Recap and Restatement: an Intro

The next to last module discussed the formation of the Royalist Tidewater political culture and the the overall  economic development-related strategies of Virginia’s most impactful royal
Governor, William Berkeley. The last module discussed the settlement of the Piedmont region and the extension of the Tidewater political culture into the Piedmont and throughout eastern Virginia. It also described the economic development-related strategies of a remarkable Royal Governor, Alexander Spotswood. Taken together, we suggested that by 1710 (or so), the Tidewater political culture had taken shape, matured into a political culture hugely connected to the several levels of Virginia’s policy systems, and that this grouping integrated with previous Virginia plantation elites–and the England-resident aristocratic/gentry elites–through intermarriage, education, travel, and established family/clan relationships to form a cohesive planter oligopoly.

As we considered the various phrasings of Virginia’s settlement, we became aware (1) that settlement seems quicker in histories, than it was in real life. Settlement was over arguably two or three generations, and the formation and making of a political culture at least as long as that; (2) and given the geographic, demographic and timing of the settlements we can discern the likelihood of variations and distinctions within the overall Tidewater political culture; the Byrds were not the Washingtons, and Northern Neck, Piedmont, and Southside/Eastern Shores, and coastal Tidewater were, at least to the native Virginia, distinct geographies. We should accordingly be wary of a simple straightforward easily summarized political culture; and the policy systems, however, dominated by the oligopoly developed regional, family and personalistic/charismatic fragmentation that, aside from the basic pillars of the culture, the manor way of life for example, tobacco-export economic base another, there was considerable friction, family and personality rivalries, and parochial perspectives. Seemingly the one economic development strategy on which they all united was land development.

What emerged was a planter oligopoly that dominated, if not controlled the local county governments, the local economic base through its plantation-export-investment nexus. The colony-level policy system included three distinct elements: 1) the remote but compelling Royal Prerogative typically expressed through its bureaucratic organizations such as the Board of Trade; 2) the Virginia domestic policy structures, Council of State and House of Burgesses which were saturated with the perspective of the planter oligopoly; (3) and a typically active, but somewhat isolated, Royal (Lieutenant) Governor often caught in the middle between the first two groups, and sometimes “seemingly going native” while fabricating his version of the Virginia’ colony best needs and interests.

The residents/citizens of the policy system, and workforce of the economic base were marginalized by the planter oligopoly, the realities of plantation-community life,society and politics, and the electoral franchise administered largely by planters in public office. The plight of black slaves, which were significantly increasing after 1680, and became dominant in the plantation workforce by the turn of the 18th century, was counter-matched by the effective economic and political disenfranchisement of former indentured servants, and lower middle and lower class yeoman white adults. Elections were adopted as the critical cornerstone structure in the Virginia policy systems, but they served to filter out the marginalized and lower strata of Virginia’s population, and by the first decade of the 18th century a huge black slave workforce that was the cornerstone to Virginia’s plantation-export economic base. If this be a democratic policy system than the reader should recognize it as a very, very early version of it–which compared very unfavorably with politics in other colonies in British North America.

Subject Matter and Purposes of this Module

In this module, we are dealing with an established policy system and political culture, which, for the first time, was confronted with new immigrants whose political culture was anything but Tidewater. Indeed, as the Tidewater political culture is aptly described as an elite political culture of the “ins” and the deferential, the new migrants into Virginia were a definite challenge to the oligopoly–and required some reaction of the planter oligopoly to them. The two immigrant migrations were Germans from Pennsylvania and Scots-Irish mostly from the same state.

Both were arriving in sizable numbers certainly after 1720, with the Germans arriving ahead of the Scots-Irish. Having said this there were also other external groups descending, migrating into Virginia in this period after 1710 through about 1760. Huguenots, Quakers, Baptists and Scottish Highlanders also took resident throughout the state. Also Virginians were themselves emigrating into North Carolina in particular. The disproportionate impact of these migrants were felt the further west into the hinterlands one went. Coastal Tidewater was but slightly affected, but Piedmont and Southside much more so. Across the Appalachians, into the Shenandoah Valley plateau, was home base for the great migrations, coming down the Great Warriors Path, now aptly rename the Great Wagon Road (it was not a road, however). As such the great bulk of immigrants and migrants were literally over the mountains, and apart from what can now be referred to as the traditional Tidewater area.

Obviously this module needs to outline the settlement of these two groups, Germans and Scots-Irish, in Virginia during this period. Secondly, the extent to which these migrations challenged the hegemony of the newly-established Tidewater political culture, the cohesiveness of the the different levels of policy system, and the reaction of the planter oligopoly ought to be assessed. These are the core purposes of this module.

To fully appreciate discussion on the second purpose, reaction of the planter oligopoly, the reader ought to be sensitive that the first purpose, outline of the migrants settlement in Virginia merely introduces the reader to the general configurations and initial arrival of these two groups. “Settlement”, however, as we stated in the introduction certainly was incremental and occurred throughout this entire fifty year period. As also discussed in an earlier module, these ethnic groups certainly came fully armed with a “culture”, but the connection of that culture to the policy system is what makes that culture a political culture. Because an ethnic group with a culture arrives at a certain time period, does not by any means suggest that culture is connected to the policy system–even local policy system. If, however, ethnic groups settle in blocs, in a “Little Sort”, found towns and settlements in which they not only dominate but saturate, then (1) we have a new phenomena for Virginia which has not produced many towns heretofore; and (2) we can see that homogeneous communities can jell sooner and assume a more meaningful economic and political presence–and culture can more easily become a political culture.  This will occur, and will be discussed.

New settlers if squatters or renters are disenfranchised by definition, and these ethnic groups were, if anything, quite mobile. They did not by any means arrive settle down in a community, and stay till death did them part. Scots-Irish in particular frequently moved on, to the next county, or the next colony. Second generation migrants also did the same. Finally, we can never forget we are still dealing with the wilderness, the frontier, isolation, Indians, no road, river infrastructure, in virginal (forgive the pun) territory. New settlers arrive on a field with trees, rolling hills, and grass–nothing else in place. You want a house, well build it; a farm, then clear it. This is a frontier economic base for the most part. I will argue the majority of new settlers will not be integrated into Virginia much before the end of this period, the 1760’s, and logically the impact of their political culture will be most felt after integration–during the drift to American independence. Put it another way, simple arrival in a new county, does not mean settlement is done and a political culture has formed and is connected to the local policy system.

 

Western Land Settlement Migrations into the Shenandoah Valley: German and Scots-Irish Migrations: 1720 through 1750

With Spotswood’s Knights of the Golden Horseshoe (1718), the Virginia Tidewater settlement reached the foothills of the Appalachian Blue Ridge mountains. Beyond those mountains, nestled in its midst, lay the Shenandoah Valley. This new land, replete with hostile Indian tribes and topography/climate not especially suited to tobacco, offered both opportunity and a bit of disruption to the emergent Virginia oligopoly. Less interested in establishing plantations, more disposed to constructing elaborate mansions. the Tidewater elite turned to land development and sale and leasing of surplus lands to sharecroppers. From the beginning, topography and climate tilted the response of the planter oligopoly to these hinterland migration. Once again, Indian-fighting and site control are first priority.

The Valley, a part of the Great Warriors Path, a Native-American grass highway, ran north almost to Philadelphia, south into Georgia. Excepting Tennessee, the Path was not permanently settled by Native Americans to any great extent, but one was sure to encounter them hunting herds of buffalo and on raids. Around the turn of the eighteenth century (1700) new travelers increasingly found their way down emigrating from western Pennsylvania, into and through Maryland, and by the 1720’s arrived in numbers to northern Virginia. They were mostly Germans who first immigrated into America into Pennsylvania, and Delaware Valley ports after 1683, at the invitation of William Penn. On their heels, less than a decade behind was another ethnic group that had also begun its American immigration through the same ports of entry: the Scots-Irish. These ethnic groups joined with French Huguenots and Pennsylvania Quakers who had also began to emigrate to Virginia in response to the William and Mary’s Toleration Act, and rising Pennsylvania real estate values.

Never before, in the almost one hundred years of its colonial settlement, had so many diverse, groupings descended on Virginia.

A new [1705 Virginia] naturalization act allowed Protestants from other European states to be admitted to rights of citizenship after seven years. Many of these immigrants settled on the frontier. Germans of varying sects began to arrive. North British borderers and Scots-Irish from north of Ireland settled in large numbers, French Huguenots founded their own settlements. The Quakers returned [after having been earlier expelled] in large numbers. The process was encouraged by some landowners [associated with the Ohio Land Company]. … as part of a campaign to attract German settlers to the land[1]. 

Both Germans and Scots-Irish were agriculturalists, the former disrupted by war and religious persecution, the latter disrupted by borderland conflicts, the various English political-religious disruptions, and the “enclosure movement” which displaced them from their traditional borderland homesteads, turning them into economic refugees. Word of warning–Scots-Irish was never a homogeneous ethnic group but a composite of borderlands residents from Ireland, Scotland, England and even Wales. Both groupings immigrated in families, sometimes the bulk of a a village went in a single crossing, or following over a period  of time. With little interest in cities, they moved through the port cities and into the interior, setting up yeoman husbandry homesteads, i.e. family farms. As the years went by, more immigrants constantly arrived in Virginia, skipped over areas the already settled by other ethnic groups, continuing toward the periphery. Today one would likely refer to these Virginia migrants as “chain” migrations. Given the head-start by the Germans, Scots-Irish when  they arrived tended to bypass German settlements and land grant areas to move on down the Wagon Road deeper into the Shenandoah.

The Germans

Between 1683 and the 1775 Revolution, an estimated 100,000 Germans traveled from Pennsylvania down the Great Wagon Road. Most Germans that arrived had settled first in Pennsylvania,or were raised there. The numbers picked up considerably in the 1730’s, increasing incrementally into the 1740’s. Despite the 1756-1763 French and Indian War, a steady, but considerably diminished,  stream of German emigrants continued. By the Revolution, Germans were estimated to have been about a third of Virginia’s total population [2]. The arrival (post 1720) of Germans-Huguenots, and then in short order a never-ending flow of Scots-Irish in the Shenandoah and then into counties that would eventually become West Virginia, Kentucky and even Tennessee. German migrants first settled in the Shenandoah adjacent to the Maryland border–most of which we shall discover was contained within the Northern Neck. Later generations would diffuse into the Piedmont and other areas of Virginia–but the Virginia Shenandoah was German-chief homeland.

Our introduction to “the Germans” includes a warning similar to that earlier provided for the Scots-Irish.  “German” was a rather flexible ethnic category–and it compares badly to definitions of  “Germans”that immigrated in post-1840 periods. Germany was not a nation previous to 1870, whose Germans included Scandinavians, often Dutch, and certainly almost anybody who the lived in north and central Europe. Late 19th century German immigrants seldom moved into Virginia, preferring other locations. Early 17th and 18th century German Virginia settlers evolved in their own particular pattern which is still in evidence today.

In the 1700’s “Germans” included a few Catholics, but more likely orthodox Protestants, with the initial wave into Pennsylvania consisting of Reform/Radical (Pietistic) Protestants who for all practical purposes considered themselves as religious refugees. A second wave, called Palatines (from which my “Coans” or Kuhn arrived) arrived after 1700–my family became whalers on Cape Cod. Palatines were, theoretically at least, natives of western German-Rhine adjacent principalities. They were political and economic refugees fleeing from Louis XIV’s several invasions; many had spent time in refugee camps in England. After the 1688 Glorious Revolution one might keep in mind the west-German principate Hanover was home to William, the husband of of Queen Mary. Among the very first German to reach the Shenandoah were Anna and Jost Hite, Palatine-Germans who started their American chain migration from Schohlarie, in upstate New York around 1715. The Hites’ engaged in land speculation along the way, selling land to subsequent German settlements (which BTW if you know the history of Palatines and land ownership is ironic in the extreme) [2a]. By 1731 the enterprising couple had parlayed their gains into ownership of about 140,000 acres in the northern Shenandoah’s Northern Neck counties–even the Palatines developed their own Ascendancy.

In the early colonial period, German was often confused with Dutch–probably because of the close articulation of Deutsch (German) with Dutch. They were often referred to as the Pennsylvania Dutch. In any case Virginia Germans were “chain migrants” who had earlier resided in Pennsylvania, and later moved on to Virginia. They came with a variety of religious persuasions, each persuasion often linked with a particular location or region in German-speaking Europe (refugees from the Palatine, Swiss Redemptionists, conventional Lutherans, strict Calvinists, Dunkers, Mennonites, pietists, and even Quakers–French Huguenots fit in easily with this crowd of Protestants.

Contrast of the German Culture with Virginia’s Royalist Tidewater– The Virginia German culture and economics did not fit well with the Royalist Tidewater culture nor its the plantation export tobacco export economic base. The Germans brought Virginia its first major experience with uncontrolled diversity in culture, government, economic base, and approach to life. In the next chapter, on colonial Pennsylvania, we will explore more deeply the content of and the connection made by the German culture on the policy system, but as an introduction, and as a specification of the contrast with the Royalist culture we will make several points. In our telling of Spotswood’s German-attraction strategy that imported Virginia’s first Germans, we can easily observe his sense of their distinctiveness with the English manner of life and perspective–and his social distance from their settlement. Dissatisfied with him and his Germanna settlement, these Germans upon expiration of their indentured contract, simply left town, moved to another county and founded their own homogeneous settlement.

Fischer and Kelly assert that:

Besides their distinctive language and publications [and] distinctive decorative arts [applied to furniture] … were attitudes toward family, gender, wealth and power. Gender roles were sharply defined, but in a manner different from English-speaking cultures. Both sexes labored at different tasks in the home and the field, and daughters inherited land along with sons. In general the German settlers were not comfortable with slavery, preferring to do their own labor. They also developed distinctive ideas of freedom … more personal and social, less political than the attitude of their English neighbors. They had a stronger sense of personal and familial responsibility, but a weaker sense of public responsibility … an intense hostility to taxes which in the long experience of German-speaking people had paid for government that repressed them. Liberty meant for them an autonomy for their churches and communities and families–an attitude at variance with their highly political English neighbors” [3].

Churches and German-teaching schools were important to the sustainability of their culture over time. Accordingly Germans were prone to forming homogeneous communities and settling next to fellow Germans. German settlement of the Shenandoah, and the formation of household farms and towns was significantly impacted by the Virginia planter oligopoly engaged in their land development ED strategy–accordingly we defer that discussion to the last section in this module. Germans, once settled in a homestead stayed there–passing it on to the next generation. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s maternal ancestors came originally from Virginia. Future generations of young Germans would move west to seek their fortune, and put some distance between their parents. They moved into what would become eastern Tennessee, but also into Kentucky where upon statehood they constituted about 5% of its 1790 population.

What has caught the interest of several historians was the very stark contrast in their preferred form of agriculture, homestead or yeoman, and their reliance on crops produced for the household or domestic consumption. Germans labored on their own farms with the family and day-laborers–but seldom slaves were found. Small-scale production of commodities with a short shelf-life was an obvious radical departure from the plantation economic base. The productivity of German yeoman farming contrasted with the large-scale, often wasteful practices of the plantation–and in time Germans diversified Virginia’s economic base, and were a constant source of innovation in farming practices. Their economic needs were different from the shredded plantation community, and settlements, if not towns which evolved into cities, fostered a middle class, not usually found in eastern Virginia. The Shenandoah became Virginia’s “breadbasket”, a factor which during the Civil War was responsible for an incredible turnover in which side achieved military control.

Finally, upon arrival German migrants did not instinctively seek to connect to the Tidewater policy system. They preferred a separate and autonomous community, composed of German that followed the religious, agricultural,  cuisine, and cultural traditions of their geography of origin–and where their language could be spoken. If  left alone to practice their religion and preserve their traditions, Germans were content to stay away from political activism and electoral politics. As we shall see a goodly number of Germans were sold land and became landowners–eligible for voting. But Left alone, they left others alone. The oligopoly, by this time operating under rules of the British Toleration Act, surrendered to the Germans what they wanted most, practice of their own religion, German schools to teach the Bible in their language, and a farm which they either owned, or held through a lease that ran for decades under terms very fair and reasonable for that day and age. The House of Burgesses did not undergo meaningful German infusion.

Off to the remote hinterland, the German migration had little direct impact on the Tidewater oligopoly nor its policy system during this period.

 

Scots-Irish

Scots-Irish migration, began as early as 1715, and therefore overlapped with the German Migration. They came down the same Great Wagon Road, in volume, only after Germans had already settled and paved the way into Virginia. Leyburn estimates that Scots-Irish founded their first settlement in Pennsylvania in 1717, in Virginia’s 1732–the year Washington was born. Leyburn suggests the “steady flow” of Scots-Irish began in PA in 1718, but in Virginia about 1736. Estimates of Scots-Irish  post-Revolutionary War North American immigration totaled in excess of 250,000,;it is likely the figure is noticeably higher. The heaviest waves of Scots-Irish began in 1740 and continued in spasms to the Revolution [4].

Overwhelmingly Presbyterian, nearly all Protestant, they traveled from borderland counties of Ireland, Scotland, England, and even Wales. The unifying element in their common culture was their  timing of arrival, their mid-American entry, and their past borderlands experience. Their background, nature, political culture will be detailed more fully in our next chapter on Pennsylvania. The contemporary perspective regarding Scots-Irish was they were literally dirt-poor, the eighteenth century reality was they came from all income levels, often in families, and not infrequently traveling together from a particular village or area. “Among these emigrants was a small elite who had been called the ‘ascendancy’ in norther Ireland. In Virginia, Scots-Irish Ascendancy included the family of Patrick Henry, who was a cousin of the great Cumbrian Whig Lord Brougham, and the ancestors of Sam Houston, who descended from a family of border baronets. The forebears of [President] Zachary Taylor–[Virginians all] were also borderland ascendancy originating in the north of England [5].

One aspect of civilization to which the Scots-Irish were respectful was religion. As soon as they arrived in sufficient numbers, Virginia settlers petitioned the Pennsylvania Presbytery to supply ministers to their communities. With the onslaught of the First Great Awakening (officially in 1740) their request was heeded, and Virginia’s Shenandoah received a flow of Presbyterian ministers thereafter. By the time of the Revolutionary War there were twenty-three Presbyterian congregations in Virginia [6] Having commented on the Ascendancy, the greatest preponderance of Scots-Irish were hardscrabble farmers st their best. The cumulative legacy of borderland residency had produced a population ill-suited to urban life, a noticeable unwillingness to settle down in one spot in preference to long-term homesteading (as did the Germans), and agricultural practices which quickly exhausted the soil, prompting hyper-residential mobility.

If impetuosity early proclaimed itself as a dominant trait among many Scots-Irish, so did their restlessness. In contrast to the Germans who once they found a home tended to remain fixed, the Scots-Irish seemed never satisfied. Needless to say many of the Ulstermen remained where they made their first homes; but thousands of others seemed to feel a real compulsion to move again and again…. It began to be said that no Scotch-Irish family felt comfortable until it had moved at least twice [7]

Both Scots-Irish and Germans had their hearts set on being farmers. Those that stayed in Philadelphia, their most common port of entry, were likely indentured servants required to do so. The goal was to get out to the frontier as soon as feasible–which accounts for their rapid mobility in search of their individual homestead. Not being the first to arrive in these frontier areas, the prime, reasonably safe, cheap, and accessible land to the Scots-Irish was mostly taken, so their tendency was to “leap-frog” settled frontier areas and move on down the road.

If the Germans tended to initially set up shop in the Northern Neck, Scots-Irish moved into Shenandoah geographies more adjacent to other Tidewater elites. They also were prone to sustained bouts of mobility that shifted them over the next decades into North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. Their tendency to chronic mobility meant a settlement pattern in many ways dissimilar to the Germans.Their children left the household early, preferring to move to the settlement periphery–to the borderlands of the wilderness. Scots-Irish were not prone to found cities, preferring to make a hardscrabble homestead farm in the isolated hinterland. It may be correct to assume Scots-Irish were more prone to simple squatting then the Germans–and if so, this did not make them popular with whoever owned the land, or with the government looking for land sales monies and quitrents. That and the application of “borderland” farming principles probably explains much of the Scots-Irish tendency to squat down, set up a homestead, and farm it until chased off, or exhausted by either burning and scorching its nutrients. Virginia landowners wasted little time in preferring Germans over Scots-Irish.

Both Germans and Scots-Irish preferred not to settle in another’s ethnic cluster, so they looked for familiar faces, languages and dialects before settling down. Even in the same county, the two ethnic groups settled different parts. Both were Protestant, but Scots-Irish were Presbyterian, not Lutheran, and their Protestantism was Calvinist, anything but pietistic which was lots closer to Quaker Protestantism. In other words, Germans and Scots-Irish were distinct migrations, and not elements of one Big Sort style of settlement. As to their distinctive value preferences, beliefs, and temperament particularly to authority, that will be explored in the next chapter. In this module, I prefer to discuss what I believe was the critical factor in understanding how the two Shenandoah migrations affected Virginia economic and political development.

That factor was the differential way in which the planter elites responded to the threat and the opportunity presented by the migrants. In essence, Germans disproportionately settled in Northern Neck counties, while Scots-Irish, arriving later crossed over the Fairfax line and settled further into the Shenandoah. In these counties Scots-Irish received different treatment than that afforded to the Germans by non-Northern Neck planter planter elites. Without any conscious intent, the differential patterns of settlement between Northern and non-Northern planter elites, in addition to the differential agriculture and mobility predispositions of Germans and Scots-Irish combined to exert different effects on the post-Revolutionary War Virginia policy systems. Of the two migrations, the Scots-Irish would prove more disruptive to the Tidewater culture and oligopoly, while the Germans would be integrated with little disruption into the state’s economic base and politics

 

Reaction by Oligopoly to Western Migrations

The Northern Neck

 

 

 

Of greatest impact to settlement of Virginia’s western lands was who “controlled” them. The sword of Damocles that dangled over the head of Virginia land control was a 1649 land grant by Charles II to a number of his royalist supporters in the English Civil War (including Berkeley’s brother). The grant totaled over 5.2 million acres, and was called the Northern Neck, it ran in a band from the Chesapeake Bay to the Allegheny–Blue Ridge-northern Shenandoah to the Potomac River in Maryland. It is a substantial portion of what today is Virginia and West Virginia. Immense by anyone’s standards, the grant required taxes paid by its landowners/renters (quit-rents) paid to the recipients of the land grants–this was delegated tax collection, not to the colony government but to the land owners, the royalist planter elite. Most of these counties were settle, those in orange along the lower Potomac and Rappahannock rivers–coastal– were principally settled by Berkeley’s royalist imports, and became a core region in the Tidewater political culture and policy systems. The counties of Loudoun, Fauquier, Rappahannock, Madison and Green mark the western borders of the Piedmont. The remainder of the orange is Shenandoah, and the yellow-brown counties are today’s West Virginia, but until 1863 were part of Virginia.

The Northern Neck grant’s practical effect was that much of northern Tidewater Virginia was afforded meaningful economic autonomy from the state’s colonial government. It permitted the creation of a distinct group of aristocratic/gentry’ elite that before the Revolution verged on being a private empire, to a considerable degree outside of governor’s–and Burgesses–direct control. If the reader can imagine it, much of this vast expanse of land was, at the time of German and Scots-Irish migrations, directly or indirectly dominated by one man, Thomas Lord Fairfax. He would hold title and influence over this area through 1779–midpoint into the American Revolution. Two surveyors he relied upon for land subdivision, a prerequisite for sale or lease to migrants, were Peter Jefferson, and a very young George Washington.

When the grant was made in 1649, control over the area was held by a number of families–and decision-making was more or less consensual, and somewhat permeable to external influence. By the late 1720’s, however, the vagaries of land inheritance caused title of the entire Northern Neck to pass into the hands of the Culpeper family, and then to one man, Thomas Lord Fairfax (in 1719). The Northern Neck grant became one of Virginia’s chief political controversy during the 1730’s and 1740’s. A massive legal struggle brought about by certain of the Royalist Families and the colony of Virginia–led and coordinated by the Byrd family–contested Fairfax’s legal title.

Byrd petitioned the English Privy Council challenging Fairfax’s claim which included alerting the Council that the quit-rents from the Northern Neck “is about as much Land as at present pays Quit rents to his Majesty in all the rest of Virginia” [8]. That commenced “the war of the maps” in which each party commissioned surveying and map making of the immense, hostile area, and submitted them to the judgment of the Privy Council. In any event, the settlement of Virginia’s western lands became a serious agenda item form policy-makers and private elites during the interlude. The House of Burgesses approved on its own, several land grants involving Fairfax lands as early as 1722. Fairfax (residing in England), fought back in 1929, launching a formal complaint which eventually fell to the British Board of Trade to arbitrate. That title and de facto autonomy was reconfirmed by the British Board of Trade in 1746–ending the legal controversy.

With the Northern Neck safely in the hands of one individual, Fairfax and his delegated land managers, and the families of the plantation owners resident in his Northern Neck, developed into a sort of political and economic nexus within the larger Virginia colony and policy system. Through this time period, the two migrations poured into Virginia–the Germans, being the first, and being desirous of setting up a yeoman agriculture, wandered into what would be future counties in the Northern Neck. Fairfax who had never stepped foot in America previous to 1735, lived off the quitrents, with a Virginia plantation owner, Robert Carter, managing his affairs in Virginia. Carter did so well, when he died (1732) he was reputed to own 1,000 slaves and was Virginia’s wealthiest man.

Fairfax’s dad had, in 1702, retained Virginian plantation owner, Robert Carter as his land agent and he handled most of early land transactions. But Carter, during much of the seventeenth century’s second decade was consumed in politics, including a stint as temporary governor, and until he returned as agent in 1722 Carter was content so long as the squatter paid his quitrents to let settlers set up farms on Northern Neck land. Carter’s main effort, in any case, was to secure Shenandoah property for himself, his family, and associates. He sold land to them, and they did with it whatever they did with it. He amassed a fortune and and an empire out of Fairfax’s holdings. Only in 1732 when Carter died, Lord Fairfax became aware of Carter’s land grab, and he recognized that if he was to seize advantage from his own property he would have to do it himself. In this context Gooch’s land grants rubbed salt in Fairfax’s wound. By 1735 or so, Fairfax was resident in Virginia. By this time, the German migration was picking up considerable steam. Fairfax, as an active landowner not interested in selling land outright He leased considerable acreage to an agent who then leased land to the Germans. The lease was for simple rent and annual payment of quitrents (taxes to Fairfax) which did not include a termination date–many ran for a half-century [8a]

When German Shenandoah immigration gathered momentum, Lord Fairfax and his manager, Robert Carter, embraced it, frequently offering (for its place and time) the Germans flexible lifelong leases that so long as quitrents were paid. This left the lessor much autonomy over land use, and lacking a term clause conveyed considerable security to the lessor, encouraging improvements made at lessor expense and ability to employ agricultural practices and crop selection at their own discretion. Thus early German migrants “benefited” from better lease terms by the principal landowner of the northern, Maryland borderland Shenandoah. With a measure of security, and freedom from crop obligations paid to the manor-lord, these settlers created true family homesteads, and yeoman husbandry in areas they settled. In later years, their children immigrated into Watauga North Carolina (eastern Tennessee) and Kentucky. The most obvious contribution of these early German settlers was their agricultural skills, which were considerable. Excellent homestead farmers, farmers who intended from the outset to develop a sustainable family homestead (often the famous log cabin), managed their soil and livestock, developed productive techniques and equipment, and most are cruel in regard to those on whom they are imposed, and injurious to the country imposing them’ [99] David critically planted crops for their own use and domestic export. As such they were a viable alternative and stark contrast to the land hungry, and enormously wasteful tobacco plantation.

Lord Fairfax. Fairfax issued occasional land grants to encourage the earliest of Germans. Others that followed (Scots-Irish) simply squatted on Fairfax’s land, and there are no records that indicate Fairfax, still residing in England, took action against them. In this way, German homestead, yeoman farming took root (sorry). Fairfax-Carter provided land grants to jump-start settlements, and on occasion land grants for community facilities. In this way, German-settled communities, which evolved into towns and cities developed. Unmentioned to this point is that Fairfax’s leases, either for life or without a termination date, satisfied Virginia’s electoral franchise law, and accordingly many Germans were able to vote, without contest or disruption. This did not bother Fairfax, who it must be said came from a Puritan wing of the Culpeper family that fought against the King. Fairfax was not a rabid royalist. That Fairfax’s lenient position to favorable land sales to Germans and others, as well as potential access to the electoral franchise was shared by others in his following is hinted at by Washington’s eldest brother who was also close to Fairfax:

A new naturalization act allowed Protestants from other European states to be admitted to rights of citizenship after seven years [of residence]. Many of these immigrants settled on the frontier, Germans of varying sects and other denominations began to arrive … The process was encouraged by some landowners who discovered in the new libertarian regime a union of principle and [self] interest. Lawrence Washington wrote to [the newly appointed governor in 1751] observing ‘It has been my opinion, and I hope will ever be, that restraints on conscience are cruel in regard to those on whom they are imposed, and injurious to the country imposing them’…  These words were written as a part of a campaign to attract German settlers to his lands [7a]. 

In any event, Carter used his power to manage and dispose of land sales and property transfers to enrich himself, and his family. It was Carter, working under an approach endorsed from afar by Fairfax, that the Germans dealt with in the first decade of their Shenandoah migration. Needless to mention, Carter turned his land ownership into political power; he For a time he arguably was the colony’s most dominant politician, at one point its temporary Governor, and was a key member of the Council of State. Upon Carter’s death, Fairfax read his obit (I am not making this up), and realized what a gold mine this property was. He packed his bags, set off for Virginia in 1735 and established his plantation by 1737. To settle the colony’s law suit seeking to overturn the 1649 Northern Neck land grant, Fairfax was required to revisit London in the mid-1740’s to bring the legal dispute to a resolution.

The matter was not resolved until 1746, in Fairfax’s favor–although the Burgesses-approved transactions made during the legal action were declared valid as well. Payment of taxes to Fairfax was, however, reconfirmed. On his return in 1745, he constructed his new estate and his manor house in Clark County (Shenandoah). In 1748 Fairfax hired his young protege, sixteen year old George Washington, to survey and demarcate his Shenandoah holdings. Fairfax, in fact, was responsible for Washington’s training as a surveyor–and biographers suggest Fairfax became Washington’s surrogate father and certainly mentor-adviser. They would be business associates as well. To help resolve claim settlement and make land sales more secure, Governor Gooch in 1749 hired two surveyors, Joshua Fry and frontiersmen-plantation owner, Peter Jefferson to properly survey the western lands.

Fairfax did not come to Virginia to grow tobacco—although he did on his many personal plantation; Fairfax came with a distinct bent toward land development and sales. The western counties offered similar advantages to a land developer as had the Piedmont; it accommodated planter succession as long-established planters could spin off Shenandoah plantations to their offspring. Also, since the Shenandoah climate and topography did not preference tobacco growing, it was healthier and its views attracted the planter oligopoly to build estates with grand manor houses. This is what Fairfax did. Finally, land sales/renting to the immigrant newcomers offered a vital new source of income to an increasingly financially stressed tobacco planter. To be sure the planter oligopoly secured Shenandoah land grants from Fairfax for themselves, continuing the traditions of the royalist oligarchy. The Chew and Borden families got sizable grants, and the most significant grant went to Lord Beverley, one of the happy venturers in Spotswood’s Golden Horseshoe crowd.

 

Settling in, in the style that he had been accustomed, Fairfax set up estates/manors for himself and family members in several areas of his grant. He never married, and today is under attack for his possible relationships with Black slave women. In several future modules detailing Virginia’s drift to Independence, and the political evolution of the Virginia planter oligopoly, we may see Fairfax’s impact lurking in the background. The Northern Neck planter families were early in opposition to anti-British economic and political regulation–but unlike Scots-Irish Patrick Henry were were “moderate”, and more prone to stress the economic not political grievances. From these Northern Neck planters came a disproportionate number of future Federalists–although the leading Virginia anti-Federalist, George Mason, was Washington’s next door neighbor–deep in the Northern Neck.

In the course of his long life [Fairfax]. a circle formed around him. Lord Fairfax’s drawing room became a school of manners for young gentlemen of the Northern Neck–among them many Washingtons, Lees, Marshalls (including John of Supreme Court fame), and his descendant, George of WWII distinction, and others who shared a distinctive set of beliefs. The Northern Neck [gave] the culture of Virginia a special meaning. On this frontier there was little of democracy and none of equality, but a strong tradition of service character, right conduct, and the rule of law. …  A cultural tradition was planted by Lord Fairfax at Greenway Court [his estate/manor]. It took root in the fertile soil of the Northern Neck and flowered in the careers of George Washington in the Revolution … the Northern Neck was the cradle of their culture, and Lord Fairfaxs was its founding father [9].

One wonders if George Washington’s and John Marshall’s distinctive and long-lasting affiliation with the post-Revolutionary Federalist Party–and in particular their willingness to embrace a strong national government and a national, not state perspective, may derive from this cultural tradition. Washington’s as a land developer did not disproportionately focus on his home state, but rather extended his interest to its western hinterland land–and lands in other states (Pennsylvania and New York). That will be partially explained in the next module’s discussion on Virginia land companies. Washington (and Marshall’s) willingness to also not only embrace, but take leadership in the building of developmental transportation infrastructure to access the western trans-Appalachian interior– separated them from many Virginia Tidewater adherents–may also be traced to Fairfax’s influence? In any case, this arrangement with Fairfax endured unmolested until 1775, the american Revolution. Lord Fairfax during the Revolution was protected by George Washington among others (despite his Loyalist inclinations), and he retained to title to his land until the Virginia Land Act of 1779. The 88 year-old Fairfax died on December 9, 1781 at one of his estates. On September 11, 1781, Lord Fairfax dined along with his land manager, his nephew, William Fairfax, with George, Mary at Mount Vernon. George was on his way to commence the Battle of Yorktown.

Governor Gooch’s Response to Migrations–Both migrations overlapped the administration of one of Virginia’s most “effective”, and durable royal (Lieutenant) Governors: William Gooch (1727 to 1749). Gooch shared Spotswood’s perspective that western settlement offered new opportunity to the Virginia colony, and were a vital element in its defense against Native Americans and their European allies. Moreover, Gooch, buffeted by the power and demands of the Virginia patriarchy lodged in the Council of State and Burgesses, saw Western settlement by new (white) migrants as a potential “third force” that in its time could check the power of royalists. Finally, migrants were potential recruits to the frontier militias, and their settlement cemented the site conquest of a rich and fertile valley from Indians and a check on possible French sphere of influence–just in time as war with French and Indians became a constant feature for the next half-century. To all that one might also philosophically observe that no matter what the Governor, or the oligopoly wanted, the migrations could not be stopped–not even by Native Americans. There was no “Trump Wall” option.

In the middle 1730’s Gooch had successfully negotiated a sort of armistice with the Iroquois,that paved the way for a more substantial migration. By Gooch’s time, thanks to Spotswood, Swiss-Germans from Germanna had settled in the Shenandoah, a beacon to their ethnic compatriots. According to Professor Dabney, the first “official” German settler in the Valley, by virtue of a land grant, was Adam Miller (nee Mueller), in 1727. He was followed by Joist Hite and Jacob Stover [10].

Gooch, however, did what he could to facilitate land sales to the Germans–bypassing the Oligopoly. Gooch’s land grants, including a 1727 40,000 acre (three counties) grant to John and Isaac Van Meter (Germans from Pennsylvania). They in turn sold much acreage to German Joist Hite, the “old German Baron”. Hite resold the land in small plots of 100 to 500 acres in what became Frederick and Orange counties to fellow Germans. Also benefiting from Gooch’s land grants was the Swiss Jacob Stover who, more in the lines of a land speculator, sold small plots to whoever could afford them. Jacob Stover initially acquired his grant through deception by “giving a human name to every horse,cow, hog and dog he owned” and selling each 100 acres to claim his land grant [11]. It was he who sold acreage to the Boone family, allowing young Daniel Boone to resettle from Pennsylvania to the Shenandoah [12]. Gooch’s land grants came at the expense of the Northern Neck (now controlled by Lord Fairfax). It was this grant that prompted the fifteen year legal hassle that brought Fairfax to America [13].

The net effect of all this is during the 1720’s and early 1730’s the Germans, and others, settled in relatively large numbers the northern Shenandoah (adjacent to Maryland) and eastern West Virginia counties. Several German-founded towns were established, such as the towns of Strasburg (Peter Stover),  of Mecklenburg, now Shepherdstown, West Virginia. “A group of Lutherans and Calvinists settled in the Hebron Valley, communities of Dunkers and Mennonites settled in other areas… The heaviest concentration of Virginia Germans was in the northern Shenandoah Valley, between the towns of Winchester and Stanton …. Substantial German populations also settled in the Piedmont counties of Loudoun, Culpeper, Madison and Floyd and into Southwest Virginia (Smythe, Bland, Washington and Blythe). [14] 

.

 

the Non-Northern Neck

In 1736 Governor Gooch issued a land grant to the prominent and well-positioned tidewater royalist planter, William Beverley. Gooch wanted a buffer between the French and Indians and southern Piedmont Virginia. Called the “Beverley Mansion” or more popularly as the “Irish Tract” (119,000 acres), the land was open frontier in what is today’s Augusta County (Staunton and Waynesboro). The area had already been loosely settled by leap-frogging Scots-Irish, Huguenots, and whatever, including the famous and fearsome John Lewis, who had settled there around 1731. A second grant by Gooch was made was to Benjamin Borden, from New Jersey–an agent of Lord Fairfax. This grant encompassed nearly 500,000 acres along the strategic headwaters of the Shenandoah and James Rivers (mostly in today’s Rockbridge Count). The grant had clear requirements that the land must be quickly settled before title was conferred. No surprise the quota was achieved in two years and the title passed to Borden/Fairfax. Filled with deer, bison, presumably playing antelope, and Indians in search of deer, bison, and playing antelope, these areas became a Scots-Irish paradise. As the above map attests, Scots-Irish dominated the settlement of the southern and southwest Shenandoah straight to the border with North Carolina. It may be of interest to the reader, that the above map resulted from 2010 resident data from the 2010 census–it appears, despite their propensity to wander, enuf Scots-Irish remain today in these western counties. In the grand scheme of things, two-hundred and fifty years is not that long for migrations/cultures to persist in some form.

Moving deeper into the Shenandoah than the Germans, Scots-Irish moved into land that had been granted earlier to Lord Beverley, and Borden who leased land from Lord Fairfax. Beverley, the son of a royalist Tidewater plantation owner, whose mother was “a Byrd”. He was descended from Robert Beverley, discussed earlier, and a member of the Spotswood Golden Horseshoe Expedition (1616) (also Virginia’s first prominent historian). William, upon inheriting his father’s estate in 1722, began a career in land speculation, living off tobacco income derived from his land tenants. Beverley after feeling the ill-effects of a bout with Virginian patriarchal politics in Williamsburg, returned to manage his land grant holdings, and his family’s estate-plantations. His Shenandoah holdings were somewhat isolated and vulnerable. Accordingly, (1) fearing for his ability to maintain their holdings against a hostile combination of Indians, squatters, and competing plantation royalist speculators, and (2) determined to comply with Gooch’s requirements the lands be quickly settled as a buffer against the French, William extended generous terms to new and past migrants (squatters). Rather than mess with the mélange of squatters that saturated the geography, the agents for the grantee simply offered generous sale terms and encouraged responsible filing of the claims to prove settlement.

Upon acquiring his Shenandoah land grant, Beverley hired a former ship captain, Scots-Irish James Patton, to recruit Scots-Irish into the Shenandoah from Scotland and England: “I should be very glad for you to import families enough to take the whole off from our hands at a reasonable price, and tho the order mentions families from [Pennsylvania], yet families from Ireland will do as well” [15]. Patton, a former Royal Navy sailor, had somehow parlayed that into captaincy of his own ship. A privateer, he acquired some wealth and came into the employ of Lord Beverley, probably serving as an clandestine shipper of illegal or taxable goods from, and into, Virginia. Beverley hired Patton to transport Scots-Irish (actually whoever got on his boat) directly to Virginia where they were resettled in the Shenandoah–conforming to the settlement requirements imposed on Beverley by the land grant’s terms.

Supposedly Patton made twenty-five such voyages, before he got the idea (in the early 1740’s) of being a land-lubber, and full-time land speculator for Beverley and occasionally Borden [16]. He organized, occasionally incorporated several of the earliest Shenandoah and west land development companies, and evolved into one of the Shenandoah’s first charismatic leader. Patton was enormously successful in this endeavor, recruiting and selling land, very instrumental in the founding of several settlements during the high period of Scots-Irish migration into Virginia. In 1757 he founded a settlement (Drapers Meadow) near today’s Virginia Polytechnic University. Five years later, in an Indian raid, Patton was killed, and his family were taken captive [16a]. No doubt the reader suspects this is the multi-grandfather of our famous General Patton of WWII (and his other grandfather of Civil War) fame. Well guess what, He is.

Since the Scots-Irish migration never stopped until the British blockade and subsequent takeover of Philadelphia in 1776, the Scots-Irish kept on coming down the Wagon Road. For a time, Virginia swallowed them up and they pushed into the peripheries of Virginia’s western territory–which were considerable, including West Virginia and Kentucky. Before 1738 much of this territory was included in one County (Orange–then in Fincastle/Kentucky). As the population swelled simple administration of these new communities and management of the settlers required that Orange be split into Frederick County (Winchester), and Augusta County. Augusta County, while officially a county in 1738, however, had no appointed officials. Only in 1745 did Gooch appoint twenty-one justices of the peace, a sheriff, and several other officials. Only in 1750 was the county seat activated in Staunton. In essence, these counties presented little challenge to voting majorities in the Burgesses–and no challenge to the patriarchy in the Royal Council.  The distances from Williamsburg, the isolation and the dispersion of agricultural homesteads, and the informality of western-style local government necessarily meant these Shenandoah counties were what we later will label “frontier policy systems and economies”.

Off the margins of Virginia and its Tidewater policy system was an area that on a macro scale stretched from Pennsylvania, into Ohio, down south thru Maryland to Georgia. David Hackett-Fischer called this the “American Backcountry”. He could also have titled it the “American Borderlands” as it was uniquely suited to the values, and lifestyle of the Scots-Irish–arguably the largest element in its resident population. Loosely settled even as a flood of migrants were still pouring down, the authority of any colony policy system over this territory was minimal. When finished with his homestead, and/or wishing to move on there was plenty of land available to do so. Squatting was always an option, particularly because it was a race between a land owner seeking rents or the homesteader exhausting his soil. Once out of lands claimed by Virginia, backcountry legal title was dubious indeed, and the further south one moved, the more the Native Americans had a say in the matter. North Carolina, and western lands that would later become Tennessee was prime in the period around and after the French and Indian War. Further south, South Carolina became attractive around the time of the American Revolution. As for Virginia-claimed western lands most of Fincastle County was subject to serious Indian attack–and almost impossible to get to as the Appalachians were a formidable barrier. So counties that became West Virginia, and the southern Shenandoah, leading into North Carolina were the principal areas into which the Scots Irish moved during this period.

Control over the land sales in the very large counties formed to manage these new populations, was a tool both to manage the franchised electorate, so to preserve as best as possible the few delegates to Burgesses, establish a modified, more autonomous influence over the local communities and economies through a mixture of yeoman husbandry and sharecropping long-term rental of land. Both were practices, with the Germans benefiting most from the former, and Scots-Irish the latter. They were aided in this arrangement by the vicissitudes of the Scots-Irish culture whose brand of husbandry, what I will call hardscrabble husbandry, did not require the establishment of a more-or-less permanent household farm. Imbued with a insatiable wanderlust, which had in reality brought them to this location in the first place, their form of agriculture meant they would soon, in all likelihood,

Although the dream of owning land and thus having a stake in society drew many Englishmen to Virginia during the colonial period, such dreams did not become a reality.  By the 1750’s only about one half of the adult white males owned enough land to qualify  to vote, and perhaps another 20 percent met the requirements as tenants by holding life-leases on property. The remaining 30 percent of adult white males, along with all women and freed blacks were excluded from direct participation in the political life of the Old Dominion [17] .

That would all come to a head when in 1776 the oligopoly confronted the need to create a new policy system in an age of egalitarian democracy and war of national independence. We shall deal with this in the appropriate modules, but to provide a clue the oligopoly was able to control the political processes that set up the new post-revolutionary war state policy system. Using the tools which had served them well up to that point, control over local communities, repression of slaves, and creative use of population exodus, they were able to preserve their way of life straight thru the Civil War. There was a cost. The state would lose competitiveness vis. a vis other states, and the economic base was unable to grow sufficiently to generate wealth to diversify its economic base or provide necessary infrastructure. But their primary goal, to preserve a way of life, and all that entailed, was paramount and to that end it worked well enuf for the better part of a hundred years.

 

Land Development Companies: the Virginia Tidewater Elite’s Pivot from the Manor Culture and Plantation Tobacco-Export Economic Base

In the mid-1740’s a curious, interesting and, it turns out important, economic-development strategy captured the imagination and pocketbooks of Virginia’s planter oligopoly. The economic development initiative was almost certainly triggered by the opportunities to profit from the Shenandoah migrations–and it certainly opened up to the planter oligopoly the new worlds which could be developed in the western hinterland territories. Tidewater and Royalist plantation families formed land development companies–and these companies over the next decades, increasingly developed into major economic development initiatives and activities that caught in their web the Virginia-level colony policy system and especially the Royal Governor. The effects of this strategy on Native Americans, of course, was in the main overwhelmingly negative as it sharpened the need for white European site control over lands they held in their possession. The ED strategy also became entangled with global politics and directly led to one major war, the French and Indian War, but also contributed to the American War of Independence.

The experiences and the financial interests of these companies were a major factor in motivating George Washington’s pre and post 1775 DTIS (developmental transportation infrastructure strategy) that we described in the first two modules of this book. They are the prelude or the pre-sequel to much larger strategies of great impact in our ED history. Moreover, the land development initiative could have marked a potential departure from the Tidewater planter oligopoly from its slave-based tobacco-export economic base, and into more commercial, even industrial and finance, sectors. As the reader, no doubt, knows, it didn’t work out that way–and in future modules I will offer my explanation–but the movement into land development did have very important political implications, as it likely fostered support for Virginia’s leadership drive to American Independence, and over time blurred into the formation, and Virginia’s early leadership in the Federalist Tribe (or political party if one prefers). That the offshoot of this strategy proved to be the trigger the launched the processes which culminated in the American Constitution and the 1789 Early Republic only underscores the after effects of this economic development strategy/initiative first started in 1749.

The Land Development Corporation, in economic development terms, was a rather subtle, but in time quite radical pivot of Virginia’s Tidewater/Piedmont plantation elites away from their dominant tobacco export, slave-based agricultural economic base to a land-based economic development strategy that relied on aggregate land in the state’s adjacent western, and trans-Appalachian interior, the Indian-owned, French-contested, European unsettled wilderness of Kentucky, Ohio and points beyond. With the tobacco export economy evidencing decline, or at least stagnation, in its search for illusionary profits and requiring a constant search for new productive land, Virginia’s plantation elite by the 1740’s turned slowly to develop an economic alternative. The land development company was the organizational structure that encapsulated this new economic development strategy, and as such it advances its claim that the land development company was the first major economic development organization (EDO) of American economic development. 

the Land Development Company–the first step 

One could make the case the land development companies that formed in Virginia in 1749 were a logical derivative of the Crown-approved public-private enterprises, the Jamestown Company, the London Company and the Plymouth Company that launched British colonial expansion into North America. Without any doubt, land, land grants, and land development were core to this enterprise, and the raft of grand goals they were entrusted to achieve. Every colony got its version of this public-private corporation. No colony started out as a pure Royal colony, solely a public affair managed by the King. Those earlier public-private royal-chartered enterprises embraced larger goals, of course, but in that these public chartered corporations were the organization state of art during colonial America, their use if quite understandable. We observed earlier that Berkeley had charted a similar public-private EDO to open up the Piedmont and to jump-start an extractive basic materials and mining cluster  in 1646–and was used several times after for related enterprises–it no doubt was the natural course for land development proponents to follow.  It began with Virginia Land Development Companies in 1749: the Ohio, and the Loyal Land Development Companies–and the dozens of others that soon followed them.

In Virginia of 1750, land had additional value to its ruling Tidewater oligopoly.  Land, in the form of the manor-plantation, was why this elite had resettled in Virginia. Land, land development, and land disposition in the form of the early medieval sale of it by peasants under attack from Vikings to feudal lords in return for protection was the heart of the medieval political and economic system. As that feudal system evolved from serfs to land tenancy, and eventually to freeholder household ownership, land and land ownership remained its heart and soul. The Virginia oligopoly that formed from Berkeley’s efforts transferred that English-Norman aristocratic tradition to Virginia, and tilting the disposition and interests of that aristocracy toward what was then a thousand year heritage that involved its participation and leadership over that most precious of commodities.

[In the South] the presence of large landed estates, engrossed in comparatively few hands, fostered a landed aristocracy. Land ownership, therefore, was desirable for social and political, as well as pecuniary reasons. The Virginian was not much of a ‘gentleman’ unless he lived in the midst of countless acres. If he was a non-resident owner, or a large ‘patentee’ of the Crown, he employed land agents on the spot to look after his estates or to sell and lease his holdings [17a]

Land development of western hinterlands was on its face both a legitimate economic/political activity for the Virginia landed oligopoly but a responsibly that it owed to the larger community over which it ruled. In short, through land on could understand how the new venture in hinterland land development as a legitimate, consensual, if not natural undertaking compatible with its Tidewater political culture. When the founders of the Ohio Company, Virginia’s first pure public-private western land development corporation, founded that corporation they were not by any means going where no aristocrat had gone before.

By this time, the German and Scots-Irish migration was in its full-fury,. Seemingly endless, by 1750 it was entering its fourth decade. In 1748, Thomas Lee and Lawrence Washington (George’s oldest half-brother (son-in-law to Thomas Lee), and a number of Northern Neck plantation owners incorporated the Ohio Land Company. Thomas Lee was a former Lord Fairfax’s principal land manager following Robert Carter (in fact, he was a Fairfax land manager (1713) under Lord Fairfax’s mother’s tenure). When our Thomas Lord Fairfax inherited the Northern Neck from his mother in 1719, he (an uncle actually) re-appointed Robert Carter as principal land manager. This set off a family feud which was not resolved until Light-horse Henry Lee married a Carter descendant (their offspring was Robert E. Lee).  To provide background information helpful to future modules, Two of Lee’s sons signed the Declaration of Independence, and a third was Senator in the Articles of Confederation. One fought as a Continental general of cavalry under Washington. It was Thomas Lee that took over the early land sales for Lord Fairfax in the Shenandoah:

Under him surveying was done in the Piedmont region, and extensive sales made on the quit rent  plan. It was under him that settlement of the lower Shenandoah Valley began in the decade before the organization of the Ohio Company. Among other things, Thomas Lee knew the Germans from Pennsylvania were on the move south and west along the valleys of the Appalachian Mountains … he came to believe that with good land titles and adequate protection, they could be relied upon to settle upon lands farther west, beyond the giant Fairfax estate. [Therefore], one explanation of the formation of the Ohio Land Company was the migration of Germans to the Shenandoah Valley, 1735-1745 [18].

The purpose of the Ohio Land Company was to raise capital, and to develop opportunities in a loosely defined Ohio territory–into geographies on the other side of the Allegheny (Appalachian Mountains. To restate for emphasis, from its beginning the Ohio Company was intended to develop trans-Appalachian lands outside of the Northern Neck. It was never intended these lands be principally extensions of the tobacco culture and economic base. Just the opposite. And it was very much a Northern Neck endeavor. In fact, a lesser known early initiative of the Ohio Land Company was to begin development of a Potomac coastal port through which it could, using the Potomac, transport settlers, their supplies and export their produce. The Company (in 1748-9) sent Lawrence Washington, the Burgesses delegate who represented the land in question to the Burgesses to secure approval for the acquisition of a facility, Hugh West’s tobacco warehouse, and sufficient adjoining acreage to found a settlement. Successful, Lawrence Washing, John Mercer and Lee–in conjunction with Governor Dinwiddie–were able to found a town, named Belhaven, but were unable to formally incorporate it until 1779. The warehouse was acquired by auction, and the foundations of what is today Alexandria’s waterfront piers were installed. Lawrence acquired significant holdings in the area, eventually inherited by George, to which he augmented considerably.

The influence of the Fairfax property and family on Lawrence, Augustine and George Washington is well known. Like Thomas Lee the Washingtons looked westward with the Fairfaxes to the Allegheny Mountains, and were ready if the opportunity arose to project themselves into the lands of the upper Ohio Valley. Neighbors and some of them relatives to the Fairfaxes, the Lees and the Washingtons … the nucleus of those who promoted the Ohio Company in 1747 Other neighbors, acquaintances, and relatives soon became members [19].

The potential that trans-Appalachian land could be developed successfully was paved by a treaty with the Six Nations at Lancaster Pennsylvania in 1744. In that treaty the Six Nations  “renounced and disclaim not only all the Right of the Six Nations, but also recognize and acknowledge the Right and Title of Our Sovereign, the King of Great Britain” . [That other tribes also believed they held title to these lands in lieu of the Six Nations will underscore the decades of Indian resistance that followed]. Of note a similar venture from Maryland also made the Ohio Valley a highly contested geography. The simple reality is many colonies, as well as Native American tribes–not to mention the King– fought to claim their sovereignty over this potentially lucrative or traditionally-held lands. Whatever the underlying morality, the lower Ohio Valley was a political, economic and legal free-for-all.

The Company petitioned King George directly for a land grant and was granted 500,000 acres in 1749. The investors in the Ohio Company soon included Governor Dinwiddie, the Ohio Company’s initial surveyor, fur trapper-Indian trader Thomas Cresap, and George Mason, drafter of the Revolutionary War state constitution and Declaration of Rights, was its Treasurer, a post he held to his death in 1792. The Ohio Company ran its affairs through the Royal Council largely because by that time a Council of State and Burgesses delegate (Thomas Lee) was elected its President. Thomas Lee, the most powerful Virginia politician of the day the Ohio Company soon became Virginia’s premier land development corporation. Within Governor Dinwiddie on board, it was able to command the active involvement of the Colony in its planning and recruitment.

While it received its grant in 1749, its approval in London consumed considerable time, and its application produced a quick rival, in the form of the Loyal Company. Led by John Lewis, a well-known pioneer of the Shenandoah, the motivating spirits were more Thomas Walker, Joshua Fry, and Peter Jefferson (the Meriweathers, of Lewis and Clark fame were also investors–as was Patrick Henry). Piedmont-based, the Loyal Company, more a child of the House of Burgesses also through several of its members enjoyed access to the Council of State. The former, however.  in 1748, a year previous to the Ohio Company’s grant from King George, granted the Loyal Company  800,000 vaguely demarcated acres that ran from the Shenandoah into the unspecified boundaries of North Carolina. This area was claimed by Virginia, but also would be claimed by North Carolina–and the British Crown. In any case, neither the Loyal nor Ohio Company grants overlapped, with the Loyal Company holdings more in the Shenandoah and West Virginia areas. In very short order, a number of smaller land companies formed by individual land entrepreneurs and their allies and associates. The largest of these and the most quixotic was one supported by Lord Beverley in the Shenandoah, operated by his pirate friend James Patton. Patton developed a series of his own entrepreneurial land companies, secured grants and filed title to holdings whose boundaries were ill-defined and legally uncertain. There were numerous others over the next decade.

Motivations Behind Virginia Land Development Companies and their Subsequent Activities

What brought about slew of land development companies between 1745 and 1755? Why is this important to a history of American state and local economic development? What does these companies say about the Virginia colonial policy system? Finally, what was their ultimate fate as their activities stretched into the French and Indian War and then confronted the 1763 British Proclamation Line?

 

The obvious motivation was to tap German and Scots-Irish migrations as recruits for their trans-Appalachian settlement ambitions. No longer content with simply selling them land in the Shenandoah, both the Ohio and Loyal Companies saw a greater opportunity in opening up the trans-Appalachian hinterland, at the time beyond the official boundaries of the Virginia colony.  Since most of these geographies did not lend themselves to tobacco economics, and large plantation, the interest of the large plantation owners was mostly limited to setting up huge estates for themselves and their children, but more so to profit from the recruitment, development, subdivision and sale to new settlers. Leasing land from these estates potentially would produce income to estate owners, from which they could maintain their lifestyles (and presumably carry on with the political oligopoly).

In this regard, land development seemed a natural extension of their agricultural economic base, and was congruent with the manor-like local economy and local policy system. By this point, the deficiencies of tobacco were well-appreciated, and many plantation owners had, or were on the verge of shifting to other crops such as wheat, or vintage agriculture with distilleries to manufacture wine and hard liquors. As to the long-term legal authority that would someday result, it is not likely that consumed much thought, and events were so much in flux there was no obvious conclusion. These were men of action and seize the opportunity–with serious political power available to deal with long-term legal issues. More likely, the investors had caught the “land-grabbing fever”–almost all of them had made their careers as explorers, surveyors, closely involved with land sales to migrants–they were all tobacco planters, of course, but like Fairfax, the description of one of their youngest associates (George Washington) were deeply torn between planter and developer–emotionally preferring the latter. While Washington’s most serious western explorations occurred after the conclusion of the 1763 French and Indian War, the Loyal and Ohio Companies were more active in the period previous to that war (pre-1754). If successful they or their progeny were likely to move in the latter direction. The War itself, and the developments after the War, however, ambushed the Land Companies ambitions.

If Washington was principally a planter, he was also a businessman and a speculator. He invested in three commercial pursuits on or near his Mount Vernon property. In addition to his flour mill, he constructed a saw mill, and in 1774 he purchased a brigantine to expand his fishing enterprise. He contemplated investing in an iron furnace in the Shenandoah … His real interest, however, was land, and following his marriage he plunged into this uncertain market with almost unbounded zeal [20].

Had this land development enterprise been more quickly rewarded, it is, in my opinion, reasonable that a wing of the Virginia planter oligopoly would have left tobacco planting behind (Washington himself would replace tobacco as his primary crop with wheat after 1764–that was not uncommon).

A second dynamic of considerable importance was the simultaneous interest of the hated French in the Ohio in particular, but also in the Kentucky area. Spain was also involved in Tennessee, Georgia and of course had colonies/settlements in Florida. It might be mentioned these were deep wilderness lands, with little to no access other than rivers–and virtually unsettled by permanent white residents, or even Native Americans. To say they were to some extent a vacuum of opportunity is probably not a great exaggeration. Opportunity, of course, tempered by Indian tribes who contested the Treaty and the French who armed them, and were clearly considering for themselves how to seize opportunity. The reader might also keep in mind that relations between England and French were chronically cold-and hot war–the period has been called the “Second Hundred Years War”, and interludes between wars were brief indeed.

All had begun to develop fur trading with Native American tribes in areas proximate to, and overlapping, the boundaries of the British. This area included the Ohio River valley which trigger the interests of land entrepreneurs from Pennsylvania and Maryland. In this period, they were also active–and somewhat successful– in securing their own land grants. An interstate land grant rush gathered some momentum, after a treaty of sorts had been negotiated with the Iroquois in 1744. The Iroquois were not resident in these areas but at that time considered themselves masters of a loose empire, having subdued or evicted other rival tribes from their hot so happy hunting grounds. In the 1744 treaty, the Iroquois ceded land (whose boundaries were vague and non-surveyed) to the King of Great Britain–although who actually had “title” to the land has subsequently generated a fair-sized literature. The treaty, negotiated by none other than Thomas Lee, Thomas Walker, and William Beverley, legitimized and opened up the borderlands to land development of three adjacent colonies.

Regulated by the London-based Board of Trade and the Privy Council–the decision-making body for the King of England, the sales and land grants that followed beginning in 1745. Inter-colony competition, from Virginia’s perspective, overlapped greatly with the threat of French influence and potential settlement–which legitimately generated fears of actual French invasion. With Virginia Governor, Sir William Gooch on the scene since 1727, Gooch by the mid-1740’s had developed a close relationship with the Virginia plantation oligarchs, worked their wonders together mostly through the Royal Council. A military officer, Gooch had been involved and in the War of Spanish Succession (1714) and was detailed to invade the Spanish port of Cartenga in 1741-where he was badly wounded. During this sabbatical he appointed Thomas Lee as acting Governor. In bad health after, he retired in 1749.

Gooch’s tenure on the whole was successful in a period in which the colony prospered–tobacco dysfunction was still in its early stages. Gooch’s management style was to “work with” the oligopoly  to achieve mutual ends through the Royal Council, but also including the House of Burgesses. Accordingly, proposals seeking permission from the Board of Trade to form the Ohio Land Company from Thomas Lee (member of the Royal Council) were duly processed and approved by the Board and the Privy Council (1748-9). The Ohio Company and the Colony of Virginia, thus, were closely intertwined and without doubt were an eighteenth century public-private enterprise, with the Land Company serving as the implementing organization. This was further solidified when Gooch’s successor, Dinwiddie became an investor.

In 1751, Robert Dinwiddie was appointed governor. A surveyor and trade/logistical official, Dinwiddie had already served on and off the Royal Council since 1738. An outsider to the oligopoly, he was not trusted and soon came into serious confrontation with them–over taxes to be paid for filing a land claim. Opportunistic, however, Dinwiddie personally invested with the Ohio Land Company and provided material support for settling the lower Ohio valley. “As a stockholder in the Ohio Company, and as a government official, Dinwiddie pursued a policy of corporate and imperial advancement … to counter French imperialism in the west… where the French had constructed a fort” [21]. In 1754, in an effort to persuade the French to abandon their Ohio Valley fort, Dinwiddie appointed George Washington lead an ill-fated expedition(s) into western Pennsylvania, the last of which resulted in Fort Necessity and the French and Indian War.

In any case, two observations leap out from Dinwiddie’s involvement with the Ohio Land Company (and BTW with the House of Burgesses involvement with the Loyal Land Company). First, the royal governor, dispatched to a remote corner of the Empire, was in ways unappreciated today more autonomous from the Crown than one might suspect. While not a free agent by any means, royal governors had their own style, background, and “expectations”. They could go “native” as Gooch and Dinwiddie–and certainly Spotswood and Berkeley did. This will be evident in other colonies as well. Moreover, the royal governor being a creature of the times operated within a blurred and complex relationship of private and public, a characteristic of a late-medieval period now well embedded in a mercantilist era. The public private land development corporation, while not the British East India Company, fit nicely in a mercantilist colonial atmosphere–with the rather obvious and transparent reality that public and private officials could personally profit.

The second observation is more subtle: the land development company in many was a legitimate public private partnership–with the private sector in charge of managing a great deal of the risk, while providing the public its benefits. On the other hand, Dinwiddie in particular did push back to Pennsylvania land development entrepreneurial initiatives, although in the long-run that proved futile. The colony also became a formal shareholder, investing 125 pounds per year into the venture–BTW not a great sum. The huge land grants which transferred control and management of the lands to the Company, however, were the core of the deal. The Ohio land company was required to set up a central fort (and garrisoning it), and a series of station-trading posts in its land grant territories. It was also required that the Company settle the region within a four year period–although the numbers were small, rapid settlement was part of the deal.

Both the Loyal and Ohio companies envisioned and conducted actual people-attraction (to Scotland) missions and arranged transport to Virginia (consider Patton) for their recruited homesteaders. This was not a venture with a long-term horizon. Roads and access trails were also contemplated–and Ohio Company did construct a rudimentary 80 mile road, associated with its successfully established, but ill-fated fort in the claim area–both at its expense. All these were at private expense, although to encourage settlement a ten year quitrent (local tax) abatement to settler was granted. Surveying, a high cost infrastructure, was conducted at private expense. The War ended any dreams of immediate settlement and by 1760 (the War midway) the Ohio Company was more, than less, stillborn.

The Ohio Company almost became a colony within a colony, albeit entrusted with considerable risk and expenses. What is lost in plain sight, its that we have the essentials of a public-private partnership, as well as the structure, a public and private corporation duly chartered by the King and colony to conduct its activities, and offering public incentives to its clients, the homesteaders. When the day came that an American state replaced the British colony, the structure would/could simply be incorporated into the state policy system, becoming a model of how to handle future public-private partnerships. The Loyal Company, however, operating in more favorable geographies did survive the war, continuing through the American Revolution. In that period, Patrick Henry became deeply involved in its affairs:

Henry was actively engaged in western land deals, when the British [1763] Proclamation against western settlement … materialized. With Dr. Thomas Walker, agent of the ‘Loyal Company’ … he became identified. beginning in 1767, in speculations in western lands. And in conjunction with William Byrd, a member of Virginia’s Governor’s [Council of State], he concluded secret negotiations with the Cherokee tribes for land in the forbidden area. Moreover, he was personal counsel to the Earl of Dunsmore, [then] colonial governor of Virginia, when the latter became a participant in the Illinois land schemes [22].

To see the public-private matter more clearly, one might make mention of the terms imposed on the Ohio Land Company by the Privy Council, but not the Burgesses-created Loyal Company. The Burgesses operating from a more parochial perspective did not impose these requirements on the Loyal Company nor on the other land companies that were chartered. Land companies that did not contest the lower Ohio did not face as severe competition from other states at this point in time–French trades and Indians were another matter. It is important to note the powerful and early linkage of national defense and economic development policy areas. The private sector certainly had its ambitions (Indian trade and land sales, and there is some evidence settlement itself was seen as a potential profit center), but the first real deliverable was a functioning fort and defense system. The same might be said regarding an economic development people-attraction strategy. People were candidates for the militia, if nothing else. To be fair to Dinwiddie that this was no small matter–as his future activities would indicate.

 

the Ohio Land Company Comes to Naught–Over the next twenty years-right through the early days of the Revolutionary War, the Ohio Land Company attempted, in its way, to achieve its mission and tasks required. From the start the capital invested was not sufficient to build, garrison and supply a fort. Looking back using a profit center analysis they had no debt, but neither did they have cash flow: land sales were non-existent, and early on the corporation was in violation of its grant covenants. At the time Indian trade was more lucrative but in two short years both the French and Pennsylvania’s upped their ante and responded to the Virginia threat. That, as mentioned, led to Washington’s 1754 ill-fated expedition, and another one that resulted directly in triggering the War of Jenkin’s Ear (French and Indian War). The War, including Braddock’s defeat, did little to advance the fortunes of the Ohio Company. We have left unmentioned the various “activities” of the Native Americans during this period, but suffice it to say, they were not helpful. Washington after the War’s conclusion attempted to revitalize it and use it to advance his own investment and ambitions, but with mixed success (and involving a controversial, and likely shady grant of land to veterans which Washington cream-skimmed the best land). In 1774, Governor Dunsmore initiated a war with various Indian tribes to stop their raids (and separate western settlers from the revolutionary war activities of the Tidewater east). It came to naught in the larger scheme of things.

By the end of the French & Indian war, the Ohio Company was barely surviving, maintaining some corporate fictional existence but no meaningful land sales or settlement. Pennsylvania was then fully-engaged in its settlement companies–with Benjamin Franklin as their London agent. It attempted to establish a presence in Kentucky during the 1770’s, but by that time it was deep in debt. Washington himself, never an actual investor but heavily involved, if only through his friend and neighbor George Mason and his mentor relationship with Lord Fairfax, was around when a “grand restructuring” of the corporation was attempted. The 1763 Proclamation Act made that essentially illegal. That the Ohio Land Company investors, save for Lord Fairfax himself, mostly drifted to and became active participants in the pre-Revolutionary War drift–and one became the commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, while others became Founding Fathers of our Early Republic is testimony that the venture did not go as its public-private participants wished. Still, that very-same commander-in-chief would use the land company structure to begin America’s venture into early modern American economic development.

 

FOOTNOTES

[1] David Hackett-Fischer and James C. Kelly, Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement (University of Virginia Press, 2000), p. 105

[2] https://www.virginia.org/GermansinVirginia

[2a] Philip Otterness, Becoming German: the 1709 Palatine Migration to New York (Cornell University Press, 2004), pp. 138-9; see also Robert Mitchell, Appalachian Frontiers: Settlement, Society and Development in the Preindustrial Era (University Press of Kentucky, 1991)

[3] David Hackett-Fischer and James C. Kelly, Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement, pp. 117-18

[4] James Leyburn, the Scots-Irish (University of North Carolina Press, 1962),  p. 186

[5] David Hackett-Fischer and James C. Brady, Bound Away, p. 121

[6] James G. Leyburn, the Scots-Irish, pp. 207-8.

[7] James Leyburn, the Scots-Irish, p. 199.

[7a] David Hackett-Fischer and James C. Kelly, Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement (University of Virginia Press, 2000), p. 105

[8] David Hackett-Fischer and James C. Kelly, Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement (University of Virginia Press, 2000), pp. 85-6.

[8a] https://www.loudounhistory.org/history/loudoun-german-settlers/

[9] David Hackett-Fischer and James C. Kelly, Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement, pp. 86-7

[10] Virginius Dabney, the New Dominion, p. 98

[11] David Hackett-Fischer and James C. Kelly, Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement, p. 113

[12] David Hackett-Fischer and James C. Kelly, Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement, pp. 111-14

[13] James Leyburn, the Scotch Irish (University of North Carolina Press, 1962), p. 203

[14] David Hackett-Fischer and James C. Kelly, Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement, pp. 113-14

[15] Lois Mulkearn (ED) George Mercer Papers Relating to the Ohio Company of Virginia (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1954) and Jim Glanville and Ryan Mays, “William Beverley, James Patton,.and the Settling of the Shenandoah Valley”, Essex County (Virginia) Museum and Historical Society Bulletin, Vol 55, 2010).

[16] James G. Leyburn, the Scots-Irish, p. 206

[16a] Patton was shrewd, and his business evolution, from proving transportation to Scots and Irish to Virginia and from there to the Shenandoah to become a moderate-sized land developer and town builder vividly demonstrates several nodes in the land development nexus. A last node was evident only after Patton’s death when his estate revealed his wealth was no longer directly tied up in land itself, but in providing finance to those who bought his land. Patton had evolved into a land banker. Ninety percent of his estate was “in the form of bonds, bills, and promissory notes due him” (Gordon S. Wood, the Radicalism of the American Revolution, p. 69}. Wood’s point is to underscore how domestic Virginia land developers were able to secure leadership in their local communities and establish considerable dominance over local policy-making, if not colony-wide–although it did Patton, with a tomahawk in his head, little good, I agree in any case, but the path from land sales to land finance was not a conscious plan to control local policy-making, it was a necessary and vital element in a successful land development program. The end-user had to obtain financing in a financial desert that was the Shenandoah west backcountry. With no established or even prospective financial institutions in place, the natural flow was to finance one’s land sales–to replace the non-existent lender. As land development evolved over the next two decades, the path to land sale financing will be a critical one to watch–and that will be evident in our next chapter on Pennsylvania.

[17] Ronald J. Heinemann et al, Old Dominion, New Commonwealth (University of Virginia Press, 2007), p. 74

[17a] A. M. Sakolski. the Great American Land Bubble (Martino Publishing, 2011, p. 3

[18] Alfred P. James, the Ohio Company: Its Inner History (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1959), p. 5

[19] Alfred P. James, the Ohio Company: Its Inner History (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1959), p. 6

[20] John E. Ferling, the First of Men: a Life of George Washington (University of Tennessee Press, 1988), p.69

[21] wttps://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Dinwiddie_Robert_1692-1770#start_entry

[22] A. M. Sakolski. the Great American Land Bubble, p. 13