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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.  The family had lived not entirely without luxury.  Crowe (p. 6) tells us that their younger son played the violin.  The older son 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 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 this 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 the onslaught Governor William Berkeley insisted on careful diplomacy with the Indians.  He vetoed any except passive resistance.  He built stockades, for example, on the larger plantations.  According to some, merely 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 own 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 credit Bacon's Long Assembly, called in 1675, with 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.  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 colonial policy as interpreted by the governor.  But since Nicholas had refused to abide with his elder brother after their father's death, we do not even know whether he was still in Virginia.  At the time of "Bacon's Rebellion" he may already have been living with his sister and her husband, Henry King.  If they were already in Maryland, they had 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




          The map 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 in 1666 by the Calverts, whose grandsire had received the royal grant to Maryland.

            Unfortunately, no earlier document for Nicholas's presence in Maryland 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 the marriage, but it more likely had to do with that of his sister, Mary.  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).  This estate again turns up in court in 1682, after Mary, now widowed, marries a Corotoman wheelwright named Charles Merryman.  This couple subsequently removed to Maryland, and this is where young Nicholas entered into a long enduring partnership with his new brother-in-law.  Their relationship continued into the next generations.  A son of Charles and Mary Merryman married Jane Long.  Jane's sister Ann married Mary's nephew, 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 when the Hailes and the Merrymans arrived there.

      Crowe reports (p. 13) that Nicholas 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 livestock, 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 Nicholas first traveled a hundred miles up the Delaware River to Bucks County, Pennsylvania, then together with others from there and from his home in Baltimore County, the party traveled three hundred miles down the Blue Ridge into Virginia.  What kind of man, in his middle years distinguished for 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 Nicholas's 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.  Since 1692, the establishment church in America had beenThe Church of England.  This was the church to which the Hailes contributed in  in 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; their hymns  spread well beyond any church.

        By this time dissenters were being drawn to the port at Baltimore, and Puritans were settling in nearby Annapolis.  Among the many new immigrants to Baltimore County were members of the Society of Friends, for whom the intimate presence of Christ went beyond the church and saturated their everyday affairs.  Their founder, William Penn, was of the same generation with Nicholas of Baltimore, but his son John, who made the Bucks County estate in Pennsylvania into a center of Quakerism, was born in the same year as Nicholas's son.  This is Nicholas of Bedford, whose route from the mouth of the Delaware River up to Bucks County in Pennsylvania and then back down the Blue Ridge 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 Haile family.

       When Nicholas's daughter Ann (1732-69) married a Bucks County carpenter, the record names her father as a resident of that Pennsylvania district.  Ann's husband, William Mead, was named after his grandfather.  At about that time when Nicholas's grandfather had come to the Corotoman, William's had been a prominent  high churchman in England. This elder William Mead is said to have had very liberal opinions, was ejected from the clergy and imprisoned; his children were among the Quakers who settled Bucks County.  Now the Meads' new destination, together with the Nicholas Hailes, was another Quaker settlement in Bedford County, Virginia.  The circumstances suggest that Nicholas, in his youth a pillar in the Church of England, had himself now become a Quaker.  So long as he and his family remained in Baltimore County they were required to pay taxes for support of the Church of England, and also to take communion in that church.  This was not the law in Pennsylvania, and it may not have been observed on the Virginia frontier.

         But religion need not be the only reason for Nicholas's move.  Exhaustion of the tidewater soil by tobacco farming had stirred general migration toward 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 to Maryland and introduced extensive use of slaves, to which the Quakers objected.  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 tradition suggests that Haile and Talbot took some heavy losses. Many ships were lost at sea; many were victims of piracy. 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.  They were a literate, pious people whose ties to one another had in America become stronger than their bonds to England or even 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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