Seventeenth-century Chesapeake Settlers

First Colonists were Second Sons of Gentry and Indentured Servants

Nov 10, 2008

Venturers to Virginia and Maryland came from western and southern England, unlike the Puritans from East Anglia towns. Their land-oriented ideals shaped the colonies.

During the first great wave of settlement to the Chesapeake Bay region of the New World, the desire to own land was the underlying motivation of English gentry and servants who left their mother country for Virginia and Maryland . The gentry were motivated by a desire to live in a rural style that was no longer available to them. The hard-working poor sought indentures: after a contractual period they would be given land or they would have the opportunity to buy it.

The settlers' expectations were rooted in their English geographic origins. Chesapeake Bay region settlers were unlike New England immigrants who came to the New World primarily from densely populated eastern England. New Englanders idealized towns and living in community. Access to land around thousands of miles of Chesapeake Bay shoreline appealed to south and west country Englishmen. The Bay and its tributary rivers and streams, somewhat like the broad Severn River that fell from Bristol, would allow them to ship products, receive goods, and move about easily from estates and farms. In 1703, Colonel Robert Quary reported to the Board of Trade that " ... in every river of this province there are men in number from ten to thirty, who by trade and industry have gotten very competent estates."

First Gentlemen of Virginia and Maryland

Sir William Berkeley, a son of the English west country gentry, was appointed Royal Governor of Virginia in 1641. During his 35 years of service to the Old Dominion, he transformed what had been a sickly outpost with an evil reputation for being corrupt and populated with the meanest sort of people.

Berkeley saw Virginia's potential as a place were England's second sons and distressed cavaliers could migrate to nurture their ideals of honor and hierarchy. Since gentry land was inherited by the first son, second and subsequent sons went into commerce or other occupations befitting the landless gentry. In addition, the ancient gentry was undone by the rise of the Puritans and the unrest surrounding the dethroning and death of Charles I.

The surnames of first families who built large estates around the Chesapeake Bay in the 1650s include Carter, Digges, Custis, Page, Harrison, Isham, Landon, Randolph, Mason, Madison, Washington, Ball, Fairfax, and others.

After the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, Berkeley continued to recruit younger sons of eminent English families.

Indentured Servants

During this same period, about 75 percent of the immigrants to the Chesapeake Bay states of Virginia and Maryland came as servants, drafted to perform the labor required for the large scale production of tobacco on gentry plantations. The third quarter of the seventeenth-century saw Virginia's population triple and the population of Maryland increase by a factor of eleven.

Indentured servants came from the bottom of the middle rank of English society, according to David Hackett Fischer, author of Albion's Seed. They understood the practice of indenture from England where such people went to hiring fairs and entered into one year servitude contracts. Many of those who survived their indenture when on to acquire estates of their own. However later indentured immigrants saw the system evolve in a way that limited their options. The cost of transportation to the New World increased the average contract to three years and beyond. In addition, the distance from England and the second-hand sale of contracts through merchants caused the indentured to suffer under the hand of unknown masters. In England, both servant and master could check into reputations and accept or reject contracts. Not so with indenture contracts in the Chesapeake. The indentured took greater risks.

As tobacco culture increased, so did the need for labor and the cruelty of the system. Indentured servants and African slaves toiled in the fields together and lived in meager quarters. By early in the 1700s, indentured servitude became less common and slaves became the preferred laborers.

Learning More About Chesapeake Ancestors

Because so many indentured servants came to the Chesapeake region, historians have had difficulty linking groups of seventeenth-century immigrants to their English roots. James Horne describes how English ship captains and merchants sold their cargo of indentured servants to planters around the Bay in Adapting to the New World: English Society in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake. Many were purposefully secretive due to a past life they wished to escape or because they were independent-spirited entrepreneurs who dabbled in piracy.

The copyright of the article Seventeenth-century Chesapeake Settlers in Colonial America is owned by Sara E. Lewis. Permission to republish Seventeenth-century Chesapeake Settlers in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.