<  PREVIOUS

Nicholas of Watauga
        Nicholas (1724-1818), like his grandfather, was granted a long life.  Born during the reign of George I, he was just a little younger than Robert Walpole, the statesman who established England's constitutional monarchy; and not much older than the American leader who defeated it, George Washington.   This 18th-century Nicholas was in his fifties by the time a new American republic was established on unheard of principles.  He then lived on to experience the presidential administrations of all four founders, Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison.  The America of his birth had comprised only a fringe of settlement along the rim of coastline, but during Nicholas's lifetime Baltimore County swelled with new immigrants.  The wilderness began to seem less impenetrable, opportunities beckoned on the frontiers, and Nicholas's father had already ventured up into the fertile new ground of the Carolina Piedmont.


Before the move, Nicholas (at the age of sixteen, if Crowe's date is correct) had married Ruth Acre, but their first children (Richard, Elizabeth, and William, and Sarah--Crowe, pp. 62-65) were born in Virginia.  From there, young Nicholas and other members of his family (the Talbots, for example) migrated yet farther south to Rowan County, at that time still a part of North Carolina.  Three more sons were born, Nathan, Amon and, yes, a Nicholas.

        By this time troubles with England were disturbing the colonies.  In 1765, the notorious Stamp Act, and then the Quartering Act (which required colonials to provide housing and food for the Redcoats) had provoked the calling of the Continental Congress at Philadelphia.  In 1767, Parliament levied the taxes (the Townsend Act) which set the stage for the Boston Tea Party.  The  backcountry families of the Carolinas were among the first to lash out against corrupt English practices.  The Carolina Regulators, instituted to maintain order, were opposed by the British governor of South Carolina, William Tryon.  In 1771, Tryon executed the leader of the Carolinians, Benjamin Merrill--after the elaborate English fashion of hanging, drawing and quartering. The Watauga Petition of 1776, sometimes referred to as the first American Declaration of Independence, was an early effort toward American self government.  Nicholas's nephew (his brother George's son) is the John Haile (born 1743 in Baltimore, Crowe, pp. 38 f.) who turns up as signatory to this document.  John then fought (together with Matthew Talbot) at King's Mountain in October of 1780.  This decisive battle was between Loyalist and Patriot colonials--Americans on both sides.  John Haile and Matthew Talbot fought as Patriots.  Needless to say, both of them, like their forebears, had once been loyal to their king.

        Nicholas's own son Shadrach (b. 1735, in Baltimore), along with Shadrach's son of the same name, were signatories to the Franklin Petition of 1787, for an independent state.   By this fourth and fifth generation on American soil, a populace now formally separated from England has developed its own distinctive character.  Although they had called themselves Patriots, they by no means championed a strong government of their own.  In the same year as the Franklin Petition, they refused to ratify the Constituion.  Also revealing, perhaps, is the fact that the elder Shadrach signs his name to the Franklin Petition, but the son must mark with his X.

        Francis Baily, a young British banker, scientist, and scholar who toured America just after the Revolution, found the breakfasts remarkable, not so much for the prodigious quantity as for the way all the guests sat around the same table without regard to rank or station.  Even the prices seemed indiscriminate:

 If our table were spread with all the profusion of American luxury, such as ham, cold beef, fried chicken &c. &c., (which are not uncommon for breakfast in this part of the world), or whether we sat down to a dish of tea and hoe-cake, our charge was all the same.  The accommodations we met with on the road were pretty well, considering the short time this country has been settled, and the character and disposition of its inhabitants, which are not those of polished nations, but a character and disposition arising from a consciousness of independence, accompanied by a spirit and manner highly characteristic of this consciousness.  It is not education alone that forms this character of the Americans:  it stands upon a firmer basis than this.  The means of subsistence being so easy in the country, and their dependence on each other consequently so trifling, that spirit of servility to those above them so prevalent in European manners, is wholly unknown to them; and they pass their lives without any regard to the smiles or the frowns of men in power. (p. 42)

Baily himself retained his strong British class consciousness, and was especially sensitive to the rude and sometimes filthy living conditions on the frontier.  He spoke of three "classes" of settlement where we might today speak of three developmental "stages," for Baily meant that the coarseness of manners, food, and shelter was gradually refined by later settlers.  It seems probable that the Hailes were never really out at the true wilderness frontier, but may have belonged to the second or third wave, moving in to occupy lands still relatively cheap but already cleared of the most vicious Indian resistance, and where a modicum of cleanliness and regularity was becoming possible.


         Nicholas and Ruth returned to Baltimore.  Here at age 42, Ruth gave birth to her last child, Joshua Thomas.  Within a few years, three of the boys (Richard, Nathan, and Amon) were old enough to join Washington's Continental Army.  After Independence, Nicholas as well as his brother George and their by now grown children headed back down the Blue Ridge for Watauga.  The young men who had fought in the Revolution had bounty lands waiting.  The earliest evidence of the family's presence in what is today Washington County is Nicholas's will, dated in April of 1807.  He actually had more than a decade of life yet left to him, and would outlive the youngest son mentioned in the will.

top

bottom



The New Republic and its Western Waters

         Among the major issues confronting the new government in Philadelphia were its debts to the veterans who had served under George Washington.  So long as the revered general was Head of State, factionalism remained furtive, and partisanship was despised.  Nonetheless, two fairly distinct mind sets did emerge in the former colonies and become dominant just as soon as the first president stepped down.  There were those who, like Washington himself, favored the strongest possible executive.  John Adams, and especially Washington's favorite, Alexander Hamilton, felt this way.  Hamilton argued for a national bank, for example, which would enable payment of the Continental Army.  Theirs was the so called Federalist view.  It appealed particularly to commercial class in New England, possibly because they desired reconciliation with their counterparts in England. 

        Agricultural people, on the other hand, were still apprehensive of government and jealous of their local control.  They began to call themselves Republicans, in admiration of the radical new republic set up in France.  France was at odds with England, and so were the Republicans, who included the entire Virginia leadership, Jefferson as well as his successors, Presidents Madison and Monroe.  Nicholas and his sons may not have been francophiles like Jefferson, but they cherished his hostility toward England.  They were also opposed to concentration of wealth and power, especially in government.  As to the unpaid soldiers, Jefferson argued that they had already sold their claims to speculators for cash money anyhow, and at a discount.

       The Hamiltonian principle prevailed for a time, the national debt was honored, but the infant republic still stood at a crossroads.  Was it to grow into the powerful nation Washington, Hamilton, and Adams envisaged?  Or would a free citizenry, the ideal of Jeffersonian Republicans, remain beyond the reach of national taxes and compulsion?  The question loomed portentously when the Federalists under the Adams administration passed the Alien and Sedition Acts.  The Kentucky Resolution and the Virginia Resolution (composed by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, 1799) declared these laws beyond the Constitutional powers of the federal government, hence null and void.  It was the first intimation of states rights and the possibility of states withdrawing from the Union.

        But in 1800, Thomas Jefferson succeeded to the presidency, served two terms and was himself followed by Virginian protégés.  James Madison found his new nation again in conflict with Great Britain, a main issue being freedom of the seas.  Madison's supporters were planters like Nicholas Haile.  Threatened by England's threat to shipping as well as by Indian depredations, Virginians were now eager to supply the national force which they had hitherto despised.  But now the merchants in New York and New England had also shifted allegiance.  They cultivated good relations both with their British business associates the with Indian tribes allied with Great Britain, so that Congress waffled on support for Madison's military.  All this brought the war home to the Haile family.
Joshua

        Joshua Thomas Haile (1767-1813), like his father and grandfather, grew up in Baltimore County.  The great event of his boyhood had been the War of Independence.  Andrew Jackson, born in in the same year as Joshua, could personally testify to brutality under the sword of British officers.  While Joshua may not have acquired Andrew's profound hatred of all things British, he may well have had similar memories.  As an eight-year-old with three brothers in the Continental Army, he surely gazed in awe upon Patriot soldiers.  He married the daughter of a captain in the Continental Army, Joshua Stephensen of Baltimore.  After the War of Independence, Joshua and Mary followed the family back to Tennessee.  Mary produced ten children there before leaving her husband a widower in his middle forties.  Joshua might well have thought himself too old for military service.  He now had children to look out for, the youngest just seven.

         But he was not free of animosity toward the British and toward the Indians.   Joshua joined the Stewart's “Kentucky” militia in Knoxville on May 29th of 1813, for five years.  He was immediately dispatched into the Indian infested forests of Ohio, probably arriving in time to take part in the sieges of Fort Meigs and Fort Stephenson that summer. The Kentucky militia were the troops with which William Henry Harrison had defeated Tecumse's Indian Confederation in Indiana and Ohio, and then defeated the British at Lake Erie.  The Kentuckians are reported to have suffered 64% of all casualties in the War of 1812.  Joshua died in the wartime Ohio capital, Chillicothe, on September first of the year of his enlistment.  Chillicothe was the militia's important station en route to the front, and the wounded from the battles were no doubt brought back there. 

       The British were not to be defeated for another two years, at New Orleans by Joshua's countrymen, the Volunteers from Tennessee under Andrew Jackson.  His victory came just in time to quash yet another plan to secede from the Union, this time by New Englanders oposed to the war.  Massachussetts' governor had already sent a secret delegation to England to work out a separate peace.  In the winter of 1814-1815, at the Hartford Convention, Massachussetts along with Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Vermont were deliberating the constitutionality of the Madison administration, and of perhaps simply expelling the southern states from the Union.

         It may take some effort on our part to appreciate Joshua's motive for volunteering.  His short career, which links a tidewater family with its Western descendants, offers an opportune point to review the old colonial frame of mind in a developing new nation.  The fierce loyalty which characterized an agrarian population constantly at watch over family and community may be beyond our comprehension today, as is the temper of a father shielding his household against marauding savages.  On the other hand, we may in our world have a heightened appreciation for economic incentives.  Land, in Joshua's world still the basis of all wealth, was either inherited, obtained by head right, or awarded as bounty for service.  The Hailes had as yet no experience with a money economy, that is to say, they knew neither wages nor monetary expenditures.  They understood economics in simple terms of land.  Land had caused them to leave Baltimore before the War for Independence; land lured them back from Baltimore to Watauga as soon as it was over.  Bounty land may have been part of Joshua's motive in 1813, for forsaking his children and joining the militia.  Joshua's daughter Bethsheba applied for the deceased soldier's service bounty in behalf of herself and her siblings.

Soil Capital

        Obviously,  capital in an agrarian world was not the same as  the capital in our industrial one.  Money, the economist likes to observe, is fungible; land is not.  In an industrial economy money is understood as income and outgo.  It is readily measurable against labor and against the necessities of life, hence money is closely identified with wages and living expenses.  The value of the money itself fluctuates with the productivity achieved by men and machines.  Most moderns do not regard their wages as capital, or treat them as such; rather, they contrast wages with capital (and in a radical democracy like ours, the opinion of most people is the operative principle).

      Land, on the other hand, is necessarily capital, and nothing else.  It may incidentally supply expendable income, but "spending money" provided by a "money crop" is lagniappe, clearly distinguishable from the land itself.  The agrarian mind does not view its capital in the industrial, democratic way, any more than it could confuse land with income and outgo.   Land can provide a living in return for its owner's diligence and frugality, by the grace of God.  But first of all the land must be conserved, then improved by hard labor.  In addition to the social standing and sustenance it provides, the soil may sometimes yield up an increase. A few years down the line, there may even accrue a surplus.  In that case, more land can be acquired.  Joshua's incentive to acquire land needs to be understood from that agrarian point of view held by his father and grandfathers.

        The four Nicholas's had themselves watched the old world change round about them.  First, the colonists had been able to open the physical landscape westward, and then to the south.  They had finally acquired independent control over it.  They had taken on character as they married into their own homogeneous community and developed their Protestant, backwoods culture.  They maintained their distinctive qualities while everything about them changed.  All these families, the Haile / Travers / Merryman/ Garrett / Stone / Long / Mead / Talbot /Acre / Stephenson bloodline--all had elected to leave their community for wilderness abodes.  They were not and had never been the good solid folk who stayed home.  Nor did they resemble their staid Puritan contemporaries in Massachussetts.  Their seed constituted a westward rolling phalanx which seems to have contained its own restless search for newground.  Already Nicholas of Baltimore, son of an "adventurer," skipped his new home in Virginia for Maryland.  The next Nicholas ventured out into the mountains of Pennsylvania and Virginia.  His son, Nicholas of Watauga, shuttled between Maryland and Tennessee.  Their tobacco growing culture remained recognizable, still fairly profitable but problematic and opportunistic.  The loss of the family's youngest boy, Joshua, to an indeterminate war in remote Ohio brought hardship, but no radical change in his children's outlook.
        
        The old agrarian economics still prevailed in the South and on the frontier, as it did in the minds of Presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.  Joshua's children continued in the old frugal farm ways.  To them spending money was akin to frivolity, and taxes were the germ of tyranny.  Yet commerce and industry were everywhere becoming dominant.  Prosperous business people did know the value of money and recognized the benefits in a strong nation, a government able to bring force to bear.  The division between the farmers and the businessmen became most apparent when it came to raising revenue.  At this time government's major funding source was tariffs on imports.  Incidentally, tariffs had side effects which worked ill for the farmer, good for the manufacturer.  The economic divide between farming and manufacturing worked as a regional divide as well.  In the northeast, commerce and industry were creating a new, modern capitalism which would quickly marginalize the old capitalism based on soil.
Independence and Servitude

        For settlers in the Carolinas, the quarrel with England had related to their intense drive for new lands.  When the Royal Colony of North Carolina was demarcated from Virginia in the late 1720s, the king encouraged settlement from both sides of the Atlantic.  Soon, the enterprising hunters, traders, surveyors and farmers came into conflict with the king's own treaties with the Indians, which barred encroachments on their lands.  The correspondence of William Mead and Matthew Talbot with John Blair offered a good example of that.  Blair assures the Indians that if Mead were shown to be in the wrong, Mead would be punished; if, on the other hand, the Indians had in fact looted and killed, then Colonel Washington would not support their "folly."  One can understand how Mead and his friends might have chafed at such unequal treatment.

        It is not surprising that Nicholas's son-in-law Matthew Talbot was a signatory to the Watauga Petition, desiring independence of North Carolina (even before the American Declaration of Independence).   Another signatory was Nicholas's nephew John (George's son, Crowe, p. 38).  Both men fought the Loyalists at The Battle of Kings Mountain in 1780, which marked the decisive phase in the War for Independence.  Although Haile and Talbot called themselves Patriots, they did not mean it in our sense.  North Carolina refused to ratify the Constitution; Nicholas's own son and grandson signed the Franklin petition in 1787, proclaiming a new republic west of the Appalachians, independent of  the United States.

        The illiteracy which the younger Shadrach Haile demonstrated on that occasion was only one of the consequences of wilderness living.  Another was a hand-to-mouth economy.  A family's possessions lay exclusively in land and the labor to till it.  Clans tried to stick together. There were lots of double cousins.  Children were an indispensable asset.  The mother loved to name a son Shadrach, thus promising at least two more boys to come.  She routinely produced a child every two years, so that a brood of fifteen is not unusual.  If a father died and left minor children, they would be welcomed by other land owners as indentured servants, as was the fortune of at least one of Nicholas's  grandchildren, Joshua's son.

         These were the same feudal concepts inherited from the Middle Ages and brought over to the Corotoman in the mid 1600s.  That first Nicholas understood the land as enfeofed, that is to say, granted by his liege lord in return for loyalty and services.  Nicholas, in turn, was lord to his own servants to whom he granted their living on the king's land.  At home in England they would have been called villeins, or serfs:  free, but no less bound to the land than was their lord himself.  Nicholas and his transported servants brought with them the old traditional attachments, implemented now by means of the indenture, also an ancient English institution.  Indenture was a contract which took its name from the distinctive wavy cut along the top of the document.  Indentures had long been customary in England between master and apprentice, spelling out their mutual obligations for a specified term.  Scholars estimate that the majority of all immigrants to the early colonies came as indentured servants.  Nicholas and his progeny for several generations relied on this institution to raise their tobacco.

       Indenture bound the worker, in return for passage to Virginia, to a number of years' service, usually four to seven, but subject to extension for infractions.  The master was in turn bound to provide sustenance, shelter and, at the end of the term, a new suit of clothes and other help to independence.  Nicholas obtained his initial land grant in return for transporting his indentured servants, and subsequently had to make more than one transatlantic voyage. The skilled and faithful labor required by tobacco growing was by no means plentiful in Virginia, so Nicholas's progeny continued the same practice.  Records show, for example, how one William Obrel, a convict indentured to Nicholas's grandson George in Baltimore County, ran away in March of 1770 (Crowe, p. 18).  This same George also purchased indentured servants in America.  When he was about to move to Watauga, he
 paid the passage of eight Irish bondsmen, off the block, Baltimore, and took them with him and his family to his new home.  They all worked out their time, married and made good citizens.  He also took with him several negro slaves. (quoted from personal papers of the Gresham family in Jonesborough, TN by Crowe, p. 31)

 The family was still relying on indentured servants.  An application for a Revolutionary War pension by one Peter Finn, who claims to have served at Valley Forge, tells how his "former guardian Nicholas Haile" (at that time a man in his fifties) had hired him to go along to North Carolina.   Finn again volunteered for military service in Watauga, and was among the Patriots at Kings Mountain.

          Already in the 1650s, when Nicholas was bringing indentured servants to the Corotoman, Britain was introducing Negro slavery into her Caribbean sugar plantations.  In the 1720s, when she opened the dense South Carolina back country, she used extensive slave labor. But raw hands from Africa were ill suited to the cultivation of tobacco, and remained impractical in Nicholas's Virginia.  Nonetheless, his son Nicholas of Baltimore does mention "three old negroes" in his own will of 1729.  Nicholas of Watauga mentions only one Negro in his will, whom it sets free, but the the testator, now in his eighties, may have already disposed of others.  I do have to reproduce below a document showing that Nicholas's grandson was involved in slave negotiations.   At that point I will discuss how a new commodity, cotton, contributed to a slave economy, and I speculate on the broader implications for this family.  Slavery is a practice so sensationally condemned that historians tend to develop its ethical and moral grievousness more fully than they detail its social and economic emergence.  It may be that the latter contexts can be made more understandable by means of individual experiences, as in these six generations from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries in Maryland, Virginia, and Tennessee.

                             NEXT >
Contents                                                                                                                      Home