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.
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.