Buying into the World of Goods: Early Consumers in Backcountry Virginia

INTRODUCTION: In Backcountry Time

introduction In Backcountry Time 1 Virginia merchant John Hook was angry. His British suppliers had disappointed him one too many times with shoddy, unfashionable goods. He lectured Whitehaven merchant Walter Chambre in a 1773 letter, explaining that their business was absolutely dependent on “dispatch, exactness , and judgement in the choise of the goods, respecting the quality, collours , patterns, and fashions.” His frustration turned to sarcasm: “for me to make money without Goods is as absurd as to suppose a Taylor to make a Coat without cloth by the needle and Shears alone.”1 Why would a merchant on the western edge of settlement in Virginia worry about colors, patterns, and fashions? Many of his customers lived in small, simply furnished, log-built cabins. Few could even afford bound labor to clear land and grow tobacco. The majority bought primarily rum, inexpensive textiles, or agricultural tools at his New London store. But Hook evidently also needed to stock some fine things to meet his customers’ tastes and desires. Mrs. George Callaway’s purchases in the previous year included porcelain cups and saucers, a pinch box (for snuff), and a butter boat and stand.2 “Free Mulatto” Benjamin Ruff bought multiple household necessities but also ribbon, embossed serge textiles, and ten strings of black beads.3 Tarleton East purchased “one fine felt hat.”4 James Smith (“the butcher”) selected simple items like rum, salt, and a small knife and paid for them with a meat credit. But Smith also chose a fine lawn handkerchief when far cheaper ones were available.5 What did each of these shoppers hope to achieve through the ownership of such stylish goods? In their expenditures, backcountry Virginians were “buying into the world of goods” in two senses: they were purchasing commodities and validating a set of ideas about taste, fashion, and appropriate lifestyle. This book examines how and why they acquired such goods and how country merchants brought these commodities to them between 1760 and 1810. It demonstrates that specialized distribution chains evolved to carry goods of the Atlantic world to colonists moving ever westward, spurring country merchants to compete fiercely and giving consumers multiple reasons to spend in ways that transcended traditional social fissures. Even so, class, ethnicity, religion, and race continued to shape frontier consumer patterns in compelling ways. This study examines a particular place and time, focusing on the life and business of one country merchant, Scottish-born John Hook (1745‒1809), who operated rural stores first in Bedford County, Virginia, and later in adjacent Franklin County. Further, it plumbs cultural evidence left by many individuals and the objects they chose when they shopped at Hook’s store. Hook’s business served as a fulcrum for social and economic relations among neighbors and family members, recording debits and credits, errands and favors . Hook may be the best-documented merchant in eighteenth-century Virginia. Besides accounts of sales and payment, his detailed records, his numerous and protracted court battles, and his lengthy correspondence with his initial partners, he left a splendid cache of business ephemera—memoranda , scrawled notes, customer lists, invoices, inventories, even detailed architectural drawings of his stores and houses. This immigrant’s personal involvement with a community makes for a distinctive business story and an intensely human one.6 According to cultural geographers and folklorists, a sense of place can have deep meaning for individuals and a single place can be both extraordinary and ordinary.7 So it was with the area in which John Hook’s businesses were located. It was ordinary like all the rural places that were settled as society moved westward toward fresh farmland in the later eighteenth century. But it was extraordinary because of the interaction among groups that settled that area of the Virginia backcountry—Germans, Scots-Irish, English—and the enslaved Africans they brought with them during a time of important political, economic, and religious turmoil. Using telling geographical nomenclature, John Hook informed his partner in Scotland in 1768 that “this and the adjacent Frontier counties is settling unaccountable fast from people below and from the Northward.”8 The people “below” came from eastern places, locales below the fall line of the James River. Those from “northward” were mostly Germans who funneled through the broad and fertile Shenandoah Valley after first landing in Philadelphia and then moving to south-central Pennsylvania. Many continued on to North Carolina, but some decided to pause in the hills of Bedford and Franklin counties. These settlers, representing different...