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C h a p t e r T w o Migration and the New Birth Devereux Jarratt and the Anglicans of Virginia Devereux Jarratt was, at heart, an optimist. In 1752, he had the opportunity to escape the drudgery of farm work to open a school in the frontier county of Albemarle, Virginia. But Jarratt was also a realist with a wry sense of humor who well understood what he was getting himself into. Becoming a teacher meant migrating to the backcountry from New Kent County in Tidewater Virginia with virtually no money and with only the clothes on his back. He did not even own a horse. The lure of a new life, however, proved irresistible to the nineteen-year-old Jarratt. “I readily embraced the proposal [to open the school], and soon packed up my all,” he recalled years later. He would be traveling light. “My whole dress and apparel consisted in a pair of coarse breeches, one or two oznaburgs shirts, a pair of shoes and stockings, an old felt hat, a bear skin coat.” To lend a little dignity to his appearance, the aspiring schoolteacher acquired “an old wig” from a slave, commenting wryly that in this status-conscious society, “people were not obliged, you know, to ask how I came by it.” If they did ask, “I suppose I was wise enough not to tell them.”1 Jarratt then borrowed his brother’s horse and saddle and said his good-byes. It would be a lonely ride. The young schoolteacher was not a member of a “company,” as Thomas Hooker, a Puritan minister, and his charges had been when they migrated from Newtown, Massachusetts, to the Connecticut frontier in 1636. Jarratt did not travel with a congregation—he was an Anglican, and an indifferent one at that. And no idealistic vision of a New Jerusalem awaited him in the hills of Albemarle County. Jarratt, unlike Hooker, was not a new arrival to America; he was a Virginian, born in 1733 in New Kent and raised by parents of modest means. “I was the youngest child of Robert Jarratt and Sarah his wife,” he recalled in the autobiography that he wrote in the 1790s. “My grand-father was an Englishman, born, I believe, in the city of London, in Devereux county.” Jarratt’s father was a carpenter of some local 48 the protestant sojourner renown, a “mild, inoffensive man, and much respected among his neighbors.” Devereux and his brothers and sisters “always had plenty of plain food and raiment, wholesome and good,” but he grew up with no great expectations of material success or social grandeur. “My parents neither sought nor expected any titles, honors, or great things, either for themselves or children. Their highest ambition was to teach their children to read, write and understand the fundamental rules of arithmetic. . . . They wished us all to be brought up in some honest calling, that we might earn our bread, by the sweat of our brow, as they did.”2 Jarratt was raised in Tidewater Virginia, Hooker in the English hamlet of Marfield. Both men became servants of God. But they were born in different centuries in different lands on different continents. One was a colonial, the other a native-born Englishman. Jarratt learned about the unfairness of life at an earlier age than did Hooker. “When I was between six and seven years of age,” Jarratt recounted, “I had the misfortune to lose my father, by a very sudden stroke.” The consequences were immediate. Devereux’s oldest brother, Robert, inherited all the family land, although Devereux was to get twenty-five pounds—a sum he considered princely—when he turned twenty-one years old. Different as he was from Hooker, Jarratt shared a few traits with his predecessor . Both men were the products of middle-class families. Both showed academic prowess at an early age. According to Hooker’s biographer, “By the age of eight or so [he] had learned to read English prose with facility and to handle pen and ink confidently, if not particularly handsomely. These were the usual requirements for admission to a grammar school.” For Jarratt, a different kind of skill stood out. “The retentiveness of my memory was very extraordinary,” he wrote. “Before I knew the letters of the alphabet, I could repeat a whole chapter in the Bible, at a few times hearing it read.”3 And like Hooker, Jarratt began attending school at about age eight. He was modest...

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