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  Governor Calvert finally returned in late 1646 at the head of a small band of soldiers and restored order. But he died in June 1647, while his restless army was still waiting to be paid for its services. There was a very real threat that if the money was not forthcoming, the soldiers would try to take it out of the hides of the colonists. On his deathbed, Calvert appointed Margaret Brent the executor of his estate, instructing her to “Take all and pay all.” He had pledged his estate and that of his brother, Lord Baltimore, to satisfy the soldiers, but his own assets were far too insignificant to cover the costs. Margaret held the soldiers off, selling her own cattle to feed them and maneuvering to try to get money either from the colonial government or Lord Baltimore’s estate. On January 21, 1648, she appeared before the Maryland Assembly and demanded two votes—one for herself and one as Lord Baltimore’s representative. The Assembly declined to give her even one, and Margaret departed after lodging a protest against “all proceedings…unlesse shee may be present and have vote as aforesaid.” Besides being regarded as the nation’s first female lawyer, Margaret was the first colonial woman to demand the right to vote.

  Margaret did accomplish her critical objective of getting power to sell some of Lord Baltimore’s cattle to pay off the soldiers, who then left peaceably. Lord Baltimore, however, was furious at the loss of part of his estate. The Maryland Assembly defended her, writing their proprietor that his affairs were better left “at that time in her hands than in any mans…for the soldiers would never have treated any other with…Civility and respect.” Margaret, they concluded “rather deserved favour and thanks from your Honor” than “bitter invectives.” But Lord Baltimore was not appeased. Rather than continue living under the authority of an implacable enemy, the Brents moved away. Margaret had saved Maryland, and its status as a bastion of religious toleration, but she could never again live there herself. The family relocated to Virginia, which seemed willing to drop its opposition to Catholicism in order to nab such high-status residents. Until her death in 1671, Margaret lived on her new plantation, which she had named “Peace”—something she probably felt she deserved a little of.

  “CONTRACTING HERSELF TO…

  SEVERAL MEN AT ONE TIME”

  Some women came to the new world to get away from a man, in the form of a harsh master or unsatisfactory lover. (The niece of the novelist Daniel Defoe, plagued by a suitor she detested, fled England for the colonies and sold herself as an indentured servant in Maryland.) Women who were independent enough to sail to America by themselves were also inclined to take matters into their own hands if they got stuck in unhappy marriages after they arrived. In the early eighteenth century, a minister described North Carolina as “a nest of the most notorious profligates on earth…Women forsake their husbands come here and live with other men.” Early southern newspapers carried as many advertisements from husbands renouncing their runaway wives as owners seeking their runaway slaves.

  It was virtually impossible to get a divorce, but thanks to the malarial swamps, few people wound up married for life. The average union ended with the death of one partner within about seven years. During the first half of the seventeenth century the mortality rate in the Chesapeake was about 80 percent. It created patchwork families made up of widows, widowers, and several degrees of stepchildren. People developed new terms for their father’s “now-wife” or their “new husband’s children”—like Eskimos with their many words for snow. Men who made it through their first year in the Chesapeake could claim the title of “seasoned,” but their life expectancy was still only about forty-five years. Women’s life expectancy was even lower, but since they married so young—almost as soon as they hit puberty—they still often outlived their husbands. The colonies were crowded with widows, many of them managing large estates. Historians who studied the wills in Maryland found that most men named their wives as executor, something that was highly unusual back in England. In some cases, this was a matter of pure affection. “All I have I leave her, and if I had more she should enjoy it,” wrote John Smithson of Maryland in his will. But often, the wife was chosen as executor out of sheer practicality. In the seventeenth-century South, many people had no close relatives in America, or near neighbors who could be trusted to oversee an estate.

  Few women stayed single long in the South; some went through five or six husbands. (One minister sued a newly married couple for his fee—for performing both the marriage service and the funeral of the bride’s first husband a few days earlier.) Some women built large estates through their serial marriages, moving up in the world with every widowhood. Sarah Offley of Virginia married Adam Thorowgood, a former servant, in 1627. He left her a comfortable inheritance when he died in 1640. Sarah then married Captain John Gookin, the son of a wealthy planter, and when he, too, passed away about three years later, the now-wealthy widow married Francis Yeardley, the son of the famous Temperance Flowerdew. It was natural for a woman to seek a new partner to help her care for her family and property. But all newly empowered widows weren’t willing to give up control in order to acquire a helpmeet. Some married only when they had received legal assurances that they could determine the disposition of their estates. Others took lovers, preferring to live in sin rather than risk the transfer of power that came with matrimony.

  Over a quarter of the early male settlers in the Chesapeake never managed to find a wife, and women were very aware of the advantage the skewed gender ratio gave them. Men complained bitterly about hard-hearted and evasive women, and Virginia passed a law prohibiting women from promising themselves to more than one suitor. In 1624, Eleanor Spragg was sentenced to apologize before her church congregation for the “offence in contracting herself to…several men at one time.” In 1687, William Rascow was so insecure about his fiancée, Sarah Harrison, that he got her to sign an oath promising not to marry anybody else. Oath notwithstanding, Sarah dumped Rascow for James Blair, who she married in a ceremony that did not include the promise to “obey.”

  The people who colonized the South didn’t develop any new philosophies about the proper role of women in society—they just didn’t have the resources to enforce the old rules that most of them still adhered to in theory. Back in England, young women were expected to consult their fathers and the other male authority figures in their lives before choosing a husband—particularly if they were young women of property. But in the South, there was an excellent chance that a girl’s father had died before she became of marriageable age. Nearly a third of the children in the Chesapeake region lost at least one parent by the age of nine, and a quarter were completely orphaned by the time they reached eighteen. Chastity was still regarded as the most important female virtue, but girls were less likely to protect their virginity when they had no parents to supervise them. (In some areas, a third of all brides were already pregnant.) And unlike the unfortunate indentured servants, free women who had sex before marriage were unlikely to pay much of a price. When men outnumbered women six to one, they couldn’t really afford to be too picky about a prospective wife’s past history or object to a stepchild or two in the package. There were plenty of pregnant brides, but outside the servant class, very few unmarried mothers. Despite the wild and wooly ambience of the early southern colonial towns, there is virtually no record of organized prostitution; women apparently found too many other opportunities. A woman’s reputation was important—women frequently sued neighbors who had been overheard referring to them as “whore.” But unmarried men, too, found they had to protect themselves from gossip in a hypercompetitive marriage market. In Maryland, men sometimes filed suit against people who said they were abusive to women, on the grounds that the stories might harm their ability to find a wife.

  What we know about the behavior of early southern women settlers is skewed toward the outrageous, since so many of the surviving records are court documents. But there are enough cases of women physically assaulting their enemies, turning their husbands out of their homes, leading religious dissen
t, and criticizing public officials to make it clear that there were plenty of female émigrés who knew what they wanted and weren’t shy in making their feelings known. Ann Fowler was sentenced to twenty lashes in 1637 for defaming a county justice, Adam Thorowgood, with the somewhat undeferential suggestion that Captain Thorowgood could “Kiss my arse.” The Virginia General Assembly, which had originally held a husband responsible for damages caused by outspoken wives, ruled in 1662 that the wives could pay the penalty themselves, by submitting to a ducking in the river—a de facto acknowledgment that the colony’s husbands could not always control the behavior of their women.

  “WHITE PEOPLE…ARE ENTIRELY

  RUINED AND RENDERED MISERABLE”

  Mary Johnson may have been the first African American woman. She arrived sometime before 1620 as the maid of a Virginia planter. Like white women, the black residents of the early southern colonies found opportunities in the general chaos around them. Johnson and her husband were indentured servants, and once they earned their freedom, they acquired a 250-acre farm and five indentured servants of their own. By the mid–seventeenth century, a free black population had begun to emerge in both the North and the South. African American women, who weren’t bound by the same social constraints as white women, frequently set up their own businesses, running boardinghouses, hair salons, or restaurants. Catering was a particularly popular career, as was trading.

  In Charleston, South Carolina, black women took over the local market, selling vegetables, chickens, and other produce they acquired from the growing population of slaves, who generally had small plots beside their cabins. The city came to depend on the women for its supply of fresh food, and whites complained long and loud about the power and independence of the trading women. In 1686, South Carolina passed a law prohibiting the purchase of goods from slaves, but it had little effect. A half century later, Charleston officials were still complaining about the “exorbitant price” that black women charged for “many articles necessary for the support of the inhabitants.” The trading women had sharp tongues, which they used to good effect. The clerk of the market claimed that the “insolent and abusive Manner” of the slave women made him “afraid to say or do Anything.” It’s hard to believe the marketers, some of whom were slaves, were as outspoken as their clientele made them out to be, but the war between the black female traders and their customers continued on into the nineteenth century. (One petition in 1747 said that because of the market “white people…are entirely ruined and rendered miserable.”)

  The relative openness of life for African Americans only lasted while the black population was small—in the mid-seventeenth century, about 300 black Virginians lived among 15,000 whites. As the number of slaves grew, white Americans began self-consciously marking the differences between the races. White servants complained about being forced to work with blacks, and legislatures passed laws making it more difficult for them to gain their freedom, acquire property, or intermarry. Blacks and whites had married legally in many of the early settlements, and interracial love affairs were common. In Virginia, officials began requiring any white woman who had an illegitimate child “by a Negro” to pay a fine of 15 pounds or spend five years in indentured service. In 1662, Virginia legislators gave white masters free rein to molest their female slaves by declaring that children of slave women were slaves for life, no matter who their fathers were.

  “I FEAR THE POWER OF ENGLAND

  NO MORE THAN A BROKEN STRAW”

  Although women were prohibited from voting or holding office, in the South they did play an active part in the raw politics of early colonial life. The most dramatic example was Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676. The uprising began with a split between the people who lived on the Virginia frontier and the ruling oligarchy headquartered in Jamestown, led by the governor, William Berkeley. By the 1670s almost everything about Virginia society had been rigged to favor the wealthy. The frontier farmers were paying enormous taxes, and getting almost nothing in return because the money quickly went into the hands of a few politically connected families. The rebels, who came to include a number of black Virginians, were generally the more sympathetic figures in this conflict—unless you happened to be an Indian. One of the frontier families’ most bitter complaints was that the governor, who engaged in profitable fur trade with the local tribes, did not share their enthusiasm for a genocidal war against the natives.

  The frontier wives, who were frequently left alone in their remote homesteads, were the most outspoken members of the kill-the-Indians faction. When Nathaniel Bacon began a rebellion aimed at overthrowing Berkeley’s government, the women spread the word about his victories and about the governor’s unwillingness to defend the colonial households. A Mrs. Haviland was a particularly “excellent divulger of news” who directed her friends to go “Up and downe the Country as Bacon’s Emissary to Carry his declarations and papers.” Women also seemed to have taken part in the councils of war and strategy planning. Sarah Drummond, the wife of one of Bacon’s advisers, was a landowner in her own right and an important member of the leadership. When the rebels’ resolve seemed to flag, she picked up a twig and snapped it in two. “I fear the power of England no more than a broken straw,” she said stoutly. Governor Berkeley’s particular bête noire was Sarah Grendon, who he described as the “first great incourager and setter on of the ignorant vulger.” In the great seventeenth-century Virginia tradition, Mrs. Grendon was already on her third husband when the rebellion broke out. Both of her first two husbands left her generous gifts, and she was probably a fairly wealthy woman. The governor never forgot her offenses, and when the rebellion failed, Mrs. Grendon was the only woman he refused to pardon.

  The Baconites did not discriminate much between the sexes, either in their leadership or when they were on the attack. Landowners loyal to the governor left their wives behind to guard their estates under the theory that a lady’s sex would be her best protection against raiders. But the rebels readily took the houses and beat the wives just as they would have the men. When Bacon stormed Jamestown, he sent his troops to round up the wives of the most prominent local men, including one of his own relatives. To buy time for the rebels to strengthen their position, Bacon placed the women along the top of a small fortification he had constructed, to stop the government authorities from rushing the encampment. “The poor Gentlewomen were mightily astonished at this project; neither were their husbands voide of amazements…. This action was a method in war, that they were not well acquainted with…that before they could com to pearce their enemies sides, they must be obliged to dart their weapons through their wives brest,” wrote one annalist. The government forces held their fire.

  The female captives went down in history as the “white aprons,” and although they later became the stars of some very melodramatic Victorian fiction, in reality their role, and that of most other loyalist wives, was essentially passive. The governor’s wife, Lady Frances Berkeley, was a very active exception. Sir William’s critics claimed his much-younger spouse had tormented him with her sexual demands, forcing him to raise money to buy her luxuries to make up for his inadequacies in bed. That sort of theory has been popular throughout history when men try to explain the political activities of strong women. But whatever their private relationship, it was clear that during the uprising Sir William was an increasingly tired old man, while Frances had enough energy for an army. She fled to London when the rebellion began and lobbied vigorously at court to gain support for her husband’s faction. She returned, seemingly triumphant, in the company of one of the royal commissioners and a thousand troops. But once order was restored—a challenge made much simpler by Bacon’s death—Lady Berkeley responded bitterly to efforts by the king’s representatives to limit her husband’s authority. She may have been particularly angry when the commissioners refused to see the female rebels as anything more than hapless housewives led astray. To show her displeasure, she arranged to have the local hangman drive the commissioner
s’ carriage, creating an enormous scandal. When Sir William died in 1677, his wife inherited all his estates and went on to beat Temperance Flowerdew’s record by marrying three governors.

  After Bacon’s defeat, Governor Berkeley’s partisans rode through the farms of their former enemies, evicting families and confiscating everything they owned. Sarah Grendon somehow managed to persuade the men to leave her alone in return for whatever goods they could carry off. But she was eventually charged with treason, a capital crime. Her husband, Thomas, acting on her behalf, approached the royal commissioners and petitioned them to try her themselves rather than leaving her to the mercy of the Berkeley regime. Mrs. Grendon then admitted that “being an Ignorant woman” she had spoken “some foolish and indiscreete words reflecting upon the sloe prosecution of the Indian warr,” and said she was “most heartily sorrowfull for the same.” The commissioners dismissed the charges. Thomas Grendon died several years later, leaving her yet another large bequest, and Sarah went on to marry a fourth husband.

  Sarah Drummond’s husband was hung as a traitor and his estate confiscated. But like Mrs. Grendon, she successfully took refuge in her identity as a powerless woman. She humbly begged the government to restore their property lest her “five poor children” starve. She also began lobbying London, and her protests reached as far as King Charles II, who not only granted her petition but also condemned Governor Berkeley and put a halt to the wave of reprisals. “As I live, the old fool has put to death more people in that naked country than I did in England for the murder of my father,” the king said angrily.