TIDEWATER TO DUSTBOWL
INTRODUCTION
Why Ask?
On
gravestones and in court houses genealogists trace the records as
meticulously as
historians follow received opinion. This essay, between history
and
genealogy, is a little attempt
to trace the sufferings and
accomplishments of a few individuals from the 17th to the 20th
century. Urbane academicians often scold the early Virginians for
"excessive individualism," "expansionism," even "racism." My hope
would just be to learn what I can from those rural travailers through
Virginia,
Maryland, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, and points west.
I am not suggesting that our own present can ever
understand times past. The fabled mirror of history casts a
deceptive reflection. If a physical mirror on the wall reverses
foreground and background, right and left, history's mirror contains
more serious distortions, and more subtle ones as well. All the
figures I
behold in my mirror seem headed in my direction. I not only
approve
their doing so, I presume that they know where they are going.
The reflecting surface is fixed in my own present moment.
The more I allow it to be informed by the banalities of my day, the
less I am able to make out past lives as they were lived. I
always have to remind myself that those who appear to be looking right
at me, are people gazing out into the unknown.
Their own mirror was as deceptive as
mine. Making the best of their passing moment, they sometimes
pursued goals which had already become unrealistic. They lived by
understandings out of their own past. Anything I say today is
based
on assumptions quite different from theirs, and is often in conflict
with
what they believed. Sometimes I try to use their language, as if
in discourse with them. Mostly I write in such a way as to be
understood by my contemporaries. I do try to eschew the politic
language of academic history writers, who trim their vocabulary,
even revise their chronological apparatus, to popular dictate. The
dilemma in points of view between the historian and his subject matter
constitutes a huge impediment--which some historians and readers do not
even wish to surmount. Let us see if we can follow the trials of
one family, let us try to sympathize with their untimely views and
obsolete understandings.
The world must supply us our material
for
thought. When we try to understand these things around us, we
wonder
how they came to be there. We try to understand, because it
helps us to think straight. And thinking straight is what we most
desire.
PRÉCIS
We are a typical American family,
in our own way. America is popularly referred to as a great
melting pot, where the volume of great migrations increased with the
passage of time until at last "inclusiveness" and "tolerance" became
watchwords in our great nation. The Hailes were a small part of
it, yet all the while remaining a strictly inbred line. Their
earlier home in the south of England, populated for centuries by West
Saxons, had been little affected by incursions from the north and
east. Now as colonists in Virginia and Maryland, they still kept
to
themselves during the 17th and 18th centuries. At last (in the
ninth American generation) there came a marriage out in Texas with
Laura Ann Kirk, a freckle-faced girl of Scots blood. One seeks in
vain for a German, Scandinavian, much less an Eastern European or
Mediterranean name. There are many, many families like this one,
set off from 21st-century multicultural America, yet offering the
easily discernible tracer over the last four hundred years of the
expanding American population.
Four hundred years is not a very
long time in human history, which we count in the tens of thousands of
years. "Years" appears to be too
small a measure. If I try to formulate modern times in more
comprehensible terms, I might say that our first American ancestor came
to Virginia about a dozen generations ago. Before that, his
family had probably lived among close kin in England for a dozen
generations after the island had been overrun by the Normans. But
even those Normans were cousins. The Venerable Bede, who wrote
our
best early history, records that the Angles and Saxons had been invited
to come to Britain as warriors. They found it so fertile that
they abandoned their homeland north of the Weser River, in present-day
Schleswig-Holstein. That migration had taken place about a dozen
generations before the Normans invaded England. In short, peering
back into the fog
of northern Europe, one
can discern a fairly continuous
genetic line of maybe
three dozen generations. Genetic kinship, of course, becomes
imponderably remote in much less than one dozen generations.
Still, blood is thicker than water.
After the Hailes had arrived in Virginia in the early seventeenth
century, they did not remain settled for long. They had found
cause to leave England, and they were not very complacent in America,
either. They seem seldom to have regarded themselves as belonging
to the solid, satisfied citizenry, however well they might have been
faring. Even at moments of respectability, even perhaps
prominence in their community, not only the children but also the
parents were apt to up and move away. One can speculate why that
was so. Exhaustion of the soil by tobacco was an early cause for
moving on. The vast royal grants made to families like the
Carters, the Byrds, Fairfaxes, Culpeppers, Beverleys may have hastened
the smaller planters' move upriver. Acquisitiveness certainly
played its rôle in migration down the Blue Ridge.
Devastation
and despair, perhaps even their own misdeeds, drove some of us out of
Tennessee. Certain early travelers thought migration
characteristic of the New World. Perhaps it was characteristic of
our ancient forebears.
Use of the word "home" for our grandparents'
residence probably goes back a long way. When hostilities broke
out in the 1770s, the Tennessee boys returned "home" to Baltimore in
order to enlist in the Continental Army. That was where their own
parents and grandparents, as well as their great-grandmother, a
Garrett, had been born. Actually, some of their grandparents had
already spent their mature years on the Virginia and Tennessee
frontiers. Even so, the family would never again reside in
one place as long as they had in Baltimore County.
This unsettled quality of life may have
contributed to what modern historians generalize as "individualism."
Not only was each subsequent generation likely to move on,
but distance from home required young people ever to start their
family afresh. Boys in their teens might set out on their
own. Girls did not enter into marriages which had been arranged
by their parents. Where a modern European couple might today feel
burdened by family traditions, Americans are more likely to seek out a
tradition, or even to try to establish a tradition for their own
children. Whether it was good for the individual thus always to
have to "start from scratch" is open to discussion. It was
typical of my family so long as they were attached to the land, that
is, until into the twentieth century.
The first of our American
forebears established himself in Virginia; his elder son continued
there. The younger moved to Maryland, lived long and produced
a large family. Some of his children were ready to forsake the
narrow tidewater for the piedmont. They would strike out not just
individually, but as a tribe--brothers, sisters, uncles, cousins, still
toting heirlooms from England as they moved out of Baltimore County
first to the Blue Ridge, then in the very next generation to the
frontier of North Carolina. Here they again braved the gloom of
the "forest primæval" and contended with the increasingly hostile
natives.
Young men served in militias to protect their
families, but also to fend off the British monarchy in the 1770s and
again in 1813. With the help of resulting bounty lands, they took
up "overmountain" settlement beyond the Appalachians. They were
by no means the first to be drawn on by ebullient American
expansionism. Whether the "Western Waters" (drained by the Ohio
and Mississippi) were to be governed by Spain or France remained long
uncertain. Aaron Burr, Sam Houston, and
others envisaged
founding new
dominions to the south and west, ambitions no doubt reflected in the
broader populace. People like the Hailes in the Watauga settlement
were among the
first to reject the English crown, and they even declined inclusion in
the
new republic formed in Philadelphia. Some of the family
continued
to drive the Indians before them as they pressed on westward, but our
immediate forebear continued tobacco farming and merchant business on
the Cumberland. One of his sons set up a trading establishment
there, others became lawyers, preachers, smiths, land
speculators. A peaceful half century was shattered by the
War. The storekeeper was seized for supplying Rebel troops, and
died in political prison. His son, among the boys resisting the
invasion, was also imprisoned. When they paroled him, he came out
to Texas. It was his children who at last had to adapt to a new
industrial age, something the family had long resisted.
I
BEGINNINGS IN
VIRGINIA AND MARYLAND
Genealogists turn up the first
Hailes in the Jamestown settlement, because that is what the
genealogists are looking for. Maude Crowe believed she had found
such records, and many other people copied them out of Crowe's book,
Descendants from First Families of
Maryland and Virginia (1978).
I doubt that my family has any direct
forebear in Jamestown*, but
Jamestown's wretched experience at the
beginning of the seventeenth century is relevant in any case. It
was closely evaluated by the more successful "adventurers" a few years
later, both those who came up the Virginia rivers as well as by the
religious
dissidents who ascended the Delaware and came back down out of
Pennsylvania. And of course the
Jamestown survivors intermarried among the rest of the Virginia
population.
*Therefore, if
you would like to skip
my account of James River Hailes, and go straight to the first
certain American Haile, just click here.
England and America, ca. 1600
The reign of Elizabeth I
(1533-1603) was distinguished by energy, learning, independence of
Europe, and flamboyant personalities. Among the latter, Sir
Walter Raleigh continued the effort initiated by his brother to
establish a colony on Roanoke Island in 1585. So far as is
known, the 117 men, women and children Raleigh left had all perished
before the next ship's call, in 1591. But the stretch of land
which he named Virginia, after his queen, was now established as part
of her estate. In that feudal world, the monarch would enfeof her
royal domain to loyal subjects. They exercised her absolute
authority abroad as at home.
Elizabeth was a popular ruler,
both among her people and in her own understanding of
sovereignty. She was less typical of absolutist Europe than was
her successor, James I (1566-1625), one of the strongest advocates of
the divine right of kings. This is the James who commissioned the
Authorized Bible that bears his name, as does the river where in 1606
he granted the Virginia Company a charter for settlements.
Jamestown was established on the James River in the subsequent
year. These plantations were nearly as disastrous as the Roanoke
attempt had been. Three quarters of all who shipped out of
England for Virginia over the next fourteen years became victims of
starvation, disease, and Indian depredations--or were lost at
sea. Yet conditions in England were such that incentive to
emigrate remained strong. Although thousands of emigrants had
perished by 1620, hundreds, even thousands more were coming every
year. Most of them came as indentured servants, but many were
refugees from the severe punishments under English law.
The Virginia Company was predicated on profit.
Colonists sent back lumber products, slate, indigo, and eventually
ores. They were encouraged to cultivate silk. Europe
obtained this cherished material from China, and the greatest hope for
Virginia lay in the expectation that China would be found not too far
beyond the Appalachians. The most immediate profit came from a
plant cultivated by the Indians and immediately beloved throughout
Europe, tobacco. King James not only abominated it but wrote his
most eloquent tract against its use. Children are still delighted
by the account of how a faithful servant of Sir Walter Raleigh, upon
glancing at a couch whence smoke was arising, dashed a bucket of water
over his lordship.
Conditions in Jamestown were brutal and primitive,
and the Virginia Company unprofitable. Nonetheless, in 1619 eight
ships arrived with over 1,200 new settlers, this time including
marriageable girls. Among the indentured servants sent in this
year were the first Negroes (slavery laws did not yet exist). In
1622, the recently friendly Indians coordinated a surprise attack
whereby hundreds of colonists up and down the river were massacred at
the same moment. This calamity was followed in 1623 by an
epidemic of the plague. The failed Virginia Company was dissolved
in 1625. Virginia was made a royal colony.
James's successor, Charles I
(1609-1649), re-appointed Governor Francis Wyatt, who had come to
Virginia in 1620 on the ship Sup[p]ly.
Among Wyatt's
retinue was a 13-year-old boy named George Hall or George
Hale. The Haile genealogist Maude Crowe (p. 1) identifies this
passenger with the name George Haile on a document of sale for 300
acres up in Northumberland County, some thirty-odd years later .
Crowe mentions no other connection with the boy on board the
Supply. Actually, Crowe
must have overlooked Thomas Haile, also a
"servant" in Jamestown. In the 1624 / 25 Jamestown Muster we
find: George Hale / Hall in the James Citty Hundred, age 13 when
he arrived on the Supply in
1620, and Thomas Haile in the West &
Sherley Hundred, age 20 when he arrived on the George in 1623.
This is the year in which Governor Wyatt's wife came to Virginia on the
Abigail, the boat suspected of
bringing the plague of 1623.
Genealogists long had the diligence of Maude Crowe
to thank for almost all their Haile records. Popular genealogy
web sites continue to follow Crowe, often without knowing it.
They never volunteer Crowe any credit, but sometimes they give it to
her obliquely, as when they uncritically advance Crowe's dubious guess
about George as if it were a fact, yet remain silent about Thomas (as
Crowe is).
One such web site points to a William Haile
(1568-1634) in Hertfordshire (Kings Warden), married to a Rose Bond
(1573-1648). They are said to be parents of a George (b. abt.
1602) and a Thomas (b. abt. 1605). According to this particular
site, William's son George turns up in America, to sire Crowe's
American Hailes. Hertfordshire, a prosperous region just north of
London did indeed have an old and prominent family of
Hales. William Hale was among three Protestants burnt at
the stake there in 1554. Richard Hale of Kings Warden founded the
Richard Hale School in 1617, which survives to this day. There is
obviously no way to deny that this Hertfordshire family could indeed be
the progenitors of the Virginia Hailes. But the George Haile who
Crowe thinks came to Jamestown, like the Thomas Haile who also appears
in the muster there, clearly belonged to a servant class difficult to
associate with the illustrious Richard of the Richard Hale
School. Genealogists, when they find a name they are looking for,
sometimes conclude that they have found the very family they have been
seeking.
By the time of the first census
along the James River, perhaps 25 "plantations," or settlements had
survived. They were commonly called hundreds after the old Roman
fashion, but contained scarcely more than a score or so men, perhaps no
women at all. Beyond mere survival, the task was to produce
profitable exports for England. Land for a plantation by royal
grant or headright (about 50 acres per head) was available to anyone
paying for passage to the colony. Labor, the main cost of a
plantation, was commonly obtained by indenture, also in return for
passage. Both George Hale / Hall and Thomas Haile were indentured
servants. A Thomas Haile also appears in 1689 as signatory to a
Somerset, Maryland allegiance to the new monarchs William and
Mary. By that date, Crowe's Thomas would have been
eighty-five. It is conceivable that there might be a connection
between one of these Jamestown fellows and the continuous line of
Hailes which Crowe does carefully trace from Virginia and Maryland down
to our Tennessee forebears at Flynn's Lick. Absent evidence,
however, we cannot even count those two servant boys among Jamestown's
lucky survivors, much less as direct progenitors of the family name
when it appears some thirty years later, north of the Rappahannock.
Nicholas
on the Corotoman
During the reign of
Charles I, the Virginia settlements spread up and down the James
River, but also northward toward the Pamunkey. The neck north of
the Rappahannock was still prohibited. To the south of the James
and below the Blackwater River, a tributary of the Chowan, lay
swampland. Some genealogists connect a Nicholas Haile (ca.
1628-1672) with Elizabeth City County, and it is conceivable that
Nicholas was related to some one in that settlement. A very
few Jamestown colonists did advance from indentured servitude to wealth
and distinction, like the explorer and Indian trader Abraham
Wood. But the earliest records of this Nicholas are after the
middle of the century and place him north of the
Rappahannock.
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That means that his circumstances had likely
been affected by the Civil War between Parliament and Charles I, which
had released a wave of refugees to America. Charles I was
executed in January of 1649. In September of the same year
Charles II, from his exile in France, encouraged his supporters by
means of several land grants on the Northern Neck (between the
Rappahannock and the Potomac ). Among the best known are
Grey Skipwith and Edward Dale, father-in-law to Thomas Carter, the
family which produced the wealthiest grandee in Virginia, Robert "King"
Carter. Northern Neck families of later fame were the Jeffersons,
the Lees, the Madisons, the Masons, the Monroes, the Randolphs, the
Washingtons, etc.
A ship
venturing out of Chesapeake Bay into the Rappahannock encounters
its first tributary and harbor in the Corotoman River. Land
patents, leases, and sales from the 1650s and 1660s along the Corotoman
refer to Nicholas Haile, a Planter. A power of attorney dated in
1654 suggests that he must have already been an individual of some
standing and means before he was thirty years old. Later
documents attest to dealings with England in the 1650s and 1660s,
including travel(s) and credit for transporting more immigrants to
Virginia. He acquired several hundred acres near the present
Christ's Church. He was empowered to collect debts for a third
party in
1666, was entrusted with the tutelage of his partner's son in 1667, was
laid in the stocks for "Uncivil language and deportment to several of
the Justices" in 1668.
Nicholas was either lucky in
this instance, or redeemed by his status, because in 17th-century
Virginia mere pillory was a mild punishment. When Charles Snead
and Elizabeth Wig, "havinge been summoned to this Court for comittinge
of ye odious sin of fornicacon which they havinge both confessed &
acknowledged," Snead was fined five hundred pounds of tobacco and
costs, "And ye sd Eliza: Wig to receive twenty stripes upon ye bare
shoulders well layen on wth a whip." This particular moral
severity should not cause us to compare these settlers along the
Rappahannock and Corotoman with their more famous and revered
Massachusetts contemporaries. The Puritans are extolled by
historians for their sense of purpose and community. Virginians
like Nicholas do not come off nearly so well. The way they
obtained their land and profited from it, as well as their life
style, encouraged "excessive individualism" (T. H. Breen,
distinguished professor at Northwestern University), and they are
roundly condemned for their independent and allegedly exploitative
behavior. While Puritans sat patiently in church, a Virginian
might be laying a bet on his quarter horse.
Land, Labor and
Education
The English country folk
displaced to America called themselves "adventurers." Station and
rank were of
paramount importance to them, and these were inseparably
associated with the land. Their eagerness to acquire land
attracted them to the New World. The same motive soon led to
their
continued migration. Like many other Virginia families, they
never accommodated to the commercial, industrial, urban outlook and way
of life. Land, in the feudal economy which they brought with them
out
of the Old World, was held only at the pleasure of the king, who
received allegiance and rent in return. A similar relationship
bound servants to their master, who was the king's proxy.
Primogeniture and entail, common in feudal England, had helped motivate
emigration, and were among the institutions to be abolished in America.
Inseparable
from land, since time out of mind, has been the labor to work it. The only way for
Nicholas to
obtain acreage, if not by direct grant from the King, was by
guaranteeing the
transport of people to Virginia (purchase of land
rights did not become possible in Virginia until the very end of the
century,under Governor Andros). Perhaps
Nicholas was a younger
son without inheritance, perhaps driven out by the Puritan Parliament
and Oliver Cromwell. He obtained his patent to
acreage along the Corotoman in return for
transporting
servants to Virginia. For their part, they indentured themselves
to
him. Bonded servitude continued to supply
labor for
the family's
tobacco production during subsequent generations in Maryland, Virginia,
and even in Tennessee as late as the eighteenth century.
English servants bonded for a specific term, perhaps four, perhaps
seven years, were legally members of their "guardian's" family.
The concept of family was
still
understood in the ancient sense of oikonomia (whence English
"economy"). Like Roman familia, it meant the entire
household including servants.
The Virginia father was bound by law to responsibility
for this extended family. We must
not think of
our
Virginia forebear with his wife and three children as being a family
about like one in our own
neighborhood. Nicholas and his wife were responsible for
the material
welfare as well as for the education of their
servants. A young Englishman signed an indenture, in
the first place, as a way of entering into a livlihood. The term
itself goes
back to the outward appearance of this kind of contract. Its
terms, stipulating the mutual obligations between apprentice and
master, were copied twice on one long sheet. The paper was then
cut between the copies so as to leave a wavy or
jagged,
an "indentured" separation. Thus each end was demonstrably a part
of
the same piece of paper. In America as in England,
the indenture
recognized
the master's need for skilled labor on the one hand, and the servant's
need to learn a
skill, on the other.
Growing and harvesting tobacco was a
lengthy process comprising several
delicate stages. The young man who mastered it could hope for a
very profitable future in a colony with plenty of land awaiting.
At the end of his apprenticeship, his master was obliged to help
establish him. In the meantime, the master
enjoyed the servant's labor and was in turn required to to
provide, beyond linens,
lodging, and board, instruction in reading, and
sometimes ciphering as well. In
practice, this meant a thorough grounding in the Bible, and arithmetic
through the "rule of threes." In short, Nicholas and his
wife Mary were in loco
parentis to their three children,
George, Mary, and Nicholas jr., together with as many servants as they
had the energy and means to transport.
Living Conditions
The colonists by no means left behind them
their caste system, which one can observe in England to this day.
Position was their most important possession, because it was
immutable. Born an aristocrat, one remained so; born a servant, a
servant for life. Nicholas, whose acreage shows that he brought
at least a dozen bonded servants, surely enjoyed a privileged existence
as compared with the "huddled masses" of London or the starving
wretches on the James River in the early 1600s--or with the great
majority of immigrants in his own generation. This does not mean
his life on the Corotoman can have been an easy one. The Indians
remained a fearful presence, the
massacre of 1622 still remembered by most, and that of 1644 by
everyone. Cautious separation of Indians and whites was
maintained by strict regulations imposed on both. The wilderness
beyond the tidewater was mysterious and deadly. Nicholas surely
brought along his armor, which included a helmet and probably chain
vest and greaves, and of course his sword and knives. He had
muskets, from our point of view not very reliable, but a terror to the
Indians. His residence was probably crude. Archeological
digs suggest that early homes near the James River might not
have even been above ground, but by Nicholas's day one may have
erected something similar to the Virginia farmhouse below.
Brick construction was
generally preferred, as it had been in the southwest of England in
Nicholas's day. Light was provided by candles of tallow or beeswax. Cooking utensils
might be hung in the fireplace.
A family's diet included fruits, fruit pies, and
pickled fruit, grains and porridge, game fish and animals.
One ate with one's narrow, pointed knife and a ceramic or pewter
spoon. Only later did a dinner knife come to table with its broad
blade, sometimes even with a
broadened tip for transporting food
to the mouth. Eventually the fork was
borrowed from the kitchen
and refined for table use. When cutting meat, the sophisticated
fork
user did not need to switch hands, but could take his already
stabbed morsel directly to the mouth with the left hand, as practiced
by Europeans.
Americans like Nicholas retained the older habit of switching hands.
Nicholas probably did not himself do field work, but
he did have to teach and supervise the entire tedious process of
tobacco
production. In the beginning, no attempt was made to clear
land. The trees were killed by girding them. Corn could be
grown on
uncleared acreage without the
use of draft animals. Tobacco grew best on newground with
plenty of sun.
Enormous labor was required to bring down the ancient forests, but once
that was accomplished
a draft animal might be hitched to a horse hoe for scraping the weeds.
Preparation of a seedbed in the last winter months, careful tending of
the fragile seedlings through the spring, and a series of
transplantings as summer began finally permitted topping the plants so
as to produce large tobacco leaves. These had to be regularly
trimmed. By
summer's end the mature tobacco might stand nine feet high.
Harvesting the huge leaves, curing, and packing were similarly arduous
and skilled tasks. Despite formidable difficulties, tobacco
brought such windfall profits that early colonists overproduced it, to
the neglect of other crops. Fertilizing was not yet practiced,
nor was crop rotation. As a consequence, tobacco exhausted a plot
after a year or so. This was portentous for subsequent
generations.
Tobacco growing provided the
first "American Dream" of the good life. It assured the rapid
development and advance of American civilization. Tobacco's
vast and increasing demands for land laid waste the virgin forests,
leached the rich soil, and introduced slavery. These complaints
were made by the growers themselves, Thomas Jefferson for
example. Looking back from our day, we are more
impressed by the human lives snuffed out by cancer and other tobacco
related diseases than by Jefferson's worries.
Governance
At about the time Nicholas
arrived in Virginia, Parliament had replaced the the royal
government. But
whether under king or commonwealth, the British Empire still loomed the
same over Americans: as a gigantic for profit
organization run by appointees striving for place and favor at
home. The colonists proudly regarded themselves as loyal,
submissive subjects. Revealing of Nicholas's understanding might
be "The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina," as drawn up in 1669
"for the better settlement of the Government of the said Place, and
establishing the interest of the Lords Proprietors with Equality, and
without confusion; and that the Government of this Province may be made
most agreeable unto the Monarchy under which we live, and of which this
province is a part; and that we may avoid erecting a numerous
Democracy." The author of this document was presumably the
philosopher John Locke, remembered as champion of human rights.
Nicholas no doubt believed he enjoyed the same
liberty and freedom as other Englishmen under the constitution and
common law. The king agreed. Charles I, for example, after
stating that he truly desired the people's liberty and freedom, went on
to say, "But I must tell you that their liberty and freedom consists in
having of government; those laws by which their life and their goods
may be most their own. It is not for having share in government, Sir,
that is nothing pertaining to them." Nicholas felt the same way
about his own servants, whose taxes he paid and for whose welfare he
was responsible. As to grievances which Nicholas might himself
have, these would be addressed to the Governor, William Berkeley, who
was
supposed to speak up in England for his vassals in America.
Berkeley answered to the ministry in London, who deliberated Royal
policy. As time passed, and England took various measures to
increase revenue, some colonists dared argue that they were entitled to
participate in decisions affecting them. This claim was treated
as absurd: it went without saying that the ministry and each
member of Parliament, including Commons, acted always in the interest
of the whole empire and never in favor of any particular constituency,
much less self-interest.
Nicholas had come to America while Oliver
Cromwell was Lord Protector. Although it is unlikely Nicholas
favored
the Puritan regime, the colonies may have fared well enough.
Governor William
Berkeley was reappointed after the Restoration in
1660. Although a good administrator under
Charles I, he had grown old, cruel, and arbitrary by the time of his
reappointment by Charles II. Like the courtier he was, Sir
William valued his colony as a source of both personal and royal
revenue--and the feudal mind drew no bright line between the two.
London dictated what was to be shipped from America. The
Navigation Acts of 1660 and 1663 restricted shipments to English
bottoms and English ports only, whatever the final destination, thus
actually making trade among American ports illegal.
Tobacco, so profitable during the governor's first administration, had
now become an article of contention because of overproduction, lack of
quality control, competition with the Dutch and other countries, and
failure of the British government to address any of these problems.