The Fabulous History Of The Dismal Swamp Company Part 8

Francis Farley helped his son with rum and sugar until direct commerce between Antigua and the mainland stopped. James did not tell him about the debts. Just as Virginians rushed to send tobacco to Britain, they s.h.i.+pped food and lumber to Antigua. At least twenty vessels arriving from Antigua entered the port of Norfolk during 1775. By early August the island's markets were glutted with American grain. Prudent Antiguans such as Farley built reserves. After captures of vessels began early in 1776, he could buy little. He heard about his son rarely, through indirect channels. He knew that Elizabeth Farley was "an obliging good Wife" and that she and James had given him three granddaughters. He knew he had one hundred slaves working in North Carolina and Virginia, but he could not find out how they fared.

Although Farley denounced Americans' war for independence, he said the British could not win. He predicted an American alliance with France more than two years before one was formed. He wrote: "I know [th]at Continent prity well, I have been in eight different Provinces, and if the [Pe]ople continue united I do not think they are to be subdued by Land forces. The Sea Coast may, but I verily believe if the King of Prussia with the best 100,000 Troops he ever Commanded was 100 Miles in the Country they would be all cut off." Farley looked to the future with gloom, expecting war and American independence to destroy the world of sugar planters in the British West Indies.

The number of whites in Antigua had fallen to 2,600. They always worried about an uprising among the 38,000 blacks. A shortage of food would increase the likelihood of revolt. And if British troops were transferred from the island to North America, whites would have no trained defenders against a slave uprising or a French invasion. Antiguans were "high Loyalists," and they called on the Crown to protect them. The government sometimes seemed more preoccupied with preventing them from selling gunpowder to Americans.

In October 1775 drought settled on Antigua. Clouds drifting southward brought no rain. Hot, dry weather lasted for eleven months. Food crops did not grow. Stockpiles dwindled. Slaves were put on short rations, which they eked out by sucking sugar cane. Francis Farley foresaw starvation for many. As shortages grew more severe and prices rose, the island attracted speculators, who bought cargoes of foodstuffs after captured American vessels were condemned in a Court of Admiralty. Resale of these supplies on the open market made provisions still more expensive.

One of James Parke Farley's last transactions with Scottish storekeepers was to buy a gun on June 15, 1776. Not long afterward, many Scots left Virginia and North Carolina. James and Elizabeth Farley returned to Virginia, where James served as a soldier, apparently in the militia. Visiting North End, home of Elizabeth's cousin on a peninsula overlooking Chesapeake Bay not far from York Town and Rosewell, he fell ill and died "suddenly" on May 1, 1777. Elizabeth Farley was pregnant. She drew on the Byrd family's gift for sarcasm as she wrote that he died "a Victim to his country." The Byrds often blamed their troubles on the American Revolution. Her brother, Thomas Taylor Byrd, applying to the Council of West Florida for a grant of land, said that he had been deprived of a large fortune because his father had remained loyal to the king.

Months pa.s.sed before Francis Farley learned of the death of his only son. A Scottish merchant who fled to New York mentioned it to a friend of Farley's, without details about how or when James had died. Knowing that Elizabeth was pregnant, Farley worried about her well-being and her children. He also feared for the security of his property in Virginia and North Carolina. Two of the three men to whom he had given power of attorney-James Parke Farley, William Byrd, and Robert Munford-were dead. His nephew, Jack, still served as an officer in the British Army. Farley thought that North Carolinians and Virginians, if they heard this, would confiscate his property. He urged Jack not to remain "a slave in the army of a very declining almost ruined country." Why not resign his commission and go to North Carolina to protect the family holdings? Francis Farley's son-in-law, Captain John Laforey, could not do so. He commanded a man-of-war, HMS Ocean Ocean. Farley wrote as if he hardly expected his nephew to heed his advice, and Jack did not.

Heavy rain fell on Antigua in September 1776. Reservoirs and ponds filled; people planted corn and other food crops. A few months later, however, drought returned. After nine months of dry heat, Antigua looked more "burnt up" than it had been for the past thirty years, "not a green thing to be seen." Early in 1777 the island began to depend primarily upon beans s.h.i.+pped from Britain. Farley was "extremely busy" trying to supply his six plantations and those he supervised for absentee owners. He cut some slaves to two-thirds of the usual ration "for fear of a total want." The sugar crop was stunted, but its owners thought more about the dangers of invasion and insurrection. Farley predicted that three out of every hundred slaves on the island would starve to death and that malnutrition would leave "a great many so reduced it will scarcely be practicable to raise them." As Antigua neared famine, Farley and his colleagues on the Council got permission from the navy to import food from St. Eustatius and other Dutch and French islands.

Despite these concerns, Francis Farley did not neglect his interests on the mainland or his daughter-in-law and grandchildren. Just after New Year's Day, 1778, he wrote to Robert Munford, requesting that cultivation of tobacco continue at the Land of Eden. Elizabeth Farley might detain some slaves in Virginia, but he knew that she was "very prudent" and would keep only a few. The rest, except those "employed in the Dizmal Swamp," should work his North Carolina land, with the proceeds going to his daughter-in-law. Farley saw speculators in prize cargoes pay 90 s.h.i.+llings per hundredweight for tobacco in St. Johns and make a good profit on it in England. Munford ought to take advantage of these prices with tobacco s.h.i.+pped to France. Farley intended to visit Virginia as soon as the "unhappy dispute" ended. Elizabeth Farley lived at Nesting, about a mile upriver from Westover. Her fourth child was another daughter, named Mary Byrd Farley. The baby girl's maternal grandfather had killed himself before she was born; her paternal grandfather did not know she existed. Francis Farley hoped for a grandson to continue the name of Farley and inherit the Land of Eden and his share in the Dismal Swamp Company.

Robert Munford was forty years old when Farley asked for his help. In the decade before the war he had acquired more land and slaves in Mecklenburg County, bringing his holdings to 4,000 acres and ninety-one slaves. His home at Richland, like Dr. Walker's at Castle Hill and George Was.h.i.+ngton's at Mount Vernon, was built of wood, but the improvements he made gave it "the appearance of magnificence." To departing Scottish merchants Munford owed large sums. He had drawn 2,300 in unpaid bills of exchange, and his debts exceeded his a.s.sets.

Munford disliked "the intemperate warmth" Virginians had shown in opposing British measures before fighting had begun. Late in 1774 a pet.i.tion circulated in Mecklenburg County. It advocated "expelling out of the country all Scotchmen." Scotchmen." Two and a half years later, after most factors had left, 190 citizens of the county pet.i.tioned the House of Delegates to inflict "more severe punishment" on any remaining Scottish storekeepers who refused to accept the new paper money in payment of old sterling debts. This pet.i.tion was signed by Sir Peyton Skipwith, Virginia's only baronet, and by such lesser men as David Royster, Joseph Royster, and Charles Royster, whose stridency showed that they were not "moderate & prudent" people of the kind Munford had hoped would forestall "the evils of a civil war." Munford did not sign. Two and a half years later, after most factors had left, 190 citizens of the county pet.i.tioned the House of Delegates to inflict "more severe punishment" on any remaining Scottish storekeepers who refused to accept the new paper money in payment of old sterling debts. This pet.i.tion was signed by Sir Peyton Skipwith, Virginia's only baronet, and by such lesser men as David Royster, Joseph Royster, and Charles Royster, whose stridency showed that they were not "moderate & prudent" people of the kind Munford had hoped would forestall "the evils of a civil war." Munford did not sign.

After Munford sided with the Revolution, he recruited soldiers, served in the House of Delegates, and, late in the war, fought the British in North Carolina. But gleeful belligerence and ostentatious patriotism among Americans still offended him. At about the time the second Mecklenburg County pet.i.tion against Scottish factors was signed by his neighbors-May 1777-he wrote a play: The Patriots The Patriots.

How many of Munford's fellow planters, if they could have seen or read his play, would have recognized themselves in his fictional sketch of them? "Her father is a violent patriot without knowing the meaning of the word. He understands little or nothing beyond a dice-box and race-field, but thinks he knows every thing; and woe be to him that contradicts him! His political notions are a system of perfect anarchy, but he reigns in his own family with perfect despotism. He is fully resolved that n.o.body shall tyrannize over him, but very content to tyrannize over others." Asked to define the word "tory," one character, member of a Committee of Safety, replies: "All suspected persons are call'd tories." Munford's loyalty to the American cause had been "suspected" in March and April 1775. The voters of Mecklenburg County chose Bennet Goode, instead of their longtime burgess, Robert Munford, to represent them in the new House of Delegates. Goode also served on the county committee enforcing the a.s.sociation. Munford's distaste for what his hero calls "the patriotic itch" and for politicians exploiting it recurs throughout his play. In Act II, just before the Committee of Safety denounces Scots as enemies, Munford's hero says of it: "I hate these little democracies." A Scot challenges the committee to prove that he is an enemy. One member answers: "We suspect any Scotchman: suspicion is proof, sir."

Munford ridiculed not only cant and bloodthirstiness among patriots but also a disposition in the American Revolution "to spurn at all government." He linked the "phrenzy of the times" with the decay of both "public virtue" and "the social virtues." Choosing as his hero one of two "gentlemen of fortune accused of toryism," he left little doubt of a connection between their being "gentlemen of fortune" and their being accused. A contemporary of Bennet Goode's later described Munford: "he was what they called an aristocrat." In The Patriots The Patriots, the Revolution is, in part, a triumph of petty and ignorant men over educated and discerning men. Munford conveyed his disgust at this dimension of patriotism by having one member of the Committee of Safety say: "shew me a clever man, and I'll shew you an enemy." The play's happy ending was written by a man who did not appear to expect such an outcome in his own life. When he received Francis Farley's letter after writing The Patriots The Patriots and read Farley's allusion to the war years-calling them "this unhappy time"-Robert Munford had reason to agree. and read Farley's allusion to the war years-calling them "this unhappy time"-Robert Munford had reason to agree.

Virginia, with the other states, received from Congress in the fall of 1777 a recommendation that property of loyalists be confiscated to provide money for the war. Members of the House of Delegates would not yet go so far, in violation of international law. British officials had not seized the property in Britain of Americans they deemed rebels. The delegates instead sequestered the property of loyalists so that profits from these estates, as well as debts owed to loyalists, would not be paid. The proceeds were invested in Continental loan office certificates-that is, lent to the United States. Among the properties sequestered were five plantations and 149 slaves belonging to Samuel Gist.

Ever since Gist's departure from Virginia, Benjamin Toler had supervised overseers on Gist's plantations. He lived near the Pamunkey River, six miles from Hanover Court House. He traveled to Amherst and Goochland counties and within Hanover County to make sure that Gist's land remained productive, sending profits to Gist. His crop of 1777 yielded about 80 hogsheads of tobacco. In London they were worth at least 3,200; even in Virginia they would bring about 1,120. Gist's letters and instructions reached Virginia by way of Holland, France, or the French West Indies. In July 1777, Gist's agent at Petersburg, Thomas Sh.o.r.e, announced his intent to go to Europe. Anyone wis.h.i.+ng to transfer money or order manufactured goods could apply to him directly or through Thomas Pleasants in Richmond or William Anderson in Hanover. Anderson offered the plantation of Gist's stepson, the late John Smith, for rent, and he bought land for Gist. In Virginians' eyes Gist was "an alien enemy who could not hold any property in this country." Yet, through Anderson, he did.

Late in November 1777, Gist and almost all leading underwriters and merchants at Lloyd's signed a memorial to the government, complaining about collusion by France and Spain in American raids on British commerce. Many privateers had few or no Americans on board. The merchants warned: "to such a Price has the Premium of Insurance already arisen, in Contemplation of these Hazards, that many of the most valuable Branches of the Navigation of the Kingdom cannot support so heavy a Charge." This memorial soon became irrelevant, as greater risks arose. On December 2 people in London learned that six weeks earlier General John Burgoyne had surrendered to the Americans in upstate New York. Although Sir William Howe had defeated George Was.h.i.+ngton's forces twice in Pennsylvania and occupied Philadelphia, the Northern Department of the Continental Army under Horatio Gates, with the help of militia, had captured an invading British Army. The value of stock fell, and one member of Parliament "said pleasantly and possibly truly enough that the insurers at Lloyds will have a good scuffle in Westminster Hall upon this Subject." Anyone could see that France's covert aid to the United States probably would soon become overt, in the form of diplomatic recognition and alliance in war on Britain. In that event Britain's merchant fleet risked not only Americans' piracy but also the French and Spanish navies. More underwriters faced bankruptcy.

By February 1778, Americans secured their alliance with France. Attempting to forestall it, Lord North's ministry appointed a peace commission to offer terms of reunion to the Americans. This commission had no chance of success, but Samuel Gist and other merchants formerly trading to America took care that reconciliation not come at their expense. They signed a memorial urging the ministry to provide in any agreement "the most effectual measures...to secure the debts due to them which have been contracted under the faith and sanction of the British laws." Americans' intent to evade paying was embodied, the merchants said, in "that most dangerous, acc.u.mulating, and overwhelming paper currency," which they made legal tender "in full discharge of book debts, bonds, and all other securities, without having any funds for its redemption." If the king did not protect "his much injured subjects," they expected "the loss of their fortunes."

Each sequestered estate in Virginia was a.s.signed a commissioner to manage a loyalist's plantations in order to extract a profit for the benefit of the Continental loan office. Samuel Gist's old ally Peter Lyons persuaded the Council-Gist's partners in the Dismal Swamp Company, John Page, Thomas Walker, and David Jameson, were councillors-to make William Anderson commissioner for the holdings of Samuel Gist in February 1778. Lyons a.s.sumed that if Gist's property "fell into other hands, it would be much injured." Of course, everyone knew that Anderson was Gist's son-in-law. His appointment "subjected him to suspicion that he would not do as much for the public as an indifferent person." He was charged with "breach of duty, for not selling the crops soon and paying money into the treasury." He made his first payments in July. That year and the next he gave more than $21,750 in Continental currency to the treasurer of Virginia. Officially, this sum was the equivalent of almost 720 sterling. Anderson withstood suspicion and complaints, occasionally carrying a musket on militia duty to show that he was no loyalist. Mary Anderson's kindness and hospitality made her popular in spite of Virginians' dislike of her father. Benjamin Toler worked Gist's slaves, and Henry Ridd.i.c.k kept the Dismal Swamp Company's slaves at work with tools Gist had s.h.i.+pped before the war.

War gave Anthony Bacon little rest. The Ordnance Board, deliberating in private without taking compet.i.tive bids, awarded him contracts for cannon of various calibers at a price of 18 for each ton of dark gray iron. A single contract on June 17, 1778, one of many between 1773 and 1779, was worth 11,700. He received more orders than any other manufacturer of ordnance. Early in the war Bacon ended his partners.h.i.+p with John Wilkinson but still used and improved Wilkinson's method for boring cannon. He brought a new partner into his operations at Merthyr Tydfil. Buying out his first partner, William Brownrigg, and replacing him with Richard Crawshay, Bacon exchanged a man of science for a man of business. Crawshay worked forges, foundries, and laborers relentlessly. Bacon leased more land around Merthyr Tydfil, as well as another furnace nearby in 1777 and still another in 1780. With more people working on iron, ironstone, and coal, new cottages rose to fill gaps between earlier ones in the town's cramped, crooked streets. The constant noise and heat of blast furnaces and iron wheels grew more intense, as did clouds of coal smoke. The forging, casting, and boring of Bacon's cannon surrounded their makers with flame, smoke, ashes, and soot. As his resident agent at the Cyfarthfa furnace, Bacon employed Richard Hill, husband of Margaret Bushby Hill, whose sister was Bacon's mistress. Bacon was a G.o.dfather of the Hills' daughter.

Taking account of the growing population of Glamorgans.h.i.+re, officials in Cardiff built a new jail. An improved turnpike ran from Merthyr Tydfil down the valley of the Taff 26 miles to Cardiff. It needed frequent repair as long teams of horses hauled wagons laden with iron guns, many with nine-and-one-half-foot barrels. At the edge of the neat walled town, guarded by a ruined castle overlooking the Bristol Channel, stood the Gwlat Quay. It became known as "Cannon Wharf." Cardiff's quiet was often broken as Bacon's guns were tested by firing 6-pound or 18-pound or 32-pound cannon b.a.l.l.s from St. Mary's Street, at the end of the wharf, into the earthen bank of the south wall. Once approved, artillery pieces were s.h.i.+pped to the king's ordnance depots and on to America.

The Ordnance Board was only one of several contract-letting boards doing business with the member of Parliament for Aylesbury. Bacon owned a colliery in c.u.mberland County. He won contracts to supply coal to the British Army in America. One, in August 1778, was worth 18,000. Earlier agreements, under which he bought coal for the army and received a commission of 2 percent, were even more lucrative, especially if he bought the coal from himself and took a commission.

Bacon also received contracts to supply provisions to the army. Although he was a lesser figure in this trade, he was paid more than 44,000 for Irish provisions in 1778. For 1779 the government stipulated a similar sum. The first agreements, setting a fixed, arbitrary price for the commodities Bacon's agents delivered, were "extremely favorable to the Contractors, & prejudicial to the publick." Bacon received overpayments even after a new system computed cost per ration.

Bacon bore the initial expense of furnis.h.i.+ng food, coal, and cannon to the Crown, relying upon the government to fulfill its agreements. It was often slow to pay. The Ordnance Board gave him debentures, certifying its debt to him. The ministry, in turn, had to float large loans to finance the war. Delays mounted. In October 1780 debentures redeemable in August 1778 remained due. George Jeffery, a merchant in Throgmorton Street, around the corner from Bacon's offices, wrote: "an Ordnance Contractor applied to me for a parcel of Goods but could give me no other payment than ordnance Debentures." Reluctantly, Jeffery took the paper at a steep discount, making "such an exorbitant profit I was ashamed to ask for it. However I found I was still lower than other People." Bacon was only one of many who were circulating "an amazing fund for Commerce" created for carrying on the war. He was most resourceful when most beleaguered by his big risks, the husband of a relative said. "Once at least, if not oftener, his creditors were called together and his books shewn; and he has been heard to declare, that several times, even in the apparent zenith of his prosperity, had the same thing happened to him, he would have been found worse than nothing." Bacon survived and, with his fellow contractors, remained loyal to Lord North's ministry.

Opponents of Lord North censured corruption and waste in the contract system. The navy, the army, and the Ordnance Board spent far more than the sums voted by Parliament, relying on the members to cover these "extraordinaries" with new public funds. This practice, the clerk of the House of Commons later wrote, rendered the process of appropriation "ridiculous and nugatory," while the ministry tolerated "frauds and abuses." In debate Isaac Barre singled out the ordnance estimate: "The expence of the ordnance service for this year was above 470,000 and no man could tell to what the account might be swelled.... It had been all imposition from beginning to end, or some persons imagined they had an interest pretending to be deceived." Members criticized Bacon by name for the amounts he collected to provide slave labor to the government in the West Indies, calling the payments "a most shameful squandering of public money." The Treasury Board received complaints about late deliveries and inferior quality in Bacon's s.h.i.+pments of provisions. In the spring of 1778 the opposition tried to prohibit contractors from sitting in the House of Commons. One member provoked Bacon by denouncing them "for being private plunderers; for entering into a conspiracy with a corrupt administration to plunder their country." Bacon rose to defend himself. He said that he fulfilled his contracts "fairly and honestly," that he was not a tool of the ministry, and that he "could not conceive why contractors should be treated in so unbecoming, nay, contemptuous a manner-as if they were monsters and not fit for human society!" After the House divided on the question, the Treasury's secretary, Lord North's political operative John Robinson, reported from Downing Street: "We were hard run yesterday...and but barely threw out the Contractors' Bill." Less than three weeks after the vote, Bacon received a contract for sixty-three more cannons. The following year 1,500 was allotted from the king's privy purse to help re-elect him in Aylesbury.

Bacon did not let oratory in the House of Commons dispirit him. He enjoyed theatrical people. One of his critics in Parliament, Sir William Mayne, who owned large estates in Ireland and received an Irish peerage in 1776, was the brother of Robert Mayne, who shared Bacon's contracts to supply Irish provisions to the army. A satirist writing a mock epitaph for Sir William while he was still alive said that Lord North, "wis.h.i.+ng to profit by his Connexions, and lamenting the Insignificance of an Instrument so wretched, implored the [king] to make a Lord of him." But even after Sir William became Baron Newhaven, he "for a long Series of tiresome Years, was neither distinguished by an Action or a Sentiment, which merited Observation." Anthony Bacon had no need to worry about what Sir William Mayne might say. Later in the war, Robert Mayne went bankrupt and killed himself.

Bacon cultivated other interests. In 1776 he helped David Garrick push a bill through Parliament incorporating a fund for the care of old and needy actors. In Wales, Bacon's "poetic and literary inclinations" led him to learn Welsh and to seek out "all the bards and educated men" within reach. He befriended the wild-eyed, drunken clergyman Evan Evans, or Ieuan Fardd, pre-eminent scholar of Welsh language and literature. In moments of liquored grat.i.tude Evans sometimes gave away his most precious possessions. He gave or sold to Bacon his rare ma.n.u.script copy of the sixth-century epic poem Y G.o.doddin Y G.o.doddin by Aneirin of the Flowing Muse, Prince of Bards, containing the story of Mynyddawg Mwynfawr and his host of men who feasted for a year before attacking Saxon invaders at Catraeth. It was "equal at least to the Iliad, aeneid or Paradise Lost." Compared to men Bacon knew, orators in Parliament talking about "what a mine of corruption government contracts were" cut a small figure. Bacon agreed with Samuel Rogers, a merchant writing from London: "Whatever be the Issue of the War in America, the Campaigns made there afford a good Opportunity for Business to People who are wise and skillful enough to keep their Affairs within their power." by Aneirin of the Flowing Muse, Prince of Bards, containing the story of Mynyddawg Mwynfawr and his host of men who feasted for a year before attacking Saxon invaders at Catraeth. It was "equal at least to the Iliad, aeneid or Paradise Lost." Compared to men Bacon knew, orators in Parliament talking about "what a mine of corruption government contracts were" cut a small figure. Bacon agreed with Samuel Rogers, a merchant writing from London: "Whatever be the Issue of the War in America, the Campaigns made there afford a good Opportunity for Business to People who are wise and skillful enough to keep their Affairs within their power."

Americans' war against Britain depended upon transatlantic trade. Virginia lay at the center of this trade. To purchase European arms, ammunition, and supplies for the war, as well as manufactured goods bought by citizens, and to repay loans, America's most valuable commodity was tobacco. During 1778 and 1779 a hogshead delivered to Spain, France, or Holland commanded more than three times its peacetime price. Delivered to Britain, it brought more than six times as much as the old price. The 22,012 hogsheads exported from Virginia yielded the equivalent of 990,083 sterling.

Robert Morris wrote to Silas Deane: "all Trading People do & must run Risques." Every master of a vessel bearing American tobacco knew this truth. Beyond the usual risks of the sea and danger of seizure by British privateers or Royal Navy vessels in distant waters, captains increasingly found that entering or leaving Chesapeake Bay was dangerous, almost prohibitively so. By 1777 the British Navy stationed fourteen s.h.i.+ps of war in waters off Cape Henry and Cape Charles. Some vessels slipped past them in fog, and others outran them, but "Tis next to a miracle if a Vessel arrives within the Capes without being chased." At the end of 1778 beaches for 25 miles south of Cape Henry were littered with wrecks of trading vessels stranded while running from British cruisers. s.h.i.+pping into and out of the bay fell to one-fourth its peacetime volume.

A safer route for getting tobacco out of Virginia and Maryland ran overland, along the northwestern reaches of the Dismal Swamp, into the waters of North Carolina. Tobacco vessels sailed out of the James River and up the Nansemond River, anchoring at Suffolk. Hogsheads were discharged into wagons to be hauled 25 miles to warehouses at South Quay on the Blackwater River. They were loaded on board sloops or square-riggers. These dropped down the Blackwater into the Chowan River and down the Chowan into Albemarle Sound. Vessels of almost 200 tons could call at South Quay. Smaller vessels also took hogsheads down the rivers to Edenton, where s.h.i.+ps, schooners, and sloops rode at anchor. When ready to depart, they sailed out of Albemarle Sound and, protected by the Outer Banks, pa.s.sed behind Cape Hatteras to Ocrac.o.ke Inlet, a break in the Outer Banks with a 12-foot draft. This was their pa.s.sage to the sea. Vessels bringing munitions, rum, and manufactured goods to America entered at Ocrac.o.ke Inlet and followed the same route to Edenton and South Quay. Supplies for General Was.h.i.+ngton's army went from warehouses at Suffolk down the Nansemond River into the James and into Chesapeake Bay, then up the bay to its northernmost point: Head of Elk, Maryland, 12 miles from Pennsylvania.

Some vessels outward bound from Albemarle Sound or Chesapeake Bay sailed for Nantes or Cadiz or Bordeaux. But most headed for ports in the West Indies-French islands such as Martinique or the Danish island of St. Croix-or, best of all, the Dutch island of St. Eustatius. A dormant volcano rising steeply from the sea about 75 miles northwest of Antigua, St. Eustatius supported on its 15 square miles a rich mixture of visitors, "smugglers, adventurers, betrayers of their Country, and rebels to their King." Though the island's harbor was poor, it was ringed for a mile and a quarter with warehouses two deep. After these filled, hogsheads of tobacco and sugar covered the beach. Merchants routinely saw two hundred vessels anch.o.r.ed in the road. In 1779 more than 2,000 vessels brought cargoes to the island, almost 300 of them from the United States. At the peak of its wartime trade, St. Eustatius held goods and commodities worth more than 3,000,000.

The British naval officer who called some people on the island "betrayers of their Country" referred not to Dutch subjects but to British merchants, agents, and s.h.i.+p captains. Everyone knew that many goods pa.s.sing through St. Eustatius came from Britain. Before the bench of the High Court of Admiralty the king's attorney said in October 1777: "Our own merchants, as well as the Dutch are concerned. The spirit of commercial adventure has seized all the world." English goods had "a prodigious Sale" in Virginia and other states. Many British merchants strove to profit. Vessels cleared from home port to a British island in the West Indies sometimes landed only part of their cargoes, then took the rest to St. Eustatius. Other captains were bolder. From a convoy escorted to St. Kitts by HMS Leviathan Leviathan in the autumn of 1779, seven vessels "went down openly to St. Eustatius." British colonists and traders in St. Kitts sent Irish provisions to St. Eustatius. These found their way to Martinique to feed the French fleet. Commenting on British merchants' trade at the Dutch island, Vice-Admiral Sir George Brydges Rodney wrote to Captain John Laforey: "I...am fully convinced, by intercepting hundreds of letters, that if it had not been for their treasonable correspondence and a.s.sistance, the American war must have been long since finished." in the autumn of 1779, seven vessels "went down openly to St. Eustatius." British colonists and traders in St. Kitts sent Irish provisions to St. Eustatius. These found their way to Martinique to feed the French fleet. Commenting on British merchants' trade at the Dutch island, Vice-Admiral Sir George Brydges Rodney wrote to Captain John Laforey: "I...am fully convinced, by intercepting hundreds of letters, that if it had not been for their treasonable correspondence and a.s.sistance, the American war must have been long since finished."

Americans had followed this trade route during the previous war and in peacetime smuggling. They built a steady trade on behalf of independence more quickly than they built a reliable army. At St. Eustatius, European goods bound for America sold for 120 to 400 percent of cost. After they made the run to Edenton, South Quay, and Suffolk, they took another large markup. Worried about criticism from his a.s.sociates Willing & Morris, Carter Braxton wrote defensively to justify charging customers only 300 percent more than he had paid for dry goods bought in the West Indies. His enemies the Lees said that he "from a ruined fortune is now ama.s.sing an immense Estate from the distresses of his country."

In Williamsburg, John Hatley Norton looked forward to getting rich. He told merchants in Rotterdam and Bordeaux: "European Goods particularly such as we used to receive from Engld, sell at an advance of 1500 pCent on sterling Cost." Many vessels were captured. Insurance at Amsterdam required a premium of 35 percent; French underwriters asked 45 or 50 percent or more. The transatlantic trade absorbed losses and premiums while remaining lucrative. Alarmed by high markups, state governments and Congress tried to control prices and regulate trade. Virginia named Fielding Lewis, Charles d.i.c.k, and James Mercer as commissioners to confer with North Carolina's commissioners on prices. Lewis served as chairman. In their meeting early in 1778, they concluded "that it is totally impracticable to regulate the general Imports & Produce of the States."

Fielding Lewis formed his opinion about importation not just from observation and report but also from experience. He and several other merchants and investors established Fielding Lewis & Company. Under the management of Joshua Storrs, the company pooled capital to send the schooner Betsey Betsey, laden with tobacco, to France and the French West Indies in search of profitable return cargoes: sugar, mola.s.ses, salt, coffee, cloth, china, and other goods. In Suffolk, Wills Cowper received tobacco for the Betsey Betsey. The company also brought cargo in the mail packet Virginia Virginia. The partners prospered. One wrote to another as they prepared a joint venture in January 1778: "May the good Luck of Fiel Lewis & Company attend us." A few months earlier a 1 1/32 share in the company sold for 500 currency. Though Lewis spent the summer of 1778 at Berkeley Springs for his health, he gave advice about the share in the company sold for 500 currency. Though Lewis spent the summer of 1778 at Berkeley Springs for his health, he gave advice about the Betsey Betsey's voyage: "it's my opinion that Rum Sugr. & mola.s.ses are the best." The partners.h.i.+p dissolved at the end of the year; its substantial profits were divided in the spring of 1779.

John Page suggested a similar venture to St. George Tucker in the autumn of 1776. Bringing in rum, sugar, munitions, and medicine from the West Indies, Page wrote, "would put you into a way of making a very considerable Fortune." Five months later, Tucker allied with Maurice Simons of Charleston. The first leg of his trip to Charleston took him along the post road from Suffolk skirting the Dismal Swamp. In the still March evening unruffled brown water reflected vast trunks and high, moss-hung branches of old cypress trees, as in an "extensive looking Gla.s.s." He heard so many frogs that the ground seemed to be alive and croaking. The uneven road threatened to drop him into the swamp. Nightfall and chill came upon him. Seeking shelter in a house near the road, he found an old woman and a girl of sixteen. They let him use a bed. As he talked with them, they gave him coffee but no milk because their cows spent the winter in the swamp, foraging. The old woman explained her coffee's unusual "pungency" by telling him that she sweetened it with mola.s.ses: "we have no Sugar. No Sir, we poor people can not afford such Dainties as Rum and sugar." The next day Tucker reached Edenton, which was "nearly overrun by the busy sons of commerce."

After meeting Simons in Charleston, Tucker returned to Virginia. On his own and his partners' account he collected hogsheads of tobacco at South Quay and sent them in the brig Dispatch Dispatch to Samuel and John Delap, merchants in Bordeaux. Early in 1779 the Delaps remitted about 2,000 sterling to Tucker through London and Bermuda. His share was more than 430. The return voyage of the to Samuel and John Delap, merchants in Bordeaux. Early in 1779 the Delaps remitted about 2,000 sterling to Tucker through London and Bermuda. His share was more than 430. The return voyage of the Dispatch Dispatch by way of Surinam was less happy. Off the Outer Banks two British cruisers gave chase. To save what he could, Captain William Hill Sergeant ran her on sh.o.r.e. Losing the vessel, Sergeant salvaged rum, mola.s.ses, and guns in her hold. Cargoes from Bermuda brought Tucker further profits. In April 1780 he bought a 100-acre farm. by way of Surinam was less happy. Off the Outer Banks two British cruisers gave chase. To save what he could, Captain William Hill Sergeant ran her on sh.o.r.e. Losing the vessel, Sergeant salvaged rum, mola.s.ses, and guns in her hold. Cargoes from Bermuda brought Tucker further profits. In April 1780 he bought a 100-acre farm.

A port town before the war, South Quay became a boom town. Virginia's two galleys built there joined other vessels in defending Ocrac.o.ke Inlet. Merchants traveling from Suffolk to South Quay had a "disagreeable journey." Whitefield's, the only tavern in Suffolk late in 1777, was "a bad one." The road leading westward from Suffolk and the Dismal Swamp pa.s.sed small plantations and worn wooden houses. Sandy soil supported mainly short marsh gra.s.s and pine trees. Occasionally a traveler saw a gristmill or a tar kiln. Near the center of these silent pine barrens stood South Quay, a busy, dirty town of many kinds of transactions. American, French, and Spanish vessels were anch.o.r.ed near the wharves. The brig El Sagrado Corazon de Jesus El Sagrado Corazon de Jesus brought twenty-two cannons. Full of sailors and teamsters, the town had little law and much rum. Early in 1778 hire of a wagon cost more than 4 per day. Pilferage from cargoes, routine in London, was rampant in South Quay. Masters of vessels, merchants, and agents made quick deals, trying to gauge how many hundreds of percent profit they could expect to turn. News of a cargo of salt attracted both merchants and local people. Essential for curing meat, salt was in short supply. Men furnis.h.i.+ng rations to the army wanted it, as did people south of the James who supported themselves partly by curing hams. At one of the peaks of demand, a bushel of salt at South Quay brought 150 currency or 112 pounds of tobacco. brought twenty-two cannons. Full of sailors and teamsters, the town had little law and much rum. Early in 1778 hire of a wagon cost more than 4 per day. Pilferage from cargoes, routine in London, was rampant in South Quay. Masters of vessels, merchants, and agents made quick deals, trying to gauge how many hundreds of percent profit they could expect to turn. News of a cargo of salt attracted both merchants and local people. Essential for curing meat, salt was in short supply. Men furnis.h.i.+ng rations to the army wanted it, as did people south of the James who supported themselves partly by curing hams. At one of the peaks of demand, a bushel of salt at South Quay brought 150 currency or 112 pounds of tobacco.

A traveler on roads out of Suffolk and Norfolk needed to take care-he might be robbed or killed by fugitives living in the Dismal Swamp. After Lord Dunmore left the region, some blacks and whites who had joined him, with others who had left their former homes, camped in dry sectors of the swamp, where militiamen did not relish pursuing them. It was safer to leave these runaway blacks, bitter loyalists, and bandits alone. Sporadically, some of them raided houses or attacked travelers, then "return'd into their strong swamps, from whence they will commit many daring outrages."

Despite dangers by land and sea, South Quay's trade flourished for the first three years of the war and revived during the last two. Demand for tobacco in Europe and for lumber and provisions in the West Indies, combined with Americans' eagerness for war supplies, liquor, sweets, and manufactured goods, drew vessels and speculators. A trader wrote to a partner in Fielding Lewis & Company: "You may guess my dislike at being engaged so long in such a Country as this." He could have said of South Quay what the master of the Saucy Jack Saucy Jack wrote about its sister port in North Carolina as a warning to the same merchant: "I can fully a.s.sure you you have no friends in Edenton-(Vultures All)." wrote about its sister port in North Carolina as a warning to the same merchant: "I can fully a.s.sure you you have no friends in Edenton-(Vultures All)."

As men in other states did, Virginia's political leaders and moralists condemned behavior typical of wartime trade. John Page said that "the Demon of Avarice" had been "let loose upon us." Depreciation of paper money enabled Edmund Pendleton to make more rapid progress in settling accounts between the state and Speaker Robinson's estate. At the same time, he deplored "the graspers" and their greed, which "pervaded every breast almost." On the list of offenders were "Planters, Importers, Speculators, & monopolizers." Two years after Fielding Lewis & Company had dissolved, Lewis complained to George Was.h.i.+ngton that imported goods cost too much: "none can afford to buy except the Tradesmen and speculators." But the demon was not confined to a few cla.s.ses or groups: "every man now, trys to ruen his neighbour."

Foretelling impending financial disaster for Virginians, moralists also deplored "luxury, and extravagancy." Prices were extortionate; yet, somehow, far too many people lived in "Indolence" and "dissipation," indulging themselves with costly objects. A list of goods in demand during August 1779 contained not only gunpowder, flints, earthenware, and cottons, but also gold leaf, blonde lace, white gloves, embroidered cambric waistcoats, brandy, and tea. A horse race in Caroline County late that year shocked Edmund Pendleton by the size of its purse: 30,000 in Virginia currency. Moral decline manifested itself both in gambling for such a large sum and in printing so much paper money that 30,000 would soon be worth only 240 sterling.

Censors of the times returned to the subject of "dirty paper," a currency almost of "no more value than Oak leaves." Inflation, they believed, brought the decay of ethics. George Was.h.i.+ngton complained that all but a few of his debtors paid him paper at face value under laws making currency legal tender. He thus received about 7.5 percent of the value of the money owed him. John Page said that "the Spirit of Traffic" spread among Virginians. He and Walter Jones saw this not as laudable enterprise and ingenuity but as "the licentious perfidy, fraud, pride and poverty which are the offspring of rags and paper, and are perfectly epidemic with us." Recalling stories of the famous bubble in France early in the century, Carter Braxton predicted in 1777 that, if prices continued to rise, "probably all our Money and Credit will end as the Mississippi scheme did."

Buying provisions at St. Eustatius, planters of Antigua regained indirectly some of their trade with North America, but not enough. Even if Antigua had enjoyed unfettered commerce, its condition would have remained desperate. Drought, beginning in 1777, continued in 1778 and 1779. The island's exports fell steeply. In a good year it produced at least 15,000 hogsheads of sugar. In 1779 and 1780 it harvested a "Dismal Crop," which yielded about 3,500 each year. Slaves' private vegetable gardens withered. The colony had to import water, which sold for 1s. 6d. per gallon. Even at that price, too little arrived. Some provisions from Britain turned out to be spoiled. In 1778 slaves began to die of starvation, "in the greatest agony." Many others were "exceedingly sickly." The following year "the Flux," dysentery, struck Antigua. As many as 7,600 black people, 20 percent of the population, died. No one knew the precise number.

Francis Farley believed that he was a humane slaveholder. He held a reserve of food on his plantations, yet feared that in a famine, "any of us that are provident and have a store of Provision by us for our own Negroes will have it forced from us." Soon he had new concerns: his wife's poor health and his own illnesses. Long a sufferer from gout, he came down with the flux in 1779. He hoped in March that a voyage to Tobago, about 900 miles round trip, would benefit him with sea air and a change of climate.

On Sat.u.r.day, March 27, just before his departure, Farley, feeling "much Indisposed," wrote his will. To his wife he bequeathed lifetime use of one of his plantations, as well as personal possessions and household goods. After making a few monetary bequests, he left most of the rest of his property in Antigua, four plantations, to Captain John Laforey, trusting him to "act the part of a man of Honor by my Grand Children." Laforey also was eventually to inherit the plantation where Farley's wife lived.

Farley devoted a long section of his will to his property in North America: the Land of Eden, his plantations near Norfolk, and his share in the "Company known by the name of the great Dismal Swamp." He knew of three granddaughters in Virginia, but he had not learned the outcome of Elizabeth Byrd Farley's latest pregnancy. She had a fourth daughter, soon to be two years old, but Francis Farley provided for the possibility of a grandson. If one had been born, Farley wrote, he was to inherit the Land of Eden, the Virginia plantations, and the partners.h.i.+p in the Dismal Swamp Company. He also was to inherit Farley's Mercers Creek plantation on the northeastern coast of Antigua. The granddaughters were to receive 2,000 sterling each, upon reaching the age of twenty-one. But if no grandson had been born, the granddaughters would inherit all Farley's property in Virginia and North Carolina and his Mercers Creek plantation jointly, share and share alike. Thus, by a roundabout way, the Land of Eden returned to the Byrd family. Old Colonel William Byrd's great granddaughters were to become partners in the scheme to drain the Dismal Swamp-a scheme, he had written fifty years past, which could be completed in ten years.

On Tuesday, March 30, Farley took pa.s.sage on board a s.h.i.+p bound for Tobago. After two days at sea, he proved to be "too far gone to recover." He died on Thursday. The s.h.i.+p changed course to put back to St. Johns, intending to return Farley's remains to the burial grounds of other members of his family. Sailing for Antigua, her master and crew sighted French frigates to windward. The men-of-war bore down upon them to seize a prize. The s.h.i.+p bearing Farley's body ran before the trade winds, closely chased by the fast frigates. She "was very near being taken" as she approached the steep, wooded slopes of the British island of Montserrat, 27 miles southwest of Antigua. She sailed into Sugar Bay and dropped anchor under the guns of Fort Barrington. The remains of Francis Farley were buried in Montserrat.

When Captain Laforey learned of his father-in-law's death, he was commander of HMS Invincible Invincible. He had irritated the ministry by testifying for the defense in the court-martial of Admiral Augustus Keppel, another episode of the political fights in the navy and the capital. Keppel had been acquitted, to the delight of the fleet and of Lord North's opponents. Celebrators and rioters moved through London's streets at night. Keppel received the thanks of the City. He was honored with a dinner at the London Tavern, where toasts were raised to the Americans and to "Keppel and Liberty." Despite Laforey's politics, the Admiralty gave him a posting he wanted: commissioner of naval affairs in the Leeward Islands, with his office at English Harbor, Antigua. The appointment made him "extremely happy." He would be near his newly inherited plantations. The Admiralty welcomed a vacancy in the command of HMS Invincible Invincible as it rea.s.signed senior officers. Leaving Eleanor Laforey and their children in England, John Laforey sailed for English Harbor. as it rea.s.signed senior officers. Leaving Eleanor Laforey and their children in England, John Laforey sailed for English Harbor.

As commissioner, Laforey oversaw the Royal Navy's most important harbor in the West Indies: a refuge from storms, a magazine of supplies, a s.h.i.+pyard for repairs, and a dumping ground for sick seamen. In the absence of an admiral, he had authority over all officers and vessels in the harbor. He found, however, that some newly promoted captains defied him-young men with no memory of the surrender of Louisburg in 1758 and with too little respect for their elders. He worked in a cramped office above a storehouse, often staying late at his desk and sleeping on a field bed nearby. Around his building, drunken sailors wandered among hovels. Laforey had little time for plantations; he learned that Francis Farley had left them "under inc.u.mbrances" which could be lifted only with profits produced by plentiful rain and large crops of sugar.

As soon as Britain declared war on the Dutch, the British took St. Eustatius, ending the island's career as an entrepot for Americans. Almost two years earlier, in May 1779, a British force had gone to Virginia to strike South Quay and Suffolk. On Sat.u.r.day, May 8, a fleet commanded by Commodore Sir George Collier sailed between the capes, into Chesapeake Bay. To the British, the spectacle looked impressive; to Virginians, frightening: five men-of-war, easterly winds filling their sails, accompanied by an armed galley, privateers, and 22 troop transports, bearing about 1,800 soldiers.

Commodore Collier and Major General Edward Mathew knew what they were after. In New York they had been told by William Franklin, royal governor of New Jersey, that a young man taken on his way from Virginia to Cadiz had let drop some information: Suffolk and Portsmouth held an unusually large concentration of provisions and other supplies. Loyalists told the British as much, hoping that the army would come to Virginia to stay. Accompanying Sir George as an advisor, James Parker returned to familiar scenes he had fled almost three years earlier. Sir George struck Virginia because it was "the province which of all others gives sinews to the rebellion from its extensive traffick." General Sir Henry Clinton allowed the army to raid but not to stay. If a permanent post around Norfolk looked advantageous later in the year, Sir George wrote, "the situation of the county of Norfolk is such as will require no very great force to keep possession, from its being covered by the Dismal Swamp and other difficulties in approaching it by land. I understand this part of Virginia carries on a great trade in tobacco and abounds in naval stores and in cattle." Loyalists tried to sell the strategic merits of the Dismal Swamp to the British as ardently as William Byrd or George Was.h.i.+ngton tried to sell the swamp's future to investors.

On the exposed point of land overlooking the Elizabeth River west of Portsmouth, among the ruins of Robert Tucker's mills and bakery, Virginians had built fortifications. As British troops landed on Monday, May 10, the commander of a small American force saw the uselessness of resisting. He withdrew along the eastern margin of the Dismal Swamp into North Carolina, returning northward on the western side.

Before withdrawing, Virginians burned a new Continental Navy frigate, but Sir George Collier still took rich prizes. In addition to vessels on the stocks in the s.h.i.+pyard, his seamen captured about 130 others in two weeks. In the yard he found large quant.i.ties of masts, sails, cordage, and seasoned timber. General Mathew's soldiers, surveying wharves and warehouses along the Elizabeth River, saw the first signs that Sir George's informants had told the truth. Almost 200 hogsheads of tobacco, more than 100 barrels of pork, more than 100 barrels of flour, as well as mola.s.ses, rum, salt-the list was long, and the proceeds of this booty, after it was taken away and sold, was divided among soldiers and sailors, according to rank. Rumor in New York the following month said that Commodore Collier and General Mathew each cleared 5,000 sterling.

Among those surprised at Portsmouth were two French vessels laden with tobacco. One, Le Soucy Le Soucy, out of Bordeaux, had brought a cargo of rum, sugar, and manufactured goods partly belonging to the Deane brothers, Silas and Simeon. Loading her with tobacco for an outbound voyage, Simeon had chosen Portsmouth as the safest port. He was there when the British appeared in the Elizabeth River. Captain Pierre Raphael Charlet, master of Le Soucy Le Soucy, tried to save her by withdrawing up the southern branch. When capture looked imminent, he put pitch and tar under the scuttles of her main deck and fired her before she could be taken. Deane tried to conceal bales of goods on sh.o.r.e, but the British, he said later, "came so suddenly upon us as to prevent saving anything.... I escaped the only Person in my Party of 30 Men." On the advice of local people, he fled westward along Deep Creek to hide in the northeastern reaches of the Dismal Swamp.

At dawn on Wednesday, May 12, he found himself trapped between a pond and a "terrible thicket." He feared he could not get out of the swamp, and he felt "almost kill'd by the Insects." He was not so lost as he thought. A little boy approached with instructions from his mother to guide Deane to the Suffolk road. He said that the English were asking for Deane by name. Simeon did not wish to become a trophy of war, the captured brother of America's former emissary to France.

With the boy's help, he reached the Suffolk road near Francis Farley's plantation. The route, however, was not safe. Too many British soldiers pa.s.sed by, plundering farms and houses on their way to Suffolk. People piloted Deane from house to house, each person pa.s.sing him on to another. He at last persuaded James Taylor to hide him "in the thick Swamp" until the British left. With a blanket for shelter and with food brought to him, he stayed more than a week "continually in the Swamp & almost ready to perish by such Millions of Insects." When he emerged, he had a beard, no stockings, torn clothing, and bare legs cut by briers. He had lost Le Soucy Le Soucy, her cargo of 360 hogsheads of tobacco, most of his merchandise, and 10,000 in currency.

While Deane waited under a blanket among the vines and stands of bamboo in the shadow of the swamp's big trees, the British destroyed Suffolk. A detachment of about four hundred men under Colonel George Garth marched to the Nansemond River. They found the unusually large collection of supplies which had attracted Sir George Collier to Virginia: more than 3,000 barrels, mostly pork, the rest flour and other provisions. With too little time and too few sailors to remove this h.o.a.rd, the soldiers burned it. Stacked next to the wharves were hundreds of barrels of pine tar, pitch, turpentine, and rum. Men knocked the heads in and poured the contents over stockpiles of food, over wharves, and into the river. The fires they set consumed all but a few of Suffolk's one hundred frame houses, as well as its warehouses. Sheets of burning tar and pitch floated on the water. Exploding barrels of gunpowder threw burning timbers high into the air. Wind and water carried fire into the Dismal Swamp. For days, as flames moving through the swamp ignited tall reeds, people heard explosive bursts like running gunfire. On their way back to Portsmouth, soldiers drove ahead of them all the livestock they could find.

Sir Henry Clinton had ordered General Mathew to bring his troops back to New York by June 1. Seeking freedom, many slaves, perhaps five hundred, went to Portsmouth to leave with them. Some became seamen in privateers. One or more of the Dismal Swamp Company's slaves left Dismal Plantation. After the British were gone, the company paid "for carrying home a runaway Negro." Late on Monday, May 24, and in the dark morning hours of Tuesday, General Mathew's men went on board their transports. The British fired the s.h.i.+pyard. Keels, hulls, masts, and timbers sent up a bright flame as Commodore Collier's vessels set sail and left the Elizabeth River. The fleet spent one more day in Chesapeake Bay, then pa.s.sed the capes and stood out to sea.

As the British departed, Williamsburg filled with people attending the spring session of the General a.s.sembly. All rooms and beds were taken, if not by delegates and senators, by "Speculators and others of the same likeness," eager to witness the struggle over new land laws. Thomas Jefferson succeeded Patrick Henry as governor on June 1. Three times in 1777 and 1778 he had tried to win pa.s.sage of measures to regulate the state's sales and grants of its western lands. Each time opponents deflected his proposal.

Jefferson wished to abrogate the vast colonial grants to companies and to groups of kinsmen and political allies. He envisioned a land office conveying public land to settlers more often, and to speculators less often, than in the past. He and George Mason had collaborated, dividing the labor of drafting bills to settle t.i.tles and to create a land office. These came before the delegates and senators in June 1779.

The legislators agreed upon rejecting the claims of the Indiana Company. Part of the urgency of fixing a policy came from a desire to thwart Pennsylvania speculators and others hoping to get Virginia's western territory. During the previous session, the General a.s.sembly had made peace with Richard Henderson and his Transylvania scheme. Though claims based on private arrangements with Indian tribes, such as Henderson's purchase from Cherokees, were invalidated, the a.s.sembly allotted to him 200,000 acres along the Green River in western Kentucky.

Jefferson's changes in the old system provoked more resistance. George Dabney, calling speculators "the greatest Enemies We have," explained: "the misfortune is the Example begins among our leaders." Jefferson later wrote about Mason's draft of a law: "His great object was to remove out of the way the great and numerous orders of council to the Ohio co. Loyal co. Misissipi co. Vandalia co. Indiana co. &c." This was Jefferson's wish, but Mason still worked to win confirmation of the Ohio Company's claim, with no more success than the Indiana Company had. Speculators and their friends were well represented in the a.s.sembly. As the bills went through the House of Delegates and the Senate, Mason had good reason to fear that they would be "mutilated mangled & chop'd to Peices."

By the time the "act for establis.h.i.+ng a Land office" emerged, it was almost a gift to speculators. It permitted purchase of public land with depreciated paper currency. Rules for surveys and conveyances favored speculators over settlers. Not surprisingly, after the Land Office opened in October, "People took out Warrants for vast Quant.i.ties of Land." Five months later, Fielding Lewis wrote: "I suppose five million acres are already granted, never was so fine a Country sold for so trifling a sum."

The "Act for adjusting and settling the t.i.tles of claimers" underwent fewer changes. Mason and Jefferson's draft declared void all orders of Council and entries for land west of the mountains except those already surveyed and patented. Only the Loyal Company and the Greenbrier Company would survive under this provision. But the act's wording cast doubt on the validity of all colonial grants of land not yet fully surveyed, and the Dismal Swamp Company's holdings were such a grant. The a.s.sembly changed Mason and Jefferson's draft. The final act for settling t.i.tles omitted mention of the west and voided unsurveyed colonial grants. The act made one exception to this new rule: "except also a certain order of council for a tract of sunken grounds, commonly called the Dismal Swamp." The a.s.sembly reserved to itself the power to determine the company's t.i.tle. Obviously, the Dismal Swamp Company had friends in the legislature, and everyone knew that one of the partners was commander in chief of the Continental Army. Nevertheless, after the Land Office opened, many people took out warrants for acres of the Dismal Swamp, "knowing that the Company had lapsed the time allowed them by the Council under the former government."

With purchases, grants, settlements, and rival claims multiplying in the west, Virginians and North Carolinians agreed that fixing their boundary in the region had become a "necessary business." No one had more interest in the outcome than Dr. Thomas Walker, since the boundary of Virginia would also mark the southern line of the Loyal Company's tracts. Though "considerably beyond his grand climacteric," Walker said of himself, his wiry little body remained vigorous. His wife died in November 1778. Later that month the House of Delegates confirmed the Loyal Company's t.i.tle to land already surveyed. In December he accepted appointment to serve as a commissioner to extend the line begun by William Byrd and continued by Joshua Fry and Peter Jefferson.

North Carolina chose commissioners led by Richard Henderson. The survey was to start in August 1779. During his visit to Williamsburg in the spring, Henderson saw Virginia's preparations for Walker's expedition: tents, utensils, provisions, arms and ammunition for chain carriers, line markers, packhorse men, and one hundred guards. Dr. Walker expected his fifteen-year-old son, Francis, to manage the Loyal Company's business someday. The boy accompanied the surveyors to get his first look at the west. Not relying solely on his own skills, Walker took another surveyor, James Michie, with him. But he spoke of "making great Haste, so that they may not wait to be very Accurate."

Early in August long lines of mounted men, with their packhorses, crossed the Blue Ridge. Pausing at Fort Chiswell, Walker wrote some letters about Loyal Company business. The men then rode into the mountains to meet Walker's fellow commissioner, Daniel Smith, and to find the North Carolinians "at the Beginning of the Line."

In 1749, Fry and Jefferson ended their survey at Steep Rock Creek, looking up at the Iron Mountains. Walker and Smith waited there for the North Carolinians, who came ten days late. Many trees had died in the preceding thirty years; no one could find markings by the earlier surveyors. The commissioners took observations with their Hadley's quadrants and azimuth compa.s.ses, then stipulated that they were on the line of 36 30 of north lat.i.tude and that they were 329 surface miles or 319 air miles west of the beach above Currituck Inlet. On September 6 they began to extend their chains due west, they supposed, over the Iron Mountains, across the south fork of the Holston River, past Shelbys Fort, toward Moccasin Gap.

A week later, during a rainstorm, Richard Henderson sat in his leaky tent writing a letter. He warned the government of North Carolina not to grant Virginia's request that landholders' Virginia t.i.tles be confirmed by North Carolina wherever their property fell on the south side of the line. He already could see that the line ran north of settlements claimed by the Loyal Company. Here was a chance to overturn some of the "secret surveys" made long ago by "an old Land monger" who, even as Henderson sat writing, had his own tent pitched not far away. People who knew nothing of the Loyal Company, Henderson said, had settled in the region and started farms. Defying the company's claims, they had been treated with "Extreme Cruelty" by the "d.a.m.n'd Scotch-Irish Virginians in Office." He hoped that settlers, not the Loyal Company, would get t.i.tle to land in North Carolina.

Henderson had predicted that news of the survey would cause "madness and rage" among Cherokees, Chickasaws, and Creeks. Walker and the Virginians also felt concern about Indians' reactions. The island in the Holston River, a customary place for meeting and trading by Virginians and Cherokees, fell on the North Carolina side of the line. In the last week of September, the commissioners met a delegation of Cherokees there. During the wait for the Indians' arrival from the valley of the Little Tennessee River, the North Carolinians began to complain that the boundary did not follow the proper parallel and ran too far south.

After Cherokee men from Chota reached the island, Dr. Walker addressed them, trying to put the best face on the surveyors' purpose. The next day, Onitositah, leader of the Upper Town Che