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Migration

        England's Civil War had probably occasioned Nicholas's removal to America, be it to escape the Roundheads or to seize an opportunity offered by the exiled monarch.  He had a tough time of it on the Corotoman, and died in his early forties. His wife survived him by no more than three years, as his elder son was appointed in March of 1671/2 as administrator of Mary's estate.  This was George.  He expanded his father's holdings along the Corotoman and served as Justice in Lancaster County during the 1680s and '90s. George married the daughter of a Captain John Rogers, and had three children.

    This first generation in the New World had lived not entirely without luxury.  Crowe (p. 6) tells us that the younger son played the violin.  This was Nicholas (jr.).  As generations after him long continued to name a son Nicholas, so as to minimize confusion I shall distinguish them by region.  Let us call this first one to move up to Baltimore County, Maryland, not Nicholas jr., but

Nicholas of Baltimore.

      This Nicholas (ca. 1657-1729) registered his own mark for cattle and hogs while he was still a ten-year-old in Lancaster County, Virginia.  After the death of his father (ca.1669) and mother (ca. 1672), it is recorded that "Nicholas Haile is gone away from his brother George Haile to his brother-in-law Henry King and estate to go to said King."  The fifteen-year-old's sister had married Henry King in the summer of 1668.  Crowe's report that they wed in Augusta County (p. 5) is puzzling, since colonial settlement had scarcely yet reached beyond the tidewater.  Some some eighty years later this boy's son and grandson, as well as numerous nieces and nephews, did in fact settle in that wilderness region.   It seems likely that Crowe's report, coming down to us through those descendants,may place the family's move too early.  Even in the Tidewater, these were still turbulent times.

        Nicholas turned eighteen in the year of the comet.  A comet was recognized immediately as ominous, and this one was followed first by an unprecedented infestation of pigeons, then by renewed Indian attacks.  In Virginia, Governor William Berkeley insisted on careful diplomacy with the Indians.  He vetoed any except passive resistance to their onslaughts.  For example, he built stockades on the larger plantations.  According to some, spending tax money in this way constituted ineffectual protection of the wealthy, paid for by the labor of the poor. A young, newly arrived aristocratic firebrand, Nathaniel Bacon, claimed the governor was coddling the Indians to save his own investments in fur trading.  Many agreed with Bacon.  The young man roused defiant, highly successful excursions against the Indians, and quickly became as immensely popular among the common people as he was hated by the vindictive, extremely unpopular old Governor Berkeley.  Nathaniel Bacon's early death from disease and exposure in October, 1676, may be all that saved him from hanging.  Historians (who like to choose sides) are divided about "Bacon's Rebellion."  Some of them call it a proper Revolution, and praise his Long Assembly of 1675 for anticipating most of the measures at last taken by the Continental Congress a century later; other historians deny Bacon credit for that, and emphasize the prudence of old Governor Berkeley.  In any case, the rapidity with which Bacon was able to raise his rabble army, the sheer size of it, and its consistent successes up until Bacon's death cast a stark light on what desperate conditions still prevailed along the James River at the end of the century.

    At the time Bacon took up his battles, Nicholas was scarcely ten years younger than he.  One naturally wonders what such an age difference might have meant to young men in those days.  Both Nicholas and Nathaniel were presumably royalists.  One might guess that the settlers up on the Corotoman were as enthusiastic about the dashing, courageous, and brilliant Bacon as were the impoverished rebels on the James River.  In addition, if Nicholas was still engaged in tobacco farming he surely shared some of Bacon's grievances against English policy as interpreted and applied by the governor.  Actually, we do not even know that Nicholas was still in Virginia in 1675.  At the time of "Bacon's Rebellion" he may have still been living with his sister and her husband, Henry King.  If he had already removed to -Maryland, he found  similar unrest there.  A Complaint from Heaven with a Huy and Crye and a Petition out of Virginia and Maryland appeared there in 1676.  This list of grievances, like Bacon's down in Virginia, constituted a petition to the King of England, begging for royal protection against local abuses.
Maryland




          The map is taken from A Character of the Province of Maryland by George Alsop, one of those scoundrels who had been sent to Maryland as punishment.  After serving his four years' sentence, Alsop promptly returned to England.  Nevertheless, he wrote in lavish praise of Maryland, and his book was published as propaganda in 1666 by the Calverts, whose grandsire had received the royal grant to Maryland.

                Crowe notes that Nicholas had married Frances Garrett, daughter of Dennis Garrett and Barbara Stone Garrett, then goes on to discuss the prominent Stone family (pp. 10-13), connected with the Calverts (the Lords Baltimore).  This excellent marriage might indicate that Nicholas arrived in Maryland at a marriageable time of life (that is to say, still in the 1670s), but the earliest document for his presence is in tax records for 1690.  His move from Virginia was perhaps occasioned by marriage, not by his own but more likely the second marriage of his sister, Mary.  We have already seen how Nicholas had gone to live with Mary and Henry King after the death of his parents, bringing along his share in the estate (Lancaster Court records, 12 Nov. 1672).  This estate again turns up in court ten years later, after Mary, now widowed, marries a Corotoman wheelwright named Charles Merryman.  Charles and Mary subsequently removed to Maryland.  I cannot say whether they were following Nicholas, or whether he accompanied them there.  In any case, the brothers-in-law entered into a long enduring partnership.  This family relationship continued into the next generations.  A son of Charles and Mary married Jane Long.  Jane's sister Ann married Nicholas's son (a nephew of Charles and Mary whom I treat below as Nicholas of Bedford).   Whatever the exact date of the family's arrival in Maryland, the site of its future busy port was still idyllic.


      Crowe reports (p. 13) that Nicholas and his wife Frances had a "'plantation dwelling' known as Part of Merryman's Lot and Haile’s Addition."  She identifies the location as (in 1978) the site of the President's home at Johns Hopkins University.  Around 1700, colonial "plantation" need have meant no more than its literal "planting."  Nicholas and Frances's home may have been of hewn logs, but the new century did see some very respectable dwellings.  Their house may have had two stories, four rooms above and below, perhaps a fireplace in each, but no closets and certainly no water closet.  Frances's family (Garretts and Stones) were well-to-do, so if Nicholas and Frances had a "mansion" it would have several outbuildings for tools, feed, perhaps a kitchen, and one or more privies.   Alsop's description of Maryland, published to encourage Englishmen to immigrate, is written from the point of view of a bonded laborer on just such a tobacco producing farm.  Alsop claims that though field labor is hard, the master's son works by the servants' side.


            At about this time, Negroes began to appear as "indentured," and before long there were laws regulating their permanently indentured status.  As to the slaves now invariably mentioned in the Maryland wills, I lived at a time which still forbade equanimity in handling the issue. We do well to repeat that bound servitude--mostly white--was fundamental to the economy of colonial Virginia, where labor was crucial and always at a premium.  Cotton, on the other hand, had not yet become the profitable crop whose vast labor requirements were to make black slavery so widespread--and so ugly.  Bondage  in seventeenth-century Maryland may have been radically different from toil in nineteenth-century cotton fields, but slavery does by now constitute a distinctive feature of colonial society from New England to the Carolinas.  The Negroes who begin to show up in wills toward the end of the 17th century may appear something like pets in the household, usually assigned to a particular family member.  Rarely, a Negro close to the testator is set free if means can be provided to care for him.

        It has in any case become entirely proper to take offense at the past.  A most highly respected book on Virginia history, Edmund S. Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom (1975), judges early America in the light of twentieth-century Civil Rights, then  devotes many pages to upbraiding the colonials for their "racism," "race hatred," etc.  Thus the historian (born in Minnesota, 1916) draws on concepts not yet formulated in his own school days and certainly not verbalized until his young manhood, in order to interpret a culture which emerged over 300 years earlier and which had disappeared a century before his writing.  Certainly none would quarrel with Morgan's conclusion that Thomas Jefferson's thinking (as representative of America's founders) is "inconsistent" with his twentieth-century premises.

        Nicholas of Baltimore, born during Cromwell's Protectorate, lived to see the Restoration, then the death of Charles II, the coronation of James II, and the Glorious Revolution followed by the benign rule of William and Mary.  Nicholas lived on, to see the last of the Stuarts, Queen Anne, and before he died the Hanoverian George I had ascended to the throne of England.  Nicholas's will, printed in Crowe, has become popular for the light it sheds on the property of a typical first generation Maryland settler.

        Maryland from time to time issued "proclamation" currency (which was heavily discounted), but actually America did not yet have a cash economy.  Wealth consisted in one's station, in real estate, and in one's personal property, including servants.  Nicholas left a respectable, but by no means a large estate:  a few hundred acres, some livestock, and apparently three Negroes, whom he calls "old" even while making provision for any children the "Negro women" might yet bear.  I presume that at his advanced age the testator was resident with one of the seven children named in the will.  Crowe assembles two or three Haile wills from these years, for the light they shed on the life of the times.  She also includes some wills from families who intermarried with the Haile children--the Merrymans, Longs, Chenowiths, e.g., were close.


        About Nicholas on the Corotoman and the son who established himself in Baltimore County I have been able to say little beyond alluding to the larger historical circumstances to which they were responding.  At last

 Nicholas of Bedford County, Va.  (ca. 1700-1760),

 the third of his family in America, emerges as a more fully rounded personality.  Unsurprisingly, that makes his life only more enigmatic.  He was born into an established Baltimore County family (at present-day Towson).  He made a good marriage to Ann Long on Christmas Day in 1723, and was a main contributor to St. Paul's Episcopal Church.  Today it is an imposing edifice, said still to contain a plaque naming Nicholas as a contributor (Crowe, p. 14).  It replaced this much more modest building:


         As best I can understand Crowe, this edifice may mark the site of Nicholas's "Chapel of Ease," a contemporary designation for "church."  While Crowe seems to have accumulated extensive notes on this Nicholas (pp. 13-15), she does not speculate why the scion of a prosperous merchant planter in his forties would with his entire family forsake a comfortable tidewater home and move to a dangerous frontier.  First, Nicholas traveled a hundred miles up the Delaware River to join the Quaker settlement in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.  Then together with others from Bucks County and from his home in Baltimore County, the family migrated three hundred miles down the Blue Ridge into Virginia.  What kind of man, distinguished in his middle years for support of the establishment religion, to which he made contributions beyond the compulsory taxes, would seek out the center of a denomination despised by the better sort of his day?  Part of the answer may arise from the date of his birth.  Men born at the turn of the century produced one of America's great spiritual movements.
The Great Awakening
       Religion engages our most profound emotions, and has inspired mankind's largest, most affluent institutions.  The Roman Church in old Europe was a parade example, but by the time Nicholas came to America, some of the devout had reduced the old priesthood and bureaucracy.  Christian congregations across Europe from Holland to Denmark to Hungary claimed an intimacy with God often characterized by song.  The king of England, however, still claimed dominance over a priesthood, and the clergy still interceded between God and man.  Like the Church of Rome, the Church of England still prescribed detailed particulars for being a Christian. This was the institution which colonists brought to Virginia, and which Nicholas continued to support in Baltimore.  Jonathan Edwards's famous pulpit in Boston was also Church of England.  But the establishment church was not to prevail in America in the long run.

        Born in the same year as Jonathan Edwards , and like him christened in the Church of England, John Wesley (1703-1791) was sent to missionary work in Savannah, Georgia.  During the long sea voyage, he and his younger brother Charles were captivated by the songs of Moravian Hussites, fellow passengers.  Congregational singing had been introduced by reformers like Jan Hus and Martin Luther, but was not yet a practice in the old church.  Charles began to compose such profoundly emotional hymns as "Jesus Lover of my Soul," "Depth of Mercy," "Hark the Herald Angels Sing," and many others.  The Wesley "Method" of  personal religion inspired staid high-church congregations.  Their hymns  spread well beyond any church.  John Wesley was a year younger than Nicholas.    This was a generation which produced dissenters in England.  Many were arriving in the port at Baltimore, and Puritans were settling in nearby Annapolis.  Among the newcomers to to Baltimore County were members of the Society of Friends, derisively called Quakers because, for them, the intimate presence of Christ went beyond the church and saturated everyday affairs.  William Penn's son, who made the Bucks County estate in Pennsylvania into a center of Quakerism, was born in the same year as Nicholas, 1702.

       What was religion to these people?  The Haile family's move north to Pennsylvania, and then back south onto the Blue Ridge was a striking manifestation of the rôle religion had taken in their lives.  When their children's generation moved yet farther on into the Watauga region at least two of the boys founded Baptist churches there.  Clearly, religiosity had become a part of life which Nicholas was passing on to his family.  Religion  imbued individual existence with meaning beyond the daily bread.  Up until now, the older church had ordered their lives for them by means of seven sacraments, each a ritual sanctifying a particular station or passage through the world. Church membership comprised numerous additional offices as well, the correct performance of which assured that one was following a sanctified path.  When the Reformer Martin Luther (1483-1545) famously reduced the number of sacraments, allowing only two of these life defining ceremonies to stand, that radically transformed the Sunday service.  But the change was more fundamental.  Luther had shifted responsibility for the Christian life away from the institution, and onto to the shoulders of each individual.

       But of course the question "what was religion to these people" can take various answers.  To a Nicholas in Baltimore, religion was at least in part affiliation with an institution.  The people got together to build an impressive edifice with which they could associate themselves, identify themselves.  They could draw self esteem from the institution, and their contribution to it.  The religion of Nicholas in the mountains of Virginia or in the Tennessee backwoods might very well despise that same institution and be proud of his own independence from it.  In this sense, the Church of England may be analagous to the King of England.  Independence of either could be won only by long and difficult inner struggle.
 Here is an overview of Nicholas's route from the mouth of the Delaware River up to Bucks County in Pennsylvania and then back down the Blue Ridge:  




The map is taken from Robert Ramsey (Carolina Cradle.  Settlement of the Northwest Carolina Frontier 1747-1762 [1964]), who describes

 a broad, fertile, grassy unsettled belt stretching from the Delaware westward and southward along both sides of the Blue Ridge and into the Yadkin-Catawba basin of western North Carolina.  John Lederer, in August, 1670, passed through Manassas Gap in the Blue Ridge and "descended into broad savannas, flowery meads, where herds of red deer were feeding.  The grass which sprang from the limestone soil was so high they could tie it across their saddles.  Since the Indians burned their land over every autumn to make their game preserve, it was only lightly wooded with occasional groves of oak or maple"

This southern expanse would draw many a Virginia family to cross the Appalachians.

       When Nicholas's daughter Ann (1732-69) married a Bucks County carpenter, the record names Nicholas as now a resident of that Pennsylvania district.  Ann's new husband was named after his English grandfather, William Mead.  The Reverend Mead is said to have been a prominent  high churchman in England back in the days when Nicholas's grandfather had come to the Corotoman. Mead had been ejected from the clergy for his very liberal opinions, and imprisoned.  His children were among the Quakers who settled Bucks County.  Now their new destination was another Quaker settlement in  Lunenberg County, Virginia.  The Hailes came along.  Nicholas, in his youth a pillar in the Church of England, had now become a Quaker.  So long as he and his family had remained in Baltimore County they were required to support the Church of England, and also to take communion in the Church of England.  This was not the law in Pennsylvania, and the law may not have been observed out on the Virginia frontier.  In any case, the marriage between Ann Haile and young William Mead shows that the the two families were close.

         But religion need not be the only reason for Nicholas's move.  Exhaustion of the tidewater soil by tobacco farming had stirred general migration toward the piedmont.  At the same time, vast land grants to families like the Carters, the Byrds, etc., increased the number and size of plantations.  Demand for labor drew large-scale immigration to Maryland and introduced extensive use of slaves, a practice to which the Quakers objected.  Nicholas had begun to explore overseas trade in tobacco, and had taken on as partner a fellow member of St. Paul's Church who was about his own age, Matthew Talbot, born 1699.  Family tradition suggests that Haile and Talbot took some heavy losses. Many ships were lost at seain these years; many were victims of piracy. This era of hostility between France and England witnessed notorious privateering on the high seas.

        Some of the Baltimore Merrymans joined he Hailes, the Talbots, and the Meads in Virginia.  These became typical Virginia families of the eighteenth century.  The Hailes had come to the New World as tobacco growers, the Meads as high church dissenters.  They were a literate, pious people whose ties to one another had become stronger than their bonds to England or even to the Church of England. They continued for two or three more generations to look back on Baltimore County as home, but they had never really been urban people, and Baltimore was now growing into a population center.   Maryland's capitol, Annapolis, was still its major settlement, but Baltimore Town was experiencing some urbanization already before the  time of American Independence.



   As a burgeoning port, it was the first stop for refugees from the oppressive slums in England.  Workers could find quick employment in its iron foundry (George Washington's father owned an interest).  The liberal policy of the Calverts had made Maryland attractive to zealots persecuted in England, the Quakers being just one example.

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