Two Jefferson-Randolph Books

 While researching my genealogy, I learned several of my ancestors were in Virginia in the 17th and 18th centuries. Curious about what their lives might have been like, I started reading non-fiction about life at that time. (I blogged about some of what I'd learned in "Colonial Ancestors.") 

Recently, I read two non-fiction books by Virginia author Alan Pell Crawford: Unwise Passions and Twilight at Monticello about two individuals from early Virginia families: the Jeffersons and the Randolphs. Likely some of my 18th century ancestors would have known them—or at least known about them.

Both books are well-written and researched. Not only did I learn about the subjects of the books—Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) and Anne Cary—"Nancy"—Randolph (1774-1837), who were distant cousins, but I also learned about life and events during the times before and after the Revolutionary War. The Jefferson and Randolph families married back and forth for generations, so family members were kin to each other in several ways. For instance, Thomas Jefferson's mother was Jane Randolph, and his daughter, Martha "Patsy" Jefferson, married Nancy's brother, Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr. (1768-1828).

The family relationhips are complicated. Fortunately, in Unwise Passions, Crawford provides the Randolph  family tree that shows connections between the two families: 

I bought Unwise Passions because I'd read something on the Interet about an 18th century scandal involving the prominent Randolphs, and it piqued my curiosity. This back-cover blurb summarizes the book: 

In the spring of 1795, the eighteen-year-old Nancy Randolph, the fetching daughter of one of the greatest of the great Virginia tobacco planters, was accused, along with her brother-in-law, of killing her newborn son. Once one of the most sought-after young women in Virginia society, she was denounced as a ruined Jezebel, and the great orator Patrick Henry and future Supreme Court justice John Marshallwere retained to defend her in a sensational trial.This gripping account of murder, infanticide, prostitution charges, moral decline, and heroism that played out in the intimate lives of the nation's Founding Fathers is as riveting and revealing as any scandal—in or out of Washington.

The book was so compelling that I read all 278 pages of the text within three days. When I saw that Crawford had also written a book about Thomas Jefferson's later years, I also wanted to read that one. 

Both books mention that Thomas Jefferson spent his childhood at the Randolph plantation, Tuckahoe, which his father Peter Jefferson (who was married to Jane Randolph) managed after the death of his friend William Randolph I. Thus, Peter's children had a close relationship with William's orphaned children. Nancy is the daughter of one of those children, Thomas Mann Randolph I.

Tuckahoe Plantation

Unwise Passions chronicles Nancy's life from childhood through her death in 1837. Much information is also provided about others in her family and about those who played significant parts in her life, such as Patrick Henry and how he rose from humble tavern-keeper origins to became a lawyer. 

Twilight at Monticello recounts how Jefferson spent the years after retirement from his political life. A back-cover blurb by Peter Onus, Thomas Jefferson Professor of History at the University of Virginia, provides a concise summary:

". . . Juxaposing affecting scenes of Jefferson's domestic life with fresh and illuminating perspectives on his subject's late-life political, philosophical, and spiritual occupations, Crawford's fine book should engage and reward a wide readership. This is a wonderful introduction to one of the most fascinating—and one of the most generally misunderstood—figures in American history."

 Jefferson's life is also marked by scandal—the Sally Hemmings affair—but he never acknowledges it either publically or privately. When his grandchildren once show him a poem that had been published about his relationship with his slave, he merely laughs. FYI: Crawford provides a diagram of Monticello that shows Jefferson's easy access to Sally's room. Twilight at Monticello gives a good balance between Jefferson's strengths and his shortcomings.

I especially liked the way both book were written— no footnotes to interrupt the flow of the narrative but numerous documentation in the end notes. Here's an example:

That Crawford utiized many primary sources added validity. Twilight at Monticello also has an index.

Many years ago, when my classmates and I studied Virginia history in the 7th grade, we were led to believe that all plantation owners were very rich and lived in elegant mansions, but both books make it clear that plantation owners were land rich but cash poor. Borrowing heavily against their next year's crop to maintain their lavish lifestyles, the plantation owners were always in debt, usually to British banks. After their deaths, the debts passed on to their heirs.  Jefferson's mounting debts was why Monticello fell into disrepair in his later years, and why it was sold outside the family after Jefferson's death on July 4, 1826.

Both of these books are excellent. I highly recommend them.

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Jamestown Brides

I first visited Jamestown, Virginia, in November 1957. I was among the seventh graders from Lee Junior High School who boarded three Greyhound buses and spent three days touring Richmond, Williamsburg, and Jamestown. At that time, all seventh graders studied Virginia history, so the trip was meant to enhance what we'd been studying. But this history had happened long ago and didn't have anything to do with me. Or so I thought.

Then, I didn't know that I had any connections to Jamestown—that my 10th great-grandfathers on my Nace side, Jonathan Giles (who arrived in 1619) and John Haynie (who arrrived in 1621) both survived the March 22, 1622 massacre, and on my Smith side that another ancestor, William Hancock (who arrived in 1619), didn't survive it.  I don't remember hearing much about about the massacre on the school trip. But I remember standing in the church at Jamestown and being told that Queen Elizabeth had stood in that church a few weeks earlier.

Now, having learned a lot about my genealogy, I decided to learn more about what my 17th century Virginia ancestors endured. (I recently blogged about what I'd learned from books I'd read about colonial life.) From my 7th grade Virginia history class, I knew that the original settlers were all men, but later a few brought their wives from England and also some single English women were sent to become wives.  In 1621, the Virginia Company, responsible for Jamestown's settlement,  having advertised in London for potential brides, sent more young women from England to become wives of planters who could pay their passage in tobacco. Some of my ancestors no doubt witnessed these maidens' arrival aboard the ships Marmaduke and Warwick. Recently I read about these women in The Jamestown Brides by Jennifer Potter.

The Jamestown Brides is a hefty book. The paperback edition, including endnotes and index, is 372 pages in a fairly small font. It is apparent the author did considerable research prior to writing this book, and for that I'm grateful. (Note: I'm also grateful the author used endnotes instead of footnotes. There are so many citations that the text would have been unnecessarily choppy if footnotes had appeared on each page.) While the writing is a bit academic, it is also quite readable.

Potter gives considerable background about what both England and Jamestown—like in 1621, why wives were needed for Jamestown, how the potential brides were selected, what their lives were like aboard ship during the voyage, how Jamestown appeared to them when they arrived, and how different life in Jamestown was from London. And then, of course, there was the Massacre of 1622.

The Marmaduke and the Warwick left London in September 1621 and arrived in Jamestown in November. The maidens had to be housed in homes where there was a wife in residence, but there weren't enough suitable accommodations at Jamestown itself. Consequently, many potential brides were dispersed to different settlements until they found husbands.

The book has many illustrations and maps. An especially useful one shows where the different settlements were.  Berkeley Hundred is where my Hancock ancestor, who was reportedly staying at George Thorpe's house, was among those murdered there on March 22, 1622, although he isn't on the list of nine killed. At least 347 men, women (including some potential brides), and children are known to have died  during the massacre, but the number is likely higher. Some—including a few of the potential brides—were taken as captives.

Page197,  paperback edition of The Jamestown Brides

I'm glad I read this book for the background it gave me in an important part of Virginia history. I especially recommend it to all those whose ancestors lived in early 17th century Virginia.  

If you're interested in Virginia's early years, another resource is Mary Newton Standard's out-of-print 1928 edition The Story of Virgnia's First Century. 

You can read it online or download it for free: http://www.ancestraltrackers.net/va/resources/story-virginias-first-century.pdf

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Colonial Ancestors

My research into family genealogy the last couple of years has made me aware that it's a miracle that I exist at all. For instance, I wouldn’t be here if several ancestors hadn't survived the Indian Massacre of 1622 at Jamestown. (Actually, on my Smith Side, I have one ancestor—William Hancock—who didn't survive it. Fortunately, his sons were back in England at the time, and I descend from one of them. One of Hancock's descendants lived less than a half mile from where I now live.)

On my Nace side, I have several ancestors who came from England to colonial Virginia. Jonathan Giles, my 10th great-grandfather who left Isle of Wight, England, and arrived in Jamestown in 1619 on the Trial, was one who survived the massacre. Another 10th great-grandfather who survived was John Haynie, who left Devonshire and arrived in Jamestown in 1621 on the Margrett and John.  

Arriving later and thus missing the massacre, was another 10th great-grandfather, Anthony Harrison, who came from Cambridge England to New Kent, Virginia in 1653 when he was 53. Major Lawrence Smith, my 9th great grandfather from Lancashire, England, was imported into Virginia in 1652 by Col. Augustine Warner.

My 8th great-grandfather, John Battaile, arrived from Essex England in 1692 and lived in Essex County, Virginia, near another 8th-great-grandfather, Andrew Harrison, Sr. And there were many other relatives who arrived in colonial Virginia during the 17th century. The more I learned about my genealogy, the more curious I became about what their lives in colonial Virginia must have been like.  

One book I read was Everyday Life in Early America, by David Freeman Hawke. Another was the Kindle version of a reprint of Home Life in Colonial Days, written over a century ago by Alice Morse Earle, which—alas!—didn't have the illustrations that her original had.

    

I also did a lot of Googling. Two resources of the many resources  I read online were Colonial Williamsburg's "Surviving the 17th Century" (and some of the links on that page) and the Virginia Humanities' "Women in Colonial Virginia."

From a painting for Colonial National Historical Park by Sidney King. A Domestic Scene at Jamestown About 1625; This scene is from The Project Gutenberg eBook, Domestic Life in Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, by Annie Lash Jester.

My conclusion: Life was hard in 17th century Virginia—particularly for women. I doubt I could have survived day to day. Women worked all day long—meal preparation meant picking vegetables, skinning and cutting up meat, cooking on the hearth—which required a lot of stooping, keeping the fire going, using heavy iron pots and utensils, and more. There were few plates in those early days—no china or pottery, although some families might have a few pewter plates which were used primarily for serving. 

There wasn't a dining table—a board was placed on two saw-horses. Some families were fortunate to have a few chairs, but many did not, so diners sat on chests, benches, or whatever could be pulled up to the board. Children often stood to eat. Most colonists ate—with knives, wooden spoons, and fingers—from wooden trenchers, squares of wood hollowed out in the center to form a sort of bowl. Trenchers were usually shared, so two people often ate from the same one. There were plenty of napkins to go round, however, since fingers often neeed wiping (and women wove the fabric that made the napkins). 

Why didn't the colonists have forks? 

By the beginning of the 18th century, knives imported to the American colonies had the new blunt tips. Because Americans had very few forks and no longer had sharp-tipped knives to spear food, they had to use spoons in instead. They’d use the spoon in the left hand to steady the food as they cut it with the knife in the right. They’d then switch the spoon to the opposite hand in order to scoop it up to eat. 

These folks drank their beverages from tankards, wooden cups, or leather cups. Water wasn't the preferred beverage—it was sometimes dirty or foul-tasting, so beer, ale, and cider were preferred, even for children.

Besides kitchen duties, women also did the washing (see illustration below), spun, wove, knitted, and sewed; made soap and candles; tended a garden; preserved food by pickling, salting, drying or making preserves; cleaned (scouring the floor—if it wasn't a dirt floor—involved sand) and tended chickens and cows. They also gave birth several times and raised children.

Wash-day in the Seventeenth Century The women soak the clothes in hot water dipped from the nearby kettle heated over the open fire, beat out the grime with paddles, rinse the articles in the shallow stream and hang them out to dry. (Courtesy of the artist, Sydney R. Jones from Old English Household Life by Jekyll and Jones, published by B. T. Batsford, Ltd., London. Photo by Thomas L. Williams)

If they needed to travel—perhaps to help a friend give birth or to attend a funeral, they either walked or went by dug-out canoe if they lived near water as many early Virginians did. Horses were a rarity in the early 1600s because they took up so much space to  transport by ship (a 1000-pound horse, plus 500 lbs. of hay, 300 or so pounds of oats—you get the picture). Plus, all the manure that had to be mucked out and carried above deck. . . . Horses that came to Jamestown in 1608 didn't survive the starving time, and it took a while for more horses to be brought in and breeding to get underway. Some fortunate families might have oxen and a cart in the early years, though. When horses did eventually come to the colonies, "no one walked save a vagabond or a fool." By the18th century, roads had improved and carriage travel was popular.  

I'm not sure I could have coped with 17th century women's clothing. The only article of underwear that women had was the shift—which looked sort of like a long nightshirt. There were no other undergarments unless you include stays. (Underpants—or drawers, which were two pieces tied together at the waist and thus open in the crotch—wouldn't come along until the early 19th century. What we know as panties would arrive even later.) Stays were worn between the shift and the outer gown. Made of linen and whalebone (or wood), stays laced up and gave women stiff, upright posture. Children, boys as well as girls, also wore stays to improve their posture. I can't imagine that stays were comfortable.

Staying warm in winter was a challenge. Early houses were drafty, and one fireplace wasn't enough to warm the whole room where people ate, slept, and lived. Bed-curtains helped, as did feather beds (sometimes another feather bed was used as a cover), animal skins, and several people sharing a bed.

I appreciate the hardships my ancestors endured to settle colonial Virginia. I wouldn't be here without these hard-working and resilient forebears.

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