Virginia Order Ways: The Anglican Idea of Order as HierarchyIn seventeenth-century Virginia, order was fundamentally a hierarchical conception. The classical expression of this idea was the Anglican Homily of Obedience, which was read in the churches of the colony:
Almighty God hath created and appointed all things in heaven, earth and waters, in a most excellent and perfect order. In heaven he hath appointed distinct and several orders and states of archangels and angels. In earth he hath assigned and appointed kings, princes and other governors under them, all in good and necessary order. … The sun, moon, stars, rainbows, thunder, lightning, clouds and all the birds in the air do keep their order. The earth, trees, seeds, plants, herbs, corn, grass, and all manner of beasts keep themselves in order. … And man himself hath all his parts … members of his body in a profitable, necessary and pleasant order. Every degree of people in their vocations, calling and office, hath appointed to them their duty and order. Some are in high degree; some in low, and every one have need of the other.1
This hierarchical idea of order had its antithesis in “confusion” or “conmingling,” two words which were used as synonyms. In the neighboring province of Maryland, for example, the Royalist writer George Alsop defined order as the opposite of confusion; and confusion as “ranging in contrary and improper spheres.”2
The ordering institutions of Virginia were as hierarchical as the idea of order itself. The most important order-keepers were not town constables who had been elected by the people, as in New England, but county sheriff’s who had been appointed in the name of the Crown. In the seventeenth century, this office was established in Virginia, and it has survived throughout the southern and western United States even to our own time. By law, a sheriff was required to reside in the county where he served. By custom, he was also expected to be a landed gentleman. In 1623, Michael Dalton dedicated his essay on the duties of the sheriff “to the better encouragement of the gentry, upon whom the burthen of the office lyeth.”3
In some Virginia counties the office of sheriff was held in rotation by the gentlemen justices. In others it became a patronage appointment. The justices of York County recommended one of their number, Captain Ralph Langley, on the ground that the “sheriff’s office may be a great help to him in his present suffering condition.”4
But the job was no sinecure. The sheriff was the leading executive officer of the county. His duties were to organize the courts, impanel juries, issue writs, call elections, read royal proclamations, maintain the peace, protect the church, administer judicial punishments, run the jail, and keep the county’s records.
The sheriff was not expected to do these things himself. A gentlemen did not work with his hands, but guided the hands of others. Just as a physician did not cut open a body (a barber/surgeon’s work) and a barrister did not actually engross a will (the task of a scrivener), so a sheriff was not actually required to lay hands upon a dirty felon. This was the work of under-sheriff’s, deputies, jailers, county whippers, and clerks who did the dangerous manual labor of order-keeping in Virginia. The gentlemen-justices sometimes compelled one criminal to punish another. One convict was sentenced to serve as a hangman; another was ordered to cut off the ears of a culprit in the pillory.5
The same hierarchical ideas also appeared in treatment of the disorderly. Convicted felons in Virginia received very different punishments according to their rank. For all but the most serious crimes, literate criminals could plead “benefit of clergy.” By reading aloud the “neck verse”6 from the Bible they escaped a hanging, and were sentenced to be branded on the brawn of the thumb. Gentlemen-felons were sometimes sentenced to be branded with a “cold iron” which left no mark that might destroy their honor. But the poor and illiterate went to the gallows.7
The death penalty was very common in Virginia. As in the mother country, hundreds of felonies were capital crimes—which was not the case in the Puritan colonies. In a sample of forty-seven Virginia court sessions from 1737 and 1772, 164 people were convicted of a felony and not allowed to plead benefit of clergy. Of that number, 125 were actually executed.8
The method of execution was the same as in England. The convict was carried in a cart to the gallows which were sometimes erected at the scene of the crime. The condemned man was made to stand in the cart with a rope around his neck, and was invited to speak his last words before a huge crowd. Then the cart was driven forward, and he was left kicking and choking in the air. Death sometimes came slowly. In 1738, when a confessed murderer named Anthony Ditton dangled alive at the end of his rope, the hangman grabbed his legs in an effort to strangle him, and succeeded only in breaking the rope. Ditton fell unconscious to the ground; when he revived he mounted the cart once more and was hanged yet again.9
Punishment did not end with death. The body was given to physicians for dissection, or for the most heinous crimes was hung in chains on the public highway as a warning to others. The bodies of pirates were hung in chains at a river’s edge. In another process called “corruption of blood,” the convicted felon also forfeited his property to the Crown. This was done in the colony of Virginia.10
In addition to the violence of law, there was also customary violence, which occurred in many forms. These were not random or promiscuous acts. The use of nonjudicial violence was sanctioned and regulated by the unwritten rules of this society, more or less as follows. First, Virginia’s system of customary violence was hierarchical in its nature. It was often used by superiors against inferiors, and sometimes by equals against one another, but rarely by people of subordinate status against those above them. Violence was thought to be the legitimate instrument of masters against servants, husbands against wives, parents against children, and gentlemen against ordinary folk. But violent acts by servants against masters, or common folk against gentle folk was followed by savage punishment.
Second, this legitimate social violence in Virginia was usually a response to some social or moral offense which affronted either the authority of a superior or the honor of an equal. In its customary forms it was meant to be measured violence. It tended to be proportionate to the seriousness of the offense, to the social status of the offender, and to the rank of the offended. But sometimes it exceeded these bounds.
The diary of William Byrd recorded many examples of customary violence:
4 April 1720 My maid Rose had endeavored to steal a sheep from Jack, for which reason I caused her to be whipped …
26 April 1720 I walked home and by the way beat my man for being drunk and saucy …
4 August 1720 Jenny B-s-n was whipped for several faults …
7 August 1720 My people almost all got drunk with cider I had given them, for which I was very angry with them and threatened to punish them that I should ever see drunk again.
The use of violence and even torture against servants and slaves occurred very frequently. An example was Byrd’s treatment of a house boy named Eugene in the year 1709:
8 February 1709 Jenny and Eugene were whipped
10 June 1709 Eugene was whipped for running away and had the [bit or boot] put on him. I said my prayers and had good health, good thoughts and good humor, thanks be to God.
30 November 1709 Eugene was whipped for pissing in bed 1 December 1709 Eugene was whipped
3 December 1709 Eugene pissed abed again for which I made him drink a pint of piss.
10 December 1709 Eugene had pissed in bed for which I gave him a pint of piss to drink
16 December 1709 Eugene was whipped for doing nothing11
This treatment continued for years:
18 September 1712 I found Eugene asleep instead of being at work, for which I beat him severely
Occasionally a servant resisted—not by violence of his own, which would have brought terrific punishment, but by announcing that he would not agree to be whipped. Some masters acquiesced in this resistance, or found another mode of punishment. But the usual response was that of William Byrd, who summoned reinforcements and increased the punishment, without reflecting very much about it.
17 June 1720 I found my man Johnny drunk, for which I threatened to beat him. He said I should not, so I had him whipped and gave him thirty lashes. I danced my dance. Read some Latin till dinner, then ate some cold ham and sallet. After dinner I took a nap …,12
It is interesting to observe that William Byrd also used the same customary violence against wives, children, servants, slaves, and animals—especially animals:
2 July 1720 I took a walk about the plantation and shot an old dog with an arrow for flying at me but did not kill him.
23 July 1720 I talked with my people and Jack told me of some horses that had destroyed a hogshead of tabacco and I gave him orders to shoot them as not being fit to live. I said my prayers and retired.13
William Byrd thought of himself as the patriarchal master of his animals as well as of his people. Here was an old English folk attitude, related to the ancient feudal law of deodand that ordered the death of any animal which caused mortal injury.
These forms of heirarchical violence were carried to Virginia from England, where they had long existed in the same form. One famous example involved Lord Lovelace in a horrific chain of violence:
Lord Lovelace seeing a maid in his kitchen pursue a dog with a spit snatched it from her and killed her on the spot. The girl’s lover revenged her death by similarly killing Lord Lovelace.14
A similar chain of violence appeared in a letter by a little girl in Virginia, Sally Fairfax, who described her feelings when a cat scratched a slave, and the slave killed the cat. Little Miss Fairfax was moved not to sadness for the cat but rage against the bondsman:
That vile man Adam at night killed a poor cat of rage, because she eat a bit of meat out of his hand and scratched it. A vile wretch of new negroe, if he was mine I would cut him to pieces, a son of a gun, a nice negroe, he should be killed himself by rights.15
Other acts of social violence had a different context. When any neighbor, stranger or even kinsman invaded the property of a landed gentleman without leave to do so, he could expect a violent response. One English country gentleman described such an event in Dorset:
I espied a pack of hounds with a man on horseback in my green lands, about my chalk hills … I scolded him very passionately, whipped off his dogs and forbade him coming any more on pain of having all his dogs killed and himself hanged, whereupon he packed away in haste and promised to come that way no more.16
Virginia gentlemen behaved in exactly the same way—responding violently to interlopers on their lands.17
Hierarchical violence of this sort was commonplace in Virginia. But there was remarkably little violence by the poor against the rich, or by the humble against the elite. William Byrd wrote to an English friend, “We all lye securely with our doors unbarred, and can travel the whole country without arms or guard.”18 Even small acts of symbolic protest against superiors brought down horrific punishments of unimaginable savagery. When, for example, Richard Barnes made “base speeches” against Governor Wyatt, he was sentenced to have his weapons broken, to be bored through the tongue, to “pass through a guard of 40 men” and be “butted by everyone of them,” to be “knocked down and footed out of the fort,” to pay £200 and to be banished from the colony.19
In that respect, the first gentlemen of Virginia were the same as the English gentry, savagely punishing anyone who used violence against them. In Wiltshire during the year 1631, for example, a shoemaker convicted of highway robbery hurled a brickbat at the judge. Instantly the shoemaker was seized. His hand was cut off and nailed to the gibbet from which he was hanged. There all could see the penalty for threatening a superior.20 Altogether, this system of violence was itself an order, as elaborately hierarchical in Virginia as it had been in southern England. In both places its social function was very much the same.
The criminal courts of the Chesapeake colonies were less active than in New England. Rates of criminal prosecuton were less than half as high as in New England.21 The distribution of criminal offenses in the Chesapeake was also different from New England. In five Maryland county courts crimes against order were less than half their proportion in New England, but crimes of violence were more than twice as high.22
Individual offenses also differed in their frequency. Prosecutions for sexual morality commonly consisted of fornication in Massachusetts and bastardy in Maryland. Crimes against order in Puritan colonies were often sabbath violations, profane speech, blasphemy, idleness and lying; in the Chesapeake this category consisted almost entirely of disturbing the peace, disorderly conduct and drunkenness, which often involved acts of violence.23 In the punishments meted out to defendants, Chesapeake courts were more apt to discriminate by social status. Masters were treated leniently; servants were punished harshly. Men received lighter sentences than women in the Chesapeake colonies. These practices were very different from New England, where discrimination by rank was more muted, and in most cases men and women were treated equally. Altogether, historian Mark Saloman concludes that systems of criminal justice in Massachusetts and Maryland had two different purposes—the former primarily to preserve comity; the latter mostly to maintain hierarchy.