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Migration

        Nicholas on the Corotoman had probably been prompted by England's Civil War to seek opportunities in Virginia.  He had a tough time of it, and died in his early forties. His wife, Mary, survived him by no more than three years (Crowe, p. 4, finds record of his elder son's being appointed in March of 1671/2 as administrator of Mary's estate).  The family had lived not entirely without luxury.  Crowe (p. 6) tells us that their younger son played the violin.  The older expanded his father's holdings along the Corotoman and served as Justice in Lancaster County during the 1680s and '90s.  He married the daughter of a Captain John Rogers, and had three children.  The younger son, Nicholas, moved to Maryland and married there.  Generations after him long continued to name a son Nicholas, so that to avoid confusion I shall distinguish them by region.  Although the family remained anchored in Baltimore County, Maryland for several more generations, we can call the first to move there

Nicholas of Baltimore.

      This second Nicholas (ca. 1657-1729) turns up in Lancaster County, Virginia records (Crowe, p. 6) when he registers his own mark for cattle and hogs, then again after the death of his father in 1672, when it is recorded that "Nicholas Haile is gone away from his brother George Haile to his brother-in-law Henry King and estate to go to said King."  If this formulation suggests some willfulness in the seventeen-year-old, then it may be an early indication of a rambunctious personality.  Crowe's report that the boy's sister had married Henry King in the summer of 1668 in Augusta County (p. 5) is puzzling.  One might question whether Henry King and his wife had really ventured out into this wilderness at a time when colonial settlement had not yet reached beyond the tidewater.  It is worth remembering, though, because some eighty years later Nicholas's son and grandson, as well as numerous nieces and nephews, did in fact settle there. 

        Nicholas turned eighteen in the year of the comet.  A comet was recognized immediately as ominous, and this one was followed first by an unprecedented infestation of pigeons, then by renewed Indian attacks.  In response to this onslaught the governor, Sir William Berkeley, insisted on careful diplomacy with the Indians.  He vetoed any except passive resistance, for example, building stockades on the larger plantations.  According to some, spending tax money on defenses constituted ineffectual protection of the wealthy, paid for by the poor. A young, newly arrived aristocratic firebrand, Nathaniel Bacon, claimed the governor was coddling the Indians to save his investments in fur trading.  Bacon aroused defiant, highly successful attacks on the savages, and quickly became as immensely popular among the common people as he was hated by the vindictive, extremely unpopular old Governor Berkeley.  All that saved Berkeley may have been Bacon's early death from disease and exposure in October, 1676.  Historians (who like to choose sides) are divided about "Bacon's Rebellion."  Some of them call it a proper Revolution, and praise the Long Assembly called in 1675 for anticipating most of the measures taken by the Continental Congress a century later; others deny Bacon credit for that, and emphasize the prudence of old Governor Berkeley.  In any case, the rapidity with which Bacon was able to raise his rabble army, the sheer size of it, and its consistent successes up until Bacon's death cast a stark light on what desperate conditions still prevailed along the James River at the end of the century.

    At the time Bacon took up his battles, Nicholas was scarcely ten years younger than he.  One naturally wonders what such an age difference might have meant in those days.  Both young men were presumably royalists.  One might guess that young Nicholas up on the Corotoman was as enthusiastic about the dashing, courageous, and brilliant Bacon as were the impoverished rebels on the James River.  In addition, if Nicholas was continuing his father's tobacco farming he surely shared some of Bacon's many grievances against English policy as interpreted by the governor.  But since Nicholas had refused to abide with his elder brother after their father's death in 1672, we do not even know whether he was still in Virginia in 1675.  At the time of "Bacon's Rebellion" he may already have been living with his sister and her husband, Henry King, in Augusta County.  If they had already moved to Maryland, they encountered similar unrest there, where the Complaint from Heaven with a Huy and Crye and a Petition out of Virginia and Maryland appeared in 1676.  These grievances, like Bacon's down in Virginia, constituted a petition to the King of England, begging for royal protection against local abuses.
Maryland



          Maryland had its beginnings as a royal grant to George Calvert, first Lord of Baltimore (it had first been in Newfoundland, but the forbidding climate caused him to seek better prospects further south).  Despite opposition from the Virginians, he obtained a charter to "Terra Maria" north of the Potomac, where his establishment of Maryland set a northern boundary to Virginia.  This was in 1632, the year of Lord Baltimore's death, but his sons initiated settlement in 1634.  The beginnings were auspicious. The settlers arrived in the spring, and so enjoyed a harvest in the fall, the Indians were friendly.  Of course the Civil War cut off their royal support for a time, but the Virginians had it no better.  Cecil Calvert had begun encouraging immigration to Maryland even before Nicholas came of age.  In 1660, Cecil's eldest son, Charles, became governor of the some 8,000 souls scattered over Maryland counties.  By 1675, the year of Cecil's death, the population of Maryland stood at nearly 15,000.  If young Nicholas was among them, as seems possible, then he witnessed yet another doubling of the Maryland population before the end of the century.  The  map above is taken from A Character of the Province of Maryland by George Alsop, one of those scoundrels who had been sent to Maryland as punishment.  After his four years' sentence, Alsop promptly returned to England.  Nevertheless, he wrote in lavish praise of Maryland, and his book was published as propaganda by the Calverts.

            Unfortunately, no earlier document for Nicholas in Baltimore County exists than the birth of a child in 1702, then in a 1707 land deed (where he declares himself to be 50 years old).  Crowe notes (p.6) that he had married Frances Garrett, daughter of Dennis Garrett and Barbara Stone Garrett, then goes on to discuss the prominent Stone family (pp. 10-13), connected with the Calverts (the Lords Baltimore).  This excellent marriage might seem to attest to Nicholas's eligibility and to his having arrived in Maryland at a marriageable time of life (that is to say, rather earlier than later in the last quarter of the 17th century).  His move from Virginia might even have been occasioned by marriage, but it was more likely that of his sister.  After the death of their father, Nicholas had gone to live with Mary, bringing along his share in the estate (Lancaster Court records, 12 Nov. 1672).  The Haile estate again turns up in court in 1682, when Mary, now widowed, marries a Corotoman wheelwright named Charles Merryman.  This couple subsequently removed to Maryland, and here Nicholas entered into a long enduring partnership with his new brother-in-law.  Their relationship continued into the next generations, e.g., a son of Charles and Mary Merryman married Jane Long.  Jane's sister Ann Long married the son of Nicholas and Frances (née Garrett) whom I treat below as Nicholas of Bedford.

        Whatever the exact date of his arrival in Maryland, the site of its future busy port was still idyllic in Nicholas's day.

      Crowe reports (p. 13) that he and his wife Frances  had a "'plantation dwelling' known as Part of Merryman's Lot and Haile’s Addition."  She identifies the location as (in 1978) the site of the President's home at Johns Hopkins University.  Around 1700, colonial "plantation" need have meant no more than its literal "planting."  Nicholas and Frances's home was most likely of hewn logs, but the century did see some very respectable dwellings.  It might have had two stories, four rooms above and below, perhaps a fireplace in each, but no closets and certainly no water closet.  A "mansion" would have several outbuildings for tools, feed, perhaps a kitchen, one or more privies.   Alsop's description of Maryland, published to encourage Englishmen to immigrate, is written from the point of view of a bonded laborer on just such a tobacco producing farm.  Alsop claims that though field labor is hard, the master's son works by the servants' side.


            At about this time, Negroes began to appear as "indentured," and before long there were laws regulating their permanently indentured status.  As to the slaves now invariably mentioned in the Maryland wills, I lived at a time which still forbade equanimity in handling the issue. We do well to repeat that bound servitude--mostly white--was fundamental to the economy of colonial Virginia, where labor was crucial and always at a premium.  Cotton, on the other hand, had not yet become the profitable crop whose vast labor requirements were to make black slavery so widespread--and so ugly.  Nonetheless, although bondage in seventeenth-century Maryland may have been radically different from that in nineteenth-century cotton fields, the institution does constitute a distinctive feature of colonial society (from New England to the Carolinas), even if it is only one small difference among many greater ones.  The Negroes who begin to show up in wills toward the end of the 17th century may appear something like pets in the household, usually assigned to a particular family member.  Rarely, a Negro close to the testator is set free if means can be provided to care for him.

        It has in any case become entirely proper to take offense at the past.  A most highly respected book on Virginia history, Edmund S. Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom (1975), judges early America in the light of twentieth-century Civil Rights, then  devotes many pages  to upbraiding the colonials for their "racism," "race hatred," etc.  Thus the historian (b. Minnesota, 1916) draws on concepts not yet formulated in his own school days and certainly not verbalized until his young manhood in order to explain to us a culture emerging over 300 years earlier.  Certainly none would quarrel with Morgan's conclusion that Thomas Jefferson's thinking (as representative of America's founders) is "inconsistent" with his twentieth-century premises.

        Nicholas of Baltimore, born during Cromwell's Protectorate, lived to see both the Restoration and the death of Charles II, the coronation of James II and the Glorious Revolution followed by the benign rule of William and Mary.  He lived on to see the last of the Stuarts, Queen Anne, and before he died the Hanoverian George I had ascended to the throne of England.  Nicholas's will, dated 1729 / 30 and printed in Crowe, has become popular on the internet for the light it sheds on the property of a typical first generation Maryland settler.

        Maryland did not yet have a cash economy (although "proclamation" currency, heavily discounted, was issued by colonial governors).  Wealth consisted in one's station, in realty, and in personalty including servants.  Nicholas left a respectable, but by no means a large estate:  a few hundred acres, some live stock, and apparently three Negroes, whom he calls "old" even while making provision for any children the "Negro women" might yet bear.  I presume that at his advanced age the testator was resident with one of the seven children named in the will, Crowe, pp. 7-8 and 24-5.  Crowe assembles two or three Haile wills on these pages, commenting that they shed great light on the life of the times.  She also includes some wills from families who intermarried with the Haile children--the Merrymans, Longs, Chenowiths, e.g., were close.
Nicholas of Bedford County, Va.

        About Nicholas on the Corotoman and his son who established himself in Baltimore County I have been able to say little beyond alluding to the larger historical circumstances to which they were responding.  This third Nicholas (ca. 1700-1760) emerges more as a personality.  Unsurprisingly, that makes his life only more enigmatic.  He was born into an established Baltimore County family (at present-day Towson).  He made a good marriage to Ann Long on Christmas Day in 1723, and was a main contributor to St. Paul's Episcopal Church.  Today it is an imposing edifice, said still to contain a plaque naming Nicholas as a contributor (Crowe, p. 14) .  It replaced this much more modest building:


         As best I can understand Crowe, this church may mark the site of Nicholas's "Chapel of Ease," a contemporary designation for "church." While Crowe seems to have accumulated extensive notes on this Nicholas (pp. 13-15), she does not speculate why the scion of a prosperous merchant planter in his forties would with his entire family leave a comfortable tidewater home and move to a dangerous frontier.  There is evidence that he first traveled a hundred miles up the Delaware River to Bucks County, Pennsylvania, then together with others from there and from Baltimore County, three hundred miles down the Blue Ridge into Virginia.  What kind of man, distinguished by his support of the establishment religion, making contributions beyond the compulsory taxes, would seek out the center of a religion despised by the better sort of his day?  Part of the answer may arise from the date of his birth.  Men born at the turn of the century produced one of America's great spiritual movements.
The Great Awakening

        Maryland's founders had been Catholic, and somewhat more tolerant than their Protestant neighbors.  Especially the Act Concerning Religion (1649) attracted colonists from numerous denominations.  The Church of England had been the establishment church since 1692, but Puritans were settling in nearby Annapolis, and dissenters were also drawn to Baltimore Town, founded in 1729.    Jonathan Edwards' Boston pulpit was still Church of England, the same church as christened John Wesley, born in the same year as Jonathan Edwards (1703).  The Wesley brothers had visited Georgia just at the time when the young Charles Wesley was beginning to compose such profoundly emotional songs as "Jesus Lover of my Soul," "Depth of Mercy," "Hark the Herald Angels Sing," and many others.  The Wesley "Method" inspired staid high-church congregations, and their hymns  spread well beyond any church. Among the many new immigrants to Baltimore County were also members of the Society of Friends, for whom the intimate presence of Christ was important in everyday affairs.  Their founder was of the same generation with Nicholas of Baltimore, but William Penn's son John, who made the Bucks County estate in Pennsylvania into a center of Quakerism, was born in the same year as Nicholas of Bedford, whose route from Baltimore (down on the Chesapeake) up the Delaware to Bucks County is apparent on this map:  




It is taken from taken Robert Ramsey (Carolina Cradle.  Settlement of the Northwest Carolina Frontier 1747-1762 [1964]), who describes

 a broad, fertile, grassy unsettled belt stretching from the Delaware westward and southward along both sides of the Blue Ridge and into the Yadkin-Catawba basin of western North Carolina.  John Lederer, in August, 1670, passed through Manassas Gap in the Blue Ridge and "descended into broad savannas, flowery meads, where herds of red deer were feeding.  The grass which sprang from the limestone soil was so high they could tie it across their saddles.  Since the Indians burned their land over every autumn to make their game preserve, it was only lightly wooded with occasional groves of oak or maple"

It was this southern expanse which soon attracted the family.

       When Nicholas's daughter Ann (1732-69) married a Bucks County carpenter named William Mead (1727-1805) the record names her father as  a resident there.  Mead's grandfather of the same name had been a prominent  high churchman in England at about that time when Nicholas's grandfather had come to the Corotoman. He was said to have had very liberal opinions, was ejected from the clergy and imprisoned; William Mead's children were among the Quakers who settled Bucks County.  Why might Nicholas have gone there?  So long as the family remained in Baltimore County they were required both to pay taxes for support of the Church of England, and to take communion in that church.  That was not the law in Pennsylvania, and the law may not have been observed on the Virginia frontier.

         Religion need not be the only reason for Nicholas's move.  Exhaustion of the tidewater soil by tobacco farming had stirred general migration to the piedmont.  At the same time, vast land grants to families like the Carters, the Byrds, etc., increased the number and size of plantations.  Demand for labor encouraged large-scale immigration and introduced extensive use of slaves.  Nicholas had begun to explore other business, probably overseas trade in tobacco, and had taken on as partner a fellow member of St. Paul's Church who was about his own age, Matthew Talbot, born 1699.  Family traditions suggest that Haile and Talbot took some heavy losses.  This era of hostility between France and England witnessed notorious privateering on the high seas.

        The Hailes, the Talbots, and the Meads became typical Virginia families of the eighteenth century.  The former had come to the New World as tobacco growers, the Meads as high church dissenters.  All were literate, pious people who formed ties to one another stronger than their bonds to England or to the Church of England. The Hailes continued for two or three more generations to look back on Baltimore County as home, but they had never really been urban people, and Baltimore was now growing into a population center. 



    Maryland's capitol, Annapolis, was still its major settlement, but Baltimore Town was experiencing some urbanization already before the  time of American Independence,  As a burgeoning port, it was the first stop for refugees from the oppressive slums in England.  They found work in its iron foundry (George Washington's father owned an interest).  The liberal policy of the Calverts had made Maryland attractive to zealots persecuted in England, the Quakers being just one example.

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