Virginia Wealth Ways: Cavalier Ideas of the Material Order“Praised be to God,” wrote a gentleman of Virginia in 1686, “I neither live in poverty nor pomp, but in a very good indifferency, and to a full content.” This ideal of material moderation was widely shared by Virginians.1 The reality, however, was very different. From the outset, the distribution of wealth was profoundly unequal. During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century it became even more so. Magnitudes of material inequality varied from one part of the colony to another, but the general trend was very much the same throughout the tidewater region.
In terms of their possessions, the adult male population of Virginia was divisible into several groups. At the top were the planters, who owned much of the land, most of the servants and nearly all of the slaves in the colony. The size of this tidewater elite was relatively large by comparison with other ruling groups. In point of numbers, the Chesapeake gentry were more like a large continental nobility than the exceptionally small aristocracy of England. As many as 10 percent of adult males belonged to this group. Together they owned 50 to 75 percent of productive assets in Virginia.
Below them was a stratum of yeomen who owned their own land and tilled it with their own hands, often with the help of a servant or two. This group of small freeholders was always a minority of Virginia’s population from 1680 to 1760—in many counties, a very small minority. Overall, it ranged from 20 to 30 percent of the population.
The bottom 60 to 70 percent of Virginia’s male population owned no land at all, and very little property of any other sort. This landless majority included a large number of tenant farmers, who worked the land of others and owned no real estate. Their numbers varied from one part of Virginia to another; in some neighborhoods they were the great majority. Below these tenants were poor white laborers, servants and black slaves. They were a rural proletariat who in most cases owned next to nothing—not even themselves.2
Overall, the Gini ratio for wealth distribution in Virginia was in the range of .60 to .75 during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. It was rising in the direction of still greater inequality.3 This typical pattern of wealth stratification in the Chesapeake was much less equal than to Massachusetts, where Gini ratios ranged from .40 to .60 in most New England towns. Throughout the Puritan colonies, the middle class of yeoman farmers and artisans made up the great majority of the population. Slaves, servants and tenants were comparatively few.4
The Virginia pattern was, however, much the same as in the south and west of England during the seventeenth century. Historian J.P.P. Horn has made a comparative study of wealth distribution in Gloucestershire and the Chesapeake colonies. He concludes that “one is immediately struck by the similarity. Both had large numbers of poor, both had middling groups making up about 30 to 40 per cent of the population, and both had a small elite of rich comprising 10 to 12 per cent.” In both Gloucestershire and Virginia, the middling ranks were minorities, and wealth was largely concentrated in the hands of a small elite.5
The leading cause was the method of land distribution, which was managed in a manner very different from Massachusetts. In Virginia, the land belonged to the Crown. Access was carefully controlled by the Royal Governor and Council. This narrow oligarchy of great planters was able to dominate the distribution of land for the better part of two centuries. The result was a pattern of ownership opposite to that of New England in a great many ways. Only a few tracts of land in Virginia went to corporate groups; most were given directly to individuals. One basis for distribuiton was the headright system in which a “privilege” of fifty acres was given for every person transported to Virginia—another device by which a large part of Virginia’s land was controlled by a few great holders.6
The average size of individual land patents in Virginia was always larger than in New England. They reached their peak in the last years of Governor Berkeley’s administration, at 890 acres on the average. Some grants were as large as 20,000 acres, or more than thirty square miles—an area larger than entire towns in Massachusetts.7
A few were of even greater size. The leading example was Virginia’s “northern neck,” a vast area of more than two million acres bounded by the Rappahannock and Potomac rivers. This enormous tract, three times larger than the colony of Rhode Island, was granted by Charles II to his Royalist supporters after the Restoration. Title was acquired by Thomas Lord Culpeper, and later passed by inheritance to Thomas Lord Fairfax, whose family held it until after the War of Independence. Many other holdings were similar in structure, though not in size Beverley manor, for example, was an area of 118,000 acres which had been given to William Beverley in 1736 for an annual rent of one pound for every thousand acres.8
A large proportion of land grants in Virginia were awarded by the Council to its own members and their kin—Carters, Byrds, Wormeleys, Beverleys, Fitzhughs and others. The contrast with New England could scarcely have been more complete. In Massachusetts, access to the land was controlled by men of middling status who used it to reproduce families of their own rank. In Virginia, the distribution of land was dominated by an elite who employed it to maintain their own hegemony. The authority of Virginia’s first families rested in part upon this material base.
Virginia’s planting elite owned not merely a large proportion of arable farmland in the tidewater, but also much of what little urban real estate there was in the colony. A case in point was a little trading town optimistically called Urbanna, which stood on Rosebud Creek across from Rosegill, the great house of the Wormeley family. The entire town was built on fifty acres of Wormeley land. For many years the Wormeleys dominated the affairs of Urbanna—by law when possible, by force if need be. When a building project displeased Ralph Wormeley, he simply sent his servants across Rosebud Creek with orders to pull it down.9
Other planters also behaved as if they owned the Anglican churches near their estates. In 1747, an Anglican minister named William Kay infuriated the great planter Landon Carter by preaching a sermon against pride. The planter took it personally, and sent “his kindred relations, or such as were subject to him” and ordered them to nail up the doors and windows of all the churches in which Kay preached.10
These great tidewater families also controlled much undeveloped land on the western frontier of Virginia. The Byrd family, for example, acquired vast tracts of virgin territory in the Piedmont and the Southside. So also did many other great planters. The frontier in the southern colonies never functioned as an engine of equality; its effect on wealth distribution was to reinforce dominant tendencies in the material culture that was carried to it.
In some parts of Virginia a very large proportion of the white population were tenants of these great landed families. Many white householders owned no land at all, and not even the roofs over their heads. This was the especially the case in the Northern Neck, where the Fairfax family had vast proprietary holdings and the great majority of all householders were its tenants. The Northern Neck was exceptional in that respect, but the number of tenant-farmers was also large throughout many tidewater counties, and in the Piedmont as well.11
Entire estates such as Beverley Manor on the Rappahannock were worked by leaseholders who paid rent in money, labor and a share of their crops. Southern share-cropping was not an invention of the post-Civil War period. Before the end of Governor Berkeley’s administration, it was well established in tidewater Virginia, where it had been introduced from southern England.12 As late as 1724, the word “farming” in Virginia still meant “tenant farming” in the English sense—a meaning it had already lost in Massachusetts.13 This was an echo of something very old in the Western world, and at the same time the beginning of something new—a material order destined to spread throughout the American south from the seventeenth century to the twentieth.
This material system supported the cultural achievements of Virginia gentlemen. It also produced a degraded caste of poor whites and an exploited black proletariat. There were large numbers of desperately poor farm workers in seventeenth-century Virginia. Some were indentured servants; others were tenants; a few were free laborers who wandered from job to job. The condition of the working poor in the Chesapeake was as harrowing as it had been in England. They were required to work from sunup to sun-down. They slept wherever they could find shelter in sheds, barns and filthy lofts. They dressed in rough, baggy linsey-woolsey trousers, with ill-fitting shirts tied at the waist with a bit of yarn, or perhaps a piece of green vine. Their diet consisted mainly of a gruel made of corn. And on top of all else they were despised as the refuse of the earth by the people who exploited them. In all of this, Virginia and England were similar; Massachusetts was a world apart.14
The working poor of Virginia, miserable as they may have been, were not the lowest stratum of the white population in this colony. At the very bottom were dependent paupers who were supported by the Anglican parishes. Pauper poverty was a persistent problem in Virginia, as it had been throughout the south of England. Where New England towns spent most of their taxes for the support of churches and schools, southern parishes were compelled to contribute the bulk of their hard-won public funds to poor relief. Here again, they resembled southwestern England in the seventeenth century.15
Another part of Virginia’s wealth ways was its system of inheritance. From an early date the laws of the colony insisted that primogeniture and entail must apply in all intestate estates. Whenever a Virginian died without a valid will, the eldest son inherited the homestead and all the lands, in fee tail rather than fee simple. This law had a genuine impact upon inheritance practices, for many Virginians died intestate.16
Planters who prepared their own testaments were permitted to do as they pleased. In the early and mid-seventeenth century, few of them observed the rules of primogeniture. Most divided their lands and chattels amongst their several children. The greater abundance of land in the New World allowed parents more latitude in that respect. As late as 1724, Hugh Jones wrote that this practice was customary in Virginia, “the tracts being divided every age among several children not unlike gavelkind in Kent.”17
But these divisions were not equal, and the eldest son tended to be specially favored. Often he inherited the “great house,” if the family was fortunate enough to own one. Younger sons commonly received less, and youngest sons got least of all. In 1699 Virginia planter John Washington (himself a youngest son) testified to the custom of the country. “I had not the value of twenty shillings of my father’s estate,” he wrote bitterly, “I being the youngest and therefore the weakest which generally comes off short.”18
As time passed, the custom of primogeniture grew stronger in Virginia. The proportion of testators who gave their land to a single child increased steadily. In western Albemarle County, for example, during the 1750s less than 8 percent of property owners with two or more children left all or most of their real estate to a single heir. That proportion rose to 19 percent in the 1760s, and 26 percent in the 1770s. The same trend appeared much earlier in tidewater counties. When land ran short, parents quickly abandoned the principle of partibility.19
The primary purpose of these customs was not to serve the interest of individuals, but to promote the welfare of the family and even the estate. When, for example, a member of the Newdigate family disposed of his lands in Warwickshire, he wrote, “ … my wife shall have the possession of the whole during her life, not only thereby the better to maintain my children, but also for the better increase of the profits of my lands.” The land itself seemed more in his mind than his own kin. More than one English gentlemen believed that his estate did not exist to serve posterity; but that posterity existed to serve the estate.20
The same concern also appeared in the Chesapeake colonies where even very rich men were forced to choose between the interest of individual children and the welfare of the family. When every child was given an equal share, the family tended to decline in status. In Maryland, for example, when a Huguenot gentleman named Mareen Duvall divided his large estate equally amongst twelve children, only three were able to marry into families of their fathers’ rank. The rest were wed to yeomen or husbandmen. The entire family lost status as a consequence of partible inheritance.21 In general, inheritance customs were very similar in the Chesapeake and southwestern England. They were an important factor in maintaining social hierarchies on both sides of the Atlantic.22
Altogether the wealth ways of Virginia were similar to those of southern England in many ways—in the small and very powerful class of landed gentry, in the large majority of landless tenants and laborers, in the minority status of its middle class, in the general level of wealth inequality (Gini ratios of .60 to .75), in the magnitude of poverty and in the degradation of the poor. The rise of this wealth system cannot be explained merely in terms of market relationships or material factors. It was shaped by the values of Virginia’s ruling elite, and transmitted through social institutions from one generation to the next.