Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South / Edition 1

by Brenda E. Stevenson

Overview

Life in the old South has always fascinated Americans—whether in the mythical portrayals of the planter elite from fiction such as Gone With the Wind or in historical studies that look inside the slave cabin. Now Brenda E. Stevenson presents a reality far more gripping than popular legend, even as she challenges the conventional wisdom of academic historians. Life in Black and White provides a panoramic portrait of family and community life in and around Loudoun County, Virginia—weaving the fascinating personal stories of planters and slaves, of free blacks and poor-to-middling whites, into a powerful portrait of southern society from the mid-eighteenth century to the Civil War.
Loudoun County and its vicinity encapsulated the full sweep of southern life. Here the region's most illustrious families—the Lees, Masons, Carters, Monroes, and Peytons—helped forge southern traditions and attitudes that became characteristic of the entire region while mingling with yeoman farmers of German, Scotch-Irish, and Irish descent, and free black families who lived alongside abolitionist Quakers and thousands of slaves. Stevenson brilliantly recounts their stories as she builds the complex picture of their intertwined lives, revealing how their combined histories guaranteed Loudon's role in important state, regional, and national events and controversies. Both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, for example, were hidden at a local plantation during the War of 1812. James Monroe wrote his famous "Doctrine" at his Loudon estate. The area also was the birthplace of celebrated fugitive slave Daniel Dangerfield, the home of John Janney, chairman of the Virginia secession convention, a center for Underground Railroad activities, and the location of John Brown's infamous 1859 raid at Harpers Ferry.
In exploring the central role of the family, Brenda Stevenson offers a wealth of insight: we look into the lives of upper class women, who bore the oppressive weight of marriage and motherhood as practiced in the South and the equally burdensome roles of their husbands whose honor was tied to their ability to support and lead regardless of their personal preference; the yeoman farm family's struggle for respectability; and the marginal economic existence of free blacks and its undermining influence on their family life.
Most important, Stevenson breaks new ground in her depiction of slave family life. Following the lead of historian Herbert Gutman, most scholars have accepted the idea that, like white, slaves embraced the nuclear family, both as a living reality and an ideal. Stevenson destroys this notion, showing that the harsh realities of slavery, even for those who belonged to such attentive masters as George Washington, allowed little possibility of a nuclear family. Far more important were extended kin networks and female headed households.
Meticulously researched, insightful, and moving, Life in Black and White offers our most detailed portrait yet of the reality of southern life. It forever changes our understanding of family and race relations during the reign of the peculiar institution in the American South.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195118032
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	11/06/1997
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	496
Product dimensions:	9.20(w) x 6.17(h) x 1.41(d)

About the Author

Brenda E. Stevenson, a native of Virginia, is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the editor of The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimke.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

The White Community: Patterns of Settlement, Development, and Conflict

Europeans first began to settle the northern Virginia wilderness that was to become Loudoun County during the 1720s and 1730s. Coming over the hills from the east and the north, most probably were not especially struck by the primeval beauty of the Virginia piedmont. After all, much of Virginia and the other colonies still were untouched by the kind of "civilization" and its costs that Europeans and their slaves would bring in the next generations. Still the place must have been beautiful. Covered with crisp, dark forests of pine, oak, sugar maple, walnut, and sycamore, dotted by grasslands and rolling hills, it was crisscrossed by numerous rivers and streams overrun with fish, swans and other waterfowl, fur-bearing otters and beavers. So plentiful were the wild geese on the Potomac River above the falls that indigenous peoples traded in goose feathers and named the waterway Cohongaroton—or Goose River—and the name stuck. Four hill ranges, including the breathtaking Blue Ridge Mountains, encased numerous valleys. Magnificent birds passed through the skies. Buffalo grazed the grasslands. Deer and elk darted in and out; bears and wolves were in abundance.

The sounds and smells of the forest were everywhere, seemingly little disturbed by the earliest dwellers who had been present since the Paleolithic era. Among the most populous were the Algonquin, who built stationary farming communities; the Manahoacs or Piedmonts, who had a semi-nomadic lifestyle they supported by hunting, fishing, and gathering; and the Susquehannocks, apeople who early Englishmen, struck by their large size, physical beauty, and obvious ability as warriors, described as "the most noble and heroic nation ... that dwelt upon the confines of America."(1)

The earliest European settlers complained bitterly of the "Indian menace," but local native peoples hardly provided a unified threat. Throughout the seventeenth century, war parties from the powerful Five Nations of Iroquois passed through this part of Virginia in their attempt to establish sovereignty ale along the eastern seaboard They eventually forced the most populous of the local people, the Piedmonts, to leave, creating a vast hunting reserve for themselves. They also finally subdued the Susquehannocks. And while representatives of other Indian groups undoubtedly traveled the region, few dared to linger long in territory that the Iroquois claimed. A small group of Piscataway (of Algonquin stock) did manage to survive, moving southward in about 1699 to settle on Conoy, a small island in the Potomac River. Some Susquehhanock also remained, but posed no longstanding threat. As warfare and especially disease took their toll on the once populous bands, they scattered westward.(2)

Finally in 1722 after years of negotiations, Virginia's Lieutenant Governor Alexander Spotswood, along with the governors of New York and Pennsylvania, met with Iroquois representatives and finalized the Treaty of Albany—an agreement which essentially forbade a native presence in the land south of the Potomac and east of the Blue Ridge Mountains on threat of their death or enslavement in the West Indies. Yet the treaty was not the complete end of the Indian presence in Loudoun. Some married local folk, especially blacks. Others traveled through or worked in the area. Bit by bit these decimated and exiled populations reasserted themselves in local history, mythology, and material culture, even though evidence of what lasting cultural influence they had on regional community and family life remains largely unearthed.(3)

The old Iroquois, Algonquin, and Susquehannock territory from which Loudoun County was carved was part of a six-million-acre grant that England's Charles II gave in 1649 to seven loyalist associates—Ralph Lord Hopton, John Lord Culpeper, Sir John Berkeley, Sir William Morton, Sir Dudley Wyatt, Thomas Culpeper, and Henry Lord Jermyn. His gift, all the land that lay between the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers from the Chesapeake Bay in the east to an unspecified western frontier, was meant to be both a grand gesture of gratitude to those who had proven especially loyal to him during the English Civil War and a potential place of refuge for his followers. Terms of the grant stipulated that the Proprietors only had to give the Crown one-tenth of all the silver and one-fifth of all the gold found and an annual nominal rent of six pounds, thirteen shillings, and four pence.(4)

The six-million-acre gift was a magnificent reward, even if its absentee owners could not immediately take advantage of it and had little intention of ever moving permanently to Virginia. But what were the implications of this kind of act for the thousands of immigrants and creoles who eventually would come to settle the area? Clearly Charles's bequest set the stage for almost immediate western expansion from the lower tidewater counties and expansive land development. Yet placing this huge quantity of property in the hands of such a few Englishmen, especially at a time when land was the key to one's financial success in Virginia, also encouraged a kind of acute class stratification that early on came to characterize the locale's history.(5)

For those privileged seven, the Northern Neck proprietary was a portentous bequest, even by royal standards. It also was a controversial one. Under normal circumstances money secured from renting the vast acreage alone would have provided richly for its new owners. But they were not operating under normal circumstances. Their benefactor was an exiled Stuart king who hardly had the power to enforce his pledges at home or abroad. It is not even certain that creditable information about the proprietorship even reached Virginia before Charles regained his thrown in 1660. In the meanwhile, settlement of the Northern Neck began in his "absence." In fact, land speculators, many of whom were among the colony's elite, while actively creating Virginia's first real land boom, acquired much of the area's finest land before the Restoration ever occurred. They bought huge parcels and began selling them off in smaller sections at inflated prices almost immediately. There also were squatters to contend with, poorer folk who had carved out small farms on some of the more isolated tracts.(6)

When faced with the terms of the original patent after Charles regained his throne, many in both classes refused to honor them. Likewise, the death of four original proprietors during the interim and the continued "absenteeism" of the remainder destroyed the likelihood that any of the King's "honored" would ever gain control of all the land that he initially promised them. This early scenario of potential class conflict over land and the kind of power and prestige its ownership guaranteed would become a recurring, divisive theme in the political economy of the white community.(7)

Governor William Berkeley, fearful of consequent political and economic unrest, sent Colonel Francis Moryson to negotiate a compromise. The King eventually recognized the ownership of lands settled during Cromwell's rule, but not those patents acquired after his restoration. Colony emissaries traveled again to England, this time with directives to purchase the entire Northern Neck property. Meanwhile Charles further confused the situation by issuing another large grant in 1673 which included some of the original Northern Neck proprietary lands. This time he showered his generosity on the Earl of Arlington and the 2nd Lord Culpeper.(8)

According to one contemporary, there was "unspeakable grief and Astonishment" when news of this new "Arlington Charter" reached the colony. But before the Crown could respond to protests, Bacon's Rebellion erupted. At the end of these difficulties, the original Northern Neck proprietors and their heirs were more than ready to settle their claims. All except one sold their land to Lord Culpeper, and the huge Proprietary passed down the Culpeper line to the Fairfax family.(9)

Loudoun became one of thirteen counties that the Virginia government eventually carved out of the Northern Neck. Land that originally was part of the expansive Stafford County formed parts of Prince William County in 1664 and Fairfax County in 1742. Loudoun was formed in 1757 from the southern and western lands of Fairfax County. It initially consisted of only Cameron parish. In 1770, however, a rapidly growing population successfully petitioned the colonial government to have Shelburne parish formed from land in the western region of Cameron.(10)

Land purchases began in the early eighteenth century when Loudoun was still part of Stafford County. Virginia's tidewater gentry were Loudoun's earliest large property holders, many representing families that would dominate Loudoun's economy and define its upper class for generations. Some used part of their large holdings as an investment in land speculation; others acquired "western" lands to expand their eastern agricultural operations and their heirs' fortunes. Until the middle of the eighteenth century, members of the Culpeper-Fairfax family remained in England, hiring prominent colony men to act as their land agents and/or surveyors.(11)

While agents provided a valuable service to their employers, it was not unusual for these men, including such illustrious colonial figures as Robert "King" Carter, Thomas Lee, Edmund Jennings, John Warner, Amos Janney, and George Washington, to exploit their positions and act more as land speculators for themselves than as representatives of absentee English landlords. The result was an early monopoly of the best lands in the hands of a few men and women. Their families' wealth and local resources created the foundation for a consistently powerful landed gentry and planter class, while poorer whites were relegated to the status of yeoman owner or renter. Consider, for example, the brief financial and family histories of two of Loudoun's earliest landholders, Daniel McCarthy and John McIlhany.(12)

Captain Daniel McCarthy of Westmoreland County was the first to officially acquire Loudoun land, setting in many ways a standard for those planters who followed. According to land records, McCarthy purchased a tract of 2,993 acres "above the falls of the Potowmack River" in 1709. Within the next few years, he began to import slaves to work his tobacco farms that were scattered throughout Northern Neck counties. By midcentury, McCarthy probably quartered the largest number of blacks on any Loudoun estate.(13)

Daniel McCarthy's race, class, and gender typified his landholding peers in numerous ways, although his lineage distinguished him even among Virginia's colonial gentry. He was the grandson of Donough McCarth, Earl of Clancarty and a direct descendant of Carmac, King of Munster in 483 A.D. Daniel's father, Donal, had been an officer in the Irish Army that was defeated by King William III. When the family was exiled, Daniel, who was still a boy, traveled with his parents to Virginia, settling in Westmoreland County. McCarthy began to acquire land in the Loudoun vicinity as a young man. Like many of the early elite immigrants, the McCarthys married within their class, creating a wealth of family resources in land and slaves in the process. Daniel married Ann Lee Fitzhugh, sister of Thomas Lee and widow of Colonel William Fitzhugh. Their eldest son and principal heir, Colonel Dennis McCarthy, married Sarah Ball, first cousin to George Washington's mother. As was customary, the McCarthys invested heavily in large tracts of land for tobacco production, passing on their name, land, slaves, and status to their eldest sons.(14)

John McIlhany's life is equally exemplary. Born in Scotland, McIlhany was about to be married when, in 1745, he joined the forces of the "Young Pretender" in his efforts to capture the British Crown. After defeat at Culloden, McIlhany and his bride fled to Virginia. They arrived at Yorktown later that year, but soon moved on to the Hillsboro area of Loudoun. There he developed "Ithica," the family's plantation, and became involved in local politics, becoming Loudoun's High Sheriff in 1768. Like McCarthy, McIlhany was able to pass his wealth and prestige on to his children.(15)

Yet clearly every immigrant family did not succeed, even among the well-to-do. Gaston De Maussion, for example, was a French soldier who came to the colonies as part of the Marquis de Lafayette's force in 1780. After the war, he sent for his wife and children, and they settled on a plantation that he bought in the Loudoun vicinity. De Maussion stayed on for more than fourteen years, but he never succeeded financially. He and his wife continuously found themselves borrowing money from Gaston's mother and even local friends. In the end, he lost his plantation for debt and returned to France, completely deserting his family. His wife, Chastenay, stayed on for four years, hoping to hear from him. In the meanwhile, she had no other alternative but to take a job as a companion for an elderly woman in New Orleans, leaving her children with a neighbor. An inheritance left to her by her employer allowed her and the children to be reunited and to return to France in 1800. The Maussions' immigration to the Virginia piedmont had ended much differently than that of McCarthy or McIlhany, but not so differently from many others whose dreams of financial success, family, and community often ended in much harsher realities.(16)

Daniel McCarthy and John McIlhany were first-generation immigrants when they purchased Loudoun land and began building their fortunes and families. Other early planters had much longer histories in Virginia. Their role as Loudoun landholders signified not a beginning, but an extension of their plantocracy, or at least its economic influence, from the tidewater reaches of the colony to the west. Many of these planters had less early influence on Loudoun than might be imagined because they remained "east," acting as absentee planters of Loudoun properties. Robert Carter of "Nomini," for example, was a fourth-generation Virginian who was able to acquire, mostly through inheritance, 39,509 acres in Loudoun. He never moved to the county, but did have his overseers and slaves establish a tobacco and grain plantation on a 2000-acre tract and rented out other parcels for a tidy annuity.(17)

Among the wealthiest of the colony's elite, Councillor Carter's family set the highest standard for colonial creole aristocracy. It was a family that included, among others, "King" Carter, the wealthiest and most powerful man in early eighteenth-century Virginia. The Carters were a force to be reckoned with, a family that held in its grasp several hundred thousand acres of Virginia land and thousands of slaves to work it. As such, Robert Carter, King Carter's grandson, was part of a different and elevated class of eighteenth-century planter than McCarthy and McIlhany. Because of his inordinate wealth, extensive landholdings outside of Loudoun, and permanent absentee status, Carter initially cultivated few family or community ties in the area. It would not be until the end of the eighteenth century, when Carter heirs actually began to live in Loudoun and base their considerably smaller fortunes there, that they established local branches of their families and contributed to the community's cultural and institutional development in the way that McCarthy and McIlhaney had done the previous generation.(18)

Early planters, residential and absentee, had tremendous influence on the county's socioeconomic evolution and, consequently, its class stratification. Tobacco was still the premier cash crop when they began to create plantations in Loudoun and slaves were outnumbering white indentured servants, especially on the larger tobacco quarters. Controlling as they did both land and labor resources, it is little wonder that planters had such sway over the county's economy. This kind of power guaranteed their representation in local and colony wide offices of established institutions of authority such as the county court and vestry, House of Burgesses and Governor's Council.(19)

Their power, however, did not extend to all reaches of cultural or community development. Ironically, planter influence may have retarded community growth in some ways, and not just because many initially were absentee. Most harmful were their actions as large landholders. Acting monopolistically and speculatively, the elite kept land prices high and, consequently, white population low. In the southern and southeastern regions of the county where planter holdings were concentrated, white population remained sparse through the era of the American Revolution. An English visitor to Loudoun as late as the 1770s had good cause to comment: "The Land is pretty good, but is monopolized and consequently thinly inhabited."(20) It was not unusual for thousands of acres of uninhabited Loudoun land to circulate in the hands of one wealthy speculator after another, each sale drawing a price more difficult for poorer folk to meet. Eventually an owner would divide a parcel into several moderately sized tracts and sell or rent them to middling folk at a substantial profit. Renting, of course, had the additional advantage to the land's owner of having one's property "developed."(21)

Most leasing contracts stipulated that renters reserve most of its woods,(22) erect a house or outbuildings, plant fruit orchards, and construct fences. When George Johnston, a local lawyer, leased 152 acres to farmer Thomas Champe in 1771 for an annual sum of 4.10[pounds], for example, he required that Champe leave untouched a minimum of "twenty five acres of woodland." The renter also had to plant "one hundred and fifty Peach trees and as many good apple Trees ... and incluse [sic] with a good strong sufficient and Lawfull fence" as well as build within five years "a good Dwelling House Twenty feet by sixteen ... [and] a Barn twenty feet square with shingled Roofs."(23)

Despite these requirements, most settlers leased rather than bought. High land prices (anywhere from 3[pounds] to 5[pounds] per acre after 1750) and long-term, secure leases were effective incentives. Most who did manage to buy property could afford only moderate sized tracts. In 1769, for example, only forty years after Europeans began to move to the Loudoun vicinity, more than 75 percent of its landholdings were between 100 and 500 acres. It was a pattern that stuck over the generations. From the very beginning of white settlement, therefore, yeomen farmers, located to the north and west of the plantation district, outnumbered most other groups. They tended to cluster in small communities that often had a strong ethnic flavor.(24)

The most populous faction, the Scotch-Irish, began to arrive from Pennsylvania and Virginia's tidewater during the late 1720s. They settled throughout Loudoun as did smaller numbers of British, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, and Cornish emigrants, creating thriving farming hamlets especially along the county's south central border.(25) At about the same time Quakers, also largely from Pennsylvania, began to form somewhat exclusive communities in Loudoun's central, north-central, and western reaches.(26)

"Jacob Janney ... came from Bucks county, Pa., to Loudoun county, Va about the year 1745, being one of the earliest settlers in that neighborhood where Goose Greek Monthly Meeting was afterwards established," one local Friend wrote of his family's early Loudoun history. Both Jacob and his wife Hannah were elders in their meeting and, as was the custom of the day, had a large family. Samuel Janney, the family's unofficial historian, traced his family's move through Thomas Janney, a Quaker minister who was imprisoned in seventeenth-century England because of his "religious testimony" and who later migrated with his family to Pennsylvania. Two generations later, Jacob and Hannah moved to Loudoun. That there were other Janney kin there when they arrived was no coincidence. Amos and Mary Janney, also from Bucks County, had settled in the area more than a decade earlier. Amos had been a land agent for the Fairfax family and had managed to purchase almost 4000 acres of local land. With this kind of economic and social foothold in the infant Quaker community, it is little wonder that more Janneys and Friends from Bucks County soon made their way to Loudoun.(27)

Clad in the simple-styled garments that symbolized their cultural ethos and distinctiveness, they created communities of mostly nonslaveholding planters, yeoman farmers, ministers, teachers, merchants, professionals, and craftsmen which differed from those of their neighbors in some fundamental ways. Certainly they had social and business contacts with other local folk, but they strove to maintain some psychological and physical distance from those who did not share their religious beliefs. Instead of trying to build a county-wide community with other local whites, Friends established and maintained strong ties with other Quakers in Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and elsewhere. Their mandates to marry within their ranks and to migrate in family groups, their residential clustering, and their active participation in periodic religious gatherings that drew members from long distances enabled them to be part of a geographically disparate, but philosophically homogeneous, Quaker community. One local Quaker spoke for most when he explained: "Friends prided themselves on being a peculiar people unto the Lord who did not seek converts and were content to draw in upon themselves."(28)

Yet limiting social relations to members of their faith did not preclude class formation within Quaker communities, just as it did not do so among those who shared a common ethnicity or race. Dennis McCarthy was a Scottish Presbyterian and John McIlhany was an Irish Catholic, both proud of their ethnic and cultural heritages, but as colonial land and slaveholders they still represented the upper class in their ethnic communities and in the county at large. Their wealth, education, and consequent status allowed them to have social, political, and economic status that was not largely determined by their ethnicity. Similarly, class based on wealth, education, and status within the Quaker meeting had profound influence on one's "place" in and outside of their towns and hamlets, linking him or her to those outside of their faith in ways that religious difference could not erase. Still intermarriage and, therefore, family formation with non-Friends was strictly avoided among those who, despite their class affiliation, hoped to remain Quakers.

Probably few county whites who were not Quakers challenged their separatist practices. Some expression of religious intolerance, after all, was not unusual in colonial Virginia or Loudoun. Moreover, local whites of other faiths may have kept their distance socially because they were not attracted to the Quakers' emphasis on the inornate and nonrecreational. But while these kinds of differences may seem superficial, some ascertained that there was cause for deeper concern. Quaker church principles could conflict with ideas and practices that others believed fundamental to their way of life. These conflicts severely threatened white community cohesiveness over the generations. Quaker policies, for example, repeatedly challenged local custom and law during times of military or social crises. Quaker religious policy forbidding military participation, for one, caused them to be the focus of great resentment and exclusion during the eras of the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and certainly the American Civil War.(29)

Still many Loudouners had to begrudgingly admit their admiration and respect for county Friends. Their success as farmers, artisans, and businessmen was obvious. Local folk also had to applaud their social vision and activism, particularly their campaign for a literate white South. It was, instead, their views and actions regarding local blacks that most distinguished and alienated them from other whites. For Friends to take on the cause of poor whites was one thing. For them to act as advocates for blacks, slave or free, in a slaveholding county was quite another matter. Over the years, but especially during the antebellum decades, Quakers articulated controversial racial policies that few in Loudoun's largely proslavery white community found acceptable.

Yet it would be misleading to suggest that county Quakers ever unanimously agreed on mounting a vocal and active opposition to slavery. Although the Quaker church condemned the institution of slavery as early as the 1750s, not all members were antislavery. Friend Elisha Hall, for example, had the dubious distinction of being the second largest slaveholder in Loudoun in 1749; he had twenty slaves. When Quakers began to oust slaveholding members from their ranks during the 1780s, not a few left the Society because they refused to relinquish their black property. Yet Friends were by far the single most important group of county whites who acted liberally toward slaves and free people of color.(30)

Their antislavery activism deeply alienated them from mainstream white community life, irrevocably fracturing white solidarity. Not only did local Friends provide free blacks with educational opportunities, they also encouraged residential and economic ties. Perhaps even more important, they helped to maintain an Underground Railroad network, while openly advocating policies of gradual, but universal, emancipation. "There is no part of our religious concerns in which these considerations are more important than in supporting our righteous testimony against slavery.... I am fully persuaded that a calm, temperate, and yet decided bearing, will have the most salutary influence in promoting the great cause of universal emancipation," Samuel Janney, Quaker minister, headmaster of Loudoun's Springdale School for Girls, and the county's premier abolitionist wrote typically in 1844.(31)

Quakers were not the only "isolationists" in the county. Loudoun's German settlers also defined their communities exclusively. First arriving in large family groups during the 1720s, most eventually settled north of Quaker strongholds, in and around Lovettsville in the northwestern corner of the county. From the very beginning, they were committed to organizing a self-contained society, separate and independent, composed only of persons of German origin and culture, although evidence of some Swedish influence has surfaced. Retention of their German cultural heritage, particularly their language, was paramount to their plans for community development.(32)

Still there was a large enough regional German community, scattered especially throughout the neighboring piedmont and Shenandoah Valley as well as in Maryland and Pennsylvania, to provide sufficient social and cultural support. Loudoun's Germans benefited from locally and regionally based leadership, schools, newspapers, printing presses, churches, and organized social activities for several generations after their arrival. Large arrivals of German Lutherans (those from the earlier years largely had been of the German Reformed Church) around the mid-eighteenth century, followed by Shenandoah Valley Germans fleeing from the violence of the French and Indian War in the 1750s and '60s, also substantially bolstered support for their otherwise locally isolated community.(33) Persons of European ethnicities of smaller local or regional representation such as the French were much less fortunate. They had to become bicultural and bilingual almost immediately if they hoped to establish any kind of community ties with other whites.(34)

The presence of comparatively large numbers of artisans among the first Germans produced a diversified economy and an important sense of independence that also helped them to sustain their separatist ideology well into the first decades of the nineteenth century. While farming and livestock still were the basis for much of their financial well-being, local carpenters, clock and furniture makers, weavers, shoemakers, millers, masons, tanners, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and distillers contributed much to the settlement's economic success and continuing cultural focus.(35)

German farmers traditionally leased and bought small tracts of land on which they cultivated grains and raised sheep, cattle, and other livestock. Everyone worked the family farm and German women performed much more field work than their neighbors. Clothed in their short, linsey wool dresses and petticoats, German female laborers undoubtedly drew the comment and criticism of other whites who reserved field work for only the poorest white women or slave females. But like their Quaker neighbors, most Germans were not slaveholders; and those who did own blacks, such as Jonathan Monkhouse or the Shovers and Sanbowers, owned relatively small numbers.(36)

There also is some evidence that there was antislavery sentiment in the county's German community. Klaus Wust asserts, for example, that the Lutheran piedmont hub in Loudoun "became a center of antislavery sentiment." Yet it seems more reasonable to conclude that the choice of some Loudoun Germans not to be slaveholders derived more from their commitment to ethnic and cultural purity and ideals of free labor and fair competition within the local agrarian economy than from their concern for blacks or the moral issues surrounding slaveholding. Few, if any, were members of Loudoun's colonization organizations or publicly supported the antislavery efforts that local Quakers mounted. All evidence, in fact, suggests that the Lutheran and Reformed leaders and membership in the area responded leniently to the practice of slaveholding, with several ministers and churches owning slaves outright. Even had some Loudoun Germans fundamentally and actively disapproved of slavery, they never were so great in number or commanded enough economic strength to have the same influence that some local Quakers had and used to support antislavery.(37)

The Germans' support of military efforts and their noncritical stance on slavery held them in better stead with other local whites. Their impressive military record as patriots in the American Revolution especially increased their local status. Still Germans faced some local white criticism from for other reasons. Many viewed their cultural differences as a mark of their ethnic and class inferiority, describing them as crude and brutish, backward and ignorant. Area Germans seemed to have had a running battle, verbally and physically, in particular with Irish settlers—each demonstrating and responding to xenophobic ideology incumbent in the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic cultures that they represented.(38)

Early political and cultural differences eventually led to the county's permanent division. Representatives of the southeastern planter element began petitioning the state legislature as early as 1781, requesting a division of county land along parish lines. The opposition counterpetitioned. Finally in 1798, the General Assembly allowed adjacent Fairfax County to annex the area between the two waterways called Difficult Run and Sugarland Run. A large body of planters concentrated in this district automatically became residents of Fairfax. Those planters remaining in Loudoun, therefore had even less influence with which to combat yeoman influence. Time eroded some, but certainly not all, of the diversity and conflicts of Loudoun's white population, particularly that centered on the slavery issue. Ethnic affiliation, cultural difference, and class stratification also had some lasting impact.

Despite their various backgrounds, all Loudoun whites faced similar challenges during the first difficult generations of settlement. They also lived and worked alike in many fundamental ways. These common experiences, embedded in their agrarian culture and patriarchal family structure, bound them together as a community of white men and women in important ways that their differences could not completely undermine.

Settling the wilderness meant universal hardship. When whites began to arrive in the 1720s and '30s there was little in the way of cultured society, intellectual resources, or material comfort waiting for them. So desolate was the place that many of the early land grants referred to it as "wasteland."(39) Homesteads and settlements were few and far between. Roads, the few that existed, were badly rutted and nearly impassable during the rainy seasons (fall, winter, and spring). Most lived in rural isolation, rarely seeing those outside of their households except at the occasional religious gathering, barn raising, corn shucking, wedding, baptism, or funeral. Even as late as 1774, a British visitor to Loudoun commented that the county was "almost all woods," and there were very few places of public gathering.(40) There were no public schools, churches, shops, banks, post offices, or the other accoutrements of town life. Many among the slaveholding elite responded to the barrenness simply by remaining "absent" for several years at a time, depending on their overseers and drivers to establish and make their "western" farms prosper.(41) For those who chose or had no choice but to remain, their first priority was to provide shelters for themselves and their families.

Virtually everyone lived in small log or frame houses which usually measured sixteen by twenty feet in size. Each "tenement" usually had a house that was one and a half stories high with two rooms and a loft, with a fence around it, a small orchard of fruit trees, and a few outhouses. There generally was only one entrance to the cabin and a small, multifunctional front room served as bedroom, kitchen, dining room, parlor, and chapel. It was there that poor as well as middling colonial families and their indentured servants and black slaves, ate, slept, labored, laughed, and learned from one another. "In the evening, after the dishes were washed and cleared off the table and the table set back," one Loudoun resident recalled, "the candle stand would be moved out from its proper corner and the whole family gathered around it; some of the men reading a newspaper or a book and the women sewing or knitting, or spinning flax or tow."(42)

Colonial households had to be self-sufficient. Most generated their own food, clothing, furniture, medicines, and entertainment and lived without those items that they could not make for themselves or acquire through local barter. Family and household members produced family gardens, livestock pens, and fruit orchards. While boys and men usually hunted and fished, females raised, butchered, cured, salted, cooked, and picked, pickled, and preserved. This pattern changed little over the years, persisting from the colonial through the antebellum decades.

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century gendered labor divisions affected almost every activity on a Loudoun family farm. The older boys and men cleared land and constructed buildings, fences, and furniture. Girls and women made domestic commodities like rugs, candles, and soap, and, along with young boys, cleaned the yard and tended to the barn and animal pens. While the nineteenth century offered them the luxury of manufactured clothing, many women continued to spin, weave, and sew clothing, blankets, coverlets, quilts and curtains. Males were the principal agriculturists and artisans in their communities, but only very elite women did not help out in the fields during harvest time. Almost every farmwoman routinely prepared meals and medicine for farm workers as well as provided valuable family income by trading and selling their livestock and dairy products.(43)

Furniture usually was scant and crude. The poor more often than not sat on three-legged stools and wooden blocks, ate out of a few wooden bowls or dried gourds and slept on pallets or homemade mattresses they laid on dirt floors. More fortunate settlers had chairs or benches, sat at a table to have their meals and slept in feather beds. Middling households included a few pewter dishes and spoons, but usually only those considered "well-to-do" possessed iron pots, a kitchen table, china, crockery, featherbeds, and bedsteads.(44)

But these were the very early settlers. Material accumulation over the generations, greater family income, and increased availability of market goods meant more aesthetically attractive homes and furnishings. By the Revolutionary War era, traveling salesmen and local stores allowed most to purchase cups, dishes, coffee pots, jars, jugs, and other kitchen fare. By the 1760s and 1770s, county estate inventories documented even luxury items for middling folk. Mary Janney, for example, a woman of only moderate means, bequeathed to her daughter her two "best" featherbeds and furniture, her three best chairs, a black walnut table, and her silver tablespoons and teaspoons in 1767.(45)

And between the end of the American Revolution and the third decade of the nineteenth century, many of Loudoun's wealthiest landholders began to take up permanent residence in the county, recreating a lavish lifestyle usually restricted to tidewater planters. This part of the Loudoun experience is most readily documented in the exquisite manor homes that they constructed and furnished. Many built on local waterways which supported wharves, mills, and ferry service. Some even had their own private chapels, schools, and hospitals, not to mention the other numerous outhouses, orchards, stables, and barns and wooden, stone, and brick slave quarters.(46)

"Coton," the mansion of Thomas Ludwell Lee and Fanny Carter, was perhaps typical of the grand style taken on by the county's wealthiest. When Thomas Lee inherited the 4700-acre Loudoun estate and "fifty Negroes above the age of ten years" from his father in 1751, all that was on the land were the structural rudiments that had signified one of his father's several outlying tobacco plantations—a stone kitchen, laundry, meat house, and some slave housing. After he married in 1786, Lee began to construct a main house which he later renovated several times. By 1804, additions to the house had increased its size to 24' by 96'. "Colon" became a county showplace, one of the most beautiful mansions in the region, and the property boasted, in addition to the house and many outhouses, two stone mills, a distillery, and a school. Others followed suit. Perhaps the most famous of the Loudoun homes was the residence of President James Monroe. "Oak Hill" was a three-storied brick house with porticos and Doric columns, facing a massive formal garden. Thomas Jefferson was its original designer. James Hoban, builder of the White House and architect of the Capitol building, completed its plans. Monroe built the house in 1820 and hired an Englishman, William Benton, to supervise his surrounding plantation, worked by the largest slave force in the county.(47)

Of course few could afford to live like Loudoun's elite. Most estate inventories from the period document much more moderate, but comfortable furnishings—"a cherry bureau in each of two bed rooms, a mirror ... in the parlor and one in two bed rooms, a dozen 'windsor' chairs, ... book case and desk ... with a cherry table in the parlor" for the early nineteenth century Quaker home of John Janney. German farmer Simon Shover had a home that boasted more luxurious items—four tables (two of walnut) and two stoves (six- and ten-plate), a kitchen cupboard and dresser, six common chairs, one corner cupboard, four beds, a walnut desk, a "parcel of old books," and numerous pots, pans, jugs, tubs, barrels, forks, and knives.(48)

Living conditions changed, but they changed slowly for most. Certainly there were more people, larger settlements, and a growing urbanization in a few areas, but farms and farm families remained the norm. Communities grew in number and size, but they did not outgrow the dominating rural landscape. Even most "town folk" of the middling, professional, and upper classes had nearby farmland and invested in agriculture and an agrarian lifestyle. The inelaborate and utilitarian ways of most Loudouners were, by the nineteenth century, a well-honed tradition of which they were proud. To those who stayed over the years, married, raised their families, and committed themselves to their communities, it was a way of life that they had long grown to appreciate.

John Janney described the architectural changes that occurred in his family's Loudoun farm house from the mid-eighteenth century through the 1830s, changes that suggest what both colonial and antebellum homes of middling farm families were like. Although the house grew in size and construction materials varied somewhat, in the end it was not so different. Nor were the generations of Janneys who lived in it. When they "first occupied the farm," John began his narrative, "they lived in a log cabin." But over the years, "they built another which was of hewed logs" that were "'chinked' with bits of wood and then plastered with mortar so that it made a warm and comfortable room." By the end of the eighteenth century, Janney's grandfather was ready to build a more elaborate home for his expansive household which then included two generations of kin, indentured servants, and free black workers. He completed "a six room stone house adjoining the log one," and turned the old house into the family's kitchen. Still, the Janneys insisted on more changes during the early nineteenth century. In 1816, they added a large frame barn; and an uncle who inherited the farm several years later built a stone kitchen to replace the wooden one.(49)

The least sophisticated or adorned of Loudon homes were those of the German community. Reputed to be unpretentious and frugal, German homes were seldom large and many observers, perhaps betraying their cultural biases, found them comparatively unattractive and uncomfortable. Some even commented that German livestock barns were better constructed and more handsome than German houses. Even neighboring Quakers who esteemed material simplicity sometimes made mention of the German community's lack of aesthetic charm. As late as 1853, for example, Yardley Taylor described Lovettsville as filled with "many old log houses that are barely tolerable." While he admired the German's "economy" and "desire for competence," he thought that they needed to pay more attention to "improvement" and "something of the ornamental."(50)

While many continued to lack material comfort, there was growing opportunity for "spirited" recreation and spiritual richness as the years passed. Indeed, "playing together" often broke down ethnic and class boundaries that praying apart enforced. Ordinaries and churches emerged in the late colonial period as the centers of social activity. The ordinary's heyday in Loudoun was between 1750 and 1830 when men and women operated facilities in private buildings and their homes. Travelers and locals alike came for "ordinary" or regular meals and to talk politics, gossip, drink, and eat. Rates for meals varied over the years—a breakfast or supper cost about 19 cents in 1806, a hot dinner with beer or cider—26 cents; both ale and a cheap bottle of wine cost 36 cents, although good Madeira was 60 cents a bottle while port was 40 cents. Lodging in "clean sheets" was nine cents a night; hay and pasturage were 30 cents.(51)

There also were other recreational avenues. Card playing, cockfights, fist fights and brawls, shooting, wood chopping, tobacco spitting, riding contests, horse shoes, hunting, dancing, and storytelling were typical male "sports." Things sometimes got out of control and ended in violence, especially when where there was a lot of drinking. Court records from the era are replete with accounts of drunken melees in which more than heads and furniture were broken. Local ethnic tensions sometimes were at the root. Descendants of area Germans, for example, tell the tale of how several men from their community volunteered to help their neighbor repair his mill dam. As was customary, the men drank as they worked. A quarrel broke out between an Irishman and a German about their home countries. A group brawl ensued and several persons were seriously hurt. The next day the German man died from his wounds. There also was the story of how local Germans angered the Irish by parading a St. Patrick in effigy with a potato necklace around his neck. The following Michelmas, Irish neighbors struck back by posting an archangel with a necklace of sauerkraut up for the entire village to see. Such was good fun for some, but too raucous for others who sought their entertainment at less bawdy community events.(52)

Religious activity was important in southern homes and farming communities, not only because it brought comfort to those who inhabited this unpredictable, often violent or tragic world, but also because it was the center of "respectable" social life. Church meetings, when they were held, could last all day. But when they were over, worshippers conversed with friends and family, exchanged gossip, and even shared a meal. According to county lore, attendance at Quaker meetings was very regular and everyone, even neighborhood dogs, got into the habit of going. On one particular day, the dog's master went outside to hitch his horse so that he could ride to the Waterford service. Suddenly feeling ill, he went back into his house and unexpectedly died. His dog waited briefly for his master to return to the horse. When he did not, the dog trotted off to town, found his usual spot at the meeting under his owner's accustomed bench, and sat out the service.(53)

Initially one's ethnicity almost bespoke one's choice of faith. But for some, one's religious sentiments also prescribed a certain kind of ethnicity. Quakers and their culture, for example, were more distinguishable by the religion and the kind of lifestyle that affiliation demanded than perhaps any other characteristic.(54) Presbyterians dominated the first Scotch-Irish neighborhoods of the 1730s.(55) Most local Irish were Catholic.(56) The first several generations of Germans were almost unanimously members of the German Reformed Church or Lutherans, although Mennonites, Dunkers, Moravians, Separatists, and Inspirationists also were present in small numbers.(57) Many British settlers were members of the Anglican Church.(58) As time wore on, however, some denominational affiliations were shared across ethnic and even racial lines. The forceful entry of the Methodists and Baptists among these communities had much to do with this phenomenon. So too did the county's population growth and natural forces of acculturation.

As early as the 1760s, and certainly by the time of the American Revolution, the Baptists and Methodists were the most prominent denominations in Loudoun. Many of these worshippers were Scotch-Irish and Welsh yeoman farmers, shopkeepers, artisans, and poorer people, although there always were some from among the county's elite and especially free blacks and slaves. Unlike the Episcopalians and Presbyterians, local Methodists and Baptists held numerous camp meetings which served as extensive membership drives. They also were able to attract large numbers of people through special appeals to the "ordinary" man and woman and a ceremonial structure which encouraged an open expression of one's spiritual feelings.(59)

Congregations large enough to attract ministers on any basis suggested a steady increase in the white population. And increase it did, from about 1500 in 1749 to more than 15,000 in 1800.(60) Town development barely kept apace. Predictably, the most important urban spot was Leesburg, the county seat, located near the county's central-eastern boundary.(61) The center of Loudoun's business, intellectual, and political life, residents could boast of several academies, a library, numerous general stores, taverns, hotels, artisan shops, churches representing most of the major denominations, a branch of the Bank of the Valley, professional offices, a regular stage coach stop, and a mail office by the 1830s. Other smaller, but similarly important urban spots, were the southwestern town of Middleburg and the Quaker strongholds of Waterford in north-central Loudoun, Hillsboro to its west, and Lincoln. Aldie, located in the south-central part of the county; Lovettsville, in the German settlement; Snickersville to its south; Hamilton; Purcellville; Arcola; Neersville; Wheatland; and Bloomfield all slowly crept into being, providing a few urban amenities for its residents and those farm families that lived close by.(62) (See Fig. 1.)

By the dawning of the antebellum era, Loudoun was a full-blown society with an admittedly small but comparatively respectably sized population. While there still were some large expanses of forest to be conquered and roads remained bad in most sections, there was a density to the population, neighboring farms, and towns that bespoke of generations-old settlements. Ethnicity, class, and culture, symbolized so well in housing styles, choice of religion, and especially one's occupation and control of resources such as land and slaves, continued to be the most distinguishing characteristics in the county's white society, both dividing and coalescing broad sectors over time.

Almost in the midst of the county's growth and development, however, there were signs of decline. While the second half of the eighteenth century fostered significant population increases among whites, there were initially only slight increases after 1800 and then significant losses during the 1830s. By 1860, fewer whites lived in Loudoun than in 1800. This kind of decline, due mostly to vigorous emigration to the Lower South, Southwest, and West, predictably stalled urban and industrial development, slowed the county's agricultural economy, and drained many communities of younger generations of families and especially young men.(63) (See Table 1.)

The pull for the hundreds and perhaps thousands of white Loudouners who left was the availability of affordable land elsewhere. The push was a county and a state with a sagging agrarian economy that remained dominated by wealthy planters who controlled land and labor resources. Added to this dismal scenario was the consistent fear of slave insurrection, drove home by the bloody Nat Turner rebellion of 1831 (it probably is little coincidence that the largest numbers of white emigrants (more than 3000) left Loudoun that decade). While the local economy demonstrated some diversity, due mostly to a growing urban class of artisans and elite professionals, merchants, and businessmen, most people were either farmers or provided services for the agricultural sector. As late as 1850, farm land still comprised 88 percent of the county's acreage, and the value of Loudoun's farm land and buildings equaled 92 percent of the total value of the county's real estate. (See Tables 2 and 3.)(64)

Problems with Loudoun's antebellum economy derived from multiple sources. Infertile land was a large part of the dilemma. The story was the same all over. Farmers who invested in tobacco cultivation during the eighteenth century routinely used inefficient or few soil conservation methods, systematically mapping land of its fertility. Only occasionally did they allow a field to lie fallow long enough to replenish its vital nutrients, or routinely use fertilizer. "The value of manure is not known here," Nicholas Cresswell commented in 1777. "If it is, they are too lazy to make use of it. Their method is to clear a piece of land from the woods, generally put it in wheat the first year, Indian corn the next, and so alternately for six or seven years together." After that, farmers would complain that "the strength of the Land is gone ... it is worn out," and they let it grow into woods again while clearing another tract for cultivation. This kind of negligence carried over to the next generations. Loudoun's nineteenth-century farmers witnessed a steady decline in soil fertility and crop yields land prices continued to rise sharply.(65)

The county's economy began to recover by 1840, partially because of changing land-use techniques. Two Loudoun farmers, John Alexander Binns and Israel Janney, aggressively addressed the problem of soil infertility. Janney was not unique among local Quakers, for many came to Loudoun in the eighteenth century using the kinds of soil conservation techniques that Binns later introduced to his community. An avid observer, Binns, for one, took notice of the farming practices of Pennsylvania farmers and local Quakers who used land plaster or gypsum and clover as fertilizers. He and his slaves experimented, combining the application of fertilizers with deep ploughing and crop rotation. Binns documented his tremendous success, publishing findings in 1803 that demonstrated that a farm he purchased in 1793 produced triple amounts of corn and wheat after five years of his applied technique.(66)

In the end, a significant number of farmers seemed to have embraced Binns's ideas, if only briefly. Thomas Jefferson, for one, was quite optimistic and sent a copy of Binns's book to friends in England and Europe. Israel Janney also publicized the benefits of gypsum and clover at about the same time. Just how important and long-term was the impact on Loudoun farming is difficult to assess. Yet certainly many county farmers eventually tried lime-based fertilizers, while others used animal manure, and most took up deep plowing.(67)

Loudouners interested in agricultural reform also initiated a regional forum. Local farmers formed the Agricultural Society of Loudoun, Fauquier, Prince William and Fairfax in 1825. Several years later, county farmers created the Agricultural Society of Loudoun. The group sponsored, among other educational and social activities, an annual county fair which encouraged farm families to exhibit their products and to take pride in their rural culture. In 1855, Benjamin Hyde Benton and lames Gulick opened the Loudoun County Agricultural Academy and Chemical Institute. Located just three miles north of Aldie, the academy was the first locally to provide "instruction in all branches of mathematics and science useful to the farmer and man of Science,"(68)

The interest in agricultural practices did not miss the attention of local inventors. Stephen McCormick patented a popular plow and William Yonson invented and manufactured a wheat threshing machine that county planters publicly recommended. Yonson advertised his goods in the local papers, assuring area farmers in 1844 that his factory in Leesburg, staffed by the "most experienced workmen," produced "upon the shortest notice" all orders for "Threshing Machines of every description in use, Wheat Fans, Shellers, Farm and Road Wagons, Ploughs of All Kinds, and especially important to Farmers, the improved Screw Spike portable Threshing Machine."(69)

Life could be difficult for farmers and town dwellers alike who weathered the storms of Loudoun's fickle economy. But most were successful enough to provide a subsistence income for their families. Yet, there always were poor people who needed county welfare. Loudoun's impoverished were of every ethnic group, generational cohort, and gender. They included blacks and whites, single, widowed, and deserted mothers and their children, the elderly, farmers, and mechanics as well as spendthrifts, alcoholics, and criminals. Court records of bankruptcies and debtor suits forcefully document the financial problems of some while accounts from the Overseers of the Poor tell of the incidence of debilitating local poverty.

Overseer records, officially kept since 1800, document that local folk actually did little to help the impoverished, centering their attention on the small numbers of visibly poor urban dwellers and especially families. Not surprisingly, they gave most support to those families without an adult male breadwinner. Every year, county officials assessed a tax on tithables to support the expense of aiding the county's poor. In 1800, for example, tax was 68 cents on each of Loudoun's 4,932 tithables, creating a fund of $3,353 to support the "estimated" "forty to fifty" poor white and black persons in the county that year. The Overseers slowly increased the amount of the tax over the next two decades until it became $1.20. But then in a chilling reversal that may have reflected the county's overall financial decline, they cut the tax back to 65 cents in 1830, 55 cents in 1840, and then even lower.(70)

Part of the loss in tax funds was made up in moneys generated on the county's poor farm which of ficials purchased in 1822. A small percentage of the poor also had temporary accommodations in Loudoun's poor house, built in 1801. Some 40 to 60 persons, including some free blacks and slaves, resided there for periods that could be as brief as a few nights or as long as several months. The Overseers of the Poor also provided temporary rent, food, clothing, and medical attention. The county generally gave some form of assistance to between 130 and 220 persons per year, of whom 5 to 25 percent were black. Many recipients of public charity were widowed or abandoned wives and their children, as the county stepped in to take the position of the family patriarch when he could not, or refused, do so. When Nancy Turner's husband deserted her and their children in 1810, for example, the county purchased and returned the furnishings that Mr. Turner's creditors had seized.(71)

The paternal and patriarchal role of the Overseers of the Poor in needy families far exceeded their distribution of public charities. More important, they assigned court-approved apprenticeships and indentures to poor children and orphans (fatherless children) whom they deemed had no vital means of support. Virginia law compelled these youngsters to remain apprentices until they became adults, and Overseers decided when, with whom, under what conditions, and precisely how long they lived and worked as such. Ideally, guardians supplied their wards with food, clothing, shelter, and a lucrative skill. The county court ordered on May 10, 1813, for example, that the "Overseers of the Poor bind James Barbour 8 years old on the 14th December last and John Peason 10 years old the 27th Feby last [as] apprentices to Tho[mas] Collins, according to Laws to learn the art and mystery of a stone Mason."(72) Given the lack of educational opportunities for poor children, apprenticeships were appealing to more than a few.(73)

Some who were aware of shrinking public funds tried organizing private charity, particularly that which helped struggling families. Gender-segregated organizations, such as women's church groups, sewing circles, mothers' associations, male lodges, and benevolent societies routinely solicited private moneys for public benefit. The Benevolent Society of Leesburg, organized in 1849, was perhaps the most well known. Its membership included some of Loudoun's most prominent men, including Francis W. Luckett, William A. and John D. Powell, Charles W. Blincoe, and Colonel Robert G. Saunders. Their goals were to provide material relief to the poor, emotional support to the ill, and financial assistance to widows and their children. The Society of Friends and other county churches also helped. Moses Gibson, for example, was a widower Friend with two daughters and a son who asked for and received assistance "in kind" from the Goose Creek Meeting for four consecutive years during the 1820s.(74)

Unfortunately, most of Loudoun's poor never received any kind of sustained or reconstructive assistance, and continued to live on the margins of society. Often homeless, these individuals and families moved from one part of the county to the next, seeking work, a place to live, and relying on their own wits and sometimes crime for daily survival. Loudoun's middling and upper classes responded by giving reluctantly and meagerly, preferring instead to support oppressive legislation like apprenticeship and child residency laws which mandated their removal from impoverished and father-absent homes.

Poverty, however, was only one social problem which affected family and community life. Alcoholism, illegitimacy, spousal abuse, and desertion were just as common. But these social "ills" were discretely different from poverty. They cut deeply across class lines, often leveling socially and culturally constructed hierarchies that poverty, given its class-specific nature, did not. Alcoholism and the disorderly and sometimes abusive behavior that resulted could have plantation mistresses sounding and acting like overseers' wives or even poorer women as they strove to keep their men in check and their families stable. "Mother says tell Grandmother that Uncle William is getting along very well," Agnes Davisson of Hillsboro wrote to her sister in 1852. "He is perfectly sober and has promised Mother that he will be for the next six months, at least." Early nineteenth-century Friend John Janney recalled the "classless" nature of "drunkards" "in and just outside" of his Lincoln neighborhood. Farmer Samuel Iden, blacksmith Henry Fredt, tanner Samuel Russell, the wealthy German planter Conrad Bitzer, and a man of lesser means, "Suky" Poulson, routinely drank and got drunk together, a habit that both infuriated and amused witnesses. It also threatened to dissolve established ethnic and class distinctions.(75)

Yet drinking was so much a part of recreational culture that it was difficult to control, stigmatize, or even isolate. For southern adolescent boys and men of every distinction, drinking, even excessive drinking, remained one of the fundamental tests of their manhood. But to sit around drinking and boasting with friends was one thing. To allow your drinking to threaten your family life, your commitment as a husband and a father, your status as a patriarch in the society was quite another. The worst case of alcoholism Janney could remember was that of Edmund Carter. Mr. Carter, who had married a respectable widow and become the stepfather to her five girls, would become intoxicated almost daily and then "drive his wife and her daughters out of the house at night, and they would [have to] seek shelter at a neighbors."(76)

In Janney's neighborhood, serious family frays that became public knowledge were community concerns. Residents of the quiet Quaker settlement did not politely ignore grim social problems like drunkenness or domestic violence. To do so would have threatened the moral fabric and cohesiveness of their Communities. Nor did they readily seek the aid or intervention of county officials. Neighborhood leaders assessed the situation, decided on a course of action, and then carried it out. Usually the process was informal; but it held the powerful Support of the majority and offenders did well to abide by it.

Janney's neighbors quickly tired of Carter's debauchery and decided to take matters into their own hands. Believing that a severe whipping would help him mend his ways, a group of local men went to Edward Carter's where they found him in a drunken stupor. They dragged him out of bed, beat him severely, placed him in a shallow grave, and then proceeded to cover him up with wooden boards.

Hurt, angry, and frightened, Carter lay in his untimely grave most of the night before he finally managed to crawl out. He brought suit against those neighbors he believed were involved in his kidnapping and assault, but was unable to prove his accusations. (Not surprisingly, no one from the community volunteered any evidence on Mr. Carter's behalf.) Not a person to hold a grudge, and keenly aware that he needed his community's support more than they needed his, he found it best to conclude that his mishap "was the work of the Devil."(77)

Unfortunately, Carter's whipping did not have the desired affect. Again his neighbors organized against him. Catching him coming home very drunk, "one of the company stepped in front of him and accosted him. The rest made their appearance on the side of the road." Carter reacted angrily, asking if they intended to beat him again. The posse of local men and boys decided instead to threaten him with a tar and feathering. "The threat proved efficient," Janney concluded, "for [Edward Carter] left the neighborhood soon after." While Janney and his neighbors rid their community of a man they perceived as a threat to its common morality and certainly to the well being of Carter's wife and children, there were no local resources available to aid persons like him who had severe emotional problems or drug or alcohol dependencies.

Although John Janney could not recall any specific "grog" shops in his neighborhood, "tippling" houses, ordinaries that retailed wine and alcohol, and personal stills were numerous. General concern for the growth of alcoholism among county residents in the colonial period provided fertile ground for the creation of antebellum temperance societies. Both men and women participated in the movement to ban public drinking. The Sons of Temperance, established in Leesburg in 1846, for example, was a "temperance, friendly and beneficial society." Male and female members agitated against establishments which sold liquor and encouraged habitual drinking. Others planned and executed activities to publicize and aid their cause. Lively parades and regional conventions "for the purpose of adopting a plan for the legal suppression of the traffic in intoxicating liquids throughout the State" were fairly common. There were also petitions to the state legislature. On February 25, 1858, more than sixty Loudouners, a significant majority of whom were women, petitioned the General Assembly to "no longer ... permit the retailer of ardent spirits to prosecute under the sanction and authority of the laws of the commonwealth." They argued that a "large portion of the enebriates [sic]" in Loudoun "acquired a taste for ardent spirits and formed the habit of intemperance at the bar room or the tippling shop." Alcoholism, they asserted, affected every realm of their society, even Loudoun's youth and respectable husbands and fathers. It created "criminals" and "fanatics" out of those who otherwise could make a positive contribution to family and society.(78)

Other social problems also elicited community response. It is clear from the Edward Carter incident that local violence of one sort or another was quite usual. It was both the source of community problems and one of the measures local folk readily relied on to solve personal and group concerns. Court records are full of incidents of interpersonal and group violence, and that was only the tip of the iceberg. During one court session alone, John McGeath was convicted of assaulting Patrick McHolland; Hugh and Adam Barr, and Robert and Moses Wilson, faced charges of beating Weedon Smith "without provocation"; and the Justices found Andrew Smarr, "laborer," guilty of assaulting Matthew Weatherby. A short time later, five other county men were in court facing the charge of "disturbing the quiet repose of Whitson Birdsall, entering his enclosements, annoying his house with horns and bells and firing of guns, [and] insulting his person." Six months earlier, Sarah Sexton and Fielding Brown brought charges against one another, both asking the court to make certain that the other "shall be of good and quiet behavior towards all the good citizens of this commonwealth," especially each other.(79)

Church and county officials also had the authority to punish men and women whose crimes had direct influence on family life—those, for example who parented illegitimate children, adulterers, and those guilty of fornication. Charles Chinn, a member of a prominent but morally unconventional Middleburg family, was one of many men found guilty of illegal cohabitation with local women. And it is little wonder that the court took an inordinate interest in lames Whaley, Jr., who was charged with "absenting [himself]" from his wife and taking up with another woman. This other woman, the mother of Mr. Whaley's illegitimate child, was his wife's sister.

The Chinn and Whaley cases notwithstanding, little legislation actually was in place to address numerous and complex social problems. Legislators passed few laws that had any impact on state-wide or local policies concerning divorce, spousal and child abuse, financial support to deserted women and children, or general relief to the poor. Instead, Loudoun's lawmakers, a small elite centered on a few planter-professional families, spent most of their energies on local fiscal concerns and modernization, rarely championing issues that impinged on family or protected it.

Loudoun politics was exciting, sometimes corrupt, or even dangerous business. Early in the county's history, for example, the landed gentry tried to create a distinct county so that they could have political dominance instead of sharing power with the small farmers and artisans. Their efforts failed, but political tensions remained high for this and other reasons.(80)

The right to participate in Loudoun's political arena was a privilege reserved for white men who met specific property qualifications. By the 1840s, poorer men were still trying to obtain the right to vote. Yet despite numerous statewide petitions, even one from Loudoun in January 1845 which requested that the legislature "consider all the free white male citizens of the Commonwealth as having an unquestionable right to an equal participation in the government under which they live," Virginia did not expand its legal franchise to include propertyless white men until 1852.(81)

The question as to who could and could not vote and the implications for election fraud continually problematized local elections. Misspelt names on voter rolls, changes in property holdings from one election to the next, the presence of a mobile voter population, and a tradition of heavy drinking on election day consistently created confusion and sometimes contested election results. The way in which Virginians structured the polling event did not help. Loudouners held elections at the courthouse in Leesburg. The custom was to have a polling table set up either inside the building or in the adjoining yard. Upon approaching the table, each voter had to announce loudly the candidate of his choice as clerks recorded the choice. The problems that could, and did, result are obvious. Peer pressure and closely monitored choices not only threatened tainted election outcomes but created lifelong hostilities among neighbors and sometimes kin. An election for the House of Representatives in 1818, for example, led to a fatal duel between two of Loudoun's most illustrious citizens—John McCarthy and General Armistead Mason. The two were first cousins who had been raised on adjoining plantations.(82)

The Federalist party was prominent in Loudoun immediately following the American Revolution and remained so well into the second decade of the nineteenth century. Local historians credit Colonel Leven Powell, founder of the town of Middleburg, planter, and Revolutionary War officer, with the Federalists' early popularity. Having created a powerful political hold over the area during the Revolutionary and early republic eras, Leven Powell's descendants and their in-laws dominated regional politics for most of the antebellum years. Indeed, the Powell-Harrison-Conrad-Jones faction was one of the most important political dynasties in nineteenth-century northern Virginia. Leven Powell's son, Burr, served in the Virginia Assembly from 1798 to 1807 and was state senator from 1813 to 1815. Another son, Cuthbert, was elected as senator immediately after his brother's tenure and was a member of the United States Congress.(83)

The Democratic-Republican party had its heyday in Loudoun during the 1820s. By the 1830s, most had become Whigs. They controlled county politics during most of the pre-Civil War period, consistently delivering three-to-one margins for presidential candidates. Locally, Whigs campaigned on platforms which supported government funding for public works such as canals, railroads, and highways—important resources for planters and businessmen who wanted greater access to distant markets. They also organized the powerful Central Clay Club which provided a forum for local political discussions and debates as well as publicized party platform.(84)

Powell men also carried considerable weight in the Whig party. George Powell served as a Whig member of the General Assembly from 1835 to 1836. Cuthbert Burr Powell was Whig assemblyman and representative to Congress from 1841 to 1843. Two of Burr Powell's sons-in-law, Burr Harrison and Robert Conrad, and a son were Whig state legislators. Matthew Harrison represented the fourth generation of Powell politicians. An ambitious young lawyer, Matthew enhanced his wealth and political connections through his marriage to the daughter of General Walter Jones. Harrison was elected, along with his cousin Burr Noland, to the Virginia Assembly in 1861. He also served Loudoun in the Confederate state legislature from 1862 to 1863 and as a Democrat in the General Assembly for one post-Reconstruction term.(85)

By the end of the antebellum era, many had come to deeply resent the hostility and activism of northern abolitionists and the threat it brought to their society. They blamed northern "extremists" for an increase in local fugitive slave activity and especially for the John Brown Raid at Harper's Ferry federal arsenal, located just three miles north of their county line, in 1859. As the issue of disunion took center stage, Loudoun sent Quaker lawyer John Janney and planter John Carter to represent them in the special convention on secession held in Richmond during the week of February 13, 1861. Janney was elected chairman of the convention, and droves of curious, excitable onlookers traveled to Richmond in anticipation of momentous decisions. Loudouner Mason Ellzey attended the convention at the invitation of Janney. Years later Ellzey proudly remembered that he had been present when Jonathan Goode gave his persuasive speech for secession. He also had seen General Lee accept the command of the Virginia forces. But unlike Ellzey, both John Janney and John Carter opposed secession, initially voting against it. The convention eventually concluded that a decision should be made by state-wide referendum. Loudoun held its polling on May 23, 1861. The majority of voters (1,626) supported secession; 726 persons opposed it.(86)

With the onset of Civil War, life changed profoundly for Loudouners. Some communities grew stronger as others faltered in the wake of the devastation military battles like Bull Run and eventual Union occupation brought to the area. Political and other ideological differences which historically had caused divisiveness among county whites exploded. The German town of Lovettsville and the Quaker stronghold of Waterford voted overwhelmingly against secession, the only two districts to do so.(87) This was only the beginning. During wartime, Loudoun divided its allegiance along the lines that the May 23rd vote predicted. The majority of the county supported the Confederate States of America, but those sections which were primarily German and Quaker sided with the Union. The Loudoun Rangers, composed mostly of males from the German community of Lovettsville, was the only organized white Union regiment to come out of Virginia during the Civil War. Loudoun was occupied by both armies during the war at tremendous loss in property and life. In August 1864 General Ulysses S. Grant found cause to order Major General Sheridan: "If you can possibly spare a division of Cavalry, send them through Loudoun County to destroy and carry off the crops, animals, negroes and all men under fifty years of age capable of bearing arms." Two months later, Sheridan carried out his orders. Loudoun was conclusively lost to the Union army.(88)

Table of Contents

Introduction,	3
1	The White Community: Patterns of Settlement, Development, and
Conflict,	9
2. Gender Convention and Courtship,	37
3. Marriage, for Better or for Worse,	63
4. Parenting,	95
5. Broken Vows and "Notorious" Endings: Divorce,	140
Introduction,	159
6. The Nature of Loudoun Slavery,	166
7. Slave Family Structure,	206
8. Slave Marriage and Family Relations,	226
9. Free Blacks,	258
10. Free Black Family and Household Economy,	286
Conclusion,	320
Appendix A,	329
Appendix B,	339
Notes,	341
Bibliography,	421
Index,	441

Editorial Reviews

"An impressive example of the kind of local and regional history that for the last generation has transformed our understanding of the past."—The New York Review of Books

"This book about the lives of blacks and whites in Loudoun County, Va., in the century before the Civil War makes fascinating reading."—The Washington Times

"Brenda Stevenson has written an eloquent, original, and humane book on the most intimate aspects of life in the antebellum South."—Edward L. Ayers, Professor of History, The University of Virginia, and author of The Promise of the New South

From the Publisher

YAStevenson uses diaries, letters, journals, and other firsthand accounts to describe the lives of a variety of people in Loudon County, VA, including slaveholders, slaves, free blacks, and poor whites, during the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War. The material is clearly organized and the writing is easily understood. Section one deals with white citizens and includes family life, gender roles, courtship and marriage, and parenting. The second half of the book focuses on African Americans and analyzes the nature of slavery, black family structure, slave marriage, and the lives of free blacks. Because Stevenson focuses on several prominent families, readers will gain insight into the mind-set of several generations of slaveholders. She creates an interesting portrait of the society of the time. Most gripping, however, are her descriptions of the lives of slaves. Narratives of severe physical punishment and rape are eye opening and stress the atrocities of the system. This moving, realistic book will prove valuable for research.Mary Proudman, Bridgewater-Raritan Regional High School, Bridgewater, NJ

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