Pharsalia: An Environmental Biography of a Southern Plantation, 1780-1880

Two: Independence and the Birth of Pharsalia, 1796-1830

Independence and the Birth of Pharsalia, 1796–1830 In creating Pharsalia, the Massies intensified the agricultural ecology of the triangle much more than the man they had bought out, John Rose. Their farming sprang, however, from the same gentry culture that had produced Parson Robert Rose and his descendants. The southern gentleman ’s status began with mastery of his plantation, where his chattels produced wealth that he could translate into rank and prestige. His greatest fear, then, was losing that control and becoming a servant to other masters—political tyrants, volatile markets, rapacious creditors, or even a capricious Nature. As the promise of the Revolution faded into the uncertainty of the young republic, the Massies established their Tye Valley plantations—Level Green for Maj. Thomas Massie in the late 1790s, and Pharsalia for his youngest son, William, in 1815. The gentry were beset by threats to their independence in these years and sought stubbornly to reassert traditional principles of plantation autonomy. Like many other planters and farmers of this era, the Massies turned to the program offered by the South’s agricultural conservationists. These men promised that English methods of soil maintenance would intensify southern agriculture by making more efficient use of what planters already possessed. Yet as young William Massie would discover as he and his slaves developed Pharsalia after 1815, the resources he owned were no longer quite enough to build an autonomous, prosperous plantation. Paper schemes met practical realities, ecological and economic, in the triangle. Pharsalia emerged as a more complex, and less successful, agricultural environment than the Massies had hoped. 64 chapter two The Massies and the Search for Independence Thomas Massie’s post-Revolutionary migration to the Tye Valley was a microcosm of the experience of the Revolutionary-era gentry and reflected his own growing obsession with political and personal home rule. He was born in 1747, the son of prominent New Kent County planter William Massie and his wife, Martha Macon Massie. After studying at the College of William and Mary like so many of his social peers, he took up his father’s occupation and became a prosperous and respected Tidewater tobacco planter. As a junior member of the plantation gentry, the young Thomas Massie inherited their vision of absolute independence. At its core, a white man’s “independence” was the complete freedom and authority he wanted to have on his own land and within his own family. To achieve this, he had to control all the necessities of life. Although perfect self-sufficiency was never attainable, it remained a standard against which white men judged their lives. In a famous letter to England, eighteenthcentury planter William Byrd II encapsulated the gentry’s ideal: “I have a large Family of my own, and my Doors are open to Every Body, yet I have no Bills to pay, and a half-a-Crown will rest undisturbed in my Pocket for many Moons together. Like one of the Patriarchs, I have my Flocks and my Herds, my Bond-men and Bond-women, and every Soart of trade amongst my own Servants, so that I live in a kind of Independence on every one but Providence.”1 Thomas Massie took up his own search for independence in the last, dangerous years before the American Revolution. William Byrd II’s selfsatisfied dream of patriarchal independence had become an anxious obsession as ominous threats gathered around tobacco planters. The tobacco market was always a troublesome one and grew more so in the 1760s and 1770s. Rural commerce was taken over by the local factors of Scots mercantile companies. These men offered good prices for tobacco and large stocks of consumer goods. Yet they charged hefty interest rates and extended their power throughout the economy. Planters of all ranks fell into debt to these new creditors and raged against their growing dependence upon them. In response, Virginians undertook a series of NonImportation Agreements, in the hopes of ending the empire’s favoritism toward British merchants. The government in London offered few con- independence and birth 65 cessions, though, and planters began to dream of making America selfsufficient in consumer goods. The Revolution itself was a culmination of this reaction against dependence on the international marketplace. It merely focused on political independence from the British government as the path to personal independence from British economic interests.2 Thomas Massie committed himself completely to this movement. He joined the...