The Fabulous History Of The Dismal Swamp Company Part 1

The fabulous history of the Dismal Swamp Company.

A story of George Was.h.i.+ngton's times.

by Charles Royster.

PROLOGUE.

"The Lake of the Dismal Swamp"

THERE ONCE WAS A YOUNG MAN whose beloved died. He lost his mind-so people in Norfolk, Virginia, said in the autumn of 1803. In his ravings the lover denied that she was dead, insisting that she had gone to the Dismal Swamp nearby. The young man suddenly disappeared and never returned. He became a legend told to newcomers. He had gone into the Dismal Swamp in search of his beloved "and had died of hunger, or been lost in some of its dreadful mora.s.ses." whose beloved died. He lost his mind-so people in Norfolk, Virginia, said in the autumn of 1803. In his ravings the lover denied that she was dead, insisting that she had gone to the Dismal Swamp nearby. The young man suddenly disappeared and never returned. He became a legend told to newcomers. He had gone into the Dismal Swamp in search of his beloved "and had died of hunger, or been lost in some of its dreadful mora.s.ses."

Thomas Moore, a promising Irish poet, was twenty-four years old when he heard the legend. He spent a few weeks in Norfolk as a guest of the British consul, John Hamilton, awaiting pa.s.sage to Bermuda. Moore followed the reading public's fancy; tales of apparitions, ghosts, and lovers mad with grief were in fas.h.i.+on. Sitting in Colonel Hamilton's big brick house on Main Street, Moore wrote a forty-line ballad, "The Lake of the Dismal Swamp."

The crazed lover speaks first: "They made her a grave, too cold and damp For a soul so warm and true; And she's gone to the Lake of the Dismal Swamp.

Where, all night long, by a fire-fly lamp, She paddles her white canoe.

And her fire-fly lamp I soon shall see, And her paddle I soon shall hear; Long and loving our life shall be, And I'll hide the maid in a cypress tree, When the footstep of death is near."

He enters the swamp and, surrounded by dangers, seeks the lake at its heart. Reaching the spot, he calls to his beloved.

And the dim sh.o.r.e echoed, for many a night, The name of the death-cold maid!

He sees on the water the reflection of a meteor and takes it to be his loved one's light; he rows a boat in the direction it had moved.

The wind was high and the clouds were dark, And the boat return'd no more.But oft, from the Indian hunter's camp, This lover and maid so true Are seen at the hour of midnight damp To cross the Lake by a fire-fly lamp, And paddle their white canoe!

During Moore's stay in Norfolk, he and the consul rode out to see the swamp and Lake Drummond, named for William Drummond, once a colonial official in North Carolina, later hanged in Virginia for treason and rebellion against the Crown's government there. Moore's ballad used the swamp's reputation as a weird, ghostly, and threatening mora.s.s. To him, the swamp was a "dreary wilderness." He found nature hostile in Virginia. A yellow fever epidemic had spread in the previous year. Norfolk had been hit by "a tremendous hurricane" during the previous month. Moore sailed for Bermuda without regret, taking from Virginia his ballad and a memory of dirty, odorous Norfolk, which, he said, "abounds in dogs, in negroes, and in democrats."

The poet and the consul could ride into the Dismal Swamp more easily as a result of the work of gangs of slaves, who were digging a ca.n.a.l to link the waters of Chesapeake Bay's tributaries with those of Albemarle Sound. Anyone could see that enterprising Virginians no longer feared the swamp. Trees were felled in ever greater numbers to provide timber for s.h.i.+pyards, as well as other lumber, staves, and s.h.i.+ngles. Lake Drummond and the land around it belonged to the Dismal Swamp Company, founded forty years earlier to turn the swamp into farmland.

In those distant days, when George Was.h.i.+ngton was a young man, eminent Virginians were fascinated by land, excited by chances to acquire it. The previous fifty years had taught them that land, combined with the labor of slaves, was wealth. To a few men the Dismal Swamp seemed to beckon, inviting them to transform hundreds of square miles into inexhaustible riches.

The young Irish poet need not have come to Norfolk in 1803 to find a legend of a dead maiden, her obsessed lover, and their ghostly boat on a mysterious lake. The frightfulness of the swamp, even its gloomy name, heightened the impression of the distracted lover's desperation. Still, Moore could have set his ballad almost anywhere. The Dismal Swamp gave occasion for stories of conduct far stranger than the legend he heard, but he did not tarry in Virginia long enough to learn the remarkable history of the people possessed by a notion that they would recover what they had lost or find what they desired in the Dismal Swamp.

I.

THE LAND OF PROMISE.

ELIZABETH WIRT WAS PREGNANT in the summer of 1803. Her husband feared for her life. Too many women died in childbirth; he had lost his first wife. To distract his mind, he began a series of lighthearted, faintly satirical sketches describing Virginia and Virginians. Though he came from Maryland, William Wirt tried to make himself an eminent Virginian in law, in politics, and in letters. He had joined an informal college of wit-crackers whose dean was St. George Tucker in Williamsburg. His friends wrote verse and essays. So would he. in the summer of 1803. Her husband feared for her life. Too many women died in childbirth; he had lost his first wife. To distract his mind, he began a series of lighthearted, faintly satirical sketches describing Virginia and Virginians. Though he came from Maryland, William Wirt tried to make himself an eminent Virginian in law, in politics, and in letters. He had joined an informal college of wit-crackers whose dean was St. George Tucker in Williamsburg. His friends wrote verse and essays. So would he.

Wirt called his pieces The Letters of the British Spy The Letters of the British Spy, pretending they had been found in a boardinghouse. Readers knew Wirt was the author. Still, a catchy t.i.tle and a pose of British condescension toward provincials helped attract notice as these sketches appeared first in newspapers, then, before the end of the year, in a small book. It was published after Elizabeth Wirt gave birth to a girl.

The spy's first letter, written in Richmond, included a short account of how that city at the falls of the James River, capital of the state, had been planned long ago by the man who then owned the site. William Byrd served the spy's purpose as a striking example of unequal owners.h.i.+p of property in Virginia. Dead for sixty years, he was a figure of romance from past days of heroic adventure. The spy described Byrd's service in 1728 with commissioners and surveyors running a boundary line between Virginia and North Carolina. Not far west of the sea their course lay through the Great Dismal Swamp, "an immense mora.s.s" of "black, deep mire, covered with a stupendous forest." Wirt crammed his paragraph with lurid color: beasts of prey, endless labor, perpetual terror, and, wildest of all, nighttime filled with "the deafening, soul chilling yell" of unnamed hungry animals. On such a night, William Byrd received a visit from "Hope, that never failing friend of man." He planned the city of Richmond, to be erected on land he owned.

Great Dismal Swamp, Albemarle Sound, and Outer Banks. Courtesy of the William L. Clements Library. Drawn by a British Army cartographer during the Revolutionary War. The dividing line between Virginia and North Carolina runs through the Dismal Swamp.

For readers who might wonder how the spy knew all this, Wirt added a footnote citing Byrd's ma.n.u.script account, preserved by his descendants in the family home at Westover. Mary Willing Byrd, widow of William Byrd's son, still practiced, with the help of her daughter and granddaughters, the hospitality of an earlier time. A guest was welcome to read a folio volume, bound in vellum, containing the work Byrd had talked of publis.h.i.+ng but had continued to revise and rewrite in two versions: History of the Dividing Line betwixt Virginia and North Carolina Run in the Year of Our Lord 1728 History of the Dividing Line betwixt Virginia and North Carolina Run in the Year of Our Lord 1728 and and The Secret History of the Line The Secret History of the Line. The volume included his accounts of two other expeditions: A Progress to the Mines in the Year 1732 A Progress to the Mines in the Year 1732 and and A Journey to the Land of A Journey to the Land of Eden: Anno 1733 Eden: Anno 1733. A reader could sit in the parlor on a chair covered in crimson silk damask, lifting his eyes from the page to high, wainscotted walls hung with portraits in black and gilt frames and to intricate, symmetrical rocaille plasterwork on the ceiling. Or a visitor might stay in a guest room and glance from William Byrd's writings to a painting above the fireplace, a naked Venus, lying asleep on her right side-the work of t.i.tian, the family said. Windows opened onto terraced gardens leading down to the James River, onto the walled garden where the body of William Byrd lay buried, and onto a separate library, which once had held Byrd's thousands of volumes. In hot weather a traveler from the North lay on a sofa by the curiously carved bal.u.s.trade of the big staircase in the central hall, catching any breeze that blew between the ornate stone pilasters of the north and south doorways. Reading the ma.n.u.script, he found Byrd to be "a sly joker," whose work "tickled me in some of my susceptible parts."

The family at Westover also preserved other writings by William Byrd. While in England, he had published A Discourse Concerning the Plague A Discourse Concerning the Plague, though he had left his name off the t.i.tle page, putting instead: "By a Lover of Mankind." This scholarly pamphlet drew upon his wide reading to a.s.semble vivid descriptions of the extent and the physical effects of the plague since ancient times. How could "this dismal distemper" be avoided? He endorsed traditional measures such as temperance, repentance for sins, and abstinence from "immoderate Venery." But he concluded that those seeking the utmost security ought to surround themselves at all times with tobacco-"this powerful Alexipharmick," "this great Antipoison." Antipoison." He told them to carry tobacco in their clothes, hang bundles of it in their rooms and around their beds, burn it in their dining rooms while eating, chew it, smoke it, take it as snuff. "Tobacco being itself a poison, the effluvia flowing from it, do, by a similitude of parts, gather to them the little bodies of the pestilential taint, and intirely correct them." Virginians escaped the plague because they produced and consumed tobacco. The plague had grown rare in England as use of tobacco spread. It was, Byrd wrote, "our sovereign antidote." Thus Virginians offered a benefit to humanity, or at least to that large portion of mankind who did not get a joke. He told them to carry tobacco in their clothes, hang bundles of it in their rooms and around their beds, burn it in their dining rooms while eating, chew it, smoke it, take it as snuff. "Tobacco being itself a poison, the effluvia flowing from it, do, by a similitude of parts, gather to them the little bodies of the pestilential taint, and intirely correct them." Virginians escaped the plague because they produced and consumed tobacco. The plague had grown rare in England as use of tobacco spread. It was, Byrd wrote, "our sovereign antidote." Thus Virginians offered a benefit to humanity, or at least to that large portion of mankind who did not get a joke.

Readers of Byrd's History of the Dividing Line History of the Dividing Line noticed his suggestion that "a great Sum of Money" be invested to drain the Dismal Swamp and thereby make that land "very Profitable." Another, smaller ma.n.u.script in Byrd's neat, square handwriting took the form of a pet.i.tion to the king. The unnamed pet.i.tioners sought a royal grant of the entire Dismal Swamp and all the unowned land within half a mile of any part of it, more than 900 square miles. To the pet.i.tion Byrd added a description of the swamp and a proposal to drain it and make it fertile, able to yield vast crops of hemp. Byrd made it all sound easy. Form a new company to finance the project for ten years with a capital of 4,000. Start with ten slaves to dig ditches, fell trees, make boards and s.h.i.+ngles, render pine tar, grow rice and corn and hemp, and tend cattle. With its own food and salable commodities the undertaking would partly "carry on itself." As fast as clearing and ditching advanced, buy more slaves, thereby accelerating progress. True, the swamp's "malignant vapours" would kill some slaves, but others would "Breed" and "supply the loss." Use profits from slaves' labor to defray expenses and purchase still more slaves. There could be "no doubt in the world" that, once the original capital had been invested, the Dismal Swamp would have become as good as any soil in Virginia, with at least three hundred slaves at work and "an incredible number" of cattle grazing and multiplying. "From all which we may safely conclude," Byrd wrote, "that each share will then be worth more than Ten times the value of the original subscription, besides the unspeakable Benefit it will prove to the Publick." noticed his suggestion that "a great Sum of Money" be invested to drain the Dismal Swamp and thereby make that land "very Profitable." Another, smaller ma.n.u.script in Byrd's neat, square handwriting took the form of a pet.i.tion to the king. The unnamed pet.i.tioners sought a royal grant of the entire Dismal Swamp and all the unowned land within half a mile of any part of it, more than 900 square miles. To the pet.i.tion Byrd added a description of the swamp and a proposal to drain it and make it fertile, able to yield vast crops of hemp. Byrd made it all sound easy. Form a new company to finance the project for ten years with a capital of 4,000. Start with ten slaves to dig ditches, fell trees, make boards and s.h.i.+ngles, render pine tar, grow rice and corn and hemp, and tend cattle. With its own food and salable commodities the undertaking would partly "carry on itself." As fast as clearing and ditching advanced, buy more slaves, thereby accelerating progress. True, the swamp's "malignant vapours" would kill some slaves, but others would "Breed" and "supply the loss." Use profits from slaves' labor to defray expenses and purchase still more slaves. There could be "no doubt in the world" that, once the original capital had been invested, the Dismal Swamp would have become as good as any soil in Virginia, with at least three hundred slaves at work and "an incredible number" of cattle grazing and multiplying. "From all which we may safely conclude," Byrd wrote, "that each share will then be worth more than Ten times the value of the original subscription, besides the unspeakable Benefit it will prove to the Publick."

William Byrd, Unknown Artist. Courtesy of the Virginia Historical Society. A portrait of the elder William Byrd painted in London and brought to Virginia.

More than 900 percent profit in ten years, a "Bogg" rendered productive, a region rescued from the swamp's "noisome Exhalations," a system of ca.n.a.ls connecting North Carolina's trade to Virginia's ports, and huge crops of hemp for cordage for Britain's merchant fleets and Royal Navy-surely the Crown must make this grant and exempt the pet.i.tioners from the customary charges and quitrents. Yet "to remove all suspicion of Fraud," they would agree to pay if they did not drain the swamp in ten years. Of course, the Crown would extend their time if they met "unforeseen Difficultys." Byrd's ma.n.u.script closed with a few sentences on the s.e.x lives and marriages of slaves, explaining the wisdom of "providing wives" who would keep men from "rambling abroad anights." At Westover, Mary Willing Byrd, then her daughter, Evelyn Byrd Harrison, at Brandon, and then her grandson, George Harrison, kept the little ma.n.u.script of William Byrd's pet.i.tion for the Dismal Swamp with the folio volume of his other writings.

Some of William Wirt's friends and some of his colleagues among Virginia's lawyers were heirs or attorneys of men who had tried to carry out William Byrd's proposal long after Byrd's death. They had been among the leading men of their day; three were still living in 1803. Wirt had some tie to each of the early members of what was now called "the old Dismal Swamp Company." His best friends in Virginia-William Nelson, Jr., St. George Tucker, and John Page, the wit-crackers of Williamsburg-knew the company well. Judge William Nelson, Jr., Mary Willing Byrd's son-in-law, remained active in its affairs. His father, William Nelson, and his uncle, Thomas Nelson, had been two of the most powerful Virginians in the 1760s, when they had helped to found the company. St. George Tucker, professor of law at the College of William and Mary, gave legal advice to members of both the Farley family and the Meade family as they squabbled among themselves over estates and debts. The late Francis Farley, planter, councillor, and judge in the Leeward Island of Antigua, had been the first to try to carry out William Byrd's proposal. Farley's son moved to Virginia and became the husband of one of Byrd's granddaughters. David Meade had lived near the Dismal Swamp in the 1760s and had acquired, through his wife, the share once owned by her father, William Waters of the Eastern Sh.o.r.e and Williamsburg. Meade lived in Kentucky in 1803, pursuing his hobbies: landscape gardening and litigation. John Page was governor of Virginia, elected to that office in grat.i.tude for his services during the American Revolution. Page needed its salary. Though his father, Mann Page, had given him land, slaves, a piece of the Dismal Swamp Company, and the largest, most ornate house in Virginia, he could not pay his own debts, let alone those of his father's estate.

Among William Wirt's colleagues in the law were Edmund Pendleton, Bushrod Was.h.i.+ngton, and John Wickham. Pendleton had administered the messy estate of Speaker John Robinson. The most powerful man in Virginia for many years, Robinson had a hand in money-making schemes of the 1760s; the founders of the Dismal Swamp Company prudently had made him a partner. Bushrod Was.h.i.+ngton, justice of the United States Supreme Court, was an executor of the estate of his uncle, George Was.h.i.+ngton. It still held a share in the Dismal Swamp Company, for which George Was.h.i.+ngton had done much service with high hopes long before. Young lawyers envied John Wickham, who made an ample income and lived a luxurious life. He sued Virginians in federal court on behalf of creditors in Britain at last able to collect old debts unpaid since colonial days. Most of these clients were merchants, and among them was one of the original partners of the Dismal Swamp Company, the baleful Samuel Gist in London. Nearing the age of eighty in 1803, Gist retained good health and a sharp mind. Rich and nominally retired, he still went into the City, walked on the Exchange, visited the subscribers' room at Lloyd's, and extracted money from Virginians and others.

Wirt felt fond of Francis Walker, genial, drunken son and heir of Dr. Thomas Walker. Dr. Walker had twice crossed and marked Virginia's west beyond the Allegheny Mountains. Leaders of the Cherokees, the Shawnees, and the Iroquois had known him well, to their cost. Had Virginia's land companies been a spiderweb, Dr. Walker would have been the spider. And he had shared George Was.h.i.+ngton's expectations for their Dismal Swamp Company. Wirt also knew Robert Lewis, mayor of Fredericksburg, who, with his brothers, was still pursued in court by heirs of Anthony Bacon, onetime a.s.sociate of their father, Fielding Lewis. Bacon, a merchant, ironmaster, slave trader, government contractor, and member of Parliament, had been the Dismal Swamp Company's first man in London before Samuel Gist arrived. Fielding Lewis, a merchant in Fredericksburg, had represented Bacon's interests in Virginia. Lewis also had joined his brother-in-law, George Was.h.i.+ngton, in starting the Dismal Swamp Company.

In 1803, William Wirt was moving his law practice to Norfolk, where everyone knew Thomas Newton, Jr., one of the city's leading politicians and merchants. Newton promoted the digging of a ca.n.a.l through the Dismal Swamp, remaining loyal to the project despite its problems. He also handled the complicated affairs of the estate of his father-in-law, Robert Tucker, Norfolk merchant and founding member of the Dismal Swamp Company, whose fortunes had fallen so rapidly just before his death. Tucker was a kinsman of both Nelson brothers, William and Thomas. He was also related to Robert Burwell. Burwell had served on Virginia's colonial Council with the Nelsons, but his main interest had been horses, and his kinsmen had agreed that he was the weak link of the Dismal Swamp Company.

William Wirt had higher literary ambitions than The Letters of the British Spy The Letters of the British Spy. He had ingratiated himself with leading Virginians, including the president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson. How better to confirm his standing as a political and literary heir to eminent Virginians than by memorializing their greatest success in a book? For Wirt, a Jeffersonian, Virginia's heroic age was not the era of William Byrd or the era of Speaker Robinson and the Nelson brothers but of the American Revolution. To celebrate it, he planned a book about Patrick Henry. He would portray Henry as a hero who had freed Virginia not only from King George III and Parliament but also from the likes of the Nelsons, Speaker Robinson, and "old Colo. Byrd."

William Byrd-"Colonel" meant that he led his county's militia-planned the city of Richmond in 1733, not as he lay in the Dismal Swamp in 1728. He never saw the interior of the Dismal Swamp. Commissioners for running a boundary line in 1728 went around the swamp, leaving surveyors to hack and wade through it. Virginia's officials had sought a precise boundary for years. People had settled farther south of the James River and farther north of Albemarle Sound in greater numbers since the 1680s. Many Virginians of the "poorer sort" moved into North Carolina, where, if they bothered to seek t.i.tle, they could get more land from the proprietor's office at lower cost than in Virginia. Worse, in 1706, the surveyor of North Carolina started running lines west of the Dismal Swamp on land that Virginia officials claimed as their colony's. Some in the area hoped to get t.i.tle from North Carolina, as they had not from Virginia. Worst of all, this intruding surveyor began to lay out a dividing line between the colonies without consulting the government of Virginia. The Council sent someone to stop him.

Virginia officials called the oldest residents of the southernmost counties to swear under oath that no one ever had believed the boundary to run where Carolinians said it did. In the summer of 1710 the two colonies, under orders from London, appointed commissioners to establish a line jointly. These four men spent September and October gathering depositions and trying in vain to take a celestial fix with a sea quadrant to find the lat.i.tude. They had no hope of agreement: the Virginians accused the Carolinians of trying to change witnesses' testimony; Carolinians accused Virginians of cheating with the quadrant. The commissioners parted bitterly, without starting a survey. Before the delegations met, Virginians, approaching the swamp from the west, concluded that there was "no pa.s.sage through the Dismall."

From a distance, the Dismal Swamp looked impa.s.sable. Ancient, immense cypress trees, ma.s.sed, presented a wall of broad, bald trunks supporting feathery crowns 100 feet up, above which a few buzzards or a hawk slowly moved to and fro. In the forest were black gum trees and thick stands of white cedar. Under the right conditions, barricades of trees reverberated a shout with an echo. The great swamp had smaller tributary swamps; it sent out broad tentacles of wetland.

The Dismal Swamp's uneven surface sloped slightly downward from west to east. Almost imperceptibly, amber water flowed from it. Beaver dams deepened standing water, providing better fis.h.i.+ng to otters and convenient frogs to great blue herons. Cypress, gum, and cedar had bases in water and roots in a deep acc.u.mulation of peat. Above the surface, the pedestals of kneelike roots of cypress and arching roots of gum trees held honeysuckle, yellow jessamine, and vines of bright hydrangea delicately climbing their trunks. Virginia creeper intertwined under branches hung with moss, locking the closely set trees together. Thick rattan stems coiled around some trees. The swamp mirrored itself where trees and their hangings were reflected in its dark water. Much of the drier, mossy ground was spongy and yielding. Where time or storms or fire had felled trees, the swamp lay choked with tumbled trunks and branches. Rich ferns grew to heights of nine or ten feet, as did reeds. These, with myriad coiled briers and hanging vines, could make any spot seem closed off from all others. Sounds did not travel far, and the swamp seemed to sit in silence, creating its own dark shade.

Yet the swamp could be noisy. On a spring or summer evening many kinds of frogs, so numerous that the earth seemed to undulate and croak, kept up a cacophony, swelling as darkness fell. In the night, frogs and bats consumed part of the vast population of insects. In summer, blood-sucking horse flies swarmed. Large mosquitoes hovered in thick clouds. Barred owls preyed on shrews and mice. At the approach of dawn, an array of birds, especially warblers and thrushes, awoke the swamp. With different cries, in autumn great numbers of grackles and crows descended.

Dense growths of tall bamboo hung in broad arches. On these, snakes sometimes sunned themselves-copperheads or a water snake exposing its bright red underside. Water snakes consumed fish and fell prey in turn to long king snakes.

On some margins of the swamp and on drier ridges and islands within it, sandy, firmer stretches supported hardwood trees-red maples and white oaks-as well as tulip poplars and forests of loblolly pine overshadowing a profuse undergrowth of cane and briers, ferns, blackberry thickets, gallberry shrubs, and rusty red and green poison oak. Blackberries, gum berries, and beehives in trees attracted black bears, the swamp's largest animals. Berries, saplings, and other ground plants were forage for flocks of white-tailed deer, some of which fell to packs of gray wolves.

Near the eastern rim of the swamp lay a broad expanse of open marsh densely covered with tall green reeds-thousands of acres of reeds swaying under the wind in waves like the surface of the sea. In its interior the swamp hid a shallow, almost circular lake ringed with old cypress trees. When its dark water lay still on a windless day outside the migrating season for swans, ducks, and geese, the swamp's silence seemed even deeper on the lake than amid the undergrowth. Around the lake the swamp's fecundity extended for hundreds of thousands of acres in every direction.

William Byrd measured his trip along the northern margin of the Dismal Swamp from the east side to the west side as 65 miles. More than any other tract in the colony, the swamp confirmed his description of Virginia. True, Virginia lacked the Garden of Eden's Tree of Life, Byrd wrote, but, apart from that, "our land produces all the fine things of Paradise, except innocence."

Visitors to the counties in southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina found many residents odd. They seemed ignorant but self-satisfied, dirty but idle, poor but dishonest. They gave travelers directions that turned out to be wrong. They told learned men about strange creatures, such as the jointed snake, which broke into inch-long pieces when struck. They acted as if there were "no difference between a Gentleman and a labourer all fellows at Foot Ball." Quakers had settled in the region, hoping to be left alone; other people, with little or no religion, sought the same comfort. Poor Virginians moved into North Carolina, got 150 or 200 acres to support some corn and pigs, while the swamp fed their cattle and they tried to evade paying quitrents to the proprietor in England. Indebted Virginians crossed into North Carolina, where their creditors could not collect. "Women forsake their husbands come in here and live with other men." In the zone claimed by both colonies, some people told a Virginia official that they lived in North Carolina and a North Carolina official that they lived in Virginia. "Borderers" allowed runaway slaves to hide and farm nearby, taking a large share of their crops in return for concealment. One governor reported: "The Inhabitants of North Carolina, are not Industrious but subtle and crafty to admiration." The leaders of both colonies wished to bring more order to "the disputed bounds" near the Dismal Swamp and farther west. To do so, they needed a clearly marked line.

In the evening of February 2, 1720, the Spotswood Spotswood, out of London, sailed between the capes and dropped anchor in Chesapeake Bay. William Byrd had returned to Virginia. He did not plan to stay long, three months at most. Yet he did not leave for England until the summer of 1721. Upon reaching London, he published his Discourse Concerning the Plague Discourse Concerning the Plague. A widower for almost five years, he went back to England partly to win a rich wife. After he failed with several women, he and Maria Taylor were married in May 1724. Twenty months later the couple went on board the Williamsburg Williamsburg and sailed for Virginia. William Byrd never saw England again. Back at Westover in 1726, he became one of Virginia's commissioners for running the boundary line. and sailed for Virginia. William Byrd never saw England again. Back at Westover in 1726, he became one of Virginia's commissioners for running the boundary line.

By spending the year 1720 at Westover rather than in London, Byrd missed the excitement of the South Sea Bubble, an episode that would affect people's notions of companies and finance for one hundred years. He received lurid reports about the collapse of the South Sea Company's stock: "The fire of London or the plague ruin'd not the number that are now undone, all ranks of people bewayling their condition in the coffee houses & open streets." Endowed with a monopoly of Britain's trade to South America, the South Sea Company never did much trading, though its monopoly was its chief tangible a.s.set. Instead, the directors undertook to refinance Britain's national debt, offering to retire it more quickly at a reduced rate of interest. To accomplish this, the company persuaded holders of government annuities, which made up the bulk of the debt, to exchange their annuities for stock in the South Sea Company, in expectation of much larger returns from a rising stock. The company would thus become the government's largest creditor and retire the national debt sooner at a lower cost.

As South Sea stock rose, annuities came in more easily, and investors bought more stock on the open market. In fact, its price had to rise for this scheme to work. The company helped by allowing deferred payment for stock and by lending money, accepting its own stock as security, knowing that loans would be used to buy more stock. The company bid up the price on the open exchange by buying some of its new issues. Many people made quick profits by buying and reselling in a rising market. Imitators of the South Sea Company announced new projects, promised immense profits, and invited subscriptions. They planned to use subscribers' money not for the advertised enterprise but to turn a profit in South Sea stock. During the spring and summer of 1720, avid striving for easy wealth grew more frantic. South Sea stock, selling at 116 before the annuity scheme, rose to 375 by May 19, then to 820 by August 12. On August 24, the company sold a new issue of 1,200,000 at a price of 1,000, all subscribed in a few hours. Its supposed value rested on nothing but "the opinion of mankind." Balladeers sang rhymed warnings: Five hundred millions, notes and bonds Our stocks are worth in value; But neither lie in goods or lands, Or money, let me tell you.

Yet though our foreign trade is lost, Of mighty wealth we vapour; When all the riches that we boast Consists in sc.r.a.ps of paper!

The South Sea Company induced the government to take legal action against some of the new projects, which were "bubbles"-all stock and no substance. Calling smaller bubbles into question encouraged doubts about the South Sea Company. Its stock began to fall in September, dropping from 1,100 to 185 in six weeks. With the help of purchases by the Bank of England, the price held near 400. Speculators took heavy losses, and two-thirds of the original holders of the national debt found that they had exchanged 26,000,000 in secure annuities for 8,500,000 in South Sea Company stock. From their correspondents, Virginians heard about "the ruinous effects of the South Sea stock and other bubbles," which had thrown England on "dismall times." At Alexander Spotswood's celebration of his birthday on December 12, 1720, in the governor's new mansion in Williamsburg, the guests, including William Byrd, danced country dances and played at stockjobbing.

The collapse of the South Sea Bubble and the similar fate in Paris of the Mississippi Company and its bubble became a theme for plays, verse, tracts, and books. Thomas Mortimer began his book of advice, Every Man His Own Broker Every Man His Own Broker, with his experience: "The author has lost a genteel fortune, by being the innocent dupe of the gentlemen of 'Change-Alley." Plays such as The Stock-Jobbers The Stock-Jobbers and and South Sea; Or the Biters Bit South Sea; Or the Biters Bit satirized such people and moralized against greed. William Hogarth created a busy, vivid print, satirized such people and moralized against greed. William Hogarth created a busy, vivid print, South Sea Scheme South Sea Scheme, linking speculation with prost.i.tution, theft, and depravity. After 1720, the words "South Sea" brought to mind not only stockjobbing and rash speculation but also financial disaster as punishment. After William Byrd reached England in 1721, he carried on his search for a wife at the height of bitter reaction against bubbles. Once he and his new wife settled at Westover, Byrd wrote to his friends in England describing the merits of life in Virginia. He made his colony sound like an idyllic contrast to dangerous, smoky, corrupt London. He tried to convince his friends that he had moved to a healthier, more fruitful, more honest country. After his service along the boundary line, Byrd's descriptions of Virginia changed. Even when they professed sincerity, his celebrations of this rich land contained a broader streak of irony. The land, like the South Sea Company, was only potentially rich. And extracting wealth from it would require not only projectors but also dupes.

Running a dividing line began in March 1728. Three commissioners and two surveyors from Virginia, four commissioners from North Carolina, one of whom was also a surveyor, another Carolina surveyor, a chaplain, and more than twenty workmen, mostly Virginians with experience in cross-country travel to trade with Indians-this group a.s.sembled on the edge of an inlet separated from the ocean by a narrow spit of land. Looking out to sea, Byrd "cast a longing Eye towards England, & Sigh'd." As waves crashed on the spit, the commissioners squabbled, finally settling on a place to plant their starting post, then headed westward, along the lat.i.tude, more or less, of 3630.

Men cleared the underbrush with hatchets; others carried surveyors' equipment and chains; some tended horses laden with supplies, a tent, and bedding. The commissioners took notes. The surveyors blazed trees. The line pa.s.sed through thickets, canebrakes, sand, mud, streams, and standing water. Before they reached the Dismal Swamp, 23 miles west of their starting post, the whole party, Byrd later wrote, could be taken for "Criminals, condemned to this dirty work for Offences against the State."

On the swamp's eastern margin, in sight of acres of reeds, the commissioners decided to push the line through the swamp. Three surveyors, with twelve workmen to carry supplies and clear the way, advanced the line, while the rest of the party took roads around the northern perimeter to the west side. The surveyors confronted a forest of cedar clogged with undergrowth and fallen trees. The swamp slowed them to a mile or two per day. Its water caused diarrhea. They had food for eight days; the swamp was fifteen miles wide. After seven days they had covered ten miles. Abandoning their survey, they pushed westward, first through dense growths of cedar, then knee-deep in water for a mile among pines. Reaching dry land, they found a farm and asked for food. After two days of rest, surveyors, chain men, and workmen waded back into the swamp and resumed the line, blazing trees for five more miles to the swamp's western margin.

Much to the surprise of Virginia's commissioners and to the delight of North Carolina's, the line came out of the Dismal Swamp farther north than anyone had expected. Acres that even North Carolina had conceded to Virginia turned out to be in North Carolina. The line mattered not only to people living near it but also to collectors of quitrents and to the Crown. Virginia's landlord was the king, but North Carolina belonged to descendants of loyal friends of the House of Stuart, who had received it as a grant from a grateful King Charles II. Even after North Carolina came under royal governance in 1729, one of those proprietors, John Carteret, Baron Carteret of Hawnes, later Earl Granville, retained the right to grant tracts and receive quitrents along its northern boundary. William Byrd, when he found time to write, heaped sarcasm on clowns who had celebrated their exclusion from Virginia.

The surveying party pushed westward, slicing across farms, pa.s.sing log huts covered with cedar s.h.i.+ngles, pausing at each road to erect a post marked "Virginia" on one side and "North Carolina" on the other. Thirty-five miles west of the Dismal Swamp, on April 5, the commissioners, worried about rattlesnakes, agreed to suspend their survey until autumn. They resumed their progress on September 21. The terrain became rolling. They forded the same winding streams several times, their wet dogs running ahead. Tree branches and bushes ripped at biscuits in deerskin bags slung across their horses, whose pack bells rang with each step. The same workmen who had carried the boundary line through the Dismal Swamp in March took it toward the mountains in the fall. Their supply of bread dwindled; hired Indian hunters killed deer, bears, and wild turkeys. The survey pa.s.sed beyond the western limit of white people's settlements. North Carolina's commissioners decided to quit.

The party stood near the southern branch of the Roanoke River, 170 miles west of the ocean. The North Carolinians said they saw no purpose in continuing the line, since settlements any time soon in "so barren a place" were unlikely. Arguing against the Virginians' desire to press on, the Carolinians also thought but did not say: "we had many reasons to induce us to believe their proceeding further was not altogether for the publick." William Mayo, one of Virginia's surveyors, had just arranged to acquire from North Carolina's commissioners 2,000 acres south of the line, within five miles of where the surveyors stopped. William Byrd and his colleague, William Dandridge, thought the Carolinians' case "strange." Land along the Roanoke looked not barren but rich. They foresaw many settlements within ten years, perhaps five. But in giving this reason for a longer survey and in offering Mayo's purchase as proof, Byrd and Dandridge confirmed the Carolinians' suspicion that the survey was not carried onward solely for the public good. North Carolina's commissioners and one of Virginia's went home. Byrd, Dandridge, and Virginia's surveyors and workmen moved westward for three more weeks, marking another 72 miles of the line.

In North Carolina's delegation were the chief justice, the receiver general of revenue, and the secretary of the colony, as well as the oily Edward Moseley-councillor, surveyor general, and treasurer. They knew private interest when they saw it. Ignoring the proprietor's instructions, they granted many large tracts to themselves in payment for their six weeks of work. Before the end of the year they sold 20,000 of these acres to Byrd for 200. This oblong stretch lay just south of the dividing line, about 20 miles west of the place where the North Carolinians had abandoned the survey. On it the Irvin River flowed into the Dan, as it wound through the valley Byrd had chosen. Creeks fed it clear water. In the woods were beech, hickory, and old oak. Tall green canes lined the river banks. Bottom land was a dark, rich mold. As soon as he looked, Byrd coveted the vale, "the most beautifull stream I ever saw." After he got it, he named his purchase "the Land of Eden." Finding that the western part held hills and rocks, he envisioned mines and named one site Potosi.

Five years after his adventures in running the line, Byrd, at the age of fifty-nine, returned to the Dan. He and William Mayo surveyed tracts they had bought in 1728. Following the southern edge of his Land of Eden, Byrd saw a broad meadow of tall gra.s.s on the south bank of the Dan, where the "Saura," or Cheraw, Indians had lived before moving into South Carolina. After his party pa.s.sed, moving eastward, he kept turning in the saddle to look back at the meadow. In the last year of his life he obtained a patent for those 5,490 acres from the governor of North Carolina. On the way home after their survey, Byrd and Mayo spent a night at one of their old campsites along the dividing line. They found a beech tree in the bark of which North Carolina's commissioners had carved their names. Byrd worked on the bark "to add to their Names a Sketch of their Characters."

Anyone as close to William Byrd as was his brother-in-law, John Custis, knew that Byrd's purchase of so much land in 1728 was a change. He had inherited 26,231 acres from his father in 1704; he had added about 5,500 acres in the following eight years. Then, except for land he acquired from Custis, growth of his holdings had stopped. For this Byrd and Custis blamed their late father-in-law, Daniel Parke. Parke had left Virginia for England, fought alongside the Duke of Marlborough on the Continent, carried news of the duke's victory at Blenheim to Queen Anne, gone to Antigua as governor of the Leeward Islands, and died there in 1710. After surviving an attempted a.s.sa.s.sination, he had been attacked by a mob and murdered. Some said that outraged husbands and fathers killed him in revenge for his amours. Some said that violators of laws regulating trade, who were those same husbands and fathers, killed him to stop his greedy interference.

Parke's will gave Byrd and Custis a taste of what his enemies had experienced at his hands. It treated a baby girl in Antigua-"that little b.a.s.t.a.r.d of Col. Parkes," Custis called her-more generously than it treated Parke's adult daughters in Virginia. The girl was to inherit his property in the Leeward Islands, worth 30,000, on condition that she took the name Parke and that her future husband did so. The will left Parke's property in England and Virginia to Frances Custis. With that legacy came liability for his debts and a bequest of 1,000 to Lucy Byrd, to be paid by her sister, Frances. Since William and Lucy Byrd were known to quarrel sometimes, ending one dispute by climbing onto the billiard table to enjoy a flourish, and since John and Frances Custis were known to quarrel constantly, though she was pregnant when she learned of her father's murder, Daniel Parke's will seemed to convey a refined malice, designed to make trouble between his adult daughters, between them and their husbands, and between the two couples and the "little b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

John Custis managed Parke's plantations in Virginia. To pay Parke's debts, these would have to be sold. Reluctant to see the family's holdings shrink, Byrd offered to a.s.sume the debts and bequests if Custis would give him the land: 9,760 acres in Virginia and property in England. Custis agreed, and Byrd soon found he had made a bad bargain. Instead of an obligation to pay 6,680, of which 4,000 could be obtained by selling property in England, he had acquired one closer to 10,000, while the English estate turned out to be mortgaged and involved in litigation. To his distress, Byrd remained in debt until near the end of his life. He even thought of selling Westover.

Buying land in North Carolina in 1728, buying more in Virginia in the 1730s, and getting grants in Virginia with help from his friends on the Council, Byrd hoped to turn this property into income quickly. He offered to sell the Land of Eden to a group of Swiss Protestants. He obtained a grant of 105,000 acres along the Roanoke River in southern Virginia, expecting to sell to another group of Swiss. After those immigrants went instead to South Carolina, he switched his plan for the first group, offering them his Virginia land, telling them how much better they would fare in Virginia than in North Carolina. He already owned the Land of Eden, but the terms of his grant in Virginia required him to find settlers. In 1737, Byrd published a book in Bern: Neu-gefundenes Eden Neu-gefundenes Eden, ostensibly written by him, Wilhelm Vogel, but mostly drawn from earlier writers on North Carolina and Virginia.

In the summer and autumn of 1738 a vessel bearing Swiss immigrants crossed the Atlantic. Their voyage took about five months, more than twice as long as the usual pa.s.sage. Upon entering Chesapeake Bay, their vessel dropped anchor near sh.o.r.e so that the immigrants could search for food. A winter storm stranded the vessel, drowned some immigrants, and froze others, leaving only ninety of the original three hundred alive. The following year Byrd told the Council that he could "no longer depend upon the Importation of Families to Settle on the Said Land." To keep his Virginia grant, he had to pay the customary charges. The wreck of the Swiss immigrants cost him 525. Late in 1740 he again tried to sell, this time to Germans. Knowing better, he still described a Virginia that resembled Paradise. He never closed the big sale.

Not long after Byrd returned to Virginia in 1726, Governor Hugh Drysdale died. For the following eighteen months the president of the Council, Byrd's friend, Robert Carter, acted as governor. Near the end of this time Carter, at the urging of his son-in-law, Mann Page, posed for a portrait. Artists routinely depicted large, bewigged gentlemen wearing long coats of superfine cloth and looking out from the canvas with an expression of authority, but Carter's portrait conveyed more command and self-confidence than pictures of others. It was easy to see why people called him "King" Carter. Now sixty-four, he had served on the Council since his thirties. Earlier he had been speaker of the House of Burgesses and treasurer of the colony. He owned 300,000 acres; among them were almost fifty farms and plantations. He had 750 or more slaves, worth about 10,000. An ambitious young Virginian imagining a successful career pictured himself as another King Carter.

Carter acquired much of his land by granting it to himself, his sons, and his sons-in-law during his long service as the Fairfax family's agent for their large proprietary holdings along the Potomac River. Overriding censure and resentment, he extended their claims and tripled their property. He reserved the best land, eventually amounting to 180,000 acres, for himself and his family. Grants to others brought him composition money and fees. Before he died, Carter signed thirty or more blank deeds, later used by his eldest son for new purchasers more than a year after Carter's death.

William Byrd and John Custis questioned the wisdom of Virginians' importing large numbers of slaves, but Carter welcomed s.h.i.+ps from Africa, expertly managing some sales. In search of rent-paying tenants for his land, he encouraged Scots-Irish settlers to come to the proprietary. He invested prudently: a long annuity and stock in the Bank of England. Always in search of solid wealth, he put no faith in what he called "that plague, the South Sea Company." He fought the efforts of London tobacco brokers to make themselves indispensable middlemen. Carter called himself a man of "plain style" and "plain dealing." In 1712, Edmund Jenings, with help from friends in London, persuaded Catherine, Lady Fairfax, to dismiss Carter as agent for the proprietary and appoint Jenings. Carter and his friends in London worked against Jenings for ten years until Carter regained the agency. He then took advantage of unpaid arrears owed to the Fairfax estate to ruin Jenings financially, extracting mortgages, even one on Ripon Hall, Jenings's home. Carter finally supplanted him as president of the Council on the grounds that Jenings was senile. "We are but stewards of G.o.d's building," Carter wrote just before retaking control of the proprietary; "the more he lends us the larger accounts he expects from us." King Carter continually expanded his stewards.h.i.+p.

At his home, Corotoman, along the Rappahannock River, Carter was surrounded by fields of tobacco, wheat, and corn. Gristmills ground his grain. A small s.h.i.+pyard turned out vessels for use in the river and the bay. The plantation and its wharves formed a small village of indentured servants and slaves. Carter's large wine cellar was that of a connoisseur. He entertained "with abundant courtesy." During a three-day visit, William Byrd drank, played cards, danced minuets and country dances, and "lay in the fine room and slept very well."

Carter and his first wife had four children; he and his second wife eight more. Three of his children were married to three of William Byrd's. Carter enjoyed reading, and he took pains to educate his children, not wis.h.i.+ng any of them to be "a dunce or a blockhead." His daughter, Judith, married to Mann Page, was, her grandson recalled, "one of the most sensible, and best informed women I ever knew." Adding Byrd's influence in England to his own, Carter helped his eldest son, John, become Virginia's secretary, an office which cost the Carters 1,500 guineas to obtain. That was how Robert "Walpool," as King Carter phonetically spelled the name of the man at the head of government, ran the empire. The secretarys.h.i.+p was in some ways better than the governors.h.i.+p; it yielded a large, steady income for life. The unsuccessful rival for the appointment was Edmund Jenings.

King Carter played favorites among his sons, daughters, sons-in-law, and grandchildren. In his later years his favorite son-in-law was Mann Page, a member of the Council at the age of twenty-three. Page and Judith Carter were married three years later, in 1717. Page called his father-in-law a "dear friend." Carter included Page in the bounty of his land grants, dividing a "great tract" with him in 1720. Nine years later Page joined Carter and two of Carter's sons in founding the Frying Pan Company, named after a run, or creek, in Stafford County where they expected to mine copper. They acquired 27,470 acres from the Fairfax proprietary, built roads, and imported Cornish miners. Despite his gout, King Carter rode to the mine to see copper extracted from ore. All to no avail-the sandstone proved less cupreous than they had hoped. Nevertheless, through inheritance and with his father-in-law's help, Mann Page acc.u.mulated more than 30,000 acres, scattered across eight counties.

Judith Carter Page found her husband affectionate and tender. To do honor to her, himself, and their children, Mann Page in 1721 began to build a new house on his plantation, Rosewell, in Gloucester County on the north bank of the York River. It replaced the wooden frame house that burned down that year. Spending the night at Rosewell in October 1720, King Carter and William Byrd were obliged to sleep in the same bed. That would hardly be necessary once Page's new house stood completed. It was the largest, most opulent home in Virginia. For sixteen years the three-story building, with its four huge chimneys, was under construction, its intricate brickwork both strong and ornamental, its roof covered with lead. Up the York River vessels bore Madeira wood, mahogany for wainscotting, pilasters and pediments of decoratively cut stone, gla.s.s for almost fifty windows, Tuscan cornices, marble mantelpieces, tiles of English Purbeck white stone and black Belgian marble for a checkerboard floor in the great hall, finely carved woodwork, and treads and risers for a staircase six feet wide. Years before it was finished, the new mansion at Rosewell had won the reputation of being "the best house in Virginia."

Mann Page spent much more money than he had. Soon his debts in England, with interest, exceeded the value of his land and slaves. He also owed money to his father-in-law. In January 1730 he suddenly fell ill. He barely had time to dictate a will, and died the same day. The executors of Page's estate were King Carter and Carter's sons until Page's sons grew to adulthood. The Carter brothers and their sister, Judith, continued work on the Rosewell mansion. They found that Mann Page's plantations did not yield enough profit to pay his creditors. King Carter obtained from the General a.s.sembly authorization to pay Page's debts and to charge the estate for princ.i.p.al and interest, but Carter died a few weeks later. One of Page's chief creditors in London, Micajah Perry, son of King Carter and William Byrd's merchant friend, grew "very angry." The brothers proposed to borrow money elsewhere to satisfy him. Though the estate operated on questionable credit, the grand house at Rosewell at last stood finished. King Carter's daughter and the grandchildren she had given him lived amid unequaled splendor.

During his lifetime and in his will, Robert Carter helped his children into large estates. Even after division of his land and slaves among his heirs, his four sons-John, Charles, George, and Landon-as well as his grandson-Robert-were among the richest of Virginians. King Carter had begun life orphaned, with 1,000 acres and 1,000. His success in ama.s.sing a fortune found no rival among young men the age of his grandson. Nevertheless, Virginians tried to emulate him. George Was.h.i.+ngton, in his thirties, explained a line of thought he had begun to form more than ten years earlier. He asked "how the greatest Estates we have in this Colony were made; Was it not by taking up & purchasing at very low rates the rich back Lands which were thought nothing of in those days, but are now the most valuable Lands we possess?" He answered: "Undoubtedly it was."

Robert Carter died in 1732, just as Virginia planters were sharply increasing the number of slaves brought from Africa and the amount of tobacco s.h.i.+pped to Britain. The colony held about 60,000 slaves in 1740, twice as many as in 1730. Foster Cunliffe, merchant for King Carter's son, Charles Carter of Cleve, sent his vessel Liverpool Merchant Liverpool Merchant from Africa to Virginia in the spring of 1732 and again in the summer of 1734 to transport more than 300 slaves. In the fifteen months between those voyages, sixteen other vessels from Africa brought almost 2,700 slaves, while still others came from the West Indies. During June 1732, the from Africa to Virginia in the spring of 1732 and again in the summer of 1734 to transport more than 300 slaves. In the fifteen months between those voyages, sixteen other vessels from Africa brought almost 2,700 slaves, while still others came from the West Indies. During June 1732, the Liverpool Merchant Liverpool Merchant was one of four slave vessels anch.o.r.ed in the York River, with 761 slaves from Gambia, Angola, and Bonny. Buyers went on board and between decks, observing men stowed fore and women aft, naked or wearing sc.r.a.ps and beads. Between them boys were fore, girls aft, all naked. A visitor watched a white woman "Examine the Limbs and soundness of some she seemed to Choose." The vessels rode at anchor for weeks, until all slaves found buyers. was one of four slave vessels anch.o.r.ed in the York River, with 761 slaves from Gambia, Angola, and Bonny. Buyers went on board and between decks, observing men stowed fore and women aft, naked or wearing sc.r.a.ps and beads. Between them boys were fore, girls aft, all naked. A visitor watched a white woman "Examine the Limbs and soundness of some she seemed to Choose." The vessels rode at anchor for weeks, until all slaves found buyers.

William Byrd feared that Virginia's blacks would follow "a man of desperate courage" able to lead them in revolt. Four slaves were hanged in 1731 on a charge of leading a conspiracy among two hundred to attack whites in Norfolk and Princess Anne counties. Maroons, Byrd said, could cause as much trouble and danger in Virginia as in Jamaica. He wished the British government would stop slave traders, who, he said, "woud freely sell their fathers, their elder brothers, & even the wives of their bosomes, if they could black their faces & get any thing by them." More vessels arrived from Africa and the West Indies. By 1750, Virginia held 101,000 black people. In that year and for several more years planters' demand for slaves exceeded the supply. Better markets for tobacco, new plantations in the piedmont, new vistas for ambition-at the height of the season in 1752, vessels in the James and York rivers held 2,000 new slaves in one eight-week period. Enterprising men with capital bought dozens of slaves at a discount, then resold them one by one a few weeks later at a profit of 2550 percent. Eager purchases "drained the Planters of Cash."

John Custis also wished the trade could be stopped. But he knew "it is so sweet to those concernd and so much concerns the trade & Navigation of great Brittain; that it will bee next to impossible to break the neck of it." By 1730, Britain had become the largest carrier of slaves in the Atlantic. The French state monopoly bought more and more Virginia tobacco. British merchants profited from this trade with the Continent; the government drew Customs revenue, especially from the domestic tobacco trade. Money or credit given to planters they soon spent, mainly to buy from merchants. The government wanted more, not fewer, vessels to cross the Atlantic. And during Byrd's and Custis's lifetimes, traffic in slaves for Virginia tasted too sweet to too many Virginians. Custis wrote to a British correspondent: "as long as wee will buy thm; you will find thm...it is a very melancholly thing seriously to consider it."

Few slaves brought to Chesapeake Bay came in vessels owned by Virginians. But many small sloops plied between the Chesapeake and the islands of the West Indies, routinely sailing back to Virginia with new slaves. A cargo of cured pork and boards and s.h.i.+ngles bought a cargo of rum and slaves. David Meade, a young merchant living along the south branch of the Nansemond River, near the northern reaches of the Dismal Swamp, pursued this trade for twenty years. His father, Andrew Meade, had begun it with his sloop Molly Molly, bound for Jamaica, bringing back eight or ten slaves each time. Andrew Meade had opened his large house to William Byrd and the other commissioners of the dividing line on a rainy night as they pa.s.sed from the eastern to the western edge of the swamp. He also entertained Sir Richard Everard, last proprietary governor of North Carolina, though the Virginia Council suspected the governor of tricky dealing on the boundary question. In 1731, Sir Richard and his family visited Andrew Meade on their way to sail for England. David Meade, then twenty years old, had led a sheltered life. He fell in love with Sir Richard's daughter, Susannah. With his father's and Susannah's help, he won Sir Richard's permission for her to stay in Virginia. She and David were married that year. Andrew Meade was generous to his son. Beginning the next year, David owned the sloops Molly, Priscilla, Susannah Molly, Priscilla, Susannah, and others bringing slaves to the James River from Jamaica and Barbados-sometimes one or two or four, sometimes eighteen or nineteen.

David and Susannah Meade enjoyed a happy marriage, bringing up six children and leading, one son said, "a monotonous and tranquil life." David joined his father in the counting room and warehouses near their home. He acquired larger vessels for more runs to the West Indies. With John Driver he founded the firm Meade & Driver, taking four lots in the new town of Suffolk, established along the Nansemond River in 1742. Allied with Robert Cary & Company of London, they imported merchandise. Meade sent his three oldest sons to England for education. He had portraits painted of himself, his wife, and their sons. He bought land along the Roanoke River in North Carolina. David Meade died at the age of forty-seven, leaving his partner with a stock of merchandise and a debt to Robert Cary & Company, which grew as Driver imported more goods. Meade left for his children both his share of the company's debt and his personal debt to Cary.

The pursuit of wealth through Virginia's transatlantic trade depended upon extending and receiving promises. Virginians and their commercial connections in Britain needed one another. To sustain the flow of commodities, slaves, and goods, they had to give trust and credit. Often, each side complained that it had been betrayed by the other. Yet the flow continued. In the days of William Byrd, John Custis, King Carter, and Andrew Meade, a great planter sent his tobacco to British merchants, who sold it. Merchants then expended proceeds of the sale among tradesmen, filling planters' orders for goods. The most ambitious Virginians also bought tobacco from and resold goods to their neighbors who worked on a smaller scale. At every stage of these transactions, someone charged an "advance"-a markup-or interest or a commission, or all three. Virginians often protested that merchants extracted too much money in disposing of tobacco, in handling orders for goods, in charging for freight and insuring cargoes. Merchants complained that they received too little money from and extended too much credit to those Virginians who balanced accounts late or never. Even when tobacco sales were good, Richard Corbin, Virginia's deputy receiver general of revenue for the Crown, wrote to England, "no Promises in Respect to any Payment can be depended upon."

Planters used an array of devices. They might consign their inferior tobacco to their creditors, sell their best for cash, and use the money not to pay debts but to buy slaves. They slowed suits for debt in the courts, where planters sat as judges. They consigned tobacco to another merchant, leaving their chief creditor unpaid. After a few months in the colony late in 1750, a young Englishman concluded: "there's a Vanity and Subtilty in the generality of Virginians." He attributed these qualities to "leaders of the Fas.h.i.+on or promoters of mean and vicious habits among the opulent, or as they are fond of styling themselves-Persons of Note." The life of a young man trying to start his fortune by commercial dealings with Virginians could be hard. Though he had a planter's word that he would get a consignment or a cargo, he learned that those hogsheads already had been loaded in a rival's vessel, bound for a different merchant. During some experiences of this kind, Edmund Wilc.o.x started ordering his innkeeper to bring him shots of rum in the morning. Even his kinsman, Richard Corbin, did not give him a cargo Corbin had led him to expect. If a relative and friend could behave this way, Wilc.o.x wrote to his employer, "what must you think of the generality?" Experience had made him cynical about Virginia. He concluded: "this may properly [be] called the Land of Promis without any intension of Performing."

Unhappy Virginians said their colony relied too much upon tobacco. Since the earliest days, officials had tried to force or persuade planters to grow other crops, as well. Hemp, called Cannabis sativa Cannabis sativa in the new Linnaean system, regularly appeared in lists of alternatives. Within a year of his final return to Westover, William Byrd foresaw that tobacco would glut the market. He became an enthusiast for hemp in 1727. It would always have a