Fear and the Shaping of Early American Societies [1 ed.] 9789004314740, 9789004314733

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Fear and the Shaping of Early American Societies

Early American History Series The American Colonies, 1500–1830

Edited by Jaap Jacobs (University of St. Andrews) L.H. Roper (State University of New York – New Paltz) Bertrand Van Ruymbeke (Université de Paris viii – St. Denis and Institut des Amériques, France)

VOLUME 4

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/eahs

Fear and the Shaping of Early American Societies Edited by

Lauric Henneton L.H. Roper

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Pieter van der Aa, “Massacre at Jamestown, Virginia, 1622” in Naaukeurige versameling der gedenk-waardigste zee en land-reysen na Oost en West-Indiën… zedert het jaar 1524 tot 1526 (Leiden, 1707), Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Henneton, Lauric. | Roper, L. H. (Louis H.) Title: Fear and the shaping of early American societies / edited by Lauric Henneton, L.H. Roper. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2016. | Series: Early American history series : the American colonies, 1500-1830, ISSN 1877-0216 ; volume 4 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016005753 (print) | LCCN 2016012959 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004314733 (hardback : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9789004314740 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: America--History--To 1810. | America--Social conditions. | America--Politics and government. | America--Politics and government--Decision making. | Fear--Social aspects--America--History. | Fear--Political aspects--America--History. | Colonists--America--History. | Europe--Colonies--America--History--17th century. | Europe--Colonies--America--History--18th century. Classification: LCC E18.82 .F43 2016 (print) | LCC E18.82 (ebook) | DDC 970.01--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016005753 Want or need Open Access? Brill Open offers you the choice to make your research freely accessible online in exchange for a publication charge. Review your various options on brill.com/brill-open. Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill.” See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1877-0216 isbn 978-90-04-31473-3 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-31474-0 (e-book) Copyright 2016 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents List of Contributors VII Introduction: Adjusting to Fear in Early America 1 Lauric Henneton 1 From Sea Monsters and Savages to Sorcerers and Satan: A History of Fear in New France 38 Leslie Choquette 2 Fortune’s Frowns and the Finger of God: Deciphering Fear in the Caribbean (c. 1600–c. 1720) 60 Sarah Barber 3 Fear and the Genesis of the English Empire in America 76 L.H. Roper 4 Fear, Uncertainty, and Violence in the Dutch Colonization of Brazil (1624–1662) 93 Mark Meuwese 5 Rumors, Uncertainty and Decision-Making in the Greater Long Island Sound (1652–1654) 115 Lauric Henneton 6 “Our fears surpass our hopes”: Virginian Reactions to the Execution of Charles i (1649–1652) 137 David L. Smith 7 “Ffourty thousand to cutt the Protestants throats”: The Irish Threat in the Chesapeake and the West Indies (1620–1700) 160 Elodie Peyrol-Kleiber 8 “Imprisoning Persons at their Pleasure”: The Anti-Catholic Hysteria of 1689 in the Middle Colonies 182 David William Voorhees

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“A Bloody Conspiracy”: Race, Power and Religion in New York’s 1712 Slave Insurrection 204 Anne-Claire Faucquez

10

Fear and the Making of a Huguenot Identity (1685–1750) 226 Susanne Lachenicht

11

“A Land where Hunger is in Gold and Famine is in Opulence”: Plantation Slavery, Island Ecology, and the Fear of Famine in the French Caribbean 243 Bertie Mandelblatt

12

“The Inhabitants of the Province had been frequently Alarmed”: Fear and Rumor in the Colonial Southeastern Backcountry (1754–1765) 265 Christopher Vernon

13

“The Unpleasing Part of the Drama”: Fear, Devastation, and the Civilian Experience of the Revolutionary War 284 Benjamin L. Carp

Index 305

List of Contributors Sarah Barber is a Senior Lecturer in history at Lancaster University in England. With a career path which started with British civil wars’ radicalism and early-modern Ireland, she was part of New British and New Atlantic history. In recent years she has concentrated on the British-Americas’ Torrid Zone and The Disputatious Caribbean: The West Indies in the Seventeenth Century was published in 2014 (Palgrave). An annotated collection of seventeenth-century manuscripts on the Caribbean will also appear in 2016 within the British Academy’s Records of Social and Economic History series. Benjamin L. Carp holds the Daniel M. Lyons Chair of American History as Associate Professor of early American history at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. He is the author of Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America (Yale University Press, 2010) and Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2007); he is co-editor, with Richard D. Brown, of Major Problems in the Era of the American Revolution, 1760–1791: Documents and Essays, 3rd edition (Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2014). He previously taught at Tufts University and the University of Edinburgh. Leslie Choquette is Professor of History, Côté Professor of French Studies, and Director of the French Institute at Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts. She is the author of Frenchmen into Peasants: Modernity and Tradition in the Peopling of French Canada (Harvard University Press, 1997) and various articles on French, French-Canadian, and Franco-American history. Anne-Claire Faucquez teaches legal English at Université Paris ii Panthéon-Assas (France). Her Ph.D. dissertation (Université Paris viii, 2011) was entitled “From New Netherland to New York: the birth of a slave society 1624-1712.” She has published articles on urban slavery (“L’esclavage en milieu urbain: le cas de New York au XVIIe ­siècle,” Transatlantica, 2013), and colonial New York, such as “Otherness and English Identity in the Colony of New York in the seventeenth Century,” The Foreignness of Foreigners: Cultural Representations of the Other in Britain, (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015).

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Lauric Henneton Ph.D. (2006), is Associate Professor of Anglo-American history and politics at uvsq Paris-Saclay (France). He is the author of Histoire religieuse des ÉtatsUnis (Flammarion, 2012), has written numerous articles and book chapters on the geopolitics of seventeenth-century New England, and coedited three volumes on commemorations (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010), American founding myths and memory (Les Indes Savantes, 2008), and the first French edition of William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation (Labor et Fides, 2004). He is the co-founder of the Summer Academy of Atlantic History. Susanne Lachenicht is Professor of Early Modern History at Bayreuth University (Germany). In 2002, she received her Ph.D. from Heidelberg University. Her research focuses on press and media during the French Revolution and minorities in Europe and the Atlantic World. Her publications include Religious Refugees in Europa, Asia and North America (Hamburg, 2007), Diaspora Identities. Exile, Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in Past and Present (Frankfurt/Main, New York, Chicago, 2009), Die Französische Revolution (Darmstadt, 2012) and Europeans Engaging the Atlantic. Knowledge and Trade (Frankfurt/Main, New York, 2014). She is the co-founder of the Summer Academy of Atlantic History and was, from 2012–14, president of the European Early American Studies Association. Bertie Mandelblatt is Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto (Canada), teaching Atlantic history, food studies, environmental history and the history of early modern empire in the History Department and the Program of Caribbean Studies. Her research concerns food history, commodity exchanges and consumption in the French Atlantic world and her current book project is entitled Feeding the French Atlantic: Slavery, Empire and Food Provision in the French Caribbean, 1626–1789. She has published numerous articles in French History, History of European Ideas, History Workshop Journal, Histoire, Économie et Société, and has a book chapter in The Political Economy of Empire in the Early Modern World (Reinert and Røge, eds., 2013). Mark Meuwese is associate professor of History at the University of Winnipeg (Canada). He is the author of Brothers in Arms, Partners in Trade: Dutch-Indigenous Alliances in the Atlantic World, 1595–1674 (Brill, 2012) and co-editor, with Jeffrey Fortin, of Atlantic Biographies: Individuals and Peoples in the Atlantic World (Brill, 2014). He is currently working on a study of massacres in the making of the early modern Dutch Empire.

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Elodie Peyrol-Kleiber is Associate Professor at the University of Poitiers (France). Her Ph.D. dissertation (2012) will be published by the Presses Universitaires de Rennes in 2016 as The First Irish in the New World. She has published several articles on unfree labor in colonial America, such as “Les engagés dans les colonies anglaises de la Chesapeake et des Antilles: des esclaves blancs?” La Circulation des Idées, des biens et des personnes dans l’espace atlantique et caribéen, Jacques de Cauna et Eric Dubesset, eds. (Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, 2014). L.H. Roper Ph.D. (1992), is Professor of History at the State University of New York – New Paltz. He is the author of Advancing Empire: English Interests and Overseas Expansion, 1614–1688 (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming); Conceiving Carolina: Propri­etors, Planters, and Plots, 1662–1729 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); The English Empire in America, 1602–1658: Beyond Jamestown (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009), and has also edited The Torrid Zone: Colonization and Cultural Interaction in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean (University of South Carolina Press, forthcoming); Constructing Early Modern Empires: Proprietary Ventures in the Atlantic World, 1500–1750 with B. Van Ruymbeke, (Brill, 2007) and The Worlds of the Seventeenth-Century Hudson Valley with Jaap Jacobs (suny Press, 2014). David L. Smith has been a Fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge (u.k.), since 1988. He has been a Director of Studies in History since 1992, and a Graduate Tutor since 2004. His books include Constitutional Royalism and the Search for Settlement, c. 1640– 1649 (1994), A History of the Modern British Isles, 1603–1707: The Double Crown (1998), The Stuart Parliaments, 1603–1689 (1999), and (with Patrick Little) Parliaments and Politics during the Cromwellian Protectorate (2007). He has also co-edited several collections of essays, including with Jason McElligott, Royalists and Royalism during the English Civil Wars (2007) and Royalists and Royalism during the Interregnum (2010), and most recently, with Michael J. Braddick, The Experience of Revolution in Stuart Britain and Ireland: Essays for John Morrill (2011). Chris Vernon completed his Ph.D. at the University of Warwick in 2013 entitled “News, intelligence and ‘little lies’: rumours between the Cherokees and the British 1740-1785.” He has written a bibliography on “Rumour in the Atlantic World” with Oxford Bibliographies, and is working on a project focusing on rumor and the development of the North American backcountry. He is currently an Academic Support Librarian at the University of Warwick.

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David William Voorhees Ph.D. (1988), is Director of the Jacob Leisler Institute for the Study of Early New York History in the City of Hudson, New York, Editorial Director of the Papers of Jacob Leisler, a National Historical Publications and Records Commission ­project, and Managing Editor of de Halve Maen. His published works include The Concise Dictionary of American History (1983), The Holland Society: A Centennial History 1885–1985 (1985), and translations of the Records of the Reformed Protestant Church of Flatbush, Kings County, New York, Volume 1, 1677– 1720 (1998) and Volume 2, Deacons’ Accounts, 1654–1709 (2009), as well as author of numerous articles on the Dutch colonial period in America.

Introduction: Adjusting to Fear in Early America Lauric Henneton

Emotions Matter

In 1994, American sociologist Thomas J. Scheff lamented that “Emotions have disappeared not only from the statement and actions of governments but also from the writings of most scholars.” He hoped that “Building an alternative social science around the concept of human interdependence, and an alternative social psychology that speaks in the language of emotion, may be the most pressing problems for contemporary social science.” Seventeen years later, in an essay entitled “The Turn to Affect,” Johns Hopkins historian Ruth Leys wrote that for too long, scholars had overvalued the role of reason and rationality at the expense of emotions.1 More specifically for this collection, in the introduction to one acclaimed recent volume, Nicole Eustace has called for a drastic revision of an eighteenth century that, she argues, was much less rational and much more emotional than historians had hitherto assumed. She writes in particular that We are used to regarding the eighteenth century as the Age of Reason and to seeing the Enlightenment as dependent on the faculty of thought. Indeed, Enlightenment rationalism is generally credited with the defining role in developing theories of natural rights. Reason’s conceptual counterpoint, emotion, has seldom garnered the same attention. Though acknowledged as an important element in the Scottish school of moral philosophy, emotion’s influence has been thought to reside primarily in the private realm of family, faith, and fiction. So studies of eighteenthcentury emotive history have paid close attention to the place of feeling in household functioning, religious awakenings, and literary flowering, but interest has more often waned when the topic has turned to political philosophy or power relations.2 1 Thomas J. Scheff, Bloody Revenge: Emotions, Nationalism, and War (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1994), 65, 143–144; Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3 (Spring 2011), 436. By way of acknowledgment, we would like to thank Anne-Claire Faucquez for the copy-editing assistance she has kindly provided as well as Leslie Choquette for commenting on this introduction and the two anonymous reviewers at Brill for their helpful remarks and suggestions. 2 Nicole Eustace, Passion is the Gale: Emotion, Power and the Coming of the American Revolution (Durham, n.c.: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Id., “The Sentimental Paradox:

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004314740_002

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However, it would be mistaken to assume that politics and power relations were devoid of emotions, and that the two are incompatible. Indeed, Matthew Kruer, of the University of Pennsylvania, has suggested that a focus on emotions and “emotional politics” could help us better understand such supposedly familiar events as “Bacon’s Rebellion” or the Susquehannock War of 1675 in Virginia. Proposing to study “the emotional basis of political subjectivity” and “the ways in which highly personal experiences become entangled with collective decision-making, and the ways that this transforms the shape of the body politic,” he has called for approaching “political subjects not as abstract entities but as necessarily embodied beings – beings that possess political desires, and who act in pursuit of those desires.”3 Do these cases mean that Scheff’s call has been heeded? Has there been an “emotional turn” or an “affective turn”? William Reddy, one of the leading scholars in the field of the history of emotions prefers to call it a trend rather than a turn, but other scholars have been less cautious.4 Another leading scholar in the field, Peter Stearns, sees emotions as “an entirely valid, indeed important topic in social history,” while, in a similar vein, but thematically closer to our collection, Joanna Bourke has written that “fear has been one of the most significant driving forces in history, encouraging individuals to reflect more deeply and prompting them to action.” Lastly, to German historian Ute Frevert, emotions both have a history and make history. Our aim in this volume is to take a closer look at the transformational role in history of one emotion – or rather one range of emotions – namely, fear. As Barbara Rosenwein has recommended about emotions in general, this is not meant to be a history of fear, but rather an integration of fear into the history of early America.5

Humanity and Violence on the Pennsylvania Frontier,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 65, no. 1 (Jan. 2008), 29–64. 3 Matthew Kruer, “Emotional Subjects: Terror and Trauma in Anglo-Susquehannock Politics, 1660–1677,” paper presented to the American Historical Association annual meeting, New Orleans, 4 Jan. 2013, kindly lent by the author. 4 Jan Plamper, “The History of Emotions: an interview with William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns,” History and Theory 49 (2010), 237–265 at 248, but see also Rob Boddice, “The affective turn: historicising the emotions,” Psychology and History: Interdisciplinary Explorations, eds. Cristian Tileagă and Jovan Byford (Cambridge, 2014), 147–165 as well as Rob Boddice, ed., Pain and Emotion in Modern History (Basinstoke, Hants.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), particularly Boddice’s introduction (1–15), and (in sociology) P.T. Clough and J. Halley, eds., The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham, n.c.: Duke University, 2007). 5 Peter Stearns in Plamper, “The History of Emotions,” 263; Joanna Bourke, Fear: A Cultural History (London: Virago, 2005), 391; Rosenwein in Plamper, “The History of Emotions,” 260.

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The abundant theoretical literature on the history of emotions in general has produced a number of important concepts, such as “emotional communities” (Rosenwein), “emotional regime” (Reddy, but critiqued by Rosenwein as too monolithic, she prefers “emotional regimes”), “emotives” (again Reddy) and “emotionology” (Stearns and Stearns).6 All of those are about how emotions are defined, valued and expressed or uttered. They are generally about social norms and ideals: what is considered acceptable (or not) by one given culture (and of course this implies cultural variations) and who sets the standards of emotional utterance. In that respect, those concepts apply only very marginally to the essays in this collection, as will be shown below. Suffice it to say at this stage that this project is more about the social and political adjustments and responses to threats as well as the longer term transformations induced by both the (perceived) threats and the responses thereto. Scholars studying emotions are divided by a “nature vs nurture” debate. On one side, the life scientists and psychologists posit the universal or ontological character of emotions. This was also the case of two of the most renowned historians of fear, Jean Delumeau and Yi-fu Tuan in the late 1970s. Delumeau made parallels between the fears of his mid-to-late twentieth-century contemporaries and those of his field of study (fourteenth to eighteenth centuries), while Tuan used examples from Roman as well as ancient Chinese history, or, building on the work of anthropologists, from non-European cultures.7 More recent historians have strongly taken exception to what they consider the essentialist approach of both older historians and neuroscientists, in particular. To Joanna Bourke, historians should not use “contemporary psychology to elucidate past behavior,” to which Rosenwein adds that “to assume that our emotions were also the emotions of the past is to be uttlerly unhistorical.” On the other hand, William Reddy has warned against the extreme use of social constructionism that leads to total cultural determinism and does not allow for any comparison. If Bourke’s and Rosenwein’s objections seem legitimate regarding the utterance of emotions and the norms and perceptions asso­ciated with whether those are considered acceptable or not by specific societies and 6 Plamper, “The History of Emotions;” Boddice, “The Affective Turn;” Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns, “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards,” The American Historical Review 90, no. 4 (Oct. 1985), 813–836; Joanna Bourke, “Fear and Anxiety: Writing about Emotion in Modern History,” History Workshop Journal 55 (Spring 2003), 111–135. 7 Jean Delumeau, La peur en Occident, XIVe–XVIIIe siècles: la cité assiégée (Paris: Fayard, 1978); Yi-fu Tuan, Landscapes of Fear (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979); Rollo May, The Discovery of Being (New York: Norton, 1983), 109.

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cultures, it may well be argued that patterns of perception of, and response to, threats transcend time and help us understand how individuals and communities adjust.8 Because a significant share of the theoretical literature is about the norms of expression of emotions and the standards of acceptability of those utterances, Joanna Bourke rightly claims that “a history of emotions cannot ignore power relations.” Social differentiation helps distinguish between vertical (topdown or bottom-up) and horizontal emotional management: for instance, which group dictates which emotions are acceptable (bravery as opposed to cowardice), how they may be expressed, or which rituals may inculcate or defuse them. Jean Delumeau divided his study of fear into two parts: the fears of the majority (the people, or lower sort) on one side, and the “ruling culture of fear” (the elite, or upper sort) on the other. We realize, then, that if power relations are indeed important, they are not the whole story. The people and the elite did not fear the same things, and they did not adjust in the same way. Additionally, there were class-based fears and responses thereto. Discussing emotions in general is a daunting task and excessive generalizations are a constant risk. In order to assess their role and impact on history, emotions need to be identified and discussed with specificity. Predictably, not all scholars agree on which emotions deserve the reader’s attention. While Barbara Rosenwein and Linda Pollock have devoted their endeavors to the study of anger, Thomas Scheff sees shame as the “master emotion” explaining the connections between violence and territorial aggression. French international relations scholar Dominique Moïsi identifies fear, hope and humiliation as the triple prism for anyone trying to understand contemporary geopolitical tensions. More specifically, Moïsi argues that older western nations are guided by fear and uncertainty, emerging powers (or brics) by hope, and the Arab world by humiliation.9 If it may be argued that shame, humiliation and anger overlap, fear and hope are also structurally related 8 Bourke, Fear, 159; Rosenwein in Plamper, “The History of Emotions,” 253; Linda Pollock, “Anger and the Negotiation of Relationships in Early Modern England,” The Historical Journal 47, no. 3 (Sept. 2004), 568, 569; William Reddy, “Against Constructionism: The Historical Ethnography of Emotion,” Current Anthropology 38, no. 3 (June 1997): 327–351 and The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge, 2001). More recently, Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 9 Barbara H. Rosenwein, ed., Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, n.y., 1998); Pollock, “Anger and the Negotiation of Relationships in Early Modern England;” T. Scheff, Bloody Revenge; Dominique Moïsi, The Geopolitics of Emotion: How Cultures of Fear, Humiliation and Hope are Reshaping the World (New York: Doubleday, 2009).

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emotions. Indeed, as philosopher Wayne Davis has shown, “hope has the same cognitive component as fear but the opposite attitudinal component: whereas fear is nondeliberative uncertainty plus aversion, hope is nondeli­ berative uncertainty plus desire.”10 Therefore, if focusing on one emotion is desirable to maintain epistemological and thematic coherence, we should keep in mind that historical protagonists feel and react to a number of complementary but also contradictory emotions, which may or may not shape the world they live in. In other words, while focusing our attention on fear, we should always be aware that anger may not be far removed. Besides, the name we commonly use to refer to those emotions (fear, anger, hope) is often a misnomer. As far as this collection is concerned, fear in the singular refers to a category of emotions, which will be more carefully defined below, ranging from vague apprehension to uncontrollable terror. Using “fear” in the singular therefore refers to one category of emotions as opposed to another category of emotions, even though they may well overlap. However, before proceeding further to define “fear” and analyze how “it” works, we need to clarify why an edited volume on the historical impact of “fear” on early modern American societies is necessary.

A Historiographical Blind Spot

In his seminal work La peur en Occident, a pioneering study published in 1978 and not yet translated into English, French historian Jean Delumeau argued that fear, in many guises, was ubiquitous in preindustrial European mentalités and could not be dissociated from the quest for security.11 Delumeau’s enterprise was admittedly much broader than Georges Lefebvre’s classic The Great Fear of 1789, initially published in 1932, as it embraced Western Europe from the Late Middle Ages to the Age of Revolutions. However, Delumeau’s “Occident,” like the “early modern society” covered in a more recent collection of essays edited by William Naphy and Penny Roberts,12 barely touched upon the American side of the Atlantic Ocean, in spite of obvious continuities entailed 10

Wayne Davis, “The Varieties of Fear,” Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition 51, no. 3 (May 1987), 287–310, quote at 291. 11 Delumeau, La peur en Occident; Georges Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France. Introd. by George Rudé. Translated from the French by Joan White (London: nlb, 1973). 12 William G. Naphy and Penny Roberts, eds., Fear in Early Modern Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997).

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by the migration of Europeans and the complex and creative circulation of news, rumors and assumptions that the “Atlantic” historiography has felicitously mapped for the past two decades. As Tobias Green aptly remarked, “Fear has largely been bypassed in the discussion of the genesis of the modern Atlantic,” and “it should not have been so.”13 There has been no panoramic study (either monograph or collective effort) dealing with the subject in early America, let alone in the entire Atlantic world. The McNeil Center for Early American Studies held a graduate con­ ference in 2009 on “Fear and Desire,”14 and more recently, Benjamin Carp, an author in this volume, organized a conference at Tufts University on “Fear in the Revolutionary Americas, 1776–1865,” which aptly complements this collection by addressing the subsequent period.15 An assortment of studies have been published on specific “fear factors” such as Owen Stanwood’s The Empire Reformed on the Glorious Revolution and the impact of fear on empire-building in its wake (2011), Matthew Mulcahy’s Hurricane and Society in the British Greater Caribbean (2008), Mary Beth Norton’s In the Devil’s Snare on the Salem witchcraft crisis in the context of imperial warfare against the French and Indians (2002), Peter Silver’s Our Savage Neighbors (2008) on the fear of Indian attacks, and to some degree Jill Lepore’s New York Burning (2005) on the 1741 slave conspiracy (or “Priest Plot”) in New York City.16 Other studies appearing in scholarly journals, of necessity, focused on specific places or events, such as an insightful article by Katherine Grandjean on grain scarcity and hunger as overlooked causes of the Pequot War, as well as Gregory Dowd’s oft-cited study of rumors in the mid-eighteenth-century Southern backcountry.17 Two collections 13 14 15 16

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Tobias Green, “Fear and Atlantic History: Some Observations derived from the Cape Verde Islands and the African Atlantic,” Atlantic Studies 3, no. 1 (2006), 25–42, quote on 27. url: http://www.mceas.org/gradconference09/ A useful recap by Elizabeth Covart was posted on The Junto blog: http://earlyamericanists .com/2014/11/18/fear-in-the-revolutionary-americas-conference-recap/ (accessed 28 Nov. 2014). Owen Stanwood, The Empire Reformed: English America in the Age of the Glorious Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Matthew Mulcahy, Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribbean, 1624–1783 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 (New York: Vintage Books, 2002); Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2008); Jill Lepore, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (New York: Vintage Books, 2005). Katherine A. Grandjean, “New World Tempests: Environment, Scarcity and the Coming of the Pequot War,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 68, no. 1 (2011), 75–100. Notable other instances include but are by no means limited to Darold D. Wax, “‘The Great Risque

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on conspiracy published in the early 1970s, one of essays, the other of documents, were limited to the United States and hardly touched on the colonial period. Similarly, Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style did not cover the preRevolutionary period.18 “New World” societies that, to some degree, were built on hope (the allure of economic betterment, however elusive, and the prospect of political and/or religious liberty) were also unquestionably built on fear. Michael Zuckerman, for instance, noted that “pessimism,” a fertile terrain for fear, “pervaded the world picture of the colonizing epoch in England as well as in America and decay colored the cosmos.” In other words, European societies at least between the “Age of discoveries” and the “Age of Revolution” “ached for order.” Another scholar has described early America as “a multitude of small fortresses,” which aptly echoes the subtitle of Delumeau’s aforementioned study – La cité assiégée.19

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We Run’: The Aftermath of Slave Rebellion at Stono, 1739–1745,” The Journal of Negro History, 67, no. 2 (1982), 136–147; Carla G. Pestana, “The City upon a Hill under Siege: The Puritan Perception of the Quaker Threat to Massachusetts Bay, 1656–1661,” The New England Quarterly 56, no. 3 (Sept. 1983), 323–353. Gregory Evans Dowd, “The Panic of 1751: The Significance of Rumors on the South Carolina-Cherokee Frontier,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 53, no. 3 (1996), 527–560 has a remarkably well-informed discussion of the historical and sociological literature on rumors, but see also Torn Arne Midtrød, “Strange and Disturbing News: Rumor and Diplomacy in the Colonial Hudson Valley,” Ethnohistory 58, no. 1 (2011), 91–112. The same can be said about David H. Bennett, The Party of Fear: The American Far Right from Nativism to the Militia Movement, revised and updated (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). David Brion Davis, ed., The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present (Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1971) and Richard O. Curry and Thomas M. Brown, Conspiracy: The Fear of Subversion in American History (New York: Holt, Reinhard and Winston, 1972). On the “fear of conspiracy” as a cause of the American Revolution, the classic reference is Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, rev. ed. 1992), esp. 144–159. Among more recent articles on conspiracy, again admittedly limited to British America: Gordon S. Wood, “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 39 no. 3 (1982), 401–441 and Philip D. Morgan, “Conspiracy Scares,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 59, no. 1 (2002), 159–166. Michael Zuckerman, “Identity in British America: Unease in Eden,” in Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden, eds., Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Princeton, n.j.: Princeton University Press, 1987), 115–157, quotes on 138, 142 (Robert Wiebe, “small fortresses”). Zuckerman’s subtitle is reminiscent of H. Roy Merrens and George D. Terry, “Dying in Paradise: Malaria, Mortality and the Perceptual Environment in Colonial South

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The contributors to this volume believe that fear, as a fundamental component in the lives of early modern settlers in the Americas, deserves a more extensive treatment, especially in terms of comparisons across cultures, across empires, across colonies, and across stages of social and political development. This collection of essays has been conceived as a geographical extension of Delumeau’s and Naphy and Roberts’ works, applied to societies across and around the Atlantic Ocean, and aimed at refining our understanding of how “fear,” conceived broadly (and defined below) influenced human actions, poli­ tical decisions, and contributed to shape societies and interactions between societies in an American environment.

Controlling Chaos: Deconstructing the “Fear” Equation

When not entirely “bypassed,” as previously noted, fear has largely been taken for granted in the historical literature as an all-encompassing, self-evident term not requiring careful definition. Fear unquestionably needs to be historicized. The following essays make clear that it was shaped by early modern mindscapes that have little to do with ours. However, beyond obvious historical specificities, fear also contains an anthropological substrate and overall patterns that transcend time. Consequently, and to some degree only, discussing fear today may help understand the fears of yesteryear, and vice versa. Delumeau followed the lead of psychology in distinguishing fear from anxiety, the former with an identified object, the latter, more of a latent climate. At about the same time, Tuan defined fear in a slightly different vein as “a complex feeling of which two strains, alarm and anxiety, are clearly distin­guishable.” He added that alarm is triggered by an obtrusive event in the environment, and an animal’s instinctive response is to combat it or run. Anxiety, on the other hand, is a diffuse sense of dread and presupposes an ability to anticipate. It commonly occurs when an animal is in a strange and disorienting milieu, separated from the supportive objects and figures of its home ground. Anxiety is a presentiment of danger when nothing in



Carolina,” The Journal of Southern History 50, no. 4 (1984), 533–550; both illustrate how entwined fear and hope were in the colonial American environment.  William Hubbard called Plymouth “our little citadel of Sion”; A General History of New England, from the discovery to the year mdclxxx (Boston, 1680; repr. New York: Arno Press, 1972), 63.

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the immediate surroundings can be pinpointed as dangerous. The need for decisive action is checked by the lack of any specific, circumventable threat.20 Even though they use different words, Delumeau and Tuan distinguish between the emotion caused by an immediate and identified threat (fear/alarm) and a more diffuse, less acute emotion caused by a threat that is not clearly identified (anxiety). The two can be connected when the indistinct threat causing anxiety is identified and named, causing a shift from anxiety to fear/alarm. One common means of operating this shift is through “scapegoating”; another is through spreading rumors. Both are ways of creating or spreading a crude form of narrative that, by making sense of unbearable uncertainty, is aimed at emotional release. Both the “ability to anticipate” and the “need for decisive action,” rightly noted by Tuan, will be further explored below. A medical doctor frequently consulted by the media about recent scares has defined fear as “a physical reaction to a perceived threat” which “helps to protect us.” This salutary dimension has been noted by others, including Delumeau, who calls it a “natural reaction to the unknown and part of our built-in defense against a potentially hostile environment”; because “we are afraid of suffering and pain” (and, we may add, being killed), “we seek to avoid it at all costs.”21 Here the assumption is clearly essentialist, as we have seen. Vulnerability avoidance and/or prevention are assumed to be shared by all mankind in one form of another, to varying degrees.22 This variability of degrees but similarity of patterns, we believe, enables cautious comparisons across time. With all the acknowledged variations due to culture, time, and space, “fear” may arguably be parsed into a multi-term equation with a subject, a range of degrees, and an object (a parameter with immense scope). It elicits a vast array of responses – what Tuan calls the “logistics of fear” – which complicate the classic binary “fight-or-flight” choice. What we mean by “fear” or “being afraid” varies greatly. As already mentioned, we are dealing with a category of emotions rather than a single emotion. The variation in emotional degrees is a function of a number of factors that may or may not play a part in any given situation. Among them are context (in particular the conjunction or combination of other, preexisting threats, 20 Tuan, Landscapes of Fear, 5. 21 Marc Siegel, False Alarm: The Truth about the Epidemic of Fear (Hoboken, n.j.: Wiley and Sons, 2005), 14–15. 22 On vulnerability avoidance and prevention, see the discussion in Davis, “The Varieties of Fear,” 294–295.

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as we shall see), the past experience of the same threat, the agency of the subjects, (in other words, their “ability to anticipate,” their capacity to face, respond to and/or avert the threat), and also the geographical proximity of the threat. In Chapter 5 below, we shall see that the threat of a Dutch-Indian conspiracy to slaughter the English settlers in mid-seventeenth-century Southern New England affected Massachusetts and the two more westerly colonies of Connecticut and New Haven very differently. The context and the culture were (almost) exactly similar; the only difference was that Connecticut and New Haven were directly exposed to that rumored threat and risked (or thought they risked) imminent brutal death, while Massachusetts’ remoteness from that scene gave its leaders a cooler head in deciding how to respond to the uncertainty of the rumored conspiracy. The variation in degrees is therefore primarily a question of the perception of one’s vulnerability: because it is highly subjective, it does not have to reflect the actuality of the threat, which historians, whose lives are not directly at stake, can comfortably discuss with the benefit of hindsight. The fear of what might happen was also fueled by actual past instances, whether directly experienced by the subject or simply known to them from hearsay or reading.23 The key component arguably resides in the combination of a preexisting sense of crisis (the context – war, drought, epidemic), the assessment of one’s vulnerability (e.g. proximity/remoteness) and agency, understood as one’s capacity of adjustment (prevention, avoidance). The notion of specter, here, is particularly useful, as we should keep in mind that we are dealing with perceptions of threats more often than with actual threats. The specter of Anabaptist anarchy in Münster in the 1530s, for instance, was regularly conjured a century later when Massachusetts was trying to deal with heterodoxy. Doing so can be interpreted either as cynical manipulation of history by the ruling politicalecclesiastical elite to enforce its own, narrow conception of orthodoxy, or as the sincere fear of a historical echo, justifying measures to avert the unpleasant consequences of anarchy. Fear, whatever its shade and degree, is a category of related emotions that has a subject and an object. In other words, someone is afraid of someone else, of something, or of someone doing something deemed detrimental by the subject. In the previous example, the Massachusetts magistrates, elders, and ministers were afraid of religious outsiders and of what they perceived as the risks of religious pluralism, heterogeneity, or division, depending on 23 Delumeau, La peur en Occident, 29; Tuan, Landscapes of Fear, 164; Jan Plamper and Benjamin Lazier, “Introduction: The Phobic Regimes of Modernity,” Representations 110, no. 1 (Spring 2010), 62.

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one’s interpretation. That subject may range in numbers from an individual to a small community (such as a family or a hamlet), or to a larger community (from town to colony), united by links ranging from ethnicity to language, religious persuasion, or shared economic interest. Symbolic communities can be loose (the Protestant interest on both sides of the Atlantic) or narrow (proponents of one specific version of Calvinism as opposed to other interpretations). In each case, the key is preservation of being, whether physical life or life as a linguistic or confessional community. A related analytical parameter is social differentiation, as already noted, between the ruling elite (political and ecclesiastical) and those who are expected to obey, the population at large, or (which often amounts to the same thing) between rich and poor, haves and have-nots. Early American societies, to some degree, were socially and economically more homogeneous than European societies, at least before urbanization increased social differentiation. However, in the example above, the subject was the “upper sort” (the Massachusetts magistrates and ministers) and an important question is the degree of popular assent (or dissent), in other words, the question of ideological differentiation. To what degree did the non-elite population of the colony share the fears of the elite, in this case the specter of Münster? Because homogeneity lessens competition (economic, but also symbolic), homogeneity may be seen – and was seen – as the guarantee of stability. It was accordingly eagerly desired, both in the economic and religious fields, as we shall see. Whenever possible, outsiders were to be kept out (strangers, religious outsiders). When that was not possible, as in the case of enslaved Africans in slave societies, or to some extent Irish indentured servants, as Elodie Peyrol-Kleiber shows in her essay below, outsiders within were perceived as a threat. Fellow subjects (sharing ethnicity, language, and religion) can become objects of fear on account of economic differences. Fear of crime or robbery is a case in point, as is fear of disrupting the precarious economic balance of the community. A sense of fragility prevailed in early modern villages, and strangers were generally suspected of becoming burdens. As a consequence, more often than not, strangers were not welcome, and villages instated “warning out” policies to keep them out.24 These exclusionary policies, more consensual 24

On warning out, see Josiah Henry Benton, Warning Out in New England, 1656–1817 (Boston, 1911); Esther L. Friend, “Notifications and Warnings Out: Strangers Taken into Wrentham, Massachusetts, between 1732 and 1812,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register 141 (1987), p 179–202; 330–357 and 142 (1988), p 56–84, as well as, more recently, Ruth Wallis Herndon, Unwelcome Americans: Living on the Margin in Early New England

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than imposed by a distant elite, were meant to ensure homogeneity and consequently cohesiveness. But the competition factor could also be religion (assuming ethnicity, language, and economic status were shared between subjects and objects of fear). Also, as we shall see, there might be a combination of factors (race and economic status, or language and religion) acting as multiplier effects. The result might be an exaggeratedly severe response, usually of an exclusionary kind aiming at suppressing competition.25 But persons or groups are not considered as threats in and of themselves: subjects feel threatened by what the other person or group might inflict on them. In other words, the human (or more rarely animal) threat is the vehicle, or perpetrator, rather than the actual threat. The most obvious threat might be physical pain (including mutilation), which could result in death. This could be caused by warfare, terrorism, torture, crime, or insurrection. All of those threats are inflicted by outsiders of some sort, which was also the case in early American societies (chiefly but not solely in the case of Indian raids and slave revolts). Other possible causes of death included famine and epidemics, which could be the (indirect) consequence of warfare, as well as of inclement climate. For example, drought triggers a fear of dearth, famine, and ultimately starvation, though there is no human object. In some communities, however, the upper sort tries to make sense of the situation by scapegoating the community and its sinful ways, enabling a collective response in the form of a day of fasting and prayer aimed at easing God’s wrath. Indeed, in the early modern worldview in general and the Puritan worldview in particular, a drought did not just happen. It was a sign of God’s ire, which was triggered by some moral failing in the community, which in turn needed to be duly identified and remedied. From the various forms of actual, physical death, we move to symbolic forms of suppression or non-being. Those include the loss of liberty, usually understood metaphorically (fears of political “slavery” and/or fears associated with “popery,” as discussed by David William Voorhees in this volume) and the loss of communal identity, in the form of ensauvagement, cultural bastardization,

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(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 2–22 and Cornelia H. Dayton and Sharon V. Salinger, Robert Love’s Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), introduction. Susan Olzak and Suzanne Shanahan, “Racial Policy and Racial Conflict in the Urban United States, 1869–1924,” Social Forces 82, no. 2 (Dec., 2003), 481–517 at 486–489 and, on competition, Lawrence Bobo and Vincent L. Hutchings, “Perceptions of Racial Group Competition: Extending Blumer’s Theory of Group Position to a Multiracial Social Context,” American Sociological Review 61, no. 6 (Dec., 1996), 951–972.

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extinction of a linguistic minority (English separatists in the Netherlands, German Lutherans in Pennsylvania, the French Huguenot diaspora), or declension of ethical and/or religious standards. German Lutheran pastor Gottlieb Mittelberger deplored that “on account of their great distance and the many forests,” “many hundred children cannot attend … schools” and lived what he denounced as a “very wild and heathenish life.” Other missionaries had similar fears about the Scots-Irish in the Southern backcountry: they called for books from England, or else their parishioners “will soon turn heathens and be as savage as the Indians themselves.”26 Mittelberger also lamented the nefarious effects of religious diversity on “our young German folks”: “the many sects, he wrote, lead people astray, and make them heterodox,” something the New England Puritans would have agreed with, but he also added that “they even forget their mother tongue,” often on account of their being servants to English-speaking masters.27 Yet emigration could also be a conservative movement intended to preserve cultural identity, in particular Englishness, to enable the settlers to “continue English” and to keep their “name of English.” The preservation of the English language among the Leiden Separatist community was an important reason for crossing the Atlantic. They were concerned about their children assimilating into the host Dutch society to the point of losing their Englishness.28 William Bradford added that the migrating generation wanted their children to say that their “fathers were Englishmen” and that they, thanks to them, were too.29 But preserving one’s cultural identity was made difficult in a “jittery, culturally competitive society,” once various ethnic groups came to live near each other, as was the case in the eighteenth-century middle colonies. This cultural competition was felt as a disturbing element and “forced proximity brought many groups to a fresh appreciation for their own distinctive ways.” Before Hector St John (born Michel Guillaume Saint-Jean) de Crèvecoeur invented the famed melting pot metaphor in the 1780s, there was a double movement of nativism and religious revival within distinct communities and religious 26

Gottlieb Mittelberger’s Journey to Pennsylvania in the Year 1750 and Return to Germany in the Year 1754, trans. Carl T. Eben (Philadelphia: John Jos. McVey, 1898), 61–62; Thomas Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), 255 (Scotch-Irish); see also Silver, Our Savage Neighbors, 11. 27 Gottlieb Mittelberger’s Journey, 113. 28 Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 24–25 and esp. Winslow, Hypocrisy Unmasked in Alexander Young, ed., Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers from 1602 to 1625 (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1974), 381, 389. 29 Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 63.

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traditions, each demanding “ultra-orthodoxy.”30 At the same time, these communities that were growing apart from one another were also united by their shared fear of violent death at the hands of hostile Indians (what Silver calls the “anti-Indian sublime”) or rebellious slaves. One clear effect of the hardening of racial dividing lines was the progressive blurring of European ethnic divisions and the simultaneous construction of “whiteness.”31 The object of fear thus affects the subject in many possible ways, and the emotion in turn triggers a response on the part of the subject, in the form of either reaction (to something that has already happened) or anticipation (of something that has yet to happen). Here a binary dimension is inevitable; either something has happened or has yet to happen. The response is therefore either reactive or proactive. Another binary dimension of the response is that it can be immediate (especially if the threat is very tangible) and short-term, which might avert pain or death without solving the problem at the root of the danger in question, or more structural/legal and longer-term, with a view to suppressing not only the immediate threat (if any) but of preventing a similar threat from becoming possible. Another binary way of categorizing responses to threats is as either defensive or offensive. Strengthening fortifications, ordering (more) night watches, and making sure the gunpowder supply is adequate are defensive measures. Raising an army and launching a preemptive raid against a neighboring polity are offensive measures, even though their ultimate aim is not gratuitous aggression but to protect the community from something or someone. Geographer Yi-fu Tuan calls the range of possible responses the “landscape of fear.” He explains that “forces for chaos being omnipresent, human attempts to control them are also omnipresent”; “in a sense, every human construction – whether mental or material – is a component in a landscape of fear because it exists to control chaos.”32 What has been felicitously called the “logistics of 30 Silver, Our Savage Neighbors, xix, 20, 22; Ned Landsman, “Revivalism and Nativism in the Middle Colonies: The Great Awakening and the Scots Community in East New Jersey,” American Quarterly 34, no. 2 (Summer 1982), 149–164. In the late seventeenth century, New England ministers tried to counter the specter of declension with Jeremiads and covenant renewal, both top-down rituals aimed at remobilizing the lethargic spiritual community. 31 Silver, Our Savage Neighbors, 23, 293–298; see also Elodie Peyrol-Kleiber’s essay in this volume on how the fear of slave revolts had a similar impact. On the period before that covered by Silver, and in particular Virginia at the time of “Bacon’s Rebellion,” see James Rice, Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) and William J. Cooper, Liberty and Slavery: Southern Politics to 1860 (Columbia, s.c.: University of South Carolina Press, 2001), 9. 32 Tuan, Landscapes of Fear, 6.

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fear,” i.e. “the ways in which people in the early modern period coped with, and took precautions against, what they feared,”33 – reacted to or anticipated – could take many forms and can be sorted into defensive and offensive types to some degree only. Defensive responses include physical removal (evacuation, emigration, refugeeism and reverse migration), diplomatic alliances, and military preparedness (fortification, watches…): the former implies that the subject sees no survival in confronting the threat, while in the latter, a degree of agency is acknowledged and the community sees itself as capable of withstanding an assault, for instance. Clearly offensive responses include preemptive military operations such as annexation of territory as buffer against an enemy, real or imaginary, which require sufficient numbers and an assessment of one’s strength that offsets the risks of such undertakings. Defensive measures are then considered as insufficient to ensure survival, and a shift from defensive to offensive measures seems more beneficial. In a similar, if admittedly less aggressive vein, one can consider commercial aggressiveness or depredations to counter the fear of food shortages as well as forms of exclusion or assimilation of outsiders (warning out of paupers, banishment of heretics, conversion of “heathen” others). One variation of the latter is witch hunts, or the capture, trial, and confinement or execution of trouble makers, in which outsider scapegoats are identified and suppressed. In such cases, the threat is an outsider within the community.34 Yet some forms of response can be considered as intermediate between offensive and defensive, showing that the dichotomy might not be entirely satis­factory. Consider such communal solidarity rituals as days of fasting and prayer (Puritan), processions (Catholic), and rogations (Anglican), which will be analyzed below. Also, black codes, for instance, were partly meant to protect the white community against blacks (radical ethnic outsiders), but do not quite fit the offensive/defensive dichotomy.35 More generally, legislation and, more broadly, rules are “effective in tempering anxiety, and the numerous rules themselves cease to be a conscious burden once they become habit.”36 Rules 33 34

Naphy and Roberts, eds., Fear in Early Modern Society, 2. This collection deals only marginally with a number of the threats covered by Delumeau, Tuan or Bourke, such as ghosts, nightmares or witches, as they did not have any significant transformative effects on American societies, simply because societies do not adjust to individual fears (nightmares) and cases of witchcraft were too anecdotal (Salem notwithstanding) in comparison to Europe to play any lasting role. 35 On the role of black codes as a metropolitan form of assuaging colonial fears, see AnneClaire Faucquez’s essay in this volume. 36 Tuan, Landscapes of Fear, 9. Two scholars have convincingly tested and shown that while “Laws and rulings legitimating white dominance over nonwhites increase the rate of

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reflect the top-down dynamics of defusing threats, but they also require assent from the population at large, lest they trigger another set of emotions – anger/ outrage – which may combine with fear of oppression to generate reactions from social unrest to violent protest, which in turn trigger fear among the elite. Rules, therefore, require a certain balance to be effective, but they do not fit the binary defensive/offensive duality, which needs be qualified. Additionally, the role of rules in attempting to “control chaos” draws our attention to the legislative record as an archival treasure trove for historians interested in mapping patterns of response to perceived threats. Items related to defensive measures and military preparedness helpfully document the anticipation of threats. The frequency, motives, measures taken, sums spent (where available), and reasons given may be quantified and charted, letting peaks appear for periods of more acute fears (including false alarms). By their very nature – strictly chronological and not thematically arranged – legislative records help historians grasp a sense of conjunction of threats in a more systematic way than private correspondence, for instance. This sense of otherwise unrelated but simultaneous threats have a multiplier effect, with each threat reinforcing the other to create a phobic climate that no single threat would generate separately. In this respect, the 1630s again make for a very valuable laboratory. The decade is known for the proverbial intolerance shown by Massachusetts towards the likes of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, as well as for the Pequot War and its bloody climax at Mystic Fort. The leaders who made those decisions in quick succession were the same men, operating in the same context. They faced Indian threats in a fledgling colony that had angered King Charles and Archbishop Laud to the point their royal charter had become the target of influential men at court. In addition, Kate Grandjean has persuasively drawn our attention to environmental factors. Indeed, she has argued that “to a degree not yet grasped, food scarcity directly preceded much of the violence that characterized English colonization. In telling the story of English encounters with New World natives, historians have not fully accounted for the roles hunger and scarcity played in thwarting peaceful relationships.”37 Grandjean’s call has been heeded here by

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violence against Asian and African American minorities” and “Laws and rulings concerning the expansion of civil rights for African Americans provoke racial competition, and whites will respond with reactionary violence against blacks,” “Passage of exclusionary legislation reduces the rate of violence against excluded minorities, as perceptions of threat and competition decline.” Olzak and Shanahan, “Racial Policy and Racial Conflict in the Urban United States, 1869–1924,” 486, 487, 489. K. Grandjean, “New World Tempests,” 75.

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Bertie Mandelblatt, who has explored the role of famine (and fear thereof) in the French Caribbean in her essay for this volume. “Popery” entails an interesting combination of threats; for Protestants, it was not only the fear of Catholicism as one among other conceptions of faith, ritual, and salvation; it was also the “aggressive civil authority” of the Church of Rome, a “combination of civil and ecclesiastical tyrannies.”38 It thus combined the fear of violent death in the name of religious “truth” with enslavement and loss of liberty (an oft-noted paradox in slave societies). Both Massachusetts and New York, for instance, banned Catholics in general and sometimes Jesuits in particular, on pain of death, the most severe of deterrents.39 As late as 1815, John Adams claimed that the fear of popery, seen as “worse than Egyptian bondage,” had been central to the American Revolution, both in the 1760’s, when an Anglican Episcopal see was rumored to be installed in or near Boston, and in the wake of the Quebec Act (1774), which seemed overly (and therefore suspiciously) generous towards recently conquered French Catholics in Canada. Adams wrote that “the apprehension of episcopacy contributed … as much as any cause” to the undermining of Britain’s political authority.40 The quest for communal security could have profound and lasting institutional consequences. The epochal events leading to and following the “Glorious Revolution” in England led to “a period of profound fear and chaos in the colonies,” and “opened the door to a new fear of imperialism” when “imperial leaders used the promise of security, couched in the language of centralization of fear of popery, to build a popular movement for empire.”41 Almost a century later, the fear of tyranny in the Founding Fathers materialized (in part) in the system of checks and balances. The Constitution as well as the Bill of Rights, to some degree, reflect pessimism about human nature (and the need to check it) rather than a naively enlightened view of Man. It was also out of the fear that the survival of the republic depended on virtue and that there could be no virtue without religious faith that an amendment explicitly recognizing the United States as a Christian nation was proposed (to no avail).42  38 Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 98. 39 Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed. (5 volumes in 6, Boston, 1853–1854), hereafter mr, 2:96 (May 1647); New York, 1691 in Lepore, New York Burning, 183. 40 Kidd, God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 58, 59; Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 96–98; see also Carl Bridenbaugh, Mitre and Sceptre: Transatlantic Faiths, Ideas, Personalities and Politics, 1689–1775 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). 41 Stanwood, The Empire Reformed, 19–20. 42 Kidd, God of Liberty, 250.

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The French, as Catholics, were seen by British Protestants as a threat in themselves, but they became even more worrying when accused of encouraging British-owned slaves to rebel. One solution to counter that fear, it was thought, was to convert slaves to Protestantism and the detestation of “popery,” especially by emphasizing obedience and submission – the classic view of religion as a form of social control. Yet, slave owners were uneasy about teaching religion to their slaves, as the latter might also find inspiration in stories such as Exodus and unwelcome (from the slave owners’ point of view) encouragement to resist servitude. As early as 1667, the Virginia Assembly had to resort to rules, as seen above, and passed a law specifying that baptism did not confer freedom in this world, only in the next.43 The slave conspiracy that agitated New York in 1741 was a triple threat as it combined the slave element with two Catholic elements: the “Spanish negroes” captured in Spanish America a few years before and a mysterious priest, John Ury.44 In the wake of the Gabriel Rebellion in Virginia (1800), the specter of renewed slave insurrection caused Southerners beyond Virginia to fear “the effect of evangelical faith on the slaves,” so that several states passed laws, again, “forbidding slaves from attending religious meetings after dark” (adding another fear factor – nighttime – to the fear of slave rebellions) “even in the presence of whites.”45 When not worrying about the evil influence of the French on their slaves, the settlers in the British colonies were afraid that their Native allies might defect to the French side. In that context, frontier missions could serve as a geopolitical bulwark – if the Indians’ own fears of enslavement could be alleviated in the first place. The same situation prevailed in Dutch Brazil in the previous century, as we learn in Mark Meuwese’s essay below. However, there was always a degree of distrust on both sides, and the English rapidly developed a fear of Indian treachery.46 In the 1680s, too, New York’s Irish Catholic governor Dongan understood the role of Jesuits in French imperial expansion and wanted to use English Jesuit missionaries to defend the English empire from northern 43

William W. Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large, Being a Collection of all the Laws of Virginiafrom the first session of the Legislature, in the Year 1619 (New York, 1823), 2:260; Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven, 119–120; Kidd, Great Awakening, 240. 44 Lepore, New York Burning, passim. George Whitefield, as the enthusiast-in-chief, was also blamed for inspiring the conspiracy (188). 45 Kidd, God of Liberty, 162. On the fear of the night, see Delumeau, La peur en Occident, 119–131, Tuan, Landscapes of Fear, 107–108. 46 Kidd, Great Awakening, 202, 240; Philip F. Gura, Jonathan Edwards: America’s Evangelical (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005), 167; Karen O. Kupperman, “English Perceptions of Treachery, 1583–1640: The Case of the American ‘Savages,’” The Historical Journal 20, no. 2 (Jun. 1977), 263–287.

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Franco-Indian pressures by securing new alliances. Fear of a hostile alliance inspired a form of counter-diplomacy in which missionaries were instrumental.47 Whether engineered by the French or not, Indian attacks, or rather the fear thereof, acted as a clear spur on the revivals that shook Scots-Irish Presbyterian churches in the backcountry as well as in western Pennsylvania. Never really secure, the men who attended revival services made sure to carry their guns with them.48 Here, revivals highlight an involuntary form of response. To some degree they were close to such communal rituals as fast days, the main difference being that fast days were meant to reverse various threats, as we shall see below, by assuaging divine wrath, while revivals were not intended to counter Indian raids. Another difference is that religious revivals were a much more intense form of emotional release than fast days.

The “Logistics” of Fear: Controlling Chaos through Legislation (Three Case Studies)

This section reflects the core, or initial, interests of this editor and the themes and issues at the root of this project. The cases sketched below are meant to be suggestive only and illustrate a number of patterns covered so far. What they have in common is that ruling elites, particularly (but not only) in New England attempted to address the sense of their own vulnerability, the precarious balance on which their mental world was standing, and to “control chaos” through legal/regulatory means of three kinds: organizing propitiatory rituals (fast days); preventing and discouraging the “pernicious” effects of rumors and the spreading of false news; and preserving a degree of homogeneity (mostly religious, but also economic) perceived as vital to maintaining social cohesion, stability, and order (intolerance, warning out). Fast Days as Communal Ritual As a communal form of conjuring fear, fast days cannot be separated from days of thanksgiving, when relief was expressed after the plea to God had been heeded (or so it was deemed). Days of fasting and thanksgiving were not universal practices in the Atlantic world, but they should not be dismissed as uniquely Puritan reversal or solidarity rituals.49 These ritualistic practices can 47 Stanwood, The Empire Reformed, 29. 48 Kidd, God of Liberty, 193. 49 Richard Gildrie, “The Ceremonial Puritan: Days of Humiliation and Thanksgiving,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register, vol. 136 (Jan. 1982) 4, and David D. Hall,

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be compared to the rogations of both Protestant England and Catholic France. In England, only one of the Catholic medieval processions had survived the Reformation: the annual perambulation of the parish in May (before Ascension, not coincidentally a crucial time in the growing season), with blessing of the corn and singing of psalms to ensure fertility and clement weather. In France, processions were automatically resorted to in case of climatic stress, so much so that the dates of these processions can be used as a sort of makeshift baro­ meter to reconstruct past climates. The intercession of the saints and their relics were used to try to ensure favorable climatic conditions, and it was a rare year when the reliquary of the local saint was not walked around the parish just before Ascension. Catholic rogations also consisted of public prayers and fasting, just as in Old and New England. The differences between the Catholic and the Protestant rituals are obvious: it is admittedly difficult to imagine John Cotton or Increase Mather exorcising bugs and carrying the Lord’s Supper into the fields, but exorcism aside, the practices of the Puritans, the Church of England, and the Catholic Church were not very dissimilar. This suggests that the ritual practices linked to subsistence and the abundance of crops transcended the various conceptions of Christianity and were deeply anchored in a common cultural substrate. This important aspect of New England’s social life may therefore be considered in a comparative fashion, which in turn makes it look less exceptional and reconnects it not so much with England as with early modern European practices and mentalities. Whether in France, Old England, or Massachusetts, the blame was always put on the sins of men, who were enjoined to return to God.50 Fast days combine a clearly propitiatory function with a strong semiotic dimension, all ultimately aimed at reducing social tensions caused by environmental factors.51

50

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Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 137, 167, 168, 212. Marcel Lachiver, Les années de misère: La famine au temps du Grand Roi (Paris: Fayard, 1991), 61–63. In his remarkable treatment of these questions, Lachiver points out that “the processions usually bore fruit.” See also Georges Minois, “Le climat, les dîmes et les prix trégorrois à travers le culte de saint Yves (XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles),” Annales de Bretagne 1 (1981) 87–108, for the use of procession dates to detect climatic anomalies. On the English rogations, see K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Penguin, 1991, 1st ed. 1971), 71. David D. Hall has rightly noted that in early modern France, church bells were rung when a storm was getting near the parish to divert it (and spare the crops), and that in the Homilies of the Church of England, there were prayers for rain, fair weather, good harvests and even against plague epidemics (Worlds of Wonder, 169). Beside the almost systematic use of the words “threat” and “frowns” (mr 4.2:118 and 135), the terms “tokens” (mr 4.2:118 and 5:465) and “signes in the heavens” (mr 5:388) accompany

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The proclamations themselves, as a form of public discourse, and a specific part of the legislative record, are an important and consistent source to explore the phobic landscape of the period. An exhaustive study, especially a quantitative one, is impossible here, so one typical proclamation has been chosen as a case study. The proclamation issued by the Massachusetts General Court on 24 December 1672, in a relatively quiet period, listed the following points of concern: 1)

A sense of moral decay, with the increasing number of sins: ignorance (of the Bible); pride (also manifested in excess in apparel); “sensuality,” which could mean anything from short sleeves to complete debauchery; “security” and “wordly-mindedness” (the materialism and religious indifference deplored in the Jeremiads, perhaps not real but clearly felt, which matters more here); “contention and striffe,” which went hand in hand with the perceived rising materialism and was based on at least a perceived increase in the amount of litigation; finally, “unsubduedness to Gods order in families, churches and commonwealth.”52 2) The literal welfare of the community: “The unusual sicknesse and diseases” at the end of the summer, which killed “many pretious and useful persons,” namely magistrates (Governor Richard Bellingham) and pastors.

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such expressions as “warning us to be watchful” (mr 4.2:144), which sometimes apply to observable phenomena as comets (mr 4.2:144 and 235, 5:388), and the semiotic field of observation: “apparent” (mr 5:509), “sensible” (mr 4.2:101 and 118, among others). Among the strings contained in fast day proclamations, another two can be mentioned: that of 13 March 1639 (mr 1:269): “Novelties, oppression, athisme, excesse, superfluity, idlenesse, contempt of authority, & troubles in other parts,” which ends on an international concern; that of 27 November 1661 (mr 4.2:34), which deplores not only sins but also the ingratitude of the population, pride (in the form of excess of apparel), the recurrent concern about the “rising generation” (cf. 4.2:451, 27 May 1670 and 5:463, 24 Oct. 1684), and the materialism sometimes associated with individualism and selfishness (mr 4.2:451, 27 May 1670). This was not a new concern. In his farewell letter to the future Plymouth settlers, John Robinson had warned against individualism and exhorted them to work for the common good before private interests. William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, Samuel E. Morison, ed. (New York: Knopf, 2001), 367–371. See also Robert Cushman’s 1621 sermon on self-love in Young, ed., Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers. The theme of decline appears explicitly in the 27 May 1670 proclamation, in which “a cooling of former life and heate in spiritual communion” and “a decay of love of God and one another” are deplored, in other words, the so-called decline of the faith and the rise in individualism. mr 4.2:451.

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3) Agricultural and climatic factors: The “unseasonable” rains during the hay harvest “whereby many have susteyned considerable damage”: no or little hay meant that cattle would be underfed or even die, thereby cutting an important source of income, as cattle was either consumed on the domestic market or exported, mainly to the West Indies.53 4) A wider view and the state of the “protestant cause”: “A fellow feeling of sympathy with the churches of God in Europe” because of the Third Dutch war, an unnatural war since it opposed “the Prottestant nations” instead of struggling against the Catholic enemy: such a war could only be a bad omen (in spite of the previous two conflicts). The concern about European Protestants was recurrent, thereby creating the sense of a “Protestant international.” The feats of Gustav-Adolf of Sweden were followed by days of public thanksgiving whereas the defeats of Protestant troops were systematically followed by fast days.54 Rumors, Rumormongering, and the Struggle against “False News” Like fast day proclamations, rumors are a form of discourse in which fears were negotiated, but they also in turn triggered other fears. One common feature shared by otherwise disparate periods and areas is arguably rumors and rumormongering, a theme addressed in several of these essays – Leslie Choquette’s on New France, Mark Meuwese’s on Dutch Brazil, Elodie PeyrolKleiber’s on the Chesapeake region, and David William Voorhees’s on late 53

54

The proclamation of 10 Oct. 1666 lists smallpox, “blastings,” mildew, the drought, caterpillars and grasshoppers (mr 4.2:321). Thanksgiving proclamations are almost systematically related to the weather and therefore to the harvests, which is not surprising in a preindustrial society which had its own harvest feast and its own form of fertility rite. The proclamation of 12 Oct. 1669 is particularly eloquent: God is thanked for having stopped “the bottles of heaven, that by excessive raines then seemed to threaten a grievous famine among us,” for having “mercifully lengthened the harvest season” (in dry weather, that is), and as a logical consequence, for having brought “the fruites of the earth” in abundance “farr beyond what in a usual course could have been expected.” mr 4.2:438. See for instance the proclamation of 5 June 1632 (mr 1:96), about the Palatinate. For the recurrent concern about the international Protestant cause see mr 4.2:235 (3 May 1665), 321 (10 Oct. 1666), 534–535 (8 Oct. 1672), 5:388 (30 March 1683) and 465 (24 Oct. 1684). The enemy of the Protestant cause is called Antichrist until the 1660s (mr 4.2:35 and 60, 27 Nov. 1661 and 8 Oct. 1662) and at least into the 1680s under Increase Mather’s pen, among others. See I. Mather, A Sermon wherein is shewed … (1682), sig. A2v (“The Protestant Cause”), A3, and an anonymous undated letter in the Mather Family Papers, m.h.s., Boston, folder 4.

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seventeenth-century New York. In Christopher Vernon’s chapter and my own, rumors occupy a central place.55 Seventeenth-century Massachusetts Bay and Virginia legislated against rumormongering, which testified both to the threatening character of rumors and the duty of the legislative assemblies to protect the community by resorting to rules, as seen above. The Massachusetts General Court posited that “lyes” were “not only sinfull … but also p[er]nitious to ye commonweale & iniurious to p[ar]ticuler p[er]sons.” The spreading of false news or of “any lye w[hi]ch may be p[er]nicious to ye publiq[ue] weale or tends to the damage or iniury of any p[ar]ticular p[er]son” were puni­shable by fines, at first, or sitting in the stocks (or whipping for the second offense).56 Likewise, in October 1649, the Virginia Assembly, reacting angrily to the death of King Charles I, legislated against “false reports and malicious rumors … tending to change of government, or to the lessening of the power and authority of the Governor or government either in civill or ecclesiasticall causes.” In March 1657/58, the Assembly – this time much less friendly to the late king – declared that if any personn or persons shall forge or divulge any false or dangerous news tending to the disturbance of the peace of this collony vnder the government now established that vnles hee produce his author forthwith shall by the next com’r. for the peace be comitted to prison and if he brings not his said author the next quarter court hee shall be fined two thousand pounds of tobaccoe or less if the merritt of the cause deserve it.57 Eventually, a few months after the Restoration, the Virginia Assembly enacted with a remarkable sense of continuity that Whereas many idle and busy headed people doe forge and divulge false rumors and reports to the greate disturbance of the peace and quiett of his majesties leige persons in this colony, Be it enacted that what person or persons soever shall forge and divulge any such false reports tending to the trouble of the country shalbe by the next justice of the peace sent for, and bound over to the next county court, where 55

56 57

See those essays for the relevant scholarly literature as well as Delumeau, La peur en Occident, 225–238; Adam Fox, “Rumour, News and Popular Political Opinion in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England,” The Historical Journal 40, no. 3 (Sept. 1997), 597–620. mr 3:18 (16 June 1645). Interestingly, “pernicious” is derived from the latin root nex, which means “violent death.” Hening, ed., Statutes at Large, 1:361 (10 Oct. 1649), 1:434–435 (13 March 1657/58).

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if he produce not his author, he shalbe fined two thousand pounds of tobacco (or less) if the court thinks fitt to lessen itt, and besides give bond for his behavior if it appeares to the court that he did maliciously publish it or invent itt.58 A few months earlier, in July 1661, acting governor Francis Moryson had observed that “the annuall feares of ye Indians which distract the Inhabitants of this Country proceed more from their own Jealousies than any reall dangers” as well as the “vast extent of [the] bounds, or the weaknesse of most of the frontier familyes.” In other words, the environment produced an acute sense of vulnerability, but the duty of the magistrate was to resist the temptation of panic and irrational initiatives that could have disastrous consequences for the welfare of the entire community. Legislation, in those cases, was meant to ensure emotional stability.59 Rumors were and remain to this day symptoms of our need to make sense of disturbing uncertainty, which we cannot stand as such. They are, therefore, the beginning of a narrative. As that narrative gains coherence and elaboration, we move from rumor to conspiracy, and conspiracy scares, because they acutely threaten the survival of the community, generally call for radical and immediate action. Once the realization of imminent (violent) death has dawned upon a community, the stakes are too high to waste any time in talk. That sense of emergency may lead to unilateral action as well as to the suspicion that any form of dithering on the part of so-called partners actually is part of the conspiracy. Examples in early American history range from the Dutch-supported Indian plot that shook the New England colonies in 1653 and “Bacon’s Rebellion” in Virginia in 1675 to the various slave plots in the Caribbean, the Southern British colonies, and New York, to the most famous conspiracy scare of all – the American Revolution.60 Rumors are central as both a means of making sense of uncertainty and a spur to decision-making, whether in the form of legislation or direct action (both top-down and bottom-up as in the case of “Bacon’s Rebellion”).

58 59 60

Hening, ed., Statutes at Large, 2:109 (23 March 1661/62). “Excerpts from the Charles City County Records (1655–1666),” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 43, no. 4 (Oct. 1935), 347–349. On 1653, see Henneton’s essay below; on New York in 1712 and to some degree 1741, see Anne-Claire Faucquez’s essay below; on “Bacon’s Rebellion,” see Matthew Kruer’s dissertation, “The Susquehannock War”; on slave plots, see Morgan, “Conspiracy Scares”; on the American Revolution, Bailyn, The Ideological Origins, 94–98, 144–159.

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Intolerance and the Quest for Homogeneity The New England Puritans’ religious intolerance has long been proverbial. The Puritan social-political project in Massachusetts, however elusive, was arguably to ensure social cohesion through homogeneity. Religious intolerance, which was instrumental in preserving that homogeneous, cohesive, community, was therefore primarily about politics, not religious beliefs as such, or rather it was about religious beliefs only insofar as they had socio-political repercussions. Religious diversity appeared as a threat to the fragile cosmos, disturbing the peace of the commonwealth. The perceived fragility of the whole socio-political edifice betrayed an acute sense of vulnerability which accounts for a number of reactions to “fear factors” seen as dangerous threats. As Delumeau has observed, the “fortress mentality” in a person or a community causes their sense of weakness and vulnerability to exalt them all the more and to perceive their foe as disproportionately formidable.61 Intolerance, therefore, was the result of a political decision-making process in which a threat to the community had been identified so some form of remedy had to be prescribed. The medical trope of the body politic, its ailments (“infection”), and the necessary pharmacopeia, was universally accepted and ubiquitous in the accompanying discourse. Consequently, such “remedies” as prophylaxis, purges, bleeding, and, in extreme cases, amputation of a rotten limb were prescribed. Once applied to the political field, they usually translated into fines, banishment, and, in exceptional but (in)famous cases, execution.62 When dealing with the Quakers, the Massachusetts authorities devoted page after page in their records to justifying the legitimacy of their proceedings. They argued for instance that they would not have executed Quakers had they not returned after having been banished from the jurisdiction: “We desire theire life absent rather than theire death present.”63 They argued that banishment was actually more humane than “confinement,” as “in banishment a man is debarred from no place but one, all others being left to his liberty.”64 Then the 61 Delumeau, La peur en Occident, 586. 62 Theological “errors” were often described as “pernicious,” a word derived from the latin root nex, which means “violent death.” Lauric Henneton, Liberté, inégalité, autorité: Politique, société et construction identitaire dans le Massachusetts du XVIIe siècle (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2009), esp. chap. 1 (43–123) and 11 (475–527). One striking example of discourse saturated with medical tropes is found in the documents related to the Antinomian crisis. David D. Hall, ed., The Antinomian Controversy 1636–1638 (Durham, n.c.: Duke University Press, 1990). 63 mr 4.1, 386 (18 Oct. 1659). 64 mr 4.1, 388 (18 Oct. 1659). On the banishment of Quakers from New Amsterdam, see Evan Haefeli, New Netherland and the Dutch Origins of American Religious Liberty (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 224.

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Massachusetts authorities resorted to the classic parallel between a family and a commonwealth and to rhetorical questions to emphasize their curiously gendered point about the magistrate as a nursing father and mother whose duty is to protect his family against outside threats: Who can make question but that a man that hath children and family both justly may & in duty ought to preserve them of his charge (as far as he is able) from the daingerous company of persons infected with the plague of pestilence or other contagions, noisome & mortall diseases? And if such persons shall offer in intrude into the mans house amongst his children and servants, notwithstanding his prohibition & warning to the contrary, & thereby shall indainger the health & lives of them of the family, cann any man doubt but that in such a case, the father of the family, in defense of himself and his, may withstand the intrusion of such infected & daingerous persons, and if otherwise he cann not keepe them out, may kill them? And if the father of a particular family may thus defend his children and household, may not magistrates do the like for their subjects, they being nursing fathers & nursing mothers by the account of God in Holy Scripture (Isaiah 49.23)? Is it not cleare that if the father in the family must keepe them out of his house, the father in the common wealth must keepe them out of his jurisdiction.65 More than plain religious diversity, the powers-that-be were afraid of political subversion in the guise of religious heterodoxy. The specter of Münster and the early sixteenth-century Anabaptists was ubiquitous in the Massachusetts discourse on the subject as the epitome of chaos brought by religious fanaticism.66 Before the Quaker challenge of the years 1656–1661, the 1630’s had been the other decade in which the Massachusetts authorities displayed religious into­ lerance, in the well-known cases of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson. The immediate threats they seemed to pose were made more acute by the general climate of heightened fear that was building throughout the decade and which can be very clearly perceived in the transatlantic correspondence, particularly the voluminous Winthrop Papers. The previous decade, a “decade 65 66

mr 4.1, 389. Emphasis mine. Examples abound, see the index entry for “Münster” in Henneton, Liberté, Inégalité, Autorité, 937 and 243–245.

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of disaster,” had seen recurrent bad harvests, dearth, famines, crime, grain riots, a plague epidemic that killed an estimated 41,000 Londoners, not to mention the rise of William Laud as bishop of London (1628) and the dissolution of Parliament in March 1629.67 In 1633, John Bluett, steward of the former Winthrop manor in Groton, deplored the “badd tymes and great feare of worse.”68 In 1636, Samuel Rogers implored God to “purge our decaying state” whereas the following year one Robert Stansby asked Winthrop to pray for England, for “things with us are dayly much worser.” To Lucy Downing, Winthrop’s sister, the situation in England showed “the allmightyes controuversie with us.” Finally, in a fast day sermon held in Massachusetts in 1640, William Hooke invited his congregation to look at the “imminent calamities” threatening England as “swords that have hung a long time over their heads by a twine thread,” thus voicing what can be called a “Damocles complex” constant in that period.69 That “Damocles complex” arguably amplified the sense of vulnerability prevalent in a new and fragile string of settlements, which in turn magnified any threat, real or imaginary. This sense of decay and decline is surprisingly similar in tone to what is found in mid-eighteenth-century transatlantic correspondence on political “corruption,” rife as it was with phrases like “our degenerate times and corrupt nation,” “the prevailing corruption and degeneracy of [English] people” (Benjamin Franklin), “our dear-bought liberty stands upon the brink of destruction” (Charles Carroll) and fears that the English constitution was “hastening to its final period of dissolution, and the symptoms of a general decay are but too visible.” Such language conveyed a sense of imminence clearly reminiscent of the Puritan transatlantic correspondence of the previous 67

68 69

Emmanuel Downing to John Winthrop, 6 March 1629, The Winthrop Papers, Allyn B. Forbes et al., eds, six volumes to date (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1929– 1992), hereafter wp, 2:74–75, in which the episode is recounted. On the “decade of disaster,” Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 9; Francis J. Bremer, Congregational Communion: Clerical Friendship in the Anglo-American Puritan Community, 1610–1692 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1994), 105. John Bluett to John Winthrop, Jr., 14 March 1633, wp 3:108. Kenneth Shipps, “The Puritan Emigration to New England: A New Source on Motivation,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register 135, 87; Robert Stansby to John Winthrop, 17 April 1637, wp 3:391; Lucy Downing to Margaret Winthrop, 1636, Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 5th series, vol. 1 (Boston: 1871), 12; William Hooke, New England Tears for Old England Fears (1640), quoted in F. Bremer, Congregational Communion, 126. The reference to the “Damocles complex” is from G. Bouthoul, Avoir la Paix (Paris: Grasset, 1967).

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century, albeit in a very different context. The sense of discursive continuity is arguably remarkable.70 Intolerance, as a struggle against diversity and in favor of (religiously) homogeneous communities, was by no means confined to “Puritan New England.” Evan Haefeli has recently analyzed the mechanics of intolerance in New Amsterdam, where Dominie Megapolensis feared that “If the Lutherans should be indulged in the exercise of their worship, the Papist, Mennonites and others, would soon make similar claims. Thus we would soon become a Babel of confusion, instead of remaining a united and peaceful people.” This “domino theory,” along with the use of satanic imagery by the Dutch Reformed ministers, “sounded much more like their colleagues in New England” than “those in Amsterdam.”71 That intolerance was a symptom of fear is seen in cases where the absence of fear explains the absence of intolerance. In Massachusetts, the Presbyterian villagers of Newbury were not forced to acknowledge their “error” or face ba­nishment as they were too few to threaten the established order. Likewise, when briefly passing through the Canaries, John Winthrop’s son Stephen wrote that the island, however Spanish and therefore Catholic, was “a place of greatest liberty to Protestants of any part of Spain,” probably on account of the innocuous presence of a mere handful of English merchants not involved in proselytizing activities.72 Similarly Michael Braddick has invited us to distinguish between “fear of popery and fear of Catholics,” emphasizing the “remarkable degree of practical religious toleration for local Catholics” in Wigan, England, as well as the “local indulgence of particular dissenters” which, he argues, “seems to have been quite usual” in spite of the fear of “dissent in the abstract.” Also, priests and places of worship were targeted during periods of acute stress while “the lay Catholic community appears to have suffered relatively lightly.” Following the work of R.L. Greaves, Braddick concludes that “persecution served political ends and flowed from political fears, but it had, obviously, failed to establish conformity.” Worse still, religious persecution seems to have been counterproductive as it was said to have “caused rather than combated plotting.”73 70

Examples cited by B. Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 86, 89, 90, 91. 71 Haefeli, New Netherland, 135, 137, 149. 72 Stephen Winthrop to Margaret Winthrop, 1645, Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 5th series, vol. 8, 203. 73 Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 324–326, 331, 332. Tuan (166) has also noted that the

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In some instances, religious toleration had actually very little if at all to do with religion. Jews were eventually admitted in New Amsterdam (in spite of the strident opposition of director-general Petrus Stuyvesant and minister Johannes Megapolensis) on account of the debt they owed to the Dutch West India Company, as Jaap Jacobs has recently shown by revising the traditional (but faulty) translation.74 In 1740, the British Parliament passed a law enabling Jews already in the American colonies to become citizens. It was argued that “the increase of people is a means of advancing the wealth and strength of any nation or country.” Toleration was a means to an end, with clearly worldly and geopolitical objectives in mind. To the objections raised against that law, the Lord Chancellor Phillip Hardwicke reacted in 1756 by declaring that “even with respect to the Jews, the discouraging of them to go and settle in our American colonies would be a great loss, if not the ruin of the trade of every one” of the colonies.75 Similarly, Jews were invited to settle in the newly founded colony of Georgia as a bulwark against the Spaniards to the south.76 Here again, the to­leration of Jews had much more to do with geopolitics than with religion. However, the use of Jewish settlers and merchants to strengthen and defend the British Empire (or prevent the “ruin” of its trade) betrays a clearly defensive outlook and the need to anticipate either internal decay or aggressions from outside. Scholars like philosopher Gaston Bouthoul, sociologist Roberta Senechal de la Roche and historian Joanna Bourke have also noted that a sense of vulnerability, which Bouthoul has called the “Damocles complex,” can cause both aggressiveness and collective violence, aimed at easing tensions, but

74

75 76

harsh treatment of American whites towards Blacks and Native Americans made them increasingly restless, which heightened fears instead of diminishing them, while Joanna Bourke has observed that, nowadays, the “frightened responses to terrorist attacks were clear examples” of counterproductive policies by antagonizing “increasing numbers of people in hostile states.” Bourke, Fear, 385. Jaap Jacobs, The Colony of New Netherland: A Dutch Settlement in Seventeenth-Century America (Ithaca, n.y. and London, Cornell University Press, 2009), 199–200. They nevertheless remained “second-class burghers” and did not “obtain freedom of public worship.” (202). Both cited in Frank Lambert, The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 133. Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society and Politics in Colonial America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 33; see also Shane A. Runyon, “Borders and Rumors: The Georgia Frontier in the Atlantic World” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Florida, 2005). In this volume, Christopher Vernon addresses the impact of rumors on the South Carolina backcountry in the same period.

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also reveals other, deeper fears. Bourke, for instance, cites historians of Ku Klux Klan violence and lynching who have shown that lynching in the nineteenth and early twentieth century was a function of social change. On the surface, the whites’ perennial fear of black rapists revealed a fear of black masculinity among whites, but also exposed deeper fears, such as social change and loss of mastery, in particular in the decade following the end of the Civil War. Collective violence, and the threat thereof, also helped maintain the antebellum slave regime. The scale and frequency of racial violence abated as conservative whites reclaimed political power in the Reconstruction South.77 Canadian historian Scott See has observed that the rapid and profound transformations that occurred in Jacksonian America (a “relentless transition to industrialism, coupled with Irish immigration and the economic and social dislocation of native-born Americans”) provided “the structural factors conducive to collective violence,” and E.P. Thompson, along with students of crowd activity, made similar observations about Great Britain.78 Senechal de la Roche has shown that collective violence can be explained by a number of variables, such as “the degree of social polarization,” or “the combined degree of relational distance, cultural distance, inequality, and interdependence,” and “the continuity of the deviant behavior at which the violence is directed,” as measured “by its frequency and duration.”79 Of particular interest for this collection, she notes that “in tribal societies where people share a single pattern of culture, collective violence is rare or absent,” which echoes what Timothy Breen and Stephen Foster have called “the Puritans’ greatest achievement”–social cohesion in homogeneous societies. On the contrary, the diversification inherent to the increasing urbanization of late eighteenthcentury Philadelphia unsurprisingly led to what John Alexander has dubbed

77 Michael J. Pfeifer, “The Origins of Postbellum Lynching: Collective Violence in Reconstruction Louisiana,” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 50, no. 2 (Spring, 2009), 189–201, here at 191, 193, 200–201; Roger K. Hux, “The Ku Klux Klan and Collective Violence in Horry County, 1922–1925,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine 85, no. 3 (Jul., 1984), 211–219, here at 218; Bourke, Fear, 334–335; Senechal de la Roche, “Collective Violence as Social Control,” Sociological Forum 11, no. 1 (1996), 97–128 here at 107–118; Bouthoul, Avoir la Paix (Paris: Grasset, 1967). 78 Scott W. See, “Nineteenth-Century Collective Violence: Toward a North American Context,” Labour/Le Travail 39 (Spring 1997), 13–38, at 27; E.P Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 50 (Feb. 1971), 76–136. 79 Senechal de la Roche, “Collective Violence and Social Control,” 115.

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the “city of brotherly fear,” mostly on account of economic polarization.80 Senechal de la Roche also notes that the combination of several of the factors she lists (such as relational and cultural distance) increased the “potential for extreme violence.” Finally, she observes that New France was relatively untouched by violence between French settlers and Indians because of the economic interdependence between them (the fur trade), as well as intermarriage, a feature that was much less common in the British colonies.81 One of the most famous episodes of collective violence in the period under consideration was perpetrated by the “Paxton Boys” of Pennsylvania in the 1760s. The violence they inflicted on Christianized Indians was the result of frustration, anger, and deeper-seated fears of treason that could result in their own demise if they did not act to prevent it, or so they thought. Their targets, Christianized Indians, were liminal members of the community, partly outsiders (ethnically speaking), partly insiders (religiously speaking). In this case, the assimilation process by which an outsider becomes an insider and heterogeneity is smoothed into homogeneity, which is supposed to defuse tensions, failed to work as far as the “Paxton Boys” were concerned: they saw the Christian Indians as outsiders masquerading as insiders, who would treacherously turn against the whites.82

Change and Continuity over Time

The use of examples from across and beyond the period under review here raises the issues of change over time and of the historicization of fear as a category of emotions. It seems reasonable to argue that, even though the context may vary enormously between two situations, some patterns may be replicated from one century to another. This obviously does not mean that all fears and all emotions have always been the same, rather that some mechanisms evince 80

Senechal de la Roche, “Collective Violence and Social Control,” 109; Timothy H. Breen and Stephen Foster, “The Puritans’ Greatest Achievement: A Study of Social Cohesion in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts,” The Journal of American History, vol. 60, 1 (June 1973), 5–22; John Alexander, “The City of Brotherly Fear: The Poor in Late EighteenthCentury Philadelphia,” in Allen F. David and Mark H. Haller, eds., The Peoples of Philadelphia: A History of Ethnic Groups and Lower Class Life, 1790–1840 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 13–35. 81 Senechal de la Roche, “Collective Violence and Social Control,” 111, 117. 82 Thomas Slaughter, “Crowds in Eighteenth-Century America: Reflections and New Directions,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 115, bo. 1 (Jan., 1991), p 3–34 at 18–20.

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striking similarities, in spite of the admittedly different contexts. Of course, even though we are dealing with a chunk of history that is much shorter than those explored by Delumeau and Tuan, the period stretching from the earliest European settlements to the Age of Revolutions was marked by profound changes. First, it should be noted that the “new milieu,” disturbing, disconcerting and fearful as it may have been, was new only for the first generation of European migrants. The second generation, the first to be born in the Americas, whether in the 1620s or 1760s, grew up with Indians and (later) Black slaves. If Paul Gilje has identified the breakdown of the ideal of corporate commu­ nalism in the beginning of the Jacksonian period, scholars of colonial cities from Carl Bridenbaugh to Gary Nash have mapped the changing environment in several American cities. Kenneth Lockridge has identified 1720 as something of a watershed. After that point, he writes, Americans found themselves living in an era marked by “increasing population density, land shortage, migration, interpersonal and interregional concentration of wealth, social differentiation and commercial dependency.” Other changes include the turn from (white) indentured servitude to the massive enslavement of Africans both in the Southern British continental colonies and in the West Indies, whatever the nationality of the masters, and the necessary racialization of threats associated to living with a servile labor force. As societies changed, fears changed, and some fears disappeared, at least in some places (famine), while new ones appeared. Slave rebellions required the turn to slavery, arson required a degree of urbanization, and so forth. Delumeau saw the decline of magic as one of the major cultural changes associated with the decline of early modern fears. This idea has been challenged by Nicole Eustace as far as eighteenth-century America is concerned, and by Joanna Bourke, who has tracked the survival of superstitious fears as well as attenuation of fear through superstitious means as late as World War ii.83 One crucial difference between early America and contemporary Europe is that Western Europe was relatively densely settled while the Americas (apart from small West Indian islands) were scantily peopled in comparison, though an increasing population was moving further and further inland, increasing demographic pressure on Native groups. Had the fear factors of the earliest years – wild beasts, famine – receded as the population grew, as Mittelberger implied in 1755?84 This may have been true on the eastern seaboard, but the settlers of the ever-advancing frontier in the backcountry may have begged to disagree. 83 Bourke, Fear, 252. 84 Gottlieb Mittelberger’s Journey, 108–109. Mittelberger, interestingly, found it noteworthy that Philadelphia “has no walls nor ramparts, these being deemed unnecessary.” (49).

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Urbanization may have changed the nature of threats but it did not provide a greater sense of security. Instead, it generated new threats, such as arson, that was not nearly as common in the early years of settlement or on the sparselypeopled frontier. About the sense of change over time, Philip Morgan has observed that A rhythm – long periods of laxity and complacency alternating with short bursts of frenzy and cathartic demonstrations of force – characterized most slave societies. New World slave societies were not police states constantly on the brink of violent rebellion, and yet sporadically white fears about potential slave rebelliousness assumed near-hysterical proportions. Rumors of slave rebelliousness in one place tended to generate other rumors elsewhere. Noteworthy too is how often urban places featured in slave conspiracy scare. He concluded that “such concentrations may suggest a greater kinship with witchcraft scares than slave revolt.”85 The comparison with witchcraft shows what the mechanisms of fears may teach us if properly analyzed. Between the urbanizing east and the advancing western frontier, the demographic pressure in areas like Pennsylvania generated tensions with Native peoples that resulted in murderous (and well-publicized) raids, in turn causing both fear (refugeeism) and outrage (revenge), feeding a cycle of violence. Areas with many indentured servants, like the Chesapeake, were comparatively less affected by demographic pressure and it was changes in the labor regime that produced anxiety. As it became increasingly difficult for servants to become freemen, and even then to be able to buy land, held largely by oligarchs, men faced the “hard choice of becoming tenant farmers – servants in all but name – or moving to marginal frontier lands bordering the Indian countries.” The “increasingly daunting obstacles to achieving patriarchal mastery” fed the “rising tide of political discontent of the 1670’s,” which was then a symptom of “precarious masculinity.” In this case, fear was admittedly compounded with frustration and humiliation. Mobilization, then, was also “a way to restore the emotional basis of political order. It was a way of achieving mastery of the situation by taking the initiative, and replacing helpless paralysis with decisive action.”86 As it “redefined Indians as alien to the body politic,” it prefigured the increasing racial distinction between whites and Indians that Peter Silver has observed in mid eighteenth-century Pennsylvania. 85 86

Morgan, “Conspiracy Scares,” 166. Kruer, “Emotional Subjects.”

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Yet that common mobilization of “whites” against increasingly acculturated “Indians” seemed to be hindered by other, dissenting whites, such as pacifist Quakers, and later in the century, Loyalists.87 Quaker pacifism, in particular, increased the non-Quakers’ sense of vulnerability, and eventually brought down Quaker rule in Pennsylvania during King William’s War (1689–1697).88 Also, inevitably, contact between European settlers and Native peoples caused changes in the latter’s ways. The demographic decline undergone by the Susquehannocks, for instance, altered the way they waged war, abolished their ritual restraint as well as their gendered patterns of ritual mourning.89 Their new, much more brutal way of war, in turn, heightened fears among frontier settlers, which fed the spiral of escalation. So far we have discussed fear mostly as an emotion that was experienced passively by European and American communities. But fear could also be mobilized and manipulated by both European settlers and the Native groups that increasingly confronted them, as will appear to various degrees in the essays by Meuwese, Smith, Faucquez, and Vernon below. Up to a degree, fear alone had rather defensive effects: the community tried to protect itself to better anticipate potential dangers, usually from outside the community. When fear reached a higher level, or when it was combined with outrage, and when the strength of the local community was deemed sufficient, it produced offensive rather than simply defensive reactions. The proponents of a more offensive than defensive policy could play on fears in the discourse they produced to mobilize and rally coalitions behind them. Similarly, rumormong­ ering was used by Native bands against Europeans to sow the seeds of uncertainty or to excite one European neighbor against another.90 The following essays have been arranged chronologically, as opposed to thematically. Thus, the reader will get a sense of change over time while finding thematic and structural echoes from one essay to another. Leslie Choquette chose to organize her panoramic exploration of “fear in New France” by following the structure of Delumeau’s book, but the other essays are more chronologically, geographically, and/or thematically specific. Bertie Mandelblatt’s essay on the French Caribbean, for instance, focuses on the environmentallyinduced fear of famine in slave societies, an instance when the primary object 87 Silver, Our Savage Neighbors, 299, xxiii. 88 Lambert, Founding Fathers, 119–120. 89 Daniel Richter, “War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience,” William and Mary Quarterly 40, no. 4 (1983), 528–559 (here 543). 90 On fearmongering on the European side, see Silver, Our Savage Neighbors, xix, xxii; on rumormongering on the Indians side, see my own essay below.

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of fear is not human but environmental. Sarah Barber’s essay on the British side of the Caribbean is also panoramic in scope as it examines the various ways in which fears were voiced in a particular milieu. These two essays (by Choquette and Barber) therefore open our exploration of early American fears. The following chapters focus more specifically on the effects of fear on the shaping of early American societies. We begin with Lou Roper’s essay on early English colonization, particularly in Virginia, which argues that fear was not the prime motive for colonization. To a degree, it may be added, America was seen as a safety valve, which would ease the tensions caused by the specter of overpopulation and its consequences (poverty, vagrancy, crime). Settling in America was viewed by certain promoters of colonization as a form of social engineering, which would channel the excess population, boost the economy in and around English port towns, and provide an outlet for religious malcontents. Yet for others, emigration was a way of leaving a corrupt and corrupting society behind: America was a moral clean slate, a way of escaping a frightening downward spiral in England and saving the rising generation.91 The coexistence of hope and fear in the colonial experience is highlighted by Christopher Vernon and Susanne Lachenicht in their chapters. In some of the papers, Native groups play a key role, in particular as potential threats. Because intercultural communication was always a major concern between European settlers and Native Americans, the impact of rumors was heightened, as appears in Mark Meuwese’s essay on Dutch Brazil in the midseventeenth century and even more centrally in mine on New England in the same period and Christopher Vernon’s on the Carolina Backcountry a century later. Anne-Claire Faucquez’s essay on the slave conspiracy of 1712 in New York approaches the theme of “fear of the non-European other” through the prism of slavery but not, as is usually the case, in a Southern context. New York, she reminds us, was not so much a slave society as a society with slaves. However, the urban context generated fears (chiefly arson) that were by definition less common in the Plantation South. Meuwese writes about a very complex situation involving many different ethnic groups. He notably shows both how fear changes sides once the attacker comes under siege and how mutual fears fuel escalating violence and an ominous cycle of retaliation. 91

Richard Hakluyt, A Discourse concerning Western Planting (Cambridge: John Wilson and sons, 1877), chap. 4, p 36–44; Robert Cushman, “Reasons and Considerations touching the lawfulness or removing out of England into the parts of America,” in Mourt’s Relation, A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, ed. Dwight B. Heath (Bedford, Mass.: Applewood Books, 1963), 94, and John Winthrop, “Reasons to be considered for iustifieinge the undertakers of the intended Plantation in New England, and for incouraginge such whose hartes God shall move to ioyne with them in it,” wp, 2:139, items 3–6.

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The object of fear, in those cases, was mostly the non-European other: Native Americans and enslaved people of African descent. Yet, before the massive turn to slavery in the late seventeenth century, indentured servitude posed similar problems made more acute by servants who, in spite of being Europeans, were considered as radically different “others”: the Irish. As Elodie PeyrolKleiber shows in her essay about the Chesapeake and the English Caribbean, the Irish fell victim to a double prejudice among the English, both ethnic and religious. At the end of her essay, she shows how the turn to slavery contri­ buted to racializing the object of fear in a servile context, which nicely echoes some of Faucquez’s own conclusions. Like the essay by Peyrol-Kleiber, the chapters by David Smith and David William Voorhees highlight Europeans’ fear of other Europeans: Smith’s on reactions to the execution of Charles I in Virginia, Voorhees’ on the Glorious Revolution and Leisler’s Rebellion in New York (including, like Peyrol-Kleiber’s, the fear of popery and how fear lead to violence). To some degree, Susanne Lachenicht’s essay on the Huguenots’ fear of communal extinction is thematically related to the previous ones as an example of inter-European fears, but it also raises the question of cultural persistence in the context of diaspora, echoing Mittelberger’s misgivings about mid-eighteenth-century Pennsylvania. Lachenicht’s Huguenots were also both subjects of fear (religious persecutions) and objects of fear (competition over resources where they had emigrated, xenophobia and so forth). Ben Carp’s chapter, at the end of the volume, deals with fears of British citizens in America due to the presence of “fellow” British soldiers. It is the most “urban” context of all the essays, along with Faucquez’s, and it shows how fear operated under the narrative veneer of bravery. The sheer diversity – and diversification – in settlement patterns, population density, and labor regimes in early American societies from Quebec to the Chesapeake, Dutch Brazil, and the Carolina Backcountry, makes it a daunting task (at best) to venture sweeping generalizations and a simplistic overarching thesis. Rather, the following essays, in attempting to reflect the diversity in cultures, time, and space, suggest that the succession of local responses and local adjustments to threats accompanied the development of early American socie­ties in varied ways. The most frequent common response seems to have been the legal response, both proactive and reactive, to cope with ever evolving threats to the community.92 But this generalization does not apply to shortterm responses to immediate threats. Also, the increasing European mastery of the American environment, marked by the progressive spatial expansion of 92

Legal and sometimes judicial, as in the case covered by Anne-Claire Faucquez in her essay.

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European colonies at the expense of Native groups (in some areas, with the reluctant assistance of enslaved Africans) was not marked by a decrease of the initial sense of vulnerability understandable in a new and precarious environment. Increasing numbers, for one thing, did not mean increasing security, as the French and Indian War clearly shows. But neither did urbanization, commercial and economic diversification, and technological progress. At the end of our period, the “decline of magic” notwithstanding, the hopes of peace and new beginnings were never far from the uncertainty (at best) of Indian wars, slave revolts, trade tensions, and rumored invasions of fierce godless guillotinehappy Jacobins, as Ben Carp remarks at the end of his essay.93 The endurance of the Indian and the slave factors, for some decades at least, was combined with the (frightening) changes induced by industrialization and urbanization as the century unfolded, not to mention the surge in Irish (Catholic) immigration, especially in regions no longer affected by the risk of Indian violence and with no slave population, like the northeastern American states. New threats included increasingly global economic depressions, or panics, that recurred with impressive regularity (1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893). The nineteenth century was marked by the disappearance of the Native threats, but the end of slavery certainly did not mean the end of racial fears. However, those sea changes are part of another story and do not fit into the world on which this volume focuses. As with all edited volumes, this one has inherent limitations. No stand-alone effort can claim exhaustiveness, and we are acutely aware of the gaps, geographical and methodological, that remain. We conceive of this volume rather as a starting point, an invitation for scholars in the field(s) of early American/ Atlantic studies to embrace the theme of fear, multilayered as it is, as historical engine, possibly to combine and contrast it with such related emotions as hope, anger, frustration, and humiliation.94 Historians should not be afraid of fear and should passionately embrace emotions as an invaluable prism through which the history of early America may be reinterpreted.

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See, for instance, Gary Nash, “The American Clergy and the French Revolution,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 22, no. 3 (July 1965), 395–412, and more recently Rachel Hope Cleves, The Reign of Terror in America: Visions of Violence from AntiJacobinism to Antislavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Dominique Moïsi, The Geopolitics of Emotion. On anger, see for instance Anger’s Past, ed. Rosenwein and Scheff, Bloody Revenge.

chapter 1

From Sea Monsters and Savages to Sorcerers and Satan: A History of Fear in New France Leslie Choquette In his path-breaking work, La peur en Occident (1978), Jean Delumeau called attention to the “climate of fear” in early modern Europe, which had not been given its due by earlier historians.1 The product of famine, plague, warfare, and religious upheaval, this culture of fear had been repressed, first by the aristocratic ideal of bravery, then by the cult of popular heroism that took shape during the age of democratic revolutions. Delumeau’s painstaking inventory of the fears affecting both common and educated folk provided important insights into what was also Europe’s first age of Atlantic expansion. The New World, as Delumeau pointed out, gave rise to eschatological fears among the elite and more prosaic anxieties among the unlettered. Christian missionaries rushed to convert pagan Americans before it was too late, while prospective colonists weighed the potential advantage of starting afresh against their fear of the unknown.2 The French, who entered the race for Atlantic empire in the sixteenth century, were no exception in this regard. France’s American colonies were frightening places, whether for those who clamored to their shores in anticipation of martyrdom or those who rioted in the streets to prevent the embarkation of neighbors and loved ones.3 1 Jean Delumeau, La peur en Occident, XIVe–XVIIIe siècles. Une cité assiégée (Paris: Fayard, 1978), 15. 2 Ibid, 44, 205. Despite this important insight, Delumeau’s “Occident” rarely stretches across the Atlantic. An important aim of this collection is to offer an American sequel or complement to his work. 3 Whether actual or merely rumored, departures for the colonies provoked a number of riots in French towns. Examples include La Flèche in 1659, where townspeople trying to stop three nuns from leaving for Montréal had to be dispersed by force; and Angers in 1662, where a levee of workers for Newfoundland provoked a panic in which more than thirty people were trampled. Despite a 1663 edict of the Parlement of Paris prohibiting kidnapping “by stealth and violence, of girls and boys under the pretext of sending them to America,” riots broke out in the capital in 1720, 1750, and 1769 in response to arrests of vagabonds and beggars, allegedly for shipment to the colonies. See Louise Dechêne, Le peuple, l’État et la guerre au Canada sous le Régime français (Montréal: Boréal, 2008), 64–65; Arlette Farge and Jacques Revel, Logiques de la foule. L’affaire des enlèvements d’enfants. Paris 1750 (Paris: Hachette, 1988); Jeffry Kaplow,

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004314740_003

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It stands to reason that the colonists of New France brought their fears with them when they crossed the Atlantic. As Louise Dechêne pointed out, twothirds of them came from France’s western provinces, “regions regularly perturbed by violence of every sort.” Moreover, the first pioneers came of age at the end of the religious wars and during the wave of popular rebellions, when “la doulce France was put to fire and sword.”4 The same factors, however, worked in New France as in the metropolis to conceal the extent of fear within the population. A powerful military ethos pervaded the colony’s elite, even – or perhaps especially – those not born to the nobility of the sword.5 After the British Conquest, heroic values continued to predominate, as nationalist historians crafted a discourse designed to instill pride in origins, thereby assuring French-Canadian survivance.6 By the twenty-first century, Canadian historians had begun to contest the pious glorification of the French colonial past. Dechêne, in her posthumous study of New France at war, went so far as to foreground the theme of collective fear, among rulers as well the ruled.7 Likewise, Gregory Kennedy’s 2014 book on Acadia challenged the image of the colony as a “peasant paradise,” presenting it instead as a militarized borderland characterized by fear, deprivation, and violence.8 No one, however, has systematically examined the full range of fear factors identified by Delumeau in the context of New France. That is the task of this chapter. Like Delumeau, I divide the discussion into two parts, according to social class: the fears of the majority; and the ruling culture of fear. The Names of Kings: The Parisian Laboring Poor in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1972), 24–26; Jean Nicolas, “La rumeur de Paris. Rapts d’enfants en 1750” (cited), L’Histoire, 40 (1981), 50. All translations mine unless otherwise indicated. 4 Dechêne, Le peuple, l’État et la guerre au Canada, 97–98. Since the eighteenth century, the term New France has been used in different ways. In its most restrictive sense, it refers to the Laurentian colony, also known as Canada. In its wider sense, it includes all French colonies north of the Caribbean, from the failed Huguenot settlement in Florida to the French colonies of Acadia, the St. Lawrence Valley, the Great Lakes, and the Mississippi. For the purposes of this essay, I adopt an intermediate definition, including Acadia along with the St. Lawrence but excluding the western and southern territories. These are worthy of treatment in their own right, not least because of the rise of a plantation economy in Louisiana. 5 W.J. Eccles, “The Social, Economic, and Political Significance of the Military Establishment in New France,” Canadian Historical Review 52 (1971), 1–22. 6 Serge Gagnon, Quebec and its Historians, 1840–1920, trans. Yves Brunelle (Montréal: Harvest House, 1982). 7 See the forward by Thomas Wien in Dechêne, Le peuple, l’État et la guerre au Canada, 22. 8 Gregory Kennedy, Something of a Peasant Paradise? Comparing Rural Societies in Acadie and the Loudunais, 1604–1755, (Montreal-Kingston: McGill-Queens’ University Press, 2014).

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The Fears of the Majority

Delumeau began his analysis of popular fears in the Old World by stressing their ubiquity. His list of everyday fears included the ocean, strangers and outsiders, novelty and innovation, neighbors, evil spells, wolves and werewolves, celestial phenomena, ghosts, epidemics, vagabonds, soldiers, dearth, and impositions. Each of these elements had its counterpart in New France, as did the associated phenomena of rumor and, to a lesser extent, sedition. Fear of the ocean, of course, had particular salience for immigrants to New France, who had to endure a long and dangerous Atlantic crossing to reach the colony. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the voyage usually lasted around two months but could take three in unfavorable wind conditions. Malnutrition and disease were common, leading to an overall mortality of around five per cent.9 Firsthand accounts of the crossing confirm that the ocean was a “place of fear, death, and madness, an abyss harboring Satan, demons, and monsters,” even for seasoned seamen and educated aristocrats.10 In 1701, the captain of a fishing boat, Guillaume Potier, was returning from Newfoundland with a cargo of cod when he saw a monstrous dragon with its tail in the sea and head in the clouds, as tall as the highest steeple and the width of the ship, with piercing eyes about as big as barrel ends, throwing horrible flames on all sides, coming straight at his ship. That led him to beseech the aid of heaven, the whole crew having begun to pray, throwing holy water to avoid it, such that when they were within about gun range of it, it happily disappeared, having dispersed into flames on all sides.11 Potier’s voyage was no less fearsome than that of Catherine de Longpré, in religion Mother Catherine de Saint-Augustin, who set sail for New France in 1648. As she later told her Jesuit biographer, “Being at Sea to come to this country, I was sick from the plague unto extremity … As I was thus alone, thinking of God in peace and confidence, behold a large dragon appeared beside me. His great gaping maw seemed to want to engulf me. He held two claws raised high as if 9

Mario Boleda, “Nouvelle estimation de l’immigration française au Canada, 1608–1760,” in Yves Landry, ed., Le peuplement du Canada aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Caen: Centre de recherche d’histoire quantitative, 2004), 35. 10 Delumeau, La peur en Occident, 40. 11 Cited in Jean-Claude Dupont and Jacques Mathieu, eds., Héritage de la francophonie canadienne, traditions orales (Sainte-Foy, qc: Presses de l’Université Laval, 1986), 73.

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to seize me, as soon as I was judged. I felt great fear at the sight of this monster from Hell.” Only an apparition of the Blessed Virgin caused the dragon to flee after “a great combat,” presaging the nun’s eventual return to health.12 Distance, novelty, and otherness were frightening in all their forms, of course.13 In New France such fears converged on the figure of the Indian, the ultimate symbol of difference. While Indian alliances were critical to French colonization in North America from its start, they also compelled the settlers to take sides in aboriginal disputes. Dechêne described the early decades of the St. Lawrence colony, from 1608 to 1669, as a time of relatively hostile relations with Natives, ranging from suspicion to isolated attacks to full-scale warfare.14 Some five to seven per cent of the French population was either killed or taken captive, hence “the climate of terror” recorded by eye witnesses. Colonists, she explained, “were plunged into a world whose signs they could not interpret. What happened to them was always unpredictable and incomprehensible. Thus it was with torture…”15 It is therefore no coincidence that in French-Canadian folklore across North America the Native is often identified as a witch.16 Yet the witch could be an outsider of any stripe: witness Jean Campagna, “the disturbing stranger” accused of witchcraft in Acadia in 1684, after two unsuccessful attempts to integrate into the community through marriage.17 Folklore also targets foreig­ners, who were feared from the first decades of colonization as pirates and invaders, if not yet as witches.18 12

Paul Ragueneau, S.J., La vie de la mère Catherine de Saint-Augustin, religieuse hospitalière de la miséricorde de Québec en la Nouvelle-France (Paris, 1671), 39–41. Of course, there is an eschatological element in the figure of the dragon. 13 Delumeau, La peur en Occident, 49. 14 Dechêne, Le peuple, l’État et la guerre au Canada, 93. She also noted the particular fascination with Amerindian cannibalism in French writings on Canada, 79. 15 Ibid., 102. 16 Dupont and Mathieu, eds., Héritage de la francophonie canadienne, 110. 17 Ibid, 111; Samantha Rompillon, “Entre mythe et réalité. Beaubassin, miroir d’une communauté acadienne avant 1755,” in Martin Pâquet and Stéphane Savard, eds., Balises et références. Acadie, francophonie (Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2007), 277–278. See also Myriam Marsaud, “L’étranger qui dérange—le procès de sorcellerie de Jean Campagna, miroir d’une communauté acadienne, Beaubassin, 1685,” (master’s thesis, Université de Moncton, 1993). 18 Dupont and Mathieu, 111; Dechêne, Le peuple, l’État et la guerre au Canada, 55. Rumors of invasion regularly panicked colonists, while piracy was a constant concern for those crossing the Atlantic. In 1639, the ship carrying the first nuns for the colony narrowly escaped capture by pirates (shortly before nearly crashing into an iceberg).

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In Europe, neighbors as well as strangers were vulnerable to witchcraft accusations, reflecting tensions plaguing densely populated rural communities.19 Delumeau believed New France to be immune to this particular fear, writing, But in America the families of French immigrants were separated from each other by vast expanses. Here neighbors were not a burden. On the contrary, their presence was sought; there was a tendency to draw closer to the nearest settler to escape the pitfalls of solitude and Indians. To denounce another Frenchman of America and get him condemned was to weaken oneself, and increase one’s isolation in the midst of a hostile universe.20 Witchcraft trials were indeed much rarer in New France than in the metropolis, and sentences tended to be more lenient, as we shall see. Nonetheless, neighbors did accuse each other of sorcery in thoroughly familiar ways. In 1671, for example, Perrine Morel, the wife of Québec clog maker François Baribeau, came to blows with neighbor Nicole Rolland, who had called her a witch. When Perrine pressed charges, the matter ended up in court, where a parade of habitants testified in favor of Rolland. Some of their testimony suggests that Old World grudges, as well as superstitions, could travel across the Atlantic. How else to interpret the accusations that Perrine’s grandfather had put grease in a pot which his servant had rubbed on a cart, making it invisible; that all of Perrine’s relatives were witches, who could make clogs burst into flames; that if they had not left France, Sieur de la Bobine, seigneur of the village, would have had them burned as witches?21 Perhaps this incident inspired a story told by Baron Lahontan, a young army officer who served in Canada in the 1680s and 1690s, in his dialogues featuring Huron chief Adario (1704). In this Enlightenment narrative, two “so-called Magicians” flee to Québec to escape being burned alive, leading the noble savage to exclaim “that there are very foolish Laws in Europe.”22 19 Delumeau, La peur en Occident, 52. 20 Ibid. 21 The trial is summarized in Robert-Lionel Séguin, La sorcellerie au Québec du XVIIe au XIXe siècle (Ottawa, Paris: Leméac, Payot, 1978), 92–93, 96–99, 125. It is unclear where Perrine and her husband came from in France; some genealogists suggest the province of Saintonge. Perrine’s accusers came from a typical range of places, urban and rural, in western France and the Paris region. The woman who told the story about the village seigneur, Marguerite Lemarché, was born in Montréal but had married a man from Sainte-Marie-de-Ré near La Rochelle. 22 Dialogues de Monsieur le baron de Lahontan et d’un sauvage, dans l’Amérique (Amsterdam, 1704), 45.

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In New France as in Europe, the common folk feared witches for their ability to perform maléfices, evil spells meant to harm. Witchcraft accusations in the colony drew on the standard French repertoire of maléfices, including tying the aiguillette to destroy sexual potency and bringing about illness or death in people and farm animals. French maléfices were often associated with impotence and sterility, so it is no surprise that the first recorded case of witchcraft in New France involved knotting the aiguillette to prevent consummation of a marriage.23 In 1657, in a context of severe sexual imbalance, fourteen-year-old Marie Pontonnier jilted her nearly 30-year-old suitor, Corporal René Bénard, in favor of Pierre Gadois, a 25-year-old gunsmith. Before the wedding, a peeved Bénard informed Marie that he was a witch and would hex their marriage by knotting a cord (the aiguillette) during the ceremony. The threat worked despite an attempt at counter magic, and in 1658, Bénard went on trial for witchcraft. When his banishment from Montréal and even a renewed nuptial blessing failed to cure the problem, the parish priest declared the marriage null and void by reason of “perpetual impotence Caused by Maléfice.”24 Nonetheless, the most common purported act of witchcraft on both sides of the Atlantic was sickening or killing people or domestic animals, often by inserting needles into a proxy figurine, a process known as envoûtement. Both Perrine Morel in Québec and Jean Campagna in Acadia found themselves accused of this maléfice. Perrine had allegedly killed calves and sheep belon­ ging to her seigneur in France, bewitched the animals of her neighbor, Élie Jean, and killed the first husband of another neighbor, Marie Marchessault, by envoûtement because “she wished him ill in France.”25 Jean Campagna’s alleged misdeeds consisted of killing two inhabitants of Beaubassin, one of them his seigneur’s wife, bewitching a third through envoûtement, and killing three pregnant cows, a milch cow, a young bull, and two oxen belonging to a fourth.26 Clearly, witchcraft accusations took the same form in New France as in Europe. At the popular level, they involved personal animosity, fear of maléfice, and, often, feelings of guilt on the part of accusers.27 (In this regard, it is significant 23 24 25 26 27

On France, see Delumeau, La peur en Occident, 54. The colonial case is described in Séguin, La sorcellerie au Québec du XVIIe au XIXe siècle, 65–81. Cited in ibid., 75. Marie went on to have eleven children and Gadois fourteen with subsequent spouses. Bénard, who also married, became the father of six. Cited in ibid., 99. Rompillon, “Entre mythe et réalité. Beaubassin, miroir d’une communauté acadienne avant 1755,” 277–278. See Delumeau, La peur en Occident, 374.

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that Campagna’s seigneur initiated the proceedings against him after being sued for unpaid wages.) Though there were no massive witch hunts in New France, a point to which we shall return, this was not for lack of fear of witches. Like witches, wolves and werewolves continued to frighten the people of the colony. In France, the wolf had long been “a symbol of fear, all fears: panic fear, collective fear, solitary fear, fear of attack, metaphysical fear.”28 Fear of wolves, moreover, was never greater than at the end of the Wars of Religion, when Atlantic colonization began.29 Ironically, the great extent of the Canadian wilderness made the colonial wolf somewhat less fearsome. In 1664, settler Pierre Boucher wrote that in New France, common wolves “are not nearly as large as those of France, nor as malicious, and have a handsomer pelt.” They are no less carnivorous, he warned, “and make war on Animals in the woods, and when they find our little dogs apart, they eat them.” “There are few of them near Québec,” he concluded. “They are more common as one goes upstream.”30 Despite the relative paucity of wolves near colonial settlements, wolves remained associated in the popular mind with evil and witchcraft. In 1686, for instance, a Montréal couple complained in court about their daughter-in-law, who had referred to them both as “old devil old Wolf Sorcerer magician.”31 Likewise, the terrifying transformation of human into werewolf was as much an article of faith in the colony as across the sea. In 1766, La Gazette de Québec, the official newspaper of the new British Regime, reported on a werewolf scare that rattled colonists in the traumatic aftermath of military conquest. The paper warned its readers, We learn from Saint-Roch, near Kamouraska, that there is a werewolf running along the coast in the form of a beggar, who, with the talent to persuade and making promises he cannot keep, has that of getting what he asks for. They say that this animal, with the help of its two hind legs, arrived in Québec the 17th [of June] last, and that it left the 18th following, with the design of pursuing its mission all the way to Montréal. This beast is, they say, in its type as dangerous as the one that appeared last 28

Frédéric Muyard, Les loups et la loi, du XIVe siècle à nos jours. Histoire d’une hantise populaire (Spéracèdes: Tac Motifs, 1998), 12–13. 29 Delumeau, La peur en Occident, 63–64. 30 Pierre Boucher, Histoire véritable et naturelle des mœurs et productions du pays de la Nouvelle-France vulgairement dite le Canada (1664; Société historique de Boucherville, 1964), 58. Wolves were apparently even rarer in Acadia. 31 Cited in Séguin, La sorcellerie au Québec du XVIIe au XIXe siècle, 197.

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year in Gévaudan, which is why the public is exhorted to beware of it as of a ravishing wolf.32 The beast of Gévaudan was a large, man-eating wolf-like animal that terrorized the isolated, mountainous French county from 1764 to 1770. It is probably no accident that the Kamouraska werewolf reappeared in December 1767, just two months after the king’s chief huntsman killed an enormous wolf in Gévaudan.33 This time La Gazette de Québec reported, We learn that a certain werewolf, who has been running about this pro­ vince for several years, and who has done much damage in the district of Québec, sustained several considerable assaults in the month of October last … But we have just learned, through the most grievous of misfortunes, that this animal is not entirely undone, that on the contrary it has begun to reappear more furious than ever and wreaks terrible carnage everywhere it goes. Be on your guard, therefore, against the ruses of this malicious beast, and take care not to fall into its clutches.34 Not only was the belief in monsters still intact in Canada, but news of specific French monsters continued to cross the ocean even after the fall of New France. In fact, werewolves remained a staple of French-Canadian folklore long after the Conquest, sometimes in combination with aboriginal monsters such as cannibalistic windigos.35 Children of French-Canadian immigrants in New England continued to be terrorized by stories of “lougarous” well into the twentieth century.36 Wolves were not the only elements of the natural environment to inspire fear in the colonial population. As in France, nighttime was associated with werewolves and ghosts, as Québec folklore attests.37 Even more frightening 32 33 34 35 36

37

Cited in Séguin, La sorcellerie au Québec du XVIIe au XIXe siècle, 38. I would like to thank Joseph Gagné for calling my attention to this incident. See Jay M. Smith, Monsters of the Gévaudan: The Making of a Beast (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2011). Cited in Séguin, La sorcellerie au Québec du XVIIe au XIXe siècle, 39. See Carolyn Podruchny, “Werewolves and Windigos: Narratives of Cannibal Monsters in French-Canadian Voyageur Oral Tradition,” Ethnohistory 51, no. 4 (2004), 677–700. See, for example, Alberic A. Archambault, Mill Village: A Novel (Boston: Bruce Humphries, 1943), 52–56. In this version, the “lougarou” is a human pig, a variant found in both Québec and Ontario. See Dupont and Mathieu, eds., Héritage de la francophonie canadienne, 107–108. See Dupont and Mathieu, eds., Héritage de la francophonie canadienne, 97–100, 105. Stories include those of a ghost priest condemned to haunt his church every night in punishment

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were unusual celestial phenomena.38 The aurora borealis was an ill omen to farmers, a portent of dearth and disease if not war.39 Comets, of course, were even worse. Describing the events of 1661, a particularly trying year for the colony, the eighteenth-century Jesuit historian Charlevoix wrote that “all that was followed by the appearance of a Comet, which finished frightening the Multitude, for whom this Phenomenon is never indifferent, especially in a time of calamity.”40 One of the aspects of that dreadful summer was in fact an epidemic, described by Charlevoix as “a malady from which no one was exempt, & which carried away above all a very great number of Children; it was a kind of whopping cough, which turned into pleurisy.” Turning to people’s reaction, he wrote, “They imagined there was maléfice; & the Doctors were the first to give expression to this opinion. Once the Common Folk are stricken, their imagination leads them very far, and all are Common Folk in certain circumstances.”41 Charlevoix’s enlightened attitude (he had been a teacher of Voltaire) dates from 1744, but the 1661 behavior he describes conforms to the pattern prevalent in Europe since medieval times. Epidemics led to episodes of collective panic, followed by a search for scapegoats.42 Nor was the epidemic of 1661 an isolated incident. Dechêne called attention to those of 1687 and 1703, which killed up to eight per cent of colonists in just a few months, as well as to the huge rise in mortality between 1755 and 1760, corresponding to the British Conquest.43 In such times of crisis, witches were not the only potential scapegoats. The colony lacked a Jewish minority during the French regime, so there were no outbreaks of anti-Semitism comparable to those that swept Europe in the wake of the Black Death.44 Instead, attention focused on another fearsome individual, the vagabond or beggar. In France, beggars made up a tenth of the for a forgotten mass and a ghost farmer forced to welcome strangers on stormy nights, having failed to provide hospitality during his lifetime. 38 Delumeau, La peur en Occident, 68. 39 Dupont and Mathieu, eds., Héritage de la francophonie canadienne, 113. 40 P. de Charlevoix, S.J., Histoire et description générale de la Nouvelle France avec le journal historique d’un voyage fait par ordre du Roi dans l’Amérique Septentrionale, t. 1 (Paris, 1744), 348. 41 Ibid. 42 Delumeau, La peur en Occident, 98, 131. 43 Dechêne, Le peuple, l’État et la guerre au Canada, 102; Louise Dechêne, Le partage des subsistances au Canada sous le Régime français (Montréal: Boréal, 1994), 157. 44 Canadian documents record the presence of only three Jews, none of whom remained permanently in the colony. In addition, the immigrants probably included a handful of Christians of Jewish origin. See Leslie Choquette, Frenchmen into Peasants: Modernity and

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rural population, and fear of their brigandage peaked each year as the harvest approached. In the summer of 1789, a time of great economic and political uncertainty, the fear of brigands would escalate into the notorious Great Fear, leading the young Revolution to abolish feudalism.45 In this context, it is significant that the Kamouraska werewolf first appeared in the critical days preceding the harvest, in the guise of a crafty and insistent beggar. Québec folklore consistently represents the quêteux, or rural vagabond, as a potential witch or as a croque-mitaines, an ogre who kidnaps disobedient children.46 Like vagabonds, soldiers instilled fear in the European population due to the policy, still current in Napoleon’s time, of having them live off the land.47 In Canada as in France, habitants had to lodge soldiers in their homes, an onerous obligation. Yet it was probably offset by fear of the Iroquois, which led colonists to welcome the colony’s first regular troops, the Regiment of Carignan-Salières, with open arms when they arrived in 1665. Repatriated after the Iroquois accepted a truce in 1667, the Regiment of Carignan was replaced in 1669 by a colonial militia composed in theory of all adult male settlers. In 1683, with French-Iroquois relations deteriorating once again, the militia was reinforced by several Compagnies franches de la Marine, regular troops serving under the auspices of France’s naval ministry. Six more army regiments joined them in 1755 during the final contest for the colony. In all, over 10,000 French soldiers and officers fought for fewer than 100,000 colonists in New France between 1755 and the defeat of 1760.48 Despite their critical role in defending the colony, soldiers could themselves inspire fear in the population, in keeping with European tradition. In the 1680s, when three wars converged (New England versus the Abenaki Confederacy, supported by New France; the Iroquois Confederacy versus New France and its Algonquian allies; and the War of the League of Augsburg, in which France

Tradition in the Peopling of French Canada (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1997), 136–142. 45 See Georges Lefebvre, La Grande peur de 1789 (1932; Paris: Armand Colin, 1988), especially 37–40, 146–148, 219, 229. 46 Dupont and Mathieu, eds., Héritage de la francophonie canadienne, 89, 111. 47 Delumeau, La peur en Occident, 158–162. 48 In 1755, there were 1,400 Troupes de la Marine in Canada and another 1,000 in Louisbourg. Of the army regiments, over 7,800 strong in all, those of Artois and Bourgogne were sent to Louisbourg, while those of Béarn, Guyenne, La Reine, and Languedoc went on to Québec. See Marcel Fournier, ed., Combattre pour la France en Amérique. Les soldats de la guerre de Sept Ans en Nouvelle-France, 1755–1760 (Montréal: Société généalogique canadienne-française, 2009), 7, 18.

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confronted an alliance of European powers),49 colonial warfare assumed two principal forms: guerilla strikes against New England and privateering raids. Guerilla attacks carried out by volunteers from among the 500 or so domiciled Amerindian warriors, the thousand soldiers, and the most eager militiamen became “the pivot of French strategy” during this period.50 It was also the great age of privateering centered in Acadia’s Port-Royal (“the Dunkirk of America”) and Newfoundland’s Plaisance.51 Military leaders often engaged in both types of warfare, for example, the swashbuckling Pierre Lemoyne d’Iberville. Though best known today as the founder of French Louisiana, he was notorious in his own time for his bold privateering exploits in Hudson’s Bay and for participating in the ruthless raid on Schenectady in winter 1690, “an experiment in total war.”52 Exploits like these, Dechêne pointed out, “fostered suspicion and widened the gulf between the population and the bands of volunteers.” Ordinary colonists feared Iberville and his companions, calling them “more wicked even than the English.”53 In Canada, as at certain times in Europe, war was inescapable, affecting the lives of everyone in the colony. In particular, the last two decades of the French Regime witnessed a mass mobilization of male settlers to the point where “the entire youth of the country lived through this experience.”54 Beginning with the first fall of Louisbourg in 1745, Québec’s population lived in constant fear of invasion. The inhabitants of the fortress, meanwhile, were evacuated to France, to return only in 1749 during a brief window of peace.55 In 1755, with war on the horizon once again, the British deported the Acadian population of Nova Scotia in a brutal episode of ethnic cleansing euphemistically known as le Grand Dérangement (the Great Disturbance). Of 14,000 Acadians, 10,000 were forcibly expelled to enemy territory, while the rest faced a harrowing overland journey to Québec.56 49 The War of the League of Augsburg is also known in America as King William’s War. 50 Dechêne, Le peuple, l’État et la guerre au Canada, 194. 51 Ibid., 206. 52 Ibid., 169. Iberville was second in command to his brother Jacques during the Schenectady raid, in which a strike force consisting of 100 Frenchmen and 100 Natives killed 125 settlers, took 150 captives (very few of whom survived), and laid waste to the surrounding countryside. 53 Ibid., 208. 54 Ibid., 98, 287, 301 (quotation). 55 Eric Krause, Carol Corbin, and William O’Shea, eds., Aspects of Louisbourg: Essays on the History of an Eighteenth-Century French Community in North America (Sydney, ns: The Louisbourg Institute, 1995), 11. 56 See John Mack Farragher, A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from their American Homeland (New York: Norton, 2005).

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The long-anticipated invasion began in earnest with the second fall of Louisbourg in 1758 and the subsequent siege of Québec. Colonists shared a common experience of “everyday fear,” exacerbated by sensational rumors, which degenerated into panic at the appearance of the British fleet. On 28 July 1758, just two days after the surrender of Louisbourg, General Montcalm’s principal aide-de-camp wrote in his diary that there were “many panic terrors in the advanced camps.” He added that even in 1756, “where the same troops occupied the same posts, we were obliged to establish a detachment of our battalions that we relieved every four days to put an end to the false alarms.”57 In a scenario prefiguring the exodus from northern France in June 1940, the civilian population fled in terror before the invaders. In the lower St. Lawrence Valley, some 3,000 families and their farm animals spent four months hiding in the forest amidst terrible deprivation. General James Wolfe’s scorched earth policy induced parishes in central and western parts of the colony to surrender, usually without a fight, even before the siege. Militiamen had begun to desert in droves by August 1759.58 After the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, in which French troops succumbed to a smaller but better disciplined British force, fear brought sporadic resistance to a halt: “fear of the English, fear of the Indians, panic toward the end.”59 Settlers particularly feared reprisal on the part of New Englanders, their targets of guerilla raids for three-quarters of a century. As the preceding examples demonstrate, the landscape of fear in New France resembled that of the metropolis from the first to the last years of the colony. Objects of popular fear on both sides of the Atlantic remained the same, whether natural, supernatural, or human in origin. Nonetheless, there was a significant difference between colony and motherland where popular violence was concerned. In Europe, as Delumeau pointed out, fear and sedition went hand in hand; the defensive reaction to fear was frequently collective uprising. Bread riots and anti-fiscal rebellions in particular were commonplace responses to widespread fears of famine and penury.60 In contrast, “the everyday nature of revolt” was much less evident in the colony.61 Subsistence crises did occur, if not to the same extent as in France, and new impositions generated fear and opposition. Yet rebellion remained, for the most part, embryonic, 57

“Journal de M. de Bougainville,” in Rapport de l’archiviste de la province de Québec, 4 (1923–1924), 349. 58 See Dechêne, Le peuple, l’État et la guerre au Canada, 397–427. 59 Ibid., 33. The Battle of the Plains of Abraham took place on 13 September 1759. 60 Delumeau, La peur en Occident, 145, 165–169. 61 Ibid., 143.

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and full-scale riots rarely materialized. An examination of the only recorded bread riot in New France helps to explain why. On 18 August 1714, two farmers from Ile d’Orléans were accosted as they attempted to unload a shipment of flour in Québec. According to their testimony, the said Savari and his wife, the wife of the Portuguese, the wife of the Pole and several other women unknown to them threw themselves onto the said grains and took and removed two quarters and two bags together weighing 508 pounds, which they took and carried away by force and violence and, for that, gathered in a crowd of more than 30 to 40.62 The incident was probably sparked by the export of Canadian grain to Louisbourg and the Antilles, a new phenomenon which revived the old belief in a pacte de famine, or monopolistic plot to starve the people. As in France, this belief was deeply anchored in the urban mentality and shared by all social classes. During the eighteenth century, it resurfaced whenever the price of bread threatened to rise, particularly, as in this case, at the ever critical and sensitive harvest time.63 The predominant role of women in the protest was also consistent with French tradition.64 In the countryside, however, things were very different. Where French farmers rioted to prevent the export of grain from their villages, Canadian habitants, who produced a marketable surplus of about a third, threatened to rebel against what they perceived as low grain prices. Less than a week after the disturbance in Québec, the authorities reported that farmers dissatisfied with the market price for their flour “pushed their insolence to the point of making 62 63

64

Cited in Dechêne, Le partage, 161. See ibid., 109, 162, 176–177; Dechêne, Le peuple, l’État et la guerre au Canada, 228. On grain exports, see also Jacques Mathieu, Le commerce entre la Nouvelle-France et les Antilles au XVIIIe siècle (Montréal: Fides, 1981). The last large-scale famine in French history occurred only four years before this incident, following the grand hyver of 1709–1710; however, none of the six participants who can be identified (of the eight whom the two farmers sued) had lived through that trauma. Pierre da Silva dit le Portugais, André Leloup dit le Polonais, and François Savary had all immigrated in the 1670s or 1680s, and their wives had all been born in New France. On women and protest, see Olwen Hufton, The Prospect before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe, 1500–1800 (New York: Knopf, 1996), Chapter 12. In France, this tradition of female protest culminated during the Revolution. See Dominique Godineau, Citoyennes tricoteuses. Les femmes du peuple à Paris pendant la Révolution française (Paris: Perrin, 2004).

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threats to enter the town thus gathered in a crowd; and they only withdrew upon learning that the troops and militiamen of this town were commanded to march on them.”65 Commenting on the rural unrest, Dechêne pointed to the dispersed pattern of settlement, along with military might, to explain why colonial bread riots remained “hesitant and unfinished.”66 Certainly the military presence was critical, as the intendant acknowledged, and the lack of nucleated villages may well have made it more difficult for habitants to organize. But it is also striking that the farmers, who in this instance did manage to assemble, were demonstrating against low, not high bread prices. This fundamental distinction between the protests of Canadian habitants and French peasants should not be overlooked. Profit, not survival, was their primary motive. Even when subsistence crises occurred in New France, as they did after poor harvests in 1736– 1737 and in 1741–1743, there was no outright famine.67 When the specter of starvation did finally threaten the colony in the 1750s as a result of war, the overwhelming military presence, seen as a bulwark against enemy invasion, prevented further disturbances.68 Similarly, rebellions against seigneurial or state demands in New France were stymied by the power of the absolutist state combined with new attitudes on the part of the settlers. Disputes over seigneurial dues almost always ended up in court, in contrast to France where they often gave rise to violent contestation.69 A partial exception was the struggle over the dîme, or tithe, which Bishop François-Xavier de Montmorency-Laval attempted to introduce “gent­ly” after his arrival in New France in 1659. In April 1663, a royal proclamation established the rate at “only” a thirteenth of the harvest, compared to an eleventh in France. Confronted by colonists who “raised difficulty” about paying it, Laval lowered the rate to a twentieth in November, to no avail.70 Mother Catherine de Saint-Augustin of Québec’s hospital wrote that toward the end of January 1664, 65 Cited in Dechêne, Le partage, 165. On the marketable surplus, see 22. 66 Ibid., 169. 67 Ibid., 102–106, 119–120. Administrators responded to the situation by curtailing exports or importing French and New England wheat via Louisbourg. 68 Ibid., 103, 122, 159. 69 Ibid., 172. 70 On the evolution of the tithe in New France, see Marcel Trudel, Histoire de la NouvelleFrance. La seigneurie des Cent-Associés. La société (Montréal: Fides, 1983, 450–451); Marcel Trudel, Histoire de la Nouvelle-France. La Seigneurie de la Compagnie des Indes occidentales, 1663–1674 (Montréal: Fides, 1997, 749–752.

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I saw demons run this way and that, to solicit & stir everyone up against our holy Bishop, on the occasion of the tithes & the good order that he was attempting to install in this country in order to put an end there to the disorder of so many sins that inflame the wrath of God.71 Throughout the winter and spring, colonists refused to publish, read, or post the royal edict on the tithe, a strategy that escalated into a virtual poster war.72 A petition followed, and the civil authorities, rather than the bishop, finally settled the matter by lowering the rate definitively to a twenty-sixth.73 Unlike their counterparts in France, inhabitants of Canada did not pay the taille or gabelle, but they were subject to royal impositions in the form of militia service, the obligation to house French troops, the corvée to build fortifications, and, in the 1750s, grain requisitions. Both militia service and the corvée gave rise to “a series of small, dispersed agitations” when they were first instituted, but order was rapidly restored.74 In contrast to Frenchmen, the colonists of New France inclined more toward litigiousness than outright rebellion. In addition, the militarized absolutist regime, which the population accepted for reasons of security, prevented the emergence of a culture of revolt comparable to that of Europe.

The Ruling Culture of Fear

Like the fears of the majority, the fears of social elites were transplanted to New France along with the immigrants. Delumeau eloquently described the ruling culture of fear that took shape in Europe during the Middle Ages in response to multiple crises: Catharism, famine, Black Death, war, rebellion, religious schism, Ottoman expansion. These threats to the culture of Christendom produced a siege mentality among elites which only intensified in the early modern period. The anguish reached its apogee during the Reformation, accompanied by “stupefying violence.” At the same time, the encounter with new and unknown continents and peoples revived eschatological fears and expectations among both Protestants and Catholics.75 71 Ragueneau, La vie de la mère Catherine de Saint-Augustin, 153, 155 (cited). 72 Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, vol. 48 (Cleveland, 1899), 226. See also Trudel, Histoire de la Nouvelle-France. La Seigneurie de la Compagnie des Indes, 750. 73 Ibid., 751. 74 Dechêne, Le peuple, l’État et la guerre au Canada, 131, 216. 75 Delumeau, La peur en Occident, 205, 346 (quotation), 385, 389.

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The discovery of America heightened the “incredible fear of the devil” that gripped Europe’s elites between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, spreading through print culture and peaking in intensity between 1575 and 1625.76 Diabolism was paramount for the Catholic missionaries who played a critical role in Canadian colonization, particularly during the seventeenth century. Indeed, the Jesuits viewed their work in New France in terms of a cosmological conflict; they came to do battle in the lands of Satan.77 Justifiably, the Jesuits of eighteenth-century New France have acquired a reputation for accommodationism thanks to priests like Lafitau and Charlevoix, whose observations of Native cultures contributed to the emerging discipline of anthropology.78 Their seventeenth-century predecessors, however, remained squarely in the exclusivist camp. Paul Le Jeune, Jesuit Superior in Québec from 1632 to 1639 and procurator of the Canadian mission from 1649 to 1662, was in fact a converted Huguenot who brought his radically exclusivist and agonistic understanding of French religious identity to the colony.79 In his Relation of 1634, he equated Manitou, the Innu term for spirit power, with the devil and tried his best to convince his would-be converts (and himself) that “I really had no fear of the Manitou, or devil.”80 The manitousiou, or shaman of the band was to him not only a “very wicked man,” but a veritable “Demon.”81 Canada’s nuns shared the Jesuits’ fear of Satan and his works. Shortly before a major earthquake struck Québec in 1663, the superior of the Ursuline convent, Marie de l’Incarnation, reported that “a Savage woman, but very good & very excellent Christian,” had seen “four furious and enraged Demons in the four corners of Québec shaking the earth with such violence that they showed the desire to overturn everything.”82 Catherine de Saint-Augustin was at this 76 Ibid., 232 (quotation), 239, 242. 77 See Alain Beaulieu, Convertir les fils de Caïn. Jésuites et Amérindiens nomades en NouvelleFrance, 1632–1642 (Québec: Nuit Blanche, 1994), 38. 78 Joseph-François Lafitau (1681–1746), who served the Iroquois mission of Kahnawake from 1711 to 1717, published Mœurs des Sauvages amériquains, comparées aux mœurs des Premiers Temps in 1724. On its influence, see Andreas Motsch, Lafitau et l’émergence du discours ethnographique (Sillery, Paris: Septentrion, Presses de l’Université de ParisSorbonne, 2001). 79 On Le Jeune, see Emma Anderson, The Betrayal of Faith: The Tragic Journey of a Colonial Native Convert (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2007), 132–136. 80 Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, vol. 7 (Cleveland, 1897), 84–87 (cited). Editor’s translation. 81 The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, 7:55, 93. Editor’s translation. 82 Lettres de la vénérable Mère Marie de l’Incarnation, première supérieure des Ursulines de la Nouvelle France (Paris, 1681), 575–576.

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same time living a “life obsessed with Demons, and possessed of God,” in the words of her Jesuit hagiographer.83 Yet diabolical obsession, which in Europe led to scapegoating heretics and witches in a wave of persecutory madness,84 caused far less violence in Canada. One incident provoked by the Iroquois Wars came close to replicating the European model; however, the familiar nexus of fears failed to produce the same level of persecutional bloodshed. The Franco-Iroquois Wars were the unintended consequence of France’s alliance with the St. Lawrence Algonquians, sealed by Champlain during his first voyage to Canada in 1603. Hostilities first broke out in July 1609, when Champlain and two other Frenchmen participated in a Huron and Algonquian war party against the Iroquois near Lake Champlain. While sporadic at first, warfare became more intense after the Iroquois defeated the Huron in 1649 and began directly attacking the French. In the 1660s, with their power at its height, the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy ratcheted up the violence once again. The documented number of French casualties, 80 dead and 70 captives between 1660 and 1667, fails to convey the terror created by Iroquois guerilla tactics.85 A major panic swept the colony in 1660 and 1661 on the heels of rumors that a thousand Iroquois warriors were preparing to invade in May 1660. Although the general invasion never materialized, a party of seventeen militiamen and a few Algonquian warriors perished at Long Sault in an attempt to head it off. The following spring, the Iroquois “appeared on all sides, like an impetuous flood.”86 Once again French patrols were vulnerable to ambush, and seven militiamen succumbed in June 1661 while trying to defend the Ile d’Orléans. “Since this time,” wrote Marie de l’Incarnation to her son in September, “we have again seen only massacres.”87 She went on to describe the panic: Since the departure of the fleet of 1660, there have appeared in the Heavens signs which have frightened many. A Comet was seen, whose tails were pointed toward the earth … In the air a man was seen aflame, and enveloped in fire. There again a canoe of fire was seen, and a great 83 Ragueneau, La vie de la mère Catherine de Saint-Augustin, 100. 84 Delumeau, La peur en Occident, 350. 85 John Dickinson, “La guerre iroquoise et la mortalité en Nouvelle-France, 1608–1666,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française, 36 (1982), 36. 86 Thwaites, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, vol. 46 (Cleveland, 1899), 205. On the panic, see also Marcel Trudel, Histoire de la Nouvelle-France. La seigneurie des CentAssociés. Les événements (Montréal: Fides, 1979), 258–264. 87 Lettres de la vénérable Mère Marie de l’Incarnation, 562.

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crown also of fire near Montréal. On the Ile d’Orléans a child was heard to cry in its mother’s womb … All these accidents have given fright to the point you can imagine.88 The reaction to these “ill-fated omens” was typically European: a witch hunt spearheaded by religious authorities.89 Marie de l’Incarnation continued, Besides it has been discovered that there are Sorcerers & Magicians in this country. That became apparent on the occasion of a Miller, who had come from France at the same time as our Lord Bishop [1659], & whom his eminence had made abjure heresy, because he was a Huguenot. This man wanted to marry a girl who had come with her father & mother on the same ship, saying she had been promised to him: but because this was a man of bad morals, they never wanted to hear him. After this refusal, he wanted to attain his ends by the ruses of his diabolical art. He made Demons or sprites come into the girl’s house with specters that gave her much pain and terror … there was reason to believe there was maléfice on the part of this wretch: for he appeared to her day & night, sometimes alone, & sometimes accompanied by two or three others whom the girl named … Monseigneur sent the Fathers there, & he went there himself to chase away the demons through the prayers of the Church. However, there was no progress … The place is distant from Québec, & it was a great fatigue for the Fathers to go so far to do their exorcism. This is why Monseigneur, seeing that the devils were trying to fatigue them through this work, & tire them by their antics, ordered that the Miller & the girl be brought to Québec. One was put in prison, & the other was locked up in the convent of the Hospital Mothers.90 Bishop Laval launched an investigation, and although only the table of contents of his dossier survives, he clearly took very seriously “the Diabolical Infestation” of Barbe Halay, an illiterate sixteen-year-old servant, by an evil spell allegedly cast by Daniel Vuil. As in Europe, accusations of witchcraft and heresy overlapped, with Laval noting that Vuil, “relapsed into heresy, nonetheless abuses the sacraments.”91 In February 1661, two months after Barbe’s symptoms 88 Ibid., 563. 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid., 563–564. 91 Cited in Trudel, Histoire de la Nouvelle-France. La seigneurie des Cent-Associés. Les événements, 318.

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first appeared, the bishop pronounced him guilty, only to be stymied by the governor. The Jesuits noted in their journal: “Great quarrel between the powers: we thought it would come to extremities on the subject of a sentence brought by the Lord Bishop against Daniel Vuil, relapsed heretical prisoner, blasphemer & profaner of the Sacraments.”92 Unfortunately for Vuil, the governor in question left office at the end of August, and his successor agreed to carry out the sentence even though, according to Marie de l’Incarnation, “the Magician and the other Sorcerers … have still not wanted to confess anything.”93 Vuil was executed by musket shot in October 1661, the only person to die for the crime of sorcery in New France. Vuil’s death did not end the witchcraft and devil scare, which continued in tandem with Iroquois hostilities. Barbe Halay spent two years in the convent undergoing the ministrations of Catherine de Saint-Augustin, who worked tirelessly “to combat the demon who tormented her, until she was delivered at last” by the intercession of a Jesuit martyr.94 The treatment, which Catherine de Saint-Augustin described to Marie de l’Incarnation, included “sewing this girl into a sack to safeguard her from the pressing importunities of this Magician.”95 Even after Barbe Halay’s cure, Catherine de Saint-Augustin remained obsessed with satanic witchcraft, a learned conception distinct from the popular preoccupation with maléfice. She accused another man of sorcery based on a revelation from a Jesuit martyr and, supported by her confessor, forced him to undergo the ordeal of pins and needles to locate the devil’s mark. Learning from the same martyr that demons and witches, desiring the consecrated host for their spells, planned to use the convent chapel for their Sabbath, she chased them away and extorted a confession from the accused witch whom she had by then tirelessly converted. In 1662, she actually witnessed a Sabbath herself in which Satan, dressed as a king and seated upon an airy throne, received reports on the evil deeds of his minions.96 92 The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, vol. 46, 164. 93 Lettres de la vénérable Mère Marie de l’Incarnation, 564. 94 Ibid., 282–283. 95 Ibid., 283. 96 Ragueneau, La vie de la mère Catherine de Saint-Augustin, 174–177. In discussing European witchcraft, Delumeau also emphasized its gendered aspect; fear of witches and fear of women were often one and the same. Delumeau, 323–343. On the role of women in European witchcraft, see also Hufton, Chapter 9. In New France, although the number of cases was limited, the correlation between women and witchcraft was much less clear. A majority of accused and accusers were men. Nonetheless, the prominent role played by Catherine de Saint-Augustin in the witchcraft scare of the 1660s is significant, if unusual

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Given the reality of diabolical witchcraft for religious authorities in New France, why did only one person die for the crime, compared to tens of thousands in Europe and even several dozen in New England? The answer lies in the changed situations of both church and state. Delumeau argued that in Europe, fear diminished when a stronger state and a more exigent religion achieved greater control over the population, beginning around 1650.97 In France, the absolutist state, which had initially used the witchcraft scare to enhance its power, began asserting control over the church, setting the stage for a more rational, skeptical approach to jurisprudence. By royal edict in 1682, witchcraft in France ceased to be a justiciable crime. New France, as the dual creation of royal absolutism and Catholic Reformation, came of age on the cusp of the new era. Royal officials claimed jurisdiction even over religious matters, and their judgments were lenient by earlier standards. Daniel Vuil’s case was exceptional because it was initiated by the eager new bishop and taken up by a brand new governor in a time of crisis. Only a short time later, the man accused of witchcraft by Catherine de SaintAugustin never went to trial at all. Jean Campagna, the accused witch from Acadia, was acquitted in 1685. Others, like Perrine Morel, appeared in court only to sue their accusers for slander.98 The church in New France also played a role in the decline of witchcraft trials. Despite the persistence of diabolism, it had largely abandoned the siege mentality of earlier times to celebrate the victories of the Catholic Reformation, not least among them the conversion of numerous “savages.” Although the newly arrived Bishop Laval chose to assert his authority by making an example of a Protestant witch, the Canadian religious establishment in general had confidence in the power of conversion to conquer the forces of darkness. Catherine de Saint-Augustin took it upon herself to convert the witches she accused, and she did not stop until she had done so. Though she continued until her death to be “strangely tormented by an army of demons that were in a European context. Her ability virtually to usurp the function of exorcist is consistent with the enhanced role of women religious in the early years of the colony. See Leslie Choquette, “Ces Amazones du Grand Dieu: Women and Mission in Seventeenth-Century Canada,” French Historical Studies 17 (1992), 627–655. In 1703, the Rituel du diocèse de Québec put an end to this situation with its order that exorcisms be performed only by priests with consent of the bishop. For an up-to-date synthesis on women in New France, see Jan Noel, Along a River: The First French-Canadian Women (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013). 97 Delumeau, La peur en Occident, 400–414. 98 For another example of a slander case involving witchcraft, see Séguin, La sorcellerie au Québec du XVIIe au XIXe siècle, 126–128.

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around me like an army ready to descend upon a Stronghold,” she explained that Jesus Christ had such a hold over her spirit “that this whole procession from Hell was not unbearable to me, & all their bad impressions served only to unite me more closely to Him who had given Himself to me…”99 In this regard, it is interesting to consider the spiritual crisis triggered by the last Iroquois War, nearly thirty years later.100 French- and Iroquois hostilities resumed in the 1680s, reaching fever pitch between 1687 and 1692. For the French, the most traumatic event was the Mohawk attack on Lachine in 1689, which left 24 dead, over 70 captive, and a village next to Montréal in ruins. Shortly after the massacre, Sister Marguerite Tardy of the Congregation of Notre-Dame of Montréal had her first vision: Her superior, Marguerite Bourgeoys (who would later become Canada’s first female saint), was in a state of mortal sin. In the ensuing months, additional visions entrusted Sister Tardy with the task of spiritual renewal: She was to merge all of Montréal’s religious orders – her own Congregation, the Hôtel-Dieu, the Sulpicians, and the Hôpital-Général (the last still in the planning stages) – into a single spiritual community. Members of the new order were to live together in a vast new seminary and wear “a new and varied habit of different Colors like a Harlequin costume.”101 Even without the Harlequin costume, Sister Tardy’s vision would have been radical. She envisioned combining, hence placing on an equal footing, a learned order of French priests, a barely established order of Canadian brothers, an order of cloistered hospital nuns, and her own non-cloistered teaching order. Yet what is most shocking about her plan is the support she received from three members of the Sulpician order, including her own confessor. By 1691, her reform movement had created deep divisions in Montréal’s religious communities, and order was restored only by sending Sister Tardy and her Sulpician supporters back to France. Thus, in the aftermath of the Lachine massacre, part of the colony’s religious establishment responded to fear by looking inward in search of reform, rather than outward to scapegoat enemies. The ruling culture of fear that had dominated the previous four centuries was coming to an end. Conclusion In conclusion, most Old World fears, whether popular or elite, made their way across the Atlantic to New France, but they did so in attenuated form. Objects 99 Ragueneau, La vie de la mère Catherine de Saint-Augustin, 207. 100 I would like to thank Jean-François Lozier for bringing this incident to my attention. 101 Cited in Séguin, La sorcellerie au Québec du XVIIe au XIXe siècle, 105.

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of fear remained the same for colonists as for Frenchmen, from hunger and maléfice among the common folk to the devil’s snares for elites; however, colonial reactions to fear were different and conspicuously less violent. New France lacked both a culture of riot and rebellion among the people and a culture of inquisition and persecution among civil and religious authorities. As in France after 1650, but to an even greater extent, fear receded in the colony due to domination by an absolutist state and victorious church. Despite the prevalence of warfare, domestic affairs in New France remained orderly and peaceful, at least by European standards, until the final trauma of military defeat.102

102 The British Conquest, of course, had a profound effect on the subsequent history of fear in French Canada. On the evolution of Québec’s culture in comparative perspective, see Gérard Bouchard, The Making of the Nations and Cultures of the New World: An Essay in Comparative History, trans. Michelle Weinroth and Paul Leduc Browne (Montréal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2008).

chapter 2

Fortune’s Frowns and the Finger of God: Deciphering Fear in the Caribbean (c. 1600–c. 1720) Sarah Barber The encounters between Europeans and the peoples, lands and seas, of two vast American continents were culturally transformative. Amongst the most profound (though subtle and prolonged) changes was that burgeoning capitalism changed the English language. A person’s worth, previously measured using the yardstick of ancestry and behavior – whether you were noble, or good – began to be calculated according to profit and estate. Personal worth/ wealth also became dependent on the color of one’s skin. The process of change, from one type of worthiness to the other, involved the initial process of establishing a European presence in the Americas, with its hazardous Atlantic crossings, treacherous internal waters and terrains, strange encounters, and alien flora and fauna. In a word, the meaning of which was also in the process of transformation, this was an adventure. It involved bravery, fortitude, physical strength and health, and a good smattering of reckless abandon. Sir Thomas Warner, founding governor of St. Christopher was lauded at his island interment as one who was “Trayned from his youth in Armes his Courage bold/ Attempted braue Exploites and Vncontrold/ By fortunes fiercest frownes hee still gave forth/ Large Narratiues of Military worth/ Written with his swords point.”1 Given the uncertainty which dogged all aspects of life in the Torrid Zone, it is noteworthy how few times individuals admitted feeling fear. One who did was the Rev. William Smith, minister of St. John’s Figtree, Nevis, who, during an earthquake in 1717, was thrown out of bed, and for two and a half minutes heard his wooden house shake and crack loudly: “our Fear then was inexpressible; and perhaps that very Passion of Fear might cause the minutes to seem longer than they really were: Surely it could not have affected me more, to have marched Soldier-like up to the mouth of an Enemy’s Cannon;

1 Part of the encomium on the tomb of Sir Thomas Warner, Governor of St Christopher, died 10 March 1649, and buried in the church of St Thomas (Middle Island), Old Road, which, when the rebuilt church was sited higher up the hill, exposed the memorial in the churchyard; Vere Langford Oliver, The Monumental Inscriptions of the British West Indies (Dorchester, u.k., 1927), 184–185. Dates are expressed in New Style.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004314740_004

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and yet … the very moment it stopped, we were no more concerned than if it had never happened at all.”2 The word can nevertheless be found, with some frequency, in the writings of British sailors, adventurers, planters and settlers, but used mundanely to express reasonable doubt: “I was afeared” was attached to statements such as those of a Mr. Harris who chose to remain aboard ship with his consignment of sugar because “twas feared” the French would levy excessive duty.3 In 1696 the Governor of Jamaica “feared” that people were discouraged and that the settlement would decay.4 There were numerous fears – fears that letters would miscarry, that people would not obey, that enemies would intercept intelligence – but these expressions do not capture the modern idiom in which fear is an expression of emotion heightened by alarm or pain, involving imminent danger and urgent action. Even though the word with its associations of immediacy and terror seems particular to English etymology, the closest we might come to a comparable modern usage was in a report by Bahamas’ resident pirate-chaser, Thomas Walker, and even then it lacks urgency, since it referred to the islanders’ former “ffeare and dread” of Spanish attack in retaliation for the pirates operating out of Eleutheria.5 In the seventeenth century one had to have “reason to fear,” whereas contemporary usage, possibly in an age which seeks to separate our conscious from our sub-conscious, has detached bravery from that inaction in which we talk of being frozen with fear. Or, in the age of scientific rationality, fear is drowned by a flood of adrenaline. This does not mean that the people living in the Americas in the seventeenth century did not feel fear in the sense that we understand it, but it does provide a headache for the historian seeking to chart its expression. Most examples of the word “fear” quoted so far, come from official documents. It was not circumspect, appropriate, or meet for dispatches to London to convey hysteria, vulnerability or cowardice. With messages apt to miscarry and even straightforward communication involving weeks of hopeful expectation and unknowability, urgency was pointless. Such expressions of fear nullified the authority of those charged with the 2 William Smith, A Natural History of Nevis (Cambridge, 1745), 62. 3 The National Archives (hereinafter tna), co 137/10, no. 57, “Minutes taken by Mr. Harris of what passed at the Board of Trade,” 9 January 1713. 4 tna, co 137/4, no. 14: Governor Sir William Beeston, Jamaica, to William Blathwayt, 23 July 1696. 5 tna, co 5/1265, no. 17: Thomas Walker, New Providence, to the Council of Trade and Plantations, 14 March 1715. The New Oxford English Dictionary ascribes the word “fear” to an Old English derivation, and its association with dread and terror to earlier usages: “Old English fǽr … sudden calamity, danger, corresponds to Old Saxon fâr ambush.”

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lawful, reasoned administration of the colonies, or the bravery and daring of those who, at a more humble level, did the state’s bidding. As something rarely admitted, fear was usually something imputed. One implication is that expressions of fear are used to tell a good story. The Puritan minister, Charles Morton, in compiling a posthumous history of his friend, Nicholas Leverton, described the point at which the calm of the company, which had travelled from Barbados to settle in Tobago, was transformed: [S]itting on ye ground he was a lighting his pipe when suddenly the man yt went forth came roaring in a most terrible manner behind him & fell down by him[.] Mr Leverton was in a passion ready to strike at the fellow for affrighting him thinking it but a mockery till by the mans stillness And a greivous wound in his head he perceved he had received a Mortal wound[.] Mr Leverton hastily apprising ye Indian Arrows flew thick about him … fled into the woods to save their lives[.] Some few of those in the booth were roused by the Alarme & fled likewise for their Security the rest were all cutt off as they lay: …Mr Leverton flying into the woods with those few that followed him in a Bog lost one of his shooes whereby he was much afflicted wth a Kind of Prickly bush growing abundanly [sic] in those parts but his Company in that affright where in to great haste to tarry for him being therefore left alone in the woods he Endeavoured if he Could to finde sight of ye Ship but he was soe beweldred with ye Bushes and bad way that when he Came, after 5 or 6 hours to ye sea-shoare he Could hear Nothing thereof he therefore Coasted Along ye shore as Conjecture Led him, still hoping that behind the next foreland he Came at he should Make descouery, of it but still in vaine, till towards Evening he came to A bay where, his fear of ye Indians and weariness togeather made him Resolve not to fetch A Compass about, about [sic] it & his hopes to find ye ships behind ye further foreland Encouraged him, being able to swim to strip him selfe and so Attempt that way to get Over by ye Nighest Cutt.6

6 C[harles] M[orton], “The Life and Death of Mr. Nicholas Leverton Sometime Minister of ye Word at St Tudy in the County of Cornwall,” ff. 3-3v [the date must be after 1663 and Morton died in 1698]: this is a draft of a pamphlet laid out as if to go to the publisher. It is in private hands and forms part of a collection of transcripts bound together by Morton, including Leverton’s life, examples of his sermons and a letter from Surinam: vellum bound stitched, 8vo. I am grateful to the owner for allowing me extensive access to this manuscript.

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Leverton had presumably related his adventures to his friend, but historians have few means of knowing whether Leverton described his own fear in these terms, or Morton embellished the facts to make his account more readable, his friend more worthy, and them both more pious. Morton, in attributing fear to a fellow Briton, was at pains to show it was justified. More often, literary accounts claim that fears are the product of the mind’s construction, and do not represent a real threat, embedding them within a second trend: others’ fears are attributed because history is written by the victor, and the victorious do not admit fear. We fear those to whom we impute greater force or forcefulness. Aphra Behn attributed fear to her African heroes, Imoinda and Oroonoko, in the face of the king’s ferocious rage on hearing of their clandestine marriage: unreasonable because a consequence of obstinacy. In contrast, Oroonoko’s rage and “indignation” at being captive on board ship, confirmed his nobility and royalty. The “fearful and cowardly Disposition” of English women and children provoked them to plead on behalf of escaped slaves, frantic but doomed in their attempts at self-defense, but they nevertheless continued to be “possess’d with extreme Fear, which no Persuasions could dissipate” at the thought of enraged and embittered Africans acting with freedom in the rain forest.7 Defoe had small boys afraid of Moors and both Africans at Cape Verde and cannibals on his island ready to die for fear at the sound of firearms. On finding human footprints in the sand, Crusoe stood like one Thunder-struck, or as if I had seen an Apparition … terrify’d to the last Degree, looking behind me at every two or three Steps, mistaking every Bush and Tree, and fancying every Stump at a Distance to be a Man; nor is it possible to describe how many various Shapes affrighted Imagination represented Things to me … the farther I was from the Occasion of my Fright, the greater my Apprehensions were; which is something contrary to the Nature of such Things, and especially to the usual Practice of all Creatures in Fear: But I was so embarrass’d with my own frightful Ideas of the Thing, that I form’d nothing but dismal Imaginations to myself … . Thus my fear banish’d all my religious Hope; all that former Confidence in God, which was founded upon such wonderful Experience.8

7 Aphra Behn, Oroonoko: or the Royal Slave (London, 1688). 8 Daniel Defoe, The Life And Strange Surprizing Adventures Of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner (London, 1719), 181–184.

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Thus, if fear was based on the psychological construction of threats, which, if their reality was exposed, would immediately dissipate, there was room within both literary and political accounts to speculate on the inner processes of others. The characters of The Tempest were fearful of the storm that brought them to the island, but having survived its rigors feared no longer: [Stephano] “Have we devils here? Do you/ put tricks upon `s with salvages and men of Ind, ha?/ I have not scap’d drowning to be afeard now of/ your four legs.”9 Whilst the storm was real, its re-creation plays with imagination’s grip on human senses, and it could be argued that Shakespeare found a discourse on fear, its reality and construction, a more creative subject than the shipwreck which founded the colony of Bermuda.10 The Tempest was an essay on psychological intercessions between human control and fear: early modern commentaries on the Indies frequently referred to similar phenomena. Belief systems and practice within the Kalinago community involved shamans’ use of “tricks” to “make themselves feared, loved, and reverenced,” interposing their learning, skills and authority between the community and evil spirits which might infect them.11 Daniel Reff describes the same impact – imputing to the indigenous peoples described in Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación a culture of fear, cure and miracles, a mixture of cultural preexistence, traded histories about the Spanish, and experience.12 The similarity of indigenous and Catholic belief in superstition was not lost on English protagonists: Puritans described the defense of Providence Island as the combined effort of black and white, the latter making a bonfire “of the Gods and idolatrous monuments” of the combined forces of Spanish, Mulattos and Indians.13 9

William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ii:ii, ll. 58–61: Frank Kermode, ed., The Tempest (London: The Arden Shakespeare, University Paperback, Routledge, 1964), 64. 10 Shakespeare, Tempest, V:i, ll. 114–16: [Alonso] “since I saw thee,/ Th’affliction of my mind amends, with which,/ I fear, a madness held me”; Tristan Marshall, “The Tempest and the British Imperium in 1611,” Historical Journal 41, no. 2 (1998), 375–400; Samuel Purchas, Haklvytvs Posthumus, or Pvrchas his Pilgrimes. Contayning a History of the World, in Sea voyages & lande-Treuells, by Englishmen & others (London, 1625). 11 Behn uses the term “Indian.” That these were Kalinago people, formerly known as Carib, is my inference: the aim was to use herbs, incantations, sacrifices and so on to ward off the impact of evil spirits. 12 Daniel T. Reff, “Text and context: cures, miracles, and fear in the Relación of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca,” Journal of the Southwest 38, no. 2 (1996), 115–38. 13 Record Office of Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland (hereinafter rollr), Finch Mss., DG7 Box 4982: ff. 2–10, f. 8. This account is curious in that it mentions the day of thanksgiving for the defense of Providence against the Spanish attack, and the sermon and prayers involved, and then the authors, Puritan ministers, describe the burning of the

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The trope, therefore, is that fear is seldom real. We should not fear what we know, nor deviate from what we know into mere imaginings. That which was unknown, could not be anticipated, did not follow a pattern, seemed irrational; that which did not seem human(e), but animal, passionate and intemperate, could invoke terror and alarm. It feeds into that key Anglophone debate of the early modern period: what was arbitrary.14 Fear of God was righteous and right. God was never arbitrary and thus the actions of God and the consequences for man, even if violence were involved, must be the result of authority.15 Its corollaries were cruelty and surprise. Animals displayed cruelty; people displayed cruelty when their violence was arbitrary and/or unexpected; or the climate and environment could be cruel in its surprise. A crew sailing to Barbados “on board the good Shipp called the John Pincke of Topsham” had no reason to be afraid of the journey because their master Samuel Shower was “under God,” but when they were taken by Algerian pirates, and thus by infidels who practiced surprise attack and violence, they had “ever since … remayned in miserable Captivity, [and] slavery under those cruel Enimies of our Saviour Christ [and] all that P[ro]fesse him.”16 It is no surprise that all goods and messages carried across sea came with an injunction for the captain “whom God preserve.” Thousands of pieces of correspondence traversed the Atlantic protected by the Latin cachet Quem Deus Conservat: “P a ffreind Q: D: C:”; “To mesr George Moore Mercht Att Porters key neare ye Custome house In London P The Dorrothy Capt Twaites qdc.”17 Fear, and whether it was justified because it

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Spanish Catholic idols, in front of their own “heathens,” followed by a moment in which the English threw off sack-cloth, God gave them a “garland of gladness” and everyone danced. This performance was therefore similar to the descriptions of pagan abandonment. James Daly, “The Idea of Absolute Monarchy in Seventeenth-Century England,” Historical Journal 21, no. 2 (1978), 227–50; Quentin Skinner, “Freedom as the absence of arbitrary power,” in Cecile Laborde and John Maynor, eds., Republicanism and Political Theory (London: John Wiley & Sons, 2009), 83–101; Douglass C. North and Barry R. Weingast, “Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth-Century England,” Journal of Economic History 49, no. 4 (1989), 803–32. Authorized Version of the Bible: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the holy is understanding,” Prov. 9:10. Devon Record Office, QS128/Topsham 126/1-13, “Maimed soldiers,” no. 7: the petition of Mary, wife of Samuel Caldome, mariner of Topsham reporting an incident of 2 January 1680(1?). This former example comes from a letter of Thomas Quintyne, judge of St. John’s, Barbados, to his kinsman German Pole Esq., Radbourne, Derbyshire, 26 February 1679, Derbyshire Record Office, Matlock, D5557/2/120/4; the latter from a letter written by

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was invoked by legitimate authority, was felt by those who rejected legitimate authority, and would be unjustified when the arbitrary and tyrannical was unmediated by divine Providence. This would provoke a particular debate in the Caribbean, as soon as debate began to rage as to whether God had predetermined the nature of Americans and Africans, or whether they could be (re) claimed from the “Tyranny of Satan” to embrace Christ.18 As those who were “barbarous, savage, and violent” acted out of ignorance of the Gospel, and could be educated by those standing in the light, the only intimation of fear on this understanding, would be in the hearts and minds of those who willfully stood in the way of conversion, who would receive “a most emphatical Threatning” of having a millstone around their necks to drown in the depth of the sea (Matt. 18:6–7), God pouring out against them the “Fury of his Wrath, and the very Dregs of his Anger.”19 Fear which inspired dread, whether of someone, a group, an animal, an object or an idea, rested on whether it possessed greater force or power than you. Lemuel Gulliver showed no fear of Lilliputians, but was afraid of his first encounter with the giants of Brobdignag.20 Disparaging remarks made about the threat posed by indigenous people usually related their primitive weaponry and the ease with which gunfire scared them away: such as the people of Tobago who were “of a timorous nature and very much dred a gunn.”21 A (manufactured) suggestion of greater force was often sufficient: General Douglas defended Montserrat “with only 4 small Ships of Warr & 5 Sloopes the first appearance of wch so scared the Enemy that they immediately presumed what might Reasonably be expected from Ten[?],” the residents feeling they “may lie down at Night without fear of being surprised in [their] sleep or carried away Sarah Crabb, Barbados, to George Moore in London, tna C110/175, unnumbered. The letter is dated 3 June 1693 and was noted as having been received on the eighteenth presumably, of June. This construction was not confined to Anglophone Christians: see the example of skipper Claes Lock, A.J.F. Van Laer, ed. and trans., Correspondence of Jeremias Van Rensselaer, 1651–1674 (Albany, 1932), 383. The other body whose person was always to be preserved by God was kingship. Given the frequent failure of correspondence to survive the crossing, many examples of transatlantic correspondence come down to us as copy-letters, which usually omit the cachet: Maurice Rickards and Michael Twyman, The Encyclopedia of Ephemera (London: Routledge, 2000), 69. 18 Thomas Bray, Apostolick Charity in its Nature and Excellence Consider’d in a Discourse upon Dan.12.3., (London, 1698), 5, of his sermon in St Paul’s, 19 December 1697, which was the spur to the foundation of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. 19 Bray, Apostolick Charity, 21, 24. 20 Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ch. 9. 21 cm, “The Life and Death.”

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Captives before the morning.”22 Other symbolisms of subordination were important, and discussed below, but proficiency with firearms carried a capital which few other advantages could match. Stephen Bull reported that the Westoes were feared by all other indigenous peoples of Carolina because they had guns, powder and shot and constantly warred with everyone except the British. Hinting that the Westoes practiced cannibalism against their enemies embellished their fearsome image, but this was savagery made frightening because the firepower made their force real.23 The British tended to construct indigenous peoples as friend or foe, and that determined whether pragmatic alliances with peoples like the Westoes could be bolstered by frightening opponents with tales of both barbaric practices and skillful arms. Africans, on the other hand, were constructed as free or unfree. In 1984, Jerome Handler published an influential article assessing the relative contributions of white and black men to the militia of Barbados. His argument – that it was only at the end of the seventeenth century that slaves began to be drafted into the militia, as an expedient to counter inadequate wartime numbers – rests heavily on a quotation from Richard Ligon’s account of the island in the midcentury. Slaves, he said, “did not commit some horrid massacre upon the Christians” because “they are not suffered to touch or handle any weapons.”24 Although Handler assumed that Britons feared slave numbers and armed insurrection, he decided that decisions whether to arm or not to arm slaves were pragmatic, and Ligon’s heightened language evidence that fear was something he imputed to settlers in order to serve his own purposes. Within the list of presentments to the Barbados Grand Jury in 1664, policing responsible, moral behavior, with the usual censure of the unlicensed sale of liquor and illegitimate births, is an otherwise misleading vote of thanks for Lord Willoughby of Parham’s efforts in keeping the community safe. It might make it sound as if other issues discussed by the Grand Jury – the Provost-Marshall indicted for removing prisoners to work on his plantation, town-dwellers ordered to keep more servants than African slaves within their houses, and 22 23 24

tna, co 152/10, no. 27v: tna, co 152/10, no. 27i: Residents of Montserrat to Queen Anne. Stephen Bull to Lord Ashley, 12 September 1670, in Langdon Cheves, ed., The Shaftesbury Papers (Charleston, sc: Tempus Publications, 2000 [Charleston, 1897]), 194. Jerome S. Handler, “Freedmen and slaves in the Barbados militia,” Journal of Caribbean History 19 (1984): 1–25 at 7; Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes (London, 1657), 46; Myra Jehlen, “History beside the fact: What we learn from a True and Exact History of Barbadoes,” in Ann E. Kaplan and George Levine, eds., The Politics of Research, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 127–139; Keith Sandiford, The Cultural Politics of Sugar: Caribbean Slavery and Narratives of Colonialism (Cambridge: University Press, 2000).

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aliens warned not to keep slaves at all – might relate to security. In fact, all referred more to general public order and the community responsibility to provide employment for poor whites.25 At the 1673 presentments, fright was imputed to planters to explain their seizure of others’ slaves, but this was also a complaint about stealing labor and not about the threat posed by slave numbers. Commentating on attempts to build up Surinam, a settler decried the high and mighty in Barbados who denigrated Surinam in order to retain their servants to balance the number of slaves, but undercut his own argument by implying rather that their reasons were economic: being also Dons of the Royal African Company, they hoped to supply slaves for Surinam.26 Worries that on the smaller, increasingly monocultural sugar islands, overcrowding, lack of hinterland into which the disaffected could escape, and vastly disproportionate numbers of white and black might cause the former to fear the latter’s violence are remarkably rare and confined to the very end of the seventeenth century. In 1683, a correspondent from Jamaica – an encomiastic account of an island blotted only by settlers’ debauched behavior – noted there was no “terror” of indigenous peoples as the Spanish had wiped them out, and there was “no such fear or danger” of Africans “as in lesser Islands” because “Jamaica is of too vast an extent for any such surprize, being in many places divided with mountains of difficult access, and great Rivers not passable but by Boats or Ferries, which dare carry no Negroes without a written Ticket or Licence from their Master or Overseer.”27 In the seventeenth century, fastness terrains in Carolina, Surinam and Jamaica – sea islands, rain-forest and mountains – where escaped slaves established de facto free communities, seem to have been regarded as a safety valve against insurrection, rather than as a hiding place from which embittered and hostile people could attack plantations and emancipate their fellows. This must have changed very quickly in the early eighteenth century, with Jamaica planters and maroons at war by the 1730s. Richard Dunn, who noted population density in Barbados (20,000 white/30,000 black inhabitants), did not cite potentially volcanic violence under the pressure of numbers and the thrall of the sugar regime as a reason for migration to Carolina.28 Wild, savage and feral existence, which has attached to the escaped 25 26 27

28

Presentments to the Grand Jury, Barbados, 13 December 1664, tna, co 1/18/154. Renatus Enys, Surinam, to Sir Henry Bennett, 1 November 1663, tna, co 1/17, no. 88, f.[c]. THE LAWS OF JAMAICA, Passed by the Assembly, And Confirmed by His MAJESTY IN Council, Feb. 23. 1683. To which is added, A short Account of the Island and Government thereof, (London, 1683), preface, d4. Richard S. Dunn, “The English Sugar Islands and the Founding of South Carolina,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 72, no. 2 (1971): 81–93.

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slave communities, was not sufficient in itself to inspire fear in the white population. It was not even sufficient to intimate violence.29 That which did inspire fear was uncertainty, explaining both the process of reasoning and the heightened expression of terror. Tobacco exporters in Virginia were being hyperbolic in describing contracts as a “terror and discouragmt,” but what they meant was that they were labyrinthine; the fear of endless, unfathomable red-tape.30 Insecurity of authority and possession bred rumors of arbitrariness: whisperings of false patents made Carolinans “uneasy for I think no body who could help it would willingly quitt being his Majesties tennant to be that of a Proprietor, and the bounds being at present uncertain betwixt us and North Carolina, people do not much care to take up land on an uncertainty for far lest they should fall under a Proprietorship.”31 People expected to discern a direct and obvious connection and rationale between action and effect; the uncertainty of boundaries led to uncertainty of tenure; evidence of the uncertainty of rule under proprietorship. The hurricanes and storms of torrid climate were as much a metaphor for real inhabitants of the region as for Shakespeare’s marooned they had created figments of the imagination.32 Anglican Alexander Garden challenged those Carolinians who were tempted by Methodism: Why will you be carried away with so strange a Wind of Doctrine, as persuades to the Belief and Expectation of a certain happy Moment, when, by the sole and specifick Work of the Holy Spirit, you shall at once (as `twere by Magic Charm) be matamorphosed, stript of your old Nature and 29

30

31 32

I do not mean to imply that the violence or threat of violence and slave insurgence did not exist. Commentators retrospectively stressed the violence and brutality of maroon communities in Jamaica in the 1690s, but did so from the remove of an impersonation narrative of forty years later. At the time, commentators played down the numbers involved and the reasons for their assertive actions: see [Robert Robertson], A Short Account Of The Hurricane (London, 1733); Idem, The Speech Of Mr John Talbot Campo-bell, A Free Christian-Negro, To His Countrymen In The Mountains of Jamaica (London, 1736). tna, co 1/4 no. 45: “The humble answer of the Governor and Counsell together wth the Burgesses of the severall Pla[~]tations assembled in Virginia vnto his Mats Letter concerning our Tobaccoe and other Com[~]odities’, 26 March 1628.” Sir Francis Nicholson, James City, to Lords of Trade and Plantations, 27 August 1700: tna, co 5/1312/2, f[c]. Matthew Mulcahy, Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribbean, 1624–1783 (Baltimore, md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Fear of hot climates in the Anglo-American colonial experience,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser, 41, no. 2 (1984): 213–240.

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cloathed with a new? Why carried away, I say, with so strange a Wind of Doctrine as this, which can blow only from enthusiastick Heads, and can serve only to scare and hurry you into frantick and convulsive Fits of Religion, which must terminate either in Bedlam, or Deism, or Popery, or at least in such a Manner as to prove hurtful to true Religion, its real Interest and Concerns?33 What Britons feared was disorder, seeking clear and consistent – “sole and specific” – lines of communication and authority. When the French “surprised” the north of St. Christopher in 1666, it was not their presence or their arms which the English feared, but the fact that they “fell in pell mell amongst our men, whoe, being but Planters, tooke a freight at soe suddeyne and desperate an onset.”34 Violence was justified, and would ameliorate the fear of those who might experience it, if it was to instill rightful authority. A godly people would assent to be ruled by a godly magistrate, because the magistrate legislated according to the laws which were a natural, revealed compact between divine and human authority. Those who behaved in an ungodly and thus inhuman fashion had cause to fear retributive justice, both of God and man. Governor Hender Molesworth of Jamaica, faced with a seaman who asked for a fifth share in return for identifying a treasure wreck, threatened him with corporal punishment “very terrible and severe” if he spoke falsely in order to fright him into truthful testimony.35 Molesworth did not regard the putative punishment (seven years in the galleys without pay and corporal punishment as the governor saw fit) as arbitrary. It was not contrary to, but rather confirmed, his rightful authority. Christopher Billop, captain of the naval ship, Bentley, is usually cited as an example of the rewards of loyalty, but he wove a preservationist path through rival authorities, several times claiming his own primacy. His operations in Nevis were the subject of complaints from Governor Sir William Stapleton because he took it upon himself to seize goods from prize ships and interlopers without going to law: according to Stapleton, “he has taken upon him to relinquish seizures, detaineing with his own part without any trial, 33

34 35

Alexander Garden, Regeneration, and the testimony of the Spirit. Being the substance of two sermons lately preached in the Parish Church of St Philip, Charles-town, in South-Carolina (Boston, 1741), 13–14. tna, co 1/20, no. 93, 825– 826: Governor Lord Willoughby of Parham to [Secretary Lord Arlington], my emphasis. Col Hender Molesworth, Jamaica, to William Blathwayt, 3 February 1685: tna, co 1/59, no. 9, f.[f].

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taking 6 gunns of an interloper in Antego, compounding with some for inconsiderable sum, breaking of chests and taking mony out of them; freightning the kings subiects heresoe yt they durst not goe in ships or sloopes about their lawfull occupasions…; after he run away from the flag or coulours I thought it felonie by ye com̃ on and statut law to run away from ye kings coullours.” At the point Billop turned pirate, and acted outside the accepted bonds of order, he provoked fear.36 Britons, especially those of Protestant confessions driven by Old Testament texts and eschatological determinism, imputed fear and cowardice to others because they, as God-fearing people, did not fear the wrath which was reserved for the unrighteous. It was a form of social control, since breaking the code could not be admitted. Further down the Great Chain of Being, amongst the ordinary people of the commonwealth, loyalty and obedience to the magistrate and the magistrate’s ability to secure allegiance, was based on right action, as a true magistrate was the inheritor of godliness. Thomas Carlyle romanticized that “[u]nder the soil of Jamaica [lay] the bones of many thousand British men – brave Colonel Fortescue, brave Colonel Sedgwick, brave Colonel Brayne” whose adventure, risk and courage founded Britain’s presence in Jamaica, but the Protectorate Council had been humbled before the Lord by such great loss of life, ascribing English deaths to He “who hath in such legible characters made known his displeasure,” and after much continued heart-searching, Britons resolved to hold, fortify and settle the island “in His name and fear.”37 It is a truism that fear would always be something ascribed to others, because no one would admit to ungodliness. Faith made one brave, and the brave, as the godly – faced with the enemy, who must therefore be a force of sin and the Devil – would be saved by faith, as the finger of God would direct earth, seas, and events to a Providential end. In 1640, the Spanish made an attempt on the islands of Old Providence and Saint Catherine, the provocative Puritan-pirate outpost roughly equidistant 36

37

Sir William Stapleton, Nevis, to the Lords of Trade and Plantations, 20 December 1682: tna, co 1/50, no. 131, f. 206. Billop was awarded a huge estate at Staten Island for negotiating the territory for the Crown against the Proprietorship of New Jersey, involved in various practices, some legitimate some illegitimate in Delaware and Nevis, as well as being indicted several times at the Old Bailey. tna, sp 25/77, 162; a post-Emancipation debate about authority and its inequitable construction, from which these quotes of Carlyle are taken, is provided by John Stuart Mill’s essay “The Negro Question,” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country no. 41 (January 1850): 25–31, with editorial note by John William Parker, Jr., and signed “D.,” in response to [Thomas Carlyle], “Occasional discourse on the Negro Question,” Fraser’s Magazine no. 40 (February 1849): 527–37.

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from the Spanish ports of Trujillo, Porto Bello, Nombre de Dios, and Cartagena.38 The Spanish attempted to inspire fear. A party which made it ashore sang in somber, stentorian tones “dreadfull and formall.” Fear was imputed to the Spanish: they were “skared” by a shot from one of the English forts; from landing at their original intended spot, driven to a different place where the ground was more treacherous; and because the English had installed a new mounting of a great gun. Some English people were afraid, but were persuaded out of it. The women – a few pregnant, some with sucking babies and others with infants – felt their spirits droop, fearing “the Accomplishmt of or Saviors woe upon themselves,” but were buoyed by the shouts of the soldiers and the prayers of the ministers. Men, who in times of safety, had derided and mocked the clergy, now gave them such new esteem that they seemed like different people.39 The ministers and ordinary soldiers are the heroes of this story: the latter showed “more then a natural courage”; despite lacking hats and shoes, being outgunned and outnumbered. The English authorities, other than the clergy, were marginalized. Seventeen military officers, of whom just three had been sent by the Adventurers’ Company, “were but as cyphers [and] lookers on being so needlesse for the present occasion.” The island’s magistracy “shewed now [in] yt time of danger no small weaknes [and] pusillanimity.” The English general, Captain Andrew Carter, whom the departed governor, Nathaniel Butler, had placed in both civil and military authority, failed to assert leadership, being swayed by the opinions of any and all. Described as flinching each time a shot flew near him, at which the common soldiers were ashamed, he took a position at Black Rock Fort, which seemed to provide an overview of his own troops’ fire, “those yt best knewe him coniectured it to bee rather for feare of ye enemies shott.”40 Later he sought to escape a place which was in danger of becoming a battleground by travelling three miles to fetch pincers, powder and shot.41 The commander of Fort Warwick, in the heat of battle fell on the soldiers’ victuals and showed not the stomach for a fight, but for a feed. Both he and Carter were assumed to be at the location which afforded the best chance of flight.42 38 Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Providence Island, 1630–1641: The other Puritan Colony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). The Spanish attacked Providence in 1635, 1640 and 1641. 39 rollr, Finch mss, DG7 Box 4982: ff. 2–10, f. 4v. 40 Ibid, ff. 3v, 5v. 41 Ibid, f. 6. 42 Ibid, f. 6v.

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Fear was both an indicator and a consequence of ill character. It was a sign that a person either possessed insufficient faith in the True God, or held to false gods. It was the difference between superstition, to which fear attached, and Providence, which would always prevail.43 The dead Spanish soldiers were found to have been fatally wounded by shots passing through their icons, or as their dying act, to have thrown down their powerless crucifixes. Such useless power, without proper godly authority, was arbitrary. The Spanish had demonstrated their fear of death: it was revealed that they were carrying “pardons” which permitted them sex with virgins, arbitrary because they could keep the women alive or kill them “at their pleasure.” As they had sung on their march up the beachhead their lyrics had invoked the “horny devil.”44 Of those English who died, one had twice attempted to run away, and another who had boasted “fearfull+despate curses & oaths” about what he would do to the enemy, was killed by shot from an English weapon. The commander of Fort Warwick assumed charge and Carter was deemed to have usurped the governorship, giving repeated examples of his arbitrary actions. One of those who had been falsely imprisoned, without trial, was the gunner whose lone bravery in manning the island’s big gun turned the siege. He had been released on the day of this engagement: imminent salvation. Those who were useless were shown to be fearful, which highlighted that Providence alone could regulate justly the balance of power, for “God himselfe seemed to putt [redundant officers] out of office in affording them no roome for any Imploymt, yt he might have all the glory of or great Victory unto himselfe alone.”45 The Gospel of Matthew offered counsel that what was meted out by you would be repaid by God and “while the enemy did lay siege to us” the clergy “did by the powerfull engine of praies lay siege to heaven to helpe the Lord against ye mighty.”46 It is no surprise that the authors of this account of the siege of Old Providence took it upon themselves to impute fear and its earthly and heavenly corollaries, cowardice, and superstition. Two of the signatories were dissenting ministers who had been a thorn in the side of any authority which saw the Laudian church as a bulwark to civic hierarchy. Colonel Richard Lane was a client of the 43

44 45 46

The Protestant English and Scots had a longstanding narrative against the intertwined evils of arbitrariness, tyranny and superstition: it lay at the core of the Reformation theology. They were well practiced at applying it to Catholics within their own borders and to the Irish, and to Irish Catholics: see the essay by Elodie Peyrol in this volume. “Vera diabolo, cornuda, sa fa fa”: rollr, Finch mss, DG7 Box 4982: f. 5v. Ibid, ff. 4, 5v. “[margin – Mat. 7.2.] With what measure [scored out] ye mete to others, it shalbee measured to you again”: Ibid, ff. 4v, 9v.

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chief mover of the Puritan Adventurers Company, the earl of Warwick, and would be the choice of the anti-Butler faction for governor after this battle. Colonel Henry Halhead was a supporter of toleration for the sectaries and another who had fallen foul of Butler, who possibly associated him with dissenting rebellion.47 So, cruelty, arbitrariness, and fear are attributed to God’s enemies, whilst resolution is the preserve of the faithful. Presumably, attributing fear, or the lack of it, was dependent on whether one was a predestinarian, or believed all capable of salvation. The slaves of the colony had demonstrated their godly potential by showing, at a time of urgency, their ultimate loyalty and steadfastness: That the hearts of our Negroes should bee fast knitt unto us in this time of distresse, who yet had formerly rebelled against us even in times of peace [and] prosperity: [and] yt neither any of them nor of our English should attempt to run to ye enemy lying so neere us, although divers of them had before this very desperately done it at a farre greater distance. This was the Lords doing, who is the God of the spirits of all flesh. The slaves did not cease being “heathens,” and did not join in the prayers, burning of effigies, or the wringing of hands, but this was an instructional homily that false gods could not save them from the fire or England’s enemies from the slaughter.48 Whether we are reading colonial or modern accounts we are the passive recipients of directed reading. If fear is seldom admitted, it is invariably accompanied by an admission that it was fleeting, regretted, shameful and overcome, usually through an expression of faith and trust in the Lord. Imputed to others, we are directed to note weak resolve – temporary because, like the women who watched the siege of Providence they were the “weaker sexe” – or signifying cowardice. But how do we know whether men showed fear because they were cowards, or behaved ignominiously because they were afraid? Those historians who wish to impute to Europeans a fear of the Other make statements such as “[m]ost of all [the plantocracy] hated and feared the hordes of restive black 47

48

British Library Sloane mss. 758. The majority of this manuscript is the autographed manuscript of Nathaniel Butler’s “A Dialogicall Discourse” (1634), but the first three folios, in Butler’s hand, are notes of letters sent by Butler during his time as governor of Providence. He complains about Sherrard and another minister, probably Leverton, and “La: Holly,” which may well be Lane and Halhead (as the name is rendered Hollyhead elsewhere): “No. 35,” Butler to Lord Saye and Sele. rollr, Finch mss, DG7 Box 4982: f. 8.

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captives with whom they had surrounded themselves”?49 Others wish to downplay the threat of slave or indigenous resistance, imputing to the Europeans no need to fear because they had greater resources to keep themselves safe.50 Colonists were prepared to commit the latter sentiment to paper, not the former. To return to the Reverend Smith’s account of God and nature in the West Indies, he felt the need to counter critics who did not believe what he wrote, and bid them accept “Traveller’s Privilege”: “I smile at their unjust Censure, and pity their Prejudice.”51 Describing the West Indies was one of Smith’s hobbies: another was deciphering codes.

49

Richard S. Dunn, “The Barbados Census of 1680: Profile of the Richest Colony in English America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 26, no. 1 (1969): 3–30 at 8, 30. 50 Harvey M. Feinberg, Africans and Europeans in West Africa: Elminans and Dutchmen on the Gold Coast during the Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society 79, no. 7 (1989), and within this volume “Counts of indictment and defense of the Negroes of Mina Contra,” 17 May 1740, 164–168. 51 Smith, Natural History, 251–252.

chapter 3

Fear and the Genesis of the English Empire in America L.H. Roper In 1584, Richard Hakluyt, at the behest of his patron, the Elizabethan courtierexplorer Sir Walter Ralegh, composed a “Discourse Concerning Western Planting.” Fear occupied a prominent place in the advocacy of American colonization of this cleric, a famously early promoter of the overseas expansion of early modern English interests, and this manuscript that circulated through the government of Elizabeth i (ruled 1558–1603) and among leading merchants and aristocrats gives a clear illustration of the thinking of a certain group of English Protestant activists (including Ralegh and Hakluyt) as to the importance of colonization. Yet, the impact of Hakluyt’s analysis and, by extension, the impetus of fear in the furthering of English exploration, trade, and settlement seems, at best, to have been limited. On the one hand, the alarms he raised may have, at least in ex post facto terms, formed the basis for a Protestant, mercantile English imperial ideology. On the other, however, his rhetoric failed, in the immediate term, to attract substantial Crown support for imperial activities, and, in the wider sense, failed to convince his contemporaries that his fears were of such a nature as to require the ready investment of their purses or their persons. Fear, as it does, complicated matters, however. The genesis of an English Empire may have occurred at the end of Elizabeth’s reign, but early modern overseas trade and colonization undertaken by the English seems to have developed largely due to the pursuit of long-range economic opportunities for which Hakluyt’s fears seems to have held little relevance. The government, lacking the apparatus and, perhaps, the inclination to orchestrate “imperial” behavior, lagged behind both in terms of acting upon Hakluyt’s cheerleading and in formulating an English imperial sensibility – a reality that enabled the Victorian historian J.R. Seeley to comment famously that the empire had been founded “in a fit of absent-mindedness.” While Seeley, perhaps deliberately, took an overly simplified view, his contention did underscore the reality, still all-too-often obscured, that a direct line cannot be drawn between the “origins” and progress of the English (British after 1707) Empire. Moreover, the fears that imperial activities

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spawned inevitably retarded imperial development, geographically, economically, and psychologically.1 For Hakluyt and his circle, as is well known, Spain and its staunch support of “popery” stood at the heart of their fears. The twenty-one points of his brief in support of “spedie planting in diverse places” (“for feare of the daunger of being prevented by other nations which have like intentions”) included observations on the “weakness” of the Castilian Empire’s American holdings that would provide the “speciall meanes [that] may bringe kinge Phillipe from his high Throne.” Otherwise, he warned, the “contynuall commynge” of the wealth of Mexico and Peru to Philip ii would “worke the unrecoverable annoye of this Realme, whereof already wee have had very dangerous experience.” In addition to providing “a great bridle to the Indies of the kinge of Spaine,” English involvement in America would help the Indians “shake of their moste intolerable [Spanish] yoke.”2 Hakluyt’s further fears stemmed from the painfully apparent situation of England that was inevitably aggravated by comparisons with that of Spain. As he and his contemporaries well knew, they lived in a period fraught with difficulties, one regarded by modern historians as among the very worst, certainly in terms of the standard of living in England, and had a correspondingly deep concern for the future of their nation. Social commentators of the last years of Elizabeth’s reign deplored, on the one hand, the gravity of the threats to the socio-political fabric of the realm: a seemingly unprecedented demographic boom that compelled mass migration – itself regarded as a grave threat to order – to London, increasingly, where the seething population lived in loathsome environments as it exploded outside of its medieval walls, died nasty deaths from disease, turned to crime or “idle” pursuits, and entertained abhorrent religious beliefs while “all other englishe Trades are grownen beggarly or daungerous.” On the other hand, the weakness of the English state, personified by the succession crisis generated by its childless “Virgin Queen” and the 1 For Hakluyt’s career and thought, Peter C. Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America (New Haven, Ct.: Yale University Press, 2010), and David Harris Sacks, “Discourses of Western Planting: Richard Hakluyt and the Making of the Atlantic World,” in Peter C. Mancall, ed., The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550–1624 (Chapel Hill, n.c.: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 410–453; on early modern English imperial thinking, David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). For Seeley, J.R. Seeley, The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1971 [London, 1895]), 8. 2 Richard Hakluyt, “A Discourse of Western Planting,” in E.G.R. Taylor, ed., The Original Writings and Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts, 2 vols. (London, 1935), 2:211–326 at 211–213, 313–319.

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inability to impose itself in a seemingly endless war of attrition in Ireland, remained all-too-palpable especially when compared with the apparent power and seeming pretensions to universal monarchy of the Habsburgs : in addition to the conquests of the Mexican and Inca Empires, the apparently unstoppable advance of Spanish-sponsored “popery” in France, the Netherlands, and Hungary suggested England, despite the relief provided by the 1588 defeat of the “Invincible Armada,” was next.3 “Western planting,” though, would cure all: it “will yelde unto us all the commodities of Europe, Affrica, and Asia” and so “supply the wantes of all our decayed trades,” provide “manifolde employmente of nombers of idle men, and for the bredinge [footnote omitted] of many sufficient, and for utterance of the greate quantitie of the commodities of our Realme,” and substantially increase the prospects for the “mayneteynaunce and safetie of our Navye, and especially of greate shipping which is the strengthe of our Realme, and for the supportation of all those occupacions that depende upon the same.”4 This grand plan to bend English fears into English greatness, unfortunately for its progenitors, ran into a number of problems. First and foremost, it fell on deaf ears. Elizabeth and her leading officials (the list of which, pointedly, never included Ralegh) recognized the threadbare nature of their finances as well as the fragile religious settlement of the realm. Thus, while the queen happily accepted her share of the low-cost, high-return privateering voyages of her “sea dogs,” such as Sir Francis Drake, she took great pains to avoid an open breach with her former brother-in-law, Philip ii. Although she bestowed huge grants of American lands upon Ralegh (following the failed colonizing career of Ralegh’s half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert), she did not follow up with money or other tangible assistance to help him perfect these grants. Despite her caution, Drake’s “singeing of the King of Spain’s beard” and the persistent calls for English action on behalf of distressed continental co-religionists made by Ralegh’s leading rival for leadership of the hot Protestant faction, Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, did drag England into the revolt of the United Provinces against Habsburg authority and a lengthy, indeterminate war. Coupled with another lengthy, indeterminate war in Ireland (noted above), this conflict compounded the misery and distress of the Elizabethan government and the society over which it ruled. There was neither time nor money for Anglo-American colonization as the “Lost Colony” of Roanoke Island (off the coast of modern North Carolina) found to its cost. As it happens, Roanoke 3 For England in the 1590s, J.A. Guy, “The 1590s: The Second Reign of Elizabeth i?,” in idem, ed., The Reign of Elizabeth i (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1–19. 4 “Discourse of Western Planting,” 211–213.

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proved the longest-lasting, despite its short life of three years, of Ralegh’s planting attempts. The prime focus of his attentions remained Guiana but Spanish resistance to his endeavors and the ambiguous response of the Indians of the place to his diplomatic overtures left him with nothing except the expense of treasure and self-promotion. Moreover, the leader of these efforts found himself in disgrace after eloping with Beth Throckmorton, one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting and then in the Tower on trumped-up treason charges in 1604.5 Thus, at the accession of the next monarch, James i, twenty years after Hakluyt had composed his “discourse,” the English had nothing to show on the colonization front and no considerable success on the overseas trading front – only the chartering of an East India Company in 1600, along with the establishment of a regular commercial relationship with Russia and the Levant. The fears that had moved Hakluyt’s pen, however, remained and – despite the preferences of Rex Pacificus – even intensified thanks to the doomed attempt of a cell of English Catholics to blow up the political nation at the opening of parliament in 1605 and the emergence of the Dutch Republic as a global economic powerhouse.6 Even so, the change in sovereigns witnessed a revival of interest in colonization as an exploratory voyage was made to the coast of North America in 1602 and two Virginia Companies received charters to undertake settlement in 1606, Hakluyt being one of the chief subscribers to the version that acquired the power to colonize the area between modern Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Florida (occupied by the Spanish). Given that Spain and England had reached a peace settlement at the Treaty of Westminster (1604), however, the antiSpanish fears that dominated Hakluyt’s analysis were not revived although the language of the Virginia Company of London continued to espouse the 5 Sir Walter Ralegh, The Discovery of Guiana (London, 1595); L.H. Roper, The English Empire in America, 1602–1658: Beyond Jamestown (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009), 11–14, 21–33. 6 The incredible nature of this latter wholly unforeseen development, which transpired over the same twenty-year period as witnessed Ralegh’s Roanoke and Guiana failures, did not escape notice. Despite the assistance (sometimes grudging) that Elizabeth’s government had lent the United Provinces and their shared Protestant consciences, some observers came to identify the Dutch as the greater threat to an admittedly overstretched Spain. In a 1651 pamphlet to the Council of State, “The Advocate” charged that “our Neighbors … aimed to laie a foundation to themselvs for ingrossing the Universal Trade, not onely of Christendom, but indeed, of the greater part of the known world,” just as the Spanish allegedly remained in pursuit of universal monarchy, The Advocate: or, A Narrative of the state and condition of things between the English and Dutch Nation, in relation to Trade, and the consequences depending thereupon, to either Commonwealth (London, 1651), 1.

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Hakluytian vision that an American colony would provide opportunities for the “idle” and impoverished through the production of useful but otherwise hard-to-obtain commodities for the metropolis. Yet, the return of English colonists to America did provoke new fears, certainly unintended and unwelcomed by the colonizers, that threatened to strangle this endeavor in its infancy. Furthermore, the abandonment of the Maine venture of the Virginia Company of Plymouth after the colonists’ first winter amidst suspicions of cannibalism cannot have enticed fence-sitters to invest in or migrate to American colonies. Arguably the most serious of these fears, certainly in intellectual terms, was the view that, contrary to Hakluyt and his followers (such as Captain John Smith), colonization, so far from curing social ills, further frayed the social fabric by diminishing the population of the kingdom by enticing subjects from useful employments to pursue pie-in-the-eye schemes in a wilderness, and, correspondingly, giving people airs above their proper stations. This powerful argument received a powerful airing in the 1605 play Eastward Hoe! written and performed before London audiences even before the charters for the Virginia Companies had passed the seals. This work, which was filled with such pointed satirical observations on the character of early Jacobean society – in an age of when such “projects,” often dubious, proliferated – that it left the authors in fear for their ears.7 Thus, it extolled the virtues of the solid apprentice, Golding, and his worthy, if stolid, master Touchstone and specifically identified Virginia colonization as a chief means identified by a group of social climbers, including the flash baronet Sir Petronel Flash, of advancing themselves (and avoiding their debts) without worrying about their personal qualities or the trouble of hard work. They wind up, though, in the Counter prison pleading for mercy from Golding and Touchstone as their drink and debauchery laced scheme having only carried them as far as the Isle of Dogs where they beached in a storm. After the founding of Jamestown, the Virginia Company’s mouthpieces hastened to reassure Londoners (and the government) that theirs was indeed a civic purpose undertaken to advance the public good.8 7 For Jacobean projects and the problems (including fear about their effects) they created, e.g., Michael Zell, “Walter Morrell and the New Draperies Project,” Historical Journal 44, no. 3 (2001), 651–675; Thomas Cogswell, “‘In the Power of the State’: Mr Anys’s Project and the Tobacco Colonies, 1616–1628,” English Historical Review, 123:500 (2008), 35–64; Astrid Friis, Alderman Cockayne’s Project and the Cloth Trade: The Commercial Policy of England in its Main Aspects (London, 1927). 8 Roper, English Empire in America, 40–41; cf. Jean Howard, Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598–1642 (Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).

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The actual founding of Jamestown colony as what proved to be the first permanent English colony in North America in 1607 fanned further fears. This settlement occupies a commanding place in the historiographies as well as in the popular comprehensions (in the way that Seeley sought to correct) of the early modern British Empire, of global modernization, and – last, but by no means, least – of the United States of America. Despite the increasing attention paid over the last half-century to the less salutary effects generated, for instance, by the transatlantic slave trade and by European interactions with indigenous people, it has proven difficult to clear the whiff of Whiggishness that has clung to these subjects ever since American independence. In sum, we still tend to regard the seventeenth-century establishment of English settlements in North America as the platform by which a distinctive, relatively liberal English culture was introduced to a New World and, in turn, came to constitute the genesis of a historically distinctive – even exceptional – nation for better or worse.9 Yet, what proved to be the genesis of the United States did not even constitute the proverbial gleam in a parent’s eye when colonists from three Virginia Company ships landed on an island in the James River in May 1607. More immediately, they failed to find a Northwest Passage to Asia (another of Hakluyt’s motives for overseas activity), mines yielding valuable ores, or any “Indian Threasure.” Worse, the indigenous Powhatans, so far from sharing the promoter’s view that the “Turkishe cruelties” perpetrated by the Spaniards, “whereby they are every where there, become more odious,” would cause them to welcome the English, put the newcomers under siege immediately upon their arrival. Then, the outbreak of the “bloody flux” heaped further misery. Fear of death, either sudden and violent at the hands of the “savages,” or 9 Significant nineteenth-century characterizations that framed ensuing historiographical debate include George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, 10 vols. (Boston, 1854–1878); Francis Parkman, France and England in North America, 2 vols. (New York: Library of America, 1983 [Boston, 1884–1892]); Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” [1893] in idem, The Frontier in American History (New York, 1920). More recent analyses, albeit following deviant tacks, include Gordon S. Wood, The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States (New York: Penguin, 2011); Alfred F. Young, Gary B. Nash, and Ray Raphael, eds., Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers in the Making of a Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1988); and Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill, n.c.: University of North Carolina, 1988).

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agonizing and slow from dysentery, became the predominant emotion among the wretched colonists as a reported fifty of the original 105 settlers died over the first summer.10 This situation called for careful, confident leadership, but, unfortunately, political distrust and finger-pointing predominated laced with further fear, this time of Spanish attack of the sort that had resulted in the notorious slaughter of Huguenots in Florida in 1565. Suspicions of betrayal (almost certainly founded in reality) to the Spaniards permeated the settlement: Jamestown came into existence as a military operation and many of its first inhabitants, such as Captain John Smith, had gained military experience in the Low Countries, but this theatre had witnessed so many instances of spying and switching of political and religious sides, perhaps most notoriously the 1587 handover of the key city of Deventer by Sir William Stanley to Philip ii’s forces in exchange for better employment. At least one early Jamestown inhabitant, the Welsh captain, Peter Wynn had served with Stanley (and had also been implicated in the Guy Fawkes plot of 1605).11 The gripping fears exacerbated by this history aggravated the customary finger-pointing and jockeying in an early modern political nation and they manifested themselves, as the colonists’ predicament continued to deteriorate, in a remarkable incident involving Captain George Kendall. According to the account of Smith, whose narratives dominate the record of the first years of Jamestown, Kendall had charge of overseeing the construction of the Jamestown fort. Within six months, Captain Christopher Newport, the colony’s leader, had departed for England and his deputy, Bartholomew Gosnold, had died leaving a settlement “destroyed with cruell diseases” and beset by “warres” so that some “departed suddenly, but for the most part they died of a mere famine.” Kendall then began “to sowe discord” and was imprisoned, but, according to accounts less sympathetic to Smith, the captain and his allies staged a coup against the president, Edward Maria Wingfield, replacing him with John Ratcliffe (also known as, curiously, Sicklemore), and released the prisoner. Subsequently, the new president exchanged blows with the colony’s blacksmith, James Read, for which the latter was condemned to the gibbet. Instead of suffering execution, though, Read accused Kendall of mutiny: his 10

11

Captain John Smith, A True Relation of such Occurrences and Accidents of Noate as hath Hapned in Virginia [London, 1608], in James Horn, ed., John Smith: Writings with Other Narratives of Roanoke, Jamestown, and the First English Settlement of America (New York: Library of America, 2007) (hereinafter, “Smith, Writings”), 5–40 at 8. P.E.J. Hammer, “A Welshman Abroad: Captain Peter Wynn of Jamestown,” Parergon, n.s., 16 (1998), 59–92.

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evidence (over the denial of his nominal social superior) was accepted and Kendall was executed by firing squad.12 This episode did nothing to settle affairs. Smith assumed the presidency and, according to his famous account (repeated and embellished over almost a quarter-century), set about building the colony despite the machinations and shortcomings of others. Under his leadership, the colonists repaired the church, fort, and storehouse, in conjunction with Smith’s celebrated “no work, no food” policy, while the captain explored the countryside, sent home Ratcliffe/Sicklemore, and secured a truce with the Indians by kidnapping two of them, burning one of their towns, and seizing their boats and fishing tackle. He claimed that only seven colonists of 200 died during his presidency, despite the plot undertaken by “Dutch-men” sent to the Indians who conspired with their sachem, Wahunsonacock, to ambush the captain, the unhappiness of the company of his hard attitude towards the “salvages,” the shipwreck of a relief fleet on Bermuda, the consumption of the colony’s food reserves when the survivors of this fleet did arrive (without stores), and the distractions caused by the undertaking of manufacturing “projects,” including attempts to refine gold, rather than establishing a regular food supply.13 Yet, Smith’s opponents had a different view of this “ambitious unworthy and vayneglorious fellowe, attempteinge to take all mens authorities from them.” Accordingly, it was Smith’s alleged desire to “ingrose all authority into his own hands” that had provoked disputes. In terms of Jamestown’s practical future, however, Smith’s career had only an epiphenomenal impact: whether by accident or the malice of his opponents (the record is unclear), a match touched off a bag of gunpowder he carried around his waist causing him severe injuries that obliged his return to England for treatment.14 12

Philip Barbour connected Kendall, who, like Smith, had military experience in Hungary as well as the Low Countries, to Sir William Stanley and identified him as a spy for English Catholics against Sir Robert Cecil, Elizabeth i’s chief minister, in 1600, Philip L. Barbour, “Captain George Kendall: Mutineer or Intelligencer?,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 70, no. 3 (1962), 297–313. Whether or not Kendall provided information on Jamestown to the Spaniards, the government of Philip iii had a remarkably detailed map of the colony by September 1607, William S. Goldman, “Spain and the Founding of Jamestown,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 68, no. 3 (July 2011), 427–450. To further fuel speculation and suspicion, Wingfield was a Roman Catholic. 13 Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England and the Summer Isles [London, 1624], in Smith, Writings, 199–670 at 353–356, 385–389. 14 George Percy, “A Trewe Relaycion of the Proceings and Ocurrentes of Momente which have Hapned in Virginia,” in Smith, Writings, 1093–1114 at 1095–1097; Edward Maria Wingfield, “A Discourse of Virginia,” in ibid, 950–966 at 964–965. For relations between

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After convalescing, Smith published his second “history of Virginia” in 1612. Five years after the English had come to Chesapeake Bay the fear of humiliating failure was palpable to those, such as the captain, concerned about England’s place in the world. Indeed, the colonists had already moved to abandon Jamestown twice: the war of attrition with the Indians, the (corresponding) difficulty in securing provisions or to establish a commercial relationship with the Powhatans, the terrible recurrence of disease; the inability to locate any sort of economic prospects, and, perhaps underpinning these other difficulties, the failure to settle a government, had left Smith and likeminded people concerned that this opportunity for their nation to compete with the Dutch, let alone the Spanish, would be squandered never to appear again. The captain, for one, had no doubt who was responsible for this embarrassing and dangerous state of affairs: his former employers who lacked colonizing experience, who ignored advice on the ground, who were only concerned with their profits at the expense of the lives of those unfortunate enough to have found themselves at Jamestown suffering under the pompous incompetence of the company’s officers. His account, together with the reports of the disasters that had beset Jamestown that made their way back to the metropolis as well as continuing concerns, sometimes translated into lampoons, about the desirability of pursuing overseas colonization had pushed the Virginia Company firmly onto the back foot.15 The result was the first colony-related propaganda war (of many) that lasted from 1607 until 1614. The colonization naysayers held sway on the London stage while the dismal reports of Smith that blamed the company for the shambles made their way into the public consciousness. The combination cannot have the Powhatans and the English, J. Frederick Fausz, “The Invasion of Virginia: Indians, Colonialism, and the Conquest of Cant: A Review Essay on Anglo-Indian Relations in the Chesapeake,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 95, no. 2 (1987), 133–156; idem, “An Abundance of Blood Shed on Both Sides: England’s First Indian War, 1609–1614,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 98, no. 1 (1990), 3–56; idem, “Merging and Emerging Worlds: Anglo-Indian Interest Groups and the Development of the SeventeenthCentury Chesapeake,” in Lois Green Carr, Philip D. Morgan, and Jean B. Russo eds., The Colonial Chesapeake (Chapel Hill, n.c.: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 225–268; Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca, n.y.: Cornell University Press, 2000). 15 Smith, The Proceedings of the English Colony in Virginia [London. 1612], in Smith, Writings, 35–118. Shakespeare’s Tempest (1611), for instance, clearly suggests the corrosive effects of colonization upon contemporary notions of socio-political hierarchy, Roper, English Empire in America, 43–47; Tristam Marshall, “The Tempest and the British Imperium in 1611,” Historical Journal 41, no. 2 (1998), 375–400.

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done much to generate interest and support for the Jamestown project. The company’s leaders, naturally fearful for their investments and reputations, naturally resorted to the printing press to defend themselves. Alderman Robert Johnson, the company’s deputy treasurer, lamented It is come to pass right worshipful, with the business and plantation of Virginia, as is commonly seen in the attempt and progress of all other most difficult things, which is, to be accompanied with manifold difficulties, crosses, and disasters, being such as are appointed by the highest Providence, as an exercise of patience, and other virtues, and to make more wise thereby the managers thereof, by which occasion not only the ignorant and simple minded are much discouraged, but the malicious and looser sort (being accompanied with the licentious vaine of stage poets), have whet their tongues with scornful taunts against the action thereof, insomuch as there is no common speech nor public name of anything this day (except it be the name of God), which is more vilely depraved, traduced, and derided by such unhallowed lips, than the name of Virginia.16 Two years earlier, William Barret had tried to rebut “such scandalous reports as have tended to the disgrace of so worthy an enterprise.” In the meantime, company officials had undertaken more tangible efforts on behalf of their colony. As Barret noted, relief expeditions had stabilized the colony’s population, its political situation, and its food supply. In addition, French vintners had begun “to plant the Vines” and with “the English labouring in the woods and groundes, every man knoweth his charge, and dischargeth the same with alacrity:” Jamestown’s success loomed, notwithstanding the doubters.17 These defenses, though, had at best a muted effect on both contemporaries and on subsequent generations of historians. Instead, the attacks on the company helped to reduce migration to, along with investment and, perhaps most importantly, interest in, the colony to a trickle. Then, this desperate period of the colony’s history has translated into a historiography that invariably

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Robert Johnson, The New Life of Virginia Declaring the Former Success and Present Estate of the Plantation, being the Second Part of Nova Britannia [London, 1612], in American Colonial Tracts Monthly, 1:7 (April-May 1897), 3. William Barret, A True Declaration of the Estate of the Colonie in Virginia [London, 1610], in Peter Force, ed., Tracts and Other Papers Related to the Settlement of the United States, 4 vols. (Washington, d.c., 1838–1846), 3:8–12, 15–17, 20–21.

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characterizes the most experienced and optimistic English colonizers during the first two decades of the seventeenth century as bumblers.18 Inevitably, given the brief history of English overseas colonization before 1607, considerable trial and error had to occur given the lack of experience and the distance between metropolis and colony, but one has to wonder how much worse the situation would have been had not, most particularly, Sir Thomas Smythe, veteran director of the East India Company and leading City merchant, had charge of things on the metropolitan end. After all, just about anything that could have gone wrong did: the “worst” sort of Indian neighbors – powerful and hostile, but not centralized and in possession of riches, like the Mexica and Incas; shipwreck; the “bloody flux;” a hothouse political environment in the colony. Yet, despite the setbacks, the company obviously persevered although its role (like so much of the early history of Jamestown) remains murky. The tenure of another Low Countries veteran, Sir Thomas Dale, as governor from 1611 to 1616 proved the foundation for recovery and the alleviation of many of the old fears. Dale solved the political turbulence by placing the colony under martial law (it was a military endeavor in its initial incarnation anyway), oversaw the building of new forts, and implemented a system under which the settlers worked three-acre private gardens (previously, all of the colony’s land had belonged to the company) to provide food. The colonists also became more aggressive, attacking and destroying an infant French settlement in Acadia in 1613 under the leadership of Samuel Argall: fear was now disseminated from Jamestown rather more than within the settlement. Argall also pursued (contrary to Hakluytian principles but in accord with contemporary English practice in the Irish colonization wars that ended just prior to the founding of Jamestown) a much more active policy, both military and diplomatic, towards the Powhatans. This culminated in the scheme carried out by Argall and the sachem Iopassus to 18

Most recently in Karen Ordahl Kupperman, The Jamestown Project (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2007). On the other hand, a recent attempt to rehabilitate (at least, intellectually) the company has argued that we should take the language of civic humanism employed in its propaganda effort at face value. According to this characterization, the pamphlets reflect the public spiritedness of its leadership. This proposition is impossible to improve or disprove, but, given the low status of, for instance, “players” and playwrights, pro-company authors would have found the moral high ground relatively easy to occupy. Moreover, given Alderman Johnson’s prominent role in the disputes that fatally wracked the Virginia Company in the early 1620s (for which see Roper, English Empire in America, ch. 4), the degree of “virtue” he possessed personally remains unclear, cf. Andrew Fitzmaurice, “The Commercial Ideology of Colonization in Jacobean England: Robert Johnson, Giovanni Botero, and the Pursuit of Greatness,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 64, no. 4 (2007), 791–820.

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kidnap Pocahontas, favorite daughter of Wahunsonacock. This coup obliged the Powhatan sachem to agree to a peace, and even provide a “quantitie of corne for the Colonies relief” in order to ransom the victim.19 But Pocahontas did not return to her family; instead, for reasons that remain unclear, converting to Christianity, adopting the English name Rebecca and marrying the Jamestown planter John Rolfe. This famous union secured the colony’s future for, in addition to removing the Indian threat, it provided the basis for a publicity tour of London and its environs by the newlyweds that reinvigorated support for Virginia and the Virginia Company. Once again, the design here remains sketchy as does the career of its chief actor, Rolfe, who, arguably, did the most to ensure the successful establishment of the English presence in America. Through his experience and connections in modern Venezuela, he obtained seed for the “Varinas” tobacco that was grown there and was in great demand in England. This development provided a socioeconomic lifeline for Jamestown, where the failure to locate mines, to locate and seize the equivalent of the Inca Empire, and to locate a Northwest Passage had rendered Hakluyt’s promise of Anglo-American success problematic. The prospects for tobacco, although hardly the ideal commodity in terms of the points of view of the Virginia Company and James i, offered an opportunity to salvage the colony.20 By 1616, with Dale set to depart his government, Rolfe was ready to publicize the “true state of Virginia,” which marked the change in the reason for the colony’s being from a military venture to a plantation. To effect this shift, though, Jamestown needed inhabitants. Unfortunately, as the planter-author recognized, its dismal history had rendered it such a dubious concept in the

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For Argall’s expedition against Acadia, Father Pierre Biard to Father Claude Acqaviva, 26 May 1614 [n.s.], Alexander M. Brown, The Genesis of the United States, 2 vols. (Boston, Mass,, 1890), 2:698–798. For the kidnaping, Argall to Nicholas Hawes, June 1613, in Brown, Genesis, 2:640–644. For Dale, Ralph Hamor, A True Discourse of the Present State of Virginia [London, 1615], in Smith, Writings, 1115–1168 at 1131–1132. For the English in Ireland, Nicholas P. Canny, “The Ideology of English Colonization from Ireland to America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 30, no. 4 (1973), 573–598; David B. Quinn, “Sir Thomas Smith (1513–1577) and the Beginnings of English Colonial Theory,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 89 (1945), 543–560. Tobacco, pointedly, did not appear in Hakluyt’s discussion of what useful commodities American colonies might provide, “Discourse of Western Planting,” 233–239, while the position of James i as an early anti-smoking advocate made the pursuit of cultivation of the weed something of an awkward policy, James i, A Counter-blaste to Tobacco (London, 1604).

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minds of his readers as to make them think at least twice before considering migration to America: How is it possible Virginia can now be so good? so fertile a country? so plentifully stored with food and other commodities? is it not the same still it was, when men pined with famine? were there not Governors, Men and Meanes to have wrought this heretofore? and can it now on the suddayne be so fruitfull? surly (say they) these are rather baites to catch and intrapp more men into woe and misery, then otherwise can be imagined.21 Rolfe sought to assuage these concerns: in addition to the “freshe and temperate” climate, fertile soil, and fine harbors with which it had always been blessed, now the government had changed from an “aristocraticall” one – “in which tyme such envie, dissentions and jars were daily sowen amongst them, that they choaked the seeds and blasted the fruits of all mens labors” – to a “monarchicall” one whereby the colonists “were daily ymployed in pallazadoing and building of Townes, ympaling groundes, and other needful busynesses.” Moreover, with peace having been established with the Indians, every colonist could sit “under his figtree in safety, gathering and reaping the fruites of their labors with much joy and comfort;” these “fruites” included maize, peas, beans, English wheat, turnips, hemp, flax, and silk, as well as tobacco. The immediate great success of the tobacco experiment, however, had already generated fears of over-production and over-dependence upon this commodity: Dale had been compelled to enact laws to stop planters from spending “too much of their tyme and labor” cultivating it thereby causing them to “neglect their tillage of Corne.”22 Even in 1616, though, the proverbial picture was worth its thousand words; thus, Rolfe and his wife crossed the Atlantic. On their trip, they were introduced at court and saw a masque, and visited “diverse Courtiers and others” with Pocahontas’ old friend, Captain John Smith, before she died at Gravesend before they could board the ship back to Virginia. Their excursion generated a successful recapitalization of the Virginia Company by 1618 with, for instance, Thomas Wriothesley, earl of Southampton, contributing £350, Sir Edwin Sandys £287 10s, William Herbert, earl of Pembroke, £400, and Sir John Harington £187 10s.23 21

John Rolfe, A True Relation of the State of Virginia [London, 1616], in Smith, Writings, 1174–1185 at 1174–1175. 22 Ibid. Hand-wringing over the Chesapeake addiction to the production of “smoak” continued throughout the colonial period, e.g., Sir William Berkeley, A Discourse and View of Virginia (London, 1662). 23 Smith, General Historie, 443; “A Complete List in Alphabetical Order of the ‘Adventurers to Virginia,’ with the Several Amounts of their Holdings,” [1618?], in Susan Myra Kingsbury, ed., Records of the Virginia Company, 4 vols. (Washington, d.c., 1906–1935), 3:79–90.

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At some point, the activities of Rolfe came to align with those of Southampton, Pembroke, and Sandys in the metropolis and evidence of cooperation – in the form of the dedication by Rolfe of his “state” pamphlet to Pembroke and his reports to Sandys – exists from the period just prior to the arrival of the American couple in England.24 By the time that Rolfe had introduced Spanish tobacco to Virginia and married his Powhatan bride, these gentlemen had become frustrated with the degree of progress that Jamestown had made under the oversight of Sir Thomas Smythe and Alderman Johnson. In the course of the reinvestment campaign for the Virginia Company, the SouthamptonSandys group won control of the company and, under the management of Nicholas and John Ferrar, began a program to capitalize on the appearances of Pocahontas and Rolfe and encourage the migration that would advance the new plantation character of the colony. Recognizing that their contemporaries equated the degree of socio-political status of individuals with their ownership of landed estates that made the seemingly readily available Virginia lands a great theoretical attraction to the long-haul movement of early modern English people, the team first set aside one hundred acres for each colonist who had arrived prior to the end of 1616. Every newcomer who arrived at their own charge after that date received fifty acres (at a shilling rent). For those who lacked the means to pay the cost of pursuing American opportunities, they devised the important expedient of indentured servitude, a variation on the prevalent labor custom of the day. Those who worked the company’s lands for seven years would receive half the profits from those lands with the other half going to the governor to defray the cost of their transport. Potential servants could and did, of course, make arrangements with private masters as well.25

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These letters include the famous notice of the arrival “20. and odd Negroes” on a Dutch privateer, Rolfe to Sandys, January 1619/20, in Kingsbury, Records of the Virginia Company, 3:241–248; Engel Sluiter, “New Light on the ‘20. and Odd Negroes’ Arriving in Virginia, August 1619,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 54, no. 2 (1997), 395–398. All dates from the sources are rendered “Old Style” unless indicated otherwise. As with all patron-client relations, it can be difficult to ascertain who took what degree of initiative, but, e.g., Sir Edwin Sandys to the Earl of Southampton, 29 September 1619, in Kingsbury, Records of the Virginia Company, 3:216–219, for the management of the company affairs by Sandys and the Ferrars and Sir George Yeardley and the Council in Virginia to the Earl of Southampton and the Council and Company for Virginia, 21 January 1620/1, in ibid, 3:424–425. For the indentured servitude plan, “Instructions to Governor Yeardley,” ibid, 3:98–109 at 100–101. For the practice of servitude, customarily involving an annual renewal of the arrangement, in contemporary England, Ann Kussmaul, Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

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Contemporaries certainly valued the acquisition of estates but, once acquired, they required that they be guaranteed from arbitrary seizure; a plantation colony could not thrive in a situation where, as had been the case in Virginia, property rights were wholly subservient to governmental authority and, especially given the distance between the company and its planters, local leaders – now that they had the prospect of advancing estates – should assume the same socio-political roles as their metropolitan counterparts. Thus, Sandys, who earned a reputation as a famous defender of English liberties in parliaments, and his associates repealed martial law and created a representative (along similar lines as the contemporary House of Commons) House of Burgesses to enact laws and, in 1621, a council of colonists to manage day-today governmental affairs.26 These measures achieved results that seem to have exceeded the wildest hopes of Virginia’s new leadership. The Reverend Samuel Purchas, Hakluyt’s successor (the cleric having died in 1616 after turning his interests to the East Indies) as colonization cheerleader-in-chief, proclaimed that “twelve hundred persons and upward” went to the erstwhile graveyard in 1619 “and there are neere one thousand more remaining of those that were gone before.” A self-satisfied Sandys informed the royal favorite, George Villiers, marquis of Buckingham, “that more hath been doon in my one yeare, wth less than Eight Thousand pounds for the advancement of that Colonie in People & store of Commodities, then was doon in Sr Thomas Smiths Twelve yeares, wth expence of neer Eightie Thousand pounds.”27 Pride (fear having been dismissed), however, came before the fall: unfortunately, this “advancement” collapsed spectacularly, although enough of a remnant of the massive influx of English people into Virginia between 1619 and 1623 survived to maintain an English presence (and, therefore, an English Empire) in America. But it was a close-run thing as too much success on the migration front sparked fears of their destruction among the Powhatans (Wahunsonacock having died in 1618). To prevent this, they attacked the English settlements in March 1622 destroying the brand-new school designed to train Indian children “in true Religion moral virtue and Civility” as well as a fledgling iron works. This “massacre” brought inevitable reprisals and another nasty Anglo-Powhatan War.28 26 27

28

“An Ordinance and Constitution for Council and Assembly in Virginia,” 24 July 1621, in Kingsbury, Records of the Virginia Company, 3:482–484. Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes: Contayning a History of the World in Sea Voyages and Lande Travells by Englishmen and others, 20 vols. (reprint, New York: ams Press, 1965), 19:122; Sir Edwin Sandys to the Marquis of Buckingham, 7 June 1620, in Kingsbury, Records of the Virginia Company, 3:294–296 at 295. Treasurer and Council for Virginia to Governor and Council in Virginia, 1 August 1622, in Kingsbury, Records of the Virginia Company, 3:666–673 at 670; Edward Waterhouse,

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Ironically, if the accusations made against the Sandys-Ferrar administration that arose as a consequence of the falling out over control of the company between that group and a faction led by Robert Rich, earl of Warwick, can be believed to any degree, most of these newcomers had suffered horribly from, at the least, the lack of infrastructure at Jamestown to accommodate a rapid population increase, allegedly compounded by incompetent and uncaring overseers so bent on self-aggrandizement that they were only concerned with how many bodies they could shove into the holds of ships. Consequently, Warwick’s partisans alleged, in the fiercely contested pamphlet theatre of this conflict, the colonists succumbed to lack of provisions, lack of defenses against the Indians, and a lack of housing in winter while Sandys and his associates had “ingrossed” nice incomes from the lotteries and other licensed operations of the company (a particularly telling charge as Sandys had made a name for himself as an opponent of monopolies). These convulsions grew so great that James i had to step in and order the annulment of the company’s charter and a royal takeover (originally intended as temporary) of the colony.29 While the factions within the company bickered, Virginia, as we have seen, burned. According to our best figures, some 3,500 to 4,000 English people moved there between the creation of the Sandys reforms and 1623, raising the colony’s population to between 4,500 and 5,000. Many of them, however, died soon after their arrival: a published account favorable to the company gave the population at 2,500 inhabitants by 1624, while a private, hostile one counted 700 people in the colony in 1619, with “3560 or 3570 Persons” arriving in 1619– 1621, but only 1,240 surviving after the “Massacre.” According to this author, another 1,000 colonists came in 1622, but “manie dyed by the way,” but “aboue 500” of these had died “since the massacre” leaving a population of 1,700. A muster roll prepared for the Crown in anticipation of its takeover in early 1625 gave a figure of 1,218 inhabitants.30 Yet, despite these shocking setbacks and the residual fears of Indian attack, death due to “seasoning,” and the sheer unfamiliarity of the “New World” for newcomers, Virginia – thus, by extension, the English Empire in America – had A Declaration of the State of the Colony and … a Relation of the Barbarous Massacre, [1622], in ibid, 3:541–571 at 552–555; Alden T. Vaughan, “‘Expulsion of the Savages:’ English Policy and the Virginia Massacre of 1622,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 35, no. 1 (1978), 57–84. 29 Roper, English Empire in America, 84–92. 30 “Mr. Wroth. Notes from Lists showing Total Number of Emigrants to Virginia,” 1622, in Kingsbury, Records of the Virginia Company, 3:536–537; “A Court held for Virginia and ye Sumer Ilande on Wednesday in ye Afternoone the 7th of May 1623,” in ibid, 2:390–412 at 398–399; Irene W.D. Hecht, “The Virginia Muster of 1624/5 as a Source for Demographic History,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 30, no. 1 (1973), 65–92 at 70–71.

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become worth preserving.31 Recognizing the potential of tobacco, the cashstrapped Crown had begun, even before its takeover of the colony, investigating schemes for developing a customs revenue stream as early as 1618. On the colonial side, Rolfe had overcome practical fears of colonization by showing the shortcut (often more difficult than it looked) by which ambitious Englishmen could approach “gentleman” status: acquire relatively obtainable American lands and turn them to the cultivation of exportable commodities (tobacco, initially, but, later, sugar in the West Indies, rice in South Carolina, wheat and other grain in Pennsylvania and other colonies) through the use of bound labor – indentured servants in the first instance, but (as early as 1615 in Virginia’s twin colony, Bermuda) African slaves – and cultivate patronage networks, both colonial and transatlantic.32 Indeed, despite the severe problems that Jamestown endured in its early history, North America, rather surprisingly, so far from a fearful prospect actually became a vision of hope for certain English people for relief from their fears about the character and future of their society if it proceeded, as they believed, on an erroneous religious course. Consider, most particularly, the group of Brownists from Scrooby, Notts., who, having fled the statutes that rendered their separatist beliefs obnoxious in England had relocated to the Dutch Republic. But there, fearful of losing their “Englishness,” they decided to remove themselves to Virginia. Although they famously wound up at “Plymouth” in “New England” rather than at Jamestown, this would have been highly unlikely had not the English colony in Virginia existed as a practical target for migration (whether as a pretext or otherwise) and had its administrator, Sandys, not been favorably inclined to the “Pilgrims” and obtained a license for them to depart England for America in 1620. The English had begun to spread.33

31

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Wahunsocock’s successor, his half-brother, Opechancanough, was an inveterate foe of the English. Having led the 1622 attack on Virginia, he tried again, aged ninety, in 1644. Captured by his enemies, he was murdered by his guards, Helen C. Rountree, Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown (Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press, 2005). For Crown plans for tobacco, Roper, English Empire in America, 105–112. For Rolfe, ibid, 131–133. For the importance of slavery and the slave trade for solving the labor problems of Anglo-American planters, ibid, 133–139. William Bradford, Bradford’s History “Of Plimoth Plantation” (Boston, Mass., 1928), including Sir Edwin Sandys to John Robinson and William Brewster, 12 November 1617, Robinson and Brewster to Sandys, 15 December 1617, and Robinson and Brewster to Sir John Wolstenholme, 27 January 1617/18, at 40–44.

chapter 4

Fear, Uncertainty, and Violence in the Dutch Colonization of Brazil (1624–1662) Mark Meuwese On 25 December 1653, Hendrik Haecxs, one of the members of the High Council, the senior administrative body that governed the colony of the Dutch West India Company (wic) in northeastern Brazil, reported a frightful occurrence in his diary. Haexcs and the High Council were based in Recife, a portcity and the capital of Dutch Brazil. Ever since Haecxs had arrived in Recife, in late 1645, the city had been under siege by an army of Luso-Brazilian rebels. The wic forces were barely able to hold out, largely because the rebels were unable to blockade the harbor. Five days before the strange event, however, a massive Portuguese fleet arrived, effectively closing the circle around Recife. During this Christmas Day, as the situation in Recife grew increasingly desperate, Haexcs noted that Henrik Harmans, a German soldier in service of the wic, had seen how “the day before at midnight and again this morning at two an uncountable number of black and unknown birds had flown from the forest over Fort De Brune and from there back to the forest.” Haexcs ended the anecdote by stating that only God could know the meaning of the sudden appearance and disappearance of the flock of birds.1 This strange but ominous report makes sense when we realize that for seventeenth-century Europeans, unexplainable natural occurrences such as the sightings of unusual animals, comets, and solar eclipses, were seen as a warning that God was unhappy with the behavior of his people and that He was sending them a sign that something terrible would happen to them in the near future. Divine punishment could be manifested in the form of the outbreak of a disease or the outbreak of war.2 In this context it is likely that Haexcs, in reporting about the strange flock of birds, was dreading and anticipating a military victory of the rebels after the arrival of the Portuguese fleet. Indeed, in 1 S.P. L’Honoré Naber, ed., “Het Dagboek van Hendrick Haecxs, Lid van den Hoogen Raad van Brazilië (1645–1654),” Bijdragen en Mededeelingen van het Historisch Genootschap 46 (1925), 296. 2 Eric Jorink, Wetenschap en Wereldbeeld in de Gouden Eeuw (Hilversum: Verloren, 1999), 45–47. For a comparative English context, see David Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Beliefs in Early New England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004314740_006

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late January 1654, one month after Haexcs had reported on the mysterious flock of birds, the demoralized wic government and army surrendered Recife to the Luso-Brazilian forces.3 This episode provides a rare and brief glimpse of the emotional world of colonial officials in Dutch Brazil. For the first half of the seventeenth century northeastern Brazil became a region heavily disputed between Portugal, Habsburg Spain, which claimed Brazil from 1580 to 1640, and the Dutch Republic. From 1624 until 1654, the wic invested great manpower and materiel in the conquest of the sugar-growing provinces of northeastern Brazil. The Dutch attempts to wrest control of Brazil from Portugal and Habsburg Spain generated constant warfare and diplomatic intrigue which only ended in 1662 when the Dutch Republic formally relinquished any claims to Brazil in return for monetary compensation from Portugal. Historians such as Charles Boxer and Evaldo Cabral de Mello have written extensively about the military and diplomatic aspects of the struggle in the Brazilian northeast. Similarly, José Antonio Gonsalves de Mello and Frans Schalkwijk have documented social and religious life in the Dutch colony.4 One issue that has received little attention from historians of Dutch Brazil is that of emotions, in particular fear and its impact on society and politics. Only recently have historians of the Atlantic world utilized fear as a category of analysis.5 In this chapter I investigate how fear manifested itself in Dutch Brazil, from the time of the first wic invasion in 1624 until the Dutch surrender 3 F.L. Schalkwijk, The Reformed Church in Dutch Brazil (1630–1654) (Zoetermeer: Boekencentrum, 1998), 62. 4 Charles R. Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, 1624–1654 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1957); Evaldo Cabral de Mello, Olinda Restaurada: Guerra e açúcar no Nordeste, 1630–1654, 3rd rev. ed. (São Paulo: Editora 34, 2007); Cabral de Mello, De Braziliaanse affaire: Portugal, de Republiek der Verenigde Nederlanden en Noord-Oost Brazilië, 1641–1669, transl. from the Portuguese, 3rd rev. ed. (Zutphen: Walburg, 2005); José Antonio Gonsalves de Mello, Nederlanders in Brazilië (1624– 1654): De invloed van de Hollandse bezetting op het leven en de cultuur in Noord-Brazilië, transl. from the Portuguese, 2nd ed. (Zutphen: Walburg, 2001); Schalkwijk, The Reformed Church in Dutch Brazil (1630–1654). 5 John Thornton, “Cannibals, Witches, and Slave Traders in the Atlantic World,” William and Mary Quarterly 60, no. 2 (2003), 273–294; Gregory E. Dowd, “The Panic of 1751: The Significance of Rumors on the South Carolina-Cherokee Frontier,” wmq 53, no. 3 (1996), 527–560; Tobias Green, “Fear and Atlantic History,” Atlantic Studies 3, no. 1 (2006), 25–42; Katherine A. Grandjean, “The Long Wake of the Pequot War,” Early American Studies 9, no. 2 (2011), 379– 411. On emotions, see Nicole Eustace, Passion is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, n.c.: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). The pioneering study of fear is by Georges Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France, transl. from the French (New York: Vintage Books, 1973 [1932]).

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of Recife in 1654. In doing so I argue that the inability of the Dutch to establish firm control of northeastern Brazil frequently generated fear, not only among wic officials such as Haexcs but also among Luso-Brazilians, Sephardic Jews, Protestant settlers, African slaves, and indigenous peoples who made up the multi-ethnic and multi-religious population of northeastern Brazil. During the frequent outbreaks of intense fear in northeastern Brazil, soldiers, settlers, slaves, and Indians acted in extreme ways ranging from inflicting brutal violence to suddenly fleeing in great panic.

Portuguese Brazil before the Dutch Invasions

Portuguese Brazil was a prosperous colony in the early seventeenth century. On the eve of the first Dutch invasion in 1624 reportedly 350 engenhos or sugar mills were operating, making the colony the largest producer of sugar in the world at that time. Although the Portuguese had brought sugarcane and skilled cultivators from São Tomé and Madeira to Brazil in the 1530s, it was not until the second half of the sixteenth century that cultivation of sugarcane really took off. The reasons for the delay had been the presence of powerful indigenous nations, French competitors, and the ineffective system of private colonization through lord proprietors or donatários. But when the Portuguese crown had firmly defeated the coastal tribes and French and had centralized colonial government, the fertile coastal areas of northeastern Brazil were quickly transformed into a large sugar-producing region. Two-thirds of all engenhos during the early seventeenth century were located in the two northeastern captaincies or provinces of Pernambuco and Bahia. The Luso-Brazilian senhores de engenhos (sugar mill owners) in those provinces greatly benefited from the growing European demand for sugar. From the port-towns of Salvador de Bahia and Olinda in Pernambuco convoys of ships loaded with sugar departed each year for various destinations in Europe.6 Despite the profitable sugar trade, Portuguese Brazil, and in particular the northeastern captaincies, continued to be vulnerable to threats from inside and outside. Virtually the entire workforce on the sugar fields and in the sugar mills consisted of enslaved laborers. Initially slaves had been forcibly recruited from indigenous groups in Brazil but by 1600 the majority of slaves originated in West Africa, especially from Angola. The Portuguese felt that West African 6 Stuart B. Schwartz, “A Commonwealth within Itself: The Early Brazilian Sugar Industry, 1550– 1670,” in Schwartz, ed., Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450– 1680 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 159–162.

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farmers were better accustomed to plantation agriculture than the seminomadic indigenous Brazilians who, additionally, proved very vulnerable to infection of deadly Old World diseases such as smallpox. To satisfy the rising European demand for sugar the Portuguese imported into Brazil about 4,000 African slaves annually during the first quarter of the seventeenth century. By the time of the first Dutch invasion more than half of the colonial population of Pernambuco and Bahia consisted of African slaves. Although the Portuguese tried to combat African resistance through the selective granting of freedom to small numbers of loyal free blacks, the engenhos were constantly plagued by slaves that ran away into the Sertão, the arid hinterlands of northeastern Brazil. Needless to say, the Luso-Brazilian population of Pernambuco and Bahia was always alert and fearful for slave revolts and resistance.7 An added vulnerability for the Luso-Brazilian population was the ongoing presence of large numbers of indigenous peoples inside and outside the colony. Many of the coastal Tupi-speaking nations such as the Potiguars and Tobajaras had been militarily defeated and resettled in aldeias or mission villages run by Jesuits and Franciscans. Although the mission Indians were legally free, senhores de engenhos often recruited them, through bribery or coercion, as a labor force in the sugar industry. For the most part though, mission Indians were utilized as auxiliaries to fight indigenous groups who still resisted the Portuguese. They were also valued as a military force who could track down runaway slaves. For example, in 1614, mission Indians from an aldeia in Bahia were mobilized to fight a rebellious slave community. The loyalty of the mission Indians was not guaranteed, however, as some groups had been allied with French dyewood traders for several decades before being defeated by the Portuguese. Most mission Indians simply wanted to maintain their autonomy and resisted the attempts of secular and religious officials to be integrated into colonial society. In 1585, mission Indians in Bahia formed a millenarian movement which attracted African and Indian slaves. The movement unnerved colonial officials because it threatened the sugar industry. The Tapuyas, a generic term for a variety of non-Tupi indigenous groups located in the Sertão, were also resentful of the Portuguese because the latter 7 Ernst van den Boogaart, “De Nederlandse expansie in het Atlantische gebied, 1590–1674,” in Van den Boogaart and M.A.P. Meilink-Roelofsz eds., Overzee: Nederlandse koloniale geschiedenis, 1590–1975 (Haarlem: Fibula-Van Dishoeck, 1982), 117–118 (African slave imports into Brazil); Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 65–72 (transition from Indian to African slavery).

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frequently subjected the Tapuya groups to slave raids. The Portuguese justified these raids by portraying the Tapuyas as wild cannibals who had to be “saved” from a savage life by bringing them into “civilized” colonial society. The Tapuya groups retaliated by occasionally raiding sugar mills and settler communities. These raids terrorized the colonial population and made the Luso-Brazilians fearful of the Tapuyas.8 A final fear-factor for the Luso-Brazilian population in northeastern Brazil was the ongoing threat of maritime raids by the French and the Dutch. Although French dyewood traders had decisively been driven from northeastern Brazil by 1600, the French crown sponsored an ambitious colonization attempt at Maranhão Island on the so-called east–west coast of Brazil in 1612. The French colony threatened Portuguese claims to the Amazon River and Luso-Brazilian forces, supplemented with large contingents of indigenous allies, confronted and defeated the French and their Indian allies in Maranhão in 1615.9 By this time, the Dutch had also become a concern for the Portuguese in Brazil. Dutch-Portuguese relations had traditionally been friendly due to substantial trade between the two countries in Europe. The relationship became complicated following the incorporation of Portugal and its colonies in the Spanish Habsburg Empire in 1580. Because the Dutch were at war with Spain, the Spanish crown curtailed Dutch trade with Portugal and its colonies. Thanks to the migration of New Christians from Portugal to Amsterdam in the late 1590s, the Dutch were able to maintain trade relations with Portugal as well as with Brazil. The New Christian merchants of Amsterdam used their family and commercial connections in Brazil to enable Dutch ships to participate in the Brazil trade. At the same time, Dutch authorities frequently sponsored naval attacks against the Spanish Habsburg Empire, including Brazil. In 1604, a Dutch naval force raided coastal Brazil to plunder sugar mills and ships loaded with sugar. During the Twelve Year Truce between Spain and the Dutch Republic from 1609 to 1621, trade between Brazil and the Dutch once again increased although Dutch privateers continued to attack Portuguese ships sailing from Brazil to Europe. In response, several Dutch ship-captains who traded in Brazil 8 Alida C. Metcalf, Go-Betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 1500–1600 (Austin, Tx.: University of Texas Press, 2005), 174–193 (Indian slave trade), 195–234 (millennial movement); Stuart B. Schwartz and Hal Langfur, “Tapanhuns, Negros da Terra, and Curibocas: Common Cause and Confrontation between Blacks and Natives in Colonial Brazil,” in Matthew Restall, ed., Beyond Black and Red: African-Native Relations in Colonial Latin America (Albuquerque, n.m.: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), 85–86 (mission Indians in Bahia). 9 John Hemming, Red Gold: The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians, 1500–1760 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), 198–216.

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were imprisoned in Bahia and Pernambuco. The unpredictable actions of the Dutch made the Luso-Brazilian population weary of dealing with the northern Europeans. For all the prosperity generated by the sugar trade, the colonists of northeastern Brazil often lived in fear of internal and external threats.10

The Dutch Occupation of Salvador de Bahia, 1624–1625

The first episode of fear connected with Dutch Brazil came when a large fleet of the West India Company attacked Salvador de Bahia, the capital of Portuguese Brazil, in May 1624. The West India Company (wic) was chartered by the States General, the assembly of the seven Dutch United Provinces, in 1621, shortly after the truce with Spain had ended. The wic was established as a trade company modeled on the Dutch East India Company. Although its main purpose was to monopolize trade and colonization in the Americas and West Africa, the States General also encouraged the wic to extend the renewed Dutch war against Habsburg Spain to the Atlantic. After the wic had accumulated enough financial means in 1623, the Heeren xix, the board of nineteen directors, came up with an ambitious plan to take control of the lucrative Brazilian sugar trade. Apart from taking control of the profitable sugar trade, the wic directors naively believed that the Luso-Brazilian population would be eager to welcome the Dutch as liberators from fiscal and political Habsburg tyranny. In January 1624, a force of 26 vessels and more than 3,000 soldiers and sailors set sail for Salvador de Bahia.11 Although Spanish officials in Madrid had warned the Portuguese governorgeneral in Salvador de Bahia about the impending Dutch attack, the inhabitants of Salvador were still shocked when the wic fleet appeared in front of the harbor in May 1624. Diogo de Mendoca Furtado, the governor-general, attempted to organize a meaningful defense of the city but the residents and soldiers soon panicked. According to Antonio Vieira, a young Jesuit priest 10

11

Christopher Ebert, “Dutch Trade with Brazil before the West India Company, 1587–1621,” in Johannes Postma and Victor Enthoven eds., Riches from Atlantic Commerce: Dutch Transatlantic Trade and Shipping, 1585–1817 (Leiden and Boston, Mass.: Brill, 2003), 49–75. For the Dutch expedition in 1605, see Henk den Heijer, De Geschiedenis van de wic, 3rd revised ed. (Zutphen: Walburg, 2002), 23. One of the ship-captains held captive in Brazil was Dierick Ruiters; see S.P. L’Honoré Naber, ed., Toortse der Zeevaart door Dierick Ruiters (1623) (The Hague, 1913), xv. Den Heijer, Geschiedenis van de wic, 35–36; Charles R. Boxer, De Nederlanders in Brazilië, 1624–1654, transl. from the first English edition of 1957 (Alphen aan den Rijn: Sijthoff, 1977), 26–29, 34.

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stationed in Bahia during the Dutch invasion, the sight of the wic ships, dramatically fitted out with Dutch flags and banners, together with the sound of Dutch trumpets, greatly intimidated the Luso-Brazilian population. A massive bombardment of the city by the Dutch ships intensified the panic among the settlers. When the Dutch ships landed several companies of soldiers outside the city walls the Luso-Brazilian soldiers “were so terrified that not even the fiery glow and encouragement of the priest could bring them to their senses.” During the first night of the Dutch attack the defenses collapsed completely as rumors spread that the wic troops were already in the city. Vieira sadly reported that “as fear is gullible; and because the night was working to the advantage of the enemy, they all fled as they did not recognize each other and considered everybody to be a Hollander.” During the night practically the entire city population, some ten thousand people, fled to the surrounding countryside, leaving behind most of their belongings. Within less than two days the wic army occupied the capital of Portuguese Brazil.12 Why was the population of Salvador de Bahia so gripped with fear? One explanation is that the Luso-Brazilian population had ignored the instructions of governor-general Diogo de Furtado. In the weeks before the arrival of the wic fleet the residents had been critical of the governor-general’s plans to improve the defenses of the city because they had to contribute to it financially. The settler population was supported in their criticism by the prominent bishop Marcos Teixeira who was suspicious of Diogo de Furtado.13 When the Dutch attacked, the city was simply unprepared for a prolonged siege and the population subsequently panicked. An additional factor that spread fear among the city’s residents was the spectre of being massacred by an angry mob of wic soldiers. In early modern Europe it was not uncommon for soldiers, who were badly paid and poorly treated, to plunder a city and kill its inhabitants after a prolonged siege. During the early stages of the Spanish-Dutch War in the 1570s, Habsburg troops had occasionally massacred the residents of Dutch towns. Compounding the fear of falling victim to rowdy soldiers was the religious factor. For the LusoBrazilians the wic army represented the dreaded heretical Protestant enemy. The clergy based in Salvador de Bahia was most likely familiar with the actions 12

Padre António Vieira, Een natte hel: Brieven en preken van een Portugese Jezuiet, selected and transl. by Harrie Lemmens (Amsterdam and Antwerp: Arbeiderspers, 2001), 14–18, quotation on page 17. See also Den Heijer, Geschiedenis van de wic, 38; Boxer, Nederlanders, 34–35. 13 Vieira, Natte hel, 14; C.M. Schulten, Nederlandse expansie in Latijns Amerika. Brazilië, 1624–1654 (Bussum: Fibula – Van Dishoeck, 1968), 28.

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of radical Protestants who had smashed religious statues and ornaments in Catholic churches in the Low Countries in 1566. As many parts of Europe were plagued by warfare between Protestants and Catholics, the residents of Salvador de Bahia had good reason to expect that the vicious religious conflict would spill over to the Americas.14 The actions of the victorious wic army suggest that the fears of the LusoBrazilian population were not exaggerated. Following the occupation of the city many company soldiers resorted to widespread looting. To the dismay of Vieira and other Catholic officials, churches and chapels in the city also became a deliberate target of Protestant vandalism. After the images in the cathedral had been destroyed, the building was prepared for Protestant services. Other Catholic churches were used as warehouses and garrisons by the wic army. At the same time, the wic commanders tried to win the sympathy of the population. Shortly after the occupation of the city Dutch officials offered amnesty to anyone who was willing to swear an oath of loyalty to Maurits, Prince of Orange and stadholder of the United Provinces. Catholic clergy, with the exception of Jesuits, who were feared by Dutch Calvinists as a subversive organization, were also invited to return to the city.15 However, after the initial shock of the Dutch invasion, the population recovered and fear soon spread through the ranks of the wic’s army. Although the governor-general had surrendered, bishop Teixeira quickly assumed command of the resistance effort in the countryside. Barely a month after the invasion colonel Johan van Dorth, the senior commander of the wic army, was killed in an ambush outside the city by Luso-Brazilian fighters including mission Indians, who cut off his head, a hand, and his private parts as evidence of their martial exploits and in an attempt to scare the wic soldiers. The violent death of Van Dorth came indeed as a great shock to the wic troops who were not prepared to wage a guerilla war on unfamiliar territory. The wic soldiers were particularly afraid of the mission Indians who were skilled archers and who made use of poisonous arrows.16 14

For siege warfare in the Low Countries, see Olaf van Nimwegen, “Deser landen crijchsvolck.” Het Staatse leger en de militaire revoluties, 1588–1688 (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2006), 126–127; C.M. Schulten and J.W.M. Schulten, Het leger in de zeventiende eeuw (Bussum: Fibula – Van Dishoeck, 1969), 74. Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 148–150 (iconoclasm), 178 (massacres). 15 Vieira, Natte hel, 19; Michiel van Groesen, “Herinneringen aan Holland: De verbeelding van de Opstand in Bahia,” Holland 41, no. 4 (2009), 291–294. 16 Vieira, Natte hel, 36 (Indian archers); Charles R. Boxer, Salvador de Sá and the Struggle for Brazil and Angola, 1602–1686 (London: Athlone Press, 1952), 54–55 (death of Van Dorth).

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Following several other ambushes the wic army entrenched itself inside the city and hoped for reinforcements from the Republic. To the surprise of the wic army in Brazil a joint Spanish-Portuguese expedition reached Bahia first in late March 1625. Although the wic garrison put up an effective resistance for one month, deteriorating relations between the soldiers and the military command forced wic officials to surrender the city on 30 April 1625. Although angry Luso-Brazilian settlers wanted to take revenge, the Habsburg commanders, following customary European rules of war, enabled the defeated wic army to return to the Republic. A group of former African slaves who had served as auxiliaries of the Dutch were not so lucky and were resold into slavery.17

Fear and Uncertainty during the War for Pernambuco, 1630–1642

A climate of fear developed again in northeastern Brazil following the second wic invasion of the region in 1630, after the company restored its financial resources through privateering in the Caribbean and Brazilian coastal waters, an activity which also greatly concerned Luso-Brazilians. The wic directors wisely avoided Salvador de Bahia this time and instead targeted weakly defended Olinda, the coastal capital of Pernambuco. In many ways the wic attack on Olinda and the nearby port of Recife in February 1630 resembled the earlier occupation of Salvador de Bahia. Like Salvador, Olinda and Recife were quickly captured by a combined naval and military force of the wic, even though the Luso-Brazilian defenders had again been warned of the impending Dutch attack. Another similarity was that the Portuguese forces again quickly retreated to the countryside from where they initiated an effective guerilla war against the wic forces in Olinda and Recife. To make matters worse, Olinda proved difficult to defend because of its widely extended urban character. Additionally, the guerilla strategy made it impossible for the wic soldiers to obtain fresh food sources outside Olinda and Recife. Barely half a year after their arrival in Pernambuco the wic army was already forced to eat stray cats, dogs, and rats to survive. Moreover, soldiers often suffered from dysentery due to the poor sanitary conditions in the crowded cities. Soldiers who ventured outside of the cities were ambushed by the Indian allies of the Luso-Brazilians. To demoralize the wic army the bodies of slain soldiers were decapitated and mutilated.18 17 M.G. de Boer, “De Val van Bahia,” Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 58 (1943), 38–49. 18 Boxer, Nederlanders, 54–58.

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In this climate of frustration and fear, the wic army retaliated by committing atrocities against the Luso-Brazilian forces. After the bodies of several wic soldiers were found with their private parts stuffed in their mouths, furious company troops swiftly executed captured guerilla fighters. Because guerillas did not abide by the rules of conventional warfare, the wic soldiers felt justified in not sparing their opponents. Sometime in March 1630, only one month after the wic invasion, company soldiers hanged two guerilla fighters, one a captured Luso-Brazilian settler and the other a mission Indian, on the grounds of the Olinda monastery. As ambushes and mutilations by the Luso-Brazilian guerilla forces continued throughout 1630, the wic soldiers became crueler towards their enemies. In December 1630, wic forces succeeded in ambushing a group of guerilla fighters. According to one German soldier who served in the wic army the captured guerillas were killed and their ears and noses were cut off as war-trophies. Mathias de Albuquerque, the Luso-Brazilian commander, complained to wic officials about the cruelties but the Dutch authorities responded that they would end the atrocities only if the mission Indians would stop mutilating wic soldiers. Moreover, when the Heeren xix learnt of the Luso-Brazilian atrocities, they instructed the crews of wic vessels to no longer take Iberian captives on the open sea but instead to throw them overboard. In the early 1630s the struggle for northeastern Brazil was a war without mercy.19 Another indication of the feelings of uncertainty and brutality prevalent among the wic and Luso-Brazilian forces in the early 1630s was the frequent cases of groups and individuals who switched sides. Almost immediately after the Dutch invasion a number of French Catholic soldiers who had enlisted in the wic army deserted to the Luso-Brazilian side. Several of the French deserters who were caught were quickly executed to prevent other soldiers from going over to the other side but some of the deserters wrote letters, which were shot into the wic fortifications with arrows, urging their countrymen to join the Portuguese. At the same time, a growing number of Indians crossed the Luso-Brazilian lines to offer their services to the Dutch. Most of these were 19

Ambrosius Richshoffer, Reise nach Brasilien, 1629–1632 in S.P. L’Honoré Naber, ed., Reisebeschreibungen von Deutschen beambten und kriegsleuten im dienst der Niederländischen West- und Ost-Indischen Kompagnien, 1602–1791 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1930), 1:54 (execution of captured prisoners), 68 (December 1630 atrocity). On the policy to throw Iberian prisoners overboard, see Barent Lampe, Historisch Verhael aller Ghedenckwaerdigher Geschiedenissen (Amsterdam: Jan Jansen, 1632), book 21:46. For other examples of unrestrained warfare in the early modern Americas, see R.D. Karr, “Why Should You Be So Furious?’ The Violence of the Pequot War,” Journal of American History 85 (1998), 876–909; Wayne Lee, Barbarians and Brothers: Anglo-American Warfare, 1500–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

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mission Indians who hoped that the Dutch could free them from Portuguese colonialism. The wic government was initially uncertain how to handle them as most mission Indians continued to fight on the side of the Portuguese. The wic officials also did not trust African slaves in Recife and Olinda because they had burnt down several houses during the Dutch invasion. Although the enslaved blacks wanted to offer their services to the Dutch in the hope of gaining their freedom, company officials responded by forcing most Africans out of Recife and Olinda, keeping only a small group as auxiliaries. Clearly the constant movement of individuals and groups whose loyalty could not be ascertained unnerved wic officials.20 The Dutch colonial government in Pernambuco also displayed great concern about possible spies. Persons who were found to have given sensitive information to the enemy were punished brutally to set an example. This happened to Adriaen Verdonck, a native of Brabant in the Southern Netherlands who had lived in Olinda at least ten years before the wic invasion. Because of his residence in Catholic Luso-Brazilian society, Verdonck was never fully trusted by the Protestant wic officials. Verdonck initially supplied valuable intelligence to Dutch officials about the society and economy of Pernambuco but in January 1631 one Indian reported that he knew about an African slave who had recently carried letters from Verdonck containing military intelligence to the headquarters of Mathias de Albuquerque outside Olinda. wic officials quickly arrested Verdonck and subjected him to torture. After Verdonck, who was described as heavy-set, somehow escaped through a small hole in the prison wall, wic authorities were convinced that he was a spy. Following his recapture Verdonck was tortured to such an extent that he died before he could be executed. According to one contemporary account, four blacks carried Verdonck’s body to the wic courthouse where the Brabander was quartered. As a warning to others Verdonck’s body parts were publicly displayed throughout Recife and Olinda. Despite this brutal treatment, wic officials continued to fear for other spies. Shortly after Verdonck’s execution another individual was arrested for giving information to the Portuguese. This time the suspect, perhaps a company employee, was deported back to the Republic.21 20 Richshoffer, Reise nach Brasilien, 59 (black auxiliaries), 61–62 (deserters), 69 (Indians crossing over); S.P. L’Honoré Naber, ed., Het Iaerlyck Verhael van Joannes de Laet, 1624–1636, Werken uitgegeven door de Linschoten-Vereeniging 35 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1932), 132 (wic officials uncertain what to do with African slaves), 151 (French deserters shooting letters into the wic camp). 21 For Verdonck’s report, see “Memorie van Adriaen Verdonck voor president en raden van Pernambuco, May 20, 1630,” in Old West India Company Archive (owic), Dutch National Archives (na), 1.05.01.01, inv. nr. 49, item nr. 9. See also owic, inv. nr. 49, item 21 (letter

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Meanwhile the Luso-Brazilian forces also greatly feared traitors in their ranks. For reasons that remain unclear the mulatto Domingos Fernandes Calabar defected to the Dutch in 1632. As a native of Pernambuco who was greatly familiar with the woods and hills in the region Calabar supplied valuable support to the wic army by escorting them on raids against the LusoBrazilian forces. As an indication of how much the Dutch appreciated his skills the senior commander of the wic army served as godfather at the baptism of one of Calabar’s children at a Reformed Church service in Recife in September 1634. When the Luso-Brazilian forces eventually captured Calabar in July 1635 they showed no mercy. After a swift trial in which Calabar was found guilty of treason Calabar was executed. Like Verdonck his body was quartered and publicly displayed to intimidate others.22 Despite the gruesome fate of Calabar, the Luso-Brazilian commanders were unable to prevent a growing number of settlers, Africans, and Indians from abandoning them. Contrary to the invasion of Salvador de Bahia when the wic reacted too slowly, this time the Heeren xix dispatched a constant stream of warships, supply vessels, and soldiers to Pernambuco. Although the Habsburg Crown did occasionally send reinforcements to Brazil as well, the Iberian naval and military forces were gradually overwhelmed by the numerically superior wic army and navy. In 1633 and 1634 the wic captured strategic strongholds in respectively the captaincies of Rio Grande do Norte and Paraíba. The wic assuaged the fears of some moradores, the Luso-Brazilian settlers, by granting them religious freedom and guaranteeing them their property. In early 1635 the Dutch also gained a substantial number of mission Indians as allies following the remarkable defection of the Jesuit Emanoel de Morais. De Morais was an important mediator between colonial officials and the mission Indians in northeastern Brazil. The 1,600 mission Indians supplied by De Morais were quickly put to good use against the mobile forces of Mathias de Albuquerque. By mid1635 the military pressure of the wic forced Albuquerque to retreat to Bahia, taking with him 7,000 of his followers, including many moradores and slaves.23 Although the wic was now in control of Pernambuco and several other northeastern captaincies, the Dutch colonial government in Recife grew greatly concerned about the sugar production. By 1637 no fewer than sixty engenhos had been destroyed or greatly damaged. Equally problematic was from political councillors in Olinda to the Heeren xix, September 23, 1630). On Verdonck’s arrest and execution, see Richshoffer, Reise nach Brasilien, 70, 76–77; Lampe, Historisch Verhael, 140–141, notes the spy who was sent back to the Republic. 22 Boxer, Nederlanders, 66–67, 77 (Calabar). 23 Boxer, Nederlanders, 75 (De Morais).

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that the wic was fully dependent on the technical skill and know-how of LusoBrazilian sugar workers and managers. Furthermore, in the chaos of war many African and Indian slaves had fled the engenhos. Finally, from Bahia small groups of Luso-Brazilian fighters, mostly mission Indians and free blacks, infiltrated behind Dutch lines to strike against sugar mills that were still operating. The Heeren xix tried to revitalize the unstable colony by appointing count Johan Maurits of Nassau, a relative of the Dutch stadholder Frederik Hendrik, as governor-general in 1636. Upon his arrival in Recife in January 1637 Maurits quickly expanded the territorial control of the wic in northeastern Brazil and through the conquest of Elmina, the main Portuguese fortress in West Africa, in August 1637, he secured the supply of African slaves to Pernambuco. Maurits and the High Council, the political council in Recife, also tried to boost the economy by auctioning sixty-five abandoned engenhos to wic employees and moradores who had remained behind in Pernambuco. The wic also sought to stimulate the sugar industry by allowing impoverished moradores to buy engenhos and African slaves from the company on credit.24 These measures notwithstanding, Maurits and the High Council continued to be apprehensive about the future of their colony. Despite several military successes, Luso-Brazilian guerilla fighters proved difficult to track down. Roving bands of guerillas and bandits, many of them deserted soldiers, destabilized Pernambuco and harassed the civilian population, especially Dutch and Sephardic Jewish colonists. An ambitious frontal assault on Salvador de Bahia in May 1638 proved very costly to the wic, resulting in the loss of many officers and soldiers. Worse, upon his return to Recife Maurits learned through intercepted letters of the impending arrival of a huge Iberian armada led by Dom Fernão de Mascarenhas, Conde da Torre. Rumors about this armada prompted the moradores in Pernambuco to conspire against Dutch colonial rule. Although wic officials detected the conspiracy, Maurits and the High Council realized that the Luso-Brazilians were not to be trusted. Fortunately for Maurits the Iberian armada was plagued by disease and weak leadership, which enabled the wic to strengthen its defenses. When the armada of Conde da Torre finally attacked in January 1640, the naval forces of the wic repulsed it.25 24 25

Schwartz, “Early Brazilian Sugar Industry,” 166–169; Gonsalves de Mello, Nederlanders in Brazilië, 143 (moradores buying slaves and mills on credit). Caspar van Baerle, The History of Brazil under the Governorship of Count Johan Maurits van Nassau, 1636–1644, transl. with notes and an introduction by Blanche T. van BerckelEbeling Koning (Gainesville, Fla.: University Press of Florida, 2011), 76–85 (Bahia), 155–170 (Conde da Torre campaign); Boxer, Nederlanders, 111–112 (Bahia attack), 113–119 (Conde da

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The threat to Dutch Brazil had not ended, however, as the Iberian landforces resorted to unrestrained warfare in the territories controlled by the wic. In a desperate attempt to defeat the Dutch once and for all, the Conde da Torre instructed the Luso-Brazilian guerillas and the Habsburg soldiers to destroy all engenhos and to not spare the Dutch and their indigenous allies. In November 1639 a letter was intercepted by the Dutch instructing Iberian forces to deliver any Dutchman into the hands of the cannibalistic Tapuyas. After Maurits was notified of these orders, he retaliated by launching an expedition to Bahia with the intention to destroy as many engenhos as possible and to kill everyone except women and children. In April 1640 twenty-seven sugar mills were burnt down by the forces of Admiral Jan Corneliszoon Lichthart, delivering a major blow to the Bahian sugar industry. To the frustration of Maurits, however, the guerillas and Habsburg soldiers were actively aided by the moradores in Pernambuco and other captaincies ruled by the wic. Maurits and the High Council were afraid to punish them, however, as the moradores were essential for the sugar production. The only actions Maurits and the Council took were prohibiting the moradores from carrying arms and to expel from the colony a number of Catholic missionaries suspected of being spies.26 As the warring parties realized that the scorched earth tactics endangered the sugar production, negotiations began in October 1640 to end the unrestrained warfare. During the discussions news reached Bahia in February 1641 of the restoration of the Portuguese monarchy. This political development eased the tense situation in Brazil as the Spanish Habsburg Crown now became a common enemy of the Dutch and Portuguese. Fighting soon ended in Pernambuco, both sides exchanged prisoners, and Maurits invited LusoBrazilians to lavish feasts in Recife to celebrate the restoration. However, while the States-General and the Portuguese Crown concluded an anti-Spanish alliance in Europe in June 1641, the Dutch assembly simultaneously permitted the wic to expand its territorial holdings in the Atlantic at the expense of the vulnerable Portuguese empire. Maurits quickly took action by dispatching a naval squadron to West Africa in May 1641. This strike force captured the important slave-port Luanda in Angola in August and the island of São Tomé in October of the same year. One month later another wic expedition conquered the island-colony of São Luis de Maranhão on the east–west coast of Brazil. As Charles Boxer has pointed out, these conquests outraged the Luso-Brazilians

26

Torre campaign plus conspiracy); Mello, Nederlanders in Brazilië, 142–143 (guerillas and bandits). Frits Smulders, ed., Antonió Vieira’s Sermon against the Dutch Arms (1640) (Frankfurt am Mainz: Peter Lang, 1996), 6–11; Boxer, Nederlanders, 117–121.

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and the Portuguese Crown but there was little that they could do as the military resources of the Crown were limited. When the Dutch-Portuguese alliance finally went into effect in Brazil in July 1642 it appeared that the future of Dutch Brazil seemed secure.27

Fear and the Collapse of Dutch Brazil, 1642–1662

Although the wic directors in the Republic were optimistic about the future of Dutch Brazil following the truce with Portugal, Maurits was much more skeptical. When the Heeren xix instructed Maurits in April 1642 to return to the Republic and to greatly reduce the wic army in Brazil in anticipation of the truce, Maurits and his supporters in Brazil responded that this was dangerous as the moradores in Pernambuco were believed to be planning a revolt. According to Maurits the moradores had grown emboldened by the news of the restoration. The governor-general also pointed out that the moradores were resentful of the wic and Jewish merchants because they would never be able to repay the loans that the company and Jews had extended to them. Other reasons for the feelings of discontent among the moradores were attempts by Dutch Reformed ministers to restrict the exercise of Catholicism in the colony, abusive behavior by wic soldiers, as well as the taxation policies of the wic. Since efforts to encourage Protestant migrants and former wic employees to become sugar planters had largely failed, Dutch Brazil continued to depend on the willingness of the moradores to accept Dutch colonial rule.28 As Maurits concluded, this proved to be an illusion. Already in October 1642 a revolt of moradores and Indians erupted in São Luis de Maranhão which the Dutch were unable to repress. Because the wic was nearly bankrupt, ironically due to its expenses in conquering Brazil, the Heeren xix ignored the warnings from Maurits. In May 1644, Maurits reluctantly returned to the Republic, together with a substantial portion of the wic army.29 27

Van Baerle, History of Brazil, 199–207 (wic conquests); Boxer, Nederlanders, 122–136; Cabral de Mello, De Braziliaanse affaire, 26–30. 28 Van Baerle, History of Brazil, 279–286 (advice from Maurits about how to treat the moradores); Cabral de Mello, Braziliaanse affaire, 31; Schulten, Nederlandse expansie, 83; Mello, Nederlanders in Brazilië, 139–141; Boxer, Nederlanders, 174–177. See also Stuart B. Schwartz, All Can be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (New Haven, Ct.: Yale University Press, 2008), 193–196, suggests that Catholic-Portuguese coexistence in Dutch Brazil was stronger than believed. 29 Boxer, Nederlanders, 187.

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Needless to say, the remaining company employees, Protestant settlers, and Jewish colonists lived in great uncertainty after the departure of the popular governor-general and most of the company soldiers. However, the moradores and the indigenous allies of the Dutch also lived in great uncertainty about the future. The moradores were saddened to see Maurits leave since his policies of toleration had guaranteed at least some rights for the Luso-Brazilians in the colony. For their part, the Indian allies of the wic were worried that in the absence of Maurits, who had been personally involved in maintaining friendly relations with the mission Indians and several Tapuya tribes, the Dutch would neglect indigenous concerns which ranged from coping with deadly diseases to having to serve on too many military campaigns. In fact, Maurits took with him to the Republic a delegation of Tapuyas and Potiguars to ascertain them of the good intentions of the Dutch.30 Although wic officials were able to repair strained relations with the various indigenous groups in the colony, the moradores in Pernambuco eventually rose up in rebellion against Dutch rule in June 1645. Ever since the departure of Maurits the High Council in Recife had petitioned the Heeren xix for military reinforcements since rumors constantly circulated about an upcoming rebellion of the moradores. In January 1645 the High Council even dispatched a diplomatic mission to Salvador de Bahia since it suspected that Portuguese officials there were fomenting the rebellion in Pernambuco. This was indeed the case as the Portuguese viceroy of Brazil, Antonio Telles da Silva, had initiated contact with prominent senhores de engenho in Pernambuco in late 1644 to organize a rebellion. Many of the Luso-Brazilian sugar planters were willing to take up arms since they were heavily indebted to the wic. In June 1645, the rebellion began and because of the greatly reduced army, the High Council was unable to put it down.31 A chaotic and extremely violent period now ensued as both sides sought to demoralize the other through brutal actions. In the captaincy of Rio Grande do Norte, local wic officials condoned a campaign of terror executed by the Tarairius, a Tapuya tribe allied with the Dutch. In July 1645, almost seventy moradores, including women and children, were massacred during a church service. One month later, wic officials approved of another terror campaign in 30

Van Baerle, History of Brazil, 276–277 (wic employees fearing departure of Maurits), 297–298 (colonists and Indians lamenting the departure of Maurits); Schwartz, All Can be Saved, 197. For the Indian concerns, see my recent Brothers in Arms, Partners in Trade: Dutch-Indigenous Alliances in the Atlantic World, 1595–1674 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012), 163–172. 31 Boxer, Nederlanders, 200–205.

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Paraíba in which the Tarairius killed one hundred moradores. These atrocities had the opposite effect as the infuriated Luso-Brazilian rebels in Pernambuco executed captured Potiguar allies of the Dutch. This in turn resulted in a new massacre in Rio Grande when the Potiguars joined forces with the Tarairius and killed eighty moradores in cold blood in October 1645. The campaign of terror culminated with the forced evacuation of surviving moradores from Rio Grande, ensuring wic and indigenous control of that province.32 In Pernambuco and the other captaincies, however, the Luso-Brazilian rebels successfully took control of the countryside and caused a panic among the population that was loyal to the wic. In particular the Jewish colonists and the Indian allies of the Dutch feared a rebel victory since they were seen as traitors by the Luso-Brazilians. By the end of 1645, the wic only retained control of Recife, the island of Itamaracá, the coastal fortress Cabedello in Paraíba, and Fort Ceulen in Rio Grande. Inside these small coastal enclaves were holed up more than ten thousand people, consisting of wic employees, soldiers, Protestant settlers, Sephardic Jews, 2,600 African slaves, and about 3,500 Indian allies. For their survival this multi-ethnic population was largely dependent on food supplies and reinforcements from the Republic. Since the wic was financially destitute this proved difficult. Moreover, in the United Provinces the wic’s costly adventure in Brazil was no longer very popular. Only with great difficulty was the wic able to send several supply ships to Brazil, which arrived in Recife in June 1646 and narrowly saved the exhausted population from starvation.33 The only reason why the wic did not surrender its meagre possessions in northeastern Brazil was because the Luso-Brazilian rebels were also substantially weakened. The impoverished senhores de engenhos lacked the resources to finance their rebel army adequately. Additionally, Dutch privateers intercepted large numbers of Portuguese ships loaded with Bahian sugar, undermining the attempts of Viceroy Telles da Silva to pay for the war against the Dutch. The Portuguese crown also had limited military means and did not want to alienate the Republic in Europe by openly aiding the rebels. In 1647 the 32

33

Mark Meuwese, “A Tale of Two Massacres in Colonial Brazil,” paper presented at the conference “Bloody Days: Massacres in Comparative Perspective,” McNeil Center for Early American Studies Conference, University of Pennsylvania, June 2011. On the DutchTarairiu alliance, see Ernst van den Boogaart, “Infernal Allies: The Dutch West India Company and the Tarairiu, 1630–1654,” in Van den Boogaart, ed., Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen. A Humanist Prince in Europe and Brazil (The Hague: Johan Maurits Foundation, 1979), 519–538. Van den Boogaart, “Nederlandse expansie,” 131 (population in 1645); Boxer, Nederlanders, 220–221 (relief in 1646).

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Heeren xix grew optimistic again after the States-General made available a large war-fleet. However, the expedition of Admiral Witte Corneliszoon de With to Brazil became a costly failure. Although Witte de With reinforced the wic army in Brazil substantially, the poorly motivated soldiers suffered two major defeats against Luso-Brazilian forces outside of Recife in 1648 and 1649. After these two lost battles the States-General were no longer willing to finance new expeditions to the beleaguered wic colony. Morale plummeted in Recife and most councillors and soldiers wanted to return to the Republic. The stalemate in northeastern Brazil continued until the fall of 1653 when the Portuguese crown, emboldened by the recent Dutch war with England, fitted out a fleet to attack Recife from the sea. After a one-month siege the demoralized High Council in Recife surrendered the city, as well as all other wic possessions in Brazil, to the Portuguese crown in January 1654.34 Although the population of Recife feared for vengeful actions of the LusoBrazilian forces, Francisco Barreto, the Portuguese supreme commander, treated the Protestants and Jews in Recife according to the European customs of war. All Protestants were given three months to prepare their departure. If they wanted they could also stay in Brazil although the practice of their Protestant faith would be prohibited. Even the 600 Jews living in Recife were permitted to leave although they had to sell their belongings before leaving Brazil. Barreto even supplied Portuguese ships to the Jews, who all took him up on the offer to leave Brazil. Even so, the surrender of Recife spread panic among the wic enclaves in Itamaracá, Paraíba, and Rio Grande. The greatly demoralized garrisons of Paraíba and Rio Grande embarked on vessels destined to the Caribbean before they received any instructions from their superiors in Recife.35 The indigenous allies of the Dutch were also fearful of the Luso-Brazilian victory. Upon receiving news of the surrender, some mission Indians boarded wic vessels bound for the Caribbean. Other Indian allies fled from the northeast to Ceará, the frontier province on the east–west coast of Brazil where the wic had maintained a small outpost since 1649. Once they arrived at the coastal wic fort the Potiguars and other mission Indians vented their anger. According 34 W.J. van Hoboken, Witte de With in Brazilië, 1648–1649 (Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 1955), especially 157–159 (poor morale); Boxer, Nederlanders, 221–243, 249–286. 35 The pardons promised by Barreto are found in Articulen ende conditien gemaeckt by het overleveren van Brasilien, Alsmede het Recif, Maurits Stadt ende Forten ende sterckten daer aen dependerende, gesloten den 26 January 1654 (The Hague, 1654) (Knuttel Catalogue nr. 7538); Schwartz, All Can be Saved, 197–198; Boxer, Nederlanders, 286–289; Schalkwijk, Reformed Church in Dutch Brazil, 62–63, 266–267.

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to Mathias Beck, the wic commander in Ceará, the mission Indians “did nothing but swear and curse the Dutch whom they had served and assisted so faithfully for many years.” The mission Indians also accused the Dutch of delivering them as “eternal slaves in hands of the Portuguese.” The situation in Ceará soon became unmanageable for the small company garrison as the mission Indians and local Tapuyas burnt sloops and harassed the soldiers and other personnel. Greatly terrified, … Beck and his men were relieved when a Portuguese expedition finally arrived in late May 1654. Meanwhile, one Potiguar leader named Antonio Paraupaba traveled to the Republic to seek aid for his people. Although the States-General entertained him and his family for two years, the Dutch assembly never sent any substantial aid to the indigenous allies of the wic in Brazil. Although the exact fate of the Dutch Indian allies is unknown, many of them appear to have become Catholic mission Indians once again.36 Despite their complete victory in Pernambuco, the Luso-Brazilians and the viceroyalty continued to be apprehensive of a Dutch comeback for several years. Dutch privateers from Zeeland did great damage to Brazilian shipping, especially the sugar trade, in the mid-1650s. Moreover, the States-General threatened to put up a naval blockade of Lisbon, making it impossible for the Portuguese crown to send reinforcements to Brazil. Ethnic relations in northeastern Brazil remained also tense after the expulsion of the wic. According to correspondence intercepted by Dutch privateers in 1657, free blacks, mulattos, and mission Indians threatened to rise up in arms because they felt mistreated by the Luso-Brazilians of Portuguese descent. The Republic was distracted by its own problems, however. In the Baltic, a vital trade region for the Dutch, the Republic was confronted with Danish and Swedish hostilities that took several years to resolve. The wic, the main initiator of the Brazilian adventure, was also bankrupt and the dominant province of Holland had little interest in waging an expensive war in Brazil. After several years of negotiations, with mediation by France and England, the Republic surrendered its claims to Brazil in return for reparation payments, in a treaty with Portugal concluded in 1662. 36

On the mission Indians going to the Caribbean, see Franz Binder, “Die Zeeländische Kaperfahrt, 1654–1662,” Archief: Mededelingen van het Koninklijk Zeeuwsch Genootschap der Wetenschappen (1976), 43. On the Indians in Ceara, see dna, owic, Letters and Papers from Brazil, inv. nr. 67: Letter from Mathias Beck to the Heeren xix, written from Barbados, 8 October 1654 (quotes); Rita Krommen, Mathias Beck und die Westindische Kompagnie: Zur Herrschaft der Niederländer im Kolonialen Ceará, Arbeitspapiere zur Lateinamerikaforschung ii-01, (Cologne: Cologne University, 2001), 70–71; Hemming, Red Gold, 310–311. On Paraupaba’s mission, see Lodewijk Hulsman, “Brazilian Indians in the Dutch Republic: The Remonstrances of Antonio Paraupaba to the States-General in 1654 and 1656,” Itinerario 29, no. 1 (2005), 51–78.

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But when the Portuguese were slow in compensating the Dutch, the StatesGeneral again threatened with war in 1667, which caused panic in Portugal as well as in Brazil. Only after the Portuguese formally pledged to pay the reparations more timely in 1669 did the fear for Dutch attacks on Brazil decline. After more than forty years the Dutch threat to Brazil was finally over.37 Conclusion Fear and uncertainty were constant themes in the history of the Dutch colonization of northeastern Brazil from 1624 to 1654. Unlike most other colonies in the Americas, Dutch Brazil hardly experienced any period of calm and stability. The one-year occupation of Salvador de Bahia was marred by chaos and constant fighting. Similarly, after the wic invasion of Pernambuco in 1630, it took years of regular and guerilla war before the Dutch trade company firmly controlled most of the northeast. Even when a truce was concluded between the wic and Portuguese officials in Salvador de Bahia in 1642, a rebellion broke out in Maranhão and rumors circulated about a LusoBrazilian revolt in Pernambuco as well. In 1645, a mere three years after the truce, the popular rebellion against wic rule started which only ended with the expulsion of the Dutch. The chronic instability and uncertainty generated fear among all the participants and bystanders in northeastern Brazil. Perhaps the most pressing feelings of fear existed between the Luso-Brazilian population and the wic occupation forces. Although the wic granted considerable religious and property rights to the Luso-Brazilians and although some Protestant men married Catholic Luso-Brazilian women, feelings of resentment, hostility, and fear continued to shape the relationship between the two groups. Even the pragmatic and popular governor-general Johan Maurits failed to reconcile the Luso-Brazilians with Dutch rule. As long as the wic army was unable to fully defeat the Iberian forces and to capture Salvador de Bahia the LusoBrazilian population in Pernambuco clung to the hope of evicting the Protestant invaders. The climate of fear, uncertainty, and resentment fostered excessive violence on both sides. Out of desperation and anger the Luso-Brazilian guerillas as well as the Habsburg forces resorted occasionally to unrestrained warfare against the wic army and its indigenous allies. In retaliation the wic resorted to 37

Cabral de Mello, Braziliaanse affaire, 117–179, esp. 130–131; Boxer, Nederlanders, 300–307. For the privateering, see Binder, “Die Zeeländische Kaperfahrt.”

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scorched earth tactics such as the destruction of most engenhos in Bahia. Only after both sides realized that the unrestrained warfare endangered the sugar production did the Luso-Brazilians and the wic engage in serious negotiations. Following the outbreak of the Luso-Brazilian rebellion in 1645, which caused panic among the wic and its Indian allies, the Tarairius and several wic officers in Rio Grande do Norte resorted to a campaign of ethnic cleansing in that province. Out of revenge the Luso-Brazilian rebels executed captured Indian allies of the Dutch in cold blood. When victory was in sight and fear for the Dutch and their allies diminished, however, cooler heads prevailed as was exemplified by Barreto who guaranteed that the Dutch and Sephardic Jews of Recife were to be treated with leniency after the recapture of Recife in January 1654. To what extent was this combination of fear, uncertainty, and excessive violence unique to Dutch Brazil? In seventeenth-century mid-Atlantic North America, tensions between nervous European settlers and equally concerned indigenous peoples frequently led to massacres and unrestrained warfare. In 1622 the aboriginal Powhatan confederacy, concerned about settler expansion, struck against the English in tidewater Virginia. In retaliation, the terrified and outraged English waged an unrestrained war against the Powhatans. Similarly, during the Pequot War in southern New England in 1637, a Puritan expedition determined to punish the Pequots as rebels torched a Pequot village with some 500 to 700 people inside. Finally, in the mid-1640s, trigger-happy settler militias in New Netherland massacred hundreds of Munsee Indians after hostilities broke out between the two sides.38 One contested colonial region that shared the same combination of fear and violence to Dutch Brazil is the borderland of New England and New France in North America. From the 1680s to the early 1760s this region saw frequent conflict and little stability. As some historians have demonstrated, the military raids by the French and their indigenous allies against frontier New England villages spread fear and trauma among the Anglo-American population.39 Similarly, the wars between New England and New France also saw unusually 38

39

The literature on the three frontier wars is extensive. See J.F. Fausz, “The Barbarous Massacre Remembered: Powhatan’s Uprising of 1622 and the Historians,” Explorations in Ethnic Studies 1 (1978), 16–36; Alfred A. Cave, The Pequot War (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996); Paul Otto, The Dutch-Munsee Encounter in America: The Struggle for Sovereignty in the Hudson Valley (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006). John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994); Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002); Evan Haefeli and Kevin Sweeney, “Revisiting The Redeemed Captive: New Perspectives on the 1704 Attack on Deerfield,” in William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., 52, no. 1 (January 1995), 3–46.

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brutal tactics that were inspired by fear, such as the forced relocation of the French Acadian population by the British in the Seven Years’ War.40 Finally, like the Dutch in the 1630s, the British were never able to impose stable control over French Canada. French-Canadians never warmed to British rule, and in 1837 they rebelled against British colonial rule. Ultimately, attempts by European powers to conquer settler colonies belonging to other European powers, such as Portuguese Brazil and French Canada, fostered a climate of fear and instability which the occupying powers were never able to control.

40

Geoffrey Plank, An Unsettled Conquest: The British Campaign against the Peoples of Acadia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).

chapter 5

Rumors, Uncertainty and Decision-Making in the Greater Long Island Sound (1652–1654) Lauric Henneton On 14 May 1653, a Long Island Sagamore named Ronessock testified under oath in front of the English magistrates at John Underhill’s house in Flushing, on Long Island, an English village under Dutch jurisdiction. His deposition, “interpreted by Adam the Indian” was “that the Indians told him that the Dutch said they would go and tell the English that the Indians will come and cut of the English … and that the English were apte to believe as children.”1 If this may understandably sound very confusing for us now, it certainly would have been even more so at the time since at stake was no less than the survival of English settlers between the Hudson and Connecticut Valleys, where Dutch sovereignty was increasingly being challenged by English settlers.2 The central issue for the English magistrates was to figure out whether or not the Connecticut and New Haven settlers were about to be “cut off” by the Indian-Dutch plot, which was the object of increasingly widespread and pressing rumors, and whether those rumors were credible enough to vindicate preemptive armed action. This short deposition vividly illustrates the literally vital dimension of rumors (defined here as unsubstantiated, unconfirmed, unverified information), the fear they generated, the practical consequences on policy-making at local and regional level in the North American colonies and their possible repercussions throughout the Atlantic world. In other words, this essay 1 Acts of the Commissioners of the United Colonies of New England, in David Pulsifer, ed., Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England (Boston, 1859), vols. 9 and 10 (hereafter pcr), 10:44. All dates are “old style,” as they appear in the records. I would like to thank Lou Roper, Paul Otto, Jaap Jacobs, David Smith and David William Voorhees for their comments and suggestions on successive drafts as well as the participants to the panel of the oieahc Conference in suny-New Paltz, where an abridged version of this paper was presented in June 2011, notably Neal Dugre, Alejandra Dubcovsky, David Silverman and Jon Parmenter. 2 One of the preeminent New England scholars once wrote that “the real spine of the New Haven colony was Long Island Sound, and the colony’s leaders saw their future as being based on commercial control of the territories bounded by the sound.” Francis J. Bremer, The Puritan Experiment: New England Society from Bradford to Edwards (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1976), 81.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004314740_007

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explores the impact of what is by definition immaterial, on what is, also by definition, very material – declaring war, levying troops, taking prisoners, killing other people and how the decision-making process had to cope with an unbearable degree of uncertainty. Regrettably, the historical significance of rumors, however central, remains largely understudied,3 just as is the case focused on in this essay, the “crisis” of 1653–1654, stuck as it is between the more intensively tilled fields of Pequot War and King Philip’s War.4 In the present case, the purely local (the New England–New Netherland interface) is embedded in a wider regional field extending from the Delaware River to at least Acadia, with links to Europe (England and the Dutch Republic). The present case took place in a context of at least Atlantic scope, as both the English and the Dutch had their eyes set on the West Indies, if not global scope with Cornelius Vermuyden’s concomitant project for dividing the globe between Protestant powers, and with echoes of the “tragedy of Amboyna,” in present-day Indonesia, ringing in the background.5 More generally, the history of the Confederation of New England, 3 Jean Delumeau, La peur en Occident, XIVe–XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Hachette, 1999 [1978]), 225– 238; Adam Fox, “Rumour, News and Popular political opinion in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England,” The Historical Journal 40, no. 3 (1997), 597–620; Gregory Evans Dowd, “The Panic of 1751: The Significance of Rumors on the South Carolina-Cherokee Frontier,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., 53, no. 3 (1996), 527–560; Tom Arne Mitrød, “Strange and Disturbing News: Rumor and Diplomacy in the Colonial Hudson Valley,” Ethnohistory 58, no. 1 (Winter 2011), 91–112; James Horn, “Imperfect Understandings: Rumor, Knowledge, and Uncertainty in Early Virginia,” in Peter Mancall, ed., The Atlantic world and Virginia, 1550–1624 (Chapel Hill, n.c.: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 513–540. 4 Neal Salisbury, “Indians and Colonists in Southern New England after the Pequot War: An Uneasy Balance,” in Laurence M. Hauptman and James D. Wherry, eds., The Pequots in Southern New England: The Fall and Rise of an American Indian Nation (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), 81–95. Katherine A. Grandjean recently remarked that “the aftershocks of the Pequot War remain somewhat unchartered by scholars” and that “Though they have vigorously debated its causes, historians have given far less attention to the war’s aftermath.” Katherine A. Grandjean, “The Long Wake of the Pequot War,” Early American Studies 9, no. 2 (Spring 2011), 379–411, quote on page 383. Grandjean, however, stops short of the 1653 crisis as her story ends with Kieft’s War in 1645. Salisbury’s article also fails to touch upon the 1653 crisis altogether. In his fine biography of Uncas, the Mohegan sachem, Michael Leroy Oberg does deal with the episode. See Uncas: First of the Mohegans (Ithaca, n.y.: Cornell University Press, 2003), 132–138. 5 Arthur P. Newton, The European Nations in the West Indies, 1493–1688 (London: A & C Black, 1933), 210; Timothy Venning, Cromwellian Foreign Policy (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1995), 159–161. Sir Cornelius Vermuyden, a native Dutch naturalized English, devised a proposal dividing the world between England and the States General: the Dutch would be given

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founded in 1643, is central to understanding the history of New England as a region made up of several interacting jurisdictions, but one that cannot be separated from a history of mentalities, in which emotions, and particularly fear, should feature prominently, here through the prism of rumors.

“More exposed to enemies and dangers than before”

The conclusion of the Pequot War in the flames of Mystic Fort in 1637 and the Treaty of Hartford the following year clearly failed to remove anxiety from the mental stage. It had “left in its wake a human landscape shattered by suspicion, fear, and additional violence.”6 Alfred Cave notes that “the defeat of the Pequots did not bring to Puritan New England any real sense of security,” adding that “one is struck, in reading New England correspondence, diaries, journals, chronicles, and legal records from the four decades between the defeat of the Pequots and the outbreak of King Philip’s War, by the persistent fear of Indian conspiracy.”7 Two allies of the English during the war, the Mohegans, under their sachem Uncas, and the Narragansetts, under Miantonomi, respectively to the west and east of the Pequots’ territory, would spend the ensuing years fighting over the fate of the surviving Pequots, control of the East whereas the English would gain control over the West, including the Americas, minus Brazil. In other words, it was a seventeenth-century version of the Treaties of Tordesillas (1493) and Saragossa (1529). Thomas Birch, ed., A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe (London: 1742) 4 vols., 2:125–127 (hereafter tsp). In the autumn of 1653, the Guinea Company merchants petitioned the Council of State to complain against the “injuries committed by the Swedes upon the coast of Guinea, their encroachments upon the English factories there, and expelling English factors from places bought for the use of the Company.” W. Noel Sainsbury, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and West Indies, vol. 1, 1574–1660 (London, 1860), 409. In the wake of the outbreak of the war, the Dutch States General expressed concern about “how the Coasts of Brazil, Guinea and New Netherland shall be preserved, and the English about those parts annoyed.” The West India Company produced a “Secret Memoir” on the subject in July 1652. E.B.O’Callaghan, ed., Documents Relating to the Colonial History of the State of New York (Albany, 1856), hereafter dchny, 1:482, 483. 6 On the Pequot War, see Alfred A. Cave, The Pequot War, (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996); Ronald Dale Karr, “‘Why Should You Be So Furious?’: The Violence of the Pequot War,” Journal of American History 85, no. 3 (1998), 876–909; more recently: Mark Meuwese, “The Dutch Connection: New Netherland, the Pequots, and the Puritans in Southern New England, 1620–1638,” Early American Studies 9, no. 2 (Spring 2011), 296–323 and Katherine A. Grandjean, “The Long Wake of the Pequot War,” idem, 383. 7 Cave, The Pequot War, 163–164.

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who were divided between those tribes, “influence over the Indians of the Connecticut River Valley,” and control of the wampum-producing Pequot territories between the Pequot (Thames) and Pawcatuck Rivers.8 One scholar has recently noted that, paradoxically, “with the war that they had waged against the Pequots … colonists had sentenced themselves to years of fear and paranoia – an unhappy obligation to police and monitor even the thinnest wisps of rumored retaliation by Indians.”9 In 1639 and 1640, the fear of an attack was deemed likely enough to justify legislation over reinforcing watches and suppressing the sale of guns and powder to the Natives (however ineffectively).10 In 1640, Connecticut wanted to conduct “a preemptive strike against the Narragansetts to disarm a potentially lethal alliance with the Mohawks,” Iroquois from the west bank of the Hudson River, a prospect that elicited “almost hysterical fear” with the English.11 In 1642, pressing rumors from western New England (New Haven and Connecticut) that Miantonomi had been rallying support on Long Island and had visited the Munsees in the Lower Hudson Valley (right in the middle of a war between the Dutch and Algonquian tribes known as Kieft’s War) led the usually more skeptical Massachusetts authorities to have Miantonomi, sachem of the Narragansetts, summoned to Boston in order to find out whether he was conspiring against the English. No plot was discovered but, “directly in response to the conflict between the Mohegans and Narragansetts,”12 four Puritan colonies joined together in a “firme and p[er]petuall league of ffrendship and amytie for offence and defence, mutuall advice and succour upon all just occations for preserveing & p[ro]pagating the truth and liberties of the Gospell and for

8

Grandjean, “The Long Wake of the Pequot War,” 392; Oberg, Uncas, 91; Cave, The Pequot War, 165. 9 Grandjean, “The Long Wake of the Pequot War,” 400; Oberg, Uncas, 87. The English tried to take control of intertribal relations: article 2 of the treaty states in particular that “If there fall out Injuryes and wrongs for future to be done or committed Each to other or their men, they shall not presently Revenge it But they are to appeal to the English and they are to decide the same, and the determination of the English to stand.” The text can be found in Alden T. Vaughan, New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620–1675 (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 340–341. 10 Examples abound; see for instance Records of the governor and company of the Massachusetts bay in New England, Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed. (Boston, 1853–54, hereafter mr), 6 vols., 1:284–285, 293 on watches and 1:323 and 2:16 on the banning of selling guns to Indians. 11 Oberg, Uncas, 94, 97. 12 Ibid., 102.

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their owne mutual safety and welfare.”13 It was first put to use in 1645 against the Narragansetts in their long-standing rivalry against Uncas.14 Uncas had been loyal to the English at least since the Pequot War and was considered reliable by such Connecticut residents as Jonathan Brewster, John Mason and Thomas Stanton. He served as the “eyes and ears of the Connecticut magistrates, regularly relaying rumors and reports of developments that threatened the safety and stability of the New England frontier,” but he was also “not above forwarding false information,” usually “implicating his opponents.” For a long time, the Connecticut authorities considered Uncas as “indispensable” for their safety and systematically sided with him against his admittedly countless enemies. As for him, he also “allowed himself to become the instrument of Puritan frontier management,” helping them secure order and safety in a highly volatile non-linear frontier region.15 Uncas eventually managed to have his Narragansett rival Miantonomi killed in 1643, with the assent of the New England authorities, but far from easing intertribal tensions in Southern New England, Miantonomi’s death, followed by his brother Canonicus’s four years later, created a power vacuum at the head of the Narragansetts in which Ninigret, the sachem of the Niantics, gained prominence. However, the English would never trust Ninigret, just as they had never trusted Miantonomi.16 13

The founding “Articles of Confederation” can be found in pcr 9:3–8. Interestingly, one of the main justifications for the confederation is that “we live encompassed with people of sev[e]ral Nations and strang[e] languages w[hi]ch hereafter may prove injurious to us or our posteritie” and that “the Natives have form[er]ly committed sondry insolence and outrages upon sev[er]all Plantacons of the English and have of late combined themselves against us.” Ibid., 3, emphasis mine. This fittingly illustrates the idea of a “city upon a hill under siege,” to borrow from the title of an article by Carla G. Pestana. Rhode Island, that “sewer” of New England, was conspicuously not included into the Confederation. Joannes Megapolensis and Samuel Drisius to the Classis of Amsterdam, 5 and 14 August 1657, in Ecclesiastical Records of the State of New York (Albany, 1901), 1:400. 14 See narrative in W. Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, Samuel E. Morison, ed. (New York: Knopf, 1952) and Vaughan, New England Frontier. On Miantonomo’s death in 1643 at the hands of Uncas and with the United Commissioners’ blessing, see Grandjean, “The Long Wake of the Pequot War.” As Jenny Hale Pulsipher remarks, “This execution – or murder, as the Narragansetts saw it – cemented the enmity between Mohegans and Narragansetts that would lead to continuous tension and increased English interference in the region.” Subjects unto the Same King: Indians, English and the Contest for Authority in Colonial New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 26–27. 15 Oberg, Uncas, 50–52, 68, 77, 90–91. 16 Ninigret was related to Canonicus by marriage. The Niantics were close allies to the Narragansetts. Oberg, Uncas, 126, 130, 132, 135; Timothy J. Sehr, “Ninigret’s Tactics of

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On top of the Native threat, real or imaginary, were the long-standing border disputes between the English and their ever-expanding settlements and the Dutch in New Netherland. The 1650 Hartford conference and treaty, which produced a clear north–south line on Long Island and on the mainland, had a very short-lived effect which did not resist the confirmation of a state of war between the two home countries in 1652–1653.17 It was in that context that the English magistrates who took Ronessock’s deposition in Flushing, Long Island, together with two agents from Boston (one of them future Massachusetts governor John Leverett) and one from New Haven, were trying to figure out whether or not they were about to be “cut off” by a secret alliance between the Dutch at Manhattan and “the Indians,” in particular the Eastern Niantics led by Ninigret. In so doing, they carefully administered oaths to all deponents, whatever it meant (probably not much) to the Indian deponents. There was a stark contrast between the perception of events by the Massachusetts authorities and by their counterparts in New Haven, which illustrates their markedly different situations. In terms of geography and consequently geopolitics, the New Havenites considered themselves a “fronteere plantation” and were only too aware of being “more exposed to enemies and dangers then before” and in particular to any hypothetical but plausible DutchIndian plot18 – an effective rumor is one that feeds on the plausible and the anxiety derived from a feeling of vulnerability.19 On the other hand, as Massachusetts was geographically less exposed, its lesser sense of vulnerability downplayed the plausibility of the rumor and the anxiety it would generate. As a result, that colony’s mercantile elite were generally more concerned with the

17

18 19

Accommodation: Indian Diplomacy in New England, 1637–1675,” Rhode Island History 36, no. 2 (1977), 43–53; Julie Fisher and David Silverman, Ninigret, Sachem of the Niantics and Narrangansetts: Diplomacy, War, and the Balance of Power in Seventeenth-Century New England and Indian Country (Ithaca, n.y.: Cornell University Press, 2014). pcr 9:188–190 for the text of the agreement. For analysis, see Jaap Jacobs, “The Hartford Treaty: A European Perspective on a New World Conflict,” de Halve Maen 68 (1995), 74–79 and Sabine Klein, “‘They have invaded the Whole River’: Boundary Negotiations in AngloDutch Colonial Discourse,” Early American Studies 9, no. 2, (2011), 324–347. Charles J. Hoadly, ed., Records of the Colony of Jurisdiction of New Haven from May 1653 to the Union (Hartford, 1858), 11, 16 (29 June 1653 session). Hereafter nhr. As Karen Kupperman has noted about the English settlers, “This general sense of great vulnerability was an important element in their fear of Indian treachery.” Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “English Perceptions of Treachery, 1583–1640: The Case of the American ‘Savages’,” The Historical Journal 20, no. 2, (June 1977) 273. Kupperman also gives prominence to guilt in the European perception of the American Natives.

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commercial rivalry with the French over fish and fur on its northeastern interface (Acadia and Maine). The Massachusetts settlers were not only more remote from the Dutch neighbors, but were also under a much less immediate threat from the French to the northeast: the buffer between Massachusetts and either the Saint-Lawrence settlements or Acadia was still large, and a string of settlements north of Salem were being progressively incorporated into a new “York county,” coincidentally created in May 1653, that was intended as a buffer between Massachusetts and Acadia.20 On 14 October 1651, the Massachusetts General Court annexed Kittery, “many of them expressing their willingness,” and noted “how prejudicial it would be to this government if ye aforesaid place and river should be possessed by such as are no friends to us.”21 This was meant to be a mutually beneficial incorporation, rather than annexation, notwithstanding its clear defensive dimension. One fundamental factor in the southern New England context was contiguity, in other words the cultural shock for English settlers to have “land neighbors,” not to be protected by the Channel and the North Sea. To be thus deprived of any natural defenses was very unusual and deeply unsettling, and it made the settlers acutely aware of their own vulnerability. To the contiguity factor was added the close proximity of the Natives from bitterly rival groups, primarily the Mohegans, under Uncas, and the Eastern Niantics (under Ninigret) and their Narragansett allies, who had been comparatively spared by the epidemics that ravaged the region in 1616–1619 and 1633, but also less potent tributary groups (the Montauks of Long Island, the Nameag Pequots of present-day New London) and others who shifted alliances frequently and unpredictably, not to mention the fear of an alliance of any of the above with the Mohawks.22

20

21 22

mr 3:250–251, 274, 278, 333, 361. The Piscataqua River settlements of Strawberry Bank and Dover, as well as Exeter, had petitioned for annexation respectively in 1641 and 1643. Francis J. Bremer, The New England Experiment, 87. A distinguished historian of the northern frontier has noted that Although frontier particularism, local pride, and Church of England sentiment produced considerable opposition, by 1658 Maine was securely within the fold [of the Massachusetts Bay Colony]. “Actually, many of the Maine settlers welcomed Massachusetts jurisdiction because it promised law and order, and the validation of land titles, in a frontier area that had seen far too much of lawlessness.” Douglas E. Leach, The Northern Colonial Frontier, 1607–1763 (Alburqueque: University of New Mexico Press, 1974), 50–51. mr, 4.1:124–125. The proximity factor has been noted by Salisbury, “Indians and Colonists in Southern New England,” 83, but with lesser emphasis than here and no correlation between proximity and anxiety. See also a passing mention in Grandjean, “The Long Wake of the

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In the “present crisis” of the spring 1653, then, the New Havenites and the Massachusetts authorities, like hawks and doves, did not agree about whether or not they should go to war against the Dutch.23 The rumors had filtered during the early spring of 1653, as the state of war between England and the United Provinces was slowly being confirmed. The long process of confirmation, long before the age of Twitter, instant-messaging and round-the-clock news, clearly added to the uncertainty of the situation: it literally took weeks if not months to know beyond doubt what was going on across the Atlantic – it became certain only in February 1653.24 Obviously, in the immediate wake of the Thirty Years War, any European conflict would inevitably have had a “multiplier effect.” Indeed, it seems possible to correlate the explosion of rumors with the certainty of the first Anglo-Dutch war (even more disturbing as it involved two countries at the forefront of international militant Calvinism) and the anxiety derived from it.

“A great rumor of warres”

Rumors of a Dutch-Indian plot became increasingly insistent about March 1653. John Mason, of Pequot War fame and a friend of Uncas, mentioned “some jealousies [i.e. suspicions] of the Dutch plotting with Nyn[igret].” Richard Odell, from Southampton, on the south-eastern tip of Long Island, wrote (in a post-script, not in the body of his letter) of “a great rumor of an insurrection amongst the Indians” but lamented he could rely on “no certain intelligence but by Indians only.” In April, Jonathan Brewster also wrote from “Manheken” (Manhattan?) to John Winthrop Jr., that “there is a great rumor of warres amongst these Indians.”25 Several correspondents of John Winthrop Jr.’s indicated that Ninigret “utterly denies … what is laid to his charge.”26 From Boston, Winthrop’s agent Amos Richardson wrote about “a fleet of

23

24 25 26

Pequot War,” 406 (“these people did not have the luxury of distance” about the English on Long Island.) E.B.O’Callaghan, ed., Calendar of Historical Manuscripts in the Office of the Secretary of State, Albany, n.y. (Albany, 1865), 1:131 (15 March 1653). The phrase “cut off” is too ubiquitous to be referenced here. Emmanuel Downing to John Winthrop Jr., 14 Feb. 1653, The Winthrop Papers, hereafter wp (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1929–1992), 6 vols., 6:248. wp 6:258, 271, 279. On John Mason, a friend of Uncas’s and a key intercultural broker, see Sehr, “Ninigret’s Tactics of Accommodation” and Oberg, Uncas, passim. Thomas Minor to jw Jr., 2 April 1653, wp 6:275–276; Richard Smith Jr. to jw Jr., 9 April 1653, wp 6:278.

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thirty sayle” being armed in the Netherland and bound for New England, but “what certainty therein we know not.” He had also heard from “a bark from the French” (Acadia?) “that there is a grett Dutch ship came from France thether who brings them news that there is a league made between England and France.”27 In the first days of May, Thomas Stanton, an interpreter and therefore a key intercultural broker in the region, deplored that “as for wars,” the commissioners for the United Colonies were “verie catilos [i.e. cautious] with out good growndes” adding that “ther way as yet is not Cleeare, though there bee a sperit of war in the minds and mouths of people,” thereby indicating the authorities had a new bottom-up dimension to take into account. Indeed, he reported that in Hempstead on Long Island “thaye have beaten up the drom and sounded a trumpet and proclayme there plase and parsons and Estates for the parliament of Ingland denouncing the Dutch.” This could be problematic as Flushing and Hempstead were English villages on Long Island under Dutch jurisdiction. This amounted to nothing less than sedition from within, not an attack from without, and could thus incur legitimate retaliations from the Dutch. Not reacting to the western New Englanders’ rumor-fed fears was now having potentially damaging consequences (other than being “cut off ”) as some settlers seemed to be taking the matter in their own hands, bypassing the Confederation’s cooling-off function. Stanton added that “Likewise by waye of Barbadas” he had heard “that a Duch ship [had] tuck[ed] an Inglish ship with sum hundred passengers at the Careebas Ilands – men wemen and Children – and sould them for slaves to the French.” If untrue, this seems to illustrate how rumors are projections of fears (such as loss of liberty and the French/ Papist bogeyman) not altogether impossible and therefore plausible.28 In the process of finding out whether the rumors had any substance and required preemptive action, Uncas, the Mohegan sachem, played an important role, and kept diligently ingratiating the Connecticut authorities, which had protected him for years. Yet how sincere or self-serving he was is as difficult to gauge today as it was at the time. It has been established that “Uncas was a studied expert at conjuring rumors that implicated his enemies” and “eagerly

27

28

This was incorrect, and it is difficult to see what either the Dutch or the French had to gain from spreading this rumor, and what the English could make of it. A. Richardson to jw Jr., 26 April 1653, wp 6:283. Thomas Stanton to jw Jr., c. 2 May 1653, wp 6:289.

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exploited English suspicions as a weapon against his rivals, the Narragansetts.”29 In other words, he may be and has been considered as a “master in the exercise of seventeenth-century realpolitik.”30 During the 1653 crisis, many of (but by no means all) the accusations leveled against Ninigret were grounded on Uncas’s intelligence. Two suspicious Indians captured by Uncas “freely confessed the whole plot formerly expressed” to him and later “before Mr. Haynes at Hartford.”31 More specifically, rumor had it that “Ninnigrett Sachem of the Niantick Narragansets went this winter to the Monhatoes and the Duch Gov[erno]r with whome hee made a league himself gave the Duch gov[erno]r a large present of wampam and the gov[erno]r gave him againe twenty guns and a great box of powder and bullets answerable in order to this designe.” Ninigret never denied having wintered in Manhattan, allegedly to consult a “French doctor,” which accounts for the wampum he was carrying.32 That Stuyvesant sold him guns is less clear, and was “utterly” denied by both Ninigret and Stuyvesant. True or not, this was unquestionably building upon the fear of the “damnable trade” of the Dutch furnishing “ye Indians with great store of guns powder and shott.”33 An “Indian Squaw” also warned “an English Inhabitant in Wethersfield that the Duch and Indians generally were confederated against the English Treacherusly to cutt them of[f,] the time of the execution to bee upon the day of election of Majestrates in the severall colonies because then it is apprehended the plantations wilbee left naked and unable to defend themselves[,] the strength of the English colonies being gathered from the severall townes.” A few years before, the same unnamed Indian woman had already warned the Wethersfield settlers that they would be attacked by the Pequot. They did not believe her and regretted it bitterly as she had told the truth. This time, therefore, she urged them to believe her and “prepare for theire defence.”34 More generally, Native testimonies about the rumored plot were “many concurrent strong and pressing,” coming on a “dayly” basis from “the Northeren and Easteren p[ar]tes,” which means not only from Long Island and the vicinity of 29

30 31 32 33 34

Grandjean, “The Long Wake of the Pequot War,” 402. Central in any dispute would be the control of wampum. See among others Salisbury, “Indians and Colonists in Southern New England,” 87. Salisbury also notes that the 1650s were a period of “increased political maneuvering for many bands.” (89). Cave, The Pequot War, 49–68. P. Richard Metcalf, “Who should Rule at Home? Native American Politics and IndianWhite Relations,” Journal of American History 61, no. 3, (Dec. 1974), 657. pcr 10:11, 18; see also A. Vaughan, New England Frontier, 174. pcr 10:8, 10. Ibid., 17, 18, 22. Ibid., 24.

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New Amsterdam but also from Massachusetts and perhaps as far as Maine (the “Eastern parts”).35 Even more damaging for the Dutch, apparently, was the testimony received as early as 17 March in Stamford, one of the westernmost villages in New England from nine sagamores, presumably Wappinger, “who live about the Monhatoes [and] did voullentarily without any Motive or Reward from the English send their Messengers to Stanford declaring and affeirming (even after they were urged by the English there to testify nothing but truth because they must send theire Testimony to the Gov[erno]r of Newhaven) That the Duch had solissited them by promising them guns powder swords weapons wascoates and coats to cutt of the English.”36 The messengers added that “they would not lye” and “were as the mouth of the Nine Sagamores whoe all spake.” The following day, one of the sagamores came and testified in person. He explained that “The Duch Gov[erno]r about a month before [i.e. February 1653] did earnestly sollicite the Indians in those p[ar]tes to kill all the English but they all Refused to bee hiered by him for that the English had donn them noe harme.”37 At this point we may wonder about the Natives’ often competing diplomatic agendas. Certainly Uncas and Ninigret were at loggerheads, but what about the “nine sagamores”? Was it in their interest to join with the Dutch, at that point rather weak, to counter the seemingly ever-expanding if not encroaching English? If they were Wappingers, they had already suffered heavily at the hands of the Dutch and their Mohawk allies during Kieft’s War ten years earlier. Did they decide to uncover the “plot,” assuming there was one, to the English to undo the Dutch and ingratiate the rising regional power? Had they gone as far as to make up a “plot” story to stir the English against their Dutch neighbors, against whom they would fight again two years later in the Peach Tree War in New Netherland? To what extent were they using rumor-mongering as a diplomatic strategy to gain some protection against their enemies? If this could not be ruled out as far as Uncas was concerned, could it be imagined on the part of the much less prominent “nine sagamores”? What is certain is that Ninigret, and probably many more in the area, had heard that “the English and the Duch were fighting together in their owne countrey,” and it cannot be ruled out that some of them saw there a self-serving opportunity.38

35 36 37 38

Ibid., 22, 23. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 10.

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“For want of due interpreters”

The New Haven and Connecticut hawks could not go to war on their own for two reasons: first, they were small colonies, still thinly peopled, and they could not muster sufficient forces to defeat a Dutch-Indian alliance they saw as particularly potent, especially if the Natives on the western bank of the Hudson joined with Ninigret’s Niantics. The awareness of this weakness only increased their perceived vulnerability and contributed to give more credit to any rumor that seemed to give substance to this state of vulnerability. Therefore they needed allies. Secondly, they were part of the Confederation, or United Colonies of New England, whose founding “Articles of Confederation” specified that, technically, any three colonies could force the fourth to go to war.39 However, although it could decide on war, the Confederation should not be seen as the imperial arm of land-hungry Puritans.40 Indeed, one colony–admittedly the most potent and indispensable one – showed that, by its sheer demographic weight, it could effectively forestall all proceedings and prevent war. Out of the 500 hundred soldiers provisionally levied by the commissioners of the Confederation, Massachusetts was to provide 333, or two-thirds of the total force, against Connecticut’s 65 and New Haven’s 42.41 Part of the difficulty for the Massachusetts magistrates was whether there was sufficient ground to go to war, an attitude that only irritated the western hawks. The elders, who were duly consulted, argued that declaring war too rashly would be in contradiction with the “Gospel of peace” they had come to America to profess.42 Yet one of the most enlightening debates documenting attitudes and arguments regarding credibility in the decision-making process comes in the form the verbatim minutes of a “counsel” held in Boston on 26 April 1653, presenting each magistrate’s opinion on the situation in the first person. One of magistrates, John Glover, “greatly doubt[ed] a cleare ground for a war because its not certaine there hath bin such engaging of the Indians & feare ye Testimonyes of ye Indians may be defective for want of due interpreters.” 39

40 41 42

pcr, 10:7 (Article 9: “It is agreed that neither the Massachusetts Plymouth Connectacutt nor New Haven … shall at any tyme hereafter begin undertake or engage themselves or this Confederacon or any part thereof in any war whatsoever … without the consent and agreement of the forenamed eight Commissioners or at least six of them.”). Thomas Hooker in July 1643 letter to John Winthrop, greeted the Confederation as a “legacy of peace.” wp, 4:401–402. pcr, 10:33. mr 3:316; pcr 10:26.

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It was therefore not the Indians who were intrinsically untrustworthy because they were considered inferior to the English (“those barbarians,” as Roger Williams repeatedly called them), but the blame might be put on the English settlers’ poor linguistic skills.43 As this was not a public declaration to the world, but minutes, it seems unnecessary to rule out Glover’s sincerity. More generally, the linguistic issue was central. During the depositions at Flushing in May 1653, one English servant living “up hudsons river” witnessed that his mistress “can speak very good Indian” and heard about the plot against the English, whereas an Indian witness and interpreter was described as someone “whoe spake English very well.”44 Both the mistress (Mrs. “Vandunk”) and the Native interpreter (Addam) were intercultural brokers, with linguistic skills on both sides of the cultural divide, and acted as filters that had to be relied on by those who did not have such skills. However, as John Glover’s wariness shows, they, even English interpreters such as Thomas Stanton, could not be relied upon blindly. The investigation also raised the issue of the Indians’ credibility.45 The English argued that the Dutch had used Indian testimonies before in North America, thus making them credible. Moreover, the Dutch had been glad to 43

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My emphasis. pcr 10:428–429; Massachusetts Archives, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston (Photostats), vol. 67, 1. Numerous occurrences of Williams calling the Indians “barbarous” or “these barbarians” abound in his correspondence, notably in the Winthrop Papers. See for instance wp 3:426, 439, 451, 509; wp 4:39–41 (3 occurrences); wp 5:279, 280, 326, 328; wp 6:449. In 1649, Williams wrote to John Winthrop Jr’s wife, Elizabeth Reade that “I beleeve nothing of any of the Barbarians on either side but what I have eye sight for or English testimonie.” wp 5:326. Here, however, the credibility of the Indians as such was considered systematically questionable. Any English testimony was considered more trustworthy, but it does not appear to be the case during the proceedings of the 1653 investigation. pcr 10:44, 45. The mistress was Mary Doughty, the daughter of minister Francis Doughty. She was the wife of Adriaen van der Donck. “Up Hudsons River” referred to Yonkers. I would like to thank Jaap Jacobs for clarifying those points. Yasuhide Kawashima writes that “Throughout the rest of the colonial period, lack of competent interpreters was continuously felt. During the revolutionary War, for example, General John Burgoyne admitted that because of their lack of knowledge of the Indian languages, the British were often at the mercy of the French-Canadian interpreters, who were all too prone to give vent to their jealousies and resentments by disaffecting the Indians.” This was an important catalyst of uncertainty for the English/British, a problem that was much less acutely felt on the French side. Kawashima, “Forest Diplomats: The Role of Interpreters in Indian-White Relations on the Early American Frontier,” American Indian Quarterly 13, no. 1 (Winter 1989) 1–14, quote on page 6. Kupperman, “English Perceptions of Treachery.”

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give credit to “the Japans” at Amboina in 1623, basing the torture and execution of ten Englishmen on the testimony of Japanese people who, like the New England Indians, were “others” in the sense that they were not Christians and not Protestants. One Indian who had told an English witness about the plot was described as a “very trusty Indian.”46 Therefore, and even though examples to the contrary abound, the Indians were not considered as intrinsically untrustworthy. The rumors they were carrying could then not be dismissed lightly. For some, though, denials were only an additional sign of guilt: as Ninigret repeatedly denied conspiring against the English, he was therefore guilty, since all conspirators denied conspiring. This sophistry also indirectly applied to Petrus Stuyvesant, who vigorously and repeatedly denied “the plot charged”: the more he denied, the guiltier he looked – at least to the hawks.47 All things considered and in spite of the numerous testimonies, no “sufficient ground” was found for a preemptive strike. Therefore, the Massachusetts authorities effectively vetoed the decision of the United Colonies commissioners and war was averted.48 The crucial point in the present case is that, in the end, fear did not lead to panic, war, uncontrolled and uncontrollable bottomup outbursts of violence, as opposed to the French “Great Fear” of 1789, the ultimate example in the field of historical rumors.49 This is all the more surprising as the crisis of 1653 took place in the wake of both the Pequot War (1636–1637) and Kieft’s War (1643–45). The latter, even if it was on the Dutch side, clearly involved English settlers including the unfortunate Anne Hutchinson and her family. Neal Salisbury, for one, has argued that “the very real tensions between the Narragansetts on the one hand and the United Colonies and Mohegans on the other never developed into war because they were offset by the exchanges of furs, wampum, and European goods linking English traders to the Narragansetts 46 47 48

49

pcr 10:28, 46. Ibid., 26, 28. The Massachusetts elders, obviously consulted, conceived that “the proffes & presumtions to be of much weight to induce us to believe the reality of the plot of the Dutch & Indians agaynst us … Yet, upon serious & conscientious examination of the proffes produced we cannot find them so fully conclusive as to cleare up present proceedings for war before the world.” mr 3:315–316. Two years before, the United Colonies’ commissioners had already declined to unite with the French, represented by Father Gabriel Druillettes, against the Mohawks. R.G. Thwaites, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents (Cleveland: Burrows Brothers Company, 1897), 36:73–111; pcr, 9:199–203. Georges Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France, trans. Joan White (New York: Vintage Books, 1973 [1932]).

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and their allies.”50 In other words, trade trumped war and served as a pacifying factor. The New Haven and Connecticut hawks seemed to have been unaware of this, then. Or perhaps the New Haven settlers, in particular, played up the fear motif because their attempts at settling on the Delaware had been frustrated by the Dutch and the Swedes for a decade.51

“Injurious and dangerous neighbours”

The New Haven authorities were persuaded – if not self-persuaded – of the reality of the Dutch-Niantic plot and of the “imminent dangers of an invasion or war.” They were indignant about the Massachusetts General Court refusal to comply with the United Colonies’ decision to raise 500 men.52 The New Haven General Court argued that the Massachusetts decision contradicted the articles of agreement on which the confederation was founded and, thus, their neighbors “have broke their covenant with us.”53 The court decided to “seeke help elsewhere” and quickly concluded that there was “no better way then to make their addresses to the State of England” and to Cromwell54 so that “the Dutch at and about the Manhatoes who have bine and still are like to prove injurious and dangerous neighbours may be removed … by war if no other means will serve.”55 They further argued that …unless the Duch bee either removed or (so farr at least) subjected that these colonies may bee freed from injurious affronts and securied against the dangers and mischievous effects wch dayly grow upon them by their plotting wth the Indians and furnishing them wth arms agst the English, and that the league and confederation betwixt the foure united English colonies be confimed and settled according to the true sence and, till this 50 51

Salisbury, “Indians and Colonists,” 89. The Swedes would in their turn be subjugated by the Dutch in 1655. Clinton A. Weslager, The English on the Delaware, 1610–1692 (New Brunswick, n.j.: Rutgers University Press, 1967); Oliver A Rink, Holland on the Hudson: An Economic and Social History of Dutch New York (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 242–244. 52 How self-persuaded the New Haven authorities were is a central and thorny question that defies any short answer. Although some self-persuasion cannot be ruled out, an altogether Machiavellian strategy seems unlikely. 53 nhr, 7, 8, 37. 54 Ibid., 37–38, 100, 112. 55 Ibid., 37, 11–12. Sending Capt. Astwood “speedily … about his own necessary occasions” (37).

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yeare, the continewed interpretation of the articles, the peace and comforts of these smaller westerne colonies will be much hazarded, and are like to be more and more impaired…56 They proved successful as instructions for the submission of the Dutch were given to Charlestown merchant Robert Sedgwick stating that “the present undertaking for vindicating the English right, and extirpating the Dutch”57 was “only designed for the security … and peace of the English plantations,” thus making the allegedly defensive dimension fairly explicit. If time allowed, Sedgwick was instructed “to proceed to the gaining of any other places from the enemy,” which may have been an implicit carte blanche to capture longcoveted Delaware Bay. To some degree, this seems to be an interesting case of “anxious aggrandizement.”58 The New Havenites’ success in prevailing upon the Rump Parliament was certainly made possible by the New English patronage networks, which were well represented in England, especially in the navy.59 It is highly likely that the New England “lobby” was behind the publication in August 1653 of a pamphlet entitled The Second Part of the Tragedy of Amboyna or, A True Relation of a most bloody, treacherous and cruel design of the Dutch in New Netherland in America, for the total ruining and murthering of the English colonies in New England; Being extracted out of several letters very lately written from New-England to several Gentlemen and Merchants in London.60 Edward Hopkins, a former 56 57

Ibid., 37–38. “Letters from Mr Corker: 2 of 5,” tsp 1:721–722, url: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/ report.aspx?compid=55294 Date accessed: 06 June 2011. The phrase “extirpateing the Dutch” also appears in a letter from John Leverett to Cromwell, 4 July 1654, in tsp 2:419. He may simply be echoing Cromwell’s instructions. 58 Thomas Hietala, Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in Late Jacksonian America (Ithaca, n.y.: Cornell University Press, 1985). See also the letter from Governor Theophilus Eaton to Governor Johan Rising (of New Sweden), June 6, 1654, in C. Weslager, The English on the Delaware, 265–266. I thank Lou Roper for sharing this reference with me. 59 Susan Hardman Moore, Pilgrims: New World Settlers and the Call of Home (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007); Bernard Bailyn, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., and London, Harvard University Press, 1979 [1955]), 94. 60 The Second Part … was published on August 8, according to the copy in the Thomason Tracts. (109:E.710[7]) therefore several months before the New Haven court decided to ask Cromwell for help. It had likely been inspired by private correspondence between New Haven and London. The publication of the Second Part took place in the immediate wake of another Amboyna-related pamphlet, published on July 2 or 3: A memento for Holland or A true and exact history of the most villainous and barbarous cruelties used on the English

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Connecticut governor, had gone back to England in 1652 and had been appointed Admiralty commissioner and Master of the Fleet prison. He was most probably instrumental in its publication since he would later oversee the printing in London of the New Haven laws.61 In this case, fear (of what might happen) was mixed with anger and outrage (of what had happened) in order to elicit a strong response from the English authorities. The “Tragedy of Amboyna,” referring to the murder of ten Englishmen in the Moluccas in 1623 at the hand of the Dutch, had been used in New England at least twice in the course of the previous months. On top of the argument cited above about the credibility of non-Christian witnesses, the Dutch “att or about the Monhatoes” had allegedly told the English that they should “shortly have an East India breakfast; In which it is conceived they refer to that horrid Treacherus and crewill plot and execution att Amboina.”62 “Amboyna” had therefore been part of the vocabulary of both the Dutch and the English in North America and elsewhere. More generally,

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merchants residing at Amboyna in the East-Indies, by the Netherland governor and conncel [sic] there. Wherein is shewed what tortures were used to make them confess a conspiracy they were never guilty of; by putting them on the rack, and by a water torture, to suffocate them; and by burning them under their arm pits, and soals of their feet, till their fat by dropping extinguished the candles (London: Printed by James Moxon, 1653). More generally, there had been a renewal of Amboyna-related publications after the Navigation Act was passed in October 1651, in particular the reflexive republication of the original pamphlet denouncing the massacre, A true relation of the vniust, cruell, and barbarous proceedings against the English at Amboyna in the East-Indies, (London: Printed by H. Lownes for Nathanael Newberry, 1624). See Karen Chancey, “The Amboyna Massacre in English Politics, 1624–1632,” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 30, no. 4 (1998), 583–598. A letter was to be written to “Mr. Hopkins to intreate him to be helpful and assistant to Capt. Astwood in this matter”; nhr, 37. Hopkins, from Hartford, Ct., would also become an mp for Dartmouth. S. Hardman Moore, Pilgrims, 165, 115n92. Interestingly, the author closes the pamphlet inviting anyone desiring “to be better informed of what here is inserted” to “repair to any Merchant that holds correspondence with New-England, whose letters can evidence the certainty thereof.” (7) If the letters could “evidence” that a rumor had crossed the ocean, it was fallacious to argue that it proved the reality of the plot. The version of the story also differs slightly from that given above: instead of striking on election day, the Indians were said to have picked a Sunday, when all the good Christians would be at church. The author may have been playing the Christian card (against “barbarous” enemies). The heroism of John Underhill assisting the Dutch during Kieft’s War a few years before was also made use of for obvious patriotic reasons in the course of the first Anglo-Dutch war. pcr 10:23, 28.

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it was brandished whenever tension appeared between England and the Netherland, and the 1653 crisis was taking place in the midst of the first Anglo-Dutch war, when tensions would be at their highest since the beginning of colonization.63

“The most shameless and lying libel”

The Dutch records reveal that they too were deep in uncertainty.64 That the Second Part of the Tragedy of Amboyna was successful in generating anti-Dutch (and pro-New England) sentiment in England can be gauged by the rapid – and strident – reaction of the “Directors at Amsterdam.” As early as November 4, 1653, they dispatched a letter to Stuyvesant accusing the Londoners of having “magnified these false reports, apparently started at their own instigation” and to have “forged and published … the most shameless and lying libel which the devil in hell could not have produced.” They also sent a translation to Stuyvesant “so that you may see yourself the strategic measures employed by that nation in order not only to irritate against us their own people but also to bring down upon us the whole world.” This would seem to clear the Netherland authorities from being behind the rumored plot.65 Yet, as early as July 1652, the West India Company had drafted a secret memoir recommending that frigates be sent to New Netherland, so that it could be used as a beachhead against the English Caribbean, thereby deflating the (self-)importance of New England. It was to be kept secret, for fear of retaliation from New England, which was deemed “very strong.”66 In September 1652, the Dutch were said to be “certainly informed” of the imminent danger of an English invasion of New Netherland, although it was not specified whether it should be by land (from New England) or by sea (from England, possibly by

63

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65 66

When the Dutch ambassador complained to Secretary (Sir John) Coke about the seizure of the Eendracht in (old) Plymouth in 1632, Coke replied only: “AMBOINA.” dchny, 1:48. In a letter to their “High Mightinesses” of the States General, Ambassador Joachimi deplored that “So long as this stumbling block be not removed, everything shall turn to our prejudice.” dchny, 1:54. It should be said outright that no evidence seems to exist of any actual Dutch-Indian plot. O. Rink, Holland on the Hudson, 252n66, and Jaap Jacobs, private communication to author, 25 May 2011. Charles T. Gehring, ed., Correspondence, 1654–1658, (Syracuse, n.y.: Syracuse University Press, 2003), 30. dchny, 1:483–484.

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way of Boston). Defensive measures were consequently urged to prepare against an English attack.67 Stuyvesant himself seems to have been embarrassed by, if not afraid of, the New Havenites’ hostility. On top of vigorously denying any conspiracy with Ninigret against the English, he wrote to the New England commissioners and to the Massachusetts authorities (by way of John Winthrop Jr., usually) deploring the “sad news” of the war between the two European nations, and proposing the “continuance of all neighbourly frindshipp alliance correspondency without on either side takeing notice of the unhoped differences between our nations in Europe,” as well as “the continuance of trade and com[m]erce as was before.” He attributed the tension between his colony and the New Haven neighbors to “falce reports rising from the Indians” and proposed the English “a defencive and offencive war against all Indians and other enimies desturbers of the good inhabitants of both provinces.”68 These “falce reports” would tend to support the hypothesis of rumormongering as a part of Native diplomacy, with both the English and the Dutch, in a context of war in Europe, left to figure out how to react, what and who to believe, who to protect and who to distrust. Conclusion Dutch protests notwithstanding, Sedgwick and his fleet arrived in Boston with instructions to “extirpate” the Dutch. Yet before they could attack New Amsterdam, they received news of peace in Europe, so they could not complete their mission.69 Sedgwick consequently turned to Acadia as second-best option:70 the Massachusetts doves’ agenda was markedly different from that of 67 68

69

70

Ibid., 487, 488. pcr 10:41 (24 May 1653). Very soon after his arrival in New Amsterdam, Stuyvesant had to vindicate himself against accusations of inciting the Mohawks against the English; P. Stuyvesant to jw, 3 April 1648, wp 5:211. The peace was signed on 5 April 1654 and news received on June 20 in Boston. As late as 23 June 1654 Theophilus Eaton, the Governor of New Haven, “acquainted the [General] court with some letters he had received from Mr. Leete, from Boston, informing that the designe against ye Duch is like to goe on.” nhr, 107–108. tsp, 2:419: Major Robert Sedgwick to the Lord Protector, Boston, July 1, 1654: “Our shippes being provided and fitted for the former designe, and our ladeing not readye, it was thought best, according to our commission, to spend a lyttle tyme in rangeing the coast against the French, who use tradinge and fishinge heareaboute. The shippes are to sayle next faire winde, if God permitt.”

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the western New Englanders’, as Acadia was then much less of a life-threatening presence.71 To their minds, the conquest of Acadia was much more a question of commercial rivalry over fish and fur in a burgeoning Atlantic economy. Ironically, the southwestern hotspot was not pacified by the outbreak of peace in Europe, and the northeastern buffer created by the incorporation of Yorkshire County was consolidated by the seizure of Acadia.72 Yet, although the capture of Acadia elicited fears of “warres with France,” France was only just out of its own civil war, known as the Fronde (1648–1653) and therefore hardly capable of launching a powerful avenging expedition across the Atlantic.73 The loss of Acadia was never acknowledged by the French as it had taken place during peacetime. This is why it was ceded back to the French so easily in 1667 at the peace of Breda – to the “great dis[conten]t and murmuring of the Government of Boston, that [His M]a:ty, without their knowledge or consent, should part [suc]h a place, soe profitable unto them, from whence they drew great quantities of Beaver, and other peltry, besides the ffishing for Codd.”74 Therefore, New England was secure on both its northeastern and southwestern borders only from 1664 to 1667, or 1670, when Acadia was finally and reluctantly ceded back to the French. Immediately after the capture of Acadia, in September 1654, the four United Colonies agreed to raise an army of about 300 soldiers against Ninigret, who had attacked Long Island Indians who were “friends” but also “tributaries” to the English. Now that the Dutch were no longer an enemy, the fear of Dutch-Indian conspiracy had disappeared and the equation had become simpler. In the end, again, English pressure was enough and no war was waged.75 71

72 73

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75

See John Leverett’s letter to Cromwell quoted above: “to spend a little tyme upon [the] coast in lookeing after the French might turne to some accompt, and be of some use to the English in these parts.” There was not yet talk of Franco-Indian alliances or Jesuitsupported Indian plots. See note 21 above. John Richard to jw Jr., 26 Sept. 1653, wp 6:433. For an account of Sedgwick’s victorious expedition, see Leverett’s letter to Cromwell, 5 Sept. 1654 in tsp 2:583–584. Moreover, Giovanni Sagredo, the Venetian ambassador in Paris, wrote to the Doge and Senate in December 1654 that “the Cardinal [Mazarin, Louis xiv’s chief minister] cares very little about the loss because it does not directly affect the king.” Calendar of State Papers Relating to English Affairs in the Archives of Venice, Volume 29: 1653–1654 (1929), 280–293. British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=89775 Accessed 18 September 2013. Add. Mss. 28089, British Library, London, ff. 12v–13v. The quote is taken from an important report entitled “The present state of New England,” by Edward Randolph, whose antipuritan and anti-Massachusetts bias requires no explanation. Alden Vaughan rightly argues that the Bay Colony had been “stung by charges that [it] had violated its covenant with its sister colonies,” implying that agreeing to levy troops

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That rumors kept their central role from one century to the next is an element of continuity. The main element of change would be the profound institutional change in New England, not so much after King Philip’s War as such, as after the imperial reorganization under the later Stuarts. Paradoxically, as Owen Stanwood has remarked, “the push for empire,” advocated by such New England nemeses as William Blathwayt and Edward Randolph, “came specifically out of a fear of the French, a fear that many colonists shared with their brethren in England,” a fear that was fed by rumors of the dark designs of the French and their natives allies, but also Catholics and even imperial advocates.76 Institutionally, as Alden Vaughan has remarked, the 1653–54 crisis was something of a watershed as it weakened the Confederation and “from 1655 to the outbreak of King Philip’s War in 1675, [it] was a shadow organization.”77 When Richard Nicolls, the first English governor of New York, was confronted with hostile rumors at the time of the second Anglo-Dutch war, he proposed an intercolonial defense scheme to Connecticut governor John Winthrop Jr., in 1665 and again in 1666, mentioning bruits of French and Indian movement. Predictably, the Connecticut General Court dragged its feet. Once Nicolls had contracted an alliance with the Mohawks, the New English colonies argued that an alliance with their Algonquian allies was ruled out, and he could only wish the Confederation was more of a “shadow” of its former self.78 Several embedded or overlapping histories have been touched upon in the case studied here: first, the history of New England as a region and its development as an English enclave between the embryonic Dutch and French North American settlements, and in the midst of Native American diplomatic intrigues, cannot be separated from the history of the Confederation of New England. Secondly, the institutional history of the Confederation of New England cannot only involve a history of abstract political principles revolving around sovereignty and other concepts: it simply cannot be separated from the day-to-day workings of its human, all too human, component, and its fuzzy, hazy, was not only made easier by peace in Europe and necessary by fear of anti-English anger on the Montauks’ side, but also because it provided a good opportunity to make amends with the three “sister” colonies. New England Frontier, 175. See also Sehr, “Ninigret’s Tactics of Accommodation,” 50. 76 Owen Stanwood, “The Protestant Moment: Antipopery, the Revolution of 1688–1689, and the Making of an Anglo-American Empire,” Journal of British Studies 46, no. 3, (July 2007), 489–497. See also Steven C.A. Pincus, “From Butterboxes to Wooden Shoes: The Shift in English Popular Sentiment from Anti-Dutch to Anti-French in the 1670s,” The Historical Journal 38, no. 2, (June 1995), 333–361. 77 Vaughan, New England Frontier, 176; Pulsipher, Subjects unto the Same King, 34. 78 Robert Black, The Younger John Winthrop, 292–295.

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messy, irrational and uncertain dimensions. Thirdly, the rumors and fears that informed and affected the mental and diplomatic context in which the 1653 crisis took place show that the history of mentalities and emotions (the human factor) is central in the two aforementioned histories (regional and institutional) and cannot be overlooked or brushed away in a few general sentences. Fourthly, these histories (including the history of mentalities) deserve a genuine transatlantic if not fully “Atlantic” treatment, as David Hall, for one, has done in Worlds of Wonder, resorting to the work of French historians of the early modern period.79 Such comparative history enriches that of each side of the Atlantic, especially through the use of non-English and of non-Protestant historiographies. Lastly, close attention to the 1653 crisis on an almost everyday basis precludes sweeping generalizations inevitable when only looking at the level of a century in which the Pequot War and King Philip’s War loom so large. Thus, “the middle decades of the seventeenth century in Southern New England” look “simply” like “a logical sequence between [the two], during which the relentless expansion of the English and retreat of the Indians took a less bellicose form.” Looking at the scare (genuine or feigned) created by the rumors of an Indian-Dutch plot in New Haven and Connecticut, this “uneasy” period may be dismissed a bit too hastily, especially as war was averted, which makes it look anticlimactic. Without overstating the case, however, the 1653 crisis and other averted conflicts from these dark ages, or soft underbelly, of New England history have a lot to tell us in terms of mentalities, in other words how things worked when the human factor is brought back into the picture.80

79 80

David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Beliefs in Early New England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). The quotes are from Salisbury, “Indians and Colonists,” 94. This is why Katherine Grandjean’s work on the environmental origins of the Pequot War in a recent William and Mary Quarterly piece is important and should be emulated; “New World Tempests: Environment, Scarcity, and the Coming of the Pequot War,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., 68, no. 1 (Jan. 2011), 75–100.

chapter 6

“Our fears surpass our hopes”: Virginian Reactions to the Execution of Charles i (1649–1652)1 David L. Smith

Introduction: Context and Historiography

On the afternoon of 30 January 1649, on a specially built scaffold outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall, Charles i was publicly executed. Many of those who witnessed this event reacted with shock and disbelief. Among those present was the seventeen-year-old Philip Henry who wrote that “there was such a groan by the thousands then present, as I never heard before and desire I may never hear again.”2 The Royalist John Nalson later recalled that the King’s “blood was taken up by divers persons for different ends: by some as trophies of their villainy; by others as relics of a martyr, and in some hath had the same effect (by the blessing of God) which was often found in his sacred touch when living.”3 On 5 February, the Scottish Parliament, appalled that their King had been executed by the English without any consultation, proclaimed Charles ii King of Great Britain, France and Ireland.4 Four days later, on the day of the King’s burial in St George’s Chapel at Windsor, a collection of his prayers and meditations, mostly ghost-written by his chaplain John Gauden, was published under the title Eikon Basilike: it quickly became a bestseller, and within a year went through thirty-nine English editions together with twenty editions in foreign languages including Latin, French, German and Dutch.5 The monarchy was formally abolished on 17 March, and on 19 May England was declared a

1 An early version of parts of this chapter was presented to the Summer Academy in Atlantic History held at Bayreuth in September 2010. I am very grateful to Lauric Henneton, Sarah Barber and Lou Roper for their helpful comments and suggestions on a draft of the essay. 2 Matthew Henry Lee, ed., Diaries and Letters of Philip Henry, m.a., 1631–96 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1882), 12. 3 John Nalson, A True copy of the journal of the High Court of Justice for the tryal of K. Charles i (London, 1684; Wing, T2645), 118. 4 John R. Young, The Scottish Parliament, 1639–1661: A Political and Constitutional Analysis (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1996), 223–225. 5 Andrew Lacey, The Cult of King Charles the Martyr (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2003), 76–94.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004314740_008

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“Commonwealth and Free State.”6 Fearing a Royalist backlash, the fledgling republic damped down opposition within England and then embarked on wars of conquest, led by Oliver Cromwell, to subdue Ireland (1649–50) and Scotland (1650–1). Both kingdoms were subsequently incorporated into a unitary republican state with England that lasted until the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in May 1660. Elsewhere within Europe reaction to Charles’s execution and the abolition of the monarchy generally ranged from incredulity to outright hostility. If, at one extreme, Muscovy was unique in taking the direct step of expelling the English resident, at the other, only the Swiss Confederation explicitly welcomed the creation of a republic in England. The most common response, as in the great monarchies of France and Spain, was to condemn the King’s death, but otherwise to take no action and thus to ensure that relations with the new republic were preserved.7 The Parlement of Paris, for example, denounced the regicides as evil men who had “dipped their murderous hands in the blood of that most just king” and declared that they had committed a “cruel deed” that was “so unprecedented that it will be abhorred by all people for ever.”8 Political and strategic considerations, however, made it prudent to avoid offending the new republic, and France and Spain were each anxious above all to prevent the other from forging an alliance with England. Spain recognized the English Commonwealth in the autumn of 1650, and France did likewise in December 1652.9 The Dutch Republic was ideologically more sympathetic towards the Protestant republic in England, but the intense commercial and maritime rivalry between the two states led to the outbreak of the first Anglo-Dutch war in May 1652.10 A similar range of responses to the Regicide was evident within the Atlantic world. The King’s execution had considerable transatlantic significance, for it involved the destruction of the Head of State of the colonies in British North America. Many colonists were stunned to learn of the King’s execution, especially because events moved with extraordinary rapidity. Just ten days elapsed between the opening of the King’s trial on 20 January 1649 and his execution: the distances involved meant that news of the trial only reached America after 6 7

8 9 10

S.R. Gardiner, ed., The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1625–1660 (3rd edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), 384–388. Richard Bonney, “The European Reaction to the Trial and Execution of Charles i,” in Jason Peacey, ed., The Regicides and the Execution of Charles i (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 247–279; C.V. Wedgwood, The Trial of Charles i (London: Penguin, 2001), 198–201, 214–215. A.Lloyd Moote, The Revolt of the Judges: the Parlement of Paris and the Fronde, 1643–1652 (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1971), 194–195. Bonney, “European Reaction,” 252–271. J.R. Jones, The Anglo-Dutch Wars of the Seventeenth Century (Harlow: Longman, 1996).

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he was already dead. As in England, many of those who had supported Parliament’s stand against Charles during the Civil Wars did not condone the Regicide or the abolition of the monarchy. Even in New England, where there was little open revulsion against the execution, and where sympathy for Oliver Cromwell and the new republic was most widespread, it seems that many felt uneasy about the turn of events.11 In the majority of the colonies, however, such unease did not translate into open protest or resistance. Only six colonies went so far as to rebel against the new republican regime, of which the largest and most powerful was Virginia. This colony’s reactions to the Regicide from 1649 until its surrender in 1652, and the fears that lay behind them, will form the subject of this essay. Royalism has long been regarded as central to the identity of seventeenthcentury Virginia. By the early twentieth century, this interpretation had become established as orthodoxy and it coloured most accounts of the colony’s reaction to the revolutionary events that took place in mid-seventeenthcentury England. This picture of a strongly Royalist colony looms large, for example, in the works of such notable early twentieth-century historians of Virginia as Philip Alexander Bruce and Thomas J. Wertenbaker. Thus in 1907 Bruce argued that Virginia was “firmly loyal to the monarchy” and “as a whole was devoted to the Church of England,” and that “the Virginians as a body were as conservative at heart as the English themselves, and conformity to the Church of England was but one phase of loyalty to the established order in the State.”12 Similarly, in a book originally published in 1914, Wertenbaker wrote: “During the civil war that was at that time convulsing England most of the influential Virginia planters adhered to the party of the King … Loyalty to the House of Stuart was strong in Virginia. The very remoteness of the planters from the King increased their reverence and love … And the Governor, in this hour of need proved a veritable rock of loyalty for the King.”13

11

12

13

Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640–1661 (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2004), 86–91; Francis J. Bremer, Puritan Crisis: New England and the English Civil Wars, 1630–1670 (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1989), 244–247; Francis J. Bremer, “In Defense of Regicide: John Cotton on the Execution of Charles i,” William and Mary Quarterly 37, no. 1 (1980), 103–124. Philip Alexander Bruce, Social Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century (Richmond, va: Whittet and Shepperson, 1907), 31–33. This book was published to coincide with the tercentenary of the foundation of Jamestown. Thomas J. Wertenbaker, Virginia under the Stuarts, 1607–1688 (Russell and Russell: New York, 1959), 91. Cf. Thomas J. Wertenbaker, Patrician and Plebeian in Virginia (Charlottesville, va: Michie Company, 1910), Part One.

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More recently, however, scholars have challenged this picture of a strongly Royalist Virginia, particularly in relation to the years of civil war and revolution in England. One of the earliest signs of this revisionism came in 1949 when Wesley Frank Craven observed that “Virginia’s now timeworn Cavalier tradition has little basis in historical fact.” In 1975 Edmund S. Morgan struck another warning note: “Not all of Berkeley’s supporters placed as high a value as he on loyalty to the king.” Then, in 1979, Steven D. Crow offered an important “reconsideration of Royalism in Virginia” from 1642 to 1652. He suggested that “Virginians regarded the King’s fortunes as less significant than their own,” and that although they “might indeed have identified with the Stuarts during the English Civil Wars,” “their pledges of loyalty were closely tied to their efforts to gain greater authority in their government and to maintain some measure of economic freedom.” Crow concluded that “between 1642 and 1652 the Virginians’ royalism frequently seems almost nonexistent; indeed, Governor Sir William Berkeley and a few of his royalist friends were probably the only die-hard Cavaliers in the colony. To be sure, the bulk of the colonists did not associate themselves with the parliamentarians in England. But their allegiance to the Crown resulted in large measure from their fear of parliamentary interference with the tobacco trade and from their essential satisfaction with Berkeley’s handling of royal government. Their commitment was to themselves, not to Berkeley or to Charles I’s interpretation of the English constitution.”14 In the context of an exploration of “fear factors,” it is interesting to note that Crow identified fear of parliamentary interference with the tobacco trade as more crucial in shaping Virginians’ actions and reactions than a positive Royalist allegiance. Indeed, it may be that even Berkeley’s own Royalism was not necessarily long-term or deeply rooted. His biographer Warren M. Billings has suggested that it was horror at the Regicide, and fear of its consequences, that drove him into active Royalism.15 What seems of particular interest here 14

15

Wesley Frank Craven, The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 1607–1689 (Baton Rouge, la: Louisiana State University Press, 1949, 1970), 247; despite Craven’s warning, the orthodox interpretation remained deeply entrenched and is found in such major works as Richard L. Morton, Colonial Virginia: vol. i: The Tidewater Period, 1607–1710 (Chapel Hill, nc: University of North Carolina Press, 1960). Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1975), 147. Steven D. Crow, “‘Your Majesty’s good subjects’: A Reconsideration of Royalism in Virginia, 1642–1652,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography [hereafter vmhb] 87 (1979), 158–173 (quotations at pp. 159 and 172–173). Warren M. Billings, Sir William Berkeley and the Forging of Colonial Virginia (Baton Rouge, la: Louisiana State University Press, 2004), especially Chapter 6.

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is that even if self-interest remained a powerful and understandable motive, the fears generated by news of the King’s execution were deeply felt and expressed themselves in two particular commitments: an abomination of the Regicide and an allegiance to Charles ii. Wertenbaker’s categorical statement that “Berkeley did not know fear”16 seems overstated to the point of being misleading. The attitude of Berkeley and other colonists to the events in England was no doubt complex, but some form of fear was surely one key ingredient of their reactions. It is to the nature and expression of those reactions that we will now turn.

Royalism and Anglicanism in Virginia, 1642–49

Berkeley arrived in Virginia early in February 1642 and formally took up his duties as governor on 8 March. He was then aged 37 and his career thus far had been chequered.17 Appointed to the Privy Chamber of Charles i in 1632, he became associated with the so-called “Wits,” a court literary circle, and one of his plays, entitled The Lost Lady, a Tragi-Comedy (1638) was performed for the King and Queen. Berkeley served in both the Bishops’ Wars, but by 1641 he had apparently come to feel that he wished to move abroad, and in August of that year he bought the governorship of Virginia from the incumbent, Sir Francis Wyatt. On his arrival, Berkeley bought land about three miles west of Jamestown on which he built Green Spring House.18 He found the colony deeply unsettled by persistent rumors that the old Virginia Company of London – which James vi and I had dissolved in 1624 – might soon be revived. It seems that these rumors were being spread as part of a campaign led by those associated with the old company, such as George Sandys. When Berkeley met his first General Assembly, on 1 April 1642, he won support for a “Declaration against the Company” that was forwarded to Charles i. The King lent a sympathetic ear, and replied from York on 5 July: “Your so earnest desire to continue under our immediate protection is very acceptable to us; … we had not before the least intention to consent to the introduction of any company over that our colony.”19 It is probable that the colonists’ desire to remain a royal colony and to thwart 16 Wertenbaker, Virginia under the Stuarts, 85. 17 Billings, Berkeley and the Forging of Colonial Virginia, Chapters 1–3; Warren M. Billings, “Berkeley, Sir William (1605–1677),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, accessed 16/04/2009. 18 Ibid., Chapter 5. 19 Ibid., 88.

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any attempts to resurrect the Virginia Company reinforced their support for the King during the years that followed. The Crown offered welcome protection from company interests that many in Virginia believed would only lead to the “absolute ruin and utter dissolution” of the colony.20 Certainly, as Virginians watched anxiously while England descended into civil war, their loyalty to the King was evident. On 31 August 1643, Captain William Roper deposed in the County Court at Northampton that “there is a rumor that there was a health druncke att the house of Mrs Alice Burdell widow to the damnation of Pymms God and the confusion of the Parliament,” but he asserted that “there was not any such health drunck in this deponents heareing.”21 As in England, Royalism was closely associated with adherence to the established Church of England, and on 2 March 1643 the Grand Assembly passed two Acts that affirmed the colony’s commitment to Anglicanism. The first of these enacted that “for the advancement of God’s glory and the weal public,” the “liturgy of the Church of England for the administration of the word and sacrament, be duly performed according to the Book of Common Prayer, allowed by his Majesty and confirmed by consent of Parliament.” The second Act then addressed the issue of conformity. It required that, for “the preservation of the purity of doctrine and unity of the Church,” “all ministers whatsoever which shall reside in the colony are to be conformable to the orders and constitutions of the Church of England, and the laws therein established, and not otherwise to be admitted to teach or preach publicly or privately, and that the Governor and Council do take care that 11 nonconformists upon notice of them shall be compelled to depart the colony with all convenience.”22 These Acts of March 1643 responded not only to the situation in England but also to a genuine threat to conformity posed by Puritans within the colony. By the early 1640s, there were committed Puritan communities in south-eastern Virginia, concentrated especially in Nansemond County and Lower Norfolk County.23 In 1642, these Puritans petitioned Massachusetts to send them more 20 21 22

23

Ibid., 86–87. Cf. L.H. Roper, The English Empire in America, 1602–1658: Beyond Jamestown (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009), 18–19, 89–91. Susie M. Ames, ed., County Court Records of Accomack-Northampton, Virginia, 1640–1645 (Charlottesville, va: University Press of Virginia, 1973), 297. William Waller Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large; being a collection of the laws of Virginia, from the first session of the legislature in the year 1619 (Richmond and Philadelphia: Samuel Pleasants, 13 vols., 1809–23), i:240–241, 277. Kevin Butterfield, “Puritans and Religious Strife in the Early Chesapeake,” vmhb 109 (2001), 5–36; Babette M. Levy, “Early Puritanism in the Southern and Island Colonies,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, volume 70, part 1 (1960), 69–348, especially 122–135.

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ministers: in the event, three not particularly able or influential ministers came briefly, but they departed soon after the passing of the 1643 Acts.24 The Puritans nevertheless remained active in that part of Virginia. In 1645 the eloquent Puritan preacher Thomas Harrison, facing charges from his church wardens in Elizabeth River parish that he did not read the Book of Common Prayer, migrated to Nansemond County. He was welcomed there and over the next three years ministered to a growing Puritan congregation.25 The enforcement of conformity to the Church of England clearly remained a problem, for on 3 November 1647 the Grand Assembly passed a further Act in response to “divers informations presented to this Assembly against several ministers for their neglects and refractory refusing after warning given them to read common prayer or divine service upon the Sabbath days contrary to the cannons of the Church and acts of Parliament therein established.” To address this problem, it was henceforth required that “all ministers in their several cures throughout the colony doe duly upon every Sabbath day read such prayers as are appointed and prescribed unto them by the said Book of Common Prayer.” In addition, it was “further enacted as a penalty to such as have neglected or shall neglect their duty herein, that no parishioner shall be compelled either by distress or otherwise to pay any manner of tithes or duties to any unconformist as aforesaid.”26 This Act thus formally upheld the Church of England as Virginia’s established church while also allowing some flexibility to local conditions: those conforming parishioners who did not wish to support a Puritan divine were not obliged to.27 In response to this Act, Thomas Harrison left for New England in 1648, and over the next year or so a significant number of Puritans migrated from Virginia to Maryland or Massachusetts.28 The Acts regulating conformity reflected the close correlation between political and religious loyalties. Just as Royalists generally adhered to the established Church so religious radicals were seen as a political as well as an ecclesiastical 24

25

26 27

28

Jon Butler, “Two 1642 Letters from Virginia Puritans,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3rd series, 84 (1972), 99–109; Levy, “Early Puritanism,” 124–126; Butterfield, “Puritans and Religious Strife,” 11–19. Butterfield, “Puritans and Religious Strife,” 23–26; Richard L. Greaves, “Harrison, Thomas (1617/18–1682),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, accessed 04/01/2009; Levy, “Early Puritanism,” 126–127. Hening, ed., Statutes at Large, i, 341–342. Edward L. Bond, Damned Souls in a Tobacco Colony: Religion in Seventeenth-Century Virginia (Macon, ga: Mercer University Press, 2000), 152–153; Butterfield, “Puritans and Religious Strife,” 26–28. Butterfield, “Puritans and Religious Strife,” 28–34; Greaves, “Harrison, Thomas (1617/18– 1682)”; Levy, “Early Puritanism,” 128–135.

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threat. On 12 October 1648, for example, a guard of “ten able men with arms and ammunition” was created to protect the Governor not only from “some treacherous attempts threatened by the salvages [sic]” but also from “the many disaffections to the government from a schismaticall party, of whose intentions our native country of England hath had and yet hath too sad experience.”29 The colonists’ worst fears of what that “schismaticall party” might do in England were realized shortly afterwards in the events leading up to the trial and execution of Charles i. On 24 July 1649, the Council of State ordered letters to be written “to the English Plantations, to give them notice of the change of government, to send the papers necessary for their information, and to require them to continue their obedience, as they look for protection.”30 On 10 October, the Grand Assembly at Jamestown responded to this news by passing an Act that denounced the Regicide and all those who approved of it, and which is worth examining in detail.31 The preamble stated that “divers out of ignorance, others out of malice, schism and faction, in pursuance of some design of innovation, may be presumed to prepare men’s minds and inclinations to entertain a good liking of their contrivement, by casting blemishes of dishonour upon the late most excellent and now undoubtedly sainted king,” and “upon this foundation [asserted] the clearness and legality of the said unparalleled treasons perpetrated on the said King.” Such people in turn, the Act continued, sought “the utter disinherison of his sacred Majesty that now is, and the divesting him of those rights, which the law of nature and nations and the known laws of the kingdom of England have adjudged inherent to his royal line, and the law of God himself (if sacred writ may be so styled which this age doth loudly call in question) hath consecrated unto him.” The Act itself then enacted that “what person soever, whether stranger or inhabitant of this colony, after the date of this act, by reasoning, discourse or argument shall go about to defend or maintain the late traitorous proceedings against the aforesaid King of most happy memory, under any notion of law and justice, such person using reasoning, discourse or argument, or uttering any words or speeches to such purpose or effect, and being proved by competent witness, shall be adjudged an accessory post factum, to the death of the aforesaid King, and shall be proceeded against for the same, according to the known laws of England.” Furthermore, anyone who “shall go about by irreverent or scandalous words or language to blast the memory and honour of that late 29 30 31

Hening, ed., Statutes at Large, i, 354–355. Calendar of State Papers Colonial, 1574–1660 (London: Longman, 1860), 330 (24 July 1649). Hening, ed., Statutes at Large, i, 359–361, from which the following quotations are taken.

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most pious King (deserving ever altars and monuments in the hearts of all good men), shall, upon conviction, suffer such censure and punishment as shall be thought fit by the Governor and Council.” Once again, as in the preamble, a denunciation of the Regicide and all those who defended it was followed by an assertion of allegiance and obligation to Charles ii. To “insinuate any doubt, scruple or question of or concerning the undoubted and inherent right of his Majesty that now is to the colony of Virginia, and all other his Majesty’s dominions and countries as King and Supreme Governour” would henceforth “be adjudged high treason.” Anyone who, “by false reports and malicious rumors,” spread “any thing tending to change of government, or to the lessening of the power and authority of the Governor or government either in civil or ecclesiastical causes (which this Assembly hath and doth declare to be full and plenary to all intents and purposes)” were to be “equally guilty” and to “suffer such punishment even to severity as shall be thought fit, according to the nature and quality of the offence.” Behind these words lay an evident fear of those, “whether stranger or inhabitant of this colony,” who attempted to justify the Regicide, or to turn others away from their allegiance to the new King. Such a fear was made all the more evident by the parenthetical comment in this Act that Charles i deserved “ever altars and monuments in the hearts of all good men.” Whatever the underlying motives of Berkeley or the other members of the Assembly, and however great their fears for their own material interests, those fears were expressed through a public commitment to the dead Charles i and the living Charles ii. Such a commitment naturally ensured that there was, to say the least, no meeting of minds between the Virginia colonists and the new republican regime in London. This conflict of outlooks had religious as well as political and constitutional dimensions. It is interesting that on 11 October 1649, the very next day after the Grand Assembly in Jamestown had passed this Act, the Council of State in London was “informed by petition of the congregation of Nansamund in Virginia that their minister, Mr Thomas Harrison,” who had briefly returned to Virginia in 1649, had “been banished the colony because he would not conform to the use of the Common Prayer Book.” The Council responded that “as the Governor cannot be ignorant that the use of [the Common Prayer Book] is prohibited by Parliament, he is directed to permit Mr Harrison to return to his ministry, unless there is sufficient cause approved by Parliament.”32 In the event, however, Harrison never returned to

32

Calendar of State Papers Colonial, 1574–1660, 330 (11 October 1649).

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his congregation, and by 1650 he was back in England where he later became chaplain to Henry Cromwell.33 Awareness in England of Virginia’s Royalist commitment may well have been enhanced by a “Declaration and Protestation of the Governour and Inhabitants of Virginia” published in the London Royalist newsbook The Man in the Moon in January 1650. This text has recently been analysed in detail by Jason McElligott, who advances several compelling reasons for regarding it as genuine. He suggests in particular that the language of the document was far removed from the jocular and even coarse tone of so much of The Man in the Moon. Furthermore, the Royalist and Anglican flavour of the document was hardly calculated to appeal to the newsbook’s mainly Presbyterian target audience, which makes it unlikely that the newsbook’s author John Crouch fabricated the Declaration for propaganda purposes. McElligott also shows persuasively how Crouch had indirect links with Virginia and may have been able to tap into channels of communication between the colony and London. McElligott’s convincing arguments in favour of this text’s authenticity are further reinforced when we compare it with the undeniably genuine Act passed by the General Assembly at Jamestown on 10 October 1649. The documents are designed for different purposes – one was a “Declaration and Protestation” whereas the other was a piece of legislation – yet they seem to spring from the same mental world and to be based upon common ideological premises. McElligott has published the text of the Declaration in full, and it repays close analysis and comparison with the Act of October 1649.34 The Declaration claimed to have been “taken by all [in Virginia], only some few of the Independent party [excepted],” and it began by denouncing “the schismatical faction in England; that walk in the name of Independents,” who had “laid violent hands upon the sacred person of the King” and imbrued “their impious hands more than barbarously in his royal blood.” Arguing that “the villainy of this Act exceeds all or any yet whatsoever that bears the name of wickedness,” the Declaration condemned the “high and desperate hand” with 33

34

Philip Alexander Bruce, Institutional History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Knickerbocker Press, 2 vols., 1910), i, 255–259; Greaves, “Harrison, Thomas (1617/18– 1682)”; Billings, Berkeley and the Forging of Colonial Virginia, 105; Bond, Damned Souls in a Tobacco Colony, 153–154; Butterfield, “Puritans and Religious Strife,” 10–12, 25–30. See Jason McElligott, “Atlantic Royalism? Polemic, Censorship and the ‘Declaration and Protestation of the Governour and Inhabitants of Virginia’,” in Jason McElligott and David L. Smith, eds., Royalists and Royalism during the Interregnum (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 214–234; the full text of the Declaration is printed at pp. 216–217. For the original text, see The Man in the Moon, no. 37 (2–9 January 1650), 297–298 (British Library [bl], Thomason Tracts [tt], E 589[8]).

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which “this viperous brood have carried on their designs, not sparing the most sacred and most precious blood of God’s anointed to satisfie their avarice.” The regicides were thus, the Declaration continued, “defying God himself, by their open blasphemies & pernicious lies.” When they contemplated such an act, “our fears surpass our hopes.” It is significant in the context of the present discussion that they expressed their collective emotions in terms of these fears. Furthermore, those fears emboldened them “to separate from” what they saw as a “master-piece of villanie.” Rather than remain silent, and thus risk giving tacit “allowance or approbation of so horrid a treason, and give the world occasion to suspect our loyalty,” the authors thought it “our duty to publish this our Declaration and Protestation” to express their “detestation of treason so high and horrid, monstrous, impious, and heretical, according to our oath, and the many oaths the miscreants have taken themselves, that damnable, Jesuitical, and now Independent doctrine that Princes may be deposed and murdered by their own subjects.” The authors of the Declaration then stated their determination to “prosecute such who shall be in our power; and shall be convinced to have been actors and consenting, or in mind approving so horrid a treason,” a goal entirely consistent with – indeed enshrined in – the Act of 10 October 1649. They went on to declare that they would “never submit to any Commission, Act, or Ordinance, from those that call themselves the Parliament of England, who are said to have usurped power over the King’s life,” and would “rather trust [them] selves to the woods and mountains, nay first to the faith of the Turks, or our neighbour savages, than yield obedience to these perjured traytors.” Moreover, and here again the resemblance to the Grand Assembly’s Act of 10 October 1649 is very close, “in case of the K[ing’s] death,” the Declaration “acknowledge[d] the late Prince of Wales his heir and lawful successor, and now to be rightfull King of all his Dominions, and of this Country of Virginia.” “Laying aside all other interest of wife, children, and estates,” the authors pledged themselves to “maintain and defend his titles to our last blood and latest breath.” They swore all this “upon the holy Evangelists” and hoped for “the blessing in God’s holy Book contained.”35 McElligott has convincingly drawn out the contrast between this text and the usual tone and subject matter of The Man in the Moon. This, together with the evident similarities between the text and the Act of 10 October 1649, offers further good reason for regarding it as genuine. Exactly how the text reached the author of The Man in the Moon remains uncertain, but the author evidently believed – or hoped – that there would be a ready audience for such material 35

The Man in the Moon, no. 37, 297–298.

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in England. Indeed, he explicitly wrote: “I would that this might be a pattern of loyalty, not only for New England, but for old England too.”36 Certainly, that there was a potential audience for such material in old England would be entirely consistent with the wave of Royalist migration from England to Virginia that occurred immediately before and after the Regicide, and which will form the subject of the next section.

Royalist Migration to Virginia

The crisis in England stimulated a growing wave of Royalist migration to Virginia, as to Barbados, during the late 1640s and early 1650s.37 Berkeley welcomed such immigrants: Virginia’s Royalist stance made it an obvious destination for defeated English Royalists, and their arrival ensured that the colony steadily took on an ever more emphatically Royalist composition. In August 1648, two ships containing about four hundred people, among them planters of Virginia and their families and servants, awaited permission from Parliament to return to Virginia.38 The rate of migration increased after the King’s execution for Virginia offered what one Royalist called “the only city of refuge left in his Majesty’s dominions in those times for distressed Cavaliers.”39 In 1649 no fewer than seven ships sailed for Virginia,40 while in August 1650 a further eight ships were granted permission to sail to Virginia on condition that the passengers took the Engagement and the ship was “secured against the enemies of the Commonwealth.”41 One week after Charles ii’s disastrous defeat at Worcester in September 1651, the Council of State granted the request of 1,610 Royalist prisoners to be sent to Virginia.42 The Royalists who came to Virginia in this period included some who founded families that later became prominent in Virginian society, including Colonel Richard Lee, John Carter, Edward Digges, William Randolph, Colonel George Mason, and John Page. A significant number of Royalist officers arrived 36 The Man in the Moon, no. 37, 298. 37 Pestana, English Atlantic, 115–116; Robert M. Bliss, Revolution and Empire: English Politics and the American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 86–92. 38 Historical Manuscripts Commission, Seventh Report (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1879), House of Lords mss, p. 45a; Morton, Colonial Virginia, i, 166. 39 Quoted in Pestana, English Atlantic, 115. 40 Bruce, Social Life of Virginia, 31. 41 Calendar of State Papers Colonial, 1574–1660, 341 (6 August 1650). 42 Ibid., 360 (10 September 1651).

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in Virginia, of whom some of the most notable were General Mainwaring Hammond; Majors Philip Stevens, John Broadnax, Richard Fox and Edward Dale; and Colonels Guy Molesworth, Joseph Bridger, and Henry Norwood.43 The last of these has left us a wonderfully graphic account of his voyage to Virginia with a group of Royalists in 1649, and of their welcome in the colony. For Norwood and his fellow Royalists, the Regicide had marked the crossing of a Rubicon, for, he wrote, “if our spirits were somewhat depressed in contemplation of a barbarous restraint upon the person of our King in the Isle of Wight; to what horrors and despairs must our minds be reduced at the bloody and bitter stroke of his assassination, at his palace of Whitehall?”44 Norwood went on to describe how the Regicide – “this unparalleled butchery” – gave “such a damp to all the royal party who had resolved to persevere in the principle which engaged them in the war, that a very considerable number of nobility, clergy, and gentry, so circumstanced, did fly from their native country, as from a place infected with the plague, and did betake themselves to travel anywhere to shun so hot a contagion, there being no point on the compass that would not suit with some of our tempers and circumstances, for transportation into foreign lands.”45 We should not underestimate the extent to which people willing to endure such hazards and privations were driven by fear of what was happening in England. Indeed, their hardiness and forbearance in journeying to North America have ironic echoes of those Puritans who had earlier fled from Charles i and Laud.46 43 Morton, Colonial Virginia, i, 166–167; David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 212–225. 44 Henry Norwood, “A Voyage to Virginia,” reprinted in Francis Coleman Rosenberger, ed., Virginia Reader: A Treasury of Writings from the first voyages to the Present (New York: e.p. Dutton & Co., 1948), 115–171 (at p. 116). 45 Norwood, “Voyage,” in Rosenberger, ed., Virginia Reader, 116. 46 The scholarly literature on Puritan migration to North America is vast. For a cross-section of some of the most significant works published within the last twenty-five years, see especially Virginia DeJohn Anderson, New England’s Generation: the Great Migration and the Formation of Society and Culture in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Roger Thompson, Mobility and Migration: East Anglian Founders of New England, 1629–1640 (Amherst, ma: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994); Francis J. Bremer, Congregational Communion: Clerical Friendship in the Anglo-American Community, 1610–1692 (Boston, ma: Northeastern University Press, 1994); David Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and Stephen Foster, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570–1700 (Chapel Hill, nc: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).

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Virginia and the Commonwealth, 1650–52

Such migration naturally tended to reinforce the Royalist character of Virginia and the colony’s mood of defiance. By early 1650, Virginia had become renowned among Royalists for its loyalty to the Stuarts, and in March of that year The Royal Diurnall reported: I hear the loyal party in Virginia have turned out all their sectaries to seek out other plantations, and will not suffer any to dwell among them that retain on their consciences the guilt of their sovereign’s blood, so loyal are the people of that country, that they have vowed to submit to no other government but their rightful king, praying to God as they really intend to be ruled and governed by no other, that all the blessing in God’s holy Book may be on them and their children, and doing otherwise, that all the curses from the beginning of Genesis to the end of the Revelation may be their portions for ever.47 Clarendon likewise wrote that “more was expected of Virginia, which was the most ancient plantation, and so was thought to be better provided to defend itself and to be better affected.”48 Berkeley even opened a correspondence with Charles ii, and invited him to become the King of the Americas. This prompted Mercurius Politicus to sneer in the summer of 1650 that Louis xiv (then aged eleven and facing the height of the Frondes) and Charles ii might joint forces: “the two may even go seek their fortunes together, and beg letters of recommendation from the Commonwealths of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland, to the tobacco planters of America.”49 On 3 October 1650, the Rump passed an “Act for prohibiting trade” with Virginia, along with Barbados, Bermuda and Antigua.50 This Act denounced those who had “most traitorously, by force and subtlety, usurped a power of government,” and “set up themselves in opposition to, and distinct from this State and Commonwealth.” In order “to use all speedy, lawful and just means for the suppression of the said rebellion in the said plantations,” the 47 48 49 50

The Royall Diurnall, no. 3 (4–11 March 1650), final page (bl, tt, E 594[23]). W.D. Macray, ed., The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England by Edward, Earl of Clarendon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 6 vols., 1888), v, 263 (Book xiii, § 173). Mercurius Politicus, no. 3 (20–27 June 1650), 41 (bl, tt, E 604[8]). C.H. Firth and R.S. Rait, eds., Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 3 vols., 1911), ii:425–429, from which the following quotations are taken.

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Rump therefore declared all those who “have contrived, abetted, aided or assisted those horrid rebellions” to be traitors and forbade “any manner of commerce or traffic” with them. Any ships that violated this prohibition were liable to be surprised. Foreign nations were likewise forbidden to trade with these colonies “without license first had and obtained from the Parliament or Council of State,” and any foreign ships that did so could be lawfully seized. Berkeley responded to this Act with a defiant speech in the Grand Assembly on 17 March 1651.51 He began by asserting that in essence the Rump’s “argument runs only thus: we have laid violent hands on your Landlord, possessed his manor house where you used to pay your rents, therefore now tender your respects to the same house you once reverenced.” He was sure that members of the Assembly had “heard under what heavy burdens, the afflicted English nation now groans, and calls to heaven for relief.” He urged them to be thankful “that God hath separated you from the guilt of the crying blood of our pious sovereign of ever blessed memory,” and warned them that “part of it will yet stain your garments if you willingly submit to those murderers’ hands that shed it.” The only threat to the colony came from England: “the Indians, God be blessed, round about us are subdued; we can only fear the Londoners, who would fain bring us to the same poverty, wherein the Dutch found and relieved us; would take away the liberty of our consciences, and tongues, and our right of giving and selling our goods to whom we please.” He concluded with a resounding rallying-cry: “gentlemen by the grace of God we will not so tamely part with our King, and all these blessings we enjoy under him; and if they oppose us, do but follow me. I will either lead you to victory, or lose a life which I cannot more gloriously sacrifice than for my loyalty and your security.” Berkeley thus made a direct connection between the security of the colony and allegiance to the King, and thus helped to cement the bond between the material and political fears of the colonists. Following Berkeley’s rousing speech, the Assembly unanimously passed a Vindication of its Royalist allegiance. The members insisted that they had “inviolably and sacredly kept” the laws of England, “as far as our abilities to execute and our capacities to judge would permit us, and with reason; for 51

The speech of the Honourable Sr. William Berkeley governour and capt. generall of Virginea, to the burgesses in the Grand Assembly at James Towne on the 17 of March, 1651: together with a declaration of the whole country, occasioned upon the sight of a printed paper from England, intituled An act, &c. (The Hague, 1651; Wing, B1976), from which the following quotations are taken.

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these laws only in such times of tumults, storms, and tempests, can humanly prevent our ruins.” They added that “these laws often enjoined us the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, and they tell us, that no power on earth can absolve or manumit us from our obedience to our prince, and his lawful successors.” It followed from this that if they owed anything, it was “to our King’s liberality, care, and protection,” and they asserted that “since the beginning of the colony” they had “never innovated nor altered anything in the main of the government.” They acknowledged that two “factious clergymen” had chosen “rather to leave the country than to take the oaths of allegiance and supremacy,” and that they “gladly parted with them.” The Vindication concluded: “we are resolved to continue our allegiance to our most gracious King, yet as long as his gracious favour permits us, we will peaceably (as formerly) trade with the Londoners, and all other nations in unity with our sovereign: protect all foreign merchants with our utmost force from injury in the rivers: give letters of reprisal to any injured within our capes: always pray for the happy restoration of our King, and penitence in them, who to the hazard of their souls have deposed him.” The colonists’ fears thus translated into an active allegiance to Charles ii as well as an abhorrence of his father’s execution. The fledgling republic in England could not afford to let such defiance go unpunished for long. In September 1651, with Ireland and Scotland both safely subdued, the Council of State ordered a Parliamentarian fleet under the command of Captain Robert Denis to be dispatched to the New World.52 When this arrived in Virginian waters the following January, some of the colonists may initially have been tempted to be resist. Mercurius Bellonius reported in February 1652 that: Sir Thomas Lunsford and Sir George Bartley [= Berkeley] have summoned all the English planters and others of our nation there residing, and administered an Oath of Allegiance to Charles the second, the son and heir of Charles their dread lord and sovereign; the which being denied by many, the five mentioned Knights threatened to hang and expulse the refusers. But no doubt shortly they will sing another tune (if already they have not done).53 52

53

Calendar of State Papers Colonial, 1574–1660, 361 (26 September 1651); Lothrop Withington, “Surrender of Virginia to the Parliamentary Commissioners, March, 1651–2,” vmhb 11 (1904), 38–40. Mercurius Bellonius, no. 3 (18–25 February 1652), 25 [mispaginated] (bl, tt, E 655[14]). On Sir Thomas Lunsford’s career, see Basil Morgan, “Lunsford, Sir Thomas” (b. c.1610, d. in or before 1656), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, accessed 13/12/2010.

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This proved to be the case: anxious to avoid bloodshed, Berkeley quietly backed down and accepted the rule of the English republic. Clarendon later wrote that the colonists were simply not in a position to put up much resistance when confronted with a force from England: “they were so far from being in a condition to defend themselves, all the industry having been employed in the making the best advantage of their particular plantations, without assigning time or men to provide for the public security in building forts or any places of retreat, that there no sooner appeared two or three ships from the Parliament than all thoughts of resistance were laid aside.”54 On 12 March 1652, Berkeley agreed articles of surrender with three Commissioners of the Council of State in England, Richard Bennett, William Claiborne and Edmund Curtis. Interestingly, Claiborne had been a planter in Virginia since 1621, and was closely associated with the Sandys-Southampton-Ferrar group that had led the old Virginia Company. Bennett was an ally of Claiborne, and assumed the governorship on Berkeley’s surrender.55 It appears that these arrangements were agreed upon relatively easily, and Claiborne does not seem to have suffered any ill effects after the Restoration of Charles ii. Although Claiborne had had a difficult relationship with Berkeley during the 1640s, the latter had made some efforts to cultivate him and it is possible that these bore fruit in the terms of the surrender.56 Certainly the articles of surrender were notably generous and did much to allay the material – as well as the political and religious – fears of the colonists.57 It was agreed, first of all, that they would “have and enjoy such freedoms and privileges as belong to the free born people of England.” The Grand Assembly would continue “as formerly” to “convene and transact the affairs of Virginia, wherein nothing is to be acted or done contrary to the government of the commonwealth of England and the law there established.” It was declared that there would “be a full and total remission and indemnity of all acts, words or writings done or spoken against the parliament of England in relation to the same.” This act of indemnity and oblivion was granted the same day as the 54 55 56

57

Macray, ed., History of the Rebellion … by Edward, Earl of Clarendon, v, 263 (Book xiii, § 173). Claiborne’s career is discussed in Roper, English Empire, 19–20, 109–111, 121–128, 131–132, 136–137. For Berkeley’s relationship with Claiborne, see Billings, Berkeley and the Forging of Colonial Virginia, 51–52, 90–91, 94, 108–110, 132. I am grateful to Lou Roper for advice on this point. The articles of surrender are printed in full in Hening, ed., Statutes at Large, i, 363–368, from which the following quotations are taken.

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articles of surrender, and extended “to all the inhabitants of this colony, from all words, actions or writings that have been spoken, acted or writ against the Parliament or commonwealth of England or any other person from the beginning of the world to this day … that all the inhabitants of the colony may live quietly and securely under the commonwealth of England.” Regarding trade, the articles of surrender stipulated that “the people of Virginia have free trade as the people of England do enjoy to all places and with all nations according to the laws of that commonwealth, and that Virginia shall enjoy all privileges equal with any English plantations in America.” Furthermore, Virginia was to “be free from all taxes, customs and impositions whatsoever, and none to be imposed on them without consent of the Grand Assembly, and so that neither forts nor castles be erected or garrisons maintained without their consent.” On religion, the articles made a concession to Anglican loyalties by permitting the use of the Book of Common Prayer “for one year ensuing with reference to the consent of the major part of the parishes, provided that those things which relate to kingship or that government be not used publicly; and the continuance of ministers in their places, they not misdemeaning themselves.” Finally, it was required that “all ammunition, powder and arms, other then for private use shall be delivered up, security being given to make satisfaction for it.” A further additional treaty was also signed which set out terms relating specifically to the Governor and Council of Virginia. None of them was to “be obliged to take any oath or engagement to the Commonwealth of England for one whole year,” nor would they be “censured for praying for or speaking well of the King for one whole year in their private houses or neighbouring conference.” Berkeley and the Council were granted “leave to sell and dispose of their estates, and to transport themselves whether they please.” Likewise, even if they did not take “the engagement for one whole year” they would nevertheless “have equal and free justice in all courts of Virginia until the expiration of one whole year.” All their land, houses and belongings were to “be particularly secured and provided for,” and Berkeley was granted “free leave to hire a ship for England or Holland to carry away the Governor’s goods, and the Council’s, and what he or they have to transport for Holland or England without any let or any molestation of any of the State’s ships at sea or in their rivers or elsewhere by any of the ships in the Commonwealth of England whatsoever.” All persons in the colony “of what quality or condition soever that have served the King here or in England” were to “be free from all dangers, punishment or mulct whatsoever, here or elsewhere.” Finally, the Governor and Council were allowed to “have their passes to go away from hence in any ships in any time within a year”; if they went to “London or other place in England” they were

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guaranteed to be free “from any trouble or hindrance of arrests or such like in England, and that they may follow their occasions for the space of six months after their arrival.” A few weeks later, on 4 May 1652, Berkeley wrote an abject letter to Charles ii.58 “I most humbly throwe my selfe at your Majesties feete,” he began, “imploring your Majesties pardon for delivering up your Majesties colony into the hands of your enemies; which pardon I should never have the confidence to beg if there had been the least possibility of resistance.” Berkeley pleaded that “the uncertainty of where or in what condition your Majesties person was, which then we had not the least knowledge of,” had “made the Counsaile even petition me to consent to articles of surrender, least as they sayd by destroying it your Majestie might loose those greate returnes you wil have from it when it please God to restore your Majestie to your other kingdoms.” He declared that he would “rather fly to your Majesties justice for punishment” if he had “offended beyond pardon then live under or within the ports of your Majesties ennimies,” and he concluded with the promise that he would ever pray “God to restore your sacred Majestie to give your victory over your ennimies to restore you to your kingdomes and give you more in recompense of those your Majestie hath been so long kept from by your ennimies.” The terms of this letter surely suggest that whatever other motives, considerations and fears were at work within Berkeley, his Royalist allegiance was genuine. Berkeley also knew that he had secured articles of surrender that were in many ways notably generous, and that would help to allay the political and material fears that lay beneath the colonists’ Royalist commitment. In particular, by guaranteeing the freedom of the colony and its free trade with other countries, the articles dispelled fears that the new English republic would try to exert a stranglehold on the Virginian economy. The articles themselves thus addressed the colonists’ fears on a practical as well as an ideological level. The benefits were enhanced by the fact that their enforcement was also, in practice, quite relaxed. For example, many parishes probably continued to use the Prayer Book throughout the Interregnum, even after the prescribed year for which this was permitted had elapsed.59 Similarly, Berkeley was allowed to 58

Warren M. Billings, ed., The Papers of Sir William Berkeley, 1605–1677 (Richmond, va: Library of Virginia, 2007), 106, printing Bodleian Library, ms Clarendon 43, fos. 111–112. No reply from Charles ii appears to have survived, if indeed one was ever written. 59 Bond, Damned Souls in a Tobacco Colony, 158–159; John Frederick Woolverton, Colonial Anglicanism in North America (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1984), 51–52; William H. Seiler, “The Anglican Parish in Virginia,” in James Morton Smith, ed., SeventeenthCentury America: Essays in Colonial History (Chapel Hill, nc: University of North Carolina

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retire to his estate at Green Spring and passed the rest of the 1650s quietly there.60 The colonists’ fears were complex and intertwined: their material concerns were articulated through their political and religious attitudes, and the articles of surrender stuck not only because they addressed all these different types of fears but also because they were not enforced too rigorously. The articles of surrender thus responded flexibly and sensitively to local Virginian conditions. This was entirely appropriate, in that the Royalism and Anglicanism of the colonists also had a distinctively Virginian character. Edward L. Bond has argued convincingly that Anglicanism in mid-seventeenthcentury Virginia began to develop an identity of its own that was distinct from that of English Anglicanism. He writes that “Virginia was different from England, and whether longtime residents realized it or not, they had begun to construct a religious identity separate from that of the mother country … It was yet neither religious toleration or religious freedom, but it was a step in that direction.”61 This trend may have been reinforced by the inability of the Bishop of London – who had legal authority over ecclesiastical affairs in the colonies – to exercise that authority once episcopacy had been abolished in England in October 1646.62 A similar point about the distinctiveness of Virginian identity can be made with regard to Royalism in the colony during the late 1640s and early 1650s. It was bound up with fears and anxieties that were rooted in the experiences and circumstances of the Virginian colonists. It reflected and expressed their desire to preserve their material interests and economic autonomy under the Crown. It was no less genuinely Royalist for that; indeed, as in England, Royalism drew much of its strength from its ability to win the support of a diverse range of people. This in turn raises the question of how similar or different Virginian reactions to the Regicide were to those of the other Royalist colonies, and this will form the subject of the final section of this essay.

Comparison with Other Royalist Colonies

In addition to Virginia, five other English colonies in the New World rebelled against the regime that gained power in England in 1649: Antigua, Barbados, Bermuda, Maryland, and Newfoundland. Each of these colonies presented a Press, 1959), 124–125; William H. Seiler, “The Church of England as the Established Church in Seventeenth-Century Virginia,” The Journal of Southern History 15 (1949), 488–490. 60 Billings, Berkeley and the Forging of Colonial Virginia, Chapter 7. 61 Bond, Damned Souls in a Tobacco Colony, 174–175. 62 I owe this suggestion to Lou Roper.

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distinctive picture, and I will suggest that Barbados was possibly the one closest to Virginia in its reactions and treatment. Newfoundland was a small settlement in this period, controlled by the Royalist Sir David Kirke, and records relating to it are sparse. The Council in London ordered Kirke’s return to London to stand trial, and in June 1652 it appointed four commissioners to assume the government of the colony and ensure its loyalty to England.63 It likewise proved relatively easy for the Council to gain control of Bermuda by means of the Somers Island Company. The order to proclaim the Commonwealth only reached Bermuda in February 1652, and the colonists complied by acknowledging their allegiance to the Company rather than directly to the Council, a compromise that proved acceptable to both sides. The Bermudans did not put up much resistance, possibly in part because they realized it was futile, but perhaps also because Puritan sympathies were much more apparent among some of these colonists than in Virginia.64 At the opposite end of the religious spectrum, Maryland’s uniqueness rested on its identity as England’s only Catholic colony in the Americas. As a result, much of the colony’s instability into the mid-1650s arose from tensions over the extent to which religious toleration should be granted. This did not translate into active Royalist resistance and by 1652 the colony had acquiesced to the Commonwealth.65 In the remaining three colonies – Virginia, Antigua and Barbados – Royalist resistance was associated with a defence of free trade and the colonists’ economic interests. Antigua was not large or strong enough, or sufficiently well developed, to put up much protest and the island accepted the authority of the Council’s Governor of Barbados, Sir George Ayscue, even before his arrival in April 1652.66 Ayscue had encountered much greater opposition in Barbados which, with Virginia, saw the most determined Royalist resistance. In October 63 64

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Gillian T. Cell, English Enterprise in Newfoundland, 1577–1660 (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1969), 119–123; Pestana, English Atlantic, 103, 117, 121. Jean Kennedy, Isle of Devils: Bermuda under the Somers Island Company, 1609–1685 (London: Collins, 1971), 195–203; Virginia Bernhard, “Bermuda and Virginia in the Seventeenth Century: A Comparative View,” Journal of Social History 19 (1985), 57–70; Virginia Bernhard, “Religion, Politics, and Witchcraft in Bermuda, 1651–55,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 57 (2010), 677–708; Pestana, English Atlantic, 103, 112–115. Bernard C. Steiner, Maryland under the Commonwealth: A Chronicle of the Years 1649–1658 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1911), 9–61; John D. Krugler, English and Catholic: The Lords Baltimore in the Seventeenth Century (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 186–191; Pestana, English Atlantic, 124–128, 150–154. Brian Dyde, A History of Antigua: The Unsuspected Isle (London and Oxford: Macmillan, 2000), 16–18; Pestana, English Atlantic, 101, 110–111, 121.

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1651, Ayscue arrived in Barbados to “reduce this stubborne island,”67 but the colony only surrendered the following January. As in Virginia, the colonists’ desire to protect their free trade was entwined with their commitment to Royalism and Anglicanism, and their resistance to the Commonwealth was led – like that of Virginia – by an energetic Royalist governor, in this case Francis, Lord Willoughby of Parham.68 In the end, Ayscue found it wisest to use the carrot more than the stick, and when Barbados surrendered in January 1652 it was on the basis of generous articles of agreement that prefigured those accepted in Virginia three months later.69 As in Virginia, there is evidence that the colonists’ Royalism was genuinely felt. In 1652, Isaac Clarke of Barbados was found guilty of treason for making Royalist statements.70 Then, at the end of July 1653, a London newsletter reported the following extraordinary story: a gentleman come lately from the Barbados very ill of the Kings Evill which is broke out into ulcers, so that his Physitians and Chirurgeans could do no good on him, and after a long and troublesome course of Physicke were giving him over: But a Gentlewoman tooke him in hand on Friday last, and only by applying a handkerchief, that had been dipt in the late Kings blood, to the diseased parts; the hard kernels already begin to dissolve (which all the art of the best Doctors could not doe) and the ulcers heale apace, so that its hoped in a few dayes (without any other application) the Gentleman wilbe recovered.’71

67 Pestana, English Atlantic, 104. 68 On Willoughby’s career in Barbados, see especially Sarah Barber, “Power in the English Caribbean: The Proprietorship of Lord Willoughby of Parham,” in L.H. Roper and B. Van Ruymbeke, eds., Constructing Early Modern Empires: Proprietary Ventures in the Atlantic World, 1500–1750 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007), 189–212. 69 The Weekly Intelligencer of the Common-wealth, no. 64 (9–16 March 1652), 388–389 (bl, tt, E 656[13]); Hilary McD. Beckles, A History of Barbados: From Amerindian Settlement to Caribbean Single Market (2nd edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 32–33; Pestana, English Atlantic, 94–96, 102–110, 115, 119; Bliss, Revolution and Empire, 86– 92; Larry Gragg, Englishmen Transplanted: The English Colonization of Barbados, 1627–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 49–51; Matthew Parker, The Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, Empire and War (London: Hutchinson, 2011), 70–75; Gary A. Puckrein, Little England: Plantation Society and Anglo-Barbadian Politics, 1627–1700 (New York and London: New York University Press, 1984), 111–128. 70 Pestana, English Atlantic, 119. 71 Bodleian Library, ms Clarendon 46, fo. 133r (newsletter, 29 July 1653).

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This remarkable report provides an appropriate note on which to draw this article to a close. The colonists’ fears no doubt came in many different forms and assumed a variety of guises, but vignettes such as this suggest that at least some of them feared the English Commonwealth because they were genuinely attached to the Crown. They continued to hold such sentiments even after the Regicide and the creation of the republic because they believed in monarchy and its unique attributes, including the power to cure scrofula. Only by acknowledging the reality of such beliefs can we fully understand the nature of the colonists’ reactions when they learnt of the execution of Charles i.

chapter 7

“Ffourty thousand to cutt the Protestants throats”: The Irish Threat in the Chesapeake and the West Indies (1620–1700) Elodie Peyrol-Kleiber On 3 May 1681, John Mould appeared to the council of Maryland in Saint Mary’s city to report on a speech he heard from a fellow colonist in Somerset county and which he thought was against the colony’s policy of religious toleration: Some time in March last [1681] myself being upon Spesutis [Spesutia] Island with Henry Johnson seekeing for Deare or Turkeys, that the said Johnson did enquire of me if I did heare of the Irish that was to come into this Province, which I did reply that I did not heare of any, then the said Henry Johnson replyed there is ffourty ffamilys to come in under the pretence of seateing Susquehannah River, but that ffourty ffamilys will proove in the End to be ffourty thousand to cutt the Protestants throats.1 The phobic context regarding “popery” was particularly propitious to such conversations since the English had witnessed the “Popish Plot” led by Titus Oates in 1678 and the exclusion crisis which ran from 1679 to 1681 and sought to exclude the Catholic Duke of York from succession to the throne. Both events were closely linked as the experience of the Popish Plot actually fuelled the speeches of the Whig leaders against the Duke of York. This anti-popery sentiment peaked with the Glorious Revolution. The news took time to reach Virginia and Maryland but by 1690, all colonists were aware of the situation in England and feared the aftermath of it in their colonies.2 Reviving fears of 1 Archives of Maryland Online [Hereafter cited as amo], vol 15, 348. http://msa.maryland.gov/ megafile/msa/speccol/sc2900/sc2908/000001/000015/html/am15--348.html, last accessed 20 November 2014. 2 For anti-catholic sentiments in England, see Tim Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles ii: Propaganda and Politics from the Restoration until the exclusion crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 157. For more on the anti-popery climate in the American colonies, see David William Voorhees’ essay in the present volume and Michael Graham, “Popish Plots: Protestant Fears in Early Colonial Maryland,” The Catholic Historical Review 79, no. 2 (April 1993), 197–216. See also Chris Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda, eds., The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America (Philadelphia: University of

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004314740_009

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Catholicism that had been a justification for founding Virginia, and Protestant officials later maneuvered to strip the Catholics of their rights in Maryland.3 The above example shows how Catholics, and especially the Irish Catholics “others,” were always on the minds of the English population during that period of political and social unrest – they were the object of the fears of the English subjects.4 However, this kind of situation was not new. This chapter examines the paradox English colonists faced concerning Irish indentured servants during the seventeenth century: they feared them, especially after the 1641 rebellion in Ireland, but they also needed them to exploit newly acquired land, since the use of African slaves was not developed enough to provide a sufficient labor force and meet the needs of the planters. The English colonists observed some 35,000 Irish Catholics serving their contracts in the West Indies and turning an island like Montserrat into an Ireland in miniature.5 A smaller part of that migration –around 3,000– arrived in the Chesapeake colonies of Maryland and Virginia.6 Although those colonies had different geographies, staple crops and agricultural structures from the Caribbean, a workforce was desperately needed and Ireland provided a convenient source of laborers when England was short of them, mainly at times when working conditions and wages improved in England and more and more over the course of the seventeenth century as it became widely known that the living conditions were far from what the pamphlets advertised and that the perspectives of a profitable future as a free colonist were dwindling. This was true for most of the century since slavery did not supplant indentured servitude before the 1690s and for some counties as late as the 1710s. However, slaves were present in the Chesapeake and this chapter examines the links that existed between Irish servants and black slaves, which increased

3 4

5 6

Pennsylvania Press, 2011) and more specifically David S. Lovejoy, The Glorious Revolution in America (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1987 [1972]), chapters 3 to 5, 32–97. Owen Stanwood, The Empire Reformed: English America in the Age of the Glorious Revolution (Philadelphia: the University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 15–16. For anti-popery in England, see John Miller, Popery and Politics in England, 1660–1688 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1973). See also Peter Lake, “Anti-popery: the Structure of a Prejudice,” in Richard Cust and Ann Hughes, eds., Conflict in Early Stuart England (London: Longman, 1989), 72–106, and Caroline Hibbard, Charles i and the Popish Plot (Chapel Hill, nc.: University of North Carolina Press, 2011 [1983]), and by Peter Lake, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 137. Elodie Peyrol-Kleiber, “Les engagés irlandais au Maryland et en Virginie: Étude d’une migration dans le monde atlantique (1618–1705),” (Ph.D. diss., Université de Paris 8, 2012), 181.

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the fears of the English planters, numerically inferior to both groups on some islands in the Caribbean from the 1650s onwards and viewed as threatening in the Chesapeake.

The Genealogy of a Prejudice

What triggered the many stereotypes circulating about the Irish was first of all their (perceived) backwardness and then, of course, a need for a justification to subdue and eventually kill that population, unwilling to be disarmed and submit to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English interventions in the neighboring island. The native Irish, also called Gaelic Irish or Gaels, were joined at the end of the sixteenth century by the Old English in the pool of victims of English negative representations of the people living in Ireland. The Old English were the descendants of the Norman conquerors of the twelfth century who had been integrated into Irish life, often adopting the customs of the Natives. For the New English of the seventeenth century, most of them were as bad as the Gaelic “wild” Irish.7 Even though the complexity of seventeenthcentury Irish history discourages easy distinction of social, political or religious groups, it seems clear that the stereotypes were maintained and developed from the twelfth century onwards, and reactivated whenever financial support from the wealthy English population was needed. The Irish as “Others” In spite of their geographical proximity, the English and the Irish remained estranged. The English in Ireland were viewed as invaders, while the Irish, in turn, were stereotyped as barbarous and uncivilized, practicing adultery and cannibalism. Giraldus Cambresis, a twelfth-century clergyman settled in Wales, sojourned in Ireland three times and published a History and Topography of Ireland, which provides representative examples of how the Gaelic Irish were 7 The Old English, descendants of the Normans who had taken control of the two-thirds of the island at the end of the 13th century and who were largely Catholics, had slowly mingled with the Gaelic Irish. Sir John Temple, among others, advocated the exclusion of the Old English from all new projects regarding Ireland as they had betrayed their Englishness or, rather, had been “contaminated” by long association with the “natives.” Kathleen M. Noonan, “‘The Cruell Pressure of an Enraged, Barbarous People’: Irish and English Identity in SeventeenthCentury Policy and Propaganda,” in The Historical Journal 41, no. 1 (March, 1998), 174; John Temple, The Irish Rebellion: or, An History of the Beginnings, and First Progress of the General Rebellion raised within the Kingdom of Ireland, in the Year 1641. Together with the Barbarous and Bloody Massacres which ensued thereupon (London, 1646).

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depicted: the Irish “count it an honorable thing, when their fathers die, to devour them.”8 Four centuries later, Edmund Spenser, an English poet who served in Ireland during the second Desmond rebellion, wrote on the same topic, mentioning the Irish rebel Murrogh O’Brien: “I saw an old woman, which was [O’Brien’s] foster mother take up his head while he was quartered, and sucked up all the blood that runne thereout, saying, that the earth was not worthy to drinke it…”9 Likewise, Edmund Treymayne, sent by Queen Elizabeth in 1571 to report on the Irish situation, wrote: I refuse to declare the Irish either Papists nor Protestants but rather such as have nether feare nor love of God in their harts that restreyneth them from ill. Thei regarde no othe [oath], thei blaspheme, they murder, commit whoredom, hold no wedlocke, ravish, steal and commit all abomination without scruple of conscience.10 Numerous debates arose after the 1641 rebellion, which was a response to the deteriorating conditions of Catholics in Ulster, as a consequence of the scheme of plantation led under the rule of Lord Deputy Thomas Wentworth. The causes of the rebellion were more complex than that, the rebellion being a result of political unrest in the three Stuart kingdoms. The rebellion, which caused the death of several thousand Protestants, naturally raised questions regarding the safety of the English settled in the Irish plantations. The subsequent debates aimed at determining how the Irish should be treated so as to avoid any similar dramatic situation but it was above all an attempt to control the threat triggered by the Irish.11 8 9 10

11

Giraldus Cambresis, The History and Topography of Ireland, J. J. O’Meara, ed. (Dublin: Mountrath and Harmondsworth, 1982). Edmund Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, 1596, W. L. Renwick, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 66. Edmund Treymayne, Notes on Ireland, June 1571, sp 63/32, no. 66, The National Archives, Kew, Great Britain, quoted in Charles Carlton, This Seat of Mars: War and the British Isles, 1485–1746 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 51. Sarah Barber concentrates on the debate between Richard Lawrence, an important member of the committee of transplantation, and Vincent Gookin, surveyor-general of Ireland, concerning the transplantation of the Gaelic Irish. Vincent Gookin advocated that the Irish be scattered on the island so that they would be unable to constitute an armed force while Richard Lawrence recommended the English to form settlement colonies with a ratio of at least five English for one Irish. Sarah Barber, “Settlement, Transplantation and Expulsion: A Comparative Study of the Placement of Peoples,” in Ciaran Brady and Jane Ohlmeyer, eds., British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge

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With the Atlantic acting as a platform of commercial as well as cultural exchanges, those fears and stereotypes in the Old World were transferred to the “New World.”12 If Nevis and Montserrat received the largest number of them in the West Indies, the Irish were also present in Barbados and Saint Christopher.13 Their forced displacement corresponded to the West Indian sugar revolution, which required a numerous labor force. The 1678 Leeward Islands census registered 800 Irish people out of 7,381 inhabitants in Nevis, 1,869 out of 3,724 on Montserrat and 610 Irish among the 4,480 inhabitants in Antigua.14 In the 1650s, up to 10,000 Irish Catholics, a majority of whom were indentured servants and prisoners of war sent there to serve their punishment, landed in the English West Indies.15 In the Chesapeake, some 3,000 Irish servants and perhaps as many as 1,000 free Irish Catholics arrived during the course of the seventeenth century. Correspondingly, the attitude of English planters and officials was quite ambiguous regarding the Irish. Although they made arrangements to prevent associations with slaves to contain their Catholicism by

12

13

14

15

University Press, 2004), 295–296. Other contemporaries engaged in the debate, as John Temple for example in his pamphlet entitled The Irish Rebellion: or, An History of the Beginnings, and First Progress of the General Rebellion raised within the Kingdom of Ireland, in the Year 1641. Together with the Barbarous and Bloody Massacres which ensued thereupon (London, 1646). The 1641 Irish rebellion was recycled in the eighteenth century, John Temple’s work published again so that the stereotypes regarding the Irish remain or be revived. It is not surprising to note that the revisionism of the Irish-Gaelic history was mainly focused on that rebellion. See Joseph T. Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fíor Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, its Development and Literary Expression prior to the Nineteenth Century (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press in association with Field Day, 1997), 385–395. For a recent approach to the 1641 rebellion, see Eamon Darcy, The Irish Rebellion of 1641 and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (Royal Historical Society Series: Royal Historical Society Studies in History New Series, Boydell & Brewers), 2013. A number of people having taken part in the colonization of Ireland also participated in settling the Chesapeake. See Elodie Peyrol-Kleiber, “Les engagés irlandais au Maryland et en Virginie,” 96–98. Jenny Shaw, “Island Purgatory: Irish Catholics and the Reconfiguring of the English Caribbean, 1650–1700,” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 2009), 50. Montserrat was often named the Irish colony. Governor William Stapleton to the Lords of Trade, 29 June 1678, quoted in Hilary Beckles, “A Riotous and Unruly Lot: Irish Indentured Servants and Freemen in the English West Indies, 1644–1713,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., 47, no. 4 (Oct. 1990), 510. Donald Akenson, If The Irish Ran the World: Montserrat, 1630–1730 (Kingston, McGillQueen’s University Press, 1997), 19. For more details concerning the West Indian population during the seventeenth century, see Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill, nc: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000 [1972]), 69, 87, 127 and 141.

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forbidding meetings and priests, they still could not consider them as equals and continued to fear their “Irishness” as defined by the English.16 Anti-Catholicism was therefore rampant in the English (then British) colonies as it was in the metropolis. Most particularly, Catholics were considered traitors, under the spell of the Pope, an illegitimate holder of religious power. Moreover, they were seen as fervent worshippers of superstitious beliefs. In fact, some customs and behaviors of the Gaelic Irish were seen by English contemporaries as inadequate. For example, alliances engaging members of the same clan, or between two different clans, implying the marriage of two cousins or even of a man and his brother’s wife, were common but considered as totally barbaric and incestuous by the English.17 They were also taken aback by the Catholic religion as practiced by the Irish. This opinion is mirrored in Giraldus Cambresis’ work: The faith having been planted in the island from the time of St. Patrick, so many ages ago, and propagated almost ever since, it is wonderful that this nation should remain to this day so very ignorant of the rudiments of Christianity. It is indeed a most filthy race, a race sunk in vice, a race more ignorant than all other nations of the principles of the faith. Hitherto they neither pay tithes nor first fruits; they do not contract marriages, nor shun incestuous connections; they frequent not the church of God with proper reverence.18 16

Shaw, “Island Purgatory,” 174–175. Of course, “Irishness,” along with the broader concept of identity is hard to grasp and could be very fluctuant from one period to another. It is therefore quite difficult to offer a definition of “Irishness.” Nicholas Canny and Anthony Padgen have worked on the notion of Irishness in Nicholas Canny and Anthony Padgen, eds., Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). Kathleen M. Noonan has studied the perception of Irishness and Englishness in the political sphere: “The Cruell Pressure,” 151–177. Susanne Lachenicht has done the same concerning the Huguenots. She has studied the way they attempted to maintain a kind of identity in Ireland, London and Prussia. Susanne Lachenicht, “Culture Clash and Hubris: The History and Historiography of the Huguenots in Germany and the Atlantic World,” in Gesa Mackenthun and and Sünne Juterczenka, eds., The Fuzzy Logic of Encounter: New Perspectives on Cultural Contact (Münster: Waxmann Verlag, 2009), 75–96. 17 For more details on Irish social habits during the seventeenth century, see Anne Laurence, “The Cradle to the Grave: English Observations of Irish Social Customs in the Seventeenth Century,” Seventeenth Century 3, no. 1 (1988), 65–78. 18 Cambresis, The History, Chapter 19, “How the Irish are very ignorant of the rudiments of the Faith.”

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It would be quite irrelevant to provide a definition of Irish people’s religious beliefs only based on the religious institutions that existed in the seventeenth century, that is the Church of Ireland and the Catholic Church. The clergy attempted to “normalize” people’s beliefs by providing Bibles and service books in Gaelic, but because they had neither the financial means nor the sufficient number of ministers, they only obtained limited results.19 Raymond Gillespie, an Irish historian, concentrates on the experiences and beliefs of the lay population so as to grasp the real nature of religion in Ireland.20 He argues that the only common point between the different religious groups was the belief in a supernatural God who was not part of the world but acted upon it. Religion for Irish Catholics rested on the dichotomous idea of Heaven and Hell with, at its basis, the Our Father, the Hail Mary, the Credo and the seven deadly sins. Moreover, religious instruction was mainly conducted by women. Therefore, while men were compelled by law to attend Church of Ireland services, women (who were not punished if they did not attend), would go, reject them, and then teach their children what they had learnt from their own mothers.21 Besides, religious beliefs varied from place to place, offering a wide range of rituals adapted to the life of the believers. In effect, Catholicism as practiced in Ireland during the seventeenth century was not at all in compliance with institutional Catholicism, but was on the contrary largely influenced by the local and familial traditions of the population. We can thus observe that the more the English attempted to “normalize” Irish Catholicism, the more the Gaelic Irish and the Old English clung unto it, as the religion of the oppressed and colonized people.22 Therefore, when Irish servants arrived massively in the Chesapeake and the West Indies over the course of the seventeenth century, English planters and authorities (governors, officials and members of the Board of Trade and Plantation) felt they had to take measures to stop these numerous arrivals and potential threat. 19

A catechism in Gaelic was issued in 1571, a New Testament in 1603 and a Book of Common Prayer translated in Gaelic was circulated in 1608. Brian Ó Cuív, “The Irish language in the early modern period,” in T.W. Moody, F.X. Martin, F.J. Byrne, eds., A New History of Ireland, iii, Early Modern Ireland 1534–1691 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 532–533. 20 Raymond Gillespie, Devoted People: Belief and Religion in Early Modern Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 1–20. 21 For the central role played by women in the education of their children, see Mary O’Dowd, A History of Women in Ireland, 1500–1800 (New York: Pearson Longman, 2005), especially Chapter 5 “Women and Religious Change, 1500–1690,” 154–186. 22 Jean Guiffan, La Question d’Irlande, (Bruxelles: Complexe, 2001), 1:20–21.

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The Irish who crossed the Atlantic arrived in the colonies with their beliefs and traditions, which developed and were adapted to the new environment. The county court records feature cases of colonists tried for calling some of their fellow colonists “Papists.” For example, a woman called George Nicholas Hack a “papist son of a whore and papist son of a bitch” in Accomack County, Virginia, while in Northampton County, one Mrs Pikes was called “a damned whore and a Papist Bitch.”23 These abuses were representative of a deep resentment of Catholicism but also that Catholicism was the cause of ill-behavior, according to the abusers. Although Maryland was indeed founded by a Catholic family and intended as a haven for persecuted English Catholics, its population was paradoxically mainly Protestant. Hence, the Protestants had to deal with being confronted by more Catholics than they had ever seen before. Yet, religious toleration was officially established and Catholic institutions existed in early Maryland. It was not at all the case for the Irish Catholics in the West Indies. However, maybe because the exercise of Catholic worship was forbidden but also because of the close presence of the French forces in the Caribbean, they managed to sustain their religion better than in the Chesapeake (especially Virginia). Irish Catholics in the West Indies did not hesitate to secretly shelter priests but they mainly managed to keep their faith alive by practicing daily rituals among themselves, and sometimes with Catholic slaves transported by the Portuguese colonizers from Africa.24 The French fear factor also developed in Maryland, as reported by two Maryland commissioners in December 1690: Ever since have the people beene in continuall feares and jealousies of the French and Northern Indians who often pass by the Confines of the said Province with French Priests who were acquainted with the English and Irish Preists there inhabiting, and as to the equall enjoyment of favours as is pretended.25

23 24

25

Library of Virginia [Hereafter cited as lv], Accomack County Court Orders, 1678–1682, 97; lv, Northampton county court orders, 1686–89, 179. For more details regarding how the Catholics kept their faith alive, see Jenny Shaw, Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean, Irish, Africans, and the Construction of Difference, (Athens, ga: The University of Georgia Press, 2013), especially Chapter 4, 101–128. amo, 8:225, http://msa.maryland.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc2900/sc2908/000001/ 000008/html/am8--225.html, accessed 20 November 2014.

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Those fears could even reach the point where Protestants would convert to Catholicism in order to stay alive, as in 1690 after the Glorious Revolution: To the great terrour of the Protestants and encouragement of the Papists The Protestants standing continually upon their guards and some flying for fear into Virginia so enraged the people as that it was not easy to restraine them from riseing tho they had no armes nor amunition to defend themselves and the more thinking men were plunged in their minds what course to take For Armes and Ammunition they had not to defend themselves and to depart the Province was to ruine their Estates and Familyes and stay they could not with safety without owneing their Allegiance to the late King James and fidelity to that present Popish Government thereby denying their Faith Allegiance and subjection to their present Majesties which would have been high Treason and adhereing to their Enemies against the conscience and interest of all good Protestants and to involve them into the same crimes of Disloyalty with their Enemies and subject them to the penaltyes of the Law for High Treason.26 The rebellious attitude of the Catholics at the announcement of William and Mary’s accession to the throne led some Protestants to refuse to pledge allegiance to the new King and Queen, which was considered treasonous. Of course, exaggeration and rumormongering were developed as the Protestants witnessed the Catholics’ discontent regarding the new king and queen. By exaggerating their perilous situation, Protestants aimed to convince the authorities back in England to settle the situation, in favor of the Protestants, by ejecting the Catholics from high positions and above all, to eliminate toleration, which was considered as the basis of the dysfunctions of Maryland. The threat underlying the above report was that if London remained inactive, the colony might be invaded by the French forces, with the help of the Maryland Catholics. And a large part of these Catholics were so close to them that they lived on their plantations and homes, as indentured servants, representing a tangible threat. A Threat in Their Households Irish indentured servants were not men and women with whom the English colonists would have had to deal once in a while, but people who would work for them, share their everyday lives, endanger the stability of their household, and perhaps marry their children. Irish servants were usually brought to the 26

amo, 8:226–227, http://msa.maryland.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc2900/sc2908/000001/000008/ html/am8--226.html, last accessed 20 November 2014.

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Chesapeake against their will as most were very young. They mainly arrived without a contract in the colonies, meaning that they might have been spirited or seduced under false pretences by agents. This was the case for Rickett Mecane whose testimony states that he was brought to Virginia against his will and at a very young age. He added that he was forced to serve fifteen years, which was against the colonial laws. Another Irish servant asked the court to free him from his contract as he had been forced to come to Virginia and wanted to go back to his mother in Ireland. The court judged his speech to be “childish complaint” and sent him back to his master.27 Once their age was determined by the county court and their contract established, servants lived on plantations with their masters. Generally, servants were single men or women between 16 and 25 years of age, who went to the colonies (or were sent there by their parents, or were spirited) because of economic hardships in the “Old World.”28 Therefore, most did not have time to start a family before emigrating. However, Irish servants tended to be younger than English servants, sometimes as young as five or six years old when they became servants.29 Moreover, once in the colony, they as the English servants were not allowed to marry or have children during their time of service. Irish migrants were more prone to migrate with kin than English servants. Edward Randolph, surveyor general of customs for North America, addressed a letter to the Commissioners of Customs, saying that Somerset County, Maryland, was “a place pestered by hundreds of […] Irish families.”30 Out of the 415 Irish indentured servants identified in Virginia and Maryland during the seventeenth century, at least thirty came with kin.31 Even though families were an element of stability, their formation added to the fear of the English planters

27

28

29

30

31

amo, Proceedings of the Provincial Court, 1658–1662, 41:476, http://msa.maryland.gov/ megafile/msa/speccol/sc2900/sc2908/000001/000041/html/am41--476.html, last accessed 20 November 2014; lv, Charles City county order book, 1676–1679, 335. James Horn established that “nearly two thirds of the servants under 21 who emigrated from London to the Chesapeake in the 1680s had lost one or both parents.” James Horn, Adapting to a New World, English Society in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 217. amo, Proceedings of the Provincial Court, 1658–62, 41:476, http://msa.maryland.gov/ megafile/msa/speccol/sc2900/sc2908/000001/000041/html/am41--476.html, last accessed 20 November 2014. “America and West Indies: June 1692,” Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, vol. 13, 1689–1692 (1901), 644–663, British History Online, accessed 9 December 2013. Peyrol-Kleiber, “Les engagés irlandais au Maryland et en Virginie,” 146–147.

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since a family was a structured item which differed greatly from the servant with no kin and was therefore considered as less manageable. Most planters in Virginia and Maryland, however, were not wealthy enough to avoid working on their plantations. In fact, a majority of the seventeenth century Chesapeake planters were ex-servants themselves and generally only had their land and one servant or two as possessions.32 So very often, servants and masters would therefore work alongside one another. Hence, great proximity often led to a struggle for authority and power. Irish servants appear to have had the reputation of being “the worst,” often described as lazy, treacherous, and renowned as particularly aggressive towards English masters. Michael De Contee was indebted to John Robinson for one able man between twenty-five and thirty years old and specifically asked “ye said servant to be sound of body and mind and to be neither of the Scotch nor Irish nations.”33 Therefore, the danger here was coming from within the household, as masters were afraid their Irish servants would endanger them and their families. Edward Hollingshade said in 1657 that his servants, whom he specifically identified as being Irish, had “Rebelliously and mutinously behaved themselves” and that he and his wife were “in fear of their lives by said servants.”34 The declaration of the Maryland Protestant planter John Mould concerning the potential arrival of Irish families, quoted at the beginning of this chapter is also a representative example: “that ffourty ffamilys will proove in the End to be ffourty thousand to cutt the Protestants throats.”35 Another particularity of Irish servants was the fact that some could not speak English. This complicated the interaction between the servant and his or her master or the community into which he or she joined. That they could speak Gaelic only posed problems, as for Norah, an Irish servant in Lancaster County, Virginia, whose contract was sold at a lesser price than usual, for that reason while Peter Walker decided to buy Teage and Thomas, two Irish servants for different durations even though they were about the same age: “in regard Teage could speake English he bought him for one yeare less than Thomas.”36 Gathering information on the origins of these Gaelic-speaking 32

See Lois Green Carr, Russell R. Menard, and Lorena S. Walsh, Robert Cole’s World: Agriculture and Society in Early Maryland (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). 33 lv, Northumberland Order Book, 1669–73, 165. Here, the Irish and the Scots were associated in the mind of this planter as the “undesirable” labor force. 34 Lucas mss, Reel 1, 1 September 1657, 161–162. 35 amo, 15:348, http://msa.maryland.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc2900/sc2908/000001/ 000015/html/am15--348.html, last accessed 20 November 2014. 36 lv, Lancaster Deeds and wills 1654–66, 202–204, lv, Northampton County Court Cases, 8:17, 28 May, 1658.

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servants is arduous but it is possible that they were recruited in small villages where they would not have extensive contacts with English speakers and therefore not understand what they were recruited for.37 Unless, of course, they had been spirited and thus had no take in the process. Apart from the trouble caused by the servants being unable to understand the orders of their masters, there was a risk of Irish servants speaking Gaelic together and triggering paranoid reactions among the English planters who could not comprehend the content of their conversations.38 As servants, the Catholic Irish were seen as potentially dangerous. However, they were to become free colonists once they had finished their contracts, which meant being eligible to sit in court or having high positions in the colonial government. In other words, they would be equals to the English colonists, at least in Maryland. If they survived their contracts, very few Irish ex-servants reached important positions or statuses in the Chesapeake societies during the seventeenth century, but the situation was somewhat different in the West Indies, where ex-servants did become planters, gaining more and more power as they themselves acquired slaves. Therefore, different fears among the Protestant planters and workers converged: the fear of being perverted or seeing their children perverted by Catholicism and superstitious beliefs, fear of losing power to the advantage of the Catholic Irish, and of being submitted to an Irish ruler. This triggered several types of reactions on the part of the Protestant colonists to try and tone down their fears. They fomented rumors to deprecate the Irish, but above all, they used the legislative tools that were available to them.

Assuaging Fear through the Law

Fears in the colonial era often caused and were caused by uncontrollable rumors. Indeed, rumors played a crucial role in shaping the policies of the colonies and the attitudes of the population. Defining features of rumors include, chiefly, doubtful accuracy and lack of reliable information and hard evidence.39 Rumors needed to find a plausible echo in the prevailing mood 37 38 39

Peyrol-Kleiber, “Les engagés irlandais au Maryland et en Virginie.” See Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British: 1580–1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), Raymond Gillespie, Devoted People and Jenny Shaw, “Island Purgatory.” For studies on rumors, see Tom Arne Midtrod, “Strange and Disturbing News: Rumor and Diplomacy in the Colonial Hudson Valley,” Ethnohistory 58, no. 1 (Winter 2011), 91–112. In this volume, the essays of Anne-Claire Faucquez, Lauric Henneton, Mark Meuwese and Chris Vernon address rumors and their political impacts.

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and attacks led by the French or Spanish forces helped by the Irish Catholics during the seventeenth century were particularly consistent with the prevailing mood. In a period when Maryland Catholics were afraid to lose everything because of the accession of William and Mary to the English throne and the overthrow of the proprietary government, assertions such as the following were given even more credit. In fact James Hanley, an Irish sugar boiler, declared in 1689 that if the French attacked Barbados, the Irish would “quickly make way for the French to come in.”40 Likewise, the rumors spread and reached the Upper House of the Maryland government the following year, expressing concern about …traitors Daily broaching lyeing news as they [the Catholics] pretended sent to the Preists and Jesuitts from all parts of the French Kings invinceable Army to conquer England and the late King James his Victory in Scotland and Ireland and his great party in England to joyn with them to subdue the Rebells as they termed the Protestants as also the great strength of the French and Canada Indians if occasion served to invade the Province and other their Majesties Protestant Colonies in those Parts praying publickly in their Popish Chappells for the Irish and French success against the English and daily drinking health to the same wishing the arrivall of that golden day as they termed it.41 This particular petition was transferred to Charles Calvert, who rejected the demands which accompanied this complaint but who reasserted, as a compromise, his will to appoint a Protestant as governor of Maryland.42 He did not have time to keep his word since later that year the Protestant Associators overthrew the proprietary officers. This was quite a radical solution found to ease those fears but in most cases, colonial officials used the law to control some aspects of the Irish Catholics’ lives.

40

41 42

The National Archives of Great Britain, Kew [Hereafter cited as tna], CO28/37, no. 7xv, Barbados, the depositions of Mr. Jacob English, William Griffith and Edward Macologh, 24 March 1689, quoted in Shaw, “Island Purgatory,” 215. See also David William Voorhees’ essay in this volume. amo, 8:226–227, http://aomol.msa.maryland.gov/000001/000008/html/am8--226.html, last accessed 20 November 2014. amo, 8:228, http://aomol.msa.maryland.gov/000001/000008/html/am8--228.html, last accessed 20 November 2014.

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Controlling Arrivals This attempt to manage Irish servants can be found in nearly all the English colonies in the course of the seventeenth century. English authorities could not hinder free Irish Catholics from crossing the Atlantic so they focused on Irish servants and prisoners of war. Before there could be too many, members of the House and governors tried to prevent the arrival of Irish servants both in the Chesapeake and in the West Indies. The law of 1655 in Virginia, the Bacon laws in Maryland, dated 1696 (in place until mid-eighteenth century), along with those enacted in the West Indies, such as a 1701 law in Nevis show how widespread this reaction was at the time. For Virginia, the law was thus formulated: Be it enacted by this Grand Assembly that all Irish servants that from the 1st of September 1653 have bin brought into this colony without indenture (notwithstanding the acts for servants without indentures it being only the benefit of our nation) shall serve as followeth, (vizt.) all above 16 years old to serve 6 years, and all under to serve till they be 24 years old and in case of dispute in that behalf the court shall judge of their age.43 In 1701, the Assembly of Nevis enacted the following law: “An Act to Prevent Papists and reputed Papists from settling in this island for the future and for the better government of those which are already settled” to prevent Catholics in general from coming into the island as it would be “a Matter, in many Respects, of evil Consequence to this Island, especially in case of a War.”44 However, another law was enacted the same year, concerning the importation of white servants, which excluded the “Irish Papists” specifically: “Encouragement be given for the Importation of white Servants, the Irish Papists excepted.” What is striking is that no explanation for this exclusion is provided, as if everyone concerned knew why the Irish Catholic servants were undesirable. In spite of this, planters were desperately in need of servants. Although some attempts to avoid hiring Irish servants are registered in the court records, most had to do with what was made available to them.45 Therefore, planters were faced with the fears of letting Irish Catholic servants 43 44

45

William Hening, ed., Statutes at Large, being a Collection of all Laws of Virginia from the First Session of the Legislature in the Year 1619 (New York: 1823), 1:411. “An Act for encouraging the Importation of white Servants; and that all Persons shall be obliged to keep a white Servant to every Twenty Negroes living.” Acts of Assembly passed in the Island of Nevis, from 1664, to 1739, inclusive, (London: J. Baskett, 1740), 35–37, 37–39. See example in lv, Northumberland Order Book, 1669–73, 165.

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enter their colony, village, plantation and ultimately their homes as well as the need for a labor force to enable them to exploit their land. These laws were meant to restrict the arrival of Irish servants. However, it is not clear if and how those legal provisions were advertised in Ireland. In the case of the 1655 law of Virginia, the law must have been known to Irish servants since it was repealed five years later because of a dwindling of the labor force. But once they were in the colonies, the officials (who were also planters) needed to know exactly where they were and who they worked for, in case of trouble. Controlling Locations and Numbers English planters had to find other means of controlling the Catholic Irish population present among them. In the West Indies, these measures appear more clearly since the Irish were more numerous, but we can uncover the same phenomenon, on a minor scale, in the Chesapeake colonies, some having been directly inspired by the West Indian reactions, as was the case with the Barbados model for managing slaves legally. Indeed, knowing where the potential troublemakers dwelt and their numbers was crucial to decision-making regarding the control exerted on them. Censuses were regularly conducted in the different islands of the West Indies. In fact, the best means of controlling the locations of Irish servants was to count the population. Sir William Petty had gone through that process for the same purpose in Ireland, namely establishing the proportion of English to Irish people in each county. In the English West Indies, there were three columns in the censuses: “English,” “Irish” and “Black” or “slave.” What was counted in Maryland and Virginia, as opposed to the West Indies was the “tithables,” the people subjected to a tax, and indentured servants, both male and female, were taxable. There was no particular column to distinguish the Irish from their English fellows but the list was organized thus: the planter responsible for gathering the tithables in his own neighborhood appeared first on his list, and then the name of his male children if they were of age, followed by his servants and slaves. For the two latter categories, “negro” was mentioned between brackets for slaves, and “Irish” for Irish servants. From year to year, the clerks and officials could then locate them, see if they had been sold to another master or if they had finished their time of service.46 To determine why some Irish were registered as “Irish” while others were not, we need to bear in mind that, for English planters, the Irish Catholics were potentially dangerous. Virginia clerks could have decided to identify the Irish 46

See for example, lv, Northampton County court orders 1657–1664, 197, Northampton County court orders 1664–1674, 14, 15, 28, 115.

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as such in the records so as to be able to consult those documents if a rebellion broke out. The process, though, was not systematic as clerks did not always write down the many details properly when an indentured servant contracted in England.47 As for Maryland, the question is more difficult to answer since the climate of religious toleration put less pressure, at least officially, on Catholics. Internal migrations could partly explain this phenomenon. Kent County, for example, was mainly peopled by Virginians who had followed William Claiborne in 1631 on the Island of Kent, which provoked serious arguments when the frontier between the two Chesapeake colonies was established, and which, inevitably, involved alarms of “popery.”48 To those individuals were added some colonists from Saint Mary’s who desired to buy the fertile lands of Kent and later Talbot counties. In 1649, a group of Puritans from Lower Norfolk and the Isle of Wight counties in Virginia also settled there. Therefore, from 1656 to 1660, three of the six clerks who were in office were either Protestants, which would explain the identification of 52 servants as specifically “Irish.”49 The same is true for Charles County where, between 1658 and 1695, six of the seven clerks were also Protestants.50 The identification and location of those Irish servants was important to the Maryland Protestants because, conditioned by the situation in Ireland and by the stereotypes they had brought with them to the colonies, they knew the Irish could represent a threat in an environment where Catholics held power. However, from 1699 onwards, each immigrant was required to take the oath of allegiance upon arrival. It then became much easier for officials to identify who was a Catholic. The notion of control remained: the Irish Catholics, who could trouble the peace of the colony, were identified.51

47 See David Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America, An Economic Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 65. 48 L. H. Roper, The English Empire in America, 1602–1658: Beyond Jamestown (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009), 109–111, 121–128, 131–137. 49 Thomas Hynson, a Puritan, was in office from 1652 to 1653 and from 1656 to 1657; William Leeds, a Protestant, was clerk from 1657 to 1658, and was replaced by John Coursey, a Puritan, from 1658 to 1660. See Peyrol-Kleiber, “Les engagés irlandais au Maryland et en Virginie,” 242. 50 George Thompson, who was close to William Stone, the governor of Maryland, was also a Puritan and was a clerk from 1658 to 1660, and from 1662 to 1667. Thomas Lomax, another Puritan, was in office from 1660 to 1662 and Richard Boughton, a Protestant, from 1667 to 1669 and from 1687 to 1689. Benjamin Rozier, also a Protestant, was a clerk from 1678 to 1680 and finally Cleborne Lomax from 1689 to 1695. Ibid. 51 Peyrol-Kleiber, “Les engagés irlandais au Maryland et en Virginie,” 241–242.

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Controlling Mobility Maybe as a result of the laws passed in the West Indies, Maryland and Virginia reacted likewise. In April 1662, the former passed an act stating that each servant who would go beyond two miles from his master’s plantation should bear a pass written in the hand of his master and allowing this journey.52 The following year in Virginia, an identical law was passed by the General Assembly, which clearly aimed at prohibiting unauthorized meetings between servants.53 Although both laws were not necessarily meant for Irish servants but for servants in general, they denote a real anxiety to keep the servants under control. If the Irish were regarded as a potential threat, it might be assumed the authorities would wish to keep weapons out of their hands. However the picture was not as simple as that. In the West Indies, even counting military forces presented a problem since the numbers could be obtained by the Irish and transmitted to the nearby French islands, enabling an attack against the English.54 This preoccupation was not as important in the Chesapeake since, once again, numbers were more limited.

“They may confederate with the Negros”55

Although the Irish provoked fear among the English settlers of the West Indies, Virginia and Maryland, their potential association with black slaves, increasingly numerous as the years passed, was a more serious threat to stability and a promise of disorder. Governor Nicholson expressed his fears for Maryland in 1697: 52

amo, 1:449–451, http://aomol.msa.maryland.gov/000001/000001/html/am1--449.html, last accessed 20 November 2014. 53 Hening, Statutes, vol. 2, 187–188, 195. April Hatfield has put forward the many relations that existed between the different English colonies, concentrating on Virginia. We therefore know that information was exchanged and reactions to certain situations were imitated, Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 54 In 1675 Sir Charles Wheler reported that St. Christopher “By the French & the Irish … is soe much weaken[e]d,” saying that “if any war should happen the French would revolt & [the] Irish would betray the English as they did in the first warr,” meaning the events of the 1660s. Charles Wheler added that the militia on the island should be “recruited w[i]th English and not have Irish mix’t with them,” CO153/2 f. 39, 7 Jul 1675, quoted in J. Shaw, Island Purgatory, 200. 55 amo, 23:498, http://msa.maryland.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc2900/sc2908/000001/ 000023/html/am23--498.html, accessed 20 November 2014.

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And as for the Irish servants, they have more privileges: and I don’t know but they may confederate with the Negros; and in the summer time they may keep out in the Woods about the Frontiers, which are very thinly inhabited.56 That fear had been present in the colonists’ mind before 1697 though, especially in the West Indies. When the Irish and the African were compared, some thought the Irish were the most barbarous. The minister Morgan Godwyn arrived in Virginia in 1665, ready to convert Africans, whom he judged were better candidates for baptism than some Europeans including the Irish.57 In fact, in disputing the widespread idea that Blacks were barbarous, he took the example of the Irish, among others, to prove that some other peoples were more barbarous: And tho Ireland in times past […] be reported to have been a place of Learning, […] yet so much are they degenerated, or at least so little Fruit thereof hath of late accrued to their Prosperity, that the Natives of that Kingdom, who have been Imported hither, are observed to be, in divers respects, more Barbarous than the Negro’s.58 Godwyn also reported a provocative saying, well known in the colonies, implying that the Irish would have better deserved being enslaved: “If the Irishman’s Country had first lighted in the Englishman’s way, he might have gone no further to look for Negro’s.”59 During the seventeenth century, many occasions lead the English population of the Caribbean islands to accuse the Irish of fomenting rebellions with slaves. Some of the latter were Catholics, baptized by their former Portuguese masters, either in Brazil or Africa. The English were afraid their associations might disrupt the established order. An accusation was uttered of a “dangerous plot & combination of the Irish and Negroes” in Bermuda in October 1661, but 56 Ibid. 57 Morgan Godwyn was an important figure of the seventeenth century as he denounced the ill treatment of slaves on the island of Barbados, the hegemony of the planters’ elite and their lack of religiosity, along with the illegitimacy of the churchwardens who had no right to interfere in Anglican affairs since they were not members of the clergy. John M. Fout, The Explosive Cleric: Morgan Godwyn, Slavery, and Colonial Elites in Virginia and Barbados, 1665–1685 (Ph.D. diss., Virginia Commonwealth University, 2005). 58 Morgan Godwyn, The Negro’s and Indians Advocate, Suing for their Admission into the Church (London, 1680), 35. 59 Ibid., 36.

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it failed to materialize.60 Likewise, the 1661 Barbados slave code also states the similarities between slaves and Irish Catholics, saying of the latter that they could “join themselves to runaway slaves.”61 Barbados’ governor ordered that Irish servants wandering out of their plantations with slaves be whipped and sent home to their masters. Lessons Learnt from the Past? By studying the laws passed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one can note that those concerning servants were often adapted to suit the situation of slaveholders. It is a sort of “white code” that preceded the black codes of the colonies.62 It is particularly true for the legal apparatus used against Irish servants. In Virginia, the 1655 act, meant to hinder the arrival of too many Irish servants by lengthening their time of service, was completed two years later by the addendum “and all aliens.”63 The set of laws commonly known as Bacon’s laws passed in Maryland in 1699 is another example of that phenomenon: a tax on Irish servants, paid by captains and merchants transporting them was put in place and five years later a tax on imported slaves was added. The judicial system was used the same way for servants and slaves, that is whenever a problem of control occurred, raising fears and anxiety among the English planters, a law was passed to address those fears and ease the tensions. Whether the English recycled techniques meant to manage their fears of black slaves and natives in dealing with Irish servants requires a separate answer for the Chesapeake and the West Indies. In the Chesapeake, where Irish Catholics remained a minority, the English officials managed to maintain control over them. There are no occurrences in the records of Irish servants and ex-servants being suspected of fomenting a rebellion. The only causes of disturbance were the odd Irish drunken man criticizing the king or the governor. They were therefore either subdued or decided to remain discreet. To integrate colonial society, some of the Irish servants who had finished their terms probably erased their Catholicism by converting to Protestantism, due to the lack of Catholic institutions and priests, especially in Virginia, while others tried to conceal their Irish origins by modifying their family names 60 Virginia Bernhard, Slaves and Slaveholders in Bermuda, 1616–1782 (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 91. 61 “An Act for the good governing of servants and ordaining the rights between masters and servants,” 27 Sept. 1661, in Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, vol. 5 (1661–1668), 61–66, British History Online, accessed 9 December 2013. 62 Terms used by Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, private communication, 20 September 2012. 63 Peyrol-Kleiber, “Les engagés irlandais au Maryland et en Virginie,” 325.

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(changing O’Brien into Bryan for example) or even their signature as was the case with Bryan O’Daly.64 This Irish and Catholic ex-servant lived in Saint Mary’s county from his arrival around 1659 until his death in 1675. He is the only Irish ex-servant who left a will, in which his signature, in Gaelic, appears. It happens that O’Daly knew how to write in Gaelic but obviously meant to hide his Irish origins by omitting the “O” and adopting an anglicized spelling of his name “Daly” instead of “Dálaigh.” His son even married into a Protestant family, the Clokers from Saint Mary’s. Catholicism was abandoned in that family after thirty years in Maryland. Once they became landowners, the Irish seemed to adhere, or at least not contest openly, the imperial scheme of the English crown, like Cornelius Bryan who had uttered rebellious words regarding the English, but who led a peaceful life once he had acquired land. Those Irish Catholics were considered as acceptable since they managed to integrate into colonial society without causing trouble. Therefore the English officials learnt how to use this part of the Irish population present on the islands and in the Chesapeake to reduce the threat their less docile compatriots could cause. It is clear from the Chesapeake records that once the Irish servants were freed and became part of the colonial society they did not appear as specifically Irish anymore, unless they caused “mischief,” which did not happen very often. Moreover, the sociability networks of ex-servants of Irish origins reveal that there was no discrimination among the planters regarding business or friendship. Bryan O’Daly had business partners and friends who were English Catholics, English Protestants, Irish Catholics, Irish Protestants, French and Dutch Catholics. Moreover, with the laws restricting the arrival of Irish servants, the Irish deemed unacceptable were less and less numerous and consequently easier to control. As for the West Indies, Jenny Shaw concludes that to resolve the problems with the Irish, it took a set of solutions, including: the assistance of particular sorts of Irish Catholics, the need for English Protestants to find a way to minimize religious differences, and a demarcation between “white” and “black” that was clear and impermeable. With the memory of inter-racial religious alliances fresh in their minds, English colonial officials moved to render such threats obsolete as the eighteenth century dawned.65 64

65

Ibid., 436. Names like O’Brien became Bryan or Briant, De Barra was changed to Barry, O’Connell became Connell, or McMahony turned into Mecane. Peyrol-Kleiber, “Les engagés irlandais au Maryland et en Virginie,” appendices 1 and 5. Shaw, “Island Purgatory,” 227–228.

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In the West Indies as well as in the Chesapeake, as can be seen in the 1708 Nevis census (which integrated Irish servants and Irish planters within generic columns of “servants” and “whites”) and the population estimates for Virginia and Maryland, the overwhelming population of slaves outnumbering the white population did not provide the English with the possibility of not considering the Irish as “white.”66 Conclusion The paradox of needing labor but fearing the labor force in the particular case of the Irish servants was never quite solved. Protestant planters tried different methods to address those fears and control the potentially dangerous servants but did not appease their anxiety. Irish servants were controlled in their movements and held into close scrutiny by colonial officials but those measures only contained Protestants’ anxiety momentarily. Apart from the differing context and environment, along with the fact that English colonists transferred their anti-Catholic fears and stereotypes of the Irish across the Atlantic Ocean, the dimension of anti-popery in the Chesapeake and the West Indies that differed the most from that in England was the compelled proximity of the Irish Catholics. In the face-to-face societies of Virginia and Maryland, Protestants had Irish Catholics as servants, neighbors or individuals they would deal with in their activities or as judges or authorities in the case of Maryland. It may be argued that Protestant and Catholic Irish people were also living in close proximity in the Ulster plantations, which was sometimes true as most of the labor force employed by the New English were Gaelic Irish. However, most of the New English planters were not living permanently on their Irish plantation, and above all the Irish were not living in their homes. So even though the fears and preconceived ideas on Irish Catholics were transferred to the Chesapeake, the responses differed from those given to anti-popery in England and Ireland, since this element of proximity did not prevail. Moreover, not only did anti-Irish and anti-Catholic sentiments endure, as can be seen for example with the hysterical reaction to the Quebec Act of 1774 which guaranteed free practice to the Catholics, but the fears of the Irish Catholics rebelling were replaced by the dread of slave conspiracy, rebellion 66

Gerald Fothergill (trans.), “St. Christopher’s, January 11th, 1707–8: An Account of All and Singular the White Men, Women and Children at Present Residing and Inhabiting in this Her Majesties Island. As Also of All Slaves, Men, Women and Children, Belonging Unto the Said Inhabitants,” Caribbeana 3 (1914), 132–139.

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and resistance. Slaves therefore replaced the Irish as the main labor-related “fear factor.” Other colonies like the Carolinas and Georgia after 1751, were faced with the same issues as practices and fears transferred.67 As indentured servitude was replaced by slavery, more and more Irish former servants became planters themselves. As Donald Akenson shows in If the Irish Ran the World, an Irish empire would have been quite similar to the English empire of the seventeenth century, although Catholic rather than Protestant. In fact, as ex-servants, Irish slaveholders knew perfectly how to deal with their labor force and avoid slave revolt and resistance. Some, as Akenson shows for Montserrat, were even harsher with their slaves than some English planters. Irish Catholics in the history of the English colonies have long been seen as victims but here in the case of Irish slave-owners, not only were they agents of their own lives, but they also triggered anxiety in English officials and planters that made them react in consequence, therefore modifying their reality, sometimes to their advantage, and sometimes to their detriment.

67

Walter Conser, Southern Crossroads: Perspectives on Religion and Culture (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008), especially 276–287. See also Miller, Emigrants and Exiles.

chapter 8

“Imprisoning Persons at their Pleasure”: The AntiCatholic Hysteria of 1689 in the Middle Colonies David William Voorhees “Being alarmed by a printed declaration at Boston the 18th last” and by England’s example “for securing our English nations liberties and propertyes from Popery and Slavery, and from the Intented invasion of a foraign French design,” the Protestant freeholders of New York’s Suffolk County declared on 3 May 1689 that they would “use all lawfull endeavours for securing our headquarters of New York and Albany forts, and all other fortifications, and the same to put into the hands of those we can confide in, till further order from the parliament in England.”1 Thus began New York’s reaction to the news that Protestant Dutch stadholder William iii, prince of Orange, and his wife Mary had in February replaced the Roman Catholic King James ii on England’s throne. Suffolk County’s reaction set off an explosion of upheaval in England’s mid-Atlantic American colonies. Within weeks, uprisings erupted throughout Long Island, spread up the Hudson River Valley, across New Jersey, and into the lower Delaware River communities as “all majestrates and military officers ware put out by the people and others chosen by them.”2 All of England’s colonies experienced turmoil due to the monarchical change, but the reaction in those colonies carved out of the former Dutch territory of New Netherland degenerated into virtual civil war.3 Mass hysteria overtook communities as mobs attacked and imprisoned officials and civilians, neighbors and strangers. On Long Island, magistrates appointed by King James – whether Catholic or not – were branded “papist[s] or frind[s] of them” 1 Suffolk County Freeholders’ Declaration, 3 May 1689, in Edmund B. O’Callaghan, ed., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, 15 vols. (Albany, n.y., 1853– 1885), 3:577 (hereafter cited as nycd). The author thanks Firth Haring Fabend, Jaap Jacobs, and Ruth Piwonka for their comments. 2 Lieutenant Governor Nicholson and Council of New York to the Board of Trade, 15 May 1689, ibid., 3:575. 3 David S. Lovejoy, The Glorious Revolution in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1974); Owen Stanwood, The Empire Reformed: English America in the Age of the Glorious Revolution (Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004314740_010

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and suffered violent harassment. On Staten Island it was rumored that “the Papists there did threaten to cut the Inhabitants throats & that the People had left their Plantations & were running [about] the woods.” In the three lower Pennsylvania counties on the Delaware River, “seditious” justices “Stirred up the people.”4 The creation of interim provisional governments intensified rather than alleviated the turmoil. The uprising of 1689–1691 is the most traumatic episode in the Middle Colonies prior to the American Revolution. For nearly two years exaggerated fears fanned a spiraling cycle of violence that paralyzed the region. This essay explores the causes for the alarm that gripped Long Island, East Jersey, the Hudson and Mohawk River Valleys, and the lower counties on the Delaware River, how the inhabitants responded to them, and their implications for the mid-Atlantic’s future development.

The Middle Colonies in 1689

In the first half of the seventeenth century, Dutch and Swedish joint-stock trading companies settled the lands between the Delaware and Connecticut Rivers. To populate their territories, the companies drew upon refugees fleeing the religious turmoil roiling Continental Europe, Great Britain, and New England. As a result, the region became populated by widely dispersed ethnically and doctrinally diverse communities. In 1664, the English acquired the  territory only to lose it to the Dutch for fourteen months in 1673–1674.5 With changing sovereignties and distant from European metropolitan centers, fiercely independent communities developed in a decentralized manner. James ii’s accession to the English throne in 1685 altered this situation by placing the region’s executive branches directly under the Stuart monarchy’s centralizing tendencies. In that year, James incorporated East and West Jersey, Long Island, and the Hudson and Mohawk River Valleys with the New England colonies into the Dominion of New England.6 4 Minutes of the Councell at New Yorke, 22 May 1689, New-York Historical Society Collections, 85 vols. (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1868–1975), 1:266 [hereafter cited as nyhs Collections]; “Affadivit Against Col Bayard & Certain Parties on Staten Island,” 25 September 1689, nycd 2:29; John Forat to Jacob Leisler, 4 October 1689, CO 5/1081/168, The National Archives of Great Britain, Kew, England [hereafter tna]. 5 Jaap Jacobs, New Netherland: A Dutch Colony in Seventeenth-Century America (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2005), 263–312. 6 Robert C. Ritchie, The Duke’s Province: A Study of New York Politics and Society, 1664–1691 (Chapel Hill, n.c.: University of North Carolina Press, 1977).

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The Dominion of New England realized the Stuarts’ imperial concept of centralized control by consolidating several provinces into a mega-province. Modeled on Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s theory “to promote Trade and the Sea” for France, the idea was to break the independence of local oligarchies by making communities economically dependent on the metropolis.7 Sir Edmund Andros arrived in Boston on 19/29 December 1686 to assume the Dominion’s governorship, but it was not until April 1688 that he superseded Thomas Dongan as New York governor, Robert Barcklay as East Jersey governor, and Daniel Coxe as West Jersey governor, and appointed Francis Nicholson, captain of the garrison at Boston, as regional military lieutenant-governor for the Dominion’s southern district.8 Seven years earlier, James had incorporated the lower Delaware River Dutch and Swedish communities into the Quaker-dominated colony of Pennsylvania. As James curtailed the economic independence of the mid-Atlantic communities he also took increasingly harsh measures to raise revenues through taxation. The theory, also Colbert’s, was that “taxes rather increase than diminish the commonwealth.” In 1686, the king instructed New York governor Thomas Dongan to take over the disposition of lands. No land purchase could “bee issued or disposed of” without the governor’s warrant.9 Moreover, James used his accession to the throne as an excuse to force communities to take out new patents. Coming at a time of agricultural drought, and with many living on credit, the outcry against the fees was so intense that the New York City Common Council sold municipal lands in lieu of taxes to raise its £300 patent fee, and Long Island assessors refused to levy taxes for their fees. Attempts to raise taxes in the Jerseys and in Delaware communities met with similar resistance. Dominion official Edward Randolph wrote in November 1687, Dongan “has so squeezed the people of New York that they are very hardly able to live, and as many as can leave the place.” Maria van Rensselaer lamented in September 1688 after Dongan levied an additional tax of £2,556, “The colony [Rensselaerswijck] must now again pay a tax of £22 1/2. This is the third tax. 7 Robert Latham and William Matthews, eds., The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 11 vols. (Berkeley, Cal.: University of California Press, 1970–2001), 9: 397. J.R. Jones, Country and Court: England 1658– 1714 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 80–82; Bernard Mason, “Aspects of the New York Revolt of 1689,” New York History 30, no. 2 (April 1949), 165–180; Michael G. Hall, Lawrence H. Leder, and Michael G. Kammen, eds., The Glorious Revolution in America: Documents of the Colonial Crisis of 1689 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1964), 86–89. 8 King James ii’s commission appointing Sir Edmond Andros, 4 April 1688, nycd 3:537–542. 9 Jones, Country and Court, 57–58; “Instructions to Governor Dongan,” nycd 3:370–371; Ritchie, The Duke’s Province, 186–190.

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Where is the money to come from? And still there is no end. This is in addition to the individual taxes of the farmers.”10

“A Wicked Arbitrarie power”

Protestant reformers had long tied economic centralization and high taxation to Catholicism and absolutism.11 Following their lead, the largely Protestant population in the mid-Atlantic region increasingly blamed their economic woes on “a wicked arbitrarie Power Exercysed by Our Late popish Governr: Coll: Dongan & Severall of his wicked Creaturs and Pensionaris Specially now under Lieutenant governr: Nicolson.” The militia of New York declared on 3 May 1689, “wee having also Long groaned under the same Oppression having been governed of Late, most part by papists who have In a most arbitrary way Subverted Our ancient priviledges; makeing us in Effect slaves to their wills.”12 The rise in anti-Catholic bigotry, however, became noticeable after the conversion of the region’s proprietor, James, duke of York, to Roman Catholicism became important following the restoration of English government in November 1674. Knowledge of James’s conversion undoubtedly fueled the controversy over the duke’s appointment in 1675 of the erratic Nicholas van Rensselaer, ordained in the Church of England, to the Albany Dutch Reformed pulpit; a controversy that rent the province for over a year.13 Throughout the following decade, James’s governmental appointments aroused increasing 10

11

12 13

Minutes of the Executive Council of the Province of New York, Victor Hugo Paltsits, ed., 2 vols. (Albany, 1910), 1:178–179, 192 [hereafter cited as mcp], and Mason, “Aspects of the New York Revolt,” 174–175. As an index of economic decline the assessed value of New York City real and personal property fell from £103,457 in 1676 to £78,231 in 1688. Simultaneously the value of imports dropped from £50,000 in 1678 to £33,335 in 1687, Ritchie, The Duke’s Province, 190–195. For East Jersey see, Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, 4 vols. (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1999), 1:384–386. Edward Randolph to William Blathwayt, 23 November 1687, Robert Noxon Toppan, ed., Edward Randolph: His Letters and Official Papers, 9 vols. (Boston: Publications of the Prince Society, 1898–1909, New York, 1967), 6:233 [hereafter cited as Randolph Papers]; A.J.F. van Laer, ed., Correspondence of Maria van Rensselaer 1669–1689 (Albany, 1935), 188. J.P. Kenyon, Stuart England (London: Penguin Books, 1978), 78; Petrus Wittewangel, quoted in Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 341. Address of the Militia of New York to William and Mary, 3 June 1689, nycd 3:584. Lawrence H. Leder, “The Unorthodox Domine: Nicholas Van Rensselaer,” New York History 35, no. 2 (1954), 166–176.

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suspicions. His appointment of Anthony Brockholst as commander of the province in 1681 and Thomas Dongan as governor in 1682 placed New York’s highest offices in the hands of Roman Catholics. Out of the seven members the duke chose for Dongan’s New York council, four were Catholic.14 A 1683 thanksgiving proclamation the Albany magistrates issued upon Dongan’s arrival as governor highlights the concerns these appointments created. The magistrates asked God “to preserve the [city and province] from all misfortunes and calamities, both from within and without, and especially, while many co-religionists are oppressed on account of their religion in one part of the world or another, to let us enjoy the pure teachings of the Gospel and the free exercise there of.”15 The population’s alarm substantially increased following French Catholic King Louis xiv’s Edict of Fontainebleu in 1685 revoked the limited religious toleration allowed by the Edict of Nantes. Louis’ banning of the Religion prétendue réformée or “so-called reformed religion,” banishment of its ministers within fifteen days, and command that all children be baptized and raised as Roman Catholics released a torrent of official violence in France and her colonies.16 The news of brutal Catholic attacks on French Protestants arrived on the heels of news of James’s accession in February 1685 to the English throne and his savage crushing in June of that year of the Protestant duke of Monmouth’s rebellion.17 The combination of these events inflamed fears in colonials with a northern border abutting French Canada and with close familial, commercial, and cultural ties that kept them intimately abreast of European happenings. “People here [in the Republic] are afraid of a war with the French,” Hilbert Coerts wrote in April 1684 from the eastern Dutch province of Drenthe to his cousin Coert Stevense on Long Island, “and when this happens woe to our country.”18 Three years later, domine Casparus van Zuren lamented from the Netherlands to his 14

The Roman Catholics were Anthony Brockholst, Lucas Santen, John Spragg, and Jervas Baxter; the Protestants were Frederick Philipse, Stephanus van Cortlandt, and John Young, nycd 3:369. 15 Arnold J.F. Van Laer, ed., Minutes of the Court of Albany, Rensselaerswyck, and Schenectady, 1668–1685, 3 vols. (Albany, 1926–1932), 3:316. 16 “Révocation de l’Edit de Nantes,” 17 October 1685, in M. Charles Weiss, Histoire Des Réfugiés Protestants De France, 2 vols. (Paris, 1853), 2:387–391; Paula Wheeler Carlo, Huguenot Refugees in Colonial New York: Becoming American in the Hudson Valley (Brighton, u.k., and Portland, Ore.: Sussex Academic Press, 2005), 27–28, 148. 17 Kenyon, Stuart England, 228–229. See also Stanwood, The Empire Reformed. 18 Hilbert Coerts tot Voor Hyes to Coert Stevens thos Voor Hees, 13 April 1684, in D.J. Wijmer, J. Folkerts, et al., Through A Dutch Door: 17th Century Origins of The Van Voorhees Family (Baltimore, Md.: Gateway Press, 1992), 156.

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former Long Island congregation, “The papists [here] brew us much misfortune, who knows when or how horrible it shall eventually burst out.”19 Rumors that the French were preparing to attack the region from either Canada or the sea and enslave the Protestant population strained the taut nerves of provincials suffering drought and crop failures. “The country here is in such a perilous condition on account of the French,” Kiliaen van Rensselaer warned in September 1687, “we expect them here every day.”20 Protestant anxieties turned to outright fear as Governor Dongan filled local offices with Roman Catholics. Initially he had quietly appointed Catholics to only minor posts, as, for example, when in 1684 he employed James Cooley as blacksmith at the fort. But in 1687 he aggressively placed Catholics in higher capacities. In that year he named Jarvis Baxter commander of the royal troops at Albany, Bartholomew Russell commander at the fort on Manhattan, and placed James Larkin in charge of the New York City custom house and granary. In April 1688, John Cavalier, who Dongan had appointed Marshal of the Admiralty in 1684 and to the Chancery Court in 1685, was made messenger of the provincial council. In 1688 Matthew Plowman arrived with a royal commission as customs collector.21 Moreover, Dongan further attempted to centralize control for James by granting to men who demonstrated affection to their Catholic monarch manorial patents with extra-ordinary judicial and administrative authority. Though these patents were not large, ranging from several hundred to several thousand acres, the Roman Catholic governor’s granting of quasi-feudal lordships with military implications raised the specter of “grandees,” that is, Roman Catholic nobles given large land grants by the Spanish crown in order to expel the Muslims from Iberia.22 19

Jonathan I. Israel, “The Dutch role in the Glorious Revolution,” in idem, ed., The AngloDutch moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution and its World Impact (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 113; Casparus van Zuren to Margarita Polhemus, 15 February 1687, in Wijmer, Through A Dutch Door, 169–170. 20 Kiliaen van Rensselaer to Richard van Rensselaer, September 1687, Van Laer, Correspondence of Maria van Rensselaer, 184. 21 Commission and Instructions to Matthew Plowman, 4 November and 13 December 1687, nycd 3:500, 501–503; William Harper Bennett, Catholic Footsteps in Old New York: A Chronicle of Catholicity in the City of New York from 1524 to 1808 (New York, 1909), 82–111, 196. 22 Dongan granted manorial patents to James Lloyd for Lloyd’s Neck (16 March 1686), to Robert Livingston for Livingston Manor (22 July 1686), to John Palmer for Cassilton Manor (31 March 1687), to Christopher Billop for Bentley Manor (6 May 1687), and to John Pell for Pelham Manor (20 October 1687). For a discussion of Dongan’s grants see Sung Bok Kim, Landlord and Tenant in Colonial New York: Manorial Society, 1664–1775 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 38–39. Edmund B. O’Callaghan, ed., The

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The appointment of Roman Catholics to the province’s highest military and civil offices sent to many a clear and threatening message. The open conversion activities of Jesuit priests Father Henry Harrison, who arrived in New York in 1685, Father Charles Gage, who was in the province after 1686, and Dongan’s private chaplain, Father Thomas Harvey (introduced to New Yorkers as “John Smith”) fueled fears:23 “This French Government being thus (by Commission) introduced,” one writer stated, “it was natural that Papists should be employed in the highest Trusts … forcing obedience from a Protestant Free People.”24 Fears further increased as French refugees fleeing persecutions “were filling up the churches.”25 “Hearing what greater success the Dragonnades in France had had,” the New York Dutch Reformed Church members later wrote, “and seeing how in those distant regions the foundation was being laid to introduce the same here in every manner, we could well imagine what was in store for us.”26

Apocalyptic Prophecy

In 1689, the Classis of Amsterdam wrote to New York City Dutch Reformed domine Henricus Selijns, “For the past year, we saw dark clouds rising against Protestantism in Europe through the powerful conspiracy of the Kings of France and England.” They added pointedly that he, however, obviously already knew this “from the newspapers of England and these parts.”27 This statement

23

24 25

26 27

Documentary History of the State of New York, 4 vols. (Albany, 1848–1853) 2: 120–121 [hereafter dhny]. Dongan’s grant of manorial patents, never larger than 2,000 acres, appears largely to have been an attempt to pack an assembly should, and when, it was revived. See Patricia U. Bonomi, A Factious People: Politics and Society in Colonial New York (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1971), 188–189. Thomas A. Hughes, History of the Society of Jesus in North America, Colonial and Federal, 4 vols. (London and New York, 1907–1917), 1:50; “Early Catholic Clergymen in New York,” dhny 3:110–111. “Loyalty Vindicated,” in Charles M. Andrews, ed., Narratives of the Insurrections: 1675–1690 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915), 376. Henricus Selyns to Boston Ministers James Allen, Increase Mather, and Samuel Willard, 8/18 May 1683, in Charles W. Baird, History of the Huguenot Emigration to America, 2 vols. (New York, 1885), 2:397. Between 1682 and 1689 five French congregations were formed in and about New York City alone. William Warren Sweet, Religion in Colonial America (New York, 1943), 207. “Letter from Members of the Dutch Church in New York to the Classis of Amsterdam,” nyhs Collections 1:398. Amsterdam Classis to Henricus Selijns, August 22, 1689, Ecclesiastical Records, State of New York, Edward Tanjore Corwin, Hugh Hastin, et al., eds., 7 vols. (Albany, 1901–1916) 2:974–975 [hereafter cited as Eccles. Recs.].

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highlights the increasing influence of the press in the Atlantic World in the 1680s. French and English Calvinists fleeing persecutions joined Dutch Reformed essayists in producing an outpouring of anti-papist tracts that trumpeted in hysterical terms the dangers of French “popery” and its spread to England. Indeed, between 1685 and 1688 at least 230 anti-papist titles emanated from the Dutch Republic to circulate illegally in England and her colonies, including Robert Ferguson’s A Representation of the Threatening Dangers (Amsterdam, 1687), Caspar Fagel’s A Letter Writ by Mijn Heer Fagel, Pensioner of Holland, to Mr James Stewart (Amsterdam, 1687), and Daniel Defoe’s A Letter to a Dissenter from his Friend at the Hague (The Hague, 1688).28 Such works reinforced in lurid detail, some accompanied by graphic illustrations, the worst Protestant fears about Catholicism. Jean Claude’s Plaintes des protestants cruellement opprimés dans le royaume de France was among these. Published in Cologne in 1686 under William iii’s patronage, Claude excited public outrage with accounts of victims being “suspended by the hair, or by the feet,” being “nearly suffocated” by the “burning of damp straws,” of the “hairs of their head an beard” being “plucked out,” and of woman stripped, shaved, and held naked over a fire.29 In the Middle Colonies, these works reached a public increasingly fearful of their English monarch’s intentions. James ii’s devotion to his Roman Catholic religion and public commitment to policies that seemed designed to curtail the liberties allowed by New Netherland’s 1664 Articles of Transfer increasingly left them little room to doubt their fate.30 28

29

30

G.O. Van de Klashorst, H.W. Blom, and E.O.G. Haitsma Mulier, Bibliography of Dutch Seventeenth Century Political Thought: An Annotated Inventory, 1581–1710 (Amsterdam: apa-Holland University Press, 1986), 122; W.P.C. Knuttel, Catalogus van de pamflettenverzameling berustende in de Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 9 vols. (‘s Gravenhage, 1888–1920), vols. 2, 3; State Tracts: Being a Farther Collection of Severall Choice Treaties Relating to the Government From the Year 1660, to 1689 (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1973 [London, 1692]), 294–299, 334–337, 380–419; John Miller, Popery and Politics in England, 1660–1688 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 244–257; A Catalogue of all the Discourses Printed Against Popery (Ann Arbor, Mich: University of Michigan, Digital Library Service, 2008 [London, 1689]). Jean Claude, Plaintes des protestants cruellement opprimés dans le royaume de France (Cologne: Pierre Martou, 1686); Short account of the complaints and cruel persecutions of the Protestants in the kingdom of France (Boston, 1893 [London, 1686, 1707]). All copies of the first English edition was publicly burned by the common hangman in London in May 1686 for containing “expressions scandalous to His Majesty the king of France,” xi–xii. J.R. Western, Monarchy and Revolution, 61–64; Act of 30 April 1685, Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series: February–December 1685 (London: H.M. Stationary Office, 1960), 605. Subsequent act of 10 February 1688, and 26 October 1688, forbade the selling, writing,

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Particularly influential in the Middle Colonies were prophetic and apocalyptic tracts that evaded the stamp of James’s customs agents under the guise of devotionals. During the 1680s, the “apocalyptic and prophetic framework based on biblical interpretation, astrology, or ancient prophecy” became a major stream in Anglo-Dutch political thought. According to this view, the Day of Final Judgment would be preceded by the Millennium, a thousand-year period that initiated Christ’s reign through the “true and pure church.” Based on prophecies found in the Old and New Testament books of Daniel and the Revelations of St. John, numerous thinkers believed that the Millennium was at hand.31 At the beginning of the century, for example, Scottish mathematician John Napier and English mathematician John Pell had independently calculated from their biblical readings “that Rome would be ruined by the end of 1688.”32 Popular works among American Calvinists, such as Theodorus à Brakel’s De trappen des geestelijcken levens [The Steps of Spiritual Life] (Amsterdam, 1670), his son Wilhelmus à Brakel’s sermon De Heere Jesus Christus voor de alleene end souveraine koninck over sijne kercke [The Lord Jesus Christ Declared to be the Only Sovereign King of His Church] (Rotterdam, 1686), and the writings of Rotterdam theologian Jacobus Borstius emphasized that the true Christian’s entire life must be devoted to preparation for the final Judgment Day.33

31

32

33

printing, or speaking of any seditious and all “false news” whatsoever. Frederick Seaton Siebert, Freedom of the Press in England 1476–1776: The Rise and Decline of Government Control (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1965), 299–300; Calendar of State Papers, Domestic: 1686–1687 (London: H.M. Stationary Office, 1964), 58, 533; Miller, Popery and Politics in England, 254. Ernestine van der Wall, “‘Antichrist Stormed’: The Glorious Revolution and the Dutch Prophetic Tradition,” in Dale Eugene Hoak and Mordechai Feingold, eds. The World of William and Mary: Anglo-Dutch Perspectives on the Revolution of 1688–1689 (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 152–164; W.E. Burns “A Whig Apocalypse: Astrology, Millenarianism, and Politics in England During the Restoration Crisis, 1678–1683,” in James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin, ed., Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture, 4 vols. (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001) Volume iii, The Millenarian Turn: Millenarian Contexts of Science, Politics and Everyday AngloAmerican Life in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 29–42. Many had predicted that the year 1666 was to be the year of the apocalypse, but when that year passed, focus was renewed on this later date, Warren Johnston, Revelation Restored: The Apocalypse in Later Seventeenth-Century England (Woodbridge, Eng.: Boydell Press, 2011), 154, 157. For earlier connections between English and Dutch millenarians see Jeffrey K. Jue, Heaven Upon Earth: Joseph Mede (1586–1638) and the Legacy of Millenarianism (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), 211–250. Journal of a Voyage to New York and a Tour of Several of the American Colonies in 1679–1680, by Jasper Dankers and Peter Sluyter of Wiewald in Friesland, trans. and ed. Henry C. Murphy (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, Inc., 1966 [1867]), 133–134.

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It was, however, French Reformed theologian Pierre Jurieu who most shaped apocalyptic thinking among the elite in the Middle Colonies in the late 1680s. A professor of theology at the French Academy of Sedan, he fled France in 1681 after Louis xiv suppressed that school to the Dutch city of Rotterdam, where he became pastor to the Walloon congregation. In 1686 Jurieu published his millenarian ideas as Accomplissement des prophéties V1: Ou La Delivrance Prochaine de L’Eglise. Instantly a bestseller, the work appeared in Dutch editions and in an English translation as The Accomplishment of the Scripture Prophecies, Or, the Approaching Deliverance of the Church Proving That the Papacy is the Antichristian Kingdom. In this work, Jurieu, citing the Book of Daniel and Revelation 20, predicted that the overthrow of the Antichrist, which he identified as the pope, and the ushering in of the Millennium would occur in 1689.34 His prophecies influenced a coterie of New York merchants working in Rotterdam in the late 1680s, including Samuel Edsall and his sons-in-law Jacob Milborne and Benjamin Blagge. These men would play leading roles in governing the Middle Colonies after the overthrow of King James’s government in 1689. Phrases such as “so wonderfull a deliverance from Popery and Arbitrary power, wrought by the goodnesse of God” pepper their writings and echo Jurieu.35 Jacobus Koelman was another theologian who influenced a more populist apocalyptic strain in the mid-Atlantic colonies. Koelman, a radical pietist domine of the Zeeland Reformed Church, who briefly became a schismatic and Labadist, led a movement to banish all remaining vestiges of Roman Catholic ritual. Koelman, as opposed to Jurieu, argued that the Millennium was not yet to come but had actually already begun with the Calvinist Reformation in 1560. Rather than a peaceful institution of Christ’s rule on earth, Koelman saw the Millennium as an ongoing violent struggle, in which “Antichrist’s power to seduce had been restricted but not actually revoked.” It was thus the duty of those of the true faith to advance God’s goals.36 34

35

36

Guy Howard Dodge, The Political Theory of the Huguenots of the Dispersion: With Special Reference to the Thought and Influence of Pierre Jurieu (New York: Columbia University Press, 1947); Harry van Bracken, “Pierre Jurieu: The Politics of Prophecy,” in Force and Popkin, Millenarianism and Messianism, Volume iv, Continental Millenarians: Protestants, Catholics, Heretics, 85–94. Van der Wall, “The Dutch Prophetic Tradition,” 159; Form of Association proposed to the Inhabitants by the Committee of Safety of New York, June 1689, is generally believed to have been composed by Samuel Edsall, CO5/1081/70–71, tna. Eccles. Recs. 1:656–658, 2:823–824, 831–839, 874–875. C.J. Meeuse, “Jacobus Koelman (1631– 1695): leven en werken” in Figuren en thema’s van de Nadere Reformatie 2, T. Brienen, et al.

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For many American Calvinists, largely drawn from rural European communities and struggling to survive in the New World environment, Koelman’s optimistic apocalyptic theology of personal action, divine retribution against evildoers, and promise of eternal life appealed. In 1682 the Reformed congregations on the Delaware River made considerable efforts to obtain him as their minister. The Rev. Henricus Selijns complained to the Amsterdam Classis in 1685 that his New York City congregation consisted of nothing but “Koelmannists” and that he felt deep sadness that he again had to live amongst so many “wild pigs and bulls of Basan [Bashan].”37 By the late 1680s, millenarian literature arriving in America increasingly presented the prince of Orange as “God’s instrument” for destroying “the Papist monster which is veritably Paganism reborn.”38 William, grandson of Charles i, and Protestant hero for thwarting Louis xiv’s invasion of the Dutch Republic in 1673, was third in line to succeed to the English throne. In 1677 he had married his cousin, James ii’s daughter and heir presumptive Mary after her sickly father ascended the throne. It was thus believed it would be only a short time before Protestant Orange attained England’s crown.39 Koelman saw William “heralding the ultimate downfall of Antichrist” and “the apocalyptic warrior, leading a mighty army to deliver the church from its enemy.”40 Following this belief, the staunchly Calvinist New York City militia captain and wealthy merchant Jacob Leisler in New York City wrote, “we were resolved to expect with great patience … that blessed and glorious Deliverance procured under God, .

(eds.) (Kampen: De Groot Goudriaan, 1990), 63–93; Van der Wall, “Antichrist Stormed,” 159–162. Labadists were followers of French pietist Jean de Labadie (1610–1674), a Jesuit convert to Calvinism who promoted spiritual renewal through home meetings. In 1669 he broke with mainstream Reformed Christians and established communal group religious communities. 37 Henricus Selyns to the Classis of Amsterdam, 1682, in A. Eekhof, De Noord-Amerikaansche predikant Henricus Selijns in de gemeente Waverveen 1666–1682 (‘s Gravenhage, 1915), “bedroofd te zijn te moeten leven onder zoo vele’wilde swynen en stieren van Basan,” 46; see also 20 September 1685, Eccles. Recs. 2:379. 38 Pierre Jurieu, Lettres pastorales addressees aux fideles de France qui gemissent sous la captivite de Babylone (Rotterdam: Abraham Acher, 1686–1689), 8:187–192 : “Qui sait si Dieu … ne donnera pas au monde un Constantin qui ruinera ce monstre de Papisme qui est véritable Paganisme ressucité,” 188. For a similar statement by an English author see “Reflections on Monsieur Fagel’s Letter” (1688), in State Tracts, 339. 39 Jones, Country and Court, 245–248; Rachel J. Weil, “The politics of legitimacy: women and the warming-pan scandal” in Lois G. Schwoerer, ed., The Revolution of 1688–1689: Changing perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 67. 40 Van der Wall, “Antichrist Stormed,” 161.

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by his Royal Highness, William Henry, Prince of Orange.”41 A deliverance, however, seemingly thwarted when news arrived in the Middle Colonies in late August 1688, just as Sir Edmund Andros incorporated the region into the Dominion of New England, of the birth in June of a Roman Catholic heir to James ii.42

“Hidden Agents of the dark Regions”

On 20 October 1690, Leisler and his council, who had assumed control of the New York government as the result of the 1689 uprisings, sent a letter to England’s new Postmaster-General John Wildman. “How far it hath pleased God to prosper us against the Combinations of the Forces of hell itselfe,” they wrote, “and doubt not by the blessing of heaven to defend ourselves against what forreigne power soever shall be made upon us.” They rejoiced “at the good news” of William’s conquest in Ireland and “his happy returne into England,” and prayed that God would “preserve & protect him through all dangers, & especially from those hidden Agents of the dark Regions.” They concluded their letter by “beseeching the Almighty to blesse you & all good Instruments in carrying you through the worke you [are] called unto, & afterwards rewarding you with heaven.”43 The letter is interesting on several levels. For one, it connects New York millenarians with notorious Leveller and extreme republican John Wildman. Wildman, a prominent agitator during England’s Civil War, had been closely connected to Fifth Monarchists, although not one himself. In exile in the Dutch Republic during James ii’s reign, he authored a number of radical tracts on behalf of the prince of Orange, whom he had accompanied during his invasion of England in November 1688.44 More important is the letter’s millenarian language. Leisler, a son of Frankfurt am Main, Germany, French Reformed minister Jacob Victorian Leisler, was a member of a family long prominent in 41 42 43 44

[Jacob Leisler], “A Declaration of the Inhabitants Soldiers belonging under the several Companies of the Train’d-Bands of New-York,” 31 May 1689 (Boston, 1689). Randolph to William Blathwayt, 2 October 1688, Randolph Papers, 6:263–265. Jacob Leisler and his Council to John Wildman, 20 October 1690, Special Collections, Blathwayt Papers, Colonial Williamsburg, Williamsburg, Va. Richard L. Greaves, “Wildman, Sir John (1622/3–1693),” The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) online ed., January 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/29405 (last accessed 1 July 2013). Wildman, An account of the reasons of the nobility and gentry’s invitation of His Highness the Prince of Orange into England (Amsterdam, 1688).

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European Calvinism and noted for his “fervent” religious zeal.45 In this letter he and his councilors drew on imagery from Psalm 74:20: “Have respect for to the covenant: for the dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty.” Clearly, for them, William fulfilled god’s covenant toward defeating the “instruments of darkness.”46 Such evil “instruments” had been gaining strength in the Middle Colonies for some time. “The adherents of popery (our Hon. Lord Governor being a papist) utilize all means for the advancement of the same,” the Long Island consistory had fumed in 1685.47 Andros’s removal of Dongan as governor in August 1688 raised Calvinist expectations. “There was great Joy when Sir Edmond Andros came here from Boston,” New York City workmen Andries and Jan Meyer related, “because we were delivered from a Papist’s Govoner Thomas Dongan & had now as we thought another Deputy Governor in the fort [Nicholson] who would defend and Establish the true Religion.” New Yorkers, though, soon “found to the contrary.” Instead of the “Images erected by Col: Thomas Dongan in the fort” being “broken down & take away,” Nicholson, an Anglican, “commanded” them removed to “a better room in the fort” and “to make all things for Said Priest, according to his will.”48 Such acts confirmed Protestant fears of a papist plot to enslave their bodies in order to steal their 45

46

47

48

David William Voorhees, “The ‘Fervent Zeale’ of Jacob Leisler,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 51 no. 3 (July 1994), 447–472. Leisler’s mother, daughter of Geneva University regent Heinrich Wissenbach, was descended from Jean Calvin’s Geneva Syndic Henri Aubert on her mother’s side, and her paternal grandfather, Jacob Wissenbach, became in 1579 the first Reformed minister at Dillenburg-Fronhausen, Hesse-Nassau, under Count Johann vi, younger brother of William the Silent. See Heinrich Hain, “Die Wissenbach unter den ersten Pfarren von Frohnhausen (Dillkreis),” Hessische Familienkunde 2, no. 6/7 (June 1953), 215. Her first cousin was famed Franeker University law professor Johann Jacob Wissenbach, a close friend of leading Dutch Reformed pietist theologian Gysbertus Voetius. See Friedrich Wilhelm Cuno, “Wissenbach, Johann Jacob,” Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, heraugegeben von der Historischen Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschften, vol. 43 (Liepzig, 1898), 548–549. In this letter, Leisler paraphrases Jean Calvin’s commentary on Psalm 74, verse 20. See Jean Calvin, Commentary on The Book of Psalms, Rev. James Anderson, ed., 5 vols. (Geneva 1557; reprint Edinburgh, 1845–1849), 3: 180–181. Long Island Consistory to the Amsterdam Classis, 20 July 1685, Flatbush Church Records, 1:169. Dongan was appointed governor of New York in 1683. He was accompanied by Father Thomas Harvey (aka as “John Smith”), an English Jesuit. By 1685 Fathers Henry Harrison and Charles Gage, as well as two lay brothers, were ministering in New York. See, Hughes, History of the Society of Jesus in North America, 1:50, and “Early Catholic Clergymen in New York,” dhny 3:110–111. Deposition of Andries and Jan Meyer, 26 October 1689, dhny 2:28.

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souls. “This was the condition of new York, the Slavery and Popery that it lay under,” a later pamphleteer phrased it, “until the Hand of Heaven sent the glorious King William to break those chains, which would otherwise have fetter’d all Europe.”49 The prince of Orange encouraged this popular perception of himself as the “biblical champion, riding forth for God’s true faith.” His propaganda machine, historian Tony Claydon writes, “employed writers, preachers, and engravers to polish his halo.”50 In February 1689, copies of William’s three declarations, printed at The Hague, began to circulate in the Middle Colonies. These works justified the prince’s invasion “to preserve the People of England … from the cruel Rage and bloody Revenge of the Papists.” Moreover, the prince’s Third Declaration did “require and expect” from “all … Magistrates and Officers Civil and Military” to “disarm and secure, as by Law they may and ought, within their respective Counties, Cities, and Jurisdictions, all Papists whatsoever.”51 Following the Third Declaration’s charge, Protestant justices and militia officers throughout the Middle Colonies called for the removal of James’ officials, forced those who replaced them to take oaths to defend “the true Reformed religion,” and demanded affidavits attesting to the doctrinal purity of any in authority whose theology was deemed questionable.52 Echoing the idol smashing of an earlier Calvinist generation, men set out to search for any evidences of Catholic images, which, if found, were immediately destroyed. “I hope before two dayes [come] to one end,” Leisler wrote to William Jones on 10 July 1689, “to have … those Idolls destroyed which we heare are dailly still worshipped.”53 The movement for civil purification, or, to use the militant’s term, “reformation,” exploded simultaneously among Dutch, French, and English Protestants in the region. Distinctions were not made between Roman Catholics and those 49 50 51

52 53

“Loyalty Vindicated,” in Andrews, Narratives of the Insurrections, 376. Tony Claydon, William iii and the Godly Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 21, 23–64, 68. Deposition of Andries Greveraet and George Brewerton, 31 December 1689, CO 5/1081/ 223, tna; Leisler to Edwyn Stede, 23 November 1689, dhny 2:40. The prince of Orange’s declarations of 30 September, 28 October, and 28 November 1688 were printed in Holland in enormous quantities in Dutch, French, German, and English; Israel, The Anglo-Dutch Moment, 12–24; State Tracts, 66–77 (quote is from the “Declaration of the Prince of Orange,” 28 November 1688. William later claimed the 28 November 28 declaration to be a forgery; Beddard, Kingdom without a King, 29–31). Jacob Leisler to William Jones in Newhaven, July 10, 1689, and depositions, dhny 2:7–9, 27–30; CO5/1081/166–167, tna. Jacob Leisler to William Jones in New Haven, 10 July 1689, dhny 2:9.

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who practiced rites inconsistent with Reformed doctrine. A pamphlet written by Increase Mather in 1686 that enjoyed wide circulation in New York, A Brief Discourse Concerning the Unlawfulness of Common Prayer Worship, for example, had identified all Church of England practices as popish.54 New York City’s Anglican minister Alexander Innes was thus forced to flee for “opinion contrary to our religion.”55 Quakers were held in particular odium because they “encourage if not out do the Roman Catholiques and most of our Calamities and divisions are truly indebted to them, covering their pernicious practices by their blind scruples, and impudent interpretations … they advance the interest of K. James.”56 Apocalyptic fears that the Divine Judgment was at hand demanded the establishment of rule by true Christians by any means. The “hidden agents of the dark regions” lurked everywhere.

“Prison is not a catholican for all State Maladyes”

According to the Revelation of St. John of Patmos, God is to send an angel to bind Satan and cast him into the bottomless pit, in which he is to be sealed for a thousand years [Revelation 20: 1–3]. Jurieu calculated that the beginning of the millennium would occur in 1689 and that “the total ruin of Antichrists Kingdom” would begin in the year 1690, “or a little while after.” During this period “The Beast and the false Prophet the Pope and his Agents, shall rally all their forces: but God shall muster all his together and give the last blow to Popery then the Beast and the false Prophet shall be thrown into the lake and plunged into the bottomless pit.”57 Koelman contended that, as the Saints established God’s kingdom on earth, “the destruction of Rome would be physical and violent.”58 Following such thinking, Protestant militias in the Middle Colonies saw themselves acting as “peti[ti]oners to the throne of heaven” for the preserving the true religion “whilst the world endureth.”59 54 55 56 57 58

59

A Brief Discourse Concerning the unlawfulness of Common Prayer Worship (Cambridge, Mass., 1686). “Abstract of the Committee of Safety,” 22 July 1689, CO5/1081/160, tna; Captain Leisler to King William and Queen Mary, 20 August 1689, nycd, 3:616. Leisler and Council to the bishop of Salisbury, 7 January 1689/90, nycd 3:656. Pierre Jurieu, The Accomplishment of the Scripture Prophecies, Or, The Approaching Deliverance of the Church (London, 1687; reprint Charleston, s.c.: BiblioBazaar, 2011), 276. Jacobus Koelman, De vruchteloose bid-dagen van Nederlandt, ghehouden tot tergingh van den Godt van den Hemel, en verhaestingh der verwoestende oordelen en plagen (Amsterdam, 1682); Sleutel ter opening van de donkerste Kapittelen in de Openbaaringe gedaan aan Johannis op het Eiland Patmos (Amsterdam and Utrecht, 1688). Address of the Militia of New-York to William and Mary, 3 June (?) 1689, nycd 3:584.

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Securing control on Long Island and the lower Hudson River Valley, the militants turned to obtaining the entire region for “ye: Person of ye: Protestant Religion that … god has Plaised to Submitt us to.”60 In June, they called for a convention of New York and New Jersey delegates to meet in Manhattan to oversee the government. Eventually six New York counties and two East Jersey counties participated. Named Committee of Safety, after similar bodies formed during the English Civil Wars and a Massachusetts committee formed in April 1689, the convention took increasingly drastic measures to “discourage our adverse party who are dailly hatching & sowing seditione amongst us.”61 John Tudor wrote in August 1689 that the committee “governe[s] and rule[s] at soe strainge a rate, that I am not able to express it, denying all power but their owne, putting in and turneing out the Militia Officers,” and “imprisoning persons at their pleasure in the forte.”62 Apocalyptic fears shaped the volatility. The great comet of 1680 and another comet in 1682 presaged drought, crop failures, pestilence, and political turmoil.63 In the former year, Dutch Labadist missionary Jaspar Danckaerts wrote of the 60

61

62 63

Declaration of the Inhabitants Soldjers, 31 May 1689, dhny 2:10; Declaration in favor of William and Mary, 3 June 1689, dhny 2:4; Address of the Militia of New York to William and Mary, 3 June 1689, nycd 3:584; “Loyalty Vindicated,” in Andrews, Narratives of the Insurrections, 384–385. Leisler to Major Nathan Gold, 16 June 1689, dhny 2:4–5. The New York counties and representatives were New York (Samuel Edsall, Peter Delanoy), Westchester (Thomas Williams, Richard Panton), Kings (Gerardus Beekman, Mindert Coerten), Queens (Richard Betts, Mathias Harvey), Richmond (William Cox, Jacques Puillion), and Orange (William Lawrence); the New Jersey counties were Essex (Henry Lyon, John Curtis) and Bergen (Teunis Roelefse van Houten). Suffolk County sent two representatives (Nathaniel Pierson and Ebenezer Platt) but it is unclear whether they sat, Charles R. Street, ed., Huntington Town Records, Including Babylon, Long Island, New York, 2 vols. (Huntington, n.y., 1887–1888), 2:33; Ulster County, New York, delegates Roeloff Swartwout and Johannes Hardenbroeck arrived after August. See, Abstract of the proceedings of the Committee of Safety, June 17 to August 15, 1689. CO5/1081/105–137, tna; Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and West Indies, 1689–1692, J.W. Fortescue, ed. (London, 1901), 126; nycd 3:597; dhny 2:45. The Committee of Safety disbanded on 11 December 1689, when Leisler assumed the role of lieutenant governor of the province, “A Memoriall of what has occurred in New-York &c.,” 1690, nycd 3:738. Mr Tudor to Captain Nicholson, August 1689, nycd 3:617. John Fiske, The Dutch and Quaker Colonies in America, 2 vols. (New York and Boston, 1903), 2:59. Although New York Reformed sermons are lacking for the 1680s, Increase Mather’s, Heaven’s Alarm to the World, or a Sermon, wherein is shewed, That Fearful Sights And Signs in Heaven, are the Presages of great Calamities at Hand, Preached … 20 January 1680 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: umi, 48106–1346 [Boston, 1682]), survives. See also Andrew P. William “Shifting Signs: Increase Mather and the Comets of 1680 and 1682,” Early Modern Literary Studies 1, no. 3 (December 1995), 4.1–34.

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inhabitants of the Hudson River Valley, “as these people live in the interior of the country somewhat nearer the Indians, they are more wild and untamed, reckless, unrestrained, haughty and more addicted to misusing the blessed name of God and to cursing and swearing.”64 Ordained clergy were scarce, and those who existed were stretched too thin to adequately minister to widely scattered communities. The broader population, with large families and few educational resources, was increasingly unlettered. Lacking the steadying hand of a trained clergy, theology degenerated into exaggerated superstition. With each event, rumors became rife, violence escalated. News in early August 1689 that Sir Edmund Andros had escaped from a Boston prison renewed panic throughout the region. Strangers were arrested and examined, homes were searched. Fantastic charges were leveled. The committee attempted to contain the spreading anarchy. “Being sensible of the greate benefitts, wch by Gods goodness wee injoy, by the advancements of your Majesties to the throne of the kingdoms of England &c tending to the preservation of the Protestant Religion, Laws, Liberties & properties,” the committee elected Leisler as provincial commander-in-chief, and, in December, as lieutenant governor. Committeemen Samuel Edsall and Peter Delanoy wrote that the selection of Leisler was because he was “a true protestant German[y],” as was the prince of Orange, “an old Stander,” that is, one who “stood” firm for the five essential Protestant doctrines against Roman Catholic error, and “a man of a fervent Zeale for the protestant Religion.”65 With Leisler at the helm, the battle “to prevent the papists & popishly evill affected adversaries to effect & bring to pass their wicked intents & designes” was now in full swing.66 In January 1690, Leisler’s government uncovered “a hellish Conspiracy to Subvert his Maties King Wm’s Governmt.” Trusted men were commissioned to make “diligent Search & Enquiry In all howses,” to “Suspect such messengers or letter Cariers” and seize them, and warrants were issued to arrest scores of King James’ former officials. Those apprehended were placed in confinement “so Close that their friends & Servts Cant Come at them.” Many fled.67 A month 64 65

Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 295. Samuel Edsall, “Humble Address of the Committee of Safety,” 17 August 1689, CO5/1081/139, tna; Voorhees, “The ‘fervant Zeal’ of Jacob Leisler.” An Old Stander believed that the Roman Catholic church erred in five essential points, or the “Five Solas,” of doctrine: (1) the bible alone is the sole authority for all matters of faith, (2) Salvation is by God’s grace alone; (3) justification for salvation is by Faith Alone; (4) salvation is only found in Christ; and (5) salvation has been accomplished by God for His glory alone. 66 Jacob Leisler to the Assembly of Maryland, 29 September 1689, dhny 2:31. 67 “Memoriall,” nycd 3:738–739; By the Lieut. Governor and Councill, 3 January 1690, dhny 2:55. By the Lieut. Governor and Councill, 17 January 1689, dhny 2:60. Bayard was

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later, on 8 February, the wildest fears of a Satanic conspiracy seemed realized when a nighttime raid on Schenectady by French Catholic forces and allied Indian warriors destroyed the province’s most important frontier outpost. News of the “barbarously murdered sixty two men women & children” was spread in terms of prophetic fulfillment. Leisler wrote of “Women with chyld ript up, children alive thrown into the flames, some their heads dashed against the doors & windows, all occasioned by their neglect of their not watching, denying to obey under the command of the Commission of Sir Edmond.” The armies of Armageddon had gathered, the bloodletting of the righteous had begun, the “wicked creatures of Sir Edmond” deceived the inhabitants in the manner of the “false prophet” of Revelation 19:19–22. Blaming the massacre on “too great a Correspondency … between the sd ffrensch & disaffected P’sons amongst us,” general arrests ensued.68 Undoubtedly, some used heightened apocalyptic fears to avenge former antagonisms. Long Island residents Gerrit Elbertse Stoothof and Roelof Martense Schenck are an example. Stoothof and Schenck had long been embroiled in a nasty property dispute, and when Leisler appointed Schenck captain of the Kings County horse and Stoothof his lieutenant, Stoothof “in a Contemptuous manner denied the Command” of Schenck. Schenck retorted that Stoothof’s actions revealed “his ill affection to this his Majties Government and [that he] is not to be trusted in his Command.” Stoothof was discharged.69 Unsubstantiated accusations, widespread searches, and massive arrests created a backlash. Historian Ernestine van der Wall notes that within the Dutch Republic, “millenarianism was rejected by the leaders of the Dutch Reformed orthodoxy.”70 Indeed, the Reformed clergy whom the Classis of Amsterdam had appointed to serve in the American churches in the 1680s, such as Henricus Selijns of New York City and Godfredius Dellius of Albany, soundly scorned such confined on 22 January 1690, see Col. Bayard’s Petitions, 24 January 1690, dhny 2:63. The date of Nicholls’ confinement is unknown. 68 For the Schenectady raid see Papers Relating to the Invasion of New-York and the Burning of Schenectady by the French, 1690, dhny 1: 285–312; and John Romeyn Brodhead, History of the State of New York (New York, 1871), 2:606–611. Jacob Leisler to Maryland, March 4, 1689/90, dhny 1:307, 2:181–184; Proclamation, February 15, 1690, dhny 2:71; Warrant to arrest Thomas Dongan, February 15, 1689/90, dhny 2:70; Warrant to arrest all Catholics, February 15, 1689/90, dhny 2:71. 69 Commissions, December 12, 1689, and January 13, 1689/90, New York Historical Manuscripts 36: 142, no. 7, 155, and 156, New York State Archives, Albany; Leisler to Gerardus Beekman, July 29, 1690, dhny 2: 279; A.D. Schenck, The Rev. William Schenck, His Ancestry and His Descendants (Washington, d.c.: R.H. Darby, 1883), 169. 70 Van der Wall, “‘Antichrist Stormed,’” 155.

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theology. But their attempts to soothe the situation through sermons of enlightened tolerance were met with popular disdain. Selyns would be “most grostly abused.” Dellius, called a “Cockcoean minister … who inveighed against the Prince of Orange,” would be “forced to leave his flock & fly for Shelter into New England.”71 Long Island Reformed domine Rudolphus Varick is a case in point. Varick initially supported the uprising. But the increasing excesses of the militants disturbed him, and by Spring 1690 he was preaching against them.72 As a result, many of his communicants began to suspect him of conspiring to restore New York to the Catholic James. Hostility turned to violence and in June Varick fled to Pennsylvania. When he returned to Flatbush the following fall, he was “by Armed Men drag’d out of his house to the fort then imprisoned” for conspiracy.73 71





72 73

“A Letter from a Gentleman of the City of New York to Another,” 1698, dhny 2:431; Lieutenant Governor Leisler and Council to the Earl of Shrewsbury, 20 October 1690, nycd 3:751–754 (in nycd, Cocceian is mispelled “Cocharan”; for the original see CO5/1081/398, tna).  Nine ministers of the 31 ordained clergymen operating in New York and East Jersey remained committed to the militants. Dutch Reformed domines Petrus Tesschenmaker, until his murder in the Schenectady massacre, and the aged Gideon Schaats, identified as Koelmanists, were avid supporters, as well as French Reformed ministers David Bonrepos and Pierre Daillé, both followers of the millenarian Pierre Jurieu, Collections of the Huguenot Society of America, volume 1 (New York, 1886), xxiv–xxvi; Voorhees, “fervent Zeale,” 466. Among the English ministry, Hempstead minister Jeremiah Hobart, Huntington minister Eliphalet Jones, and Jamaica minister John Prudden, all Presbyterians, recognized Leisler’s authority and appear to have also been enthusiastic supporters Leislerians awarded Hobart for his support by ordering Hempstead to pay his salary, Benjamin D. Hicks, ed., Records of the Towns of North and South Hempstead, Long Island, n.y., 8 vols. (Jamaica, n.y., 1896–1904), 2:67. Jones’ stance is gleaned from Huntington’s strong support of Leisler, Street, Huntington Town Records, 2:33–34. Prudden was a member of Leisler’s Queens County Committee, Josephine C. Frost, ed., Records of the Town of Jamaica Long Island New York 1656–1751, 3 vols. (Brooklyn, 1914), 1:111; he was removed as Jamaica minister in 1691, W.W. Munsell, History of Queens County, New York (New York, 1882), 231. For Lutheran minister Bernardus Arensius see Harry Julius Kreider, Lutheranism in Colonial New York (New York, 1942), 26–29.  Most importantly, the voorlezers, or those in charge with guiding services within the Dutch Reformed church, were to a man, with the notable exception of New Utrecht reader Joost De Baane, the most ardent of Leisler’s supporters. See Firth Haring Fabend, Dutch Colonial Family in the Middle Colonies 1660–1800 (New Brunswick, n.j.: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 163–164, 197–198; Willem Frederik (Eric) Nooter, “Between Heaven and Earth: Church and Society in Pre-Revolutionary Flatbush, Long Island” (Ph.D. dissertation, Vrije Universiteit te Amsterdam, 1994), 63–64. Leisler to the Earl of Shrewsbury, 20 October 1690, nycd 3:751–754; Eccl. Recs. 2:1007, 1048–1053. Henry R. Stiles, A History of the City of Brooklyn Including the Old Town and Village of Brooklyn, the Town of Bushwick, and the Village and City of Williamsburgh, 2 vols. (Albany, 1869),

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Many followed Varick’s example in turning against “the reformation.” By Fall 1690, the militants’ use of confinement was so widespread that the Connecticut government chastised Leisler following the imprisonment in Albany of their Major-General, Fitz-John Winthrop. “And Sir,” they wrote, “you necessitate us to tell you, that a prison is not a catholicon [remedy] for al State Maladyes, though so much used by you.”74 Conclusion On 1/11 January 1690/1691, Leisler sent a long rambling letter to Connecticut Governor Robert Treat. Believing that Connecticut had “breach[ed] its Covenant” to “secure against and damnifie the Enemies,” he appears a man whose genuine faith in the imminence of God’s earthly kingdom was being sorely tested. Citing James 3:17, he noted “St. James highly condemns those Hypocrites.”75 He then lamented, “to have the los of all New England attributed to mee as well as this Province is too much to lye at stake For … It is indifferent to me whether Don Quixote encounters with a Flock of Sheep or Windmills.” He continued, “Good God to what exces do men run themselves into, neither regarding morality or the legible proceedings of the Creator, when his Judgments are abroad & carry such remarkable stamps of punishing these Territories … warning us not to trust to or owne crafty inventions or formidable Powers, unlesse or intentions are pure.” Concluding sorrowfully, “For my Part i must owne mine and the Iniquities of this Province, and that we have highly, as well as justly merited whatever may befall us, and in a sence thereof acknowledge that it is the Lords mercy, & Longe Suffering that wee are not consumed, not only for or accustomed Vices, but in an speciall manner for our ingratitude under so marvelous a Deliverance.”76 Within weeks Leisler’s regime faced its greatest challenge. Royal troops under the command of Captain Richard Ingoldsby arrived. Leisler complained to Ingoldsby, “since your arrivall great numbers of disaffected persons to ye King’s interest Papist & others who are fledd from justice have taken encouragement to

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1:169; Nooter, “Between Heaven and Earth,” 62; Varick to the Amsterdam Classis, 9 April 1693, Eccl. Recs., 2:1048–1053, and domines Selyns, Varick, and Dellius to the Amsterdam Classis, 12 October 1692, ibid., 1041–1045. John Allen to Jacob Leisler, 1 September 1690, dhny 2:289. “Wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be intreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy,” King James Version. Jacob Leisler to Governor Robert Treat, 1 January 1691, dhny 2:316–319.

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come into this city and Comit insolencies agreable to their dispositions.” Here were the “enemies to God.”77 Armageddon. For two months the province hovered on the brink of civil war until William iii’s governor, Henry Sloughter, arrived.78 Sloughter called for the arrest and imprisonment of Leisler and thirty six of his most prominent supporters. Scores more had their homes plundered and properties confiscated; hundreds were fined. A hastily convened court tried Leisler’s council and found all but two guilty of high treason. When riots broke out on Staten Island in reaction to the court sentence, fear gripped the government of a new provincial insurrection. To end the “diseases and troubles of this Government,” Leisler and his chief aide, Jacob Milborne, were quickly executed on Saturday morning, 16 May 1691.79 At their execution the mob chanted the 79th Psalm:

1 O God, the heathen are come into thine inheritance; thy holy temple have they defiled; they have laid Jerusalem on heaps. 2 The dead bodies of thy servants have they given to be meat unto the fowls of the heaven, the flesh of thy saints unto the beasts of the earth. 3 Their blood have they shed like water round about Jerusalem; and there was none to bury them. 4 We are become a reproach to our neighbours, a scorn and derision to them that are round about us. 5 How long, Lord? Wilt thou be angry for ever? Shall thy jealousy burn like fire? 6 Pour out thy wrath upon the heathen that have not known thee, and upon the kingdoms that have not called upon thy name. 7 For they have devoured Jacob, and laid waste his dwelling place.

The Millennium was obviously not at hand. William iii, now on the throne, had not established God’s Kingdom of Saints. Apocalyptic fears dissolved into cycles of revenge that colored the region’s politics for decades. Nonetheless, the 1689 movement unified a broad spectrum of Protestants to a common 77

78 79

Jacob Leisler to Richard Ingoldsby, 14 February 1691, Du Simitière, No. 32, Pennsylvania Historical Society, Philadelphia; Leisler’s Declaration Against Maj. Ingoldesby and His Council, 16 March 1691, dhny 2:345; Charles H. McCormick, “Governor Sloughter’s Delay and Leisler’s Rebellion, 1689–1691,” The New-York Historical Society Quarterly 62, no. 3 (July 1978), 238–252. dhny 2:334–335. Sloughter to Col. Codrington, May 1691, dhny 2:380; Lawrence H. Leder, “Records of the Trials of Jacob Leisler and His Associates,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 36, no. 4 (October 1952), 431–457.

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cause throughout the mid-Atlantic. Many Protestants withdrew from the orthodox churches to attend services of more pietist preachers, while orthodox ministers attracted new adherents.80 The enforced exodus of Roman Catholics from New York was so complete that few Catholics remained in the region after 1691. In that year the New York Assembly excluded Catholics from its bill of rights provisions; in 1700, it barred Catholics from office and the franchise.81 The immediacy of the exaggerated dangers of papist seductions to false doctrine with the attendant result of eternal damnation for those so ensnared disappeared; the threat of the evil agents of the Antichrist no longer spread terror. New terrors now shaped the region. 80

81

Petition, Varick to Ingoldsby, 16 September 1691, Council Minutes, 1668–1783, 97 vol., New York State Archives, Albany, 6:55. For discussions of the impact of the 1689 rebellion on religious events in the Middle Atlantic see Randall Balmer, “The Social Roots of Dutch Pietism in the Middle Colonies,” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture, 53, no. 2 (June 1984), 187–199; Joyce D. Goodfriend, “The Social Dimensions of Congregational Life in Colonial New York City,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 46, no. 2 (April, 1989), 252–278. Gov. Benjamin Fletcher wrote to the Lords of Trade on 30 May 1696, “I do not know of ten papists in the province.” nycd 4:151. See also, Acts of Assembly Passed in the Province of New-York, from 1691 to 1725 (New York, 1726), 5, 42–44.

chapter 9

“A Bloody Conspiracy”: Race, Power and Religion in New York’s 1712 Slave Insurrection1 Anne-Claire Faucquez The night of 6 April 1712, when twenty-five to thirty slaves resolved to win their freedom and take revenge on their masters in New York City, has failed to strike the collective memory.2 However, for the first time on the North American continent, a group of slaves assembled and killed nine Whites while wounding twelve others. The insurgents gathered at midnight and set fire to Peter Van Tilburg’s shed two hours later. Alerted by the flames, New York inhabitants were ambushed by the slaves, who attacked them with rifles, knives, clubs, swords, axes and hatchets. One Robin stabbed his master, Adrian Hoghlandt, in the back, one Tom shot Andries Beekman in the chest while a slave known as Peter the Porter hit Joris Marschalk, his master’s son, in the chest too.3 This uprising triggered off a real movement of panic in the city as Governor Hunter sent the New York and Westchester militias to search every corner of the town for the culprits. The fear even spread to the colony of Massachusetts where the Boston Weekly News-Letter published an account of the event, concluding “this has put [us] into no small Consternation the whole town being under Arms.”4 This revolt has generated remarkably little scholarly interest: only two articles have been devoted to it as opposed to the flow of works dedicated to the 1741 New York slave conspiracy, the West Indies or the Southern rebellions – the 1739 Stono Rebellion in South Carolina, Gabriel’s conspiracy in Virginia in 1800, Denmark Vesey’s alleged revolt in Charleston, South Carolina in 1822 or Nat Turner’s rebellion in Virginia in 1831.5 1 “A bloody conspiracy of some of the slaves of this place, to destroy as many of the Inhabitants as they could […] to revenge themselves, for some hard usage they apprehended to have received from their masters,” E.B. O’Callaghan, Bertold Fernow (ed. and trans.), Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, 15 vols. (Albany, 1853–1887), 5:349–350 (hereafter drchny). 2 All dates are rendered in New Style with the year beginning 1 January. 3 drchny, 5:349–350, 5:339–344; 346–347. 4 Boston Weekly News-Letter, 7–14 April 1712. 5 Kenneth Scott, “The Slave Insurrection in New York in 1712,” New York Historical Quarterly Society Quarterly 45 (1961), 43–74; Thelma Wills Foote, “‘Some Hard Usage’: The New York City Slave Revolt of 1712,” New York Folklore 18 (1993), 147–159. For the link between the 1712 and 1741

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004314740_011

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However, the 1712 insurrection seems fundamental in many respects. First, it was the first revolt on the North American mainland which, following James G. Randall’s definition of an insurrection, may be considered as successful. An insurrection, Randall writes, is an organized armed uprising which seriously threatens the stability of government and endangers social order. … [It] is distinguished from rebellion in that it is less extensive and its political and military organization is less highly developed. The term insurrection would be appropriate for a movement directed against the enforcement of particular laws, while the word rebellion denotes an attempt to overthrow the government itself.6 Indeed, even if these slaves neither secured the abolition of slavery in New York nor obtained their freedom, they managed to seek revenge for “some hard usage they apprehended to have received from their masters”7 and to kill New revolts see Eric W. Plaag, “New York’s 1741 Slave Conspiracy in a Climate of Fear and Anxiety,” New York History 84, no. 3 (2003), 275–299. Among the most prominent works on 1741 are: Daniel Horsmanden in The New York Conspiracy or a History of the Negro Plot, with the Journal of the Proceedings against the Conspirators at New York in the years 1741–1742 (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1810); Leopold S. Launitz-Schurer, Jr, “Slave Resistance in Colonial New York: an Interpretation of Daniel Horsmanden’s New York Conspiracy,” Phylon 41, no. 2, (2nd Qtr., 1980), 137–152; Andy Doolen, “Reading and Writing Terror: The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741,” American Literary History 16, no. 3, 377–406; T.J. Davis, A Rumor of Revolt: The Great Negro Plot in Colonial New York (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985); Peter Charles Hoffer, The Great New York Conspiracy of 1741: Slavery, Crime, and Colonial Law (Lawrence, Ks.: University Press of Kansas, 2003); Jill Lepore, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005). The West Indies were particularly agitated with rebellions in the 1730s: St John’s in 1733, Jamaica in 1734–1739 and Antigua in 1736. See Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca, n.y.: Cornell University Press, 1982); Richard Hart, Slaves Who Abolished Slavery: Blacks in Rebellion (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2002); Gelien Matthews, Caribbean Slave Revolts and the British Abolitionist Movement (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 2006). On Southern revolts see: Mark Michael Smith, Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt (Columbia s.c.: University of South Carolina Press, 2005); Philip J. Schwarz, Gabriel’s Conspiracy: a Documentary History (Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press, 2012); John Lofton, Denmark Vesey’s Revolt: the Slave Plot that Lit a Fuse to Fort Sumter (Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 2013); Nat Turner, ed., Thomas R. Gray, The Confessions of Nat Turner: Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, Va. (Miami, Fla., Mnemosyne Pub. Inc., 1969). 6 James G. Randall, Constitutional Problems under Lincoln (New York, London, 1926). 7 drchny, 5:431.

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York inhabitants, thereby disturbing public order, spreading fear in the city, and showing white masters that they were able to resist their condition. Before that date, slaves had only managed to organize plots, which had all been aborted.8 The insurrection of 1712 then corresponds well to what Marion D. Kilson classifies as a type ii, or Vandalistic, Revolt, “aimed at the destruction of slave holders and their property,” and it was thus successful in that particular sense.9 This insurrection is also essential to our better understanding of the diversity in the forms of slavery in colonial North America, and so rebuts the commonly held view that North American slaves fared better than their counterparts in the West Indies and hardly resisted their condition.10 More specifically, it enlarges our insight into Northern urban slavery and urges us to adopt a more nuanced position in the debate as to whether cities were a favorable environment for slave rebellions, arguably one of the leading causes of alarm in the early American colonies.11 This chapter thus supplements the works of Kenneth Scott’s comprehensive account of the trials following the insurrection and Thelma Wills Foote’s work on 8

9

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11

Instances of such plots are the 1663 Gloucester Conspiracy in Virginia organized by black slaves, indentured servants and a few Native Americans; the 1687 slave plot in Westmoreland County or the 1709 alliance slaves made with local Natives in Williamsburg. The type i or Systematic Revolt is “oriented towards overthrowing the slave system and establishing a Negro state” whereas the type iii or Opportunistic Revolt aims at “escape from servitude.” Marion D. Kilson, “Towards Freedom: An analysis of Slave Revolts in the United States,” Phylon 25, no. 2 (1964), 175–178. The two landmark studies which developed the image of the submissive, childlike slave were Ulrich B. Philips, American Negro Slavery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966 [1918]) and Stanley Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959). According to Eugene Genovese, slaves in cities benefited from a greater autonomy and could travel around more easily than on the plantations, giving them more opportunities to gather and plot a rebellion, Eugene D. Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro‐ American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979). However, other historians like Richard Wade have claimed that the concentration of military forces in cities limited the possibility for slave rebellions. Similarly, the greater cultural diversity of the slave population in urban environments as well as the largest number of enslaved women limited the possibilities for slaves to communicate, intermingle and prevented the emergence of a leader, Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities; the South, 1820–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). Ulrich B. Philips stated that the majority of slaves sent to the Northern colonies did not come directly from Africa but had been seasoned in the West Indies and were thus of a less rebellious nature (Philips, American Negro Slavery, 113).

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the slaves’ motives. It intends to show how the specificity of the New York environment at the turn of the eighteenth century and the pervasive feeling of fear contributed to its success. Indeed, New York shared many characteristics with Southern colonies and distinguished itself from other Northern colonies as a slave society where the growing black presence (enslaved and free) posed a real threat to the population.12 Interestingly, it was only in 1702 that the New York legislature started to codify the status of black people even though the first slaves had arrived in Dutch New Amsterdam as soon as 1626.13 Yet, this first slave code was more of a preventive than a curative measure as only minor crimes had agitated the slave population during the seventeenth century, so the need to limit slave gatherings in order to prevent rebellions emerged more from the authorities’ fears of possible future crimes than from any precedent.14 As a slave society, New York City lived with the constant fear of having to prevent slave insubordination. Indeed, slaves tried to resist their condition by any possible means which ranged from isolated acts of disobedience (breaking tools, refusing to work, feigning illness, self-mutilation, suicide, escaping) to more organized actions like plotting a rebellion to kill the masters, regain liberty or overthrow the established order. New York City inhabitants thus had to cope with those daily threats until their lives were directly put at risk.15 12

13 14

15

The distinction was made by Philip Morgan and Ira Berlin: Philip D. Morgan, “British Encounters with Africans and African-Americans, circa 1600–1780,” in Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Strangers Within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire (Chapel Hill, n.c.: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 157–219; Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 9–10, who defined “societies with slaves” by their relatively low number of slaves in the total population (usually less than 20%), the wider variety of tasks slaves performed and a more diversified labor force, while in “slave societies,” slavery economic activity, where slaveowners made up the economic and political elite and where a strict system of slave codes governed relations between blacks and whites. “An Act for the Regulateing of Slaves,” in Charles Z. Lincoln, The Colonial Laws of New York from the Year 1664 to the Revolution (Albany, 1894), 1:519–521. South Carolina experienced a similar situation as it introduced its first slave code in 1701, which was renewed in 1712 and 1739, before the first slave rebellion broke out in Stono in 1739. See L.H. Roper, “The 1701 Act for the better ordering of Slaves: Reconsidering the History of Slavery in Proprietary South Carolina,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 54, no. 2 (April 2007), 395–418. Slave resistance has become an acknowledged reality since the landmark work by Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave revolts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943). For the historiographical debate on slave resistance, see Junius P. Rodriguez, ed., Encyclopedia of Slave Resistance and Rebellion (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2007), 1:vxxx–xxxi. For the best works on African forms of resistance in North America, see Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture:

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The panic engendered by the 1712 slave insurrection came not only from this internal threat posed by the growing black population who started to be considered as the “enemies of [the] households,”16 but from another external menace: Catholics, some of whom took part in the rebellion and made the scare of a “popish” plot to conquer the colony a reality. Beset by these pervasive dangers, New York authorities tried to assuage the inhabitants’ fears and restore order in the city by setting up severe trials and condemnations and by passing stricter slave codes.

Internal Fears

From its founding in 1624, New York City had been subjected to a multitude of threats, some being inherited from Europe, such as the tyranny of rulers or of religious persecution, others having grown in America with the forced cohabitation with the “others,” such as Africans or Natives.17 The first African slaves were brought to New Netherland in 1626 by the Dutch West India Company, which considered them from the very beginning as more efficient and preferable to white indentured servants “who [had to] be bribed […] by a great deal of money and promises.”18 Most of these Africans belonged to the Company and thus benefitted from a particular status, being considered as “corporate slaves.”19 As such, they were granted certain rights such as the freedom to own personal and real property (whereas Jews, for

16

17 18

19

Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill, n.c.: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), and Walter C. Rucker, The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture and Identity Formation in Early America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2005). This expression was used by Judge Daniel Horsmanden in The New York Conspiracy or a History of the Negro Plot, with the Journal of the Proceedings against the Conspirators at New York in the Years 1741–1742 (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1810), 11, 106. Owen Stanwood, The Empire Reformed: English America in the Age of the Glorious Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 4. As early as 1644, the Directors of the Company declared: “For the advancement of the cultivation of the land, it would not be unwise to allow, at the request of the patroons, Colonists and other farmers, the introduction from Brazil of as many Negroes as they would be disposed to pay for at a fair price […] which Negroes would accomplish more work for the masters and at a less expense than from servants.” drchny, 1:154. On the fears induced by indentured servants, see Elodie Peyrol-Kleiber’s essay in this volume. Morton Wagman, “Corporate Slavery in New Netherland,” The Journal of Negro History 65, no. 1 (Winter, 1980), 34–42.

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example, were not), to marry and become a full member of the community by joining the Dutch Reformed Church, to own servants, to have grievances redressed in the courts and through petitions, and even to be paid for their work. Eighteen years after their arrival, the first eleven slaves were emancipated and were granted a condition of half-freedom: they had to work for the company in times of need but were given their own plots of land in the northern part of New Amsterdam. These half-free blacks were also trusted to serve in the militias, and slaves, who were given arms, helped to defend the settlement during Native-American wars. At the end of the Dutch period, one-fifth of the black population of New Amsterdam were free (75 out of 375).20 Black people thus did not seem to constitute a real source of fear for Dutch settlers, although this does not necessarily mean that Whites were more tolerant towards Blacks in New Amsterdam. Their peculiar status can be explained by the fact that before the 1660s slavery had not yet been codified in other colonies in America and slaves were commonly referred to as “servants.”21 Moreover, the company only emancipated old slaves who were becoming costly and burdensome but retained their children into slavery.22 Yet if the law did not distinguish servants from slaves, black people were still differentiated by their working conditions. The slaves of the company worked in chains, as a 1642 ordinance implies, which stipulated that anyone convicted of drawing a knife would be fined 50 florins and in case of a failure to pay this fine, those convicted were required “to work three months with the Negroes in chains.”23 The white perception of black people evolved as their numbers grew in the city after the English conquest. From 375 in 1664 (out of 1,875 inhabitants),24 they reached 801 in 1703 (17.7% of the city’s population) spread over 41% of the households, 975 in 1712 (16.7%) and 2,444 in 1746 (20.9%).25 Most slaves were 20 21

22

23 24 25

Joyce D. Goodfriend, “Burghers and Blacks: The Evolution of a Slave Society at New Amsterdam,” New York History 59, no. 2 (April 1978), 125–144. The first slave code in English America was passed in Barbados in 1661, and was copied by the assembly of Jamaica in 1664, the Carolina assembly in 1696 and the Antigua assembly in 1702. Virginia had its first slave code enacted in 1705. “With the express condition that all their children already born or yet to be born shall be obliged to serve the Company as slaves,” in Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan, Calendar of Historical Manuscripts in the Office of the Secretary of State, Albany, n.y., Part ii, English Manuscripts, 1664–1776 (Albany, 1865–1866), 87 (hereafter chme). E.B. O’ Callaghan, Laws and Ordinances of New Netherland, 1638–1674 (Albany, 1868), 12. drchny, 14:458–459. Evarts B. Greene, Virginia D. Harrington, American Population before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York, 1932), 92–93. The rate for the 1703 Census comes from E.B. O’ Callaghan, The Documentary History of the State of New York, 4 vols. (Albany, 1849–1851), 1:611–624.

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concentrated in southeastern Manhattan, where they toiled on the docks or the wharves, but they enjoyed a great deal of mobility and autonomy: some were allowed to travel alone, by foot, horse or boat, to sell products in the market, to work as porters or messengers, to attend trials, to attend public punishments, and to socialize and meet family and friends in church, at the cemetery or the tavern. That slaves were wandering about everywhere in the city contributed to an overall feeling of insecurity among the white population, which the authorities had to handle by trying to restore public order. Black people were, for instance, suspected of committing robberies to compensate for their lack of possessions or to sell their loot and earn some money for themselves. In 1684, the Common Council forbade both servants and slaves to give, sell or exchange goods during their time of service, which could lead to corporal punishment, while a free person who engaged in such a transaction had to pay a £5 fee (New York currency) on each object purchased.26 Burglaries which were, as a rule, considered as felonies and were punishable by the capital punishment were considered as even more dangerous when committed by black people because they were planned and organized and so equaled rebellion. This is why in 1685 and 1695, Harry Thompson and Quick were condemned to capital punishment for such a crime and in spite of being pardoned were whipped, branded and banished from the colony.27 Finally, white people’s worst fear was a physical assault administered by wandering slaves. On 26 August 1696, the mayor of New York City himself, William Merritt experienced this kind of trauma when he arrested a slave named Prince because he and a group of black people were too noisy in the street and was punched in the face by the displeased slave.28 If these kinds of personal assaults remained fairly rare, the authorities cast a suspicious eye on slave gatherings, which could provide the opportunity to plot rebellion. Indeed, a conspiracy was considered as frightening as a revolt, and, indeed, equaled treason.29 For Thomas J. Davis, who defined what 26 27 28

29

Colonial Laws, 1:519–521. Richard Shannon Moss, “Slavery on Long Island: A study in Local Institutional and Early African-American Communal Life, New York” (Ph.D diss., John Hopkins University, 1993), 171. The court ordered that the slave be severely punished, being “cartered round the city within the fortifications and receive 11 lashes at each corner,” Kenneth Scott, New York City Court Records 1684–1760, Genealogical Data from the Court of Quarter Sessions (Washington, dc: National Genealogical Society, 1982), 9. Barry Coward, ed., Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theory in Early Modern Europe. From the Waldensians to the French Revolution (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); Hoffer, The Great New York Conspiracy, 23.

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“conspiring” was in the 18th century, it was characterized as the act of “asserting and agreeing,” “‘loose talk’ of doing a deed” and was regarded by the authorities as a convenient means to control and condemn slaves.30 According to P.C. Hoffer, who wrote about the 1741 slave conspiracy: the prosecution could take place without the proof that the crime ever took place or that the slaves made any attempt to further its commission. Conspiracy prosecutions turned crimes merely imagined or anticipated by the master class into opportunities to punish those slaves who dared to speak aloud of resistance to slavery.31 On 4 October 1682, the General Court of Assizes blamed the free time that slaves enjoyed on the Sabbath when “Many Great Evills and convenincys [were] Committed and Done by Negroes and Indian Slaves, their Frequent Meetings and Gathering themselves to gather in Great Numbers on the Lords Day […] using and Exerciseing Severall Rude and Unlawfull Sports and Pastimes.”32 Yet, in practice, most slaveowners seemed to be rather permissive and not to care overly about their slaves wandering about in the city on Sundays as Sabbath breaking was common among Whites as well.33 Thus, the city authorities tried to compel masters’ cooperation by passing an ordinance on 9 April 1700 saying that “the owners of Indian and negro slaves have neglected to restrain them from Associating together on the holy Sabbath in time of Divine Service to the Great Scandal of the Christian Profession and Religion.” As a consequence, “the Common Council order[ed] that If more than three congregate such slaves [were] to be punished as the law direct[ed].”34 Likewise, in 1722, the municipality wished to limit slaves’ gatherings at funerals: it forbade the conducting of ceremonies at night, restricted the number of people as well as the use of shrouds and coffins, and imposed a ten-shilling fee per infringement on the slaveowner.35 Whites did not only fear black people congregating at night, they despised above all these ceremonies, which they considered heathenish. They were horrified by 30

Thomas J. Davis, “Conspiracy and Credibility: Look Who’s Talking, about What: Law Talk and Loose Talk,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 59, no. 1 (Jan. 2002), 167–174. 31 Hoffer, The Great New York Conspiracy, 25. 32 Colonial Laws, 1:356–357. 33 Joyce D. Goodfriend, “The Struggle over the Sabbath in Petrus Stuyvesant’s New Amsterdam,” in Wayne te Brake and Wim Klooster, eds., Power and the City in the Netherlandic World (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 205–224. 34 Herbert Levi Osgood, ed., Minutes of the Common Council of the City of New York, 1675–1776 (Albany, ny, 1901) 2:101–103 (hereafter mcc). 35 mcc, 3:296.

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the physical and emotional exuberance of these celebrations but also by the possible conduct of sacrifices, which evoked a whole imagery of savagery, beastliness and witchcraft.36 Indeed, on March 25th, 1712 the slaves are said to have gathered and conspired to launch their rebellion during a secret ceremony during which they “bound themselves to secrecy by sucking the blood of each other’s hands” and were given “a powder to rub on their clothes to make them invulnerable.”37 Many of those involved in the insurrection shared a common Akan origin from the Gold Coast of Africa (belonging to groups like the Coromantees and the Pawpaws, enslaved members of which came to New York between 1710 and 1712).38 These slaves shared a common culture and most of them were experienced warriors who had been sold into slavery as war prisoners.39 Some slaveowners worried that their slaves would be tempted to rebel if they were baptized. Yet, since the English conquest in 1664, colonial authorities tried to reassure the population by making it explicit that baptizing the slaves would not lead to their emancipation. That year, the Duke Laws forbade the enslaving of Christians but specified that “Nothing in this law shall be to the prejudice of Master or Dame who have or shall by indenture take Servants for a term of years or for life,” or with the passing of the 1706 “Act to Encourage the Baptism of Negro, Indian, and Mulatto Slaves.”40 Yet, they did not succeed in eradicating that anxiety, as many masters kept refusing to send their slaves to the new catechizing school established by Anglican Elias Neau in 1704. They were afraid of having them instructed, baptized or simply meet other slaves, a feeling of dread that came to a head when they learned that two of Neau’s students had taken part in the 1712 insurrection.41 The fear of slave rebellions was exacerbated by a pervasive fear of arson, which was exactly how the 1712 revolt and the 1741 panic started. From its beginnings, just like any other colonial city, New Amsterdam had always been prone to fires, which resulted in the passing of many ordinances aimed at 36 37 38 39

40 41

R.J. Swan, New Amsterdam Gehenna: Segregated Death in New York City, 1630–1801 (Brooklyn: Noir Verite Press, 2006), 187. The Boston Weekly Newletter, 14 April, 1712; drchny, 5:341–342. Elizabeth Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America (Washington, dc: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1930–1935), 3:444. John K. Thornton, “War, the State and the Religious Norms in ‘Coromantee’ Thought: The Ideology of an African-American Nation,” in Robert Blair St. George, Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America (Ithaca, n.y.: Cornell University Press, 2000), 181–200. Colonial Laws, 1: 18; 1:597–598. Sheldon S. Cohen, “Elias Neau, Instructor to New York’s Slaves,” New York Historical Society Quarterly 55 (1971), 7–27; K. Scott, “The Slave Insurrection in New York,” 62–67.

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taking all the safety measures as well as at imposing severe penalties upon arsonists.42 On 3 January 1664, Lysbet Anthony, who had set fire to her master’s house was condemned to the stake but was pardoned at the last minute and sold to public auction.43 Similarly, another slave named Cuffy was executed for arson and hanged in chains on 2 March 1685 to set an example.44 Fugitive slaves were also perceived as a threat. If some were able to flee as far as New France, as a 1705 “Act to prevent running away of Negro Slaves out of the County of Albany, to the French at Canada” shows, some gathered in New Harlem (a village in Northern Manhattan) or on Long Island to form bands of maroon slaves terrorizing the villagers by pillaging their houses. These practices which occurred outside the city were so terrifying to the inhabitants that in 1702, Governor Cornbury responded to the complaints of the population and ordered the local authorities and militia to restore order and kill those who would try to escape.45 These fears coalesced on 24 January 1708, six years after the passing of the first slave code, when two slaves, an Indian man and a black woman, murdered the Hallett family in their sleep in Newtown, Queens.46 Although The Boston Weekly News-Letter explained that “they did it […] because they were restrained from going abroad on Sabbath days,”47 Governor Cornbury accused them of having conspired to kill their masters and characterized the event as a “negro plot & bloody Murder.”48 This case led to the implementation on 30 October 1708 of the first law aimed at repressing slave revolts, called An Act for Preventing the Conspiracy of Slaves, which provided that any slave convicted of murder or attempt thereof was to be tried and sentenced to death.49 Yet ironically, it was only after the implementation of that law that the first slave conspiracy and revolt took place in New York. The passing of a law thus reflects the fears of a society but does not necessarily mean that those fears and threats have been suppressed. 42

Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness: the First Century of Urban Life in America, 1625–1742 (New York: Knopf, 1955), 56–57. 43 N. Phelps Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498–1909, Compiled from Original Sources and Illustrated by Photo‐Intaglio Reproductions of Important Maps, Plans, Views, and Documents in Public and Private Collections (New York, 1915–1928), 2:217. 44 chme, 135. 45 Colonial Laws, 1:582–584; chme, 180; R. Moss, “Slavery on Long Island,” 193–194. 46 Quoted in Graham Russell Hodges, Root & Branch: African Americans in New York & East Jersey, 1613–1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 64. 47 Boston Weekly News-Letter, 26 January 1707. 48 Ibid., 9–16 February 1707. 49 Colonial Laws of New York, 631.

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External Fears

This internal threat of the black presence, specific to the Americas, was coupled with older fears colonists had inherited from Europe, like Catholicism, or rather “popery.”50 The colony of New Netherland had been founded by strict Calvinists who, during the Eighty Years War (1568–1648), were ready to defend the Reformed faith against Catholicism. Many settlers, moreover, shared a fear of “popery” as well as a traumatic experience of the Inquisition having sought refuge from religious persecution in the United Provinces or in the Palatinate.51 The creation of the Dutch West India Company itself had religious, as well as commercial, goals, as one of its founders, Willem Usselincx, had expressed his wish to liberate the Western Hemisphere from Spanish Catholic tyranny.52 Following the English takeover, when the proprietor of the colony, the Catholic Duke of York, became King James ii and appointed two Catholic governors, Anthony Brockholls (1681–1683) and Thomas Dongan (1683–1688), panic overwhelmed the city.53 James’s autocratic behavior, as he included New York into the Dominion of New England and rejected the Charter of Liberties, contributed to a popular belief in the existence of a papist conspiracy to deprive the colonists of their liberties. This fraught atmosphere burst out with the news of the 1689 Glorious Revolution and the deposition of James ii. Jacob Leisler, a German immigrant and strong Calvinist, led a militia that overthrew Governor Francis Nicholson in support of the newly appointed English monarchs William and Mary and to combat “the combination of the forces of hell” that threatened the colonies.54 50

See Owen Stanwood, “Catholics, Protestants, and the Clash of Civilizations in Early America,” in Chris Beneke, Christopher S. Grenda, eds., The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 218–240. 51 Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, “The Walloon and Huguenot Elements in New Netherland and Seventeenth‐Century New York: Identity, History and Memory,” in Joyce D. Goodfriend, ed., Revisiting New Netherland: Perspectives on Early Dutch America (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 41–54. 52 Jonathan i. Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585–1740, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 84. 53 See David W. Voorhees, “‘Imprisoning persons at their pleasure’: The anti-Catholic hysteria of 1689 in the Middle Colonies” in this volume, as well as Jason K. Duncan, Citizens or Papists? The Politics of Anti-Catholicism in New York, 1685–1821 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 3, 6, 8, 17, 18. 54 On Leisler’s Rebellion see: Jerome R. Reich, Leisler’s Rebellion: A Study of Democracy in New York, 1664–1720 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1953); David Lovejoy, The Glorious Revolution in America (Middletown, ct: Wesleyan University Press, 1987); Randall H., Balmer, “Traitors and Papists: The Religious Dimensions of Leisler’s Rebellion,” New York History 70 (1989); David W. Voorhees, “The ‘fervent Zeale’ of Jacob Leisler,” William and

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Venerated in the French Huguenot Church for his support of the victims of Catholic tyranny, Jacob Leisler was nevertheless charged with treason for his attack on the royal garrison at Fort James and was executed in May 1691. The aftermath of that rebellion generated a systematic denial of Catholics’ religious and civil liberties in the colony as official instructions from London to governors ordered them “to permit a liberty of conscience to all Persons (except Papists).”55 In 1700, the New York assembly passed a law that threatened life imprisonment for any Catholic priest who came to the colony.56 That hatred of Catholics was amplified by the political context and the imperial threat posed by France and Spain, who were contesting powers in Europe, and whose colonial expansion infringed on one another’s in the New World. Indeed, rumors started to spread claiming that James ii intended to retain control over New York by joining with Catholic France during King William’s War (1689–1697).57 English people started to express the fear that after Louis xiv had “invaded [their] Caribbean Islands […they] would take over by force, [their] lands in the province of New York and Hudson’s Bay.”58 Indeed, on 8 February 1690, the French decided to strike Schenectady with the help of their Native allies, devastating the village, killing 60 people and taking 30 prisoners. The English responded by assembling a force of ships and colonial militia under the command of Sir William Phips who was sent on a failed expedition to Quebec. Then, between 1692 and 1696, New France organized new raiding parties which terrorized Maine and New Hampshire and seized all but one of the English forts on Hudson Bay.59 On the Eve of the 1712 slave insurrection, New Yorkers were once more distraught after the failure of the 1711 Walker Expedition against Quebec60 and the shipping disaster of 22 August 1711 on the Saint Lawrence River on, when eight ships were wrecked and some 900 soldiers drowned.61 Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 51, no. 3, Mid-Atlantic Perspectives (July 1994), 447–472; Hermann Wellenreuther, ed., Jacob Leisler’s Atlantic World in the Later Seventeenth Century: Essays on Religion, Militia, Trade and Networks (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2011). 55 Edward T. Corwin, ed., Ecclesiastical Records of the State of New York (Albany, 1901–1916) 991, 1034, 1214, 1658, 1670, 1807, 2756, 4632. 56 Colonial Laws, 1:428–430. 57 Known in Europe as the “Nine Years War” or “War of the League of Augsburg.” 58 Stanwood, The Empire Reformed, 147. 59 Ibid., 147–168. Peace finally came (temporarily) with the Treaty of Ryswick on 20 September 1697. 60 A British attempt to attack the French province in 1711 during Queen Anne’s War, the North American theatre of the War of Spanish Succession (1702–1713). 61 Adam Lyons, The 1711 Expedition to Quebec: Politics and the Limitations of British Global Strategy (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

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Spain was New York’s other threat. A strong anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish mood emerged when the population heard that two “Spanish Indians” had taken part in the insurrection. These Indians who were “free men subjects to the King of Spain,” had been captured from Spanish prizes by privateers and sold to local inhabitants. Indeed, according to the Boston Weekly News-Letter in 1704, a ship with 30 black and Native American slaves taken on the coast of New Spain arrived in New York harbor.62 This practice was not uncommon as in 1687, the provincial assembly had already asked for the immediate liberation of “all Indian Slaves within this Province, subjects to the King of Spain, that can give an account of their Christian faith, and say the Lord’s prayer, be forthwith set at liberty, and sent home by the first conveyance, and likewise them that shall hereafter come to the Province.”63 After the rebellion, Governor Hunter had to justify this recurrent practice to the Board of Trade and admit his unease as these “Spanish Indians” had been held in bondage illegally, explaining that these two are prisoners taken in a Spanish prize this war and brought into this Port by a Privateer, about six or seven years agoe and by reason of their colour which is swarthy, they were said to be slaves and as such were sold, among many others of the same colour and country, these two I have likewise reprieved till Her Majesties pleasure be signified. Soon after my arrival in this government I received petitions from several of these Spanish Indians as they are called here, representing to me that they were free men subjects to the King of Spain, but sold here as slaves, I secretly pittyed their condition but haveing no other evidence of w[ha]t they asserted then their own words, I had it not in my power to releive them.64 These “Spanish” slaves were finally pardoned by the British monarch but their participation in the revolt as well as the anxiety expressed by Governor Hunter in addressing the Board of Trade, as this incident could have led to a diplomatic crisis, testifies to the real threat that France and Spain, Great Britain’s two Catholic arch-enemies, represented for the colony of New York. That two Spanish Catholic slaves had started the insurrection by putting fire to their masters’ houses and attempted to murder New York City inhabitants, subjects 62 63 64

Boston Weekly News-Letter, 24 July 1704. R. Brodhead, History of the State of New York (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1859–1871) 2:509–510. drchny, 5: 342.

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of the British crown, was considered by the population and the authorities as proof of a Catholic conspiracy led by Spain or nearby New France to conquer the colony. Indeed, the report of the revolt in the Boston Weekly News-Letter clearly distinguished between black and Spanish Native American slaves: “Some Cormentine Negroes to the number of 25 or 30 and 2 or 3 Spanish Indians having conspired to murder all the Christians here.”65 Moreover, this practice of kidnapping Spanish sailors continued during the eighteenth century: at the time of the alleged slave conspiracy of 1741, there were still some 20 “Spanish Negroes” in the city and that panic actually started with the alarming cry “the Spanish Negroes; Take up the Spanish Negroes!”66 The ensuing trials led to the execution of a Spaniard named Juan de la Silva who protested his innocence, prayed and kissed a crucifix.67 New Yorkers’ anxiety towards Blacks and Catholics was also conveyed in the way the colonial elites managed the population’s fear.

The Political Management of Fear

In response to the 1712 insurrection, colonial authorities had to set up a whole mechanism in order to better control the black population’s conduct, first, by staging arbitrary and expeditious trials, then by hardening the slave system and passing more severe slave codes. Indeed, as Richard Bond has noted, in times of crisis, all branches of power came together: “laws circumscribed behavior and prescribed punishments, court bodies tried and convicted individuals who assaulted the public peace, and public punishments hoped to teach the guilty (and the voyeuristic crowd) a lesson to deter further crime.”68 For the members of the elite, the courts were a place where they could transmit and enforce their values to the settler population.69 The sentences that were imposed guaranteed moral order and protected the community, but also bolstered authority. If the way colonists imposed their punishments was influenced by the way the elites reacted to rebellions at home in England, the 65 Boston Weekly News-Letter, 7–14 April 1712. 66 Horsmanden, The New York Conspiracy, 160. 67 Foote, Black and White Manhattan, 164. 68 Richard E. Bond, “Ebb and Flow: Free Blacks and Urban Slavery in Eighteenth‐Century New York” (Ph.D. diss., The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, 2005), 181. 69 William M. Offutt, Jr, “The Limits of Authority: Courts, Ethnicity and Gender in the Middle Colonies, 1670–1710,” in Christopher L. Tomlins, Bruce H. Mann, eds., The Many Legalities of Early America (Chapel Hill, n.c.: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 358.

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management of the slaves and the implementation of the slave legislation were innovative.70 Colonial authorities thus tried to impose their power in the way they conducted the trials against black people. Slaves received special treatment: they did not have the right to argue with their accusers, to call witnesses in their own defense or to testify on their own behalf; the evidence of one slave, meanwhile, was sufficient to convict another slave in cases of plotting or confederacy, whereas English law demanded the confession of two witnesses and they did not enjoy the right of double jeopardy. However, as it could be difficult to compel slaves to confess, prosecutors made extensive use of coercive tactics, including the threats of the gallows and torture (in this world and the next). Sometimes the promise of royal mercy or of a lesser punishment was sufficient to elicit confessions. The punishments were usually meted out according to the common law and distinguished between misdemeanors and felonies. “Base” people such as women, servants and slaves, were whipped for disregarding the Sabbath, adultery, lying, sloth and thefts. The severest crimes could lead to mutilation, capital punishment or banishment. The latter was considered the worst punishment and a particular humiliation imposed upon those who represented a danger for the community and who were thus excluded from the group to which they belonged.71 Men and women were also treated differently, however. In the case of the 1708 Hallett murder, a male Indian slave was hanged whereas a black woman was burned alive. This difference of treatment can be traced back to a 1352 statute by which a woman who killed her husband or her master was not only considered as a murderer but as a traitor against the monarch; as women were their husbands’ vassals, killing them meant killing the king.72 Public whipping was a common form of punishment for unruly servants and slaves because it did not endanger their lives nor did it deprive the owners of their property. The work the slave provided was thus preserved and the community did not have to compensate masters.73 Moreover, whipping was often accompanied by moralizing speeches and sermons that aimed at creating a 70

71 72

73

See J.A. Sharpe, Crime in Early Modern England, 1550–1750 (New York: Adison, Wesley, Longman 1999), 188–198; Alison Wall, Power and Protest in England, 1525–1640 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Keith Wrightsnon, English Society, 1580–1680 (Hoboken: Taylor & Francis, [1982] 2000), 173–179. Thomas G. Blomberg, Karol Lucken, American Penology: a History of Control (Hawthorne, n.y.: Aldine de Gruyter, 2000), 31. Rebecca Hall, “Not Killing Me Softly, African‐American Women, Slave Revolts and Historical Constructions of racialized Gender” (Ph.D. diss. University of California, Santa Cruz, 2004), 127–128. Colonial Laws, 1:631.

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real spiritual and educational experience for all those who were watching.74 In the same manner, the scars in the skin embodied the authority of the government, which was forever remembered by the criminal.75 The need to punish with extreme severity was thus felt after the 1712 insurrection. As a result, more than 70 slaves were taken into custody, 43 were brought to trial by jury, 18 were acquitted, 25 were convicted and 18 were executed.76 These trials were also remarkable for their haste: between April 12 and May 30 all the convicted slaves were sentenced to death by the City’s Court of Quarter Sessions: “twenty to be hung; three to be burned to death – one by slow fire in torment for eight to ten hours and until consumed to ashes; one to be broken upon the wheel and so to languish until dead; and one to be hung in chains without sustenance until dead.”77 The aftermath of the rebellion was also marked by the three repeated attempts to prosecute the slave Mars, who belonged to Attorney Jacob Regnier, for the murder of Adrian Beekman. He was acquitted twice but was then recommitted for the murder of Henry Brasier, a case that was transferred to the Supreme Court of Judicature, which finally condemned and sentenced the slave to be hanged. Yet, Mars was pardoned by Governor Hunter who denounced the manipulation of one Attorney Bickley who had tried desperately to secure the conviction in order to get back at his opponent Regnier (who had opposed Bickley’s appointment as Attorney General), thus turning the trials into a “party quarrel” and forcing the said Regnier to resign from his post as city recorder.78 Similarly, two slaves who had been accused of murder, Cuffee and Dick, served as witnesses for the Crown, almost certainly under a promise of immunity by the Attorney General as none of them were prosecuted.79 Such a practice was denounced by Governor Hunter who declared that “they were made use of […] all the criminals before the Justices […] and without their testimonies very few could have been punished.”80 74 75 76

77 78 79 80

Lucken Blomberg, American Penology, 23–34. Hall, “Not Killing Me Softly,” 127. In 1741, 200 conspirators were named, 152 blacks and 21 whites arrested for plotting, burning and pillaging the city, 80 of them finally recognized they had participated in this alleged plot, 4 whites and 17 blacks were hanged, 13 Blacks were sent to the stake and 72 others were deported to the West Indies. Similarly, the slave plot in Antigua led to the execution of 48 Blacks. See Mark Fearnow, “Theatre for an Angry God Public Burnings and Hangings in Colonial New York, 1741,” tdr 40, no. 2 (Summer 1996), 15–36. Minutes of the General Quarter Sessions of the Peace, 11 April, 1712, ms, New York Municipal Archives, Surrogate Court’s Building. drchny, 5:339–341, 356–357. Scott, “The Slave Insurrection,” 53. drchny, 5:341–342.

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The manipulation of the defendants in the trials and the violence of the punishments was a way for colonial authorities to assert their power and discipline the black population. Governor Hunter, however, found himself in a difficult position, torn between the necessity to restore order in his colony, allay the fears of the population and his own fear of displeasing the Crown, who did not look favorably upon the executions as they disrupted its trade and economy. Moreover, the slaveowners wished to be compensated and so was the mayor of New York, Caleb Heathcote, who requested to be reimbursed for the “Iron work Gibbitts Cartldge Labourers firewood and Other Materialls and Expences for the Execution of several Negro slaves.”81 To that end, Governor Hunter wrote to the Board of Trade in June 1712 to apologize for the excessive number of executions when “a few only” would have been sufficient “for an example.” He also recognized their brutality but explained that it was necessary to reassure the population: “I am informed that in the West Indies where their laws against their slaves are most severe, that in case of a conspiracy in which many are engaged a few only are executed for all example […] (but) nothing less could please the people.”82 He thus appealed to the Privy Council to reprieve some rebels, among them a pregnant woman (but she still met death after giving birth), a free Black, two Spanish slaves and two other “Negroes […] at the instance of the Justices of the Court, who were of opinion that the evidence against them, was not sufficient to convict them.”83 Despite Attorney General May Bickley’s strong disapproval,84 they were all granted the royal pardon on 20 October 1712.85 The New York provincial assembly then hardened the slave system by reinforcing the laws. On 10 December 1712, it passed an “Act for Preventing, Suppressing and Punishing the Conspiracy and Insurrection of Negroes and Other Slaves,” which allowed slaveowners to “punish their slaves for their crimes and offences at Discretion, not extending to Life or Member” and insisting that any slave convicted of murder, rape, arson or assault would “suffer the pains of Death in such manner and with such circumstances as the aggravation or enormity of their crimes […] shall merit and require.” It also placed slaves suspected of such crimes under the jurisdiction of special courts, without a grand jury investigation and with the presence of a trial jury dependent on the willingness of the slave’s owner if he agreed to pay the costs. It also 81 mcc, 3:27. 82 drchny, 5:356–357. 83 Scott, “The Slave Insurrection,” 59. 84 Hodges, Root and Branch, 66. 85 Scott, “The Slave Insurrection,” 61.

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restricted the conditions of emancipation of the slaves and the liberties of free blacks. These “idle slothfull people” could no longer have access to private property and the masters manumitting their slaves had to pay £200 as bond to the government as well as an annual fee of £20 to the slave in order to prevent them from becoming public charges.86 On 2 November 1717, a revised law eliminated the annual payment former owners had to make to their freed slaves but it still required them to post the bond, making masters reluctant to free slaves throughout the remainder of the eighteenth century.87 At the local level, the Common Council of the City of New York ordered the passing on 14 March 1713 of a “Law for Regulating Negro and Indian Slaves in the Night Time,”88 providing that no slave above the age of fourteen was allowed to travel at night without a lantern and allowing inhabitants to seize them, bring them before the mayor, recorder or alderman and put them to jail. Yet, Governor Hunter was divided between the need to harden slave laws and the way the Crown would react. He apologized to the Board of Trade for the ruthlessness of the 1712 “Negro Act” explaining that “the Late Hellish Attempt of yo’ Slaves Is sufficient to Convince [them] of the necessity of putting that Sort of men under better Regulation by Som good Law for that purpose, and to take away the Root of that Evill to Encourage the Importation of White Servants.”89 He tended to be cautious because he still had in mind that in New Jersey, the 1704 New Jersey “Act for Regulating Negro Indians and Mulatto Slaves” had been considered as so severe that Queen Anne vetoed it five years later on the grounds that “the Punishment to be inflicted on negroes &c is such as never was allowed by or known in the Laws of the Kingdom.”90 Even though the British crown granted a great deal of autonomy to its colonial assemblies, which could fashion their own colonial laws based on practice91 86 87

drchny, 5:342. “An Act for Explaining and Rendering more Effectual an Act of the General Assembly of this Colony entitled, an Act for Preventing, Suppressing and punishing the Conspiracy and Insurrection of Negroes and other slaves,” 2 November 1717, O’ Callaghan, Journal of the Legislative Council of New York, 417. 88 mcc, 14 March 1713, 3:30–31. 89 O’Callaghan, Journal of the Legislative Council, 1:333; Stokes, Iconography, 4:474–475. 90 drchny, 5:157. In 1686, the English Crown already worried that too strict a legislation might anger slaves even more and had warned Governor Thomas Dongan to try and limit the owners’ ill-treatment of their slaves: “provision is to be made that ye wilful killing of Indians & Negros may bee punished with death, And that a fit penalty bee imposed for the maiming of them,” drchny, 3:374. 91 Jonathan Bush, “The British Constitution and the Creation of American Slavery,” in Paul Finkelman, ed., Slavery & the Law (Madison, Wis.: Madison House, 2002), 382.

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and take into account the specificity of their environment, in contrast to French or Spanish colonies where slave laws were subjected to a written code originating from the metropole like the Code noir or the siete partidas, the monarch still had the prerogative to oversee the legislation passed in the colonies and to regulate it. The slave codes thus reflected elite consciousness of the potential threats of the slave population and expressed their will to control and impose their power on society. Colonial governments accordingly used the law as a sword to divide society along the color line and prevent class solidarity of the sort that occurred in Virginia with the 1676 Bacon’s Rebellion, which gathered the “giddy multitude,” that is “an amalgam of indentured servants and slaves, of poor whites and blacks, of landless freemen and debtors” against planters.92 Indeed, because of its remarkably diverse population, the colony of New York was constantly agitated by political factionalism93 between, on the one hand, the court party, which supported the royal governor, often in exchange for land grants or appointments to governmental offices, and, on the other hand, an opposition country party which dominated the legislative assembly and tried to fight the rule of the Crown-appointed governor.94 This factionalism came to a head in 1689 with Leisler’s Rebellion, which arose from a population “divided against itself by confessional, linguistic, natal and social distinctions.”95 Leisler was supported by the group of Dutchspeaking laborers and artisans as well as the Protestant refugees who shared the hatred and fear of Catholic tyranny, some of them having experienced the devastation of the Thirty Years War in Europe (1618–1648), and who resented the power of the Anglo Dutch ruling class – the municipal government, prominent clergymen, wealthy merchants and landlords “who had materially benefited from the patronage that James ii had bestowed on his loyal supporters.”96 92

T.H. Breen, “A Changing Labor Force and Race Relations in Virginia 1660–1710,” Journal of Social History 7, no. 1 (Fall 1973), 2. Indeed, New York settlers were certainly aware of the rebellion in the neighboring colony as Sir John Werden, the secretary of the Duke of York informed Governor Edmund Andros (1674–1681) that the King “forb[ade Andros’s] admitting any of the accomplices of Bacon the cheife of the seditious in Virginia into [his] governmt; [as] they may have scattered about to debauch the fidelity or attract the pitty of the neighbour colonyes,” drchny, 3:245. 93 Patricia U. Bonomi, A Factious People, Politics and Society in Colonial New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971) describes political factionalism in New York as “an almost endemic condition of the colony’s public life,” 78. 94 Foote, Black and White Manhattan, 159. 95 Ibid., 124. 96 Ibid., 101; on the Dutch assimilation see Randall Balmer’s A Perfect Babel of Confusion: Dutch Religion and English Culture in the Middle Colonies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

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The English governing elite, who had found it hard to impose itself on the Dutch population after 1664, attempted to strengthen its power by uniting the Protestant population under the label of “white people” by granting them rights as English subjects.97 In 1683, the colonial assembly passed an “Act for Naturalizing all these Foreign Nations at Present Inhabiting within this Province and Professing Christianity,” which suppressed all political distinctions between English subjects and foreigners as long as they were Christians, they had been residents of New York City for at least six years and they were ready to take the oath of allegiance to the English Crown.98 If Catholics could be naturalized under Governor Dongan, only Protestants were accepted after Leisler’s Rebellion, whereas Jews were “tolerated” – they could receive a patent of denization from the Crown in exchange for a fee and didn’t have to take the Anglican oath of allegiance.99 In 1713, after many German immigrants from the Palatinate had arrived in the colony,100 the assembly passed legislation to naturalize all foreign-born Protestants living in the colony and to make them take the Test Act, by which they abjured any allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church.101 The creation of this artificial category of whiteness was thus a means to include disparate groups of Europeans (English, Scottish, Scotch-Irish, Dutch, Scandinavians, French, Germans) who shared the same skin color and Protestant faith while excluding black people and Catholics. This was how the English elite was able to anglicize the population. Thelma W. Foote persuasively argues that the expansion of the communal boundaries of the English nation amounted to a reterritorialization of Englishness – that is, a movement from defining Englishness as primarily consisting of the external trait of having been born on the soil of England to positing certain internal traits of innate racial disposition as the essence of Englishness.102 97 Foote, Black and White Manhattan, 124. 98 Colonial Laws, 1:123–124. 99 After the execution of Leisler, who Jews opposed as he overthrew a government that had supported them, they were granted the right to vote and hold public office. See William Pencak, “Anti-Semitism, Toleration, and Appreciation: The Changing Relations of Jews and Gentiles in Early America,” in Beneke, Grenda, The First Prejudice, 241–262. After 1718, they could be naturalized by the assembly which permitted them to omit the phrase “on the true faith of a Christian,” Edwin G. Burrows, Mike Wallace, Gotham: a History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 133. 100 Philip Otterness, Becoming German: The 1709 Palatine Migration to New York (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 2004). 101 Ibid., 858. 102 Foote, Black and White Manhattan, 91–92.

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This essentialist conception of the nation thus carried a racial aspect, as it could be inherited and bequeathed by blood. This way, during the court proceedings, the factious white settlers were temporarily united around the discovery and suppression of a dangerous insurrection from below and their attention was diverted from the internal conflicts that divided them. Excluding black people from the white community was thus a convenient means to forge solidarity within society.103 Conclusion The 1712 New York slave insurrection illustrates how the rampant feeling of fear which surrounded the rebellion did not only stem from the threatening presence of black people in New York City but was more a multilayered consciousness made up of interconnected threats like that of France, Spain and Catholicism. It is also instructive in the way colonial authorities manipulated that fear. Indeed, the conditions in which the trials took place, the violence of the executions and the strict reinforcing of the slave codes do not seem to have been sufficient to quell the fears of the population.104 Worse still, more coercion led to an increased desire for revenge on the part of the oppressed and a growing feeling of fear on the part of the oppressors. The New Yorkers’ two greatest fears – the rebellion of black slaves and a Catholic invasion – were amplified in the course of the eighteenth century and turned into complete hysteria, leading to uncontrollable and irrational feelings of paranoia and persecution, which were even mocked by the neighboring colony of New England. In April 1741, the city was prey to a new series of fires, which led people to think immediately about a new slave insurrection and made them launch a real “bonfire of negroes”:105 200 conspirators were named, 152 blacks and 21 whites arrested for plotting, burning and pillaging the city, 80 of them were forced into confessing, four whites and 17 Blacks were hanged, 13 Blacks were sent to 103 Winthrop P. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill, n.c.: the University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 120. 104 In 1730, the Montgomorie Act aimed at consolidating the provincial codes of 1702, 1708 and because of the “many Mischiefs had been Occasioned by the too great Liberty allowed to Negro and other Slaves,” “An act for the more effectual preventing and punishing the conspiracy and insurrection of Negroes and other slaves, for the better regulating them, and for repealing the acts herein mentioned relating thereto,” Colonial Laws of New York, 2:679–688. 105 Lepore, New York Burning, 205.

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the stake and 72 others were deported to the West Indies.106 This movement of panic was ridiculed by a New Englander who sent an anonymous letter in which he denounced New Yorkers’ reaction and deplored this “bloody tragedy […] (which) puts (him) in mind of (their) New England witchcraft in the year 1692 […] Which […] New York justly reproached (them) for, & mockt at (their) Credulity about.”107 Indeed, New Yorkers, who had condemned the hysteria of the witch hunt conducted by New Englanders in Salem underwent their own bout of frenzy with that belief in a slave conspiracy. If the 1741 conspiracy has received such scholarly attention, it was more for the excitement it created than for “the formidableness of the menace.”108 Indeed, this event, which limited itself to a conspiracy (no one was actually killed), the existence of which has never been proven, has become memorable due to the staging and manipulation of fear by the colonial authorities with the publication in 1744 of Judge Horsmanden’s account of the trial,109 in which he clearly emphasized Blacks’ and Catholics’ malevolence in plotting to destroy the city. Yet, arguably, 1741 cannot be considered separately from 1712. More than the striking similarities between the two events, some commentators even see 1741 as a commemoration of 1712,110 that slave conspiracy was nothing but the expression of the exacerbated fears that had emerged with the slave insurrection thirty years before.

106 Mark Fearnow, “Theatre for an Angry God Public Burnings and Hangings in Colonial New York, 1741,” tdr 40, no. 2 (Summer 1996), 15–36. 107 Lepore, New York Burning, xvii; Salem proceedings had been criticized by Dutch and Huguenots ministers from New York City, see Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 (New York: Knopf, 2002), 286–287. 108 U.B. Philips, American Negro Slavery, 469. 109 Horsmanden, The New York Conspiracy or a History of the Negro Plot. 110 Lepore, New York Burning, 53.

chapter 10

Fear and the Making of a Huguenot Identity (1685–1750) Susanne Lachenicht Fear, in the case of the Huguenots, seems to be a most obvious driving force in the making of an Atlantic refuge and the shaping of a Huguenot identity. In France, the persecution of Ceux de la Religion Prétendue Réformée, or French Calvinists, had started in the 1550s. It culminated with St. Bartholomew’s Night, on 23/24 August 1572: first in Paris, then all over France, thousands of Protestants were slaughtered in order to extirpate the Calvinist “heresy” and to suppress the opponents of the reigning house of the Valois and the “pretenders”, the Guise of Lorraine. Persecution and massacres were to shape the Huguenots’ identity from the beginning, as early master narratives such as Jean Crespin’s Histoire des martyrs (Geneva 1582 [1597, 1608, 1619]) illustrate. The trauma of persecution seemed to end in 1598, with the Edict of Nantes granting Protestants in France some fundamental religious, civic, economic and political rights. Persecution resumed in the 1620s, when Cardinal Richelieu sought to deprive the Huguenots of their military strongholds and political power in France. Notwithstanding the fall of La Rochelle in 1628 and the Edict of Alès (1629), Huguenots were able to live peacefully in France, still enjoying most of the privileges that King Henry iv and the Edict of Nantes had granted them in 1598. From 1660, however, Louis xiv assumed full power over politics in France and slowly eroded the Protestants’ legal and religious status. The Dragonnades, from 1681 onwards, were followed by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, the Edict of Fontainebleau. The latter put an end to Protestantism in France and deprived French Calvinists of all rights granted in 1598. For many but not all Huguenots in France, the 1680s brought another trauma, of violence, torture, rape and massacres in Huguenot households, of flight, of the loss of relatives, of property, health and the homeland, and of the disruption of families. Emigration from France and resettlement within Protestant Europe had already started during the second half of the sixteenth century. Between 1562 und 1628, an estimated 20,000 Protestants fled from France, some only temporarily, some for good. From the 1680s to the 1720s another 150,000 to 200,000 Huguenots left. They migrated to the Netherlands, Switzerland, England, Wales, Scotland, to some of the Protestant states within the Holy Roman

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Empire, such as Brandenburg-Prussia, the Palatinate, the Landgraviate of Hesse-Kassel, Wurttemberg and Franconia, to Scandinavia, Ireland, the Americas and South Africa.1 Once they had left France, fearing being captured and executed for high treason during their flight, as the Edict of Fontainebleau prohibited that Huguenot laypersons emigrated, French Protestants were quite unlikely to return to France: […] they will leave their new homes with difficulties; the remembrance of the past miseries and the present ease, fears of being treated as suspects & manifoldly hated for their religion and their flight from France, they will stay where they are now and where they enjoy ample freedom.2 We do know, however, that persecution back in France did not hinder Huguenots from returning back home, if only temporarily in some cases.3 Fear of persecution did not come to an end in 1685. The vast majority of French Protestants, about 500,000, did not flee from France but chose to stay. Some converted and became devout Catholics, others, especially in the Cévennes and in Provence, continued to practice Protestantism and thus turned into Crypto-Calvinists.4 The latter were threatened by further dragonnades, forced 1 Robin D. Gwynn, Huguenot Heritage. The history and contribution of the Huguenots in Britain (London, New York: Routledge and Paul, 1988), 24, 31; Eckart Birnstiel, Andreas Reinke, “Hugenotten in Berlin,” in Stefi Jersch-Wenzel, Barbara John, eds., Von Zuwanderern zu Einheimischen. Hugenotten, Juden, Böhmen, Polen in Berlin (Berlin: Nicolai, 1990), 16–152, here 31; Jean-Pierre Poussou, “Mobilité et migrations,” Jacques Dupâquier, ed., Histoire de la population française, t. 2: De la Renaissance à 1789 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995), 99–143. 2 “[…] ils ne changeront de Domicile qu’avec peine, le souvenir des maux passez & la tranquilité presente, la crainte d’etre tourmentez comme suspects & doublement odieux par leur Religion & par le Refuge les retiendra dans les Lieux où ils vivent dans une pleine Liberté.” State Papers of Queen Anne, vol. xxxiii, f. 56–80, Photostats at the Bodleian Library Oxford. 3 Archiv der Französischen Kirche im Französischen Dom Berlin (AFrD), Registre des Actes consistoriaux de l’Église française reformée de Berlin, vol. 1, 26 February 1696, f. 294, for England see Robin D. Gwynn(ed.), Minutes of the Consistory of the French Church of London, Threadneedle Street 1679–1692 (London: Huguenot Society of Great Britain and Ireland. Quarto series, 1994) vol. lviii, Entry of 16 September 1689. 4 Michel Vovelle, “Jalons pour une histoire du silence, les testaments réformés dans le sud-est de la France du XVIIIe au XVIIIe siècle,” Cinq siècles de protestantisme à Marseille et en Provence (Marseille: Fédération historique de Provence, 1978) 42–59; Philippe Joutard, “The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes: End or Renewal of French Protestantism?,” in Menna Prestwich, ed., International Calvinism, 1541–1715 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 339–368, here 359–360.

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conversion, torture, deportation, galley slavery (for men), imprisonment in gaols and convents (women), and execution. It has often been said that the trauma of the dragonnades and the persecution of Protestantism in France caused the Camisards’ revolt in the Vivarais and Cévennes regions from 1702.5 Between 1702 and 1710/12 the so-called French Prophets and their followers spread fear and death in southern France.6 Violence and angst reigning over the Huguenots’ survival in France turned into further violence and terror. Huguenots as much as other Protestants believed that they were “God’s elect.”7 Persecution for their faith, violence, torture and martyrdom made the Huguenots believe that God tested the firmness of their faith.8 Their many sufferings meant that they had to preserve the purity of the Calvinist faith at all costs. Guided by Providence, Huguenots in France had to fulfil God’s will, as much as Huguenots in exile, in the so-called refuge, felt obliged to preserve the faith of their ancestors. I have argued elsewhere that persecution made the Huguenots’ “gate-keepers”, such as pastors, military leaders and diplomats, eager to establish a “Protestant France abroad”, a separate nation or diaspora that was meant to create and maintain one Huguenot identity.9 Fear of persecution 5 Philippe Joutard, La légende des Camisards. Une sensibilité au passé (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 87–88. 6 Joutard, “The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes,” 360–366. 7 Barbara B. Diefendorf, “The Huguenot Psalter and the Faith of French Protestants in the Sixteenth Century,” in Barbara B. Diefendorf, Carla Hesse, eds., Culture and Identity in Early Modern Europe (1500–1800). Essays in Honor of Natalie Zemon Davis (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 41–63, here 42; Eckart, Birnstiel, “La naissance d’une ‘nation’: la réorganisation sociale dans le Refuge huguenot,” Michelle Bouix, ed., Minorités et construction nationale, XVIIIe–XXe siècles (Pessac: Maison des Sciences de l’homme d’Aquitaine, 2004), 24–34, here 23–24; Eckart Birnstiel, “La France en quête de ses enfants perdus. Mythe et réalité du retour au ‘pays des ancêtres’ des huguenots du Refuge, de la Réforme à la Révolution,” Diasporas. Histoire et Sociétés 8 (2006), 22–44, here 39; Luc Racaut, “Religious polemic and Huguenot identity,” Raymond A. Mentzer and Andrew Spicer, eds., Society and culture in the Huguenot World, 1559–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 29–43. 8 Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1999), 76; David El Kenz, Les Bûchers du Roi: la Culture protestante des Martyrs, 1523–1572 (Seyssel: Champvallon, 1997), 72; Racaut, “Religious polemic,” 29–32; Racaut, Hatred in Print. Catholic Propaganda and Protestant Identity during the French Wars of Religion (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 63–67, 113. 9 Susanne Lachenicht, “Huguenot Immigrants and the Formation of National Identities,” The Historical Journal 50, no. 2 (2007), 309–331; Lachenicht, “Culture Clash and Hubris: The History and Historiography of the Huguenots in Germany and the Atlantic World,” Gesa

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and fear of losing one’s faith, and thus the favor of God, was to determine the Huguenot refuge or diaspora and the ways their re-settlement would have been shaped, if the Huguenot “gate-keepers” or Huguenot leaders had had their way. Huguenot pastors and military leaders, “gate-keepers”, such as Henri Massue de Ruvigny and Henri de Mirmand, aimed at settling French Protestants in exile in entirely separate communities, separate from the indigenous and other migrant communities. Huguenot colonies, as they termed the planned settlements, should have been granted their own churches, consistories, educational system, hospitals, administration, law and jurisdiction: As it pleases Your British Majesties to grant, in your Kingdom of Ireland, asylum to the refugees […], the refugees in Switzerland and Geneva pray most humbly to bestow on them the following privileges: Your Majesties will have the goodness to obtain an Act of Parliament by which all the French refugees coming into England will be naturalized […]. […] The 1st Lord Gallway, […] nurtures hopes […] that the English […] will agree to the French refugees’ settling as a separate nation […]. Your Majesties will have the goodness, if they please, to build a church, with a spire, and two houses for two pastors, together with another house where the precentor and the sexton could dwell; everything within an enclosure, with space for the churchyard and gardens. We humbly pray Your Majesties to have built a hospital and to disclose some space for the monasteries and a house for the colony’s administration and the court. […] If there were other colonies in other parts of the Kingdom of Ireland, Your Majesties will have built, in all their piety, churches and parsonages wherever they will be of need. […]10 10

Mackenthun and Sünne Juterczenka, eds., The Fuzzy Logic of Encounter: New perspectives on cultural contact (Münster, New York, Munich, Berlin: Waxman, 2009), 75–96. “Puisqu’il plait à Leurs Majestés Britanniques de vouloir donner des retraites en leur royaume d’Irlande aux réfugiés […], les réfugiés en Suisse et à Genève les supplient très humblement de vouloir […] leur accorder les conditions suivantes: s.m. auront la bonté de procurer un Acte du Parlement d’Angleterre qui naturalise, ipso facto, tous les réfugiés français qui iront s’établir en Irlande […]. […] le 1er Milord Gallway, […] fait espérer […] que les Anglais […] consentiront pourtant que nous fassions une colonie à part […]. Leurs M[ajestés] auront, s’il leur plait, la bonté de faire bâtir un temple, avec son clocher, et deux maisons pour loger deux pasteurs en titre avec une autre maison où l’on puisse loger un chantre et un marguillier et enfermer le tout dans un enclos, avec des espaces, nécessaires pour un cimetière & des jardins. De plus s.m. sont très humblement suppliées de faire bâtir un hôpital et marquer des places pour des maisons collégiales et pour une

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Knowledge of plantations and settlements schemes was available in early modern Europe. The Huguenots borrowed from these earlier colonization schemes, such as the Ulster plantation in the early seventeenth century, for their own purposes: […] the refugees have reason to believe in Your Majesties bounty and that they [the refugees] will not be treated less favorably than the English & Scottish in their plantations and colonies in Ireland.11 Earlier models for colonization could have preserved the ethnic and religious diaspora as one intact community, a diaspora scattered all over the world but kept together by closely knit networks and social endogamy.12 However, French Protestant exiles in the Atlantic World, in Hamburg, England, Ireland, and North America, had to face other solutions. While some German Protestants states such as Brandenburg-Prussia, used Huguenots for internal colonization and thus granted mostly all privileges that Huguenots claimed for their brethren, the English, Irish and colonial American governments only allowed the Huguenots their own churches and consistories. The Lutheran city of Hamburg denied the Huguenots even the latter. Contrary to the Brandenburg and Hesse-Kassel experience, French Protestants in the Atlantic World were required to integrate into state and society by accepting British or colonial law, administration, and the supremacy of the Anglican Church.13 Fear, however, was not the sole driving force for Huguenot migration and re-settlement in the Atlantic World. Voluntary migration and settlement had already started before the onset of persecution in France both in the sixteenth and later seventeenth century. In 1555, the Huguenot leader and later martyr,

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maison de ville où il y ait un quartier destiné pour l’administration de la justice. […] S’il se fait d’autres colonies en d’autres endroits du royaume d’Irlande que dans la dite ville, s.m. selon leur piété, feront bâtir des temples et des maisons pastorales partout où besoin sera. […]” Bibliothèque de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français (BibSHPF), Paris, Papiers Court, Cote 617, no. 17. “[…] les Réfugiés ont lieu de tout espérer des bontés de s.m. et qu’ils ne seront pas moins favorablement traités que les Anglais & Ecossais qu’ont fait des plantations et des colonies en Irlande.” Projet pour l’établissement des réfugiés en Irlande, BibSHPF, Papiers Court, no. 17 M, M 617, f. 187. Myriam Yardeni, “Refuge et encadrement religieux de 1685 à 1715,” in idem, ed., Idéologie et propagande en France (Paris: Picard, 1987), 113–124, here 118. Susanne Lachenicht, “Intégration ou coexistence? Les huguenots dans les Îles britanniques et le Brandebourg,” Diasporas. Histoire et Sociétés 18 (2012), 108–122.

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Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, had organized an expedition to Brazil to found the colony of la France antarctique near Rio de Janeiro. In 1562, Coligny tried to establish a French colony in Fort Caroline in the Spanish part of North America, which failed abysmally. While Coligny had thought of settling Huguenots in those parts of the world, these projects of colonization were not necessarily based on fear of persecution but have to be seen in the light of colonization efforts and Protestant missions – and in terms of economic interest.14 Huguenots settling in the Dutch colony of Nieuw Nederland from the 1620s, especially in Nieuw Amsterdam, were often second generation refugees who had fled to the Netherlands during the second half of the sixteenth century.15 Many of them came for economic reasons. Even in the later seventeenth century, most Huguenots who settled in the British colonies did not arrive on account of the direct fear of persecution and massacre back in France. In 1677, eight years before the actual revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the settlement of New Paltz was founded in Ulster Country. New York Governor Edmond Andros granted the Huguenots, coming by way of the Palatinate, where they had found refuge in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Andros’ patent enabled those French Protestants to found a Calvinist church and settlement.16 In 1679, the Richmond brought Huguenots to South Carolina, a colonial venture organized by Anthony Ashley Cooper, the second Earl of Shaftesbury, and two Huguenot refugees in London, René Petit and Jacob Guérard. In the same year, Shaftesbury had become Lord President of the Council of Trade and Plantations. Also, he was one of the Lord Proprietors of the Carolinas. Again, the Huguenots settling in the Carolinas came from Switzerland, London and the Netherlands, onward-migrants who had already lived outside France for years, if not for a generation or two. While persecution back in France and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes should have sparked Huguenot immigration to the Carolinas from 1685 onwards, settlement schemes were already more or less abolished in 1686. The Carolina proprietors now – it seems – wanted other settlers than French Protestants fleeing from France.17 Thus, settling Huguenots in the British colonies was far less driven by the proprietors’ direct response to 14 15 16 17

Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, From New Babylon to Eden: The Huguenots and their Migration to Colonial South Carolina (Columbia, s.c.: University of South Carolina Press, 2006), 2–3. John W. Pratt, Religion, Politics and Diversity: The Church-State Theme in New York History (Ithaca, n.y.: Cornell University Press, 1967), 11–13. Paula Wheeler Carlo, Huguenot Refugees in Colonial New York. Becoming American in the Hudson Valley (Brighton, England; Portland, Oregon: Sussex Academic Press, 2005), 19–24. Van Ruymbeke, From New Babylon to Eden, 207.

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persecution back in France than historiography might have suggested. However, Huguenots, also by direct way of France, continued migrating to the Carolinas, at least up to the 1720s. While some did flee for fear of persecutions, the majority and especially Swiss Reformed refugees came for economic reasons.18 In 1686, Jacob Leisler, a German Calvinist from Frankfurt am Main and leader of the famous Leisler rebellion of 1689 to 1691, acquired land in Westchester County (New York) where he settled Huguenot refugees from the Caribbean (the French Antilles) and from La Rochelle. In this case, fear of persecution in the West Indies and back in France was the driving force indeed.19 Fear arose in contexts of cultural encounters, with the English and the Irish in the British Isles, with Indians, African slaves and European settlers in the Caribbean and North America. When settling on the eastern and western shores of the Atlantic, Huguenots were confronted with fears in some respects similar to the ones they had been confronted with back in France: distrust and the rejection of otherness. In the countries of refuge, these fears had different overtones, though. Outside France, distrust and xenophobia included not only religious but also ethnic stereotypes. In 1576, the Lord Keeper Francis Bacon accused the French refugees in England of their dubious loyalties: If the ffrenche denizen’s hart continue naturally ffrenche and lovinge to his owne Cuntrye Then can he not Love our Cuntrye nor be meet to be amongest us, yf he be unnaturall and can find in his hart to hate his owne Cuntrye then will he not be trustie to our Cuntrye and so more unmeet to Lyve amongst us.20 18

19

20

Ibid., 36; R.C. Nash, “Huguenot Merchants and the Development of South Carolina’s Slave-Plantation and Atlantic Trading Economy, 1680–1775,” Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, Randy J. Sparks, eds., Memory and Identity. The Huguenots in France and the Atlantic Diaspora (Columbia, s.c.: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 208–240, here 212. Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (spg), series A 20, copies of the letters received and sent, 1727, Letter of Stouppe to spg of 11 December 1727; spg papers, series A21, Copies of the letters received and sent, 1727–1732, Letter of Stouppe to spg of 15 July 1728, and David William Voorhees, “Jacob Leisler and the Huguenot Network in the English Atlantic World,” Randolph Vigne, Charles Littleton, eds., From Strangers to Citizens: The Integration of Immigrant Communities in Britain, Ireland and Colonial America, 1550–1750 (Brighton, England; Portland, Oregon: Sussex Academic Press, 2001), 322–331, here 325. Laura Hunt Yungblut, Strangers Settled Here Amongst Us: Policies, Perceptions and the Presence of Aliens in Elizabethan England (London, New York: Routledge, 1996), 36.

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Again in England in the 1570s, some inhabitants of the City of London complained about: […] the contynuall and daily resort of strangers of divers nacons unto this cytty … [being] the cause of great scarcety of victuals raiseinge rents and contynuall encreasing of begger idle vagabonds and theeves of our own countreymen and nacon.21 One year later, more inhabitants of the City of London wrote a letter to Queen Elizabeth stating about the French refugees: [They] ought not to be in companies or Societies … [yet] they are a common wealth within themselves, trade in partner shippe with strangers, and as factors for whole cittyes, comerce with us for nothing that they can have of their own nacon, though they be denizen’d or born heere amongst us, yett they keep themselves severed from us in church, in government, in trade, in language and marriage.22 Up to the 1620s, these prejudices did not change: [They] combyn’d themselves togeather, they marry not with our nation, they sett their owne people aworke in all sorts of trades … they alter not their affection, their apparrell … language … nor conforme themselves to our churches [and] gouvernment.23 Still in 1710, French refugees in London were perceived as a society en vase clos and as a threat to the hosting society, as the Letter to the French Refugees concerning their Behaviour to the Government shows: Members of the hosting society – in this case presumably an Anglican pastor – suspected the French Protestants of being Republicans, who “think that they only are the Children of Grace, the particular Favourites of Heaven, and therefore that all the Right of Dominion and Power belongs peculiarly to themselves.” According to the author, the French Protestants in England were “a separate Body in the Nation, not only by [their] manner of dwelling near one another, but by [their] assembling together in [their] French Churches, and also by [their] distinct 21 22 23

Lien Bich Luu, “Assimilation or Segregation: Colonies of Alien Craftsmen in Elizabethan London,” Huguenot Society Proceedings (hereafter hsp) xxvi, no. 2 (1995), 160–172, here 160. Luu, “Assimilation or Segregation.” Luu, “Assimilation or Segregation.”

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Language.”24 Huguenots in Britain were, as Matthew Glozier has stated, “looked upon with suspicion by a largely xenophobic British public.”25 The Huguenots’ presence in the Isles threatened English society, as their arrival was supposed to cause overpopulation and the scarcity of bread and housing, particularly in London. Furthermore, their craftsmanship meant unwelcome competition for English artisans. From time to time, negative perceptions of the French refugees led to revolts against Huguenot settlements and individual craftsmen. In 1682, the inhabitants of Norwich accused the French Protestants of working for less money than their English colleagues and employing too many apprentices. In Rye, Huguenots were physically attacked on their way to church.26 Particularly during the reign of King William iii (of Orange), Englishmen feared the growing influence of his alien entourage, largely consisting of Dutch, German and French Calvinists. In 1693/94, Sir John Knight, mp for Bristol, attempted to prove that the French refugees’ presence damaged the English economy through overproduction and their ignorance of the English guilds’ rules.27 In early modern England, it seems, fear of strangers, or xenophobia, included fear of competition, of scarcity of food and housing, the lack of loyalty and, finally, high treason. Solutions seemed to be the integration (avant la lettre) of “strangers” (foreigners), which would have meant the loss of their original languages and cultures, the disintegration of their religious and ethnic communities and the melting of the foreigners’ various economic enterprises in craft, commerce and trade with the English. However, xenophobia also implied the fear of “papism” and of forcing the English back to Catholicism. From the 1680s, the “anti-Huguenot undercurrent” defamed the refugees in England as “papists in disguise”28 who would murder the English nation: […] they were French or Walloon Protestants that came into this nation for Refuge, and had got estates, and would overthrow the Government, 24 25

26 27 28

A Letter to the French Refugees concerning their Behaviour to the Government (London, 1710), 8. Matthew Glozier, The Huguenot soldiers of William of Orange and the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688. The Lions of Judah (Brighton, England; Portland, Oregon: Sussex Academic Press, 2002), 5, 136. Malcolm R. Thorp, “The Anti-Huguenot Undercurrent in Late-Seventeenth-Century England,” hsp xxiii, no. 6 (1976), 565–580, here 571–572. Thorp, “The Anti-Huguenot Undercurrent in Late-Seventeenth-Century England,” 576–578. Esmond Samuel de Beer, “The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and English Public Opinion,” hsp xviii, no. 4 (1950), 292–310, here 302–307; Thorp, “The Anti-Huguenot Undercurrent in Late-Seventeenth-Century England.”

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and cut our throats … and now there is come over a great many more of late, and in a little time they will be the same as these are. To which my Lord Mayor replied: “I hope that the King will take a course to send them back again to their country.”29 For the Anglican Church, the French refugees reinforced the Presbyterian element among England’s Dissenters, as Bishop Morley of Winchester put it in a letter to the Bishop of London, Henry Compton.30 Many Anglicans disapproved of the French Calvinists being exempted from the penal laws against nonconformists, particularly as English Dissenters used French Churches in England for their services.31 Anglicans published pamphlets, reminding French refugees of the necessity of Anglican conformism, of the “unity and peace” of the Protestant churches in England.32 Furthermore, French Protestants in England were accused of not respecting the Day of the Lord. Generally, it was assumed that their persecution in France had been the result of the Huguenots’ ungodly behavior prior to 1685.33 In the Irish refuge, the Church of Ireland (so the Anglican Church there) would have wished the Huguenot refugees to assimilate with and consolidate the Protestant ascendancy within a predominantly Catholic country.34 In the British colonies in North America, in this case in Boston, French refugees were also perceived as “French Catholics in disguise who were sent by the Antichrist to multiply the colony’s woes.”35 In the Hudson Valley, English settlers depicted 29 30 31 32

33

34 35

A.F.W. Papillon, Memoirs of Thomas Papillon, of London, Merchant (1623–1702) (Reading, 1887), 231–232. Bishop Morley to Henry Compton, Bishop of London, no date, Rawlinson mss 984 C, f. 50. Bodleian Library, Oxford. Letter dating from 12 November 1683. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson mss, 984 C, f. 48. John Bingham, The French Churches Apology for the Church of England: or, The Objections of Dissenters against the Articles, Homilies, Liturgy, and Canons of the English Church, Consider’d and Asnwer’d upon the Principles of the Reformed Church of France. A Work chiefly extracted out of the Authentick Act and Decrees of the French National Synods, and the most Approved Writers of that Church. By J. Bingham, m.a. and sometime Fellow of Univ. Coll.in Oxford (London, 1706), 337. Lettre d’un ministre de l’Église Anglicane, a un ministre Francois refugié, sur le peu de respect pour le jour du repos, qu’on a remarqué en quelques uns de ses compatriotes, qui font gloire d’avoir abandonné leur patrie pour la cause de la religion reformée (London, 1703), 1. Raymond Pierre Hylton, Ireland’s Huguenots and their refuge, 1662–1745: An Unlikely Haven (Brighton, England; Portland, Oregon: Sussex Academic Press, 2005), 179. Jon Butler, The Huguenots in America: a Refugee People in New World Society (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press 1983), 73–74.

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their Huguenot fellow settlers as the “French ennemi and traitor” who would deliver the colonies to France in case of a French invasion.36 How did those fears then shape a Huguenot identity in the Atlantic World? It is quite obvious that Huguenots in the Atlantic World were subject to a number of fears that required contradicting narratives and practices. The trauma of the persecution of their faith, and everybody adhering to it, the fear of God and being His elect, should have led to the establishment of Huguenot churches in exile and the foundation of an orthodox and endogamous Huguenot diaspora. The latter could have guaranteed the purity of the French Calvinist faith. In the countries of refuge, xenophobia, fear of otherness, of competition and of treason, the need to conform to the Anglican Church, not only in England but also in Ireland and the British colonies in North America, should have enhanced the Huguenots’ rapid integration (avant la lettre) and the disintegration of their specific French Protestant culture. The Huguenots, it seems, chose pragmatic solutions to this conundrum. English fears of the French Protestants’ disloyalty to the Crown and Anglican Church and of high treason were met by Huguenot regiments supporting William of Orange in his wars against the Jacobites.37 Besides military support to the Protestant cause in Europe French Protestants in England sought to publish panegyrics and flattering sermons which were supposed to convince the English public of the French refugees’ loyalty to their new monarch or prince.38 […] let us exclaim “vive le Roy.” My refugee brethren, you are bound to it, because it is your duty to contribute to the prosperity of a kingdom which has received you with such charity; you are bound to it, as you are refugees, as the King himself had declared to protect Zion in his captivity, & and to be the provider of your Poor.39 36 37

38

39

Wheeler Carlo, Huguenot Refugees in Colonial New York, 27. See e.g. Pierre Jurieu, Examen d’un libelle contre la religion, contre l’Etat et contre la révolution d’Angleterre, intitulé Avis important aux réfugiés sur leur prochain retour en France (The Hague, 1691), 216. See e.g. Peter Drelincourt, A speech made to His Grace the duke of Ormond, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and to the … privy council. To return the humble thanks of the French Protestants lately arriv’d in this kingdom; and graciously reliev’d by them (Dublin, 1682). “[…] écrions nous, vive le Roy. Mes Freres Refugiez, vous y êtes obligez non seulement parce que votre Devoir vous engage, à prendre part au Bonheur d’un Royaume, qui vous a receu si charitablement dans son Sein; Vous y êtes encore plus particulièrement obligez, en qualité de Refugiez; puis que le Roy a declaré, luy même, qu’il vouloit être le Protecteur de Sion captive, & le Pere nourricier de vos Pauvres.” Jean-Armand Dubourdieu, Les Voeux des Protestants, ou sermon sur le i Sam. Ch. x Ver. 24 (London, 1714), 26.

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Pamphleteering was also meant to prove the Huguenots’ willingness and actual efforts to “integration” avant la lettre: Everything that could be said about the [French] refugees, within reason, is, that they are but a small number of people having escaped from violent & cruel persecution, who, by the good & charitable welcome of the English, the benevolence & liberty of their government & many other advantages which you can find among the English, have entirely forgotten the country where they had been born, & and they have adopted the interests of this nation [England], so that since 25 years, we have seen them become naturalized, with a vengeance, mixing with the English that they have become incorporated into this nation, & that we can look at them [the English and the French refugees in England] as one and the same nation, who are of one and the same Religion, whose concerns are the same and whose commitment is reciprocal.40 Likewise in the North American context Huguenots hoped to dispel fears of disloyalty by emphasizing the opposite, as a petition to King William iii, dating of 1695/96, demonstrates: The French Protestants Refugees in this Kingdom, in behalf of themselves, and of the French Protestant Refugees settled in the English Plantations in America, do humbly Represent, that having been cruelly prosecuted in their Native Countrey, for the sake of their Religion, they came and sheltered themselves in this Kingdom, being invited there-to by the late King Charles the Second’s Declaration of the 28th July 1681: And since, by another of his present Majesty, made the 25th of April 1689, inviting all French Protestants hither, and promising them their Protection. 40

“Tout ce qu’on peut dire raisonnablement des Réfugiez, c’est qu’ils sont une petite poignée de gens échapez d’une violente & cruelle Persécution, à qui le bon et charitable Accueil des Anglois, la douceur & la liberté de leur Gouvernement, & tant d’autres Avantages qu’ils ont trouvé parmi eux, ont fait entierement oublié le Pais de leur Naissance, & entrer dans tous les Intérêts de la Nation, en sorte que depuis 25 Ans, on les a vus se faire naturaliser avec empressément, contracter des Alliances avec les Naturels du Pais, tellement qu’ils se sont incorporez avec eux, & on ne peut les considérer que comme un seul & même Peuple, qui professe une même Religion, dont les Intérêts sont communs, & les Engagements réciproques.” Réponse ou Copie d’une lettre à l’auteur de l’Avis salutaire aux Réfugiez (London, 1711), 3–4.

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That upon this Encouragement they came over in great Numbers, bringing all they could convey away with them, with their Trade, Arts and Manufactures, and where kindly received by this Nation, and had that Favour shewn to them, that a great many of them were made Free Denisons. That they also being invited by several of the Lords Proprietors of the English Plantations in America, to go thither and inhabit those Countries, many of them transported themselves and Families there, with great Hazards, Troubles and Charges. That some Hundred Families of them are now settled here, and have improved in a manner those Colonies, by making the Ground Arable, and by their Trades, Labours and Industry; insomuch, that particularly Carolina and New York are, for the most, inhabited by them. That the said French Protestants Refugees, settled here and in those Countries, have, on all Occasions, shewed their Loyalty, Zeal and Affection, to the present Government, by supporting very cheerfully the Charges and Taxes of the Land, and wearing Arms for the Defence of it, especially in the Attacks of Quebek, Martinico, Guadalupa, Jamaica, and St. Domingo, several having lost their Lives, and others being wounded, in those Occasions: And many there and here being come to great Losses, both by the Earthquake at Jamaica, and by the Enemies Privatiers at Sea.41 As the English public, and especially pastors of the Anglican Church, suspected Huguenots in England of being Presbyterians (and as such close to the rebels of the Civil Wars of the mid-sixteenth century), French Calvinist pastors tried to dispel these suspicions. In one of many pamphlets published between the 1680s and 1720 the Huguenots assured English Anglicans of their conformism and loyalism to the English Church and Crown or of the alikeness of the Anglican and continental Calvinist churches: […] that the Government, Rites and Ceremonies of the Church of England are not so unknown and unpractis’d in the Reformed Churches beyond the Sea, as has been pretended, there being hardly one of her Rites and Ceremonies that is not used in one or other of the Reformed Churches abroad [und] that none of the Reform’d Churches are Enemies to Episcopacy. That the Church of Geneva did not approve of our Presbyterian Parliament Assembly of Divines. That Calvin himself was 41

The Case of the French Protestants Refugees, settled in and about London, and in the English Plantations in America, manuscript, Bodleian Library, Oxford, f. theta 661 (67).

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neither against our Common Prayer nor Episcopal Government, nor Bucer, Capellus, Peter Martyr, Zanchius, Andreus, Riverus, Dr. du Moulin, Mons. Bochart, Beza etc.42 Thus, on the outside, Huguenots in the British Atlantic World promoted their loyalty to the British crown and the Protestant cause, political and religious conformism and their willingness to serve Britain in every possible way. Within the Huguenot churches and settlements, however, Huguenot pastors sought the exact opposite. There, their aim was to preserve the orthodoxy of their French Calvinist faith and social endogamy among their flocks. While claiming conformism in their dealing with the English public and the Anglican Church, Huguenots unofficially despised the very Church to which they officially had to conform. The Anglican Church was not only a persecutor of Presbyterians, and as such also of French Calvinists, but also too close to Catholicism. Huguenot pastors in Britain compared the English Test Acts to the French crown’s efforts to financially relieve French Protestants after they had converted to Catholicism.43 And as late as 1718, according to the (officially) conformist French pastor Jean-Armand Dubourdieu in London, the Anglican Church, being not a truly Calvinist church, was “not yet ripe for, or worthy of so great a Blessing”, which should have been the union of the French and Anglican Churches.44 In Ireland where the immigration of Huguenots was less important than in England or the Netherlands, some Huguenot churches, as the one in St. Patrick’s Cathedral officially conformed to the Church of Ireland (Anglican Church in Ireland) but withheld: With regard to the more important aspects of this discipline, which are not cared for by the [Anglican] rules, we will consult the Discipline of the French Reformed Churches of France, and we will follow their rules as much as this times and this country will allow us.45 42

43 44

45

The Church of England prov’d to be Conformable to, and approv’d by all the Protestant Churches in Europe. Being an Abridgement of Mr. Durel’s Book of Foreign Churches (London, 1706), 48. Dianne N. Ressinger, ed., Memoirs of the Reverend Jaques Fontaine (London: Huguenot Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 1992), 133. Jean-Armand Dubourdieu, An Appeal to the English Nation or The Body of the French Protestants, and the Honest Proselytes, Vindicated from the Calumnies cast on them by one Malard and his Associates, in a Libel Entitled, The French Plot Found against the English Church (London, 1718), 90. “Dans des faits importans, sur lesquels il n’y auroit point de Reglement dans cette Discipline, on Consultera la Discipline des Églises Reformées de France; et on en suivra

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Even conforming Huguenot churches in Ireland such had a clearly hybrid character. The majority of French Protestant refugees, arriving in Ireland, stuck with the non-conformist French Huguenot churches in any event.46 For the British colonies in North America, Jon Butler has held that the Huguenots, there, were subject to quick assimilation.47 Paula Wheeler Carlo, Bertrand Van Ruymbeke and myself have successfully challenged this theory. While fears of disloyalty and a lack of Anglican conformism persisted, the governor of New York, still in the late 1750s, confirmed the French Huguenot Church in New York (City) substantial privileges. Here, Anglican conformism was a far cry from reality. […] to secure them [the members if the French reformed congregation in New York] & their Successors joining with them of the same Religious Persuasion in the full Exercise & Enjoyment of all their civil and religious Rights & to preserve to them & their Successors the Liberty of Worshipping God according to the Conscience & Usages of the Protestant Reformed French Churches in Geneva in Europe.48 Also in New York, the Église du Saint Esprit’s consistory opposed the French pastor Louis Rou, perceiving him as an “Anglican sympathizer.”49 As late as the 1760s, some French Protestants, if only a minority, supported New York’s French Church financially so “that the said Church shall continue to be moderated and governed in Peace, conformable to the Discipline of the Reformed Churches of France.”50 Still in 1763, the New York Église du Saint Esprit rejected Anglican conformity, in spite of financial problems and decreasing numbers in membership: Not that we consider the Anglican Church not to be a true Church of Jesus Christ, Our Lord; but out of respect for our predecessors who established les maximes autant que le tems, et le pays le permettront.” Issac de Huisseau, Au nom de Dieu. Discipline pour l’Eglise Françoise de Dublin qui s’assemble a St. Patrick (Dublin, 1695), chapitre dernier, article vi. 46 Susanne Lachenicht, Hugenotten in Europa und Nordamerika. Migration und Integration in der Frühen Neuzeit (Frankfurt/Main: Campus Verlag, 2010), Chap. 4.4. 47 Butler, The Huguenots in America, 145. 48 New York Historical Society (nyhs), Registre des Résolutions du Consistoire de l’Église Françoise de la Nouvelle York, 1723–1766, see the entries of 1759, 1760 and 1763, and Historical Documents relating to the French Protestants in New York, 1686–1804, 2:413, 416–417. 49 Wheeler Carlo, Huguenot Refugees in Colonial New York, 111. 50 Abstracts of Last Wills, 15 volumes (New York: New York Historical Society, 1892–1907), 4:418.

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and founded our Church, we desire to conserve and maintain her the way she had been established, which was the unanimous desire of all members of the consistory.51 The French Reformed identity had to be preserved in honor of the persecuted ancestors, as also becomes evident from John Pintard’s letters dating from the 1830s: “How can I abandon the Church erected by my pious ancestors!” As a fourth generation Huguenot descendant, Pintard felt obliged “to uphold the Church of my Forefathers & to pay my adoration where our pious ancestors poured forth their orisons [sic] to our Heavenly Father.”52 The Huguenots’ social endogamy in the Atlantic World, however, was to crumble, at the very latest from the mid-eighteenth century onwards as numbers of intermarriage indicate. Up to the 1720s, the numbers of Huguenots who married non-Huguenots were small, amounting only to 6% of the refugees. Between the 1720s and the 1780s the rate of intermarriage increased. During the 1720s and 1730s between 15 and 20% of the refugees married non-Huguenots, with numbers rising to 60 to 80% in the later eighteenth century. Intermarriage and onward migration of Huguenots having arrived in London in the first place, enhanced the disintegration of Huguenot churches and neighborhoods, as I have shown elsewhere.53 The same was true for Huguenot churches and communities in Ireland and in the British colonies in North America. Depending on the size and the economic and social independence of Huguenot communities, the process of integration became tangible by the 1720s or 1730s, problematic from the 1760s and dramatic towards the end of the eighteenth century, from a Huguenot diaspora perspective. In the end, even the privileged groups of pastors who previously had cultivated a distinctive Hugue­ not identity, became affected by the “lingering” process of integration and assimilation.54 The complex blend of fears shaping Huguenot settlements in the Atlantic World brought about pragmatic choices (as the Huguenots might have phrased it) or ambivalence and ambiguity from the countries of refuge perspective. Xenophobia, fear of competition and of treason, on the side of the receiving or colonizing societies, enhanced the Huguenots’ outwardly affirming their loyalty 51

Registre des Résolutions du Consistoire de l’Église Françoise de la Nouvelle York, 1723–1766, entry 8 January 1764. 52 [John Pintard,] Letters from John Pintard to his Daughter Eliza Noel Pintard Davidson, 1816–1833, 4 vols. (New York: New York Historical Society, 1940), 1:3–4. 53 Lachenicht, Hugenotten in Europa und Nordamerika, Chap. 4. 54 Lachenicht, Hugenotten in Europa und Nordamerika, Chap. 4.8.

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to the Crown, their usefulness for state, economy and society and of their willingness to “integrate.” Fear of persecution back in France motivated many Huguenots’ emigration and accepting conditions of settlement in the Atlantic World that did not meet their requirements and expectations. Fear of God and of the loss of their faith, for which they had suffered and been persecuted back in France, led to the foundation of a Huguenot diaspora that was determined to safeguard its French Protestant identity at any cost. While the master narratives created in the Atlantic refuge – that of the Huguenots’ quick assimilation in Britain and her colonies – survive up to the present day, the preservation of an intact Huguenot diaspora and identity failed in the long run.

chapter 11

“A Land where Hunger is in Gold and Famine is in Opulence”: Plantation Slavery, Island Ecology, and the Fear of Famine in the French Caribbean Bertie Mandelblatt Introduction Drawing on his experience as an indentured servant working on St. Christopher [St. Kitts] during the first decades of French colonization in the 1620s and 1630s, Guillaume Coppier published a travel account after his return to France which testifies to the confusion, continued misjudgements, and generalized lack of both knowledge and preparedness for everyday life displayed by French colonists in the tropical Caribbean islands which they set out to colonize. Reflecting on the precarious position of the French on St. Christopher, where Coppier was seeking his fortune, he declared, “I have found that this is a country where hunger is in gold and famine is in opulence. That is to say that the wealth here is but superficial, and the need for those goods that sustain life is very great.”1 Although this reference to famine, to hunger and its relationship with the wealth produced by European colonies surely tilts towards the lyrical, in this short passage Coppier displays a pragmatic awareness and even fear of the ever-present danger of starvation, one of many colonial fears that fueled a state of widespread colonial insecurity that was at once a psychological disposition, a rich cultural imaginary, and an inventory of exceedingly concrete possibilities. The constant sense of insecurity that marked the experience of the first generations of settlement reflected Europeans’ encounter with unfamiliar landscapes, ecosystems and peoples in contexts in which Europeans were attempting to develop profitable ventures that would justify their continued presence. Insecurity in the form of the perpetual insufficiency and inedibility of food rations that Coppier’s published narrative repeatedly evokes was not only a phenomenon linked to successful terrestrial settlement in the Atlantic world. It was also an integral and omnipresent feature of the maritime 1 Guillaume Coppier, Histoire et voyage des Indes Occidentales, et de plusieurs autres regions maritimes … (Lyon: Jean Huguetan, 1645), 25.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004314740_013

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e­ xpeditions that launched these ventures and kept them supplied. Indeed, hunger made its first appearance in Coppier’s narrative well before he arrived in the Lesser Antilles in 1629, first evoked soon after his vessel’s departure from Le Havre carrying 600 Picards, Normans and Bretons. Here he described in detail the ship biscuit, “white-bearded with age,” the ration of rotten beef “penetrated throughout by plentiful numbers of enormously fat, round, long, greasy worms,” and the daily “half pot of stinking water resembling the double beer of Amsterdam in colour” that he needed to hold his nose to drink.2 However, once landed on St. Christopher, the fears stirred by rotting shipboard food supplies took on a different cast, one that was at once more collective and, as this chapter will argue, more structural in nature. Historians have written at length about colonial fears as a historical phenomenon: those inspired by the perceived potential dangers of plantation societies that were as varied as the tropical climate; sexual violence; miscegenation; as well as slave revolts, and other forms of slave resistance such as poisoning and marronage,3 culminating with the fear of the transmission of radical ideas of liberation and abolition.4 Few historians, however, have focused specifically on subsistence crises. The historiography of the colonial Atlantic world has neglected the fears linked to food insecurity, inadequacy and insufficiency, despite the fact that planters, merchants and colonial officials articulated these fears incessantly throughout 2 Coppier, Histoire et voyage des Indes Occidentales, Preface, 4. 3 At its broadest, marronage refers to the phenomenon of the flight of slaves from plantations. For more on the use of the word, see Jean-Pierre Tardieu, “Cimarrón-Maroon-Marron: An Epistemological Note,” Outre-Mers: Revue d’Histoire, 94.350–351 (2006), 237–247. 4 Natalie Zacek Settler Society in the English Leeward Islands, 1670–1776 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Sherry Johnson, Climate and Catastrophe in Cuba and the Atlantic World in the Age of Revolution (Chapel Hill, n.c.: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Matthew Mulcahy, Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribbean, 1624–1783 (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Fear of Hot Climates in the Anglo-American Colonial Experience,” William and Mary Quarterly 41, no. 2 (April 1984): 213–240; Edward B. Rugemer, “The Harrisons Go to Jamaica: Race and Sexual Violence in the Age of Abolition,” Journal of Family History 33, no. 1 (2008): 13–20; Guillaume Aubert, “The Blood of France: Race and Purity of Blood in the French Atlantic World,” William and Mary Quarterly 61, no. 3 (July 2004): 439–478. Yvan Debbash, “Le crime d’empoisonnement aux Iles pendant la période esclavagiste,” Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer 50, 179 (1963), 137–188; Caroline Oudin-Bastide, L’Effroi et la terreur: Esclavage, poison et sorcellerie aux Antilles (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 2013); Sara E. Johnson, Fear of French Negroes: Transcolonial Collaboration in the Revolutionary Americas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).

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the period.5 Fewer scholars still have taken the next step: tracing the ways such fears had far-reaching consequences, and the transformative effects on the colonial societies in which they took root. Similarly, scholars of famine have not attempted in any sustained way to apply the vocabulary of famine studies that emerged out of analyses of Ireland and the nineteenth- and twentiethcentury European colonies in Africa and Asia to studies of empire and slavery relating to periods before the nineteenth century. A third group of scholars, those who study famine in the early modern period, have not yet extended their analysis to empire.6 For their part, although environmental historians and historical geographers are increasingly turning their lens to questions of the relationship between environment and empire in the early modern era, the political economic structural bases of hunger that dogged plantation societies in the New World have not been systematically explored.7 What we need is an examination of how food supply fears were exacerbated, first, by a social and economic system that made colonists and planters nominally responsible for slave subsistence within an essentially unstable and ferociously unequal distribution of power; and, second, by the colonial investment in export-oriented agriculture that took the place of efforts aimed at forestalling local food shortages before they developed.8 This kind of analysis also needs to account for the clear transition from the kind of personal discontent expressed by Coppier about his own personal situation to the trepidation over the possibility of slave famine expressed by colonists of varying stripes (planters, overseers, colonial authorities) who, in fact, feared very little for their own 5 Richard Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: the Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624– 1713 (Chapel Hill, n.c.: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 263–264, 272–281. 6 James Vernon, Hunger: A Modern History (Cambridge, ma, Harvard University Press, 2007); Marcel Lachiver, Les années de misère. La famine au temps du Grand Roi (Paris: Fayard, 1991); John Walter and Roger Schofield, eds., Famine, Disease and the Social Order in Early Modern Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Andrew B. Appleby, Famine in Tudor and Stuart England (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1978). 7 William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983); J.R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); William Beinart and Lotte Hughes, Environment and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); David Watts, The West Indies: Patterns of Development, Culture and Environmental Change since 1492 (Cambridge University Press, 1987). 8 A key work that addresses this intersection of the human and environmental causes of famine in the Anglophone Caribbean is David Watts, “Cycles of Famine in Islands of Plenty: the Case of the Colonial West Indies in the Pre-emancipation Period,” in Famine as a Geographical Phenomenon, Bruce Currey and Graeme Hugo, eds. (Dordecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1984), 49–70.

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subsistence but became increasingly aware of the costs associated with high rates of slave mortality and disease. This fear of famine took very different forms as colonial settlements themselves grew and evolved in Caribbean contexts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, before the revolutionary period of the 1790s dramatically shifted power relations. Awareness of both the precariousness of food supplies and the very real consequences of subsistence crises – such as interruptions to the expansion of plantations and plantation agriculture; slave revolts; high slave mortality; marronage; the increase in trans-imperial smuggling and the loss of control of colonial trade – were critical in the shaping of plantation societies. Though such fears often went unacknowledged, they lay behind major developments in the way plantations were designed and managed, and in shifts in trade policy and local governance, even though most of these shifts proved largely unsuccessful at providing long-term solutions to the ongoing subsistence crisis. This chapter argues that food, both its presence and more acutely its absence, was a determining factor in the spread and development of French colonies in Caribbean in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and in the establishment of plantation slavery which formed the backbone of the economic and social structures of the colonial societies which emerged. The inability to create a stable and nutritionally adequate food supply capable of maintaining enslaved populations in the long term pointed to fundamental contradictions in the institution of Caribbean plantation slavery and set the stage for the growth of regional and transatlantic food trades. This chapter seeks to understand how the colonial awareness of the precariousness of food supplies was framed, while at the same time accounting for the concrete reality of hunger in island and plantation contexts in the early modern period. Focusing on the broader colonial Caribbean with special emphasis on the Franco-Caribbean, I first examine how subsistence crises were built into European colonization in the Lesser Antilles, from the very beginnings of colonial occupation in the early seventeenth century to the pre-revolutionary period of the 1780s. I then provide an overview of the definition of famine in order to integrate these imperial histories of subsistence crises into recent historiographical debates about famines which have been focused around nineteenth and twentieth-century crises. This recent literature on famine helps us chart the move of hunger in this plantation context, and the colonial awareness of it, into politics and political action by providing a vocabulary and analytic categories, and by allowing us to see formal relationships between chronic food shortages, disease and mortality rates that occurred locally, and also by making it possible to connect these phenomena to broader social, political and

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economic patterns taking shape across the emerging Atlantic world. By way of conclusion, this chapter will make these connections by outlining some of the key ways the colonial awareness and representation – indeed discursive manipulation – of slave famine was structured into the institution of plantation slavery in the early modern Caribbean.

Hunger in the New World

The risks associated with hunger and starvation constituted an integral element of European colonization from the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century beginnings of transatlantic overseas expeditions and terrestrial settlement in the Antilles, well before the French voyages of the 1620s led to the permanent occupation of several islands. The study of Christopher Columbus’ voyages to the Caribbean after 1492, for instance, permits a brief analysis of the role that hunger played in colonization. Patterns can be detected in this first, crucial venture that would reappear in a decisive fashion in the decades and centuries to come, across the Caribbean but also, more broadly, across the Atlantic world.9 One of the most far-reaching aspects of hunger’s place was the way it combined with and exacerbated the effects of other crises endemic to the arrival of Europeans, such as the presence of diseases, many of which were ship borne; the violence and conflict that characterized European relationships with Amerindian peoples who lived in the areas where Europeans landed; the inability of Europeans to adequately adapt to Amerindian subsistence practices that had been developed around local environments; and the chaotic, decentralized nature of early European settlements. Moreover, in such circumstances, local environmental and climatic events such as short-term droughts and hurricanes, which would not have had catastrophic effects in isolation, worked in conjunction with the precarious conditions that followed on European arrival to disastrous effect. For example, in 1495, during his second voyage to Hispaniola, Columbus noted in a report that he sent back to Spain that widespread lack of foodstuffs was killing both Spanish and Indians. Indeed, Columbus believed that hunger had killed two thirds of the Taino in Cibao, one particularly hard-hit region of Hispaniola. The scarcity of food was due, Columbus claimed in his report, to 9 The following section draws on Noble David Cook, “Sickness, Starvation, and Death in Early Hispaniola,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32, no. 3 (Winter 2002), 349–386 and Noble David Cook, Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002), 20–59.

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the Taino deliberately destroying maize crops, in the mistaken belief that the lack of food would prevent the return of the Spanish.10 When they did plant maize, a shortage of seasonal rainfall prevented a successful harvest, causing further death. The scale of Taino mortality due to hunger and in combination with diseases such as typhus, dysentery and influenza overwhelmed Spanish efforts to establish early settlements and to develop working mines. Columbus was not alone in his assessment of the role of hunger in the early colony. Writing in the mid-sixteenth-century about Columbus’ early ventures on Hispaniola on the basis of a variety of eyewitness and other accounts, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda underlined the role of hunger, rather than disease, in the very high rates of mortality for both Taino and Spanish which characterized early Spanish colonial settlements. What was the principal cause of the continuing waves of starvation of the 1490s? Simply put, Spanish reliance on limited imported food rations as an ongoing source of sustenance necessarily and rapidly put them in a dependent relationship with the peoples they were attempting to enslave as part of their campaigns to establish economically profitable settlements. Even a decade after Columbus’ landfall, the Spanish ships in the fleet commanded by Nicolas de Ovando, which arrived in 1502, landed on Hispaniola with inadequate quantities of food provisions, and the Spanish dependence on Taino food supplies and on Taino populations to support them therefore persisted. Furthermore, the Spanish were both unwilling and unable to fully adopt Taino agricultural and consumption practices, as had been the case a decade earlier.11 In short, in the first generations of European settlement on Hispaniola, hunger had a pivotal role to play in the mortality rates which provoked the New World demographic collapse that defined Spanish colonization in the Caribbean, as well as on the mainland. Although the nature of Spanish settlement in the Greater Antilles evolved and grew more secure during the sixteenth century, there were crucial similarities in the ways patterns of hunger emerged during the first sustained colonizing endeavours undertaken by the French in the Lesser Antilles in the 1620s and 30s, 10

11

It is possible that in characterizing what he witnessed in this way, Columbus was misidentifying Taino slash-and-burn agriculture, an agricultural technique in which fields are burned at the end of each dry season to release the nutrients of overgrown burnt vegetation into the soil, N.D. Cook, “Sickness, Starvation, and Death in Early Hispaniola,” 380. For a description of the place of slash-and-burn techniques in tropical Caribbean conuco agriculture, see D. Watts, The West Indies, 53–60. Cook gives the example of the Spanish unwillingness to consume readily available Taino manioc beer as a safe and healthful beverage, preferring instead to consume water, which, because it contained pathogens unfamiliar to them, caused cramps, diarrhea and dehydration, N.D. Cook, “Sickness, Starvation, and Death in Early Hispaniola,” 377.

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well over a century after the Spanish expeditions had begun. By this time, the French had had experience attempting to establish permanent colonial settlements in Brazil and Florida in the mid-sixteenth century, but the adventures of Guillaume Coppier in 1620s St. Christopher cited above testify to the ways food provision continued to prove woefully inadequate and hunger continued to feature in early colonies. For example, Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre, the Dominican priest whose 1667–1671 account of the French colonies remains one of the key primary sources for early French colonial history in the Caribbean, recounts a story that took place during the first tumultuous years of French settlement on St. Christopher when the French shared possession of the island with the English, and tensions between the two European groups remained high.12 At one point during this early period, colonists grew so discouraged by their lack of success in their struggle against the English, and feeling abandoned by the Compagnie de Saint-Christophe, the chartered company responsible for the French colonizing effort, that they simply stopped planting food provisions, focusing solely on tobacco in order to maximise short-term profits, after which they intended to return to France. Some even went so far as to rip out planted provisions in order to have more cleared land available for tobacco. After six months, Du Tertre, writing around forty years later, reports: all having changed their minds about returning to France, [the colonists] began to lack food provisions, and to suffer more than ever, and the famine was so great that they would have perished altogether had Divine Providence not sent them the ship’s captain from Zeeland who had traded with them the year before. He sold them flour, wine, meat, clothing, textiles and all that was generally necessary to them with six months of credit, contenting himself with the tobacco that he obtained from the island. He sold it so well in Zeeland that several merchants from Flushing and from Holland had the idea to come trade with St. Christopher, which they have continued to do ever since… …they sent so many vessels that we lacked nothing and it is true to say that without the help that our Colonies received from the Dutch, they could never have survived; but it must also be said that they took all the profit and that the great good produced from commerce which should have enriched France was destined for them.13

12 Jean-Bapiste Du Tertre Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les Français (Paris: Thomas Jolly, 1667–1671). 13 Du Tertre Histoire générale des Antilles, tome 1, 36–37 (author’s translation).

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This short description of early colonial famine conditions clearly lays out two aspects of the hunger question: first, on the local level, it describes the uneasy relationship between commodity agriculture and the cultivation of food provisions that characterized French settlement throughout the colonial period; second, on the global scale, it powerfully presents how, of necessity, colonial food consumption tied French colonists into transnational and transatlantic merchant networks that escaped French control, with hunger and famine waiting in the wings, even as France and the United Provinces fought a number of mid-century wars. These French-Dutch geopolitical tensions, which increased dramatically in the colonial realm with Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s rise to political prominence as the Secretary of State for the Navy in 1665, did little to dispel the absence of metropolitan French support for its overseas colonies. The lack of support from France was a constant complaint voiced by planters and colonists during the early generations in which chartered commercial companies – one after the other – failed in their responsibilities of adequately provisioning the colonies with needed supplies. Given the ongoing lack of support from metropolitan France, the extent to which colonists were aware of the ever-present danger of starvation, and their ability and willingness to cultivate food provisions locally in adequate amounts to guarantee a stable local food supply were decisive factors in determining if, how and when hunger would appear in colonies, and shaping colonial institutions more broadly. As with the Spanish experience on Hispaniola, early French colonial efforts at local subsistence agriculture were intimately connected to the relationships that colonists maintained with the Arawak and Carib peoples who lived on the islands of the Lesser Antilles they occupied, at least partly – St. Christopher and as of 1635, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Marie Galante, Grenada, Dominica, and a handful of others. While there is evidence that the French did indeed learn vital lessons in the selection of key crops, as well as in cultivation and processing techniques of important foodstuffs such as manioc, the patterns of land use that followed on colonizing efforts inevitably put colonists in relations of conflict with Amerindian peoples and stifled their attempts to effectively copy Amerindian food practices fully. For instance, Du Tertre reports that one of the first actions that the French engaged in when they arrived on the island of Martinique in 1635 was to plant staple food crops. Indeed, the early colonial phase of tobacco cultivation on all the islands was characterized by diversified local economies in which the cultivation of food provisions played a much more important role than it would after the shift to sugar.14 The colonizing expedition that left for Martinique 14

This pattern held true for the British Caribbean islands as well: for more detail on Barbados, Jamaica and the British Leeward Islands, see Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, passim.

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from St. Christopher, was led by the experienced Pierre Belain d’Esnambuc, accompanied by men who were “accustomed to the climate, to the work and to the fatigue of the country, and who were well able to clear the land and to cultivate food provisions.” The company was equipped with necessary agricultural tools as well as “manioc and potatoes to plant; with peas, beans and other grains to sow.” Their stay was brief, only long enough to build Fort St. Pierre. “After overseeing the construction of a habitation and the planting of manioc and potatoes…,” narrates Du Tertre, d’Esnambuc returned to St. Christopher in November, leaving a lieutenant to maintain a small colony of Frenchmen.15 Manioc was, indeed, the staple food crop of Amerindian peoples throughout the tropical and sub-tropical Caribbean, and the French quickly learned to process the poisonous bitter manioc variety that was most commonly consumed.16 Manioc, and the other tropical crops named by Du Tertre, took centre stage throughout the colonial period in the many ways that local agriculture was harnessed to support colonial populations: in plots devoted to slave provisioning when and where they were developed, and in the choices of crops for cultivation within plantations.17 Nevertheless, the French, in their adaptations of Amerindian subsistence systems, were never successful or effective at creating the complex, stable, long-term and balanced native food supply systems they were attempting to imitate. At the most basic level, the primary reason for this failure was the French focus on commodity export agriculture. This difficulty would have significant consequences with the shift from tobacco to sugar production which took place slowly and erratically from the mid-seventeenth century onwards and with the political, economic and demographic changes to colonial society that this shift brought about, most critically the loss of local agricultural diversification. Adopting manioc as the staple of new colonial diets was a relatively straightforward endeavor, yet the French did not engage fully in the profoundly important hunting and fishing activities which were central to Arawak and Carib subsistence. The French were consequently unable to secure adequate local sources of protein for their colonists, and increasingly, for slaves.18 And a 15 16 17

18

Du Tertre, Histoire générale des Antilles habitués, 1667, tome 1, 101. For a summary of Caribbean Amerindian food and agricultural practices at the moment of European arrivals, see 51–56 of Watts, “Cycles of Famine in Islands of Plenty,” 51–55. For a deeper examination of the importance of slave provision grounds and subsistence agriculture within the plantation, see Chapter 7 of Bertie Mandelblatt, Feeding the French Atlantic: Colonial Food Provisioning Networks in the Franco-Caribbean during the Ancien Régime (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 2008), 215–252. Philip P. Boucher uses the expression “commuter-economy” to capture Carib and Arawak land use for subsistence purposes in which gardens were planted on islands away from primary residences, and populations engaged in constant travel amongst islands to visit

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stable and established protein source in dietary regimes was a critical factor in warding off large-scale malnutrition and the high mortality rates and recurrent hunger that malnutrition provoked in the dense slave populations required by mature sugar plantations.19 Although in the eighteenth-century a range of published observations describing the sugar-era dietary regime of slaves began to articulate colonial fears that food lay at the heart of high slave mortality rates, they did not pinpoint nutritional deficiencies, such as a lack of protein, as key causes of the food crisis largely, of course, because of eighteenth-century ideas about nutrition in general, and about the role played by protein in nutrition, in particular.20 In 1745, for example, Élie Monnereau published the first edition of his guide to indigo planters, a guide that would see multiple editions and would be copied by other Caribbean planter-authored agricultural manuals. He wrote extensively about the economic importance of planting food provisions within the plantation compound in order to avoid work-force subsistence crises. He writes: as pressing as other work is, nothing is more necessary than planting food provisions because a plantation that is lacking them is like a body without a soul – this point is of such importance that we attend closely to

19

20

gardens, to hunt and to fish, according to season and to geographical variability; Cannibal Encounters: Europeans and Island Caribs, 1492–1763 (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 36. Few scholars studying the diets of slaves have focussed adequate attention on the consequences for nutrition and mortality of such protein-poor diets. Exceptions include Vertus Saint-Louis, Système colonial et problèmes d’alimentation: Saint-Domingue au XVIIIe siècle 1700–1789 (Montréal: Les Éditions du cidihca, 2003), 137–138; Karen Bourdier, “Vie quotidienne et conditions sanitaires sur les grands habitations sucrières du nord de SaintDomingue à la veille de l’insurrection d’août 1791” (Ph.D. diss., Université de Pau et des pays de l’Adour, 2005), 75–83, 232–260; and, in more general terms, Kenneth F. Kiple, The Caribbean Slave: A Biological History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 76–88. Standard studies of the diets of Caribbean plantation slaves are the above-cited; John Parry, “Plantation and Provision Ground: An Historical Sketch of the Introduction of Food Crops to Jamaica,” Revista de Historia de America 39 (1955), 1–20; J. Parry, “Salt fish and Ackee,” Caribbean Quarterly 2, no. 4, 29–35; and Gabriel Debien, “La nourriture des esclaves sur les plantations des Antilles françaises aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles,” Caribbean Studies 4, no. 2 (1964), 3–27. Although the role of protein in diets is still debated today, it is generally agreed that Caribbean plantation slaves consumed too little in relation to their workloads (Kiple, The Caribbean Slave, 80–81). For the evolution of this debate since the seventeenth century, see Kenneth J. Carpenter, Protein and Energy: a Study of Changing Ideas in Nutrition (Cambridge University Press, 1994).

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plantation managers who neglect this crucial point; it is the quantity of cultivated food provisions that determines the economic health of plantations.21 The 1776 medical handbook on slave disease published by French doctor JeanBarthélemy Dazille ties slave disease and mortality to planter practices related to slave subsistence still more closely. In it, Dazille pinpoints food as the principal cause of slave illness: “The first cause of the different illnesses to which Slaves are subject derives from their food, which generally consists of manioc root, crudely mashed, formed into a cake, and most often badly cooked.”22 Although Dazille’s discussion of the critical nutritional deficiencies that haunt slave dietary regimes is largely restricted to an exposition on the importance of fermentation in diets – he believed that an entirely vegetable diet was potentially a good one – his recognition of the primordial structural importance of the food consumed by slaves signals the growing awareness of metropolitan authorities at the end of the eighteenth century of the possibility of prolonging slaves’ lives through better treatment. A lack of nutritional balance – and an almost universal absence of adequate levels of protein – nonetheless remained a key aspect of slave malnutrition and mortality throughout the colonial period. The failure to exploit local marine resources is also a striking illustration of the inadequacy of French attempts to mimic existing Amerindian food practices, a phenomenon mirrored by the English in their colonies of the Lesser Antilles. Fishing was an essential component of Carib subsistence, in which a remarkable variety of fish, shellfish, marine mammals and reptiles were caught by net, spear, hook, diving, poison, traps, bows and arrows, and other methods.23 The many missionary accounts that testify to the first generations of interaction between the French and their Carib and Arawak interlocutors describe in detail the astonishment of the French confronted with the variety and array of marine resources. Crucially, while the French valued Amerindians greatly because of the fish, tortoises, manatee, crabs, and crustaceans that they were able to obtain from them by trade, and for the fishing skills they learned from their Amerindian partners, these skills remained peripheral to 21 22 23

Élie Monnereau, Le Parfait indigotier, ou description de l’indigo, contenant un détail circonstancie de cette plante (Amsterdam: J. Mossy, 1765), 87. Jean-Barthélemy Dazille, Observations sur les maladies des nègres: leurs causes, leurs traitements et les moyens de les prévenir (Paris: Didot le jeune, 1776), 26, 262–266. Richard Price, “Caribbean Fishing and Fishermen: A Historical Sketch,” American Anthropologist 68, no. 6 (December 1966), 1363–1383.

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the plantation complex, and fishing itself was never fully integrated into mature plantations dietary regimes. More precisely, plantation slaves who engaged in fishing typically supplied fish for planters and their families, rather than for the plantation as a whole, and plantation slaves themselves relied heavily on the variety of locally-grown pulses, tubers and root crops – as well as banana and plantain – described in first-hand accounts of plantation life throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.24 The most common sources of protein throughout the colonial period continued to be salted beef and salted cod, both of which were expensive and often difficult to obtain via the complex merchant networks noted above by Du Tertre in his discussion of Dutch provisioning of the French islands.25 The colonial imperative to maintain control over enslaved labor forces played an important part in limiting seafood in slave diets. As Richard Price argues in his study of Carib fishing on the French islands, fishing gave the few plantation slaves who engaged in it a kind of physical freedom that was antithetical to the labor regimes that developed with the shift from tobacco to sugar and to the ways plantations developed to support this shift.26 That is, fishing automatically implied a freedom of movement, an ability to spend time away from plantations, the possibility of meeting with a wide range of people, a proximity to local markets and an increase in opportunities to sell one’s catch, all of which ran counter to the restrictive labor policies that characterized sugar plantations and, from the perspective of planters, posed genuine risks of slave flight and conspiracies. For all of these reasons, fishing remained marginal to plantation subsistence activities. The scale of colonial nutritional crises brought about at least in part by the lack of hunting and fishing was greatly increased by the growth of colonial populations that took place after French planters definitively moved into the production of sugar. More precisely, in 1670, when sugar was being cultivated in steadily increasing amounts in the Lesser Antilles, white and black populations were approximately equal at 15,000–16,000 each, across the French West Indies and Guiana. By 1730, the white population stood at 32,033 (i.e., it had a little more than doubled) but the population of enslaved Africans or those of 24

25 26

Other types of primary sources that attest to the predominance of carbohydrate starchy staples in slave diets are legislation, correspondence between local colonial authorities and the French Navy, and merchant records. Bertie Mandelblatt, “A Transatlantic Commodity: Irish Salt Beef in the French Atlantic,” History Workshop Journal 63 (Spring 2007), 18–47. For an analysis of the consequences across the Caribbean of the shift to sugar, see B.W. Higman, “The Sugar Revolution,” Economic History Review 53 (2000), 213–236.

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African descent now stood at 160,278 – that is, it had increased tenfold.27 By 1790, the number of enslaved Africans or those of African descent on Saint Domingue alone stood at nearly 500,000, more than ten times that of whites, who numbered between 30,000 and 40,000 and of the free coloured population, which was about the same as the white population.28 Moreover, Louis xiv’s 1685 Code Noir had decreed that centrally-distributed provisions were to be the authorized method of providing food provisions to slaves: that is, instead of slaves being given land and time to cultivate their own subsistence crops, planters were to purchase or organize the collective cultivation of foodstuffs and distribute them to their labor forces.29 Notwithstanding significant differences in food provisioning between Saint Domingue and France’s much smaller colonies in the Lesser Antilles,30 the explosive increases in the size of enslaved populations over the colonial period therefore swelled the ranks of those who were not – de jure or de facto – able to fully control their own subsistence. That is, the dramatic rise in slave populations increased in important ways the proportion of the overall colonial population that did not control its own subsistence. Slaves, unlike other colonial subjects, were heavily dependent for their subsistence upon the slaveholders who controlled both their labour and the distribution of resources, including the allocation of plantation land to subsistence cultivation and the distribution of imported foodstuffs After slave demographics, a final factor that played a pivotal role in both the emergence of slave subsistence crises and planter awareness of these crises on the French islands was the tropical climate. Along with Amerindian subsistence agriculture, the climate was an aspect of the Caribbean environment with which the French were entirely unfamiliar upon their arrival. The unpredictability and sudden violence of earthquakes and especially hurricanes, as well as periodic droughts, devastated export as well as provisions agriculture and destroyed investments, thus greatly exacerbating the precariousness of colonial subsistence in general, and slave subsistence in particular. Slaves were 27

James Pritchard, In Search of Empire: the French in the Americas, 1670–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), Appendix i, 423. 28 Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London: Verso, 1988), 163. 29 The Code Noir also imposed minimum allocations of salt beef or salt fish: neither the centralized distribution dictum nor the beef/fish allocation dictum were followed to any great degree. 30 Saint Domingue, at over 27,000 km2, was vastly larger than the other colonies; it supported more provisions agriculture and livestock-raising than the smaller islands, and engaged in a significant illicit provisions trade with Spanish Santo Domingo on the eastern two-thirds of Hispaniola.

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disproportionately affected as French colonists continued to rely more heavily on imported foodstuffs, including wheat flour which was turned into bread in local bakeries.31 Most often occurring in the Caribbean between July and October, hurricanes, above all, were a constant and oft-described aspect of island life, and the damage they caused had featured in descriptions of the island since the seventeenth century and continued to dominate colonial correspondence of all kinds through the eighteenth.32 Indeed, concerns over the destruction to food crops that hurricanes wrought was one of the principal ways colonists articulated their fear of subsistence insufficiency and famine: letters between Caribbean colonies and the French metropole are filled with anxiety over food scarcity after the hurricane season, along with proposed solutions to anticipate future hurricanes and organize the replanting of provisions after storm-wrought destruction.33 Certainly the subsistence crises that hurricanes produced allowed colonists to envision that the periods of starvation that followed on from devastated provision grounds and provision stocks were natural disasters beyond their control, crises of meteorological accident and not the consequences of human choices of political economic policies that deliberately relegated slave subsistence below the demands of export agriculture.34 31

32

33

34

The consumption of wheat flour by military garrisons greatly increased the transatlantic demand for it. After Bordeaux joined the restricted number of French cities permitted to trade with the Antilles in 1716, it dominated flour exports to the islands. François Crouzet, Histoire de Bordeaux, tome 5: Bordeaux au XVIIIe siècle, F.-G. Pariset, dir. (Bordeaux: Fédération historique du Sud-Ouest, 1968), 191–210, 221–226. For the frequency of hurricanes during the colonial period of the Caribbean, see César N. Caviedes, “Five Hundred Years of Hurricanes in the Caribbean: Their Relationship with Global Climatic Variabilities,” Caribbean Hurricanes 23, no. 4 (April 1991), 301–310. For an example of seventeenth-century missionary account of a hurricane (published two decades later), see Jean-Baptiste Labat, Nouveau voyage aux isles de l’Amérique (La Haye: P. Husson, 1724), volume 1, part 2, 67–71. See the administrative correspondence cited in Lucien Abénon, “Ouragans et cyclones à la Guadeloupe au XVIIIe siècle: le problème alimentaire,” in Alain Yacou, ed, Les catastrophes naturelles aux Antilles: d`une Soufrière à l’autre (Paris: Éditions Karthala, 1999), 163– 171; for the British case, see Matthew Mulcahy, “Weathering the Storms: Hurricanes and Risk in the British Greater Caribbean,” The Business History Review 78, no. 4 (Winter 2004), 635–663 The distinction between these two perspectives is highlighted in Rudolf Widmer, “Désastres ‘naturels’ et sécurité alimentaire. La Martinique et Santiago de Cap-Vert au XVIIIe siècle,” in Jean Barnabé et Serge Mam Lam Fouck, eds, Sur les chemins de l’histoire antillaise: Mélanges offertes à Lucien Abénon (Matoury: ibis Rouge Éditions, 2006), 181–200.

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Famine Historiography and the Question of Definitions

What qualifies as a famine, what is the relationship between hunger, starvation and famine, and how is it productive to apply this term to a given historical hunger crisis? How often and how systematically does hunger need to occur before the term “famine” can be invoked? This chapter argues that the vocabulary that has emerged in studies of famine is indeed productive, and that, moreover, the definition of famine is vital to understanding how and why the term should be used in the study of early modern empire and to plantation societies in the New World. Articulating a rigorous definition allows us to integrate the environmental causes of famine with the political economic causes connected to transatlantic trade policy and the exigencies of profit-bearing export agriculture. It therefore allows us to understand hunger as a structuring agent of slave-based plantation societies, not as either an unfortunate series of geographic accidents or as inevitable fallout from the social and moral failures of these societies, as understood post facto. Most importantly, it allows us to understand how slave hunger was – in the colonial Caribbean generally, and in more precise ways in the colonial Franco-Caribbean – in the words of David Arnold, “an agent of historical transformation.”35 That is, tracing the planter/ colonist consciousness of the economic and social risks associated with slave subsistence crises, and the responses and solutions to these risks that they sought through the historical evolution of the plantation society that they created is a key method for understanding the underlying structural nature of famine. To begin, the writings of Amartya Sen on food, famine, poverty and entitlements usefully distinguish the question of food supply from the question of specific populations’ access to food supplies.36 Sen developed his theories of entitlement in relation to twentieth-century famines in India, Bangladesh and Ethiopia, stating explicitly that slave economies operated according to quite different systems of entitlement; yet his most general distinctions between food supply and the relationship of certain categories of people to food supplies hold true in slave economies as well. Sen has been critiqued, however, for relying too heavily on purely social relations in his analysis of food entitlements and food supplies. Mike Davis’ work on how patterns of climate fluctuations and the globalization of empire and famine were constitutive features of 35 36

David Arnold, Famine: Social Crisis and Historical Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 5–28. Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).

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the Third World in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries offers a fully multidimensional analytic frame that integrates critical material and environmental factors. Furthermore, Davis underlines the role of chronic malnutrition in blurring the definitional edges of famines: famine, he writes, “is part of a continuum with the silent violence of malnutrition that precedes and conditions it, and with the mortality shadow of debilitation and disease that follows it. Each famine is a unique, historically-specific epidemiological event … famine and epidemic mortality are not epistemologically distinguishable.”37 In other words, famines are not historically hermetic events defined by a pre-­determined rate of mortality, and that demand both certain environmental conditions and a certain response (or lack thereof) from the state and from markets in order to earn the status of famine.38 Indeed a strong working definition of famine that includes a focus on chronic malnutrition that may or may not produce a given rate of mortality in a given time-span is offered by Cormac Ó Gráda: the term famine … represents the upper end of the continuum whose average is “hunger.” Malnutrition, in which [large numbers of] people endure every day, might be seen as slow-burning famine. Moreover, in famine-prone economies malnutrition is usually endemic, and individual deaths from the lack of food are not uncommon. Yet classic famine means something more than endemic hunger. Common symptoms absent in normal times include rising prices, food riots, an increase in crimes again property, a significant number of actual or imminent deaths from starvation, a rise in temporary migration, and frequently the fear and emergence of famine-induced disease.39 This strong definition combines an understanding of the environmental and political economic causes of malnutrition with attention to state response, and opens the way for considering how famine was a structural component of early imperial projects in which slave responses to ongoing and endemic subsistence crises included work stoppages, sabotage, theft, poisoning and other 37 38

39

Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2002), 21. For older definitions of famines, see Cormac Ó Gráda and Jean-Michel Chevet, “Famine and Market in Ancien Régime France,” The Journal of Economic History 62, no. 3 (Sept. 2002), 706–733. Cormac Ó Gráda, Famine: A Short History (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2009), 6–7.

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kinds of attacks on slave-holders, flight from plantations and the formation of autonomous maroon communities, and rebellion and revolt.40 The archive of colonial administrative correspondence from the Lesser Antilles is filled with the traces of these kinds of events, both threatened and real. In 1672, for example, in the midst of a subsistence crisis, Jean Charles de Baas-Castlemore, the governor general of the French islands wrote to the Secretary of State for the Navy, warning that if “slaves lacked (imported) beef, then planters would lack slaves, because those slaves with the strength would flee plantations or desert, and those without, such as women and children, would weaken further and die.” Later in the same letter, he forewarns of having to call a halt to work on the wooden stockade at the bay named Cul de Sac Royal because “the slaves who serve the workers, having only manioc flour, are deserting, and the workers who have no meat cannot or will not continue to work. I have suspended the work until French merchants bring meat to our islands.”41 Two years later, de Baas again writes of suspending work because of a lack of food.42 Similarly, in 1688, Gabriel Dumaitz de Goimpy, the Intendant of the French Windward Islands, again urged the Secretary of State to send more French merchants with food supplies, as “island residents are in the worst straits imaginable; those who cannot obtain beef are obliged to go live elsewhere, and, worse, they cannot distribute meat to their slaves so these slaves abandon plantations or steal to eat.”43 Indeed, theft was a commonly reported consequence of food shortages.44 Food riots were a much greater threat, signaling as they did the shift from individual desperation in the face of hunger to collective action, and there is evidence in these administrative archives for such riots: by white creole planters, by slaves, and sometimes by both groups working together. In 1717, the passage of metropolitan legislation attempting to restrict the endemic smuggling 40

41 42 43 44

It should be noted that not only slaves revolted in the face of chronic hunger. In 1717 the promulgation of new restrictions on colonial trade of which food provisions made up important cargoes prompted the most significant colonists’ revolt to date on Martinique. See Jacques Petitjean Roget, Le Gaoulé: la révolte de la Martinique en 1717 (Fort de France, Société d’histoire de la Martinique, 1966). Archives nationales d’outre mer (hereafter anom), Colonies Series C8A1, folio 199 and 202, De Baas to the Secretary of State for the Navy, November 20, 1672. anom, Colonies Series C8A1, folio 262, De Baas to the Secretary of State for the Navy, February 8, 1674. anom, Colonies Series C8A5, folio 138, Dumaitz de Goimpy to the Secretary of State for the Navy, November 11, 1688. For example, see also anom, Colonies Series C8A20, Duquesne to the Secretary of State for the Navy, December 30, 1714, folio 31.

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that was linked to ongoing subsistence crises provoked the most significant colonists’ revolt to date.45 The resolution of this crisis proved temporary and partial as even a decade later, the Intendant of the islands, Charles-François Blondel de Jouvancourt was writing the Secretary of State to warn that the lack of meat in particular was the direct cause of worrying unrest in slave populations, and that the risk of whites joining them was growing: “if ships with cargoes of meat do not arrive daily, we will be greatly troubled, as I have no doubt that the current disturbance among the slaves is caused by colonists’ inability to provide slaves with their daily ration; and we fear even more that several whites will join them to lead their assemblies.”46 And the next year, he again wrote of the “murmur of colonists” discontented with the high price of import­ ed beef, insisting that there were 500 colonists at Le Diamant on Martinique ready to revolt: “the first ships from Nantes to arrive will be burned, along with (the merchants’) warehouses because (they) are the cause of the current high prices and of the current famine.”47 The complex interplay between the political economic imperatives of long-distance trade in the profit-generating years after the War of Spanish Succession, metropolitan colonial trade policy that evolved barely attending to conditions on the periphery, and the local ­conditions that affected both export agricultural production and working populations put these colonial administrators in the almost impossible position of representing to the metropolitan naval hierarchy the real consequences of subsistence crises, as well as how to best anticipate future subsistence risks and to secure food stocks. It is thus their language that expresses most urgently the fear of famine in colonial populations.

A Conclusion by Way of Five Points

If, as this chapter has argued, slave hunger acted as an agent of historical transformation in the plantation societies of the early modern Caribbean, its force was refracted through planter/colonist awareness of this hunger and its 45

46 47

For a discussion of this revolt in its political economic context, see Bertie Mandelblatt, “How Feeding Slaves Shaped the French Atlantic: Mercantilism and Food Provisioning in the Franco-Caribbean during the 17th and 18th centuries” in The Political Economy of Empire in the Early Modern World, Sophus Reinert and Pernille Røge, eds. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 202–203. anom, Colonies Series C8A38, Blondel to the Secretary of State for the Marine, November 30, 1727, folio 392. anom, Colonies Series C8A39, Blondel and Feuquières to the Secretary of State for the Marine, November 28, 1728, folio 138.

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consequences. Unanswerable questions concerning planter attitudes towards the inhumanity of slaves’ living conditions dog every social and economic history of the colonial Caribbean. Nevertheless, few have interrogated the farreaching social and economic forms that this awareness of slave hunger took. This chapter argues in conclusion that there are five broad categories of actions taken by the planter class (including metropolitan agents), actions commonly associated with the development of plantation societies. (1) Circulation of Food Crops: the global, regional and transatlantic circulation of food crops in attempts to create a reliable, stable and local food supply in the Caribbean and put subsistence fears to rest was an enduring feature of plantation slavery. Although this phenomenon is often associated with the late eighteenth-century, these practices had been in force since the early sixteenth century, and the establishment of permanent Spanish colonies on Hispaniola where, for example, the Spanish were responsible for transporting bananas and plantains from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean expressly to form a staple of colonial diets.48 (2) Creation of Local Food Stocks: the earliest accounts of plantation life attest to the ongoing juridical attempts by colonial authorities to encourage the building up of stocks of manioc, banana and plantain (“new” dietary staples) in all the island colonies, in anticipation of hurricanes and droughts, but also of the mismanagement of labor and the allocation of arable land to the cultivation of export commodities that resulted in inadequate food supplies. Indeed, the first legislation to pass in new French colonies was related to this requirement. For instance, one of the earliest laws in Médéric-Louis-Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry’s massive five-volume collection of legislation related to Saint-Domingue and the other French islands, is an ordonnance of July 13, 1648 passed by the governor of Martinique commanding that: “habitants plant and cultivate foodstuffs to guarantee the food supply of their slaves, and that militia officers be employed to survey and to report on this activity.”49 Such laws were repeatedly promulgated throughout the colonial period with 48

49

For a discussion of the transport of breadfruit from the Pacific to the Caribbean in the late 1780s, see Richard Sheridan, “Captain Bligh, the Breadfruit and the Botanic Gardens in Jamaica,” Journal of Caribbean History 23, no. 1 (1989), 28–50; for a review of the arrival of bananas and plantains 170 years earlier, see J.H. Parry, “Salt Fish and Ackee,” 32. Ordonnance du Gouverneur de la Martinique, qui ordonne des planter des Vivres du 13 Juillet 1648. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Loix et constitutions de colonies françaises de l’Amérique sous le vent, 1550–1785 (Paris: Chez l’auteur, 1784–1790), vol. 1, 68.

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different wording, and with more precise detail about supervision and oversight. In some cases, legislation even exempted slave-holders who raised livestock and cultivated food provisions from paying the full head tax on their slaves.50 The continuous repetition and diversification of this genre of legislation as well as its extension through all levels of governance (local directives through to metropolitan rulings emanating from the king’s Council) indicate the degree to which these commands were not, in fact, fully effective. Although there are exceptions, especially later in the eighteenth century, planters and slave-holders continued to resist devoting land and time to subsistence agriculture despite the importance of food security, oriented as they were towards export agriculture. (3) The “Improvement” of Plantation Management: in the mid-eighteenthcentury, the first planters’ guides began to be published offering advice to would-be sugar, coffee and indigo planters, such as Monnereau’s indigo guide cited above. These guides included substantial detail on the incorporation of subsistence agriculture within plantations and advice on how the strategic use of plantation agriculture could maintain local food supplies. These publications were part of a set of practices associated with the process of “improvement” or “amelioration” of plantation management, as it was known in the British Caribbean, which grew in popularity from this point onwards. These practices were concerted attempts to make slavery “more sustainable,” by increasing the living standards of slaves.51 Another prime feature of amelioration was the construction of hospitals within the plantation grounds for sick and dying slaves, which began to appear in the 1780s.52 (4) Colonial Science: the founding of the Jardin royal des plantes médicinales in 1626 in Paris and the Académie royale des sciences a few decades later, as well as the Royal Society in England in the 1660, heralded the emergence of new institutions and new disciplines of science in the early modern era, in which empire and colonies played pivotal roles. In particular, metropolitan men of science turned their attention to what would become 50

51

52

See, for example, anom, Colonies Series A25 2830. Fo 35. 14 juillet 1723. Ordonnance du roi exemptant de la capitation d’un nègre les habitants qui élèveront des bestiaux et qui cultiveront des vivres aux iles du Vent. David Lambert, White Creole Culture, Politics and Identity during the Age of Abolition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 44–45; see also Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the “Improvement” of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 55–67. See most especially, Karen Bourdier, Vie Quotidienne, 377–471.

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colonial natural science, launching botanical gardens in the colonies and engaging in experimentation specifically in aid of improving agriculture, including subsistence agriculture, expressly for the benefit of planters.53 (5) Imperial Political Economy: chronic and endemic slave hunger–and planter consciousness of it–had myriad implications for the evolving political economy of the relations between French metropole and France’s Caribbean colonies.54 First and foremost, even before the rapid expansion of transatlantic slave trade in the latter seventeenth changed the demographic structure of famine, an ongoing lack of adequate food provisions resulted in the growth of the institution of smuggling that would mark Caribbean colonies of all national affiliations throughout the colonial period. The quasi-permanent state of food insecurity guaranteed that smuggling would become a persistent feature of island economies, regardless of the concrete presence of a subsistence crisis: the fear of famine did not require actual famines to have exceedingly powerful transformational political economic effects. Certain smuggling trades became vital to the prosperity of given colonies: eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue, for instance, depended heavily on illicit wheat, peas, and salt fish traded by enterprising New Englanders, who sailed south to engage in this trade. Second, slave hunger became instrumentalized in the ­commercial antagonism of the latter eighteenth century between French planters and colonists (such as those in Saint-Domingue) seeking to trade with foreigners, and French metropolitan traders attempting to ban such exchanges. That is, colonial – specifically slave – hunger facilitated the strategic mobilization of the free trade discourses that dominated political economic relations and thought from the mid-eighteenth-century onwards. Indeed, colonists and planters began to use subsistence crises as a rhetorical tool in support of their attacks in the commercial debates over l’Exclusif, as the French mercantilist protectionist trade policy was 53

54

For the Franco-Caribbean, see François Regourd and James McClellan iii, The Colonial Machine: French Science and Overseas Expansion in the Old Regime (Turnhout: Brepols Publisher, 2012), 303–305, 335–344; F. Regourd, “La Société Royale d’Agriculture de Paris face à l’espace colonial (1761–1793),” Bulletin du Centre d’histoire des espaces atlantiques [Université Bordeaux-iii], no. 8 (1998), 155–194; F. Regourd, “Maîtriser la nature: un enjeu colonial. Botanique et agronomie en Guyane et aux Antilles (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles),” Revue française d’Histoire d’Outre-mer, no. 322–323 (1999), 39–63. This is the principal argument of Mandelblatt, “How Feeding Slaves Shaped the French Atlantic” in The Political Economy of Empire in the Early Modern World, Reinert and Røge, eds. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 192–220.

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known.55 A last aspect of these complex questions was the practice of granting permissions to trade with foreigners, deliberate contraventions of the principles of l’Exclusif, that were systematically issued by local colonial authorities. The administrative correspondence cited above testifies to the critical gaps between metropolitan policy-making and the evolution of conditions in the Caribbean periphery, gaps that colonial officials found themselves needing to describe in their reports and to bridge through such measures as granting temporary permissions to trade with foreigners. In conclusion, this chapter has argued that with the decisive shift towards sugar production the Caribbean plantation itself moved through phases of experimentation which tended towards a rationalized, self-conscious system that featured as a central pillar the calculation of the human costs of its operation. The plantation can be seen as an Enlightenment project that emerged as a way of managing famine for the purposes of profitability. This management required, in the first instance, full awareness on the part of the planter class of the consequences of not attending to the chronic subsistence crises that it engineered. Perhaps like all such projects, it was never completely successful, as planters, their plantation managers and local colonial authorities engaged in the constant balancing of commercial, social and technical imperatives. Nevertheless, for those who resided on the islands, full consciousness of the potential implications of slave hunger took the form of fear, as their fortunes could hang in the balance.

55

For these questions of political economy, see especially: Manuel Covo, “Commerce, empire et révolutions dans le monde atlantique. La colonie française de Saint-Domingue entre métropole et États-Unis (ca. 1778–ca. 1804),” (PhD dissertation, ehess, 2013); see also Joseph Horan, “The Colonial Famine Plot: Slavery, Free Trade and Empire in the French Atlantic, 1763–1791,” International Review of Social History 55 (2010), 103–121. For the evolution of the French colonial trade policy in the face of this commercial antagonism, see: Jean Tarrade, Le Commerce colonial de la France à la fin de l’Ancien Régime: l’évolution du régime de “l’Exclusif” de 1763 à 1789 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972); for the British West Indies, see: Richard B. Sheridan, “The Crisis of Slave Subsistence in the British West Indies during and after the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 33, no. 4 (Oct. 1976), 615–64.

chapter 12

“The Inhabitants of the Province had been frequently Alarmed”: Fear and Rumor in the Colonial Southeastern Backcountry (1754–1765) Christopher Vernon In early November 1756, a small group of British settlers had begun to build a succession of plantations in the disputed region along the Settily River between Georgia and Florida. One morning they were confronted by one of the sights that they most dreaded: a party of lancers carrying the flag of imperial Spain appeared on the opposite bank of the river. The captain of this party crossed the river by boat and met with William Gray, one of the settlers’ leaders. At this meeting the Spaniard explained his purpose in coming to this sparsely settled and undeveloped region. He declared that his master, the governor of Florida, had given orders that the British settlers should be cleared from the Spanish lands and that the Settily River settlers were trespassing within that boundary. He ordered the settlers to pack up their belongings and return to Georgia. After discharging this official duty, the captain casually mentioned to Gray that the Creeks and the French in Louisiana had agreed on a plan to attack the British. The captain further confided that the French and Creeks had sought to have the Spaniards of Florida join them in the attack but, he assured Gray, the Spanish governor had refused to countenance such a dishonorable action.1 Word quickly spread of the Spaniard’s warnings. Gray wrote to the commanding officer at Frederica, the nearest British fort. Within a month the story had passed as far as Charles Town, South Carolina, where Governor William Henry Lyttleton soon forwarded the news on to the Board of Trade in London.2 Gray’s warnings were joined by the testimony of a young settler who was passing through St. Augustine on his return to Georgia and had heard talk that “Five Indian Towns were already solely in the French Interest and a Rupture 1 William Gray to the Commanding officer at Frederica, 20 November 1756, The National Archives of Great Britain, London, Colonial Office Records, (hereafter co), CO5/386, f. 81–82, Gray had been involved in the politics of the backcountry for some time, on one occasion leading a party of Chickasaws in defending Fort Frederica, Daniel Pepper to Governor William Henry Lyttelton, 30 March 1757, Documents Relating to Indian Affairs: 1754–1765 (hereafter, “dria 1754–1765”) William L. McDowell, Jr., ed. (Columbia, s.c.: University of South Carolina Press, 1970), 356. 2 Lyttelton to Board of Trade, Charles Town 26 December 1756, CO5/386, f. 71–74.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004314740_014

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had happen’d between the Indians and the English.”3 These reports caused great alarm in the British colonies. Immediately upon hearing of the danger South Carolina officials began reinforcing the colony’s defenses to counter the feared attack. The warnings of a possible attack also had a significant impact on the settlers. Lyttleton reported to London that “the greatest part of them went away some time ago to establish themselves upon Cumberland Island, as it is said, before the Spaniards required them to remove.”4 The fears of British officials and colonists had made direct confrontation unnecessary for the Spanish. The key factor for understanding this series of events was fear, as this was what motived the British settlers to move. But the fear displayed by the settlers also revealed the importance of another mechanism, that of rumor. As with Lauric Henneton’s essay above, the question of whether the French were genuinely planning an assault on the British backcountry settlements is somewhat immaterial to this essay. What mattered was that the British believed an assault was plausible, feared that possibility and responded accordingly. As the passage of this fear from squatters on the edges of the empire to the center of British government suggests, rumor as a factor in events in colonial America had a symbiotic relationship with rumor in the backcountry, Indian country and in the colonies and even into the heart of imperial government.5 3 Deposition of William Wilkins, 24 November, CO5/386, f. 76. 4 Lyttelton to Board of Trade, 3 December 1756, CO5/386, f. 91–94. 5 Sociologists have made studies of rumor for decades; for example, Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern, Witchcraft, Sorcery, Rumors and Gossip (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), Gordon W. Allport and Leo Postman, The Psychology of Rumor (New York: Russell & Russell, 1947), Jean-Noel Kapferer, Rumors: Uses, interpretations, and Images (London: Transaction Publishing, 1990), for discussions of rumor in race relations see Patricia A. Turner, I heard it through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). In this study I have drawn in particular on the work of Tomatsu Shibutani, Improvised News: A Sociological Study of Rumor (Oxford: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966) who described rumor as “improvised news” that is news which comes into being when there is a lack of reliable or satisfying news from official channels. The concept of rumor that Shibutani describes may be either true or false and can be transmitted orally and in written forms. Rumor acts as a collaborative process whereby groups and individuals jointly construct an understanding of events which were unclear into something which can fit within the cultural context familiar to the people among whom the rumor has spread. Rumor has been a subject of study for historians of early modern Europe for many years, see Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighborhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), Simon Walker, “Rumor, Sedition and Popular Protest in the Reign of Henry iv,” Past and Present, no. 166 (Feb. 2000),

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Very often the catalyst for displays of fear was the arrival of some alarming rumor in the locality and likewise an atmosphere of fear often led to a greater prevalence of rumor. Rumor and fear also could be a resource which could be used to achieve certain aims in the backcountry. As with the case of the Spanish warnings in 1756, fear could be used to manipulate others to achieve a particular end. But fear was also an uncontrolled force capable of causing massive disruption throughout society. No single group or individual was immune from the corrosive impact of fear. The Spaniards of Florida could be, and often were, influenced by fears just as much as the British. At the same time, this symbiotic relationship between rumor and fear created a paradoxical link between fear and cross-cultural relationships. The peoples who inhabited the backcountry encountered one another both as a potential threat and as trading partners, diplomatic counterparts and on occasion even friends. Thus, information, of which rumor was a part, moved around the southeastern backcountry and fear and rumor could be used and could unintentionally affect the inhabitants of the backcountry. The fear that the French and their Indian allies might launch an attack on the British southeastern colonies was a genuine concern for colonial leaders. The outbreak of the Seven Years War and the ensuing attacks on the backcountry areas of Virginia and Pennsylvania had been news in the southern colonies for several years by 1756.6 The previous year, Indian attacks had struck throughout the middle colonies. These raids left terrifying examples of white bodies “all the Skin of their Heads … scalpt off.”7 31–65, Georges Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973), Arlette Farge and Jacques Revel, The Vanishing Children of Paris: Rumor and Politics before the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991). Historians of early America have also increasingly begun to emphasize the role of rumor; see for example, Tom Arne Midtrød, “Strange and Disturbing News: Rumor and Diplomacy in the Colonial Hudson Valley,” Ethnohistory 58, no. 1 (Winter 2011), 91–112; Joshua Piker, “Lying Together: The Imperial Implications of Cross-cultural untruths,” American Historical Review 116, no. 4 (October 2011), 964–986. 6 For the Seven Years War see Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (London: Faber, 2000), Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (New York: Norton, 1988). For violence in the backcountry, Matthew C. Ward, Breaking the Backcountry: The Seven Years War in Virginia and Pennsylvania, 1754–1765 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003), Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: Norton, 2008). 7 Silver, Savage Neighbors, 45, quote, William Parsons cited in ibid., 59.

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Attacks like these had struck throughout New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia but thus far the war had spared the southern colonies. This was not to say that the southern colonies had not known the violence of Indian attack. The wars of the 1730s and 40s had led to violent raids by Spanish and French allied Indians on Georgia and South Carolina including an attack on a Georgia fort in which the attackers decapitated the dead defenders.8 These attacks continued intermittently throughout the 1740s. More importantly for this essay, so did alarms and fears of a potential attack. In 1747 Governor James Glen of South Carolina complained to his superiors that “the People of this Province were Annually Alarmed with Accounts of intended Invasions, even in Time of profound Peace.”9 In 1751 a widespread panic seized South Carolina; the central idea of this panic was that the Cherokees were poised to attack in alliance with the French. It was against this background of fear that the events of 1756 must be seen.10

The Southeastern Backcountry

The backcountry is an important geographical area in any discussion of rumor and fear in the lower south. The region consisted of the area between the settled regions of the British colonies and the American Indian nations and confederations of the interior. In these areas, far from the centers of either European colonial settlement or American Indian towns, colonial settlers, traders, and officials affiliated with a wide variety of European powers, interacted, traded and competed with one another and with an equally diverse range of American Indian peoples. In the southeast of North America, by the mid-eighteenth century, the British had settled firmly into the coastal regions of Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia. To their south in Florida the Spanish empire maintained a largely military presence at St. Augustine and Pensacola. To the west the French supplied colonies at New Orleans and Mobile and sought to extend their influence up the Mississippi River towards 8

9 10

For examples of raids see South Carolina Gazette (hereinafter scg), 22 December 1739, 7 March 1743, Glen to Board of Trade, 26 July 1748, CO5/372, f.67, for decapitations see scg, 2 April 1741. Glen to the Board of Trade, 7 February 1747, CO5/372. f.1. For a discussion of this panic and the rumors surrounding it see, Gregory Evans Dowd, “The Panic of 1751: The Significance of Rumors on the South Carolina–Cherokee Frontier,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., 53, no. 3 (1996), 527–560, it should be noted that this incident also encompassed a similarly widespread panic among the Cherokee that the British were conspiring to attack them.

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their ­northern colonies in Canada. Among the Indians, the Creek Confederacy maintained a strong presence across what is now the Deep South of the United States. Around the Mississippi River, the Choctaws had a strong trading and diplomatic relationship with the nearby French colony of Louisiana. To their north the Chickasaws had, despite their relatively small numbers, survived decades of war with the French and their allies and had gained a reputation as a warlike and dangerous people who often allied with the British. Finally, in the mountains of what is now Kentucky and Tennessee, were the Cherokees. Despite repeatedly siding with British (most decisively in the Yamasee War), the Cherokees continued to present a significant barrier to British expansion west. Within these varied groups there were a plethora of ethnicities and affiliations. Amongst the subjects of the British Empire in the southeast, for example, were Scots, Irish, Huguenots and Dutch. The Indians were equally heterogeneous, as many of the Indian nations in the southeast had formed or been joined by others tribes who had been scattered in the maelstrom of disease and political upheaval that had followed the arrival of Europeans in the region. The Creeks for example included Shawnees, Yamacraws and Chickasaws linked by ties of kinship and alliance to the wider Creek polity while the Cherokees encompassed speakers of three separate dialects. In the later colonial era Creek communities also split off to form the Seminoles.11 Added to this were the invisible ties of acquaintance and friendship which developed through day to day contact in the backcountry. It was not uncommon for groups within one Indian confederacy to have ties to another. For example The Mortar, a Creek chief who had long been considered an enemy by many British officials was able to cross into the lands of the Lower Cherokee and find allies among their towns.12 Most of the southeast Indian confederations were divided into groupings of towns based on location; the Cherokees for example were at various times divided into three or four groupings: the Lower, Valley, Upper and Overhill Cherokees. These sections often acted independently and were even known to decide questions of war and peace individually. It was in this fluid, confusing, insecure and sometimes dangerous landscape that fear became an 11

Tom Hatley, The Dividing Paths: Cherokee and South Carolinians through the Revolutionary Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 6. On the linguistic and cultural variety within south-eastern Indian societies see Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, The Columbia Guide to American Indians of the Southeast (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 179–180, 188. 12 Hatley, Dividing Paths, 157, David H. Corkran, The Cherokee Frontier: Conflict and survival 1740–62 (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962), 130, 162.

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important factor in both the international politics and day to day life of the backcountry. By the mid-eighteenth century the European powers had expanded their colonies to the point where they began increasingly to encounter one another and these confederacies.13 The Indians had a keen understanding of the threat that these new arrivals could pose to their possession of their lands and of the way of life that they had built. This increased pressure added to the tension of encounters in the backcountry and gave urgency to the fears of both whites and their indigenous neighbors. Communications in this environment were slow and sporadic. The evidence for official lines of communication in the backcountry and between colonies is  fairly limited. Nevertheless, from the passing references in much of the correspondence of the era, it is possible to construct a general picture of the networks of information passing that occurred in this era. Information might be carried by specifically authorized messengers tasked with delivering a specific message to a named individual.14 More commonly, however, they were given to known travelers who were heading in the desired direction who would either deliver the letter themselves or pass it to a trusted individual who would continue the delivery.15 Similar methods were also used for the passing of less formal news. Travelers carried rumors they had heard and passed it on in discussion at trading posts and houses through which they passed. In 1757, the South Carolinian George Chicken complained irritably that “We have a great Deal of Flying News at Times in this Nation which the Traders make a Practice of communicating to their Merchants in Town without examining the Tendency such Reports may have as they write of hand frequently without Confirmation.”16 The movement of this information was outside the control of anyone in the backcountry, Indian or British. The commercial networks of deerskin traders, with their links both to their Indian customers and to the colonial networks of suppliers and creditors on which their business depended, were vital to conduits of communication in

13

14 15 16

For the changing face of the backcountry, see Bernard Bailyn Voyagers to the West: A passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), 13–24. For examples see CO5/386, f. 58, 89, 146, 150. For examples see CO5/476, 23–24. For examples see Letter signed Philolethes, 2 March 1763, Henry Laurens Papers (Columbia, sc: University of South Carolina Press, 1972), 3:337, George Chicken to Lyttelton, 30th March 1757, dria 1754–65, 356.

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the backcountry.17 Traders included information on current news in their letters to suppliers and acquaintances. Packhorse men, the less senior rank among the traders, generally carried the letters on behalf of their employers, as for example Walter Bateman, assistant to the trader Cornelius Doherty, trader at the town of Hiwasee, who was sent to Charles Town with intelligence that Doherty had received by runner from a contact at the town of Tellico.18 These networks of information were often informal and loosely linked. Traders and backcountry settlers supplied information to colonial officials without necessarily being part of the imperial hierarchy themselves. As a result the networks were also not inherently linear. While the most prominent traders and fort commanders often synthesized information from a number of different sources for the colonial governor or council, they were not the exclusive providers of information to the colonial government. For example, Daniel Pepper, colonial agent for South Carolina to the Creeks, forwarded letters, information and rumors from traders in the confederacy as well as talks and treaty agreements from Creek headmen.19 But this did not prevent the traders from writing directly to the Grand Council of South Carolina.20 Settlers, colonial leaders and American Indians alike knew that these were places of great insecurity. The structure of Indian societies, with little in the way of coercive authority and a strong emphasis on voluntary harmony as the basis for social cohesion, had great difficulty in preventing violence. Likewise, colonial governments lacked either the will or the ability to project their power into these areas.21 This was very much an environment where the power of the European empires was far outstripped by their pretensions. While European maps showed vast lands under the dominion of their patrons the truth was that European empires had great difficulty imposing their will beyond the limits of their settlements. The representatives of the various empires in the backcountry were days if not weeks from support. As the commander of one backcountry fort put it to his superior 17

For evidence of some of the networks developed by British traders in this era and the ways they were used to pass information see CO5/386, f. 48, 58, 89. Traders were even able to mobilise their networks to spy on Cherokee meetings see CO5/386, f. 130–131. 18 CO5/386, f. 89. 19 Daniel Pepper to Lyttelton, 30 March 1757, dria 1754–1765, 351–353. 20 See for examples, Letter from James Beamer, South Carolina Council Journal, 3 April 1754 (microfilm copy in South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Columbia, s.c.), 186–187. The trader Lachlan McGillivray wrote repeatedly to the Council in 1746, South Carolina Council Journal, 1 November 1746. 21 Hatley, Dividing Paths, 10–12.

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With regard to my preventing the Indians here from going where and when they please to Warr or otherwise, I don’t conceive a possibility of it. Presents and Entertainments are the only Means of bring[ing] them to the Fort and your Excellency well knows that I have no Fund for such Things.22 This example makes clear the importance of fear in two respects. First, it demonstrates that officials lived with the fear that their relative lack of power would be exposed or exploited. Secondly, it shows that colonial officials were required in performing their duties to become adept at playing on the fears of others to achieve their aims. For the settlers in the disputed regions between the colonies and Indian confederacies, the picture was further complicated by the often uncertain and even illegal nature of their settlement. For example at the settlements on the Settily River the colonists had erected their homes without a land patent from any of the British colonies. They were, even in the opinion of British officials, squatters.23 As such they could not be sure whether the colonial power would side with them in the event of a dispute with the Spanish.

Fears and Rumors

Fear and the uses to which it was put in the colonial backcountry were inextricably tied up with networks of information gathering and rumor. Rumor is, of course, a difficult thing to define and distill. While rumors are most stereotypically an oral form of communication, they can be written down and passed on in letters, newspapers and reports. In the backcountry much rumor was never recorded, existing as oral culture without ever being added to the written record. At the same time we are confronted with a major imbalance in the sources, a problem common to any study of Indian-European encounters in the colonial era.24 The sources on life in the backcountry are suffused with rumor: letters and reports passing between the inhabitants of the backcountry 22

23 24

George Cadogan to Gov. James Glen, Ft. More, 27 March 1751, William L. McDowell, ed., Documents Relating to Indian Affairs 1750–54 (Columbia, s.c.: University of South Carolina Press, 1958), 12. Lyttelton to Lords of Trade, Charles Town, 26 December 1756, CO5/386, f. 71–74. In recent years there have been several attempts to access the American Indian perspective on early encounters, see for example James H. Merrell, The Indians’ New World: Catawbas and their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), Juliana Barr, Peace came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North

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and outwards to their contacts and superiors in the colonial centers of the coast, and thence to the imperial authorities of the major European empires are filled with speculation, stories and intelligences. With the plethora of competing groups and interests in the backcountry, not to mention the practical problems with communication, it was very difficult for individuals to know with much confidence what was going on outside of their immediate vicinity. In this confusing environment, fear and rumors are closely linked. The rumor which was most likely to be passed on, repeated and believed was the rumor which pandered to the fears that were prevalent in that society. For instance, at a 1756 conference the governor of Louisiana attempted to convince the Cherokee delegates present that the English were plotting to invade Cherokee territory. He warned that “already thirty Horses laden with Irons have been sent into your Nation: The Uses they are to be put you may easily guess is to the enslaving your Women and Children after having knocked all the Men on the Head.” He also claimed that, the food “the Governor gave them when they went to Charles Town which was mixed with something that was sure to kill some of them before they returned to their Nation.”25 These warnings were not chosen at random, the Frenchman used rumors which were current among the Cherokees and which provided a solution to events which the Indians could not explain. The mention of poisoning in particular clearly drew upon Cherokee fears disease-infested colonial cities and the very real possibility that they would not come back from visits there. These fears were not without foundation. Seven years previously, in 1749, Governor Glen wrote regretfully to the Lords of the Trade of the high mortality rates of a Cherokee delegation that had come to Charles Town. Glen and his representatives had had to struggle just to get the Cherokees to town, as “the Captain of the Albama Fort and the Governor of Moville Spread Reports that they were sent for to Charles Town to be Sacrificed, they also hired a Gang of Three score Indians to fall upon some of the out Towns of the Cherokees.”26 Having eventually convinced the Cherokee leaders to enter the colony Glen made sure that “great care was also taken to hire Convenient houses for them a Mile or twos [sic] distance from Town where they might have the benefit of fresh air and wholesome water and plenty of

25 26

Carolina Press 2007), Daniel Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: a Native History of North America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). Abstract of a Talk between the Governor of New Orleans and the Cherokee and Shawnese Indians, 4 December 1756, dria 1754–1765, 368. Glen to Lords of Trade, 28 December 1749, CO5.372, 168–172.

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food of the best kind.”27 Despite this, “many of them very soon fell Sick, and tho they were attended by the best Physicians here, yet they began to drop off.” The deaths continued on the road back to Cherokee country and, Glen lamented, “they all give out that what told them by the French was too true.”28 For the Cherokees as with other Indian peoples, the idea that they could be poisoned while visiting the colonies was a way of explaining the mysterious deaths of so many of their leaders.

“Consequences too plain to need being enlarged upon”: Fear in War and Diplomacy

The Spanish were not the only group who could use fear as a diplomatic weapon. The British too made attempts to play upon the fears of their adversaries in order to achieve their aims. In 1749, Governor Glen sent an officer to St. Augustine to speak to the governor of Florida. The topic of the discussion was the numbers of slaves who escaped from the southern British colonies, fleeing southwards. The British knew that the Spanish were harboring and even encouraging these escapees.29 In an attempt to apply pressure for the return of these slaves, Glen suggested that the British envoy play on Floridian fears of the southeastern Indians. Glen suggested informing the Spaniards that “those Slaves are the Absolute Property of many of the Planters who live in the Outparts of this Government” and that these planters “who Live in great Friendship with the Indian Nations around us” might take matters into their 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. For other examples of of these kind of fears in Indian society, Merrell, The Indians New World, 146–147. 29 These suspicions were tied up with the fears of British colonists of a slave revolt, a deeply felt and long established fear in the southeastern British colonies. For examples of this fear, see Report of the Committee of both Houses to Enquire into the late Expedition against St. Augustine. 1743, South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Columbia, s.c., New York Gazette, 20 November 1749. On the most famous slave panic in colonial North America see Thomas J. Davis, A Rumor of Revolt: The “Great Negro Plot” in Colonial New York (New York: Free Press, 1985), Jill Lepore, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery and Conspiracy in Eighteenth Century Manhattan (New York: Vintage Books, 2006), Serena R. Zabin, The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741: Daniel Horsemanden’s Journal of the proceedings with related Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2004). For a discussion of the impact of these fears in the late colonial era see J. William Harris, The Hanging of Thomas Jeremiah: A Free Black Man’s Encounter with Liberty (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

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own hands, “that Rewards may be Privately offered to induce them [the Indians] to Recover those Slaves and there can be no doubt but that they will Seize all Negroes indiscriminately and that the Consequences of drawing down Indian Nations to the Gates of St. Augustine are too plain to need being enlarged upon.”30 In this situation, the evocation of Spanish fears became a tool that the British used to further their own ends. In this case the gambit does not seem to have been effective for any great length of time as the Spanish continued to encourage and offer freedom to escaped slaves as well as supporting a settlement of former slaves in northern Florida throughout the 1750s.31 Fear also had an important role to play in conflicts between the British and Indians. In 1755, a group of settlers from more northerly colonies migrated to Georgia, traveling “Many Hundreds of Miles” in search of new land to farm. Traveling into the backcountry near the Ogeechee River, they found what they assumed to be “a Quantity of uncultivated and vacant Lands … they had sat down on the same” on the assumption that this land was free for the taking.32 In fact the land was part of the hunting grounds of the Creek Confederacy and the Creeks were very concerned to find these interlopers. Traders were one thing; they brought valuable European goods and came in small enough numbers that the disruption that they caused in Creek society could usually be managed. Settlers, though, who took up and fenced off Creek hunting grounds were quite another. The Creeks had been dealing with Europeans for several generations by that time and knew that when settlers came they were likely to be followed by others. Creek Indians began harassing the new arrivals and, unaware or indifferent to their encroachment on Creek lands the settlers on the Ogeechee settlers appealed to the governor in Savannah to protect them from these “insults[,] they [the Creeks] having used many Threatnings and thereby put them in fear of their Lives.” The colonists warned that unless something was done about this “they would be under a Necessity of leaving the province.”33 Each group was extremely fearful of the intentions of the other. The Creeks saw an alien encroachment on their hunting lands with the prospect of the arrival of unknown numbers of land-hungry settlers. The settlers, 30 31

Glen to Raymond Demere, CO5/372, f. 194–195. Jane Landers, “Spanish Sanctuary: Fugitive Slaves in Spanish Florida 1687–1790,” Florida Historical Quarterly 62 (January 1984), 3, 296–313, Irene A. Wright, “Dispatches of Spanish officials bearing on the Free Negro Settlement of Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, Florida,” The Journal of Negro History 9, no. 2 (April 1924), 144–195. 32 Allen D. Gardener, ed., Colonial Records of the State of Georgia, Compiled and Published under the Authority of the Legislature (hereinafter crg) (Atlanta: Franklin, 1904), 7:93–94. 33 Ibid.

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newly arrived on lands that they viewed as unused and free, saw the threat of strange and violent savages lurking outside their doors. This was a potentially highly explosive juxtaposition. In early September 1756 matters came to a head when a group of Creeks took a number of horses from the settlers’ pens, a party of settlers pursued them, there was a confrontation, shots were fired and two Indians were killed.34 The settlers claimed that they had been attacked and had fired only to prevent one of their number, who was hit in the cheek and had his hat shot from his head, from being killed, but in the backcountry that hardly mattered. Whatever the truth, two Creeks were dead and the laws of clan vengeance demanded that the deceased men’s clan avenge the killing. The settlers seem to have been unaware of this reality. Their leader, Edward Brown, wrote to Governor Reynolds at Savannah appealing to the governor to chastise the Indians.35 Nevertheless, the settlers were quick to move back to more secure parts of the colony, abandoning their farms in the around the Ogeechee River and fleeing eastwards. Much more articulate in their fears of Creek retaliation were the magistrates and senior traders of Augusta, many of whom had spent years or even decades trading and negotiating with Indians in the backcountry and who knew the dangers posed by a breakdown in relations. The sense of alarm in their reporting of the violence on the Ogeechee is palpable, they declared that “Indian blood has been Spilt and Consequently an Indian War is almost unavoidable the only thing in all humane Probability that can prevent it is the having of the Murderers Secured For to make them Satisfaction.”36 These Georgians had reason to worry about the prospect of a war. They argued “That Augusta and the Places Adjacent being not only frontiers but places where the Stores and Trading Goods for all the Chickasaws Creek and Part of the Cherokees are kept are of the Greatest consequence for in all Probability they would for the sake of those Stores be the first that would be Attacked.” The traders also claimed that the fort at Augusta “at present cannot answer any of those Wise and Salutary Ends [for which it was built] being in every Part of it in a ruinous and untenable Condition for the truth of Which we can Appeal to your Excellency who had Occular Demonstration thereof.” They further claimed that even if their fort was in good repair it would not be sufficient to defend the inhabitants due to a lack of manpower: “the few Soldiers that had been for a Long time at that Station which by repeated detachments to South Carolina and else where are 34 35 36

Edward J. Cashin, Lachlan McGillivray, Indian Trader: The Shaping of the Colonial Frontier (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 148, crg 7:395. crg 7:390–391. Cashin, Lachlan McGillivray, 148. crg 7:392.

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now rendered fewer being insufficient for its defence in Case of an Attack.” In their exposed and fearful situation the traders hoped to link the survival of their community with the safety of the wider colony. Officials in Savannah might have been lukewarm to the prospect of providing military support for a trading post hundreds of miles away, but if the wider colony (including their own posts) was threatened by attack, the traders hoped that that the colonial capital would be inspired to send assistance inland. To accentuate this sense of alarm, they warned that “If this place were destroyed the destruction of the whole Province would in all Probability follow.” As evidence for this the Augustans pointed to the supplies kept at the trading houses of their town. They claimed that with these supplies the Creeks would have “enough to enable them to Carry on the War where and how long they pleased.”37 Fear, then, was an important bargaining tool in the internal politics of the British colonies. The fear felt by the Augusta traders was real enough – they had certainly had cause to fear an Indian war – but the performance of that fear also became their strategy to gain assistance from the colonial capital. Their claim that “we Cannot hold this Place Long without Speedy Assistance” drew on their own fears and appealed to the fear and self interest of the audience for the letter creating a powerful combination in support of the traders’ appeal for help. Both Indians and Europeans used fear as a tool in negotiations. For example in 1758 a delegation of Creeks led by the headman Hoyanne visited Savannah to push for the removal of group of settlers from the backcountry. The Council of Georgia noted that “the Indians in their written talk complain heavily of the Settlements made on their hunting Grounds at the Ogeechee by the White People and desired such Settlers may be ordered to remove from thence; For that Settlements being made so close upon the Indians have already raised Jealousies and discontent among them.” It was a regular complaint of the Creeks and other Indian confederacies that settlers were encroaching on their land, on this occasion they decided to try and emphasize the danger that this could pose to British interests in the backcountry. They claimed that the French had sent representatives among the Creek towns and were trying to increase anger with the British “and (under Colour of rendering the Safety and Security of the Indians more certain) have actually applied to them for Leave to strengthen the French fort at the Albama’s: Which though the Indians have absolutely refused, yet they earnestly press that those Settlements may by 37

Ibid., 398–399.

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vacated that no uneasiness may Spring up between Us.”38 The Creeks were careful to emphasize that they had refused the overtures of the French and that their concern was to avoid “uneasiness.” Nevertheless there is an unmistakable edge to the mention of the French interest in events. The Creeks were clearly attempting to play on British fears of French influence in the region.

“It might draw my proceedings into Contempt”: Fear and the Limits of Imperial Power

As has been noted above, there was a significant discrepancy between the land claimed by the European empires in the backcountry and the degree to which they could effectively wield coercive power. Fear could even be used as a method for colonial leaders to bridge the gap between what their imperial masters demanded and what they actually had within their power to achieve. In 1758 the South Carolina Governor William Henry Lyttelton received a letter from William Pitt, then in the midst of putting into practice his grand strategy for winning the Seven Years War. In that plan, the southeastern colonies were something of a backwater and it seems likely that Pitt hoped to keep tensions in the region to a minimum to keep resources free to pursue more important aims. Thus, Pitt called on South Carolina to appoint a Commissioner to work with Georgia to remove the illegal settlers from “the Settlement called New Hanover or any other Settlement that may have been made without Leave of his Majesty or those acting under his Authority.”39 Pitt further ordered that two commissioners, one each from South Carolina and Georgia should travel to the illegal settlements and “should give Orders in His Majestie’s Name to the Inhabitants of the said Settlement or Settlements to remove from thence before a certain day, which the Commissioners might Assign in their own discretion.”40 The orders were clear: the southeast colonies were to remove the unauthorized British settlers in the disputed borders with Florida to avoid unnecessary friction with the Spanish. This order placed the leaders of South Carolina and Georgia in a rather difficult position. They knew that they were bound to see the orders of their imperial masters implemented but they also knew that doing it could lead to all kinds of trouble. As Henry Ellis, governor of Georgia put it with classic understatement: “I really apprehend the manner of doing it, so as to prevent 38 “Proceedings of the Governor and Council of Georgia,” crg 7:764. 39 William Pitt to William Henry Lyttelton, 10 June 1758, CO5/476, 29. 40 Ibid.

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any mischievous Consequences, requires more than ordinary precaution and Management.” The governors knew that they lacked the resources to compel obedience from settlers out in the distant backcountry, and that any attempt to do so might be “accompanied with Circumstances [of] too alarming and Publick a Nature in many Accounts.” Ellis warned that if they pushed the southern settlers out in the way ordered by London “the streights [sic] it may drive [the settlers] to, may be provoked to take some desperate Resolutions” such as joining with the Spanish or the nearby Indians. Furthermore, Ellis warned that: I am the more cautious in this Business, from a persuasion that let it be conducted with ever so much prudence, it will be apt to excite some uneasiness in the Minds of our People and check the progress of our Southern Settlements, for whom these Out Laws served as a sort of Barrier, and were indeed in some respects useful as they frequently intercepted Run away Negroes. Ellis hoped that they could persuade the settlers to move by sending not Commissioners but “a Messenger (or messengers)” who would inform them of the orders from London and offer them land in Georgia or South Carolina if they removed quietly.41 Lyttelton, on the other hand, argued that messengers would lead to as much trouble as commissioners. He also remarked that the commission should be very carefully worded: I also think that no Words should be inserted in the Public instructions which I shall give to the Commissioner, impowering him to use any threats to the Inhabitants, because there are no words in the Kings Orders to me, directing me to use Force to compel them to remove, should their disobedience render it necessary, and should I employ threats, and not be prepared to second them by a proper Force, it might draw my proceedings into Contempt.42 In this sense then the fear extended from the backcountry into the heart of the colonial establishment. The governors saw that they did not have the power to force obedience out in the backcountry and they feared that if they tried to do so without being able to back their orders with force the extent of their weakness would be become clear. This would threaten both their 41 42

Henry Ellis to Lyttelton, 28 November 1758, CO5/476, 31. Lyttelton to Ellis, CO5/476, 36.

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own authority and the larger imperial foundation of the British Empire in the region. But the governors also hoped that they could use the settlers’ fears as a way to achieve their aims without having to resort to violence or coercive action. Lyttelton suggested that the Commissioners be given “private Instruction to represent to those People the dangerous Consequences that may attend their refusing or delaying to remove, but to be careful that he does this as from himself, and not in His Majesties name or mine.”43 While the nature of these “Consequences” were not specified, the most logical path would have been that the Commissioners would play upon settler fears of an attack by Indians or the Britain’s imperial rivals. The governors set this strategy in motion and appointed commissioners to put it into practice. Henry Hyrne was appointed as Commissioner from South Carolina and he went to New Hanover with his counterpart from Georgia, James Powel. The two men presented their credentials to the settlers in the region including one Mr. Gray, who appears to have been Edward Gray, who had several years previously been involved in an attempt to gain control of the Georgia Commons House, not the William Gray mentioned above.44 Gray claimed that he would be prepared to remove as the orders demanded but warned that some of the other colonists “were so much involved in Debt, that they could not return either into Carolina or Georgia. These he claimed might be induced to go over to the Spaniards, from whom they had received strong invitations.”45 Fear then could work both ways, encouraging men such as Gray’s neighbors to set up home on the furthest limit of lands claimed by Britain. Hyrne tried to counter this with another form of fear, that of the alien nature of the Spanish colony: “I observed to him how dangerous such a Step would be, whereby they would put themselves in the power of a People bigotted to quite different Sentiments in Religion, Subject to Methods of Government widely differing from those they had been used to, and who they might be sure would always watch them with a jealous eye.”46 Gray promised to do all he could to prevent any defections to the Spanish even to the point of using force. The settlers then were also faced with competing fears; on the one hand many feared that they would be pursued for debt if they returned to the British colonies, on the other there were the uncertain consequences of shifting allegiance to the Spanish Crown in a time of war and seeking shelter in Florida. 43 Ibid. 44 Cashin, Lachlan McGillivray¸ 142–143. 45 Report of Henry Hyrne, CO5/476, 52. 46 Ibid.

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Beyond Backcountry Fear

Despite these currents of fear, it would be untrue to assume that fear was the only motivating emotion in the backcountry. There was a great deal of hope and promise for the future vested in the availability of land in the backcountry. The settlers of New Hanover who agreed to remove back to the more established areas of British settlement had clearly made some changes to the landscape with an eye to long term settlement: They [the settlers] all professed themselves determined to obey his Majesty’s Orders but said as they should be greatly distressed by being obliged to quit settlements which they had made with much Expense and labour, they hoped that whenever His Majesty should think proper to permit, these parts to be settled, they might have the Preference to those Lands, whereon they had made some improvements, and when the Grain should be ripe which they had already sown, to reap it and carry it off.47 This did not describe a people entirely overcome with fear. The settlers were clearly hoping to improve their fortunes for themselves and their families. There was also a not inconsiderable degree of amicable contact between peoples in the backcountry. The very fact that some of the settlers at New Hanover saw defection to the Spanish as a viable alternative to returning to the British colonies suggests that there were some peaceful contacts between the settlers and either Spanish authorities or Floridian settlers in the area. Similarly settlers in the backcountry had a certain amount of amicable contact with the Indians of the southeast. In November 1756, just as the Spanish captain was giving his ultimatum to William Gray, William Wilkins set out to go hunting. However he did not go alone. As well as being accompanied a number of other settlers Wilkins joined a group of Creeks in their “Fall hunt.” The familiar way that Wilkins discussed the hunt in an official deposition suggests that this hunt was not the first he had been on with the Creeks and that this would not be a shocking thing for a young settler in the backcountry to be doing. While on this hunt Wilkins and his companions were warned that war was imminent between Creeks and the British. The brother of the senior Seminole Creek chief known to the British as the Cowkeeper warned the settlers that they should not return home overland, that they might be killed “by some forward young Indian.”48 47 48

Ibid., 53. Deposition of William Wilkins, 24 November 1756, CO5/386, 76.

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These events suggest a number of intriguing aspects of life in the backcountry. The fact that the settlers could be on a hunt with a group of Creeks while elsewhere in the Creek confederacy there were attempts being made to initiate a war between the Creeks and the British gives some idea of the complex and often precarious nature of the relationship between Indians and whites in the backcountry. The intercession of a headman to ensure that the settlers made it to safety further suggests the complex nature of the relationship between settlers and Indians. These incidents make it clear that fear was not an overriding factor in all cross-cultural relationships. What emerges instead is a complex picture in which such interactions often carried with them an element of risk whilst at the same time offering significant benefits in terms of material gains and potentially close friendships. There were no backcountry inhabitants for whom this dichotomy was more evident than the deerskin traders, who were usually in the vanguard of colonial expansion, introducing European-made goods into American Indian societies, marrying Indian women, and acting as representatives of colonial society. This made them both extremely important in intercultural communication and commerce and extremely vulnerable to any breakdown in those networks. Daniel Pepper confirmed their importance in his letters to Governor Lyttelton. He complained that the traders were not spending enough time in the Indian towns “which they by their Licence are obliged to reside in for six Months ­certain,” he argued that “their not attending has been of great Disadvantage to me, as I must expect my Intelligence from them, as I cannot possibly be everywhere.”49 However their vulnerability was equally apparent, traders were usually the first to die when there was a breach between the Indians and the British. This was when the friendships that traders had built up with Indians became quite literally a question of life or death. In 1760 there was a general massacre of traders among the Creeks. The first to be killed was John Ross, trader at the Upper Creek Town of Sugatspoges, who the trader James Adair described as “surly and ill-natured.”50 Ross was killed along with two black servants (most likely slaves), but while the servants were simply killed Ross was “chopped to pieces in a most horrid manner.”51 Ross, it seems, had earned the ire of the Indians in his town. In one day, eleven traders 49 50

Daniel Pepper to Lyttelton, 30 March 1757, in dria 1754–65, 354–355. James Adair, The History of the American Indians; particularly those nations adjoining to the Missisippi [sic], East and West Florida, Georgia, South and North Carolina, and Virginia: containing an account of their origin, language, manners, … With a new map of the country referred to in the history (London, 1775), 261. 51 Ibid.

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were killed and a number only escaped through the intervention of friendly Indians. Moses Price escaped after being warned by one Indian woman and given food by another. Several Creek warriors were sent to kill Robert French but decided “to preserve him instead.”52 The traders also needed to trust their Indian allies. When William Rae was assaulted in his store, a Creek who had been visiting him tried to intervene. He “grasped him [William Rae] from behind, with his face toward the wall, on purpose to save him from being shot; as they durst not kill himself [the Indian], under the certain pain of death.” But fearing that this was part of the attack, Rae threw the Indian to the ground and making himself “too fair a mark” was shot and killed.53 Survival in the backcountry in these most dangerous and desperate of circumstances depended absolutely on cross-cultural friendship and trust. This incident shows clearly both the brutal dangers that existed in the colonial backcountry and the ways that intercultural friendship and loyalty could transcend those dangers. What emerges then in this welter of events is an environment in which fear and rumor are key parts of the strategies employed for success and survival. From the colonial governors in Charles Town and Savannah to the headmen in Indian country and settlers living on disputed tracts of river land, fear was a tool used by a wide variety of actors to further their aims. Rumor and fear were closely related phenomena which fed off one another. Fear was very much a part of everyday life. The dangers of the backcountry were real enough that fear could often be a perfectly reasonable response to the potential threats that existed. Settlers and Indians lived with the knowledge that attacks by hostile forces could appear unexpectedly, with deadly consequences. 52

Joshua Piker, Okfuskee: A Creek Indian Town in Colonial America (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2004), 135. 53 Adair, History of the American Indians, 262.

chapter 13

“The Unpleasing Part of the Drama”: Fear, Devastation, and the Civilian Experience of the Revolutionary War Benjamin L. Carp Mercy Otis Warren wrote one of the earliest histories of the American Revolution. Although Great Britain had threatened “terror, servitude, or desolation, to resisting millions” she wrote, “the mind now willingly draws a veil over the unpleasing part of the drama, and indulges the imagination in future prospects of peace and felicity.” Many historians of this conflict, indeed, have similarly obscured the terrifying nature of the Revolutionary War. Dubbed a “limited war” in the midst of the “Age of Reason,” the War for American Independence is said to occupy a relatively gentle lull between the horrors of the Thirty Years War and the French Revolution. Furthermore, the Continental Army came to represent new ideals of voluntarism, fearlessness, and restraint in the hopes of setting a positive example for the world. Hardly a tale of terror, the Americans’ own narrative of the Revolution rests upon a carefully crafted legacy of bravery and heroism.1 The American Revolution involved several types of conflict: it was a brutal partisan civil war, an anti-imperial uprising, an eighteenth-century “limited war” of siege, pitched battles, and naval maneuvers, and an “unlimited” extirpative imperial war, depending on the time and place. Faced with a mixed populace of staunch Whigs, outright Loyalists, and reluctant neutrals, America’s Revolutionary leaders hoped to inspire their neighbors to feats of valor and encouraged them to face the attendant hardships with stoicism. For 1 Mercy Otis Warren, History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution, 3 vols. (Boston, 1805), 3:300; for more on eighteenth-century warfare, see Christopher Duffy, The Military Experience in the Age of Reason (Ware, Mass.: Wordsworth Editions, 1998 [1987]); David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Mariner Books, 2007); Armstrong Starkey, War in the Age of Enlightenment, 1700–1789 (Westport, Ct.: Praeger, 2003); Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775–1783 (Chapel Hill, n.c.: University of North Carolina Press, 1979); Wayne E. Lee, Crowds and Soldiers in Revolutionary North Carolina: The Culture of Violence in Riot and War (Gainesville, Fla.: University Press of Florida, 2001); Ricardo A. Herrera, For Liberty and the Republic: The American Citizen as Soldier, 1775–1861 (New York: New York University Press, 2015).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004314740_015

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reasons that were practical as well as idealistic, they enjoined their army to show restraint – rather than inspire fear – among white soldiers and noncombatants. These leaders also sought to maintain their local dominance and expand the zone of white settlement into Indian lands.2 Patriotic Americans disclaimed fear – and encouraged a fearless ideal – in the service of their political, ideological, and emotionological goals.3 By drawing a veil over fear, however, they made it more difficult to contend with the real fears that the Revolution unleashed across the American continent. Yet fear stalked the Revolution. By the eighteenth century, Americans appreciated that fear might grow out of misunderstandings or subjective interpretation of an opponent’s motives. It grew from passion rather than reason, and therefore it might need careful management. Reasonable fears might give way to panic, or paralytic timidity, and these in turn might undermine rational thinking, decisive action, and political unity.4 Horror was also inherent in warfare. Excessive violence – the most frightful kind – might be beyond the broadly accepted “rules of war,” but these rules were not always obeyed, and white Americans defined Native Americans (for instance) as being outside the sphere that those rules governed.5 Revolutionary War soldiers on both sides suffered and died from privation, disease, injury, and death at the business end of ordnance, small arms, and edged weaponry, as did civilians. Noncombatants were raped, assaulted, and murdered. Soldiers, sailors, robbers, and saboteurs destroyed, plundered, and appropriated property, while authorities confiscated civilian buildings 2 On the multifaceted nature of the war, see (for example) Stephen Conway, The War of American Independence, 1775–1783 (London: Edward Arnold, 1995); John Grenier, The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2005), esp. Ch. 5; John S. Pancake, This Destructive War: The British Campaign in the Carolinas, 1780–1782 (Tuscaloosa, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 2003); Mark V. Kwasny, Washington’s Partisan War, 1775–1783 (Kent, Ohio.: Kent State University Press, 1996); on restraint, see Lee, Crowds and Soldiers. 3 Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns, “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards,” American Historical Review 90, no. 4 (1985), 813–836. 4 My broader interpretation on the ideologies surrounding fear has drawn from Yi-Fu Tuan, Landscapes of Fear (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979); Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture 13th–18th Centuries, trans. Eric Nicholson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990 [1983]); Corey Robin, Fear: The History of a Political Idea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Ioannis D. Evrigenis, Fear of Enemies and Collective Action (Cambridge, u.k.: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 5 On “frightfulness” and warfare see Wayne E. Lee, Barbarians and Brothers: Anglo-American Warfare, 1500–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), esp. 3–5.

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and dispossessed people from their homes. Entire cities and towns burned, from Falmouth, Maine, to Norfolk, Virginia; others suffered from neglect and deterioration under occupying armies. Many Loyalists and Whigs became refugees, whether periodically or permanently.6 Finally, the Revolution initiated social upheaval that struck fear in the hearts of entrenched interests, and American elites maintained – even strengthened – institutions of fear and coercion that had existed prior to the war.7 In particular, this essay argues that civilians’ fears for their lives and property during the Revolutionary War were often at odds with patriotic rhetoric about fearless sacrifice. The fearsome legacy of the American Revolution represents a culmination of colonial American history, while also raising troubling questions about the role of fear and coercion in the new nation. From the beginning of the American colonies’ protest against Great Britain in the 1760s, American Whigs excitedly warned their neighbors about the threats posed by Parliament and its placemen. While Progressive historians such as Philip Davidson, John C. Miller, and Arthur M. Schlesinger dismissed these political fears as irrational, manipulative, or as a stalking horse for selfinterest, Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, and J.G.A. Pocock persuaded a generation of scholars that when the Revolutionaries attributed human actions to a concerted conspiracy of corruption, they were imposing a rational trajectory of cause and effect on the frightful chaos that surrounded them. Britons and Loyalists, too, had their own parallel conspiracy theories, and the agents of their torment were the Whig leaders themselves.8 Indeed, some Americans 6 Wayne E. Lee, “The American Revolution,” in David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler, eds., Daily Lives of Civilians in Wartime Early America (Westport, Ct.: Greenwood Press, 2007), 31–69. 7 Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007). 8 Philip Davidson, Propaganda and the American Revolution, 1763–1783 (Chapel Hill, n.c.: University of North Carolina Press, 1941); John C. Miller, Sam Adams, Pioneer in Propaganda (Boston: Little, Brown, 1936); John C. Miller, Origins of the American Revolution (Boston: Little, Brown, 1943); Arthur M. Schlesinger, Prelude to Independence: The Newspaper War on Britain, 1764–1776 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958); Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enlarged ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1992 [1967]), esp. 144–159; Stephen E. Lucas, Portents of Rebellion: Rhetoric and Revolution in Philadelphia, 1765–76 (Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1976); Gordon S. Wood, “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 39, no. 3 (1982), 401–441; J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political  Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, n.j.: Princeton University Press, 2003 [1975]), esp. chs. 14–15; Janice Potter, The Liberty We Seek: Loyalist Ideology in Colonial New York and Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983); Robert M. Calhoon, “The Loyalist Perception,” in

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concluded that irrational British fears had precipitated the rebellion. James Iredell of North Carolina argued in June 1776 that Americans had not initially sought independence – indeed, most regarded it “with horror.” Yet British paranoia – Britons’ “dread, or the pretended dread, of this evil [i.e., independence], has almost produced it.” These fears had grown from misunderstandings and miscommunication, and they became “the parent of all the violent acts that now irritate the minds of the Americans.” In the American mind, the British had acted unreasonably, and from fear; the Americans, dreading enslavement at the hands of Parliament, believed they had mobilized sensibly and legitimately against an identifiable conspiracy. Already, Americans were claiming to be on the side of reason rather than fear.9 From 1774 to 1776, the pace of events began to force many Americans to weigh their hopes against their fears, and determine a firm political allegiance. Whigs presented their fellow Americans with a stark choice. The path of virtue led to liberty and republican government, which included an adherence to the law of nations and the laws of war, and proper responses to their well-­ articulated fears: vigilance against oppression, and resistance to tyranny. Fear became a positive, creative force, spurring the revolutionaries to the actions that had become necessary in hard times. The virtuous path placed heavy demands on an individual – a full political and military commitment that brought with it the risk of property loss, societal upheaval, and death. Yet to shy away from these commitments, or even flinch in the face of them, was to take the path of fear and timidity (the negative side of fear), and this invited the specter of despotism. Hesitation and indecision explained the cowardly behavior of moderates, the apathetic, and people who just wanted to be left alone. As for Loyalists, they were motivated either by greed or by fear. In the eyes of the Whigs, the Tories cowered in the face of the British army and navy; they wanted to hold onto their property and continue their old livelihood; they shuddered at the very idea of popular sovereignty, and they preferred the slavish stupor and false security of monarchical government. If too many Robert M. Calhoon, Timothy M. Barnes, and Robert S. Davis, eds., Tory Insurgents: The Loyalist Perception and Other Essays, rev. ed. (Columbia, s.c.: University of South Carolina Press, 2010 [1989]), 3–14. 9 Griffith J. McRee, ed., Life and Correspondence of James Iredell, 2 vols. (New York, 1857), 1:321– 322. Christopher Looby, Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 67–78; Paul Langford, “British Correspondence in the Colonial Press, 1763–1775: A Study in Anglo-American Misunder­ standing before the American Revolution,” in Bernard Bailyn and John B. Hench, eds., The Press and the American Revolution (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1980), 273–313.

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Americans shared the Loyalists’ fears, the Revolutionary movement would be insufficient to succeed. Thus Whig leaders needed not just to draw upon their own reserves of bravery, but stamp out timidity and cowardice wherever they found it. Under the vaguely worded aegis of the Continental Association, therefore, Whigs in many communities initiated their own campaigns of terror, using fear as a motivator of political allegiance. The Loyalist Jonathan Saywood of York, Maine, received such threats from his neighbors in 1775 that he was “afraid to go abroad” and “continually on my guard.” Threats and assaults – even an occasional murder or execution – plagued Loyalists after 1774, throughout the war, and even after the peace treaty of 1783. American exceptionalists have traditionally objected to the use of the term “terror,” arguing that Americans experienced nothing like the Terror of the French Revolution. Yet for many Loyalists, the fear was certainly real.10 As the Continental Congress began calling upon American towns and villages to undertake military preparations, Whig leaders needed to help their fellow Americans navigate between two competing fears: on the one hand, the fear of tyrannical impositions by Parliament (and, ultimately, the king); on the other, the fear of disruption and death.11 Patriot writers were well aware that fear motivated many people’s political decisions. The South Carolina historian David Ramsay argued that some turned to Loyalism “from the love of ease, others from self-interest, but the bulk from fear of the mischievous consequences likely to follow.” The Patriots of 1775, by contrast, were “Elevated with the love of liberty, and buoyed above the fear of consequences by an ardent military enthusiasm, unabated by calculations about the extent, duration, or probable issue of the war.”12 Although Benjamin Rush praised these “Staunch 10

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Jonathan Saywood Diary, 31 December 1775, York Mss., American Antiquarian Society, quoted in Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 283; ibid., 291–300; for the argument that Americans never turned to serious violence against Loyalists, see T.H. Breen, American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), chs. 7–8. Comparisons between the American Revolution and French Revolution are commonplace: one could argue that while the centralized killing of the Reign of Terror became a source of particular attention and controversy in the memory of the French Revolution, the diffuse and uneven impact of the war on Revolutionary America made it easier for Americans to forget. There are many works on the motivations of Continental soldiers and militiamen; for a recent overview, see John Resch and Walter Sargent eds., War and Society in the American Revolution: Mobilization and Home Fronts (DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007). David Ramsay, The History of the American Revolution, 2 vols. (Trenton, n.j., 1811), 1:165, 254.

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Whigs” for their fortitude, he also identified three other sorts of whigs: “Furious Whigs,” who were quick to reach for the tar bucket to torture Tories but who were “generally cowards” when it came to military service; avaricious “Speculating Whigs”; and “Timid Whigs,” whose hopes “rose and fell with every victory and defeat of our armies.” Rush dismissed the Whigs who terrorized Loyalists as an anomaly, and he criticized the greed and timidity that characterized inconstant Whigs.13 In his Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774), Thomas Jefferson defiantly argued that there was no room for temporizing, because American grievances were grounded in natural rights. “Let those flatter who fear; it is not an American art.”14 Once blood was shed at the battles of Lexington and Concord, there was even less room for timid vacillation or frightened moderation. Instead, those leaders who pushed for independence sought to instill courage in the militia and the Continental Army. Revolutionary leaders disclaimed all fears, while at the same time stoking a more poignant fear of what would happen if Americans failed to resist Great Britain. Benjamin Franklin proclaimed his fearlessness on behalf of the American seaboard towns as he conferred with David Barclay and Dr. John Fothergill in London in February 1775. When Barclay “hinted how necessary an Agreement was for America, since it was so easy for Britain to burn all our Sea Port Towns,” Franklin answered “that the chief Part of my little Property consisted of Houses in those Towns; that they might make Bonfires of them whenever they pleased; that the Fear of losing them would never alter my Resolution to resist to the last that Claim of Parliament” to alter American constitutions. Franklin expressed his patriotism in the form of a fearless, even blithe unconcern for American property. Later on, George Washington’s Fabian strategy sought to avoid battles with a superior British force by avoiding the coastline, yet this required the Americans to concede dozens of fixed posts – and these concessions were often unpopular.15 Loyalists, meanwhile, encouraged the British army to teach Americans “to fear her power,” as Jonathan Sewall wrote in May 1775. Americans were at such a pitch of frenzy that they would not listen to reason “till the passion of Fear is 13 14 15

Benjamin Rush, The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush, ed. George W. Corner (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1948), 118–119. Thomas Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America (Williamsburg, Va., 1774), Evans #13350, 22. Benjamin Franklin to William Franklin: Journal of Negotiations in London, 22 March 1775, in William B. Willcox, ed., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 40 vols. (New Haven, Ct.: Yale University Press, 1978), 21:584; Royster, Revolutionary People at War, 117.

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awakened.” While Sewall hoped for “as little Havok and Bloodshed as may be,” he hoped “to see great Britain raise with a power that shal strike Terror thro’ the Continent.” If the British were to put forward a weaker force, the war would be prolonged, leading to greater loss of life and “the Devastation of a great part of a Fine Country.” At the same time, Sewall had heard of the Whigs’ strategy to desert the seaport towns. Although he worried that it would succeed, he believed that most urban property owners (unlike Franklin) were against such a measure, and would prefer a peaceful neutrality. “Now many are intimidated by the Threats of their Countrymen & a despair of protection, into an involontary compliance,” while the Whigs were “seized with the Dementia of the times” to “make a Volontary Sacrifice of themselves, their Wives, Children & Fortunes.” To the Loyalists (reinforced by the thought of Thomas Hobbes), it was the rebels who were unreasonable, while a healthy respect for Parliament would facilitate peace and good order.16 Within a few months, Americans had the opportunity to weigh their fears against their commitment. After the burning of Charlestown, Massachusetts, during the Battle of Bunker Hill on 17 June 1775, Edward Holyoke of Salem wrote, “The destruction of Charlestown by fire (for it is all burnt down) has struck our People at Salem with such a panic, that those who before thought our Town perfectly safe, now are all for removing off.”17 By contrast, Abigail Adams reported that most people bravely brushed off the loss of the town, saying it affected them “no more than a Drop in the Bucket.”18 But her father was not so sanguine. “My Father has been more affected with the distruction of Charlstown, than with any thing which has heretofore taken place. Why should not his countenance be sad when the city, the place of his Fathers Sepulchers lieeth waste, and the gates thereof are consumed with fire, scarcly one stone remaineth upon an other.”19 Dorothea Gamsby, who was ten years old at the time, later told her granddaughter about the immediacy of her memories of 16

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Jonathan Sewall to [Frederick Haldimand], 30 May 1775, Add. Mss. 21695, British Library, ff. 120–124; see also Stephen Conway, “To Subdue America: British Army Officers and the Conduct of the Revolutionary War,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 43, no. 3 (1986), 381–407. Edward A. Holyoke to his wife, 20 June 1775, in William Upham, ed., “Extracts from Letters Written at the Time of the Occupation of Boston by the British, 1775–1776,” Historical Collections of the Essex Institute 13 (July 1876), 213; Jeffrey M. Nelson, “Ideology in Search of a Context: Eighteenth-Century British Political Thought and the Loyalists of the American Revolution,” Historical Journal 20, no. 3 (1977), 741–749. Abigail Adams to John Adams, 18 June 1775, in L.H. Butterfield, ed., Adams Family Correspondence, 11 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1963), 1:223. Abigail Adams to John Adams, June 25, 1775, in Adams Family Correspondence, 1:230.

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“that fearful contest … Dismay and terror, wailing and distraction impressed their picture on my memory, never to be effaced.”20 John Adams, writing back to his wife, reported some of the reactions among delegates to the Continental Congress. While offering condolences to his fatherin-law, he said of the burning, “It is a Method of conducting War long since become disreputable among civilized Nations: But every Year brings us fresh Evidence, that We have nothing to hope for from our loving Mother Country, but Cruelties more abominable than those which are practiced by the Savage Indians.”21 John Langdon agreed: “The low, base, and wanton Cruelty of the Ministerial Sons of Tyranny, in burning the once pleasant and populous Town of Charlestown, Beggers all Description,” he wrote. “This does not look like the fight of those who have so long been Friends, and would hope to be Friends again, but Rather of a Most Cruel enemy.”22 Richard Henry Lee added, in an address to the people of Great Britain: “Armies in North America have at length drawn the Sword of violence to ravage this Country, burn houses, and destroy his Majesties faithful American subjects.”23 Among American leaders, the destruction of coastal towns was making reconciliation with Great Britain more difficult – and the fear of further such treatment acted as a spur towards Whig allegiance. Benjamin Franklin became particularly incensed, and his outrage was renewed throughout the war every time he read of an American town laid in ashes. To an English correspondent he reported that the British troops “without the least Necessity, they barbarously plundered and burnt a fine, undefended Town … called Charlestown, consisting of about 400 Houses, many of them elegantly built; some sick, aged and decrepit poor Persons, who could not be carried off in time perish’d in the Flames. In all our Wars, from our first settlement in America, to the present time, we never received so much damage from the Indian Savages, as in this one day from these.” This was hyperbole, but it suited Franklin’s purposes to add a racialized, rhetorical flourish – the tools of the British ministry were more barbaric than the Indians.24 After the destruction of Charlestown was followed by the burning of Falmouth (Maine), Jamestown (Rhode Island), and Norfolk (Virginia), Whig

20 21 22

23 24

Catherine S. Crary, ed., The Price of Loyalty: Tory Writings from the Revolutionary Era (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), 49. John Adams to Abigail Adams, 7 July 1775, in Adams Family Correspondence, 1:241. John Langdon to Matthew Thornton, July 3, 1775, in Paul H. Smith et al., eds., Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774–1789, 25 vols. (Washington, d.c.: Library of Congress, 1976– 2000) [hereafter “ldc”], 1:574. Richard Henry Lee, draft of address to the people of Great Britain, 27 June?, 1775, ldc, 1:550. Benjamin Franklin to Jonathan Shipley, 7 July 1775, Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 22:95.

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leaders rapidly used fear of property devastation to garner support for their cause. “It is the good fortune of many to live distant from the scene of sorrow,” wrote Thomas Paine in January 1776; “the evil is not sufficiently brought to their doors to make them feel the precariousness with which all American property is possessed.” He encouraged readers to look to occupied Boston, “that seat of wretchedness,” where the inhabitants were faced with starvation and “the fire of their friends” if they stayed, or plunder by British soldiers if they left. After the events of the past years – property destruction, the impoverishment of displaced families, battle deaths – he accused those still in favor of reconciliation as having “the heart of a coward.” He continued, “I mean not to exhibit horror for the purpose of provoking revenge, but to awaken us from fatal and unmanly slumbers, that we may purse determinately some fixed object.” Britain could only conquer America “if she do not conquer herself by delay and timidity.” Paine appealed to prevailing ideals about masculinity and courage, which became particularly salient during the Revolutionary War.25 An ardent military enthusiasm, labeled a short-lived “rage militaire” by historian Charles Royster, gripped the revolutionaries during the first year of war; their faith in God and their fight for redemption in the face of evil made failure impossible. Americans’ innate courage and virtue would be enough to stave off ruin and overcome the superior discipline of British troops. This courage encompassed both men and women, whose willingness to sacrifice would encourage the strong and shame the weak (though men also frequently deflected their fears onto women). Americans would not be timid in the face of tyranny, because that would indicate an acceptance of their fate as obedient slaves. American leaders had read their Montesquieu, and they had internalized his distinction between a despotism governed by fear, and a republic governed by virtue. Their claims to fearlessness were never fully realized, of course – in times of trouble, Americans fantasized about fleeing to the wilderness for sanctuary, because such departure was preferable to capitulation, loyalism, and despair. As a result, elite leaders needed to make sure that their rhetoric emphasized positive rather than negative motivations – love and virtue, not fear and self-interest.26 25

Thomas Paine, Common Sense (Philadelphia, 1776), 41–43; Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2008); on masculinity and the Revolution, see John A. Ruddiman, Becoming Men of Some Consequence: Youth and Military Service in the Revolutionary War (Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press, 2014). 26 Royster, Revolutionary People at War, 13–19, 25–31, 112–113, 158–161, 204–207; Nathan O. Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary

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In other words, as Ramsay later explained, “The love of property was absorbed in the love of liberty. The animated votaries of the equal rights of human nature, consoled themselves with the idea that though their whole sea coast should be laid in ashes, they could retire to the western wilderness, and enjoy the luxury of being free.” Americans therefore “disregarded” the vulnerability of the seaport towns. This attitude partook of the same fearlessness that American leaders hoped would animate the troops. As military strategy, this ideal was sound. As Paine had written, “The more sea port towns we had, the more should we have both to defend and to loose.”27 On 3 July 1776, John Adams seemed to welcome “calamities still more wasting, and distress yet more dreadful,” because they would inspire virtue in place of error and vice: “The furnace of affliction produces refinement, in States as well as individuals.”28 Americans saw destruction as purifying in part because they had what Jack P. Greene calls “an inbred Christian fear of the adverse moral effects of wealth.” Luxury and prosperity had corrupted Americans, and the destruction of worldly goods was just the sort of shock Americans needed to induce penance and restore virtue.29 Yet a strategy of abandoning the seaports also endangered the lives and property of seaport inhabitants. Americans’ fear for their property and their communities came into conflict repeatedly with Congress’ willingness to abandon the cities. For instance, on 18 July 1775, Captain James Wallace threatened to bombard Newport, Rhode Island, and at 9:30 p.m. actually discharged a cannon (though it was loaded only with powder). According to the Newport Mercury, “the women really thought the firing on the town was begun, many of whom fainted away, and went into fits, and a number, we are told, absolutely miscarried by the fright.” The next morning Wallace went even further – one of his ships pointed its guns diagonally across the wharves towards the parade and courthouse (the Rev. Ezra Stiles heard that the cannon was pointed at his meetinghouse), and he put combustible materials into ferry boats for his sailors to use for igniting the town. He stood down only after making his point in such unmistakable New England (New Haven, Ct.: Yale University Press, 1977); Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. and eds. Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1989) [Book iii, Ch. 9], 28. 27 Ramsay, History, 1:254; Paine, Common Sense, 60. 28 John Adams to Abigail Adams, 3 July 1776, in Charles Francis Adams, ed., The Works of John Adams, 10 vols. (Boston, 1854), 9:418. 29 Jack P. Greene, “Search for Identity: An Interpretation of the Meaning of Selected Patterns of Social Response in Eighteenth-Century America,” in idem, ed., Imperatives, Behaviors, and Identities: Essays in Early American Cultural History (Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 143–180 at 150.

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fashion. Apparently one Mrs. Dawley “was so frightened … that she went into strong convulsions, and continued in violent fits, and very delirious, till she died.” Wallace later bombarded other local towns, and despite Nathanael Greene’s call to “Fight or be slaves!” there was little the Whigs could do. Many inhabitants abandoned the town (formerly the fifth-largest in Anglo-America), and the British occupied it without much opposition in December 1776.30 In December 1775, Congress also debated whether Washington’s army should invade Boston, which would likely result in the destruction of the town. John Dickinson spoke eloquently against the act, arguing that “Liberty & Life may be obtain’d at too dear a Price” that “The Destruction of many of our Friends, Women & Children [would be] certain,” and that such a hasty, “horrid Expedient” would be “dishonorable” and would “Injure our Reputation in America.” Still, the Bostonian John Hancock “spoke heartily for this Measure,” and Congress voted to instruct Washington to attack Boston “in any manner he may think expedient, notwithstanding the town and the property in it may thereby be destroyed.” Seven colonies were for it, two were against, and New Jersey was divided.31 Hancock would write to Washington, “may God Crown your Attempt with Success, I most heartily wish it, tho’ individually I may be the greatest sufferer.” For Hancock it was a patriotic honor to sacrifice his property for the good of his country. Yet we can imagine that Hancock himself, distant from the scene of battle and secure in his wealth and reputation, in reality had much less to fear than Bostonians of more modest means, who would have to witness the bombardment firsthand.32 From within Boston, General William Howe assured the town’s Whig selectmen, who were “very Anxious” for the town’s preservation, that “he has no intention of destroying the Town Unless the Troops under his Command are 30

31

32

Newport Mercury, 24 July and 7 August 1775; quoted in W.G. Roelker and Clarkson A. Collins iii, “The Patrol of Narragansett Bay, 1774–1776, by H.M.S. Rose, Captain James Wallace,” Rhode Island History 9, no. 1 (January 1950), 11–12; Franklin Bowditch Dexter, ed., The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, d.d., ll.d., President of Yale College, 3 vols. (New York, 1901), 1:589; Major General Nathanael Greene to Nicholas Cooke, 24 October 1775, in William Bell Clark, ed., Naval Documents of the American Revolution, 11 vols. (Washington, d.c.: u.s. Government Printing Office, 1966), 2:595. John Dickinson’s Notes for a Speech in Congress, [21–22 December 1775], ldc, 2:502; Richard Smith, diary, 22 December 1775, ldc, 2:513; Worthington Chauncey Ford, ed., Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789, 34 vols. (Washington, d.c.: Government Printing Office, 1905), 3:444–445. John Hancock to George Washington, 22 December 22, 1775, Philander D. Chase, ed., The Papers of George Washington: Revolutionary Series [hereafter pgw:rs], 21 vols. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1987), 2:589–590.

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molest[ed] during their Embarkation, or at their departure” by the Patriot forces. In that case, Howe said, “He did not know what He might do.” In other words, if Washington would leave his men alone during the evacuation, Howe would ensure that no rowdy soldiers made a bonfire of Boston’s remaining buildings. The selectmen thus wrote to Washington on 8 March, “If such an Opposition should take place we have the greatest reason to expe[ct] the Town will be exposed to Intire destruction.” They begged Washington for “Assurances that so dreadfull a Calamity may not be brought on by measures without.” The selectmen sent messengers to Washington with Howe’s request that Washington not send troops (“the Rabbel”) into town until after the British had departed. Howe and Washington eventually honored this informal bargain, but contemporaries believed a catastrophe was only narrowly avoided.33 The Declaration of Independence encapsulated a year’s worth of fear in its list of grievances: He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people. He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation. … He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions. Though most of the other grievances in the Declaration concerned British governance, these lines highlighted British wartime conduct (or imagined conduct). Notably, the Declaration does not highlight the armed resistance of American soldiers: instead, the delegates to the Continental Congress posed these terrors as threats to civilians. Meanwhile, American leaders were encouraging their compatriots to dismiss these fears. In June 1776, James Iredell of North Carolina had argued that “the savage incitement of Indians to murder a 33

John Scollay, Thomas Marshall, Timothy Newell and Samuel Austin to George Washington, 8 March 1776, pgw:rs, 3:434; Harry Miller Lydenberg, ed., Archibald Robertson, LieutenantGeneral Royal Engineers: His Diaries and Sketches in America, 1762–1780 (New York: New York Public Library, 1930), 76; Josiah Quincy to James Bowdoin, 13 March 1776, BowdoinTemple Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, 6th ser., 9 (1897), 397.

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few helpless people in the back country, and the more than diabolical purpose of exciting our own domestics … to cut our throats,” were chimerical nonstarters. “We have not been intimidated by this conduct from persevering in our duty, but only the contrary have been actuated by a more determined spirit.” White Americans were resentful of British meddling with Indians and slaves, Iredell argued, but not overtly afraid.34 Such fortitude led the historian David Ramsay of South Carolina to conclude that Lord Dunmore’s offer to free Whigowned slaves had backfired: “The colonists were struck with horror, and filled with detestation of a government which was exercised in loosening the bands of society, and destroying domestic security.” As with the response to British tyranny, this was a righteous sort of horror, one that made the British into monsters without making the colonists look frightened. Six months after Dunmore’s proclamation, “The negroes had in a great measure ceased to believe, and the inhabitants to fear,” Ramsay wrote, and the end result was “insignificant.” Fears of Indian attacks and slave uprisings were long-standing, mired in whites’ cultural anxieties, and (historians have argued) quite significant, contrary to Ramsay’s claims and Iredell’s bravado.35 The Declaration of Independence particularly noted that “foreign Mercenaries” and “merciless Indian Savages” violated the laws of war: they were “barbarous” and engaged in “undistinguished destruction” of noncombat­ ants. The British returned these accusations in kind, arguing that the American rebellion was also barbarous and beyond the pale. While these grievances highlighted the grim cost in human lives, these arguments also mentioned the plunder, desolation, and destruction of civilian property.36

34 McRee, Life and Correspondence of James Iredell, 1:321. 35 Ramsay, History, 1:320–321; Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991); Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), esp. Ch. 5; Michael A. McDonnell, The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 21–23, 85–86, 135–144; J. William Harris, The Hanging of Thomas Jeremiah: A Free Black Man’s Encounter with Liberty (New Haven, Ct.: Yale University Press, 2009); William Ryan, The World of Thomas Jeremiah: Charles Town on the Eve of the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Silver, Our Savage Neighbors, Ch. 8. 36 David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 55–60; Eliga H. Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), 115–118.

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Once the rage militaire had worn off, Americans rapidly came to understand the inadequacy of their reliance on innate courage and virtue. American troops were unprofessional and undisciplined. They had plenty of occasions to retreat in the face of the enemy. (When the Americans gave up Fort Ticonderoga in 1777, a disgusted “MARCUS BRUTUS” wrote, “It is vain to palliate such conduct, by assigning fear as the cause. Fear was treason.”) They were liable to desert, and many evaded recruitment; local governments schemed to cheat the quota systems. Furthermore, many farmers were outraged that state governments structured recruitment incentives so that the physical risks of combat fell disproportionately on poorer men. Civilians, too, cowered in the face of invading armies, despite their leaders’ insistence that fear was a sign of unworthiness. The historian Wayne E. Lee highlights this central contradiction: “Armies were expected to restrain their behavior, but on the other hand everyone knew that war was awful … [and] a civil war was even more horrifying than a normal one.” Cultural expectations might ameliorate the use of fearsome and extreme violence, but the prevailing culture also sanctioned frightful tactics in some circumstances. Fear might give way to apathy, but it also might give rise to rage.37 American leaders were aware that the less fortunate would suffer the most during an enemy raid or occupation. In April 1777, Benjamin Rush praised Americans’ courage, crowing, “The time is now past when the sight of a few frigates or red coats threw our whole country into a panic. We are preparing to receive them in Philadelphia.” Realistically, he was ready to accept an American defeat and British occupation, and he only wished that it were possible to confine the suffering to the city’s Loyalists. “They deserve more than the most complicated calamities of war from his hands. But we tremble for the poor women and children who must suffer with them. Few of them I believe will fly for safety into the back parts of our state, owing to the difficulty of procuring tolerable accommodations, so much have the country families been crowded with refugees from this and the neighboring cities.”38 Sure enough, as Lord Cornwallis prepared to march the British army into Philadelphia after the Battle of Brandywine, the Continental Congress and other Whig refugees fled the city in the early morning hours of 19 September. Four days later, with the British eleven miles away, “the inhabitants were exceedingly alarmed by an apprehension of the City being set on fire.” Inflamed by the prevailing rhetoric about 37

38

[Boston] Independent Chronicle, 24 July 1777; Lee, Crowds and Soldiers, 113 (quote), 116; Royster, Revolutionary People, 58–72, 132–140, 169, 174–177, 267–270, 276–282, 363–365; McDonnell, Politics of War. Benjamin Rush to Anthony Wayne, 2 April 1777, in L.H. Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush, 2 vols. (Princeton, n.j.: Princeton University Press, 1951), 1:136.

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British barbarity (and the precedent of American saboteurs), fears were borne on the wings of rumors. Although the Loyalist-leaning Robert Morton called these “womanish fears which seize upon weak minds,” he “Set up till 1 o’clock, not to please myself, but other people.” Morton called these fears “womanish,” projecting them onto those that society had traditionally deemed more vulnerable; this was one way that men could cope with the group’s collective fear without impugning their own masculinity. On 25 September, with the British army five miles away, Sarah Logan Fisher described “People in very great confusion, some flying one way & some another as if not knowing where to go, or what to do. … The night passed over in much quiet, tho’ many people were apprehensive of the city’s being set on fire, & near half the inhabitants, I was told, sat up to watch.” The next day, Cornwallis’ column entered the city without a shot being fired – the rumors had been false, but the fear had been real.39 In many of the cities that were threatened by armed occupation, inhabitants were so fearful on behalf of their property that they attempted to declare neutrality. This was exactly the sort of “timidity” that Paine found so despicable. In early 1777, for instance, General Thomas Mifflin, worried that Philadelphians might declare neutrality to save themselves from destruction, announced that he himself would set the city on fire if they did so.40 A couple of months later, John Adams found that Philadelphia was populated only by neutral, insipid Quakers from whom “neither good is to be expected nor Evil to be apprehended,” and a small, despicable “Pack of sordid Scoundrels male and female” who were preparing their minds, bodies, houses and cellars for a reception of the British army.41 While Adams found Philadelphian timidity to be relatively harmless, Charleston’s fearful inhabitants actively meddled with the American war effort. In the spring of 1779, Charlestonians panicked as Major General Augustine Prévost approached the town from Savannah. Governor John Rutledge, with the reluctant assent of General William Moultrie, sent out a flag 39

40

41

“The Diary of Robert Morton,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 1, no. 1 (1877), 7; Nicholas B. Wainwright, ed., “Sarah Logan Fisher: ‘A Diary of Trifling Occurrences’: Philadelphia, 1776–1778,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 82, no. 4 (October 1958), 450; John W. Jackson, With the British Army in Philadelphia, 1777–1778 (San Rafael, Cal.: Presidio Press, 1979), 16ff; on rumors, see Carl Berger, Broadsides and Bayonets: The Propaganda War of the American Revolution (Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1961),144–145, 169–171. William H.W. Sabine, ed., Historical Memoirs of … William Smith Historian of the Province of New York Member of the Governor’s Council and Last Chief Justice of that Province under the Crown Chief Justice of Quebec, 2 vols. (New York: Colburn and Tegg, 1956), 2:58, 122. John Adams to Abigail Adams, 7 March 1777, Adams Family Correspondence, 2:169–170.

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of truce and asked Prévost for terms. Upon receiving Prévost’s demand for surrender and loyalty on May 11, Rutledge and five of the eight Privy Council members proposed (over the strenuous objections of Moultrie, Lieutenant Colonel John Laurens, Brigadier General Casimir Pulaski, Lieutenant Governor Christopher Gadsden, and other civilian radicals) “a neutrality, during the war between Great-Britain and America,” with South Carolina’s allegiance to be determined by whatever treaty the two sides might reach. Prévost, stating that he did not have the authority to settle such a question, reiterated his demand for a complete surrender instead. Moultrie, taking charge once again, refused to back down. Prévost, who knew that Major General Benjamin Lincoln’s reinforcements were approaching, decided to lift the siege. Though General Moultrie and a Charleston newspaper later claimed that the citizens had been unaware of the Privy Council’s offer of neutrality and would have been willing to fight to the finish, it was clear that civilian leaders’ fears were at odds with the military commanders’ fearlessness.42 During the British siege of 1780, Lincoln convened a Council of War on 20 April, when his situation had become dire. General Lachlan McIntosh and other officers wanted to attempt an evacuation, while the engineer Colonel Jean Baptiste Joseph, the Chevalier de Laumoy successfully argued for capitulation. Gadsden arrived in the middle of the conference and “appeared surprised & displeased that we had entertained a thought of a Capitulation or evacuating the Garrison.” Though he admitted he was ignorant of the state of the garrison’s provisions, he insisted on consulting with the Privy Council before a decision was made. That evening Gadsden, in the company of Thomas Ferguson, Richard Hutson, Benjamin Cattell, and David Ramsay, denounced the Council of War and treated the officers “very Rudely.” Gadsden asserted that “the Militia were willing to Live upon Rice alone rather than give up the Town upon any Terms,” and that “even the old Women were so accustomed to the Enemys Shot now that they traveled the Streets without fear or dread.” Ferguson (Gadsden’s son-in-law) confronted Lincoln and warned that they were keeping a close eye on the Continental troops’ attempts to gather boats for evacuation, and he announced that if they attempted to withdraw, “he would be among the first who would open the Gates for the Enemy and assist 42

James Haw, “A Broken Compact: Insecurity, Union, and the Proposed Surrender of Charleston, 1779,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 96, no. 1 (1995), 30–53; William Moultrie, Memoirs of the American Revolution … (New York, 1802), 423–435; Carl P. Borick, A Gallant Defense: The Siege of Charleston, 1780 (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), Ch. 1; E. Stanly Godbold, Jr. and Robert H. Woody, Christopher Gadsden and the American Revolution (Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 1982), 192–195.

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them in attacking us before we got aboard.” Lincoln later explained himself to Congress that “the Civil Authority were utterly averse” to evacuation; while Ramsay would write in his history, “To withdraw the regular army clandestinely from the town, and leave the citizens to the mercy of an enraged enemy, without giving them the offer of joining in the intended retreat, would have been ungenerous.” As historian Carl P. Borick writes, the members of the Privy Council “were willing to sacrifice the security of the rest of the state, and possibly of the entire south, for the security of Charleston” and its inhabitants. Their shortsightedness risked Charleston’s destruction, since Sir Henry Clinton might have lost patience and decided to bombard or invest the town. Nevertheless, the War Council allowed itself to be browbeaten into giving up on the idea of evacuation, and the next day they drew up cushy terms for capitulation – terms that Clinton scornfully rejected. Charleston fell about a month later, one of the largest American surrenders of the war.43 Local and national leaders often made the decision to sacrifice American property for the good of the overall war effort. While these decisions did not always lead to tragedy, they still resulted in the destruction and occupation of dozens of American towns, including most of the largest cities in the thirteen states. Overall, historians have concurred with George Washington that the Continental Army treaded much more lightly on the American countryside than did the British army. In August 1780, Washington emphasized that Americans had received “no inconsiderable support” from being able to “contrast the conduct of our Army, with that of the Enemy, and to convince the inhabitants, that while their rights were wantonly violated by the British Troops, by ours they were respected.” In other words, unlike British troops (with their ostensibly barbarous Hessian, black, and Indian allies), American 43

Lachlan McIntosh, “Journal of the Siege of Charlestown, 1780,” in Lilla Mills Hawes, ed., Lachlan McIntosh Papers in the University of Georgia Libraries, University of Georgia Libraries Miscellanea Publications, No. 7 (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1968), 103–104; At a Council of Officers held in Garrison, Charlestown, 20 and 21 April 1780, enclosed in Major General Benjamin Lincoln to the Continental Congress, 24 May 1780, Papers of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789 (National Archives Microfilm Publications, Microcopy No. 247, roll 177), 391–392; David Ramsay, The History of the Revolution in SouthCarolina, from a British Province to an Independent State (Trenton, n.j., 1785), 2:53–54, quote 56; Moultrie, Memoirs of the American Revolution, 2:73–78; Borick, Gallant Defense,167–172 at 170; David Ramsay to Benjamin Lincoln, 27 May 1780, in Robert L. Brunhouse, ed., David Ramsay, 1749–1815: Selections from His Writings, in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society for Promoting Useful Knowledge 55, part 4 (1965), 66–67; David B. Mattern, Benjamin Lincoln and the American Revolution (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1995), 101–103, 108.

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leaders claimed that their troops had no need to rely on terror and violence to win the war, at least not amid the coastal settlements.44 This may have been true of the Continental Army, but militiamen did not always exercise the same restraint; as a result, New York, New Jersey, and the Carolinas degenerated at times into a brutal, retaliatory civil war.45 In Indian country, meanwhile, Americans embraced the terrible, extirpative tactics that had served them in earlier colonial conflicts. In his orders to General John Sullivan, Washington called for the destruction of Iroquois country. He urged the American troops to spread themselves out as broadly as possible, to make attacks “with as much impetuousity, shouting and noise as possible … to rush on with the war hoop and fixed bayonet,” and thereby “disconcert and terrify the Indians.” The commanders were not to listen to any overture of peace “before the total ruin of their settlements is effected,” and after that the officers could “endeavour to draw further advantages from their fears.” Washington explained that such severe chastisement would inspire such terror as to ensure “Our future security.”46 No surprise, therefore, that Seneca leaders (some of whom had perpetrated the infamous “Wyoming Massacre” of 1778) later said to Washington, “we called you the town destroyer; and to this day, when that name is heard, our women look behind them and turn pale, and our children cling close to the necks of their mothers.” (The Seneca, too, seem to have agreed with Robert Morton’s gendered notions of fear: “Our councillors and warriors are men, and cannot be afraid; but our hearts are grieved with the fears of our women and children.”) Washington’s response echoed Mercy Otis Warren’s: “it is my desire, and the desire of the United States, that all the miseries of the late war should be forgotten, and buried forever.” He hoped for “mutual friendship and justice” in the future.47 44 45

46 47

George Washington’s Circular to the States, 27 August 1780, in Worthington Chauncey Ford, ed., The Writings of George Washington, 14 vols. (New York, 1890), 8:411. Adrian C. Leiby, The Revolutionary War in the Hackensack Valley: The Jersey Dutch and the Neutral Ground, 1775–1783, rev. ed. (New Brunswick, n.j.: Rutgers University Press, 1992 [1962]); Michael S. Adelberg, “An Evenly Balanced Country: The Scope and Severity of Civil Warfare in Revolutionary Monmouth County, New Jersey,” Journal of Military History 73, no. 1 (2009), 9–47; Pancake, This Destructive War; Lee, Crowds and Soldiers. George Washington to John Sullivan, 31 May 1779, in Theodore J. Crackel et al., eds., pgw:rs (2010), 20: 716–719. Speech of Cornplanter, Half-Town, and Great-Tree, 1 December 1790, and George Washington’s reply, 29 December 1790, in United States Congress, American State Papers 07, 2 vols., Indian Affairs, 1:140, 142; Grenier, First Way of War, esp. Ch. 5; Lee, Barbarians and Brothers, esp. part 4.

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Yet not everyone could bury these memories. Over forty years after he had served as a chaplain in the American army, Timothy Dwight was still shaken by what he remembered from his time in Westchester County, New York, in 1777. Civilians there, caught in a war zone between the British and American armies, “feared everybody whom they saw, and loved nobody … Fear was, apparently, the only passion by which they were animated. The power of volition seemed to have deserted them. They were not civil, but obsequious; not obliging, but subservient. They yielded with a kind of apathy … If you treated them kindly, they received it coldly; not as kindness, but as a compensation for injuries done them by others … Both their countenances and their motions had lost every trace of animation and of feeling.” He concluded, “all thought beyond what was merely instinctive had fled their minds for ever.” After describing these haunted civilians, Dwight immediately recalled the landscape: “Their houses … were in a great measure scenes of desolation.” Their furniture had been plundered or broken; walls, floors, and windows had succumbed to violence and disrepair; and the cattle were gone; their fences had been burnt or torn down; their fields were full of weeds; and the great Boston Post Road was empty. “The world was motionless and silent.” Several historians have cited this passage; Sung Bok Kim compared it to his own experience of the Korean War, to demonstrate that frightful tactics did not always galvanize victims and instill a new sense of patriotic fervor; instead, sometimes a climate of fear led to depoliticization and despair.48 Colonial Americans had striven to cope with a variety of fears, some particular to the New World and some inherited from the Old, and many of these became entrenched in the new United States: the frightful extirpation of the Native Americans continued after the American Revolution, as did the enslavement of African-Americans, which became firmly intertwined in the economic and social development of the southern states. Even among free whites, fear became embedded in the construction of the new American nation. They may not have shown the same deference to elites that they did before the war, yet some republicans worried along with William Manning of Massachusetts that “free governments are commonly destroyed by the combinations of the judicial and executive powers in favor of the interests of the Few.” Upon the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, an alliance of Calvinist ministers and Federalist politicians almost immediately began to try to shelter civil society from 48

Timothy Dwight, Travels in New-England and New-York, 4 vols. (London, 1823), 3:471–472; Sung Bok Kim, “The Limits of Politicization in the American Revolution: The Experience of Westchester County, New York,” Journal of American History 80, no. 3 (1993), 868–889, esp. 871, 882–883.

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v­iolence and disorder. Fearful of human nature, they condemned Shays’ Rebellion, political violence in America, and (later) the pernicious influence of the French Revolution. Some chroniclers even began to write violence and disorder out of the history of the American Revolution, in order to contrast it with the violence in France. Like Warren and Washington, they drew a veil over the Revolution’s climate of fear.49 All civilizations, even as they strive to construct a secure society, retain certain anxieties about threats from without and from within. They conjure new dangers to replace ancient superstitions. The Revolutionary War, more frightening than is generally appreciated, certainly left behind its own ruinous “landscape of fear.” Rather than succumb to the seductiveness of the Founders’ fearless rhetoric and take the traditional narrative of the Revolution at face value, students of history should listen to the ways in which people experienced the Revolutionary War, with all its horrors. The Revolutionary War stood at the crossroads of Americans’ lingering colonial fears and their new national anxieties.50 49

Alfred F. Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), 55–57, 64–66; William Manning, “The Key of Liberty: Showing the Causes Why a Free Government Has Always Failed and a Remedy against It” [1799], in Michael Merrill and Sean Wilentz, eds., The Key of Liberty: The Life and Democratic Writings of William Manning, “A Laborer,” 1747–1814 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 141; Rachel Hope Cleves, The Reign of Terror in America: Visions of Violence from Anti-Jacobinism to Antislavery (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2009), esp. 37–57; see also Robin, Fear. 50 Tuan, Landscapes of Fear.

Index A Brakel, Theodorus 190 A Brakel, Wilhelmus 190 Abenaki Confederacy 47 Accomack Co., Va. 167 Adams, Abigail 290 Adams, John 17, 291, 293, 298 Africans, African slaves 11, 18, 32, 36, 63, 66, 67, 68, 74, 92, 95, 96, 101, 103, 104, 105, 109, 161, 174, 176, 177, 207n15, 208–224, 232, 254, 255, 275, 279, 296, 302 Akan (African nation) 212 Akenson, Donald 181 Albany, N.Y. 182, 185, 186, 187, 199, 201, 213 Alès (Edict of, 1629) 226 Amazon (River) 97 Amboyna (massacre, 1623) 116, 128, 130, 131, 132 American Revolution 7n18, 17, 24, 183, 284–303 Amsterdam 28, 97, 132, 188, 192, 244 Andros, Sir Edmund 184, 193, 194, 198, 222n92, 231 Angola (West Africa) 95, 106 Antigua (Island) 71, 150, 156, 157, 164, 205n5, 209n21, 219n76 Arawak (Native nation) 250, 251, 253 Argall, Samuel 86 Arnold, David 257 Augusta, Ga. 276, 277 Ayscue, Sir George 157, 158 Baas-Castlemore, Jean Charles de 259 Bacon’s Rebellion (1675) 2, 14n31, 24, 222 Bahamas Islands 61 Bahia 95, 96, 98–101, 104, 105, 106, 108, 109, 112, 113 Bailyn, Bernard 7n18, 286 Baltic Sea 111 Bangladesh 257 Banishment 15, 25, 28, 43, 186, 218 Barbados 62, 65, 67, 68, 123, 148, 150, 156–158, 164, 172, 174, 177, 178, 209, 250 Barcklay, Robert 184 Barclay, David 289 Barreto, Francisco 110, 113

Baxter, Jarvis 186n14, 187 Behn, Aphra 63, 64n11 Bennett, Richard 153 Berkeley, Sir William 140, 141, 145, 148, 150–155 Bermuda Colony 64, 83, 87, 92, 150, 156, 157, 177 slaves in 92 Billings, Warren M. 140 Bishops’ Wars 141 Blagge, Benjamin 191 Blathwayt, William 135 Blondel de Jouvancourt, Charles-François 260 Bond, Edward L. 156 Bond, Richard E. 217 Bonrepos, David 200n71 Borick, Carl P. 300 Borstius, Jacobus 190 Boston, Ma. 17, 118, 120, 122, 126, 133, 134, 182, 184, 194, 198, 235, 292, 294, 295, 302 Bourgeoys, Marguerite 58 Boxer, Charles 94, 106 Braddick, Michael J. 28 Bradford, William 13 Brandenburg-Prussia 227, 230 Brazil 93–114, 117n5, 177, 208n18, 231, 249 Brazil (Dutch) 18, 22, 35, 36, 93–114 Breda (Peace of, 1667) 134 Brewster, Jonathan 119, 122 Bridger, Joseph 149 Broadnax, John 149 Brockholst, Anthony 186, 214 Bruce, Philip Alexander 139 Bunker Hill, Battle of 290 Butler, Jon 240 Butler, Nathaniel 72, 74 Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar Núñez 64 Cabral de Mello, Evaldo 94 Calabar, Domingos Fernandes 104 Calvert, Charles 172 Calvin, Jean 194n45, 238 Cambresis, Giraldus 162, 165 Cape Verde (Isands) 63

306 Carib (Native nation) 64n11, 250, 251, 253, 254 Carlo, Paula Wheeler 240 Carroll, Charles 27 Cartagena 72 Carter, John 148 Cattell, Benjamin 299 Cavalier, John 187 Cave, Alfred 117 Ceará (province) 110, 111 Cévennes 227, 228 Charles Co., Md. 175 Charles i (King of England) 23, 36, 137, 140, 144, 145, 149, 159, 192 Charles ii (King of England) 137, 141, 145, 148, 150, 152, 153, 155 Charles Town, S.C. 265, 271, 273, 283 Charlestown, Ma. 130, 290, 291 Cherokees 268, 269, 273, 274, 276 Chesapeake Bay (region) 22, 33, 36, 84, 161–181 Chickasaws 265n1, 269, 276 Claiborne, William 153, 175 Clarendon, Edward Hyde, first Earl of 150, 153 Claude, Jean 189 Clinton, Henry 300 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste 184, 250 Coligny, Gaspard de 231 Cologne 189 Columbus, Christopher 247–248 Concord, Ma. 289 Connecticut 10, 115, 119, 123, 126, 129, 131, 135, 136, 201 Connecticut River Valley 115, 118, 183 Conspiracy 6, 7, 10, 33, 83, 105, 188, 198–200, 214, 217, 273 Catholic conspiracy 82, 160, 194, 286, 287 Indian conspiracy 24, 83, 115–136 Slave conspiracy 18, 35, 177, 180, 204–225 Continental Congress 288, 291, 295, 297 Cooley, James 187 Coppier, Guillaume 243–245, 249 Cornbury, Henry 213 Cornwallis, Lord Charles 297, 298 Coromantees (African nation) 212, 217 Cotton, John 20 Coxe, Daniel 184

Index Craven, Wesley Frank 140 Creeks (Native nation) 265, 269, 271, 275–282 Crespin, Jean 226 Crèvecoeur, Hector St John 13 Cromwell, Henry 146 Cromwell, Oliver 129, 138, 139 Crouch, John 146 Crow, Steven D. 140 Cumberland Island 266 Curtis, Edmund 153 Daillé, Pierre 200n71, Dale, Edward 149 Dale, Sir Thomas 86, 87, 88 Danckaerts, Jaspar 197 Davidson, Philip 286 Davis, Mike 257–258 Davis, Thomas J. 210 Davis, Wayne 5 Dazille, Jean-Barthélemy 253 De Albuquerque, Mathias 102–104 d’Esnambuc, Pierre Belain 251 de Mascarenhas, Dom Fernão (Conde da Torre) 105 de Mendoca Furtado, Diogo 98 de Montmorency-Laval, François-Xavier 51, 55, 57 de Morais, Emanoel 104 de Saint-Augustin, Mother Catherine 40, 51, 53, 56, 57 de With, Admiral Witte Corneliszoon 110 Dearth, see famine Dechêne, Louise 39, 41, 46, 48, 51 Defoe, Daniel 63, 189 Delanoy, Peter 198 Delaware Bay (region) 71, 130 Delaware River 116, 129, 182, 183, 184, 192 Dellius, Godfredius 199, 200 Delumeau, Jean 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 25, 32, 38, 39, 40, 42, 49, 52, 56n96, 57 Digges, Edward 148 Disease 21, 26, 40, 46, 77, 82, 84, 93, 96, 105, 108, 246, 247, 248, 253, 258, 269, 273, 285 Epidemic 10, 12, 20n50, 27, 40, 46, 121, 258 Malaria 7 Plague 20n50, 26, 27, 38, 40, 149 Dominica 250

307

Index Dongan, Thomas 18, 184–188, 194, 214, 221n90, 223 Dowd, Gregory Evans 6, Drake, Sir Francis 78 Du Tertre, Jean-Baptiste 249–251, 254 Dubourdieu, Jean-Armand 239 Dumaitz de Goimpy, Gabriel 259 Dunn, Richard 68 Dutch Republic 13, 78, 79, 92, 94, 97, 103, 123, 132, 138, 186, 189, 192, 193, 199, 226, 231, 239 Dwight, Timothy 302 Earthquake 53, 60, 238, 255 Eastward Hoe! 80 East India Company (Dutch) 98 East India Company (English) 79, 86 East Indies 131 East Jersey. See New Jersey Edsall, Samuel 191, 198 Elizabeth i (Queen of England) 76 condition of realm 77–78 Elizabeth River 143 Ellis, Henry, governor of Georgia 278–279 Elmina 105 Ethiopia 257 Eustace, Nicole 1, 32 Exclusion Crisis (1679–81) 160 Fagel, Caspar 189 Falmouth, Me. 286, 291 Famine 6, 12, 16, 17, 22n53, 27, 32, 34, 38, 40, 46, 49–52, 59, 82, 88, 109, 136, 234, 243–264, 292 Ferguson, Robert 189 Ferguson, Thomas 299 Ferrar, John (Virginia Company officer) 89–90 Ferrar, Nicholas (Virginia Company officer) 89–90 Flatbush, N.Y. 200 Flushing (Long Island) 115, 120, 123, 127 Florida 39, 79, 82, 249, 265, 267, 268, 274, 275, 278, 280 Fontainebleau (Edict of, 1685) 226, 227 Foote, Thelma Wills 206, 223 Fort de Brune (Dutch Brazil) 93 Fort Ticonderoga 297

Fort Warwick 72, 73 Fothergill, John 289 Fox, Richard 149 France 20, 22, 39–59, 78, 111, 123, 134, 137, 138, 150, 184, 186, 188, 191, 215, 216, 224, 226–236, 239–242, 243, 249, 250, 255, 263, 303 Franciscans 96 Franconia 227 Franeker University 194n45 Frankfurt-am-Main 193, 232 Franklin, Benjamin 27, 289–291 Frederica (Fort) 265 French Revolution 284, 288, 303 La Grande Peur (the Great Fear) 5, 47, 128 Fronde (1648–53) 134, 150 Gabriel’s Rebellion (1800) 204 Gadsden, Christopher 299 Gage, Charles (Father) 188 Garden, Alexander 69 Hammond, Mainwaring 149 Geneva 194n45, 226, 229, 238, 240 Genovese, Eugene 206n11 Georgia 29, 181, 265, 268, 275, 276, 277, 278, 279, 280 Gilbert, Sir Humphrey 78 Gillespie, Raymond 166 Glen, James 268, 273, 274 Glorious Revolution 6, 17, 36, 160, 168, 214 Gloucester Conspiracy (1663) 206n8 Glover, John 126, 127 Glozier, Matthew 234 Godwyn, Morgan 177 Gold Coast 212 Gonsalves, José Antonio 94 Grandjean, Katherine 6, 16, 116n4, 136n80 Green, Tobias 6 Greene, Jack P. 293, 294 Grenada, 250 Guadeloupe 238, 250 Guiana 79, 254 Gulliver, Lemuel 66 Gustav-Adolf (King of Sweden) 22 Haecxs, Hendrik 93 Haefeli, Evan 28

308 Hakluyt, Rev. Richard 76–80 Hall, David D. 20n50, 136 Hamburg 230 Hancock, John 294 Handler, Jerome 67 Hardwick, Phillip, Lord Chancellor 29 Harrison, Henry (Father) 188 Harrison, Thomas 143, 145 Hartford (Treaty of, 1638) 117 (Treaty of, 1650) 120 Haynes, John 124 Heathcote, Caleb 220 Hempstead (Long Island) 123, 200n71 Henry iv, King of France, 226 Hesse-Kassel 227, 230 Hispaniola 247, 248, 250, 255n30, 261 Hiwasee, S.C. 271 Hobbes, Thomas 290 Hofstadter, Richard 7 Holy Roman Empire 226 Holyoke, Edward 290 Hopkins, Edward 130 Horsmanden, Daniel 225 Howe, William 294 Hudson Valley 118, 235 Hunter, Robert 204, 216, 219, 220, 221 Hurricanes 6, 69, 247, 255, 256, 261 Hutson, Richard 299 India 257 Ingoldsby, Richard 201 Innes, Alexander 196 Iopassus (Potomack sachem) 86 Iredell, James 287, 295, 296 Ireland 78, 137, 138, 150, 152, 161–166, 169, 172, 174, 175, 177, 180, 193, 227, 229, 230, 235, 236, 239–241, 245 Iroquois (Native nation) 47, 54, 56, 118, 301 Iroquois Confederacy 54 Iroquois Wars 54, 58 Isle of Wight 149 Isle of Wight Co., Va. 175 Itamaracá, 109, 110 Jacobs, Jaap 29 Jamaica 61, 68, 69n29, 70, 71, 209n21, 238 James i (King of England) 79, 87, 91

Index James (Duke of York) 160, 185, 214 as James ii, King of England 182, 183, 189, 192, 193, 214, 215, 222 Jamestown, R.I., 291 Jamestown, Va. 80–92, 141, 144–146 founding of 81 condition of colonists in 82–83 See also Powhatan Confederacy, Captain John Smith Jefferson, Thomas 289 Jesuits 17, 18, 40, 46, 53, 54, 56, 96, 98, 100, 104, 134n71, 147, 172, 188, 192, 194n47 Jews 29, 46, 95, 105–113, 208, 223 Johan Maurits (Prince, of Nassau) 105, 106, 107, 108, 112 Johnson, Alderman Robert 85–86 Jurieu, Pierre 191, 196, 200n71 Kalinago (Native nation) 64 Kennedy, Gregory 39 Kent Co., Md. 175 Kentucky 269 Kieft’s War (1643–1645) 116n4, 118, 125, 128, 131n61 Kilson, Marion D. 206 Kim, Sung Bok 302 King Philip’s War (1675–1676) 116, 117, 135, 136 King William’s War (1689–1697) 34, 215 Kirke, Sir David 157 Kittery, Me. 121 Koelman, Jacobus 191, 192, 196 Kruer, Matthew 2 La Rochelle (France) 42n21, 226, 232 Labadie, Jean de 192n36 Lancaster Co., Va. 170 Larkin, James 187 Laud, William 16, 27, 149 Laumoy, Jean Baptiste Joseph, Chevalier de 299 Laurens, John 299 Laval, Bishop see de Montmorency-Laval, François-Xavier Le Havre 244 Lee, Richard 148 Lee, Richard Henry 291 Lee, Wayne E. 297

Index Leeward Islands 164, 250n14 see also Antigua, Montserrat, Nevis Lefèbvre, Georges 5 Leisler, Jacob 192, 193, 195, 198, 199, 200n71, 201, 202, 215, 232 Leisler’s Rebellion (1689–1691) 36, 214, 222, 223, 232 Lepore, Jill 6 Leverett, John 120, 134n71 Leverton, Nicholas 62, 63 Lexington, Ma. 289 Lichthart, Admiral Jan Corneliszoon 106 Ligon, Richard 67 Lincoln, Benjamin 299 Lisbon 111 London 27, 61, 65, 77, 79, 80, 84, 87, 121, 130, 131, 132, 141, 145, 146, 151, 152, 154, 156, 157, 158, 168, 169n28, 215, 231, 233, 234, 239, 241, 265, 266, 279, 289 Louis xiv (King of France) 150, 186, 191, 192, 215, 226, 255 Louisiana 39, 48, 265, 269, 273 Lower Norfolk County, Va. 142, 175 Lyttleton, William Henry 265, 266 Madeira 95 Madrid 98 Manning, William 302 Maranhão (San Luis de, Island) 97, 106, 107, 112 Marie de l’Incarnation 53, 54, 55, 56 Marie Galante (Island) 250 Martinique 250, 259n40, 260, 261 Maryland 143, 156, 157, 160, 161, 167–180 Mason, Colonel George 148 Mason, John 119, 122 Massachusetts 10, 11, 16, 17, 20, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 118–133, 142, 143, 197, 204, 290, 302 Massue de Ruvigny, Henri 229 Mather, Increase 20, 22n54, 196 Maurits (Prince of Orange) 100 McElligott, Jason 146, 147 McIntosh, Lachlan 299 Megapolensis, Johannes 28, 29 Merritt, William 210 Miantonomi (Narragansett sachem) 117–119, see also Narragansetts Mifflin, Thomas 298

309 Milborne, Jacob 191, 202 Miller, John C. 286 Mirmand, Henri de 229 Mississippi River 39n4, 268, 269 Mittelberger, Gottlieb 13, 32, 36 Mobile 268 Mohawk River Valley 183 Mohegans (Native nation) 117, 118, 121, 128 see also Uncas Molesworth, Guy 149 Molesworth, Hender 70 Monmouth’s Rebellion (1685) 186 Monnereau, Élie 252, 262 Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de 292 Montserrat (Island) 66, 161, 164, 181 Moreau de Saint-Méry, Médéric-Louis-Élie 261 Morgan, Edmund S. 140 Morgan, Philip D. 33 Morton, Charles 62, 63 Morton, Robert 298, 301 Moultrie, William 298, 299 Münster, Germany 10, 11, 26 Mulcahy, Matthew 6 Munsees (Native nation) 118 Muscovy 138 Muslims, in Iberia 187 Mystic Fort 16, 117 Nansemond County, Va. 142, 143 Nantes (France) 260 Nantes, Edict of (1598) 186, revocation of 186, 226, 231, see Fontainebleau (Edict of) Naphy, William 5, 8 Narragansetts (Native nation) 117, 118, 124, 128 Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831) 204 Neau, Elias 212 Negroes, see Africans, African slaves Netherlands, see Dutch Republic Nevis (Island) 60, 70, 164, 173, 180 New Amsterdam 25n64, 28, 29, 207, 209, 212 New England 10, 13, 19, 20, 24, 25, 28, 45, 47, 48, 57, 92, 113, 115–136, 139, 143, 148, 183, 200, 201, 224, 225, 263 New England, Confederation of 116, 126, 135 New England, Dominion of 183, 184, 193, 214,

310 New France 22, 31, 38–59, 113, 213, 215, 217 New Hampshire 215 New Hanover, Ga. 278, 280, 281 New Harlem 213 New Haven Colony 10, 115–137 New Jersey 71n36, 182, 183, 184, 197, 221, 294, 301 New Orleans 268 New Paltz, N.Y. 231 New Spain 216 New Sweden 130n58 New Utrecht 200n71 New York City 6, 18, 184, 188, 191, 192, 194, 196, 199, 204–225, 240 New York (Colony) 17, 18, 24, 36, 135, 182–203, 204–225, 231, 232, 238, 240, 268, 301, 302 Newport, Captain Christopher 82 Newport, R.I. 293 Niantics (Native nation) 119–121, 126 see also Ninigret Nicholson, Sir Francis 176, 184, 194, 214 Nicolls, Richard 135 Ninigret (Niantic sachem) 119–128, 133, 134 Nombre de Dios 72 Norfolk, Va. 286, 291 Northampton County, Va. 142, 167 Norton, Mary Beth 6 Norwood, Henry 149 Ó Gráda, Cormac 258 O’Brien, Murrogh 163 Oates, Titus. See Popish Plot. Ogeechee River 275–277 Olinda (Brazil) 95, 101–103 Opechancanough (Powhatan sachem) 92n31 See also Powhatan Confederacy Oroonoko 63 Ovando, Nicolas de 248 Page, John 148 Paine, Thomas 292, 293, 298 Palatinate (Germany) 22n54, 214, 223, 227, 231 Paraíba (Cabedello fortress) 104, 109, 110 Paris 48n3, 52n21, 134n73, 138, 226, 262

Index Pawpaws (African nation) 212 Peach Tree War (1655) 125 Pennsylvania 13, 19, 31, 33, 34, 36, 79, 92, 183, 184, 200, 267, 268 Pequot (Native nation) 117, 118, 121, 124 Pequot War 6, 16, 113, 116, 117, 119, 122, 128, 136 Pernambuco 95–98, 101–112 Petty, Sir William 174 Philadelphia 30, 79, 297, 298 Philip ii (King of Spain) 77, 78 Philip iii (King of Spain) 82, 83n12 Phips, Sir William 215 Pilgrim settlers 92 Pintard, John Pitt, William Plymouth, Ma. 8n19, 21n52, 92, 126n39 Plowman, Matthew 187 Pocahontas 87–89 See also John Rolfe, Powhatan Confederacy Pocock, J.G.A. 286 Popery 12, 17, 18, 28, 36, 70, 77, 78, 160, 175, 180, 182, 189, 191, 194, 195, 196, 214 Popish Plot (1678) 160 Porto Bello 79 Portugal 94, 97, 107, 111, 112 Powhatan Confederacy: war between Jamestown and 81, 84, 86, 90, 113 Prévost, Major General Augustine 298, 299 Propitiatory rituals (Days of Fasting and Humiliation, Processions, Thanksgiving) 4, 12, 14n30, 15, 19–22, 64n13, 186 Providence Island 64 Pulaski, Casimir 299 Purchas, Rev. Samuel 90 Quakers 25, 34, 196, 298 Quebec Act (1774) 17, 180 Queens, N.Y. 197n61, 213 Ralegh, Sir Walter 76, 78–79 Ramsay, David 288, 293, 296, 299–300 Randall, James G. 205 Randolph, Edward 134n74, 135, 169, 184 Randolph, William 148 Recife (Brazil) 93–95, 101–113 Rensselaerswijck, N.Y. 184

Index Revolts (fiscal, peasant) 49, 78, 107, 112, 176, 234 Slave revolt 12, 14n31, 33, 37, 96, 181, 244, 246, 259, 274n29 of New York, 1712 204–206, 201, 212, 213 of the Camisards 228 Rich, Robert, earl of Warwick : and dispute of with earl of Southampton and Virginia Company 91 Richelieu, Jean-Armand du Plessis, Cardinal 226 Rio Grande do Norte (Captaincy) 104, 108–109, 110, 113 Roanoke (Lost Colony) 78–79 Roberts, Penny 5, 8 Rolfe, John: introduction of tobacco to Jamestown by 87 marriage of to Pocahontas 87 Roman Catholicism: fear of, see Richard Hakluyt see popery Royal African Company 68 Royster, Charles 292 Rumors, rumormongering 6, 7n17, 9, 10, 17, 19, 22–24, 33, 34, 37, 298 in Brazil 99, 105, 108, 112 in the Caribbean 69 in New England 22–23, 115–136 in New France 40, 41n18, 49, 54 in New York 183, 187, 198, 215 in the Southern Backcountry 29, 265–283 in the Chesapeake 24, 141, 142, 145, 168, 171, 172 Rush, Benjamin 288, 297 Russell, Bartholomew 187 Scarcity (food), see famine Saint-Christophe, Compagnie de 249 Saint-Domingue 252n19, 261, 263 St. Lawrence River 39, 41, 49, 54 Salem, Ma. 121, 290 Salem Witchcraft Crisis (1692) 6, 15n34, 225 Salisbury, Neal 116n4, 128 Salvador de Bahia 95, 98–101, 104–105, 108, 112 Sandys, Sir Edwin 88–91 relationship of with Pilgrim settlers 92

311 Sandys, George 141 São Luis de Maranhão 106, 107 São Tomé (Island) 95, 106 Savannah, Ga. 275, 276, 277, 283, 298 Saywood, Jonathan 288 Schalkwijk, Frans 94 Schenck, Roelof Martense 199 Schenectady, French and Indian attack on (1690) 48, 199, 200n71, 215 Schlesinger, Arthur M. 286 Scotland 138, 150, 152, 172, 226 Scott, Kenneth 206 Sedan (Academy of, France) 191 Sedgwick, Major Robert 71, 130, 133, 134n73 See, Scott 30 Seeley, J.R. 76, 81 Selijns, Dominie Henricus 188, 192, 199 Seminoles (Native nation) 269 Sen, Amartya 257 Seneca (Native nation) 301 Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de 248 Settily River 265, 272 Seven Years War (1756–1763, in America, French and Indian War, 1754–1763) 37, 114, 267, 278 Sewall, Jonathan 289–290 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, first Earl of 231 Shakespeare, William 64, 69 Shaw, Jenny 179 Shawnees (Native nation) 269 Shays’ Rebellion (1786) 303 Silver, Peter 6, 14, 33 Slave insurrections, see revolt Slave revolt, see revolt Sloughter, Henry 202 Smythe, Sir Thomas 86, 89 Smith, Captain John 82 accounts of Jamestown of 84–85 visit of with Pocahontas and John Rolfe 87 Somers Island Company 157 Somerset Co., Md. 160, 169 South Africa 227 Southeastern Backcountry 6, 13, 35, 36, 265–283 Spain 28, 77–79, 94, 97, 98, 138, 215, 216, 224, 247, 265

312 Spenser, Edmund 163 St. Bartholomew’s Massacre (1572) 226 St. Domingo 238 St. Augustine 265, 268, 274, 275 St. Christopher (Island) 60, 70, 176n54, 243, 244, 249, 250, 251 Stamford (New Haven) 125 Stanton, Thomas 119, 123, 127 Stanwood, Owen 6, 135 Stapleton, Sir William 70 Starvation, see famine Staten Island 71n36, 183, 202 Stevens, Philip 149 Stiles, Ezra 293 Stono Rebellion (1739) 204 Stuyvesant, Petrus 29, 124, 128, 132, 133 Suffolk Co., N.Y. 182, 197n61 Sugar 61, 68, 92–98, 104–113, 164, 172, 250–254, 262, 264 Sullivan, John 301 Surinam 62n6, 68 Susquehannocks (Native nation) 34 Susquehannock War (1675), see Bacon’s Rebellion Sweden 22 Switzerland 226, 229, 231 Taino (Native nation) 247–248 Talbot Co., Va. 175 Tapuya/Tarairius (Native nation) 96–97, 106, 108, 109, 111, 113 Teixeira, Marcos 99, 100 Telles da Silva, Antonio 108, 109 Tellico, S.C. 271 Tennessee 269 Thirty Years War (1618–1648) 122, 222, 284 Tobago (Island) 62, 66 Treat, Robert 201 Treymayne, Edmund 163 Trujillo (port) 72 Tuan, Yi-fu 3, 8, 9, 14, 15n34, 32, 285n4 Tupi/Potiguar/Tobajara (Native nation) 96, 109, 111 Ulster Co., N.Y. 231 Ulster Plantation (Ireland) 180, 230 Uncas (Mohegan sachem) 116n4, 117–125 Underhill, John 115, 131n61

Index Vagabonds 38, 40, 44, 47, 233 Van der Wall, Ernestine 199 Van Dorth, Colonel Johan 100 Van Rensselaer, Kiliaen 187 Van Rensselaer, Maria 184 Van Rensselaer, Nicholas 185 Van Zuren, Casparus 186 Varick, Rudolphus 200 Vaughan, Alden 134n75, 135 Verdonck, Adriaen 103 Vermuyden, Cornelius 116 Vesey, Denmark 204 Vieira, Antonio 98, 99, 100 Virginia 2, 18, 23, 24, 69, 76–92, 113, 137–159, 160, 161, 168, 169, 170, 173, 175–180, 204, 206n8, 222, 267, 268, 286, 291 population of 91 slaves in 92 See also Jamestown, Captain John Smith, Virginia Company Virginia Company: defenses of 85–86 revitalization of 87–90 See also Alderman Robert Johnson, John Ferrar, Nicholas Ferrar, Sir Edwin Sandys, Sir Thomas Smythe, Robert Rich, earl of Warwick Vivarais 228 Wahunsonacock (Powhatan sachem) 86, 90 Wales 162, 226 Walloons 191, 234 Wampum 118, 124, 128 Wappinger (Native nation) 125 War of Spanish Succession (1702–1713) 260 Warner, Sir Thomas 60 Warren, Mercy Otis 284, 301, 303 Washington, George 289, 294, 295, 300, 301, 303 Wentworth, Sir Thomas 163 Wertenbaker, Thomas J. 139, 141 West India Company (Dutch) 29, 93, 98, 132, 208, 214 West Jersey. See New Jersey Westmoreland Co., Va. 206n8 Westoes (Native nation) 67 Wildman, John 193 William iii (King of England) 182, 189, 202, 234, 237

313

Index Williams, Roger 16, 26, 127 Williamsburg 206n8 Willoughby of Parham, Lord Francis 67, 158 Winthrop, Fitz-John 201 Winthrop, John 27 Winthrop, John Jr. 122, 133, 135 Winthrop, Stephen 28 Witchcraft 6, 15n34, 33, 41–44, 55–57, 212, 225 Wood, Gordon 268 Wriothesley, Thomas, earl of Southampton 88

See John Ferrar, Nicholas Ferrar, Sir Edwin Sandys, Robert Rich, earl of Warwick Wurttemberg 227 Wyatt, Sir Francis 141 Wyoming Massacre (1778) 301 Yamacraws (Native nation) 269 Yamasee War (1715–1717) 269 Zeeland 111, 191, 249 Zuckerman, Michael 7