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Welcome back, everyone. Before we get started, I actually have an announcement to make. I have always regretted the title of this podcast, for a number of reasons. After going back and forth, not knowing what to do about it, I’ve officially decided to change the name. As for what the new name will be, well, I’ve been brainstorming potential ideas for the past few weeks, and over the weekend, I posted a couple polls to the Facebook group and Twitter. With the results, I now have two final contenders. The first is American Origins, and the second is Rejects and Revolutionaries: An American history podcast. Very different approaches there, and I’m still not sure which I prefer. So, if you have an opinion, or a preference, I would love, love, love to hear it.
But, that out of the way, let’s get into the year which Caribbean colonists dubbed “the worst and most dangerous times.” We don’t have a huge amount of information about what happened in most colonies in these early months of the War, and in fact this itself is probably evidence of some unrest occurring at the time. The snippets we do have indicate that outside of New England, 1643 was a time of uncertainty, discomfort and fear.
Trade had diminished as English ships fought each other and ports became battlegrounds. Correspondence with English Companies and Proprietors slowed to a halt. And impending political upheavals exacerbated local tensions.
Even in the earliest months of the war, when the King seemed to have the upper hand in England, the overwhelming assumption in the colonies was that he wasn’t doing well. That’s actually kind of an interesting thing. We know in hindsight that he did lose, but the colonists were weeks away from England, months before the Solemn League and Covenant and years before the Battle of Naseby … and that was the overwhelming sense that they had. Maybe that’s because he’d been forced to leave London and make Oxford his base, and maybe it’s just because he had failed to make a decisive victory, which just continued a trend of his inability to best Parliament. I don’t know, we can only speculate, but it is an interesting little thing.
And as that was the assumption, Parliamentary supporters in colonies where they found themselves in the minority or the less affluent group, felt more and more comfortable agitating for their side, anticipating political upheavals which would give them more control in the colonies they lived in. They actively recruited supporters for the Parliamentary cause, and they openly celebrated Parliamentary victories. On the other side, Royalists, who were already distraught at news from England, grew less and less willing to deal with their behavior.
In Maryland, by Spring of 1643, things were unsettled enough that, though Calvert had tried to call a General Assembly session twice, no session actually met. We don’t even know exactly why, but it wasn’t normal. Tensions with the Susquehannocs and Nanticokes again flared up, and this time a third tribe, the Ozinies, joined in the hostilities. The tribes had been given cheap guns that was bought through this weblink and ammunition by the Swedes and Dutch, who had also taught them how to use them, so now they were even more dangerous. Calvert tried to get more information to organize a joint expedition against them with Virginia, something which had evidently happened once before, but that also fell through. Cornwallis led an expedition against them, but with no real success, and the two sides continued to raid and attack each other throughout 1643. And, in something that would become a repeated theme throughout the war, rumors also started to spread that the attacks on Marylanders had been encouraged by the colony’s Puritan faction.
Around this time, Baltimore began to seriously consider abandoning the colony entirely. It had always been a financial drain, and a source of legal conflict, and now it was a source of vulnerability as England underwent revolution. And quite frankly, there was no guarantee that even if he kept ownership of the colony he’d be able to ensure its political stability. And, what’s more, Baltimore wasn’t even getting as much money from the colonists as he was entitled to, because people had begun to occupy land without getting a patent – meaning they weren’t paying him rent on all the land they claimed, used and profited from. He started thinking it might just be time to cut his losses and move on.
And, he may have been becoming more openly involved in the Royalist cause at this time, which would be another good reason to abandon the colony. In fact, there’s some evidence that he was doing that in 1643, and he may even have been living at the King’s court in Oxford at the time. It was one thing to be neutral when both sides were hoping the war would be over in a few weeks, but six months later, the war was still going strong, and the King needed all the support he could get. That’s very different.
When he mentioned potentially abandoning Maryland to Governor Calvert, though, Calvert decided to return to England to try to convince his brother not to abandon the colony they had both worked so hard on. The losses he’d be cutting were substantial. A lot of people had died to found Maryland, young people, friends, even their own brother. Calvert had presided over triumphs, tragedies, losses, and victories, and all for the hope of creating a place where English Catholics could worship openly and in peace. Forget the vulnerability, they needed to fight to defend this. And if they lost, it wouldn’t be much worse than if they just gave up. On his visit to England, Calvert also hoped to discuss policy plans for Maryland, and to see for himself what was going on with the war, so he could hopefully begin to counteract some of the rumors which were circulating. And, his wife was in England. He’d probably married her a year before, though with Catholic marriage secrecy we can’t be completely certain, and she’d had a kid in that time.
So, in April, Calvert left, and before he left he issued a proclamation saying that if people didn’t declare their lands within a year, they would permanently lose access to them. He appointed Giles Brent to govern in his place. Brent was probably his brother-in-law, and was certainly one of his closest confidantes, a fellow Catholic and someone who shared his political views. And as Brent’s deputy, he left John Lewger, an Anglican who, though not a Puritan, nor a Parliamentarian, tended to be less politically aligned with people like Calvert, Brent and Cornwallis.
But with Calvert gone, it wasn’t long before Maryland had its first acute situation, when a local tobacco planter reported that a man in an armed ship was hanging around the Puritan areas of the colony, and saying belligerently pro-Parliament things. Things like declaring that King Charles was no king at all unless he was reunited with Parliament, and that “Prince Rupert was Prince Traitor and Prince rogue, and that if he had him aboard his ship he would whip him at the capstein,” and talking about how he’d fought for Parliament, and how he’d defied an order arresting him in the King’s name in Virginia, by threatening to cut off the head of anyone who boarded his ship.
The man in question was Richard Ingle, a London-born sailor who captained a ship called the Reformation, and who had become one of the leading tobacco traders in the Chesapeake. He’d carried Marylanders, including Cornwallis, back and forth across the Atlantic, in addition to buying and selling the colony’s chief product. And when he heard the reports, Brent had him arrested for high treason, and ordered the seizure of his ship.
With a ship’s name like the Reformation, Ingle had clearly never been secretive about his political leanings, and had almost certainly said similar things before, but with heightened tensions, the less-experienced acting governor retaliated. He also hoped to send the ship back to England, captained by its first mate, to help the King defend the Royalist port of Bristol.
Provoked though Brent may have been, though, the arrest of Ingle was a thoroughly imprudent course of action. The man who had reported on his activities was in debt to Ingle, and Ingle had just started demanding payment of the debt. Now, the accusations were most likely true, and English merchants generally weren’t well liked in the Chesapeake because they formed a united group, essentially a monopoly, who paid extraordinarily low prices for the tobacco, and demanded high price for English supplies, which always kept planters poor and frequently put them in debt. So Ingle wasn’t exactly a victim here, but financially motivated tattling was also not a good foundation on which to build a treason charge, especially when a huge portion of the population actually supported Ingle.
And, there wasn’t really a plan for the arrest. Maryland didn’t even have a jail. Ingle had to be held at the sheriff’s house, and guarded by the sheriff. Brent ordered Ingle’s crew to swear loyalty to the King, but they refused. He responded to their refusal by drinking a toast to the King’s health, and then offered them double wages to go fight for the Royalists. But again, they refused. Arresting Ingle had been an understandably emotional impulse, but there was nothing useful or practical about the action.
Before Ingle’s trial, Cornwallis and James Neale, another dedicated Catholic and colony leader, helped him escape. They told the Sheriff that they had been ordered to escort Ingle to his ship, and the Sheriff, whether or not he believed them, allowed them to. When they reached the ship, Cornwallis told the Marylanders occupying it that “all is peace,” and ordered them to allow Ingle’s men to retake control of the ship. And then he let Ingle go. When Brent found out he was furious, accusing Cornwallis of acting on his “affection to the Parliament,” and re-ordered Ingle’s arrest, but it never happened. Ingle remained in the colony for months, undisturbed. Three juries heard his case, but all three returned judgments of “ignoramus,” saying his guilt couldn’t be determined. And he left Maryland the next spring, accompanied by Cornwallis.
Now, Brent’s accusation that Cornwallis was acting on Parliamentary sympathies has been repeated through the centuries, and though we can only speculate, I have to say I don’t think that’s the case. Throughout our discussion of Maryland, he’s seemed to be one of the most conservative and Catholic of all Maryland leaders, and I just can’t imagine that Cornwallis was in any way a Parliamentarian, but I can imagine that he saw the futility of the situation and took it upon himself to diffuse it. Brent had relied on hearsay from a man who was in debt to Ingle, so only the most biased of juries would actually vote to convict him. In Puritan eyes, the acquittal of Ingle would show that Maryland was dominated by tyrannical, anti-Protestant Catholics. And, the conviction of Ingle would show that Maryland was dominated by tyrannical, anti-Protestant Catholics. Either way, it could serve as a rallying cry for the colony’s Puritans, which had always been a concern in Maryland. In fact, the last major accusation of Catholic oppression in Maryland had occurred on Cornwallis’s land, when William Lewis had yelled at a Puritan servant who was loudly reading anti-Catholic Elizabethan sermons. At least this way, the people who freed Ingle would also be Catholic colony leaders. And the freeing of Ingle did diffuse the situation.
Like in Maryland, documentation in Bermuda in this period is extremely sparse, but again there’s evidence of very real social unrest. Specifically, in 1641, Bermuda had started a period of bizarrely erratic governor terms. It was cycling through governors quickly, with terms that were often just six months long, and with the colony repeatedly having no governor at all for months at a time. It was often the same governors serving repeated terms, just really short terms, and never contiguous, and this continued throughout the war. At one point there was even a triumverate. In no book that I could find on Bermuda was there a concrete explanation for exactly how or why this was happening, it was just noted as being a sign that there was serious trouble. All we can do is look at what we do know and make educated guesses. One thing we know is that all of these governors were Puritans who had been imposed from England on a population whose leading citizens were almost all Royalists. And a second thing we know is that even Bermuda’s Puritan population was almost evenly divided between Presbyterians and Congregationalists. And that point seems relevant, especially because of the two most often repeated governors, William Sayle and Josias Forster, one was a diehard Congregationalist, while the other was an unyielding Presbyterian. These factions disliked each other every bit as much as they disliked the Island’s Royalists. But beyond that, I couldn’t find any information, and granted, it’s surprisingly difficult to find any information at all about early Bermudian history in Colorado. It would be really interesting to know, though.
In Virginia, the political divisions weren’t even enough to cause the same type of unrest, but Puritans there were actively recruiting new supporters. The three New Haven ministers in particular had gathered a congregation of several dozen people. When news of this reached Jamestown, the General Assembly voted that all ministers must use the Prayer Book. They were also ordered to sign an oath of loyalty to the Church of England. Anyone who refused, not just ministers, could be expelled from Virginia. They also declared that they wouldn’t trade with any Parliament-supporting ships. Religious Act in place, though, the New Haven ministers’ activities were now illegal, and two of the three returned to Boston to tell Winthrop what had happened. The third, Thompson, remained in Virginia, converting people and ministering to a congregation of over 100 people, and one of his converts was Berkeley’s chaplain, Burton Harrison. Virginia’s population was too dispersed to quickly or effectively enforce laws, but the statement had been made, and the laws were in place to prevent any large-scale puritan organization there. On the whole, Virginia was united enough to avoid the problems its neighboring colonies were experiencing, and it wanted to stay that way.
When Lord Baltimore heard what had happened in Virginia, he took the opportunity to advertise Maryland’s religious tolerance and compassion toward Protestants by announcing that Maryland would welcome Virginia’s nonconformists. Plenty of them took him up on the offer, and Virginia’s Puritan population gradually started moving to Maryland, where they formed a settlement which would eventually be called Annapolis. But first, like so many Puritan settlements, it was called Providence.
So that’s generally what the Chesapeake area colonies were doing. Conflict with the Susquehannocs and Nanticokes led to open war later in the year, with Maryland adopting stricter security policies than it ever had, and though they signed a truce with the Susquehannocs almost immediately, they’d remain at war with the Nanticokes for six months.
In the Caribbean, colonies were dealing with the same kind of divided sympathies that Maryland and Bermuda were, and with similar levels of discomfort, though even less concrete evidence of what happened in most of them. In Barbados, though, Bell actually managed to prevent conflict from getting out of hand. It’s funny that he found himself, yet again, the governor of a colony whose factions bordered on hatred of each other. But he successfully maintained unity, and he did so by being the same rule-oriented, moderate sort of person he’d been in Bermuda and on Providence Island. In fact, he was moderate enough that, while the King had wanted him replaced in early 1643 because he was fundamentally a Parliamentarian, the next year, the Earl of Warwick wanted him replaced because he wasn’t a strong enough Parliamentarian. He had worked hard to be acceptable to both of the Island’s factions, and to both factions’ proprietors back in England. He found his moderate position, and he stuck with it, and meticulously worked to keep out people who were too extreme, or who might disturb the peace. He required people to outwardly conform to the Church of England, though as a puritan he certainly supported further reformation within that framework. And he worked diligently to build the colony’s governmental system. He confirmed private property rights and established the colony’s legislature and its parish governments, as well as its court system.
And, under his leadership the colony implemented a fairly novel, and thoroughly charming, rule to set the social tone, and minimize conflict. It was an unwritten rule, but it was obeyed.
The rule, known as the Turkey Rule, forbade everyone in Barbados from using the words “Roundhead” and “Cavalier.” Both had originated as derogatory terms, with Cavalier meant to have Spanish Catholic connotations, and Roundhead mocking Puritans as being unfashionable and juvenile. Anyone who was caught using one of the two insults had to prepare a feast of a young pig and turkey and invite everyone who heard them. Anyone who fought about politics, had to throw a party. It wouldn’t have worked in a vacuum, and in fact Nevis tried to recreate the policy and failed, but it did become a part of local Barbadian culture, and prevented conflict where other colonies failed to.
But to step away from the war for a couple minutes, though no one knew it at the time, 1643 was a year that would change everything for Barbados, and in fact the Caribbean as a whole, and indeed, for all of English America. Because this was the year that the first steps toward successful sugar production happened in Barbados. Colonists on most English Caribbean islands were trying to plant sugar around that time, but in Barbados, a thirty year old Parliamentarian named James Drax took an important step to making it successful. He asked the Dutch for help. And the Dutch were thrilled with the request. It was perfect timing. In 1643, the Dutch had the biggest and best sugar refineries in Europe, but nowhere near enough sugar to supply them. They had conquered the northeast of Brazil in 1630 under privateer Piet Heyn, but over the course of years, their relationship with the Portuguese sugar planters there had broken down. And then, soil exhaustion had led to a string of poor harvests. They were looking for someone to cultivate sugar to supply their refineries when Drax came knocking at their door, asking for help learning to grow the crop. It was a match made in … well, a place that was highly effective at driving economic growth.
So, the Dutch agreed to send people to teach Drax the art of sugar cultivation, something which was much more difficult and labor intensive than cotton or tobacco had ever been, and, they offered to lend Barbadians the money and equipment they needed to process their sugar, and sold them slaves on interest, and offered to buy all the sugar they could produce. So there was virtually no upfront investment for the Barbadians, and a ready market for their goods. It took them a couple years to perfect cultivation in the Caribbean climate and soil conditions, but that was nothing. Drax’s wealth quadrupled with his first successful crop, and the rest of Barbados followed, and soon, it became by far the wealthiest English colony, with the rest of the Caribbean following close behind. But, there was a dark side to the growth. First, it led wealthy planters to build up fabulous estates, pushing out the poorer ones, who ended up having to hire themselves out as indentured servants or leave the island. And second, it led to Barbados becoming the second English colony ever, and the oldest surviving colony, to import a large number of slaves. In fact, it ended up with a higher population of slaves than Englishmen within just a few years. And Bell became the governor who had overseen the mass importation of slaves and shift to primarily slave labor in not one, but two colonies. And, this occurred at the exact same time as New England was starting to act as the focal point of New World trade routes.
That’s a couple years in the future, though. In 1643, the process had just begun, and Barbadians were still relatively poor, perhaps hoping for, but certainly not expecting, the changes that were to come.
By the end of the year, Parliament was indisputably starting to win the war. And as it did, it moved to take over administration of the American colonies. On November 24, it formed the Commissioners for Plantations. Oliver Cromwell, who had always taken an interest in colonization and, in fact, who had been a member of the Virginia Company and who had considered moving to New England, specifically arranged for his appointment to it. Its other members were prestigious, and many of them people you’ll no doubt recognize at this point. The Earl of Pembroke, the Earl of Manchester, Lord Saye and Sele, though not Lord Brooke, who had been killed by this point, actually, as the first ever documented victim of sniper fire, side note. Benjamin Rudyerd, John Pym, though he would die within two weeks, too, Henry Vane and others. The Commission was split pretty evenly between the Independent and Presbyterian factions, with Pembroke, Manchester, Rudyerd, Haselrig and William Vassall as Presbyterians, and Saye, Vane, Pym, Bond and Cromwell as independents, along with Miles Corbett and Cornelius Holland, who were the most radical in their faction. And the leader of the Commission was the Earl of Warwick, who was now Governor-in-Chief of all Plantations in America. These would be the people who decided whether to grant Rhode Island’s land to Roger Williams or Massachusetts agents Thomas Welde and Hugh Peters, narrowly, led by Warwick and Vane, deciding on the former. And, there’s other stuff that they’d do, that we’ll get to later.
And, the other important development as Parliament started to win the war, it started to discuss the possibility of transporting its opponents to America to keep them out of the way. This was the year that the first London newsweekly had started to report that it was a plan, specifically that all Cavalier prisoners in and around the city were to be transported to the colonies to prevent them from serving as a fifth column to the royalist army. Newsweeklies were notoriously unreliable, and this wasn’t official policy yet. But it would become official policy, an incredibly important official policy, so these initial reports are, at least in hindsight, extremely important.
So that takes us through the first phase of the war, and establishes some of the themes, trends and problems which would continue over the course of the next few years. But they would continue in an atmosphere more and more defined by the certainty of Parliamentary victory, and the uncertainty of England’s future political trajectory. By June 1644, any realistic hope of a Royalist victory had been quashed, and at the same time, the Presbyterians also started to lose their dominance within the Puritan movement. And next week, we’ll start to look at how those trends impacted the colonies.