The Early Modern Chesapeake Redux—Again

For more than half a century, scores of historians have pieced together a remarkably deep and coherent perspective about the origins and development of the Chesapeake colonies. During the 1960s, distinguished scholars engaged in an “origins debate” about the nature of colonists’ turn to forming a slave society in North America. Some historians subscribed to the “unthinking decision” argument of Winthrop Jordan about the relationship between slavery and racism, and some fiercely defended more deliberate stages of economic policy-making and new strategies of plantation building. Even earlier, political and social history was reconceptualized boldly by historians such as Wesley Frank Craven, Arthur Middleton, Aubrey C. Land, and Thad Tate; in time, this work was itself refashioned by Ronald Hoffman, Rhys Isaac, Paul Clemens, Timothy Breen, Gloria Main, and others who integrated religion, slavery, tobacco economies, and elite power in dazzling books that kept rolling off printing presses through the 1970s and 1980s. In 1975, Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (1975) instantly became the most sweeping and detailed account of colonial Virginia, as well as the most authoritative argument about the “paradox of slavery and freedom” for the next thirty years.

By then, historians collaborating with Lois Green Carr at St. Mary’s City Commission were diligently bending their backs in the fields of social history, unearthing seventeenth-century county and provincial records, stripping them to compile deeply detailed data bases, and using the quantitative methods just being adopted by social historians to reconstruct novel pictures of local and everyday colonial life in the Chesapeake. In following years, the work of Lois Green Carr, Lorena Walsh, Russell Menard, Paul Clemens, Alan Kulikoff, Gloria Main, and many others produced a deluge of articles and monographs full of revisionist arguments. At first, the scholarship emerging from this “Chesapeake School” became known for its view of colonial economy and social life that set the region apart from the dominant New England perspective; Virginia and Maryland seemed to be astonishingly different—even failures in their early years—when compared to northern colonial experiments. By the early 1980s, the sheer weight of evidence put forward by the Chesapeake School tipped the profession’s astonishment toward acceptance, even orthodoxy. Virginia and Maryland in the seventeenth century seemed, indeed, to constitute a truly distinctive (most historians said less successful) region, with its emphasis on staple crop agriculture, comparatively greater gaps between the riches of coastal plantations and rude internal settlements, greater numbers of servants and slaves in more brutal labor regimes, higher mortality, greater import dependency, more pronounced shortages of women, lower life expectancy, and more fragile political authority. But was Chesapeake distinctiveness somehow more, or less, “American” than economy and society unfolding in the mid-Atlantic and New England areas? As Jack Greene argued in Pursuits of Happiness (1988), American culture and institutions did not radiate outward from the Puritan experiment in New England but rather emerged from myriad points of settlement and development throughout the British colonies. The Chesapeake, a region once believed to have made a minor contribution to “becoming American,” now possibly embodied what was most American about us.

In recent years, the impact of Atlantic world studies has pulled Chesapeake scholars toward more expansive geographies and transnational connections, while the cultural turn has pulled many of them away from county archives, trash pits, shipping returns, court records, or plantation accounts. What was once a tight cluster of scholars working, artisan-fashion, in close proximity to one another in local archives has become a dispersed enterprise with many lines of inquiry. Of course, most members of the Chesapeake School have not vanished, as Lorena Walsh’s very productive career attests. As a historian at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation for twenty-seven years, Walsh continued to refine her early work on Maryland to include Virginia; and her recent magisterial study, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit: Plantation Management in the Colonial Chesapeake...