided that a good guarde in the night be kept upon them...And it were fitt a house were builte for them to lodge in aparte by themselves...(*Tyler p. 264; my emphasis).

The assembly also made it lawful for all free men to trade with the Indians. Trade, not warfare, was the primary mode of relation between English and Indian in Virginia. It was not a particularly friendly trade, but one apparently perceived by all parties as advantageous, and, perhaps, necessary. The ÒRelation of the Virginia Assembly of 1624Ó described it in this way:

We never perceaved that the Natives of this Countrey did voluntarily yeeld themselves subjects to our gracyous Sovraigne, neither that they took any pride in that title, nor paid at any time any contrybutione [tribute] of corne for sustentation of the Colony, nor could we at any tyme keepe them in such good respect of correspondency as we became mutually helpful each to the other but contrarily what was done proceeded from feare and not love, and corne procured by trade or the sworde. (Tyler p 425*)

Structure 20 at the Jordan-Farrar site sticks out of the wall of the fort palisade like a sore thumb (Figure 3.9). It is situated in the corner with the main gate and bastion. This building's location is very similar to one drawn in 1625 on the fort at Bangor, an English settlement in Ulster (Figures 3.10 and 3.11). Note also the notch, gate, maze and central street of this fort which so resemble those of Jordan's Journey. These buildings which are outside the fort, but attached to it at the main gate, are reminiscent of trading posts and gate or guard houses on some 18th-century frontier forts. In these latter cases, the gate house often served as a trading post, as, I believe, did Structure 20. And since Samuel Jordan and his fellow Assemblymen saw fit to permit Indian servants only in those well-peopled places where they could be guarded at night and, preferably, housed in separate quarters, I suggest that Structure 20, outside the fence and adjacent to the probable guard tower at the gate, also served as an Indian barracks.

Violence between colonists and Indians did occur, and it certainly affected the Jordan's Journey settlers' view of themselves and their world. Burial 17 was a dual interment of a man and woman, possibly husband and wife (Figure 3.12). Burial 17B had lodged in his upper thorax a small quartz arrowhead of the type used by the Powhatans. Each apex of the point was shattered, as if it had impacted armor or bone before coming here to rest. This was one of the earlier burials in the south cemetery, as noted by its inadvertant intrusion by a later interment. This may represent a pair of massacre victims brought here after death, or who died later of mortal wounds. But arrows and hatchets were by no means the most serious threat to a long life at Jordan's Journey, and relationships between the settlers and their Indian neighbors were far more complex, and far more important, than a tabloid account of March 22nd, 1622 can effectively communicate.

***

Despite its early date, Jordan's Journey may also tell us something important about relations between blacks and whites, and the institution of racial slavery in Virginia, with all that that means for formation of group identities. The pot mentioned in the previous chapter, and illustrated in Figures 2.3 and 2.4, was, for me, one of the most interesting objects found at Jordan's Point. It is a slightly carinated vessel with mammiform lug handles and a flat base. It was hand built from slabs or fillets, and was finished by coarsely smoothing the surface with a wet hand after the pot had dried to the leather-hard stage. The surface was then burnished, apparently not with a stick or stone, but with a cloth or skin and silt or clay slip. It was burnished on both interior and exterior surfaces. It was fired inverted over a smudging fire, probably to seal the clay-body pores with soot. Its form, finish and wear patterns indicate it was a cooking pot designed for use with liquid-based preparations, such as stews and gruels.

As I have noted, this pot is probably of a West Indian ÒcreoleÓ type. It has many formal and technological attributes similar to those found in what Ebanks has called the Afro-Jamaican pottery tradition. I wondered if the pot had been made in the Caribbean and carried here as a commodity, or if it had been made in Virginia by an African or creole Carib slave. Dr. Tom Davidson of the Jamestown Settlement Museum prepared both thick and thin sections from the vessel. I have not yet had these properly studied by a petrographer or mineralogist, but the temper seems to be a mixture of grog, quartz and quartzite. If this is the case, the pot was more likely made in Tidewater Virginia than in the Caribbean islands.

The vessel's sherds were spread over four features in the Northwest corner of the site, including in postmolds to one of the two small enigmatic buildings I previously described, Structures 17 and 18*check MVC*. These are nearly identical structures sitting adjacent to each other. Their size (*x*) is consistent with some later slave cabins, and Structure 17 included a small rectangular Òroot cellarÓ in one corner. There is little doubt that these were domestic structures, given the rich domestic assemblage from the root cellar and the postmolds. I think they were slave cabins, and their placement at the opposite end of the fort from other dwellingsÑincluding the dwellings of the Jordan and Farrar indentured servantsÑis suggestive. These houses are structurally placed among the cattle pen, trash pits, and agricultural buildings. If this interpretation is reasonable, then I think that the arguments we have heard far too many times about institutionalized race-based slavery being an invention of the late 17th or early 18th century are, at best, overstated. That period documents refer to Africans as ÒNegro manÓ or ÒNegro woman,Ó without names, and usually without other qualifiers, is also significant. Separate quarters, and separate conceptual treatment, not only for Indian servants, but also for black slaves, was the order of the day as early as the 1620s.

***

Identity also proceeds from one's status within a community and perceptions of the rigidity or permeability of status boundaries. Approximately 1/3 of those living at Jordan's Journey in 1625 were servants, and all but William Farrar, Cicely Jordan and her children were tenants or cottagers. Martha McCartney (*) has traced some of the tenants and servants through the documents and has found that some returned to England, some went on to patent sizeable landholdings of their own, and manyÑa great manyÑjust disappeared from the records. Most of these probably did not live long. Those who came to Virginia, whether as free persons or servants, probably did so in the hope of improving their lot in life. Samuel Jordan and William Farrar were both descended of gentry families, and they held gentry positions in Virginia. Nonetheless, they were probably non-inheriting sons whose estates in the New World were superior to any they might have amassed had they remained in the Old.

Certainly the hopeÑeven the expectationÑof bettering one's position meant that colonists, as a rule, were likely to hold strict class boundaries in scorn. Much more so during the boom times of the 1620s, when money was being made handily. John Pory, in his letter to Sir Dudley Carleton wrote:

Nowe that your lordship may knowe, that we are not the veriest beggers in the world, our cowkeeper herre of James citty on Sundays goes accowtered all in fresh flaming silk' and a wife of one that in England professed the black arte, not of a scholler, but of a collier of Croyden, weres her rough bever hatt with a faire perle hatband, and a silken suite thereto correspondent.(Tyler p 425*)

The same year Pory wrote that letter, Samuel Jordan and his fellow assemblymen passed acts ÒAgainst Idleness, Gaming, drunkenes and excesse in apparell.Ó (*p263). Flush times tended to blur social distinctions. Three years later the ÒCouncels Letters for VirginiaÓ contain the following observation:

...seeing they could get so much and such great estates for themselves as to spend after the rate of 100 pounds, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, nay some say 2000 or 3000 pounds yearely, that were not worth so many pence when they went to Virginia, can scarece contain themselves either in diet, apparell, gaming, and all manner of superfluity... (p346*)

The artifacts from Jordan's Journey suggest a certain amount of opulence. Even the tenant's trash pit at 44Pg307 produced fine brass objects, delft or faience dishes, porcelain and wine bottles (Figures 3.13-3.15). As No‘l Hume has cautioned, we need to be careful when interpreting artifacts which today might command very high prices at the auction block. A fine Westerwald frieze jug may have been a very common object (Figure 3.16), but certainly a silver hairpin (Figire 3.17), probably owned by Cicely Jordan, was a symbol of affluence. Some luxuries came cheap in Virginia. While the price of fine Virginia tobacco was very high in London, it was everyday fare in the colony. The tiny bulbous pipes made in England and Holland were duplicated in form by pipemakers at Jordan's Journey, but they often held two or three times as much tobacco (Figures * Ref to figure in Creole chapter). Silver and gold threads, silver sequins, finely carved knives, bejewelled and beaded clothing, Ming porcelain wine cups, ornamental delft tiles, and many other objects all bespeak a comfortable, even somewhat hedonistic lifestyle. These were not the Òveriest beggers in the world,Ó and it's not at all difficult to imagine even servants at Jordan's Journey appearing for Sunday services accoutred in Òfresh flaming silkes.Ó This ÒexcessiveÓ behavior was clearly frowned on back in the homeland. While the assembly passed a token one-line act against Òexcesse in apparell,Ó the Virginia Company in London passed explicit sumptuary laws designed to enforce humility among the Òlesser sortesÓ and to preserve prerogatives for those of more elevated station (*).

Burial number 4 at the Jordan-Farrar site is probably the remains of Samuel Jordan (Figures 3.17). His status as a gentleman, and as head of the plantation, and an elder male in the community are noted in the extraordinary pains taken with his interment. His grave was the deepest, and best prepared of the 25 burials in the cemetery. He was buried in a coffin, and his was the only grave with offerings, noted here by one of two brass clasps that held together a box of some sort laid upon his coffin. His teeth, like those of other high-status coffin burials in the samples studied by Owsley and Compton (*), were full of caries and abscesses. It was an old saw in 17th- and 18th-century England that you could recognize a gentleman by his rotten teeth, evidence of access to that great luxury of the day: sugar. Since Samuel spent all his adult life in Virginia, he probably consumed his sweet treats mostly within the fort walls of Jordan's Journey.iv

Many early 17th-century Virginia sites are known for their spectacular assemblages of militaria, and Jordan's Journey is no exception. Our finds include numerous parts of swords, suits of armor of various kinds, daggers, musket barrels, matchlocks, snaphaunce locks, musket shot, and canon balls...all the iron macho goodies we expect for this period (Figures 3.19). In the ground we could plainly see evidence of the firing step on the box bastion at the tenants compound, 44PG307, and the large fort at the Jordan-Farrar Site is probably our glitziest artifact. Stanley South (*) noted in his analysis of the artifact patterns from 18th-century frontier sites that they often contained greater indications of interactions with Native Americans, as well as elevated proportions of both military items and luxury items. I do not suggest that life in the 1620s at Jordan's Journey was somehow just like life in French-and-Indian War or Revolutionary War forts, but the similarities are compelling. The American frontier, whether we talk about the early 17th century, the late 19th century, or somewhere in between, attracted primarily young people who perceived opportunities Òout thereÓ that were better than those back home. These opportunities tended generally to have some high risk costs, however, and if there is a Òfrontier pattern,Ó or a Òfrontier mentality,Ó I suggest it is largely in the intersection of opportunity and risk.

Virginia was a deadly place, and it earned itself a horrid reputation as a gateway to hell. The Indian massacre was as much a cause celebre in London of the 1620s as it is among historians and archaeologists today, but the real grim reaper was disease. In 1619, John Pory (p. 283*) wrote, ÒBoth those of our nation and the Indians also have this Torride sommer bene visited with great sickness and mortality.Ó A document called ÒThe Discourse of the Old Company,Ó prepared in 1625, described the summer following the massacre:

...through the troublesomenes of those tymes, they could not freely imploie themselves in plantinge...many Plantations being drawne into few places for their better defence. Wch pestringe of themselves did likewise breed contagious sicknesse; wch being encreased by the Infection brought in by some shipps, there dyed that yeare of mortallitie neere upon 600 more...(*)

That Òyear of mortalitieÓ claimed the life of Samuel Jordan, and probably many others whose remains we uncovered in the cemetery at Jordan's Journey. Several of the graves were hurriedly dug, and bodies were laid in them with little or no preparation. One woman was interred in a shallow, irregular, coffinless grave while still in the throes of rigor mortis (Figure 3.20). She was not wrapped in a proper shroud but thrown rather unceremoniously into the hole, with nobody willing to touch her corpse to re-arrange it in a posture of repose. The trash pits at Jordan's Journey contained many valuable or useful personal items that were apparently quite serviceable when discardedÑbone combs, jewelry, knives, weapons, and armor. I suspect these items belonged to victims of pestilence and, like their owners, these objects were hastily buried to lessen the chance of contagion.

Owsley and Compton (*) note that death at Jordan's Journey came early. Let's look at the statistics. Figure 3.21 is a chart which shows the age distribution of the community according to the muster, in light gray bars. The dark grey bars show the age distribution of burials at the site. There is a huge contrast in the frequency of teenagers in these two data series. Very few people in the 15-20 year bracket were alive at the site in 1625, but a great many of those in the graves belong to that age group. Virtually nobody could expect to live beyond 40, and very few could hope to reach that age. Owsley and Compton have pointed out that many of the dead at Jordan's Journey show signs of having survived rather serious childhood diseases or malnutrition. If we look at the length of time persons appearing in the muster had been in Virginia, we see a small cadre of seasoned veterans, and a large corps of newcomers who did not, apparently, survive their Òseasoning,Ó as it was called. This simply underlines the dilemma: those who ventured to Virginia were leaving hard and dangerous lives for the potential rewards of making tobacco. And there were potential rewards, ifÑand it was a big ifÑif they Òescaped.Ó

Perhaps, then, this frontier syndrome begins to make sense. The gaming, excess of apparel, and other small luxuries of life, like the big luxury cars in today's poorest neighborhoods, were the small compensations for lives of desperation. If you aren't going to live to enjoy it, why embrace frugality and build an estate of land or capital? Adams and Bolling (*) suggested that a similar situation helped explain why slaves in the Antebellum south spent what money they had on consumable luxuries; there was little or no hope for Òimproving one's lot in lifeÓ through savings or investment. But if some of the protestant-mercantlist values of the Company men back in London were flouted by those whose lives were on the line in the colony, sanity required the attempt to maintain some continuity of culture under even the bizarre conditions of life in early Virginia, and there is nothing like the symbolically luxurious Òcomforts of homeÓ to do that, unless it is to live the life you are expected to live, despite unexpected conditions. With that thought, let's revisit Cicely Jordan, and see if we can amend her story.

***

Cicely arrived in Virginia at about the age of 10, as one of many young girls bound for wives to the Virginia settlers. Like many early colonists, she probably came to Virginia virtually a slave, not as a free-willed adult seeking her fortune. She appeared in Jamestown under the name Cicely Bailey. Temperence Bailey, one of her charges at Jordan's Journey, may have been her daughter or stepdaughter from an earlier, teenage, marriage. She was 20 or 21 when she bore her first child by Samuel Jordan, and she was widowed, with three children, by the age of 23. She was 24 when she married William Farrar, and she bore him two children before her death, probably at the age of 31 or 32. At Jordan's Journey, Cicely had a better than usual opportunity to live a life of gender expectations somewhat more normal for her time than many other Virginia women. The sex ratio at Jordan's Point was about 3 men per 2 women, whereas, colony-wide, there were 4 or 5 men for every woman. Most of the households at Jordan's Journey were those of nuclear families and their servants, a condition which did not obtain in other Virginia settlements throughout most of the colony's first century.

Cicely may have had some very heavy gender role expectations placed on her as a child. I draw this conclusion primarily from her name, for ÒCicelyÓ was a popular fictional character invented by Thomas Tusser in his then well-known lessons, in verse, teaching other little ÒCicelysÓ throughout the English realm how to be proper housewives. In one verse Cicely is being warned not to make any of ten common mistakes in the making of cheese. This verse concludes:

ÒIf thou, so oft beaten,
Amendest by this,
I will no more threaten,
I promise thee, Ciss.Ó (from Anderson p 134*)

And so bad housewives and maidservants made bad cheese and got beaten for their transgression, and every little English girl, we might suppose, knew this to be the case. A good wife was one who knew her ÒCicelyÓ lessons.

In 1990, Charles Hodges (*) excavated a series of burials where the entry road to Jordan's Point's new housing development now runs. One of these was a female, in her early 30s, buried deeply in a coffin in a well-prepared grave. When we aligned Hodges' excavation grid with our later grid, we found that this burial lay near to, and aligned with, that of Samuel Jordan. We believe these are the remains of Cicely Jordan Farrar. Owsley and Compton found her teeth to have characteristic grooves caused by holding sewing pins between her incisors, a gesture still common among seamstresses. Cicely's kitchen included a large iron spit and a fine brass skimmer. She had an outside oven and probably baked bread for her entire household. Behind her house stood a buttery where she made ale, salted and pickled fish (see Structure * in Figures 3.4 and 3.5). Of course, she had help from servants and, possibly, from some of the tenant wives, but she no doubt also worked in the tobacco fields and helped supervise the community's needs, particularly in her husbands' absences at government business in Jamestown. She almost certainly was responsible for growing the medicinal herbs, preparing poultices and potions, and ministering to the sick and dying of Jordan's Journey.

When a husband died, she drank toasts with the local minister. When a better offer came along, she took it. Unlike her contemporaries in England, Cicely held a major bargaining chip: she owned 100 acres of Jordan's Journey, by right of being an ancient planter. These were her acres, and they allowed her to negotiate a marriage with greater material security. Indeed, she wore a silver hairpin and a tortoise shell comb. She may have dressed in fresh flaming silks. She knew how to tipple some fine wine and ale, and she knew, somehow, how to turn a life most of us cannot imagine, into a relatively prosperous and fortunate one, and to survive, as few others did, into her 30s. Let us hope that the archaeology of Jordan's Point, if it does nothing else of significance, will recast Cicely's life story, and get it out of the gossip sheets and into the history books.
i. This essay was developed from an oral paper presented at the 1994 Society for Historical Archaeology Conference in Vancouver, B. C.
ii . The picture of Jordan’s Journey presented here is an interpretation based upon an excavation directed by Mr. Jay Harrison (*) at site 44PG300 in 198*; work directed by Nicholas Lucketti and Barabara Heath (*) of the James River Institute of Archaeology at site 44PG151 in 198*, and a series of studies directed by Douglas McLearen and myself (Mouer and McLearen *, McLearen and Mouer *, *, *) for Virginia Commonwealth University at sites 44PG302, 333, and 307. Other contributing work includes excavation of key burials by Charles Hodges in 199* (*). Also of prime importance is a volume of historical research on the site prepared by Martha McCartney (*), fornensic analysis of historic burials by Douglas Owsley and Birgita Compton (*), and in-depth artifact analyses by Taft Kiser (*), Beverly Straub (*), and Dane Magoon (*). Many conversations over several years with Doug McLearen, Chris Egghart, Beverly Binns and others have provided a great many insights. This work was coordinated by David Hazzard who manages the Theatened Sites Program of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, which was the primary sponsor of this research. Other contributors include Virginia Commonwalth University, The National Geographic Society, an anonymous donor, and numerous volunteers and students.
iii. For more information on Cicely Jordan, and on women in early 17th-century Virginia, see Moncure (*,*), ****
iv. It should be noted that another factor in Jordan’s dental pathology could have been many years of a diet in which maize served as a staple food.

Monday, February 2, 2015

Mary Randolph, The Virginia Housewife and the "Other" American Revolution




This paper was prepared for an oral presentation given on the archaeological site of Presquile Plantation at Bermuda Hundred, Virginia in the mid 1990s. 




 

This edition of The Virginia Housewife with notes and comments by Karen Hess is the most authoritative version available today, and it is far superior to the scores of facsimile editions.

The first regional cookbook in America was Mary Randolph’s The Virginia Housewife. Published in 1824, the book is an absolute marvel and a monument to one of history’s great cooks. I think of it as the first truly American cook book. Mrs. Randolph was married to David Meade Randolph. “Davies,” as he was called, grew up at Curles Plantation, and I have no doubt he was nourished on foods and medicines prepared in the Curles kitchen from recipes like those from a manuscript known as Jane Randolph Her Book--a typical 18th-century plantation woman's recipe book begun by Davies' grandmother.



Mary was born into the highly privileged Cary-Randolph clan, among the wealthiest 1% of the colony, in the mid-18th century, but she was also a child of the Enlightenment and of the tumultuous changes of the revolutionary period. The Early Republic world of David and Mary Randolph lay cleanly on the other side of Revolution and Enlightenment, and in many ways, it represents what I like to call "The Other Revolution." This other revolution was economic, in that economic power rapidly changed from the planter elite to merchants and industrial capitalists. It was geographic, in that the focus of culture and power moved from the rural seats of a few privileged families to the urban milieu of the new world of business. It was cultural in that urban values quickly supplanted rural ones, and revolutionary ideas of equality and liberty came to be applied--at least for a few decades--to woman and even in some cases to slaves. Many more woman left the inner sanctum of domesticity and entered into the public domain, becoming economic and political forces of some substance. Many black slaves were manumitted in the heady days following the Revolution, and the rising middle class and huge influx of immigrants transformed American culture almost overnight. Mary’s and David’s lives were very different from those of their grandparents' generation, and Mary’s cookbook is not merely a 19th-century published version of a Colonial receipt book.

Mary and David lived for many years at Presquile Plantation in what appears to have been a kind of tranquil gentility following the Revolution. Her husband was her first cousin. Cousin marriage was the typical pattern of the Randolphs and other ruling families of 18th-c Virginia, because by marrying within the clan, the vast resources of land and slaves were not scattered to heirs of diverse lineages. David was a son of the second Richard Randolph of Curles. Richard purchased the Presquile tract, built a small but elegant Georgian manor house here, and presented it to his son and daughter-in-law upon their marriage. The Battle of Yorktown had not yet been fought and Benedict Arnold was soon to encamp at Bermuda Hundred, but plantation life went on as it had for a century.

The planter elite had some competition from merchants---especially Scots and Scotch-Irish merchants. While planters attracted merchant ships and consumers to their plantation wharves, the merchants competed for the trade in cities such as Richmond and Petersburg and in regional river market towns like Bermuda Hundred. The Randolph's chief competitor here was Jonathon Hylton, and, subsequently, his son Daniel. Archaeological evidence from their home indicated that they vied not only for a larger share of the marketing business, dominated by the Randolphs in this area, but also for their share of the planters' cultural prestige.

David Meade Randolph, like his cousin Jefferson, was highly influenced by ideas of the Enlightenment. He was an inventor, a scientist of sorts, and an entrepreneur in various industrial enterprises. He invested heavily in the cities. He took on a partnership with one of the top Scots merchants in Richmond--David Ross--to start a major flour-milling industry. He was not content to sit on his farm as a patron of his bucolic rural dominion, because he apparently could see that there was an economic and cultural revolution in the air as well as a political one. Evidence suggests that his relationship with his wife, Mary--known to her friends and family as "Molly"--was much more one of equals than was the tradition. Davies enjoyed a reputation here at Presquile as a scientifically-minded experimenter. He was even called the "best farmer" in the land. But Molly was not simply the household manager. It appears her influence extended into the business, if not the science, of farming at Presquile.

Historian Rhys Isaac has done an especially good job of describing the relations of debt that seem to have knit together Virginia society in the 18th century. The planters remained hugely indebted to their merchant factors in England and Scotland, while local middling and small planters remained perpetually indebted to the great planters like the Randolphs. These debts were never fully repaid, but, rather, it was the indebtedness that caused small farmers to be obligated to great planters, and the planters, in turn, to be obligated to their British factors.

The Revolutionary War was largely financed by the great Virginia planters, and one of the worries of the other colonies was that, in the new republic, these rich Virginians would have entirely too much power. And so it was that Benjamin Franklin and other delegates to the Treaty of Paris in 1783 permitted the defeated British to legally call in all debts against Virginia planters. These debts were enormous, and the crippling effect on the ensconced planter elite was devastating. In those days, debts passed from father to son and grandson. Among the most heavily indebted of the planters was Richard Randolph of Curles. Those debts caused many of the Randolph plantations to be laid upon the auction block--including Presquile.

Just prior to the turn of the 19th century, Davies and Molly left their plantation, never to return to that life. Instead they took up life in the rapidly growing urban center of Richmond. They built a fine house in the heart of the city and named it “Moldavia” after their nicknames. Davies earned income not only from his various enterprises, but also from his political office of US Marshall. However, with the end of Federalist domination in Washington, and the election of Jefferson, Davies lost his post. The continuing drain of his father's pre-war debt left David Meade Randolph all but impoverished. Taking advantage of the newly liberal atmosphere, Mary Randolph had created a Boarding House at Moldavia as soon as they had arrived in Richmond. While Davies fortunes sank, hers rose, and they rose largely on her management skills and her reputation as an ingenious cook. Molly's reputation spread, and society soon came to dine at her boarding house. Her business, it appears, kept the Randolphs in the center of Richmond's elite circle. There is an apocryphal story that when the slave Gabriel fomented his plot for a massive slave revolt in Richmond in 1800, that he ordered all whites in the city killed except Mary Randolph. She was to be spared if she would agree to be his wife and queen in a new regime.

Was Mary Randolph's influence and success simply a result of some elusive qualities, like "feminine charm" and "grace". I don't think so. I believe that Mary was as much a product of the Enlightenment period as was her husband. That period was dedicated to the idea that humanity was central, that the application of effort and systematic inquiry would yield knowledge, and knowledge would yield success in all human ventures. This was the age of the dawn of modern science and modern business alike. Let me read from Mary Randolph's preface to her book, The Virginia Housewife.

The difficulties I encountered when I first entered on the duties of a House-Keeping life, from the want of books sufficiently clear and concise, to impart knowledge to a Tyro, compelled me to study the subject, and by actual experiment, to reduce every thing, in the culinary line, to proper weights and measures...The government of a family bears a Liliputian resemblance to the government of a nation. The contents of the treasury must be known...A regular system must be introduced into each department...The grand arcanum of management lies in three simple rules: “Let every thing be done at the proper time, keep every thing in its proper place, and put every thing to its proper use.”

On the title page of her fine cook book, Mary Randolph had the publisher print an aphorism: “Method is the Soul of Management.” Mrs. Randolph’s preface stresses the notion that method and management are the sole of housewifery, a surprisingly modern concept expressed in language that almost presages the “scientific” cooking school that came to dominate American cookery at the end of the 19th century. But Mrs. Randolph’s rationalism is not a product of late modernity, of industrialism, but of its dawning in the Enlightenment. Enlightenment values permeate Mary Randolph’s Virginia Housewife in the subtleties of careful measurements which, the author assures us, she has refined through continual experimentation. This notion of rational order and method as the proper pathway to success in any complex enterprise is very much the same notion that led to so many political, scientific and entrepreneurial successes in the late 18th- and early 19th-century period. Remember, Mary Randolph had many years of experience helping to manage a large commercial farm, staffed by slave labor. She then ran a highly successful boarding house and restaurant, not only enabling her to maintain her household against the loss of her husband's estate, but also against the loss of her husband, for she outlived Davies by many years. Eventually she remarried--her new husband was George Washington Parke Custis. Mary left Richmond and moved to live with Custis at his home, Arlington, in Washington, D.C. There I suspect she became familiar with another cookery manuscript well known to Virginia's culinary historians. It is often called the Martha Washington cookbook or something similar and is associated with the Custis family.

It is to the benefit of all succeeding generations that she decided to commit her own recipes and some cookery notes to a publication. Her book The Virginia Housewife was published in 1824, when Mary was 70 years old. It contains many recipes virtually unchanged from the traditional English cookery represented in the Curles manuscript and in the Martha Washington book. But it also contains much, much more. Here we find many recipes that are purely American, based on American ingredients and prepared in ways that indicate centuries of creolized cultural practices. Her ingredients include corn, hominy, rice, squashes, chili peppers, and other staples of southern cooking. Recipes for johnny cakes, buckwheat cakes, cornbread and other commonplaces of our culture stand alongside the most sumptuously spiced creations tinged with European, East Indian, and Caribbean flavors and techniques. The Virginia Housewife reveals the unique touches of a talented and creative cook. This individual genius comes through loud and clear and proclaims a very different era in cookery books. No longer are ancient “receipts” faithfully copied for the transmission of a cultural model that stretches back to the Medieval period. Here, instead, is a combination of brand-new creations with the old, tried-and-true ways transformed through an individual vision. And the old includes not only the academic, accepted “English” heritage, but the folk or country creole recipes passed through oral, living tradition rather than through meticulously copied canonical texts. It is easy to detect the strong influences of Native America and African America in Mary Randolph's world.

Mary Randolph was no housewife. Certainly not in the traditional sense conveyed, for instance, in Richard Bradley’s The Country Housewife published a century before Mary Randolph’s book. Mary did not raise a family, and despite her plantation upbringing and the bucolic beginnings of her married life to Virginia’s “best farmer” --and I have little doubt that her management skills and creative efforts lent much to the success of that farm--she eschewed the role of home-maker. While working within the realm of the “domestic,” it is clear that Mary Randolph’s activities, like those of her husband, were primarily entrepreneurial. There is no hint in the meager documents of her life that she simply wielded her skills at cookery and hospitality to hold onto the fading glories of elite society; rather, she seems a person engaged, like a great many others of her age, in the New Republic, in finding a way to turn her individual skills and efforts into a comfortable living. No longer content with the pre-ordained quarter of life carved out in the traditional plantation-culture landscape, Mary Randolph embraced both the Enlightenment and the Revolution and promises of individual accomplishment.

 

Mary Randolph's is the oldest known grave at Arlington Cemetery. She died four years after the appearance of the first edition of The Virginia Housewife. Her epitaph tells us: “her intrinsic worth needs no eulogium.” Her book has been republished dozens of times. There are untold numbers of completely pirated editions put out under other names. The Virginia Housewife has never gone out of print, nor, in my mind, should it. I have cooked recipes from the book, and I can vouch that Mary Randolph was a genius at cookery, but she was more than that. Along with others in the urban society of post-Revolutionary Richmond, she embraced the liberty and pride of her American, creole heritage, and the place her new country’s status made for her in a world order of nations tied by diplomacy, trade, and cultural exchange. Born a colonial, Mary Randolph lived to help create, and enjoy, her own liberty, and that is what characterizes best the "Other Revolution."