Virginia Death Ways: The Anglican Idea of Stoic FatalismOn the dark subject of death in Virginia, a curious double paradox presents itself. The most striking fact about death in the Chesapeake was how much there was of it, compared with New England and western Europe. Rates of mortality may have been at least twice as high in tidewater Virginia as in rural Massachusetts, and higher also than in many parts of England during the seventeenth century. Illness and death were constant companions in this “pestered country.”
A second fact was equally striking. Virginians appeared, on the surface at least, to have been remarkably nonchalant about the mortal dangers that surrounded them. They showed comparatively little of the anxiety about death that was so much a part of Puritan culture. They did not observe the rituals of “daily dying” which became standard spiritual exercises in Massachusetts. Neither did they drag their children screaming to the open grave. By comparison with other people, the Virginians responded to sudden and terrible mortality with a cultivated sang froid that could not have been more different from the manic behavior of Massachusetts Calvinists.
In the year 1720, for example, William Byrd II traveled to Williamsburg on public business. “About 12 o’clock,” he wrote in his diary, “I went to the Capitol and in court the Secretary was struck with the fit of an apoplexy and died immediately and fell upon me. This made a great consternation. About two I dined at [illeg.] and ate some wild duck.” Byrd added no reflections on the frailty of life, or the omnipotence of God. Immediately after this event he sat down to a heavy dinner with no sense of incongruity or loss of appetite.1
Subsequent passages in his diaries suggest, however, that this show of unconcern was merely a facade. A few months after the courtroom death of Secretary Cocke, Byrd began to be deeply troubled by dreams of his own impending demise. On December 2, he wrote,
Colonel Harrison came to us and we played at cards and I lost ten shillings and about 11 o’clock went home and said my prayers. I dreamed that I had notice given me that I should die suddenly in six or seven days.
The next day, he was horrified when his friend Colonel Harrison told him “he dreamed there was a funeral at Westover, which agreed with my dream last night and made me begin to think there was something to it.”
The day after, Byrd went to church twice, and was careful to say his prayers morning and night. When a housemaid incautiously entered his bedroom he showed unusual restraint. “After I was in bed,” he wrote, “the maid of the house came into my chamber and I felt her and committed uncleanness but did not roger her.”
Seven days later William Byrd awoke to discover that his dream was false. He hurled himself back into the business of life. When a young slave girl came within reach, he forced himself upon her. “I felt the breasts of the negro girl, which she resisted a little,” he noted. Then he went out and visited his friends and in the evening “walked a little to pick up a woman and found none.” He dined with his friends, gambled at cards, and was delighted to have a winning streak. While his luck continued at the gaming table, all thoughts of death disappeared.2
Another outlet for the fears that lurked below the surface in Virginia was elaborate death ritual—much more elaborate than in early New England. After Secretary Cocke died, for example, there was a splendid service at Bruton Church, with Governor
Spotswood in attendance. A table was erected which proclaimed that “the principal gentlemen of the country attended his funeral, and, weeping, saw the corpse interred. …”3
State funerals made a great show in Virginia—more so in the eighteenth century than the seventeenth. When Governor William Botetourt died in 1770, an elaborate procession was staged in Williamsburg. The street was lined with militia from York and James City counties, and the bells of the town tolled mournfully. The funeral parade was led by the hearse surrounded by six mutes and eight pallbearers, followed by the governor’s servants in “deep mourning,” and the chief mourners in white hatbands and white gloves. The aisle of Bruton church was carpeted in black; the altar, pulpit and governor’s throne were hung with black cloth. The sermon was heard by a large crowd who wept copiously through the ceremony, in an open and extravagant display of grief which was also customary at Virginia funerals, and very different from the grim restraint of New England burials.
Interments were conducted with high ceremony even for Virginians of modest rank. The minister and pallbearers wore mourning gloves, love scarves, ribbons and other tokens of grief. A common part of the proceedings was a fusillade which by the quantity of gunpowder indicated the status of the deceased. Thomas Wall in 1650 in his will requested “three volleys of shot for the entertainment of those who came to bury him.” As many as ten pounds of black powder were expended on these occasions—enough for many volleys.4
Even more lavish was the consumption of food and liquor. At the funeral of Mrs. Elizabeth Eppes, the assembled mourners consumed three entire sheep and a steer, plus five gallons of wine and two gallons of brandy. That was a comparatively abstemious event; at other funerals as many as fifty or sixty gallons of alcoholic beverages were drunk by a crowd of mourners who were highly volatile and heavily armed. More than a few Virginians requested in their wills that weapons and alcohol be omitted from their funerals, in hopes of preventing “excess.”5
The place of burial in Virginia was normally not a public burying ground as in New England, but a private family plot in some secluded corner of a farm or plantation. Hugh Jones described the prevailing customs:
The parishes being of great extent (some sixty miles long and upwards) many dead corpses cannot be conveyed to the church to be buried: So that it is customary to bury in gardens or orchards, where whole families lye interred together, in a spot generally handsomely enclosed, planted with evergreens, and the graves kept decently: Hence likewise arises the occasion of preaching funeral sermons in houses, where at funerals are assembled a great congregation of neighbours and friends; and if you insist upon having the sermon and ceremony at church, they say they’ll be without it, unless performed after their usual custom.6
Indentured servants who died in appalling numbers were hurried into the ground with little ceremony. Black slaves were often buried in unmarked graves, apart from their masters. Public funerals for slaves were forbidden by order of the Virginia Council in 1687.7Great planters noted the death of slaves without even bothering to record their names:
18 August 1739 several people sick above, God preserve them.
22 August … my sick people continued bad, God preserve them.
23 August … My people were still ill: God save them if it be his good pleasure. … After dinner I was a little out of order myself but visited my sick people again who were better, thank God. I had a negro girl die. God’s will be done.8
There were a great many deaths to record in the Chesapeake, but Virginians never really became hardened to them. They mourned their losses as deeply as people in other times and places. The death of infants caused parents to suffer as grievously as in our own time. An example was the death of William Byrd’s infant son Parke Byrd in 1710:
3 [June 1710] … news was brought that the child was very ill. We went out and found him just ready to die and he died about 8 o’clock in the morning. God gives and God takes away; blessed be the name of God. Mrs. Harrison and Mr. Anderson and his wife and some other company came to see us in our affliction. My wife was much afflicted but I submitted to His judgment better, notwithstanding I was very sensible of my loss, but God’s will be done. … My poor wife and I walked in the garden …
4 … my wife had several fits of tears for our dear son but kept within the bounds of submission …
5 … my wife continued very melancholy, notwithstanding I comforted her as well as I could …
6 … we prepared to receive company for the funeral … we gave them burnt claret and cake. About 2 o’clock we went with the corpse …
7 … my wife continued to be exceedingly afflicted for the loss of her child, notwithstanding I comforted her as well as I could …
8 … my wife continued disconsolate …
9 … my wife continued melancholy …
11 … my wife was still disconsolate …
14 … my wife began to be comforted, thank God …
18 … In the afternoon my wife told me a dream she had two nights. She thought she saw a scroll in the sky in form of a light cloud with writing on it. It ran extremely fast from west to east with great swiftness. The writing she could not read but there was a woman before her that told her there would be a great dearth because of want of rain and after that a pestilence …9
In the twentieth century, the death of an infant is an exceptional event. But in Virginia households during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century it happened very freqently. Even so, the psychic cost of these losses was very great. Their cumulative effect was greater still.
Virginians found a way of coming to terms with death by cultivating a spirit of stoic fatalism which was in keeping with other aspects of their culture. This attitude was not invented in America, but carried out of England in the seventeenth century. In Warwickshire, for example, when a father was grieving deeply for the death of a young child, a friend sent a typical letter of condolence:
Noble Sir,
I am very sorry that I am not able to give sufficient comfort to one, that hath such cause of sorrow as now you have, but we all knowing that all things happen according unto the will of God, the best remedy I think is ever for all things with patience to give praise unto him, and no doubt but he that took away that child, which now to you justly doth bring great grief, can and will in his good time give more children that then will yield more cause of rejoicing then this now of sorrowing, so that I know your wisdom is such that it will not let you give yourself ever too much unto sorrow’s yoke, and for your bedfellow, who hath an equal if not a greater part in this sorrow than yourself, I am sorry that I am neither worthy nor able to send her sufficient comfort for her now too much greaved and discontented mind, but I pray you let my best service be remembered unto her. …
Your always well-wisher
and true affectionate friend.10
Virginians shared the same attitude, and found frequent opportunity to express it. An example was Frances Bland Randolph (1752-88), who lost her husband when she was twenty-three, and followed him to the grave when barely thirty-six. When she was fifteen, the death of a much-loved sister prompted her brother to write, “Alas, Fanny, ‘tis in vain for us to grieve at misfortunes.” She agreed, “It is of little use to dwell on melancholy subjects.”11
The children of the Chesapeake were taught this stoic fatalism at an early age. William Fitzhugh in 1698 wrote to his mother, “Before I was ten years old … I look’d upon this life here as but going to an inn, no permanent being by God’s will … therefore always prepared for my certain dissolution, which I can’t be persuaded to prolong by a wish.” The death of one’s children, he wrote, could be “cheerfully and easily borne” if one cultivated the proper attitude of resignation.12
Here was a way of thinking about mortality that was far removed from the cultivated death-obsessions of Calvinist New England. The Virginia attitude of stoic fatalism rested upon a belief that people were not personally responsible for their misfortunes, and that they must accept what fate might bring. That brave defense, alas, did not always work for them. In 1720, Robert Carter wrote to a friend after losing his wife, “ … after we have preached up all the lessons of resignation we are masters of, so long as we carry flesh and blood about us … all our philosophy will sometimes recoil and give ground under such severe trials. I remain a mourner to this day.”13