TIDEWATER TO DUSTBOWL
Why Ask?
    I would like to know what my people were looking for.  What was the purpose of their arduous quest out of the south of England in the 1600s, down the Virginia Blue Ridge in the 1700s, and finally onto the western plains in the 1800s?  History in the schoolbooks follows political contests, violent conflicts and popular trends.  An individual, to be considered at all, must figure in these larger schemes.  Genealogists do seek out particulars; on gravestones and in court houses they trace a family as meticulously as historians follow received opinion.  Here is a little essay between history and genealogy.  It traces the sufferings and accomplishments of individuals from the 17th to the 20th century.  Urbane historians scold the early Virginians for "excessive individualism," "expansionism," even "racism."  My hope, on the other hand, would be to learn from those rural farmers of previous centuries.
 
History distorts the past

   I am certainly aware that my own present can never understand times past.  The mirror of history, like the mirror on our wall must by its very structure cast a deceptive reflection.  While the physical mirror simply reverses foreground and background, right and left, history contains more serious, but more subtle distortions.  All the figures mirrored there are headed in my direction.  I not only approve of that, I presume that they know where they are going.  The reflecting surface is shaped, of course, by my own present moment.  The more I allow my present to be informed by the banalities of the day, the less I am able to make out past lives as they were lived.  I always have to remind myself that those who appear to be looking in my direction, are people gazing into the unknown. 

       And their own mirror was deceptive, too.  Making the best of their passing moment, they often pursued goals which were already unrealistic at the time. Their very language was based on understandings out of their past.  The language I speak contains assumptions quite different from theirs, and often in conflict with what they believed.  Shall I try to use their language, as if in discourse with them?  Shall I speak my own tongue, in hopes I will be understood by my contemporaries?  Or shall I go farther, as the history writers do, and  trim my vocabulary, even my chronological apparatus, to political dictate?  Dilemmas like this constitute huge impediments to history writing--many readers do not even wish to overcome them.  Let us see if we can follow the trials of one family, whether we can sympathize with their changing views and understandings.
English America

        We are a typical American family, in our own way.  America is popularly referred to as a "great melting pot," where the volume of "great migrations" increased with the passage of time until at last "inclusiveness" and "tolerance" became watchwords in our great nation.  This family was part of it, yet all the while remaining a strictly inbred line--only English during the 17th and 18th centuries in Virginia and Maryland.  Their earlier home in the south of England, populated for centuries by West Saxons, had been little affected by Scandinavian invasions to the north and east.  At last (in the 9th American generation) a marriage in Texas with Laura Ann Kirk, a freckle-faced girl of Scots blood.  One seeks in vain for a German, Scandinavian, much less an Eastern European or Mediterranean name.  There are many, many families like this, set off from 21st-century "multicultural" America, yet offering the easily discernible tracer for history over the past four hundred years of that growing population.

    After they left their homeland, they did not remain settled for long.  Obviously having found cause to leave England, they were not very complacent about America, either.  They seem seldom to have regarded themselves as belonging to the solid, satisfied citizenry, however well they might have been faring.  Even at moments of respectability, even perhaps prominence in their community, not only the children but also the parents were apt to up and move away.  One can speculate why that was so.  Exhaustion of the soil by tobacco was an early cause for moving on.  The vast royal grants to families like the Carters, the Byrds, Fairfaxes, Culpeppers, Beverleys may have hastened removal from the Tidewater.  Acquisitiveness certainly played its rôle as they migrated down the piedmont.  Devastation and despair, perhaps even their own misdeeds, drove them out of Tennessee.  Certain early travelers thought migration characteristic of the New World.

       In my own day we used the word "home" for the grandparents' residence, and I suspect this had been so for some generations.  When hostilities broke out in the 1770s, the boys returned "home" to Baltimore in order to enlist in the Continental Army.  That was their grandparents' residence, and perhaps their great-grandmother, a Garrett, had been born there, as had they and their own parents and grandparents.  But actually already those grandparents as well as parents had spent their mature years on the Virginia and Tennessee frontiers.  Still, the family would  never again reside in one place as long as they had in Baltimore.

       This unsettled quality of life may have contributed to what modern historians generalize as "individualism."   Not only was each subsequent generation likely to move on, but  distance required young people ever to start their family afresh.  Boys might set out on their own in their teens.  Girls did not enter into marriages arranged by their parents.  Where a European couple might feel burdened by family traditions, Americans were more likely to seek out tradition, or even to try to establish a tradition for their own children.  Whether it was good for the individual thus always to have to "start from scratch" is open to discussion.  It was typical of my family so long as they were attached to the land, that is, until into the twentieth century.
Land and Labor

    The first of my family I can trace were no grand aristocrats, nor were they quite among the servant class, either.  Rather, they were country folk displaced probably by Oliver Cromwell and his Puritan Roundheads.  They called themselves "adventurers," the word in that day for our "entrepreneurs."  Station and rank were of paramount importance to them; and these were  inseparably associated with land.  Their eagerness to acquire land attracted them to the New World.  The same motive led to their continued migration.  Like many other Virginia families, they never accommodated to the commercial, industrial, urban outlook and way of life.  In the feudal economy which they brought with them to the New World, land was held at the pleasure of the king, who received allegiance and rent in return.  The same relationship bound servants to  the king's representative, who was their master.  Primogeniture and entail, common in England, had helped motivate emigration, and were among the institutions to be abolished in America.

       Since time out of mind, inseparable from land has been the labor to work it.  The first of our family obtained his holding  in return for transporting servants to Virginia, who were in turn indentured to him.  Bonded servitude continued to supply labor for the family's tobacco production during subsequent generations in Maryland, Virginia, and even in Tennessee as late as the eighteenth century.  It was replaced only by slave labor.
 
        The first settler established himself in Virginia; his elder son continued there.  The younger moved to Maryland, lived long and produced a large family.  His children were ready to forsake the narrow tidewater for the piedmont.  They would strike out not just individually, but as a tribe--brothers, sisters, uncles, cousins, still toting heirlooms from England as they moved from Baltimore County first to the Blue Ridge, then in the very next generation to the frontier of North Carolina.  Here they again braved the gloom of the wilderness "forest primæval" and contended with the increasingly hostile natives.

    Young men served in militias to protect their families, but also to defeat the British monarchy in the 1770s and again in 1813.  Partly with the help of resulting bounty lands, they took up "overmountain" settlement beyond the Appalachians.  They were not the first to do so, but were drawn on by ebullient American expansionism.  Whether the "Western Waters" drained by the Ohio and Mississippi were to be governed by Spain or France remained long uncertain.  The Hailes were among those proposing an entirely new republic on the Watauga, foreshadowing later projects by Aaron Burr or by Sam Houston--and others.  Some of the family continued to drive the Indians before them as they pressed on westward, but our immediate forebear continued tobacco farming and merchant business on the Cumberland.  One of his sons set up a trading establishment there, others became lawyers, preachers, smiths, land speculators.  A peaceful half century was broken by the overwhelming War.  The storekeeper was seized for supplying Rebel troops.  He died in political prison.  His son, also imprisoned, came out to Texas when they paroled him.  The grandchildren at last had to adapt to a new industrial age, something the family had long resisted.
When and Where?

        Genealogists turn up the first Hailes in the Jamestown settlement, because that is what they are looking for, and Maude Crowe, Descendants from First Families of Maryland and Virginia (1978), believed she had found such records.  Many other people copied them out of her book.  I will sketch them in here.  I doubt that we have a direct forebear among them, but their wretched experience at the beginning of the century is in any case relevant.  It was closely evaluated by the more successful "adventurers" who came up the Rappahannock a few years later.  And of course the Jamestown survivors intermarried with the small, interrelated Virginia population.
Jamestown in the 1620s?

        The reign of Elizabeth I (1533-1603) was distinguished by energy, learning, independence of Europe, and flamboyant personalities.  Among the most tragic of these both in his personal fate and in his New World venture, Sir Walter Raleigh, was continuing the effort initiated by his brother to establish a colony here (1585).  So far as is known, the 117 men, women and children Raleigh left on Roanoke Island had all perished before the next ship's call, in 1591.  But the land which he named after his queen was now established as part of her estate.  In that feudal world, the monarch would enfeof her royal domain to loyal subjects.  They exercised her absolute authority abroad as at home.

        Elizabeth was a popular ruler, both among her people and in her own understanding of sovereignty.  She was less typical of absolutist Europe than her successor, James I (1566-1625), one of the strongest advocates of the divine right of kings.  This is the James who commissioned the Authorized Bible that bears his name, as does the river where in 1606 he granted the Virginia Company a charter for settlements.  Jamestown was established on the James River in the subsequent year.  These plantations were nearly as disastrous as the Roanoke attempt had been.  Three quarters of all who shipped out of England for Virginia over the next fourteen years became victims of starvation, disease, and Indian depredations--or were lost at sea.  Yet conditions in England were such that incentive to emigrate remained strong.  Although thousands had perished by 1620, hundreds, even thousands more were coming every year, most of them indentured servants, but also people avoiding the many felony charges punishable in England by death.  

    The Virginia Company was predicated on profit.  Colonists sent back lumber products, slate, indigo, and eventually ores.  They were encouraged to cultivate silk.  Europe obtained this cherished material from China, and the greatest hope for Virginia lay in the expectation that China would be found not too far beyond the Appalachians.  The most immediate profit came from a plant cultivated by the Indians and immediately beloved throughout Europe, tobacco.  King James not only abominated it but wrote his most eloquent tract against its use.  Conditions in Jamestown were brutal and primitive, and the Virginia Company unprofitable.  Nonetheless, in 1619 eight ships arrived with over 1,200 new settlers, this time including marriageable girls.  Among the indentured servants sent in this year were the first Negroes (slavery laws did not yet exist).  In 1622, the recently friendly Indians coordinated a surprise attack whereby hundreds of colonists up and down the river were massacred at the same moment.  This calamity was followed in 1623 by an epidemic of the plague.  King James already before his death had decided to make Virginia a Royal colony, so the failed Virginia Company was dissolved in 1625.
    
       James's successor, Charles I (1609-1649), re-appointed Governor Francis Wyatt, whose wife had recently come over on the Abigail, the same boat that apparently brought the plague of 1623.  Wyatt himself had arrived in 1620 on the Sup[p]ly.  Among his retinue  was a 13-year-old named George Hall or George Hale, whom the Haile genealogist Maude Crowe (p. 1) believes to be identical with a George Haile who some thirty-odd years later sold 300 acres up in Northumberland County.  Crowe finds no other connection between the two than George's name (which may not have been Haile / Hale at all).  She must have overlooked another "boy" aged 20, Thomas Haile, also a "servant," presumably indentured.  Both young men appear in the 1624 / 25 Jamestown Muster, George Hale / Hall in the James Citty Hundred, age 13 when he arrived on the Supply in 1620, and Thomas Haile in the West & Sherley Hundred, age 20 when he arrived on the George in 1623.  Genealogists long had the diligence of Maude Crowe to thank for almost all their records.  Web sites in popular genealogy continue to follow Crowe without knowing it.  They never volunteer Crowe any credit, but sometimes they give it to her obliquely, as when they uncritically advance her dubious guess about George as if it were a fact, yet remain silent about Thomas (because Crowe is).  One such web site points to a William Haile (1568-1634) in Hertfordshire (Kings Warden), married to a Rose Bond (1573-1648), who are said to be parents of a George (b. abt. 1602) and Thomas (b. abt. 1605).  This particular site (apparently following Crowe, since unacquainted with the Jamestown Muster) makes William's son George the sire of Crowe's American Hailes.

        By the time of the first census along the James River, perhaps 25 "plantations," or settlements remained.  They were commonly called hundreds after the old Roman fashion, but contained scarcely more than a score or so men, perhaps no women at all.  Beyond mere survival, the task was to produce profitable exports for England.  Land for a plantation by royal grant or headright (about 50 acres per head) was available to anyone paying for passage.  Labor, the main cost of a plantation, was commonly obtained by indenture in return for passage.  Both George Hale / Hall and Thomas Haile were indentured servants.  The latter would have been eighty-five in 1689, when a Thomas Haile appears as signatory to a Somerset, Maryland allegiance to the new monarchs William and Mary (Crowe, p. 9).  Further research might turn up a connection between one of these Jamestown fellows and the continuous line of Hailes which Crowe does carefully trace down to our Tennessee forebears at Flynns Lick.  Absent evidence, however, those two servant boys cannot even be counted among Jamestown's lucky survivors, much less as direct progenitors of the family name as it next appears north of the Rappahannock.
Nicholas on the Corotoman

          During the reign of Charles I, the Virginia settlements spread up and down  the James River, but also northward toward the Pamunkey.  The neck north of the Rappahannock was still prohibited.  To the south of the James and below the Blackwater River, a tributary of the Chowan, lay swampland.  Some genealogists connect a Nicholas Haile (ca. 1628-1672) with Elizabeth City County, and it is conceivable that he was related to some one  in that settlement.  A very few Jamestown colonists did advance from indentured servitude to wealth and distinction, like the explorer and Indian trader Abraham Wood.  But the earliest records place this Nicholas north of the Rappahannock, after the middle of the century.    

 

 
 

        The Civil War between Parliament and Charles I had released a wave of royalist refugees to Virginia.  Charles I was executed in January of 1649.   In September of the same year, from his exile in France, Charles II encouraged his supporters by means of several land grants on the Northern Neck (between the Rappahannock and the Potomac).  Among the best known are Grey Skipwith and Edward Dale, father-in-law to Thomas Carter, the family which produced the wealthiest grandee in Virginia, Robert "King" Carter.  Northern Neck families of later fame were the Jeffersons, the Lees, the Madisons, the Masons, the Monroes, the Randolphs, the Washingtons, etc.

          A ship venturing into the Rappahannock out of Chesapeake Bay encounters the Corotoman River as first tributary and harbor.   Land patents, leases, and sales from the 1650s and 60s along the Corotoman refer to Nicholas Haile, a Planter.  A power of attorney dated in 1654, suggests that he must have already been an individual of some standing and means before he was thirty years old.  Later documents attest to dealings with England in the 1650s and 1660s, including travel(s) and credit for transporting more immigrants to Virginia.  He acquired several hundred acres near the present Christ's Church.  He was empowered to collect debts for a third party in 1666, was entrusted with the tutelage of his partner's son in 1667, was laid in the stocks for "Uncivil language and deportment to several of the Justices" in 1668.
      
        Nicholas was either lucky in this instance, or redeemed by his status, because in 17th-century Virginia mere pillory was a mild punishment.  When Charles Snead and Elizabeth Wig, "havinge been summoned to this Court for comittinge of ye odious sin of fornicacon which they havinge both confessed & acknowledged," Snead was fined five hundred pounds of tobacco and costs, "And ye sd Eliza: Wig to receive twenty stripes upon ye bare shoulders well layen on wth a whip."  Moral severity should not suggest that we compare these settlers along the Rappahannock and Corotoman with their more famous and revered Massachussetts contemporaries.  The Puritans are extolled by historians for their sense of purpose and community.  Virginians like Nicholas do not come off nearly so well.  The way they obtained their land and profited from it, as well as their life style,  encouraged "excessive individualism" (T. H. Breen, distinguished professor at Northwestern University), and they are roundly condemned for their independent and allegedly exploitative behavior.  While Puritans sat patiently in church, a Virginian might be laying a bet on his quarter horse.

        The only way for Nicholas to obtain acreage, if not by direct grant from the King (purchase of land rights in Virginia did not become possible until the very end of the century--under Governor Andros, 1692), was by guaranteeing the transport of people to Virginia.  Perhaps he was a younger son without inheritance, perhaps driven out by the Puritan Parliament and Oliver Cromwell.  This would imply that Nicholas was the first of his line to come to America, and that he brought his means from home.   If Nicholas's wife Mary is the daughter of Rawleigh Travers of Jamestown, as some suggest, then Nicholas established his family pretty much immediately after arrival in Virginia.  It seems more likely that he was already married before he left England.  Crowe (pp. 4-8) gives account of their three children, George, Mary (who married Henry King), and Nicholas (jr.).     

        A cousin of mine, Martha Denham, reminds me that our maternal forebears in the Crank family were located just across the Rappahannock from Nicholas Haile.  According to Lancaster County records, Thomas Crank (1650-1721) lived in that region which later split off as Middlesex County.  As in the case of Nicholas, it is possible, although unlikely, that the Cranks came up from settlements on the James River (a John Crank was a soldier in Jamestown).  The subsequent history of the Cranks places them in the same expanding tobacco culture as the Hailes.  Thomas's son Matthew (1680-1718) m. Elizabeth Chewning (1680-1720) continued  on the tidewater, although his son Matthew II ((1708-1802) m. Mary Baskett (b. 1715), was born farther up the Rappahannock in Caroline County.  I shall continue to call attention to this related family of typical Virginians.

    The colonists by no means left behind them their caste system, which one can observe in England to this day.  Position was their most important possession, because it was immutable.  Born an aristocrat, one remained so; born a servant, a servant for life.  Nicholas, whose acreage shows that he brought perhaps a dozen bonded servants, surely enjoyed a privileged existence compared with the "huddled masses" of London or the starving wretches on the James River in the early 1600s--or with the great majority of immigrants in his own generation.  Nonetheless, his life on the Corotoman can by no means have been an easy one.  The Indians remained a fearful presence, the massacre of 1622 still remembered by most, and that of 1644 by everyone.  Cautious separation of Indians and whites was maintained by strict regulations imposed on both.  The wilderness beyond the tidewater was mysterious and deadly.  Nicholas surely brought along his armor, which included a helmet and probably chain vest and greaves.  He had muskets, from our point of view not very reliable, but a terror to the Indians, and of course his sword and knives.  Nicholas's residence was probably crude.  Archeological digs suggest that early homes in the James River vicinity might not have even been above ground, but by Nicholas's day one may have erected  something similar to this Virginia farmhouse.

Brick construction was generally preferred, as it had been in the southwest of England in Nicholas's day.  Light was provided by tallow or beeswax candles.  Cooking utensils might be hung in the fireplace.

         A family's diet included fruits, fruit pies, and pickled fruit, grains and  porridge, game fish and animals.  One ate with one's narrow, pointed knife and a ceramic or pewter spoon, which one also used to hold meat while cutting it.  One switched  one's spoon to the right hand to scoop the bite up (the dinner knife with a broad blade for transporting food to the mouth came later, sometimes it  even had a broadened tip).  Eventually the fork was borrowed from the kitchen and refined for table use.  When cutting meat, the sophisticated fork user could transport his already stabbed morsel directly to the mouth, albeit with the left hand.  Americans like Nicholas retained the older habit of switching hands.

        Nicholas probably did not himself do field work, but he had to manage the intense labor required by tobacco production.  Like corn, tobacco could be grown on uncleared acreage without the use of draft animals.  Once the labor had been applied to bring down some trees, a draft animal might be hitched to a horse hoe for scraping the weeds.


Despite formidable difficulties, tobacco brought such windfall profits that early colonists overproduced it, to the neglect of other crops.  Fertilizing was not yet practiced, nor was crop rotation.  As a consequence, tobacco exhausted a plot after a very few years.  This was portentous for subsequent generations.  The first "American Dream" of the good life, which assured the rapid development and advance of American civilization, was none other than tobacco, the crop whose vast and increasing demands for land laid waste to the virgin forests, leached the rich soil, and introduced slavery.  These complaints were made by the growers themselves, Thomas Jefferson for example.  Looking back from our day, we are likely to be more impressed by the human lives snuffed out by cancer and other tobacco related diseases than by Jefferson's complaints.

        At about the time Nicholas arrived in Virginia, its Royal Governor had been replaced by Parliament.  Whether under king or commonwealth, the British empire loomed the same over Americans:  as a gigantic for profit organization run by appointees striving for place and favor at home.  The colonists proudly regarded themselves as loyal, submissive subjects, as we can infer from "The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina," drawn up (1669) "for the better settlement of the Government of the said Place, and establishing the interest of the Lords Proprietors with Equality, and without confusion; and that the Government of this Province may be made most agreeable unto the Monarchy under which we live, and of which this province is a part; and that we may avoid erecting a numerous Democracy."  The author was presumably the philosopher John Locke, remembered as champion of human rights.

     Nicholas no doubt believed he enjoyed the same liberty and freedom as other Englishmen under the constitution and common law, and his king agreed.  Charles I stated that he truly desired the people's liberty and freedom, going on to say, "But I must tell you that their liberty and freedom consists in having of government; those laws by which their life and their goods may be most their own. It is not for having share in government, Sir, that is nothing pertaining to them."  Nicholas felt the same way about his own servants, whose taxes he paid and for whose troubles he was responsible.  Any grievances which Nicholas might himself have would have been against the Governor, William Berkeley, who was supposed to speak up in England for his vassals in America.  Berkeley answered to the ministry in London, who deliberated Royal policy.  As time passed, and England took various measures to increase revenue, some colonists dared argue that they were entitled to participate in decisions affecting them.  This claim was treated as absurd:  it went without saying that the ministry and each member of Parliament, including Commons, acted always in the interest of the whole empire and never in favor of any particular constituency, much less self-interest. 

    Nicholas had come to America while Oliver Cromwell was Lord Protector.  As a loyal subject to the king, he was no doubt attached to the monarchy and welcomed its Restoration (1660), but many frustrations among the colonists were aggravated when Governor William Berkeley was reinstated.  He had been a good administrator under Charles I, but had grown old, cruel, and arbitrary by the time of his reappointment by Charles II.  Like the courtier he was, Sir William valued his colony as a source of both personal and royal revenue--and the feudal mind drew no bright line between the two.  London dictated what was to be shipped from America.  Whatever the final destination, the Navigation Acts of 1660 and 1663 restricted shipments to English bottoms and English ports only, thus actually making trade among  American ports illegal.  Tobacco, so profitable during the governor's first administration, had now become an article of contention because of overproduction, lack of quality control, competition with the Dutch and other countries, and failure of the British government to address any of these problems. 
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