The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race

Essay on Sources

211 essay on sources The county court records of seventeenth-century Virginia form the backbone of this book. I used records from Accomack, Northampton, Surry, and York counties because they have relatively complete seventeenth-century runs. Other counties with some seventeenth-century records are Charles City County (formed in 1634, fragments), Henrico County (formed in 1634, fragments after 1650), Lancaster County (formed 1651, records after 1652), Lower Norfolk County (formed 1637, fragmentary records from 1637–46), Middlesex County (formed c. 1669, records begin in 1673), and Old Rappahannock County (formed 1656, fragments after 1683). All of these records are available on microfilm at the Library of Virginia in Richmond. The Rockefeller Library at Colonial Williamsburg keeps a set of the York County microfilms; Linda Rowe maintains a set of transcripts, abstracts, and biographical files of people mentioned in the York records. Other counties that formed in the seventeenth century have no surviving seventeenthcentury records. The laws of seventeenth-century Virginia were collected in the early nineteenth century; see William Waller Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large, being a Collection of all the laws of Virginia (New York: R. & W. & G. Bartow , 1819–23). (Hening collected almost all the seventeenth-century acts. A few missing statutes appear in Warren M. Billings, “Some Acts Not in Hening’s Statutes: The Acts of Assembly, April 1652, November 1652, and July 1653,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 83, no. 1 [January 1975]: 22–76, and Jon Kukla, “Some Acts Not in Hening’s Statutes: The Acts of Assembly, October 1660,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 83, no. 1 [January 1975]: 77–97.) Appeals and capital cases were tried at Jamestown; for fragments of these records, see H. R. McIlwaine, ed., Minutes of the Council and General Court of Virginia (Richmond: privately printed, 1924). Many of Virginia’s seventeenthcentury court records, including most of the Jamestown records, burned when the retreating Confederate army set fire to Richmond in 1865. For the period before 1624, the most complete source is Susan Myra Kingsbury , ed., Records of the Virginia Company of London, 4 vols. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1906–34). For the initial two years of English exploration, see Philip L. Barbour, ed., The Jamestown Voyages under the First Charter, 1606–1609, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Hakluyt Society, 1969). The observations of William Strachey and John Smith overlap to some degree, but both are invaluable: William Strachey, The Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania, ed. Louis B. Wright and Virginia Freund (Lon- 212 Essay on Sources don: Hakluyt Society, 1953), and Philip L. Barbour, ed., The Complete Works of Captain John Smith, 3 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986). For a solid set of papers spanning most of the seventeenth century, see Warren M. Billings, ed., The Papers of Sir William Berkeley, 1605–1677 (Richmond : Library of Virginia, 2007). For useful comparisons to nearby places, see William Hand Browne, ed., Archives of Maryland (1883–1972, 1990–), at www .aomol.net/html/index.html, and J. H. Lefroy, ed., Memorials of the Discovery and Early Settlement of the Bermudas Somer Islands, 2 vols. (London: Longmans , Greene, 1877). Three good examples of the propaganda literature circulated by the Virginia Company are William Crashaw, A Sermon Preached in London before the right honorable the Lord Lawarre, Lord Governour and Captaine Generall of Virginea, and others of his Majesties Counsell for that Kingdome, and the rest of the Adventurers in that Plantation . . . (London, 1610); [Robert Gray], A Good Speed to Virginia (London, 1609); and [Robert Johnson], Nova Britannia : Offering Most Excellent Fruites by Planting in Virginia (London, 1609). Other printed sources form the company period are William Strachey, For the colony in Virginea Britannia: Lawes Divine Morall and Martiall, &c (London, 1612); Alexander Whitaker, Good Newes from Virginia Sent to the Counsell and Company of Virginia (London, 1613); and Edward Waterhouse’s propaganda masterpiece, A Declaration of the State of the Colony and Affaires in Virginia with a Relation of the Barbarous Massacre in the Time of Peace and League, Treacherously Executed by the Native Infidels Upon the English (London, 1622). The writings of George Percy are always a good counterpoint or corrective to the writings of John Smith. See George Percy, Discourse [1608], in Barbour, Jamestown Voyages, I, and Percy, “A Trewe Relacyon (1625),” Tyler’s Quarterly Historical and Genealogical Magazine 3, no. 3 (January 1922): 259–82. Sources for late seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century Virginia are...