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Mary Ball Washington

Despite her many mythologies, George Washington's mother was a strong, complex, and anxious woman. She was a fervent reader of devotional books, frugal to a fault, and on occasion, so cash poor as to be unable to feed herself and her dependents.

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Despite her many mythologies, George Washington's mother was a strong, complex, and anxious woman. She was a fervent reader of devotional books, frugal to a fault, and on occasion, so cash poor as to be unable to feed herself and her dependents.

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Written by Maria Elisa Velázquez Gutierrez PH
Translated by Wiley G. Barnett

If little is known about the presence of Africans in Mexico, less is known about the participation of Mandinga, Wolof, or Bantu women, among the many groups of African women who arrived in Mexico and whose participation was decisive for the economic, social, and cultural development of the country. It is calculated that around 250,000 Africans were introduced to New Spain, of which about 80,000 were women. This figure does not include those who entered as contraband or the Creoles, that is, those born in Mexican territory. Numbers revealed by researchers of this topic demonstrate that in the second half of the sixteenth century and the first decades of the seventeenth, Mexico was the Hispanic country that received the largest number of Africans.

The African women and their descendants played a decisive role in the construction of Mexican society. Many of them worked in the farms of the times, in particular the sugar plantations that proliferated in states such as Morelos and Veracruz, cutting sugar cane, piling up the sugar cane, and doing other field labor. Their insertion in the regional economy, while barely recognized by the historiography, was relevant, and it is demonstrated by Adriana Nevada, whose research highlights that the men and women slaves of the sugar ranches represented 30 percent of the invested capital in these units of production at the beginning of the eighteenth century. In the cities these women occupied jobs as housekeepers, cooks, and wet nurses, functions intimately linked with the everyday lives of the people who hired them, mostly Spaniards and Creoles. Many African women and Afro-descendants were in charge of raising the children of their masters, creating relationships of affection and recognition. For the most part, the Afro-descendants, once free, worked in the cities of New Spain, carrying out different tasks. Many of them were merchants of different products in permanent and temporary markets known as "tianguis" in Mexico. Others worked as cooks and were in charge of "public dining rooms."Others worked as healers, midwives, or in manufacturing, many times serving sentences imposed by the Inquisition. And lastly some worked as auxiliaries working with pottery, tailoring, and shoe making. Some of them were able to obtain jobs as teachers and others had access to economic conditions that were to a certain extent advantageous in relationship to other sectors, mostly through marriage.

A number of stigmas and stereotypes were associated with women of African origin: violence, rebelliousness, colors, laughter, sensuality, maternity, submission, witchcraft are some of the images that these women evoked when we review the literature, works of art, and documentation sources of the viceroy period. But basically two extreme ideas, distinct yet complementing each other, seem to have been part of the occidental concept of the feminine during those times (and even to the present day). These ideas included, of course, African women and their descendants. One idea, which was inherited from primitive Christianity and medieval thought, characterized Eve, and hence all women, as "an instrument of the devil," as inferior, perverse, as the supreme temptress. The other idea alluded to the worldly lady, the ideal Amazon on horseback, that in Spain, by the fifteenth century reflected the romantic counterpart of the Virgin cult. This contradiction between subjugation and adoration was transmitted for centuries and became part of the feminine ideology of New Spain. Juan Luis Vives, an educator in the sixteenth century, said, "Everything good and everything bad in this world, one can say without fear of making a mistake, comes from women. . . ."

Obviously the African women of Muslim and animist cultures had a different concept of themselves and of their work in the family and community. Even today, these stereotypes are reflected in the popular culture of our society. Rarotonga, a protagonist of a Mexican short story of the 1950s called "Lagrimas y Risas," was a sensual, beautiful, proud, and dominant woman; in contrast, Mama Dolores, the protagonist of a famous movie titled The Right to Be Born, was a dedicated mother and a docile victim who was capable of any sacrifice.

The truth is that several practices and customs of the African women and their descendants in relation to their attire, their character, their behavior, and certain cultural traditions were criticized and seen with suspicion during the viceroyalty. Gestures, ways of wearing clothes, ways of dancing, but mostly the posture and presence of the women of African origin claimed the attention of chroniclers who visited New Spain during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Slaves expressed their customs and their resistance to slavery in their daily lives through practices that Europeans considered blasphemous and/or witchcraft. Many Africans and Afro-descendants, especially women, were accused by the Inquisition of committing acts against the Christian faith by using herbs, charms, and magic to obtain love, cure illnesses, or cause harm to their masters. For example, the documenting sources testify that in Mexico City the largest number of women accused of witchcraft by the Inquisition were women of African origin.

A great number of cases provide information about this situation, among them a document of 1577, concerning a report against a woman of African origin who was accused of "making a lot of money" on the basis of making, as specified in the file, " . . . superstitions, witchcraft, prayers and conjuring, reprehended by the Holy Mother Church, mixing with these, mass and other sacred things invoking the demons having tacit pact with them or tacit to be able to understand and force secrets from men's hearts and make their wills surrender. . . ." Many others were accused of serving as "alcahuetas," for example the slave of Luis Martin de Carvajal, for using the ". . . habit of lying, and giving beverages to many people so that they turn crazy and without sanity so they love the women with whom they deal preparing beverages and witchcraft and giving them chocolate to drink to such people, to make them do these things. . . ." To insult or to speak against the Christian precepts was a form of resistance to subjugation, which such speakers paid for with abuse and punishment from the Catholic Church.

Freedom was obtained through different means. Because slavery was transmitted through the mother, many male slaves would get involved in domestic partnerships, legitimate and illegitimate, with indigenous women so that their children would not be slaves. Female slaves would enter into relationships with Spaniards or Americans, achieving in certain cases the recognition of their children by the children's fathers, who frequently granted their children freedom. Close and affective relationships that developed between masters and slaves, especially in urban settings, led many masters to grant freedom to their slaves, fundamentally to women who had breastfed them or raised them. It was also common for slaves to buy their freedom after years of service. The census from this period reflects the communal living and mixture of the different groups: families were integrated by indigenous women and mulattos, by black women with mestizo children, or by indigenous women, Spaniards, and Afro-descendants. Various testimonies reveal the complex social and cultural processes that existed. For example, in my research about women of African origin in Mexico City, I found documents about one African Wolof who had been able to obtain his freedom and who owned land and other property, as well as several slaves. The Wolof also had a slave daughter, a mulatta, who asked his support to obtain her freedom. The life of Juan Correa, the famous baroque painter of the seventeenth century, also illustrates the integrated nature of life during this time. The mulatto artist was one of the preferred artists of the times; his works were in demand all over the territory of New Spain and he was even elected to decorate the sacristy of the Cathedral in Mexico City. He was a teacher in his own workshop and a director of his guild, a position that was given only to individuals recognized for their integrity and their artistic trajectory. Correa captured, in his art, images of "little angels" and the "God child" with the physical features and coloring of Afro-descendants, something that was very unusual in that period but apparently was allowed. Correa had a slave woman at his service while at the same time he was contributing economically toward the payment for the freedom of his nephew, who was a slave. These examples, among many others, demonstrate that in spite of the segregation that existed in that period, at least until the middle of the eighteenth century, the color of one's skin was not an insurmountable obstacle to better economic and social conditions and to close, affective, and working relations with the different ethnic groups. The "pseudoscientific" racism generated by the intense commerce of African slaves during the eighteenth century, which was supported by some ideas from the school of rationalism based on the superiority of some races over others, promoted new negative ideas about Africans and justified their exploitation and the inhuman traffic that had its peak from that point on. However, when these ideas were brought to America, the mixing of races was already an undeniable reality in Mexico.

About María Elisa Velázquez Gutiérrez
María Elisa Velázquez Gutiérrez is a researcher and Professor in the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) where she coordinates since 1997 the permanent seminar: Populations and Cultures of African Origin of Mexico.

From her multiple texts, stands out a book on Juan Correa´s life, mulatto painter of the XVII century, published by the National Council for Arts and Culture in 1998, as well as the compilation of a book with articles by specialists made to create a balance on the studies of Africans and their descendants towards the end of the millennium, entitled: Populations and Cultures of African Origin in Mexico. This book, published in April of 2005 gives birth to an editorial series dedicated to the theme in the INAH, entitled Africanías. As part of this collection, a book was published in 2006 of her authorship entitled Women of African Origin in the Novohispanic capital, centuries XVII and XVIII. In 2007 she published a book entitled Portraits of Africans and Afro descendants in Guanajuato, centuries XIX and XX by the National Institute of Culture of Guanajuato.

She is in charge of one of the lines of research of the International Project AFRODESC since 2007, which joins researchers from France, Colombia and México. Since February of 2009 she was named by the Director of the UNESCO Vice President of the Scientific International Project The Slave Route of the UNESCO.

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Essay: African and Afro-descendant Women in Mexico City during the Colonial Period | Black in Latin America | PBS

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Written by Maria Elisa Velázquez Gutierrez PH Translated by Wiley G. Barnett If little is known about the presence of Africans in Mexico, less is known about the participation of Mandinga, Wolof, or Bantu women, among the many groups of African women who arrived in Mexico and whose participation was decisive for the economic, social, and cultural development of the country.

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After Spain's conquest of Mexico and other American lands, these events inspired books, paintings, and other historical and artistic records. In this section are materials illustrating these interpretations. Some of these items highlight the efforts of Bartolomé de las Casas (1474-1566), an early Spanish historian and Dominican missionary in the Americas, to persuade the Spanish Empire that indigenous peoples deserved humane treatment. Also featured are the spectacular Conquest of Mexico paintings created in the seventeenth century that capture the drama of the original encounter as imagined and interpreted by artists 150 years later.

The Fate of the Indians of the New World

This manuscript, signed by Bartolomé de las Casas, was sent to Charles V (1500-1558), Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain, for presentation to the Council of the Indies as they debated the fate of the Indians of the New World. In it, Las Casas makes this plea, "In order that the Indians may be preserved in life and liberty there are no other means save that Your Majesty should incorporate them in your royal crown as your vassals, which they are, terminating all the encomiendas which are made in all the Indies, and giving neither one nor any Indian to [a] Spaniard."

Tales that Inspired Conquistadors

Amadis of Gaul, the most famous romance of Spanish chivalry, may have originated as early as the mid-fourteenth century. The handsome, virtuous knight Amadis achieves incredible feats of arms, in which he is undefeated. The earliest extant printed version, from 1508, is by Garci Ordónez (or Rodríguez) de Montalvo (ca. 1450-ca. 1505). Montalvo's avowed purpose was to inspire Spanish youth to imitate Amadis. Numerous sequels appeared, and the work was translated into other languages. Bernal Díaz del Castillo refers to Amadis in his account of the conquest of New Spain, and the name "California" appears in another work by Montalvo.

Inspiration for the Conquest of Mexico Paintings

Antonio de Solís served King Charles II of Spain as the official historian for the American colonies. In his monumental Historia de la conquista de México, written more than 150 years after the events described, Solís relied heavily on the work of previous chroniclers, including Lopéz de Gomara, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, and Hernán Cortés himself. Written in an elegant and dramatic style, the book was immediately successful and was translated into other languages, including English. The book brought new attention to Cortés and to a heroic view of the Spanish Conquest. This work may have directly inspired the Conquest of Mexico series of paintings.

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Exploring the Early Americas Interpreting the Conquest

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After Spain's conquest of Mexico and other American lands, these events inspired books, paintings, and other historical and artistic records. In this section are materials illustrating these interpretations. Some of these items highlight the efforts of Bartolomé de las Casas (1474-1566), an early Spanish historian and Dominican missionary in the Americas, to persuade the Spanish Empire that indigenous peoples deserved humane treatment.

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The resources in this primary source set are intended for classroom use. If your use will be beyond a single classroom, please review the copyright and fair use guidelines.

Teacher's Guide

To help your students analyze these primary sources, get a graphic organizer and guides: Analysis Tool and Guides

"I assure your Highnesses that these lands are the most fertile, temperate, level and beautiful countries in the world."
--Christopher Columbus.

Background

The Age of Exploration

During the age of exploration, European countries explored new lands for political, religious and economic reasons. The explorations of the 15th and 16th centuries were fueled by a growing desire for expansion and trade, advances in shipbuilding and commerce, and the search for new markets and for the legendary sources of precious metals and other commodities.

Portugal took a leading role during most of the fifteenth century in searching for a route to Asia by sailing south around Africa, allowing the Portuguese to accumulate a wealth of knowledge about navigation and the geography of the Atlantic Ocean. Their explorations were colored by the European world view in the late 15th century based upon imaginings about the unknown and scientific observations of the known. Maps created during this time illustrate a Medieval world view laid out into three continents, but also record real and imagined countries.

Spain's explorations were driven by the desire to expand its knowledge of the world, to discover spices and riches and to expand Christianity. In 1492, when Christopher Columbus, sailing for Spain, took a westerly course across the Atlantic Ocean searching for an alternative route to the Indies, he inadvertently "discovered" a new continent.

The Naming of America

In 1507, Martin Waldseemüller, a German cartographer, created that map that first showed tithe area of Columbus's discovery. Waldseemüller named this new land "America" in honor of Amerigo Vespucci, who recognized that a "New World" had been reached through Columbus's voyage.

Exploring, Conquering, and Claiming America

The items in this primary source set are materials that can be used to teach about the age of exploration, specifically, the contributions and interactions of Hispanic peoples in North America. They include:

1508

Juan Ponce de León accompanied Christopher Columbus on his second voyage to the New World. He was appointed the first Governor of Puerto Rico and is also credited with the first known European excursion to Florida.

1519

Hernando Cortés was part of the generation of Spanish colonizers that began the first phase of the Spanish colonization of the Americas. Cortes formally claimed Mexican land for the Spanish crown in 1519.

1524

Francisco Pizarro conquered the Inca Empire and took part in explorations of the northern Caribbean coast of South America.

1531

The Huexotzinco Codex, an eight-sheet document was part of the testimony in a legal case against representatives of the colonial government in Mexico, ten years after the Spanish conquest in 1521.

1540

Francisco Vasquez de Coronado explored Arizona, New Mexico, Kansas, Colorado, the Grand Canyon and the Texas panhandle while searching for the Seven Golden Cites of Cibola in what is now Arizona. Coronado led Spaniards and Native Americans on an expedition of the southwestern part of the U.S.

1540

Grand Canyon, Colorado River, Ariz. The first European known to have viewed the Grand Canyon was García López de Cárdenas from Spain.

1541

Hernando de Soto, a Spanish explorer and conquistador, claims to have been the first European to see the great Mississippi River.

1565

St. Augustine was founded by the Spanish and is the oldest city in the present-day United States of America.

1602

Sebastián Vizcaíno, a Spanish soldier, entrepreneur, explorer, and diplomat was commissioned to explore and map the western coast. He designated many of the coastal landmarks that we know today, including San Diego.

1602

Inscription Rock, or El Morro (The Castle), as the Spaniards called it, is a striking landmark on the ancient trail between Acoma and Zuni. Spanish explorers and the administrators recorded their names and dates on smooth surfaces of the cliff, which reveal also numerous Indian petroglyphs.

1606

Juan de Onate's mark on Inscription Rock. Onate passed the landmark on his return to the Rio Grande from "the south sea."

1610

Santa Fe San Miguel Mission was founded as the capital of the Spanish colony of New Mexico.

1710

Tabula Mexicae et Floridae shows the extent of New Spain and Florida, New France, the American colonies, and the West Indies, rivers, towns, and trade routes.

1769

Father Junípero Serra, famous for the founding of the California Franciscan Missions. Mapa, que comprende la Frontera, de los Dominios del Rey, en la America Septentrional was the result of the Marques de Rubí's 1766-68 survey of the presidio system in New Spain. It was commissioned by Charles III. Mission San Diego de Alcala, Misson Valley Road, San Diego, San Diego County, CA, one of Father Serra's California Missions.

1776

This map by Antonia Vélez and Escalante shows missions, Indian towns, and prisons from Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico.

1786

Santa Barbara Music - Alabado: a song of Praise sung in Spanish.

1807

A map of the Internal Provinces of New Spain. 1807, created by Zebulon Pike.

Suggestions for Teachers

These Library of Congress primary source materials support teaching about Hispanic exploration and settlement of America. They may be of special interest during National Hispanic American Heritage Month.

Students can compare and contrast the various maps for chronology, level of detail, and changes over time.

Students can evaluate the influence and contribution of Spanish explorers vs. English, French and Portuguese explorers. A class discussion of how history depicts each group could prove interesting.

Students can compare and contrast New England, New France and New Spain.

Students can research the biographies of the Hispanic explorers mentioned: Columbus, Ponce de Leon, Hernando Cortes, Francisco Pizarro, Hernando Coronado, Ferdinand DeSoto, Sebastian Vizcaino, Junipero Serra, Dominguez & Escalante. Challenge their critical thinking by asking them to examine or draw conclusions about the motives for each explorer.

Students can create timelines (Spanish discoveries vs. English discoveries)

Students can plan an expedition: Whose route would they follow? Why? What supplies would they need? How long would their expedition take? What obstacles would they expect to encounter?

Students can write a diary or personal narrative as a member of one of the expeditions.

Students can re-enact an incident from the life of one of the explorers, in first person with dress, maps, and stories.

Students can write a letter to the government encouraging funding for one of the expeditions.

Students can consider how their life might be different if these explorers had not made their discoveries and propose an alternative history.

Students can compare and examine the Winter Count and the Huexotzinco Codex. What do these methods of record keeping tell us about the people who created them? Students might enjoy creating a personal timeline or an accounting system using similar techniques.

Students can map the Missions established in New Spain. How many of these still exist? What was the impact of these settlements on safety/forts, religion, government, and a trade/transportation network? This primary source set also provides an opportunity to help students understand that different times shape different cultural values and mores. The set may also provide impetus for discussions that compare and contrast the assumptions and behaviors of a different time with what is politically and morally acceptable, today.

Additional Resources

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Hispanic Exploration | Classroom Materials at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress

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The resources in this primary source set are intended for classroom use. If your use will be beyond a single classroom, please review the copyright and fair use guidelines. To help your students analyze these primary sources, get a graphic organizer and guides: Analysis Tool and Guides "I assure your Highnesses that these lands are the most fertile, temperate, level and beautiful countries in the world."

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Christopher Columbus, together with the brothers Martin and Vicente Pinzón, sails west from Palos in Spain

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A Portuguese prince, Henry the Navigator, becomes fascinated by exploration down the coast of Africa and commissions successive voyages

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Coverage of the various historical cultures, rulers, and states of the Americas

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Life Story: Gateras of Quito Indian Woman in Special Attire (India e traje de gala) Vicente Albán, Indian Woman in Special Attire (India en traje de gala), ca. 1783. Oil on canvas.

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Life Story: Doña Teresa de Aguilera y Roche

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Life Story: Doña Teresa de Aguilera y Roche Tried by the Inquisition The story of the wife of the governor of New Mexico, who was arrested by the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Content Warning: This life story addresses physical abuse.

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Spanish Colonies Key Ideas 1. Women played critical roles in the Spanish conquest of the Americas. 2. Spanish and Native women in the Spanish colonies found many ways to challenge and subvert the patriarchy of Spanish colonial society. 3. Native women played a

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By Anya Montiel of the National Museum of the American Indian and the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Sara Cohen of Because of Her Story

This month marks National Native American Heritage Month. Many of our Smithsonian museums document and share Native American history. Here are nine photos, videos, and other objects from our collections about 12 women to know.

1. Theresa Secord

Theresa Secord (Penobscot) has tirelessly taught the art of ash and sweetgrass basketry. As a founding member of the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance, she helped inspire more people to become weavers from the Maliseet, Mi'kmaq, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot nations. Through her work, the number of basketmakers grew from 55 to more than 200. Secord became the first U.S. citizen to receive the Prize for Creativity in Rural Life from the Women's World Summit Foundation in 2003. She also received a National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship in 2016. You can watch her speak about her research and art at our National Museum of the American Indian in 2015.

2. Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte

Susan La Flesche Picotte (Omaha) broke barriers as a woman doctor in the 19th century. She was born and raised on Nebraska's Omaha reservation. At age 14, she left home to continue her schooling, attending the Elizabeth Institute in New Jersey and later the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia (now Hampton University). She continued her education at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania. She graduated a year early and first in her class. At age 24, she returned home and became the only doctor for more than 1,200 people across more than 400 miles. She made house calls on horseback and later by buggy. After she married Henry Picotte and had two sons, she sometimes brought her children with her on house calls. Towards the end of her life, she solicited enough donations to open a hospital on the reservation in Walthill, Nebraska.

3. Jennifer Kreisberg, Layla Locklear, Charly Lowry, Soni Moreno, and Pura Fé

Founded in 1987, Ulali is an Indigenous women's a cappella group. Ulali is known for their harmonies and a wide vocal and musical range. Current members include Jennifer Kreisberg (Tuscarora), Layla Locklear (Tuscarora), Charly Lowry (Tuscarora), and Pura Fé (Tuscarora). Soni Moreno (Mayan/Apache/Yaqui) is a former member. As Ulali, these women have performed throughout the world, including the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. Their songs have been featured on the Smoke Signals movie soundtrack, in Robbie Robertson's Music for the Native Americans album, and in the Turner documentary series The Native Americans. Watch Kreisberg, Moreno, and Pura Fé perform "Mother" at the 1997 Smithsonian Folklife Festival.

4. Marie Watt

Based in Portland, Oregon, Marie Watt (Seneca) is a multidisciplinary artist. She is also the first Native American student to receive an MFA from the Yale School of Art. Watt's work draws from Indigenous principles, Native American women's leadership roles, history, and family narratives. Four of Watt's artworks are in the collection of our National Museum of American Indian, including a textile work " In the Garden (Corn, Beans, Squash)" and three works on paper. This textile work, "Edson's Flag," is part of the Renwick Gallery of our Smithsonian American Art Museum. Watt created "Edson's Flag" to honor her great uncle Edson Plummer. Plummer served in the Air Force during World War II. Following his death, his funeral flag was passed down through the family. When it reached Watt, she decided to use it in her work to honor him and other veterans. She has received a Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship, Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and a Bonnie Bronson Fellowship Award.

5. Suzan Shown Harjo

In 2014, Suzan Shown Harjo (Hodulgee Muscogee/Southern Cheyenne) received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. As an activist, poet, and journalist, Harjo has fought for Native American sovereignty rights for more than 40 years. These important issues include protecting sacred sites, religious freedom, treaty rights, removing Native American mascots, and language revitalization. Harjo worked as the president of the National Congress of American Indians. She served as a special assistant for Indian legislation in President Carter's administration. Harjo was a founding trustee of the National Museum of the American Indian. She guest curated the museum's exhibition Nation to Nation: Treaties Between the United States and American Indian Nations.

6. Otellie Pasiyava Loloma

Ceramicist Otellie Pasiyava Loloma (Hopi) was born at Second Mesa on the Hopi reservation in northern Arizona. After World War II, she studied at the School for American Craftsmen and later at the Alfred University in New York. She returned to Arizona to operate a pottery shop with her husband, Charles Loloma. She was one of the first faculty members at the Native American arts school, the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She taught ceramics and painting for 26 years. Loloma encouraged her students to experiment with techniques, materials, and forms.

7. Isabella Aiukli Cornell

In 2018, Isabella Aiukli Cornell (Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma) used her prom dress to raise awareness about missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. According to the Department of Justice, American Indians and Alaskan Natives are two and a half times more likely to experience violent crimes and at least two times more likely to experience rape or sexual assault crimes in comparison to other ethnicities. Experts believe even more crimes go unreported. In 2019, the U.S. began a federal investigation into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.

Cornell chose a red prom dress because red represents the movement to end this crisis. She has been part of the movement since she was a teenager. Cornell is also a member of Matriarch, an organization that works to create a safe space for Native women experiencing violence. Cornell asked the dress designer, Della BigHair-Stump (Crow), to include a cultural design on the top as well. The diamond pattern represents the diamondback rattlesnake. The Choctaw Nation considers the rattlesnake, who protected the crops, an important relative. Cornell said, "Today and always we remember and honor our missing and murdered Indigenous women. They are not forgotten. Bring them justice. Bring them home."

8. Ofelia Zepeda

Poet and linguist Ofelia Zepeda, PhD, (Tohono O'odham), wrote the first grammar book on the Tohono O'odham language, a language spoken by Indigenous people of the Sonoran Desert area of Arizona and northern Mexico. Zepeda also co-founded the American Indian Language Development Institute. The Institute revitalizes Indigenous languages across generations. Today, she is the director of the institute. In 1999, she received a MacArthur Fellowship for her work. Her collections of poetry include Ocean Power: Poems from the Desert (1995) and Jewed'l-hoi/Earth Movements, O'Odham Poems (1996). You can learn more about Zepeda in American Indian, a magazine produced by our National Museum of the American Indian.

Related Posts:

Anya Montiel (Tohono O'odham and Mexican descent) is the curator of American and Native American women's art and craft at the Smithsonian, a joint position between the National Museum of the American Indian and the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Renwick Gallery. Her research examines the intersections of Native American art, global arts and crafts, and the art market.

Sara Cohen is the digital audiences and content coordinator for Because of Her Story, the Smithsonian American Women's History Initiative. She shares lesser-known histories of women through this website, the Because of Her Story newsletter, and Smithsonian social media.

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Twelve Women to Know for Native American Heritage Month | Smithsonian American Women's History

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By Anya Montiel of the National Museum of the American Indian and the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Sara Cohen of Because of Her Story This month marks National Native American Heritage Month. Many of our Smithsonian museums document and share Native American history.

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Philadelphia was a center of patriotic fervor and activity during the American Revolution. Many of its residents, including women, participated in the war for independence by providing material and moral support for the "patriot" cause. On June 12, 1780, one such Philadelphian, Esther De Berdt Reed (1746-80), penned a broadside entitled "Sentiments of an American Woman" in order to rouse her fellow women to participate in the Revolutionary cause. As a result, dozens of women responded to Reed's call, forming the Ladies Association of Philadelphia, a group of upper-class women who led a door-to-door campaign raising money for Washington's Continental Army. Through their efforts, the Association "ladies" came to recognize their essential role in winning American independence.

Reed's tract summoned her female peers to fulfill the promise they made at the outset of the war, asserting that women were both "animated by the purest patriotism" and "born for liberty," authoritatively dismissing the notion that women were not patriotic or political beings. The broadside harked back to women of the past who had proven the merit of their patriotic contributions, providing a precedent for women's political activism. Compelling her female compatriots to aid the suffering of the soldiers, Reed reminded Philadelphia's women how they, along with women across the colonies, had participated in the boycotting of teas, as well as spinning bees, both feats of female political activity performed in the name of the American cause. The "offering of the Ladies," Reed averred, was nothing new; indeed, she was merely impressing upon her audience the need to reaffirm the commitment they had already made to the Revolution.

Just three days after the Pennsylvania Gazette published the broadside under the title " Sentiments of an American Woman," more than thirty women gathered to discuss the best way to aid the Revolutionary troops. After a productive meeting, the newly formed Ladies Association of Philadelphia published its notes, which appeared in newspapers across the British colonies. Members similarly wrote letters to their acquaintances in neighboring colonies suggesting that they imitate the efforts of the LAP. Sarah Franklin Bache (1743-1808) followed suit and wrote letters to her female friends soliciting their assistance, and women in New Jersey and Maryland copied the Ladies Association of Philadelphia model in their own fundraising efforts.Working independently and without the assistance of men, the Association collected more than $300,000. Though the group originally desired that the funds be distributed directly to the soldiers as remuneration for their patriotism, Washington desired that the funds be used to purchase materials for and manufacture clothing which the Continental Army needed desperately. Washington thanked the Association for the group's contribution to the cause of liberty, and one soldier composed a poem in the women's honor, recognizing "the patriot females who their country save."The work of the Ladies Association of Philadelphia became a model of political activity for women in the years of the early republic. Most importantly, these Philadelphia women proved their mettle, took the initiative to participate in the American cause, and recognized their essential contribution to the colonies' ultimate victory.
Jacqueline Beatty is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University. (Author information current at time of publication.)
Copyright 2013, Rutgers University

Themes

Time Periods

Locations

Essays

Arendt, Emily J. "'Ladies Going about for Money': Female Voluntary Associations and Civic Consciousness in the American Revolution." Journal of the Early Republic 34, no. 2 (Summer 2014): 157-186.

Berkin, Carol. Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for American Independence. New York: Random House, 2005.

Kerber, Linda K. Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1980.

Norton, Mary Beth. Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980.

Reed, William B. The Life of Esther De Berdt, Afterwards Esther Reed, of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia: C. Sherman, 1853.

Zagarri, Rosemarie. Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics and the Early American Republic. Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.

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Ladies Association of Philadelphia - Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia

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Philadelphia was a center of patriotic fervor and activity during the American Revolution. Many of its residents, including women, participated in the war for independence by providing material and moral support for the "patriot" cause.

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In 1942, at the age of 17, Maria Tallchief moved to New York City to pursue her dreams of becoming a dancer. With luck, grit, and determination she joined the famed Ballet Russe Monte Carlo as an apprentice and moved quickly through the ranks, dancing first in the corps de ballet and later performing leading roles.  Tallchief is widely considered America's first major prima ballerina.

You can learn more about Maria Tallchief (Osage Nation), featured on a new quarter from the US Mint, and other Indigenous women in our featured biographies this month.
Use the NWHM's compendium of online biographies to spark curiosity and dig deeper into women's impact throughout our shared national history. Explore more here.

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A renowned leader in women's history education, the National Women's History Museum brings to life the countless untold stories of women throughout history and serves as a space for all to inspire, experience, collaborate, and amplify women's impact.

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Catalina Trico: Founding Mother Catalina Trico to William Morris "Catalina Trico to William Morris," The Documentary history of the state of New-York, Vol. 111, ed. E.B. O'Callaghan (Albany: Weed, Parsons & Co., 1850).

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The Remarkable Life of Teuntje Straetmans, a Woman of New Amsterdam

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The Remarkable Life of Teuntje Straetmans, a Woman of New Amsterdam

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The Gotham Center for New York City History

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A court case involving rent that was due on the property illustrates the fact that Dutch women, even when married, were considered competent to conduct business. In February of 1660, Corbesij appeared before the court of New Amsterdam demanding payment of 25 guilders in unpaid rent on the property at Wall Street. The tenant, Gerrit Pilsner, argued that while Straetmans had rented the house to him, she had also promised to fix leaks in the house. Because she had not done so, he had been forced to find other accommodations.[9] What is interesting to note here is that even though Corbesij was Straetmans's husband and thus her legal guardian, the court refused to hear the case in Straetmans absence. Instead, Corbesij was told to have his wife appear in court. English women would not have been called to court to settle cases like this by themselves, and their husbands would have been judged competent to act in their stead. When the court met again, Straetmans did indeed appear as the plaintiff in two cases against the two tenants of her houses. She demanded payment from both, but because she had not kept the homes well, she received only a portion of the rent that was due.[10]

Also in 1660, Straetmans' husband Gabriel Corbesij sued Lauwerens Caustersen, a soldier who owed him money. Yet Straetmans appeared in court on behalf of her husband. The court did not dismiss or postpone the case because the wife of the plaintiff came to represent him, and we know that this was not an isolated case. Women represented their husbands and families in multiple cases before the New Amsterdam court, though in this particular case, the court told Straetmans that it was not the proper venue for resolving the dispute.[11]

Further displaying her legal savvy, Straetmans also used New Amsterdam's court to protect her reputation. The court system was open and accessible to ordinary citizens, and the famously litigious New Amsterdammers made good use of it. Because of the flexible procedures with simple rules of conduct, people did not need a law degree to plead their cases. Having a good reputation was important in the Dutch colony because in a small community one's reputation was sometimes all one had. Historian Virginie Adane has pointed out that disputes over reputation in New Amsterdam had a gendered aspect to them as well, as accusations were commonly leveled against poor and middling women to ensure that they were reminded of their place in society. Their crude manners were juxtaposed to those of the more genteel, supposedly more moral, male authority of the upper classes.[12]

In a 1658 court appearance, Straetmans defended herself in a case brought by plaintiff Pieter Jansen. He accused Straetmans of insult and abuse involving name calling and a threat with a knife.[13] In 1660, Straetmans again had to defend herself in court. This time she was accused of having struck a woman named Styntie, "... so that the blood followed."[14] Straetmans admitted the offense but claimed that Styntie had provoked her by publicly calling her a whore. When Straetmans could not deliver proof of the alleged provocation, she was convicted and fined.

The 1660 incidents were the last ones in the New Amsterdam records relating to Straetmans and her husband. She must have been in her mid-40s when on October 19, 1662, Teuntje Straetmans died. The minister of the Dutch Reformed Church of Brooklyn, dominee Henricus Selijns, and Teunis Jansen, deacon at the church, made the arrangements for her funeral. It was a simple service. Carel de Beauvois, the schoolmaster gave a "funeral oration" and she was buried in a plain wooden coffin.[15] Before her death, Straetmans had asked Selijns and Jansen to be the executors of her estate, so after the funeral they went to her house at the Gowanus to take an inventory of her possessions. Most likely they also discussed with Corbesij and Margriet Meijerink, Straetmans oldest daughter who was married by this time, what to do with the two youngest children, Laurens and Anna, eleven and eight years old respectively.

According to Dutch law, a child became an orphan if either one or both parents died, and in this case, the surviving spouse was not even the biological father of the children. Ordinarily, the Orphanmasters would take care of the orphaned, but since Straetmans had asked her minister to take care of her children, the church took charge of her affairs. Selijns made sure the children were cared for by two different families. Laurens was placed with Selijns for a contract period of six years, while eight-year-old Anna was placed with the family of farmer Gerrit Cornelissen who lived at a farm in Midwout (Flatbush).

Selijns also had to make sure the children received their "just due" from their mother's estate. Dutch Parents were concerned with the well-being of both male and female offspring, and both inherited from their parents. Straetmans estate was divided according to Dutch custom, which dictated that property was divided into two equal shares: one part went to the surviving spouse, while the other part was divided equally among the children regardless of their gender.[16] In the inventory of Straetmans's belongings, there are some illustrations of this division of property. For example, she left two pieces of linen measuring 35 els (24 meters). Selijns writes, "which was divided in two: one half for Gabriel Corbesij and the other half for the children; [this latter half] will be subdivided in three: for Margariet, Laurens, and Anna."[17] After the English takeover in 1664 a slow transition in inheritance practices took place, and sons came to be favored over daughters, as was the custom among the English.

Just when the children's lives must have regained some sense of normalcy, the church leadership received shocking news. On February 17, 1664, a traveling Englishman informed Selijns that Tieleman Jacobsen, Straetmans's third husband, was actually still alive on the island of Jamaica. The church leadership decided to write a letter to Jacobsen to inform him of his wife's death, and they assured him that his daughter Anna was with a family who treated her very well and "like your daughter as much as their own children." [18] The church then added that he might want to send for his daughter or send her something as a "token of paternal affection."[19] Not wanting to hand over Anna to just anyone, Selijns suggested Jacobsen could get a warrant with "proper procuration and a certain statement" from his governor or a magistrate so that they would know for sure he is alive and well and whether he wanted Anna sent to him, the "risen father."[20] From Selijns' correspondence it becomes clear that Jacobsen had wanted to go to New Netherland but changed course once he learned that his wife had remarried. Bigamy was a serious crime and Jacobsen's appearance would have led to, at the very least, an uncomfortable situation. But after Straetmans's death, it seems that Jacobsen did indeed settle in New Netherland to care for his daughter.

From Straetmans's story, it becomes clear that some women, like men, were highly mobile migrants in the Atlantic World. She was one of the many women who lost several husbands, and without a spouse, she had to fend for herself and her children in foreign, sometimes even hostile, lands. When Straetmans arrived in New Amsterdam, she was clearly able to take care of herself, purchasing two small houses before marrying her fourth husband. Moreover, she was able to hold on to this property and preserve it for her children. During her final years, the English were slowly encroaching onto territory the Dutch considered theirs. In 1664, the English took over the colony and with the introduction of their common law system, many rights of women slowly eroded.
Annette M. Cramer van den Bogaart received her Ph.D. in History from Stony Brook University and is currently an adjunct assistant professor at Farmingdale State College (SUNY).
[1] I.N. Phelps Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island 1498-1909 (v.2) (New York: Robert H. Dodd, 1915-1928), 324. The houses owned by Straetmans are listed at block Q: nr. 1 on the Castello Plan of Manhattan, created by surveyor Jacques Cortelyou in 1660. Under the direction of Toya Dubin and Nitin Gadia, the project "Mapping Early New York" is underway at the New Amsterdam History Center in order to create "New Amsterdam at Any Time" using Google Maps. ( New Amsterdam History Center Newsletter, Vol. 3, no. 1, Spring 2020.) A beta version of an overlay of the modern map of Manhattan and the Castello Plan is available at https://www.thenittygritty.org/nahc/encyclopedia/map/swipe.html.

[2] See among others: Els Kloek, Vrouw des Huizes: Een cultuurgeschiedenis van de Hollandse huisvrouw (Amsterdam: Balans, 2009), 81-86. Kim Todt, "'Women are as Knowing Therein as the Men': Dutch Women in Early America" in Women in Early America Thomas A. Foster, ed. (New York: New York University Press, 2015).

[3] C.J. Wasch, Doopregister der Hollanders in Brazilië, 1633-1654 ('s-Gravenhage: Genealogisch en Heraldisch Archief, 1889). Mauritie was baptized on November 1, 1637.

[4] Ibid, Margariet was baptized "Margarita" on April 20, 1639.

[5] Ibid, June 30, 1649

[6] Records of the Reformed Dutch Church in New Amsterdam - Marriages (New York Genealogical and biographical Record, 1890 and 1940).

[7] Charles T. Gehring, trans. & ed. New York Historical Manuscripts: Dutch, Volumes GG, HH & II, Land Papers. (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., Inc., 1980), Patent HH72.

[8] Ibid., Patent HH113, July 13, 1660.

[9] Minutes of the Court of Burgomasters and Schepens of New Amsterdam, February 17, 1660. New York City Municipal Archives. Available from https://newamsterdamstories.archives.nyc/nycma-records-new-amsterdam

[10] Ibid., February 24, 1660.

[11] Ibid., June 8, 1660

[12] Virginie Adane, "Trading Places: Men, Women and the Negotiation of Gendered Roles in the Port of New Amsterdam, 1630-1664," De Halve Maen, 86, no. 3 (Fall 2013), 51-58.

[13] Minutes of the Court of Burgomasters and Schepens, August 27, 1658.

[14] Ibid., September 14, 1660.

[15] A.P.G. Jos van der Linde, trans. & ed. Old First Dutch Reformed Church of Brooklyn, New York: First Book of Records, 1660-1752 (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., Inc., 1983), 77.

[16] Narrett, chapter 4.

[17] Van der Linde, ed., 51.

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The Remarkable Life of Teuntje Straetmans, a Woman in New Amsterdam - The Gotham Center for New York City History

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The Remarkable Life of Teuntje Straetmans, a Woman in New Amsterdam By Annette M. Cramer van den Bogaart Today, when you look at the impressive facade of the neoclassical building at 55 Wall Street in Manhattan, known as the National City Bank Building, you would never guess that somewhere buried

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Plan of New Amsterdam, 1660

This first accurate plan of the city, drawn in 1660, shows a defensive wall along the northern edge of the city (Wall Street today) and a broad city street (or Broadway) running north.

Peter Stuyvesant

Peter Stuyvesant, governor of New Amsterdam, fostered cooperation and an enterprising spirit among the varied people there. To accomplish this, he awarded land grants that gave recipients the rights to live, farm, and trade. This grant is for land in Midwout, part of today's Brooklyn.

Identity of the City

Beavers, the most important commodity in the region, loomed large on this proposed coat-of-arms for New Amsterdam. In 1664 the English military seized New Amsterdam and renamed it for James, the Duke of York.

Africans in New Amsterdam

The Dutch West India Company brought enslaved people from its slave-trading posts in Africa to work on farms, build roads, and perform domestic labor. Urban life created a different sort of African American society than was emerging in the plantation colonies. Africans in New Amsterdam lived in their own households and established families. After years of work, some won partial freedom and land allotments from the company. Still, the company claimed the children of these people as slaves. To increase those children's chances of freedom, African parents and godparents had their children baptized in the Dutch Reformed Church.

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This first accurate plan of the city, drawn in 1660, shows a defensive wall along the northern edge of the city (Wall Street today) and a broad city street (or Broadway) running north. Peter Stuyvesant, governor of New Amsterdam, fostered cooperation and an enterprising spirit among the varied people there.

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Digital Exhibitions: New Netherlands Institute

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Digital Exhibitions: New Netherlands Institute

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Explore Dutch America through documents, artifacts, people & places

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In September 1609, Henry Hudson and his crew, sailing for the Dutch East India Company, entered what is now New York Harbor and began traveling up the river that would later bear his name. The company had asked Hudson to find a northern route between Europe and Asia to give them an advantage over competitors. While the river did not provide a route to Asia, Hudson took notice of the region's riches: lush natural resources, a protected harbor on the Atlantic, and an abundance of beavers, whose fur was valuable in Europe.

Hudson's report of his discovery inspired settlement of the colony New Netherland. Over the next six decades, New Netherland grew to include parts of present-day New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. The colony started as a series of fur trading forts along the Hudson River (then called the North River), specializing in trade with Native Americans for beaver furs. The fur trade served the interests of Dutch merchants, who ultimately unified as the West India Company (founded 1621).

Between the 1620s and 1660s, the colony grew as a result of a number of influential leaders and initiatives. In 1626, colony director Peter Minuit purchased the island of Manhattan from Native Americans and built Fort Amsterdam, later surrounded by the city of New Amsterdam, on its southern tip. In 1629, the West India Company established a system of land distribution to encourage settlement in the colony. In the 1640s, director Willem Kieft expanded the southern and eastern boundaries of the colony, but came into conflict with neighboring Europeans, Native American allies, and the residents of the colony. The last director of New Netherland was Peter Stuyvesant. Under Stuyvesant, the colony's multicultural population-diverse European ethnic and religious groups, Africans, and Native Americans-grew. The colony flourished between 1647 and 1664. After years of tension between New Netherlanders and New England settlers, however, British forces sailed to New Amsterdam in 1664 and demanded surrender. With no military resources to defend the colony, Stuyvesant was forced to hand it over and it was renamed New York.

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In September 1609, Henry Hudson and his crew, sailing for the Dutch East India Company, entered what is now New York Harbor and began traveling up the river that would later bear his name. The company had asked Hudson to find a northern route between Europe and Asia to give them an advantage over competitors.

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New Netherlands: What's in a Primary Source?

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New Netherlands: What's in a Primary Source?

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[ Today the ] undersigned director and councilors of New Netherland,[ authorized thereto by a resolution ] of the chamber at Amsterdam, [ parties of the first part, and the owners ] of the ship whereof[ left blank ] is [ commander ] measuring about [ left blank ] tons, [ parties of the second ] part, have agreed and contracted that the aforesaid skipper shall receive a license and the necessary documents enabling him to trade for slaves on the coast of Africa and to profit thereby as he sees fit. Likewise, he shall return to the Manhathans with the aforesaid slaves and such other cargo, provided that the issued license concerning the coast of Africa does not permit him to trade on the Gold Coast, and that he shall not come any further west than Ardre or at the most Popo; under penalty of forfeiting the aforesaid ship and its cargo. For which purpose the director and councilors shall be allowed to place a supercargo on board the aforesaid ship, (whom the skipper shall be obligated to board in the cabin), and if necessary also to administer an appropriate oath to the crew. For which consent and license the aforesaid owners promise to pay promptly upon the return of the aforesaid ship and before its cargo is unloaded, to the aforesaid director and councilors fifteen guilders for each Negro as duty without claiming any exception or compensation thereon, pledging their persons and possessions, nothing excepted, with renunciation of beneficium ordinis, divisionis et excusionis, as having full knowledge thereof.

Done at New Amsterdam this [ left blank ]

Notes

Ardre and Popo are both in Dahome on the slave coast of Africa.

Legal expression denoting a pvilege or right which allows a. surety to require that the creditor first proceed agamst the principal and exhaust his remedy agamst him, before resorting to the surety; and allows one of several co-sureties to insist upon paying only his pro rata share of the debt.

References

A complete copy of this publication is available on the New Netherland Institute website.

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Today the ] undersigned director and councilors of New Netherland,[ authorized thereto by a resolution ] of the chamber at Amsterdam, [ parties of the first part, and the owners ] of the ship whereof[ left blank ] is [ commander ] measuring about [ left blank ] tons, [ parties of the second ] part, have agreed and contracted that the aforesaid skipper shall receive a license and the necessary documents enabling him to trade for slaves on the coast of Africa and to profit thereby as he sees fit.

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Economic and Civic Concepts in New Amsterdam

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Economic and Civic Concepts in New Amsterdam

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[The director general and councilors of New Netherland, to all those who hear or see this read, greetings.

Let it be known that by daily and] sad [ experience it is found ] that the [ previously issued and frequently renewed ] ordinances and edicts [ against the ] profaning of the Lord's Sabbath; the unseasonable tapping on that day, and at night after the posting of the guard or the ringing of the bell; against the very dangerous, indeed, damnable sale or dispensing of wine, beer , and distilled spirits;[ii] the baking and selling of coarse as well as small or white bread, are, according to the good intention of the director general and councilors, to the dishonor of God, to the serious damage, loss and disturbance of the peace and quiet of the inhabitants, and to the great contempt of the authority and quality of the superior and inferior magistrates of this province, neither regarded, observed, maintained nor even justified, and as necessity clearly requires; therefore, the aforesaid director general and councilors, wishing, by virtue of their office, and prompted by duty and necessity, to provide herein, do renew and enlarge their previously enacted ordinances and edicts, and hereby prohibit and forbid:

First, all persons from performing or doing on the Lord's day of rest, by us called Sunday, any ordinary labor, such as plowing, sowing, mowing, building, sawing wood, blacksmithing, bleaching, hunting, fishing, or any other work that may be lawful on other days, on pain of forfeiting one pound Flemish for each person; much less any lower or unlawful exercise and [amusement, drinking alcoholic beverages, frequenting taverns or tap houses, dancing, playing cards, ticktacken, caetsen, balslaen, clossen, kegelen,[iii] going by boat, cart or wagon before, between or during the Lord's service, on pain of a double fine; in particular, no] innkeepers [ shall be allowed to set a buffet before, between or ] during the sermons, nor [ be allowed to tap, bestow, give or sell to anyone any brandy ], beer , or distilled spirits, [ directly ] or indirectly, on pain of the innkeeper or tapper [ forfeiting six guilders ] for each person, and each person found drinking at the aforesaid time, three guilders; likewise, no innkeepers or tappers shall be allowed to set buffets nor continue on Sunday or on any other day that continue on into the night after the mounting of the guard or the ringing of the bell, nor shall anyone be tapped, sold or dispensed any wine, beer or brandy or distilled spirits, on the same penalty; meetings of domestic guests on public business, alone excepted, determined by the consent and order of the magistrates.

Secondly, with regard to the very dangerous, injurious and damnable sale, dispensing, and giving of any wine, beer or distilled spirits to the wilden or naturellen of this country, from which almost as many mischiefs proceed, or at least are threatened and apprehended, as there are drunken wilden, the aforesaid director general and councilors, renewing and enlarging their previously published edicts, do hereby order and command that no person, of whatever capacity or profession he may be, shall sell, barter, bestow, give, furnish or carry or allow to be carried, to or for any wilden, in or out of the house, by land or water, from yachts, barks, boats, or canoes, carts or wagons, by whatever name such [ vehicles may be called, either directly or indirectly, any beer , wine, brandy or distilled spirits, under penalty of five hundred guilders, and in addition to be arbitrarily punished on the body, and banished from the country. And in order that the same may be discovered, for the better promotion and maintenance of the ] public [ peace and quiet, between the good ] inhabitants [ of this province and the ]barbaren, all superior and inferior officers, free or hired servants of the Company, and inhabitants of this province are, by their office and fealty, exhorted, required and commanded to aid in excluding, discovering, and informing about such most dangerous and damnable sale or bestowal of wine, beer , or distilled spirits, or, failing therein, to pay half the fine in case it afterward appear, or become known that they were privy to, or had not informed of, such sale, giving or dispensing of wine, beer , or distilled spirits to any wilden.

Further, the aforesaid director general and councilors, being credibly informed and told that wine, beer and distilled spirits, are peddled and retailed up and along the rivers, from up-going and returning yachts, barks, boats, ships and canoes, do hereby not only interdict and forbid such peddling and retailing, but ordain, enact and command that no skippers, sloop owners [ barcquiers], canoe men or boatmen, or any other free or bound inhabitants, of whatever name, nation, capacity or occupation they may be, shall from this time forth, either for themselves or for others, embark, load, take with them, in any bark, yacht, boat, canoe, or another vessel, any wine, beer , brandy or distilled spirits in large or small casks, or even in cans, jugs or bottles, [ without having first entered the correct quantity with the officer of the place where the wine, beer or distilled spirits, in large or small quantities, are embarked, shipped or loaded, and received from the officer a certificate or permit, on which shall appear the quantity and quality of casks and other measure of the wine, beer or distilled spirits to be taken along, for whom shipped, and to whom consigned, and shall bring back a ] proper certificate or proof [ of the delivery to such person, signed by the officer and the receiver thereof at the place of delivery; ] and all that on pain of forfeiting the concealed wine, beer or distilled spirits, and a fine of five hundred guilders for the first time, and forfeiting in addition, for the second offense, the bark, yacht, boat, or canoe.

Thirdly, in regard to the baking and selling of coarse and white bread, neither of lawful weight nor at the fixed price, the aforesaid director general and councilors renewing and enlarging the previously published order on that subject, do hereby ordain and command that all bakers and all other inhabitants who make a business of baking or selling bread, whether for Christians or barbaren, shall be obliged, as well for the accommodation of Christians as to derive profit thereby from wilden, to bake at least once or twice a week both coarse and white bread, as well for Christians as wilden, of the stated weight and at the price as follows:

The coarse loaf shall weigh:

The double, 8 lbs., and cost 14 stivers. The single, 4 lbs., and cost 7 stivers. The half, 2 lbs., and cost 3½ stivers.

The white loaf shall weigh:

[The double, 2 lbs., and cost 8 stivers. The single, 1 lb., and cost 4 stivers.

The half, ½ lbs., and cost 2 stivers.

All bread found to be of less weight or sold at a higher price, without the previous knowledge, order and consent of the inferior court, shall be forfeit, and there shall be paid in addition a fine of twenty-five] pounds Flemish for the first time; for the second time, double as much, and for the third time, six hundred guilders, and their trade be absolutely prohibited to them.

Further, no bakers or persons who make a business of selling coarse or white bread to Christians or wilden shall be allowed to mix any sifted bran either wholly, or in part with the coarse bread, but bake the coarse bread as the flour comes from the mill; or to make any other sort of coarse or white bread either for wilden or Christians than is herein previously specified, on the aforesaid penalty. The inspection thereof remains subject to the respective courts, each within its jurisdiction, and those whom, as better judges of bread, they shall assume to themselves.

Fourthly, the director general and councilors, being further informed and considering that frauds can creep in, both in the matter of tapping and baking, for the concealment whereof excuses may be set up and invented, because no guild or certain number is known up to this time; to prevent such, as much as possible, the director general and councilors ordain and command that, from this time forward, no person shall make any profession of baking or tapping unless he first apply to the court in the respective jurisdiction and receive from it, or its agent, a license for that business, which all tavern keepers and bakers shall renew every quarter of a year commencing the first of November, next and pay for it each time one pound Flemish for the benefit of the respective court, on pain of suspension of his business for notorious and obstinate neglect.

The fines and amercements specified above are to be applied one-third [ for the officer ] who shall enter the complaint; one-third for the church or the poor; one-third for the public benefit.

In order that all this may be the better known, practiced and observed, and that no one pretend ignorance hereafter on this subject, the director general and councilors do hereby ordain and command that this shall be published and posted everywhere that it is customary to have publication made, and that after publication they be observed and executed without any grace, favors, simulation or respect of persons, as we find such to be appropriate for the public service and for the better and greater peace of the good inhabitants.

Thus done, renewed and amplified in the session of director general and councilors of New Netherland on the 26th of September 1656.

Published and registered in Fort Amsterdam on the 26th of October.

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The director general and councilors of New Netherland, to all those who hear or see this read, greetings.

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Contract for Importing Enslaved People from Africa

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Contract for Importing Enslaved People from Africa

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Digital Collections : Text : Form of a contract for importing slaves from Africa [NYSA_A1810-78_V11_45b]

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Contract between the director and council of New Netherland and ----------, to import a cargo of slaves from Africa into that province.

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Thomas(ine) Hall:  Colonial Williamsburg

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Thomas(ine) Hall:  Colonial Williamsburg

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We stand on the shoulders of giants. When we celebrate our progress, we look to those who came before. This LGBTQIA History Month and Intersex Awareness Day (October 26) we uncover one of history's buried giants and rejoice in their story. While the LGBTQIA abbreviation is modern, the individuals represented by the letters are not. People of gender and sexual minorities have always existed, though their lives and bodies have often been rendered invisible in the historic record. They lived full lives and were significant actors in shaping our modern world.

As a member of the Colonial Williamsburg Gender and Sexual Diversity Research Committee, I examine the history of marginalized people and try to piece together their lives based on the scant evidence left behind. Many of the people I study were pushed to the fringes of society. The words and actions of those around them, often filled with hate and harsh judgment, are sometimes all that mark their passing and time on Earth. How can you know a person when you only hear about them from those who abuse and spurn them? It is only by submerging completely in the details that a picture begins to crystalize. Each life a world entire; full of ambitions, lives impacted, and loved ones left behind. When we research and bring these stories to light we gain a more vibrant view of history, beautifully true and ours. There is a power in speaking truth, not just looking at the past in nostalgia of a time gone by and progress made; but truly acknowledging the complexities. As a watercolor artist, I have made it a habit to speak the names and paint the people I research so that I can focus on the human behind the text. This helps me to honor their lives and keep their humanity in mind, even while reading the sometimes heartbreaking stories of their treatment by those around them. One such individual is Thomas/Thomasine Hall, an intersex Virginian whose entire life is marked in the historic record by a single court case.

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We stand on the shoulders of giants. When we celebrate our progress, we look to those who came before. This LGBTQIA History Month and Intersex Awareness Day (October 26) we uncover one of history's buried giants and rejoice in their story. While the LGBTQIA abbreviation is modern, the individuals represented by the letters are not.

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5.

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Mary Cooper records five years as a Long Island farmwife, 1768-1773 (PDF)

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Eliza Lucas Pinckney records her management of South Carolina plantations, 1749-1762 (PDF)

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Mary Jemison recalls her capture and adoption by Seneca Indians, 1758-1780s

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Elizabeth Ashbridge recounts her path to becoming a Quaker, 1730s

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Jane Turell pens a spiritual journey through grief, 1720s-1735 (PDF)

"I find it requires great care, attention and activity to attend properly to a Carolina Estate, tho' but a moderate one, to do ones duty and make it turn to account . . ."

"It has beene a tiresom day to me. It is now bed time and I have not had won minuts rest today."

"[My husband] heard I was turned Quaker; at which he stamped, and said, 'I had rather have heard she was dead . . .'"

Elizabeth Ashbridge, 1730s

"Thrice in my Womb I've found the pleasing Strife,
In the first Struggles of my Infants Life:
But O how soon by Heaven I'm call'd to mourn,
While from my Womb a lifeless Babe is torn?"

It is cliché to portray the lives of white colonial women in two categories-the frontier wife's as short, arduous, and dangerous; the wealthy matron's as urban, privileged, and long. And all, of course, dominated by the men in their lives. Where is the truth in the clichés? Where is the overlap? How much do women's personal decisions, even in the centuries before women's liberation, count? Here we read from the published memoirs, diaries, and letters of five white colonial women. Their life spans range from 27 to 90 years, their adult roles from a tired farmwife to an innovative plantation manager. All were wives, all but one were mothers, and all the mothers lost at least one child. Mary Cooper, the farmwife, had survived all six of her children when she died at age 64. Consider these writings with those of other white women in this Toolbox, including the letter of Elizabeth Sprigs and the poems of Annis Boudinot Stockton, Sarah Parsons Moorhead, and Martha Wadsworth Brewster. Is there a prototypical colonial white woman? (31 pages.)

1. Complete this chart (PDF) to analyze the decisions made by these women as young adults, mothers, women of faith, and, in two cases, farm or plantation wives. (Chart as Word doc.)

2. To what extent do their decisions reflect their identity as white women of British ancestry?

3. What did each woman hope to achieve? How did each pursue her goals?

4. What opportunities, constraints, and hardships did they face in their adult lives? How did they respond?

5. If multiplied many times, how would their decisions impact colonial society?

6. How do the women differ within their shared ethnic identity? How did these differences influence their lives and decisions?

7. How do their relationships with male relatives differ from those with women relatives? How do they relate to these differences, as far as you can determine?

8. Project the lives of Jane Turell, Elizabeth Ashbridge, and Mary Cooper if they had lived past the age of 50 and through the American Revolution. How would the nation's independence have affected their lives?

9. Which woman would you want to interview? What questions would you ask? Why? How does your gender influence your choice of questions?

10. In your interview, what difference would you emphasize between the colonial woman's life and a woman's life in America today?

11. What questions would these women have asked each other in interviews? Create a dialogue between two of these women in which they discuss the similarities and differences of their lives.

12. Create another chart (PDF) to evaluate the validity of the published life narratives. How close do we get to each woman's private life and thoughts? For what purposes are the narratives written? What time span of each woman's life is covered? Was the work published in the woman's lifetime? (Chart as Word doc.)

13. Consider the statement of historian Alan Taylor: "As the colonial population became less English, it assumed a new ethnic and racial complexity, which increased the gap between freedom and slavery, privilege and prejudice, wealth and poverty, white and black." How do these readings illustrate Taylor's point?

Mary Cooper:

7

Eliza Lucas Pinckney:

8

Mary Jemison:

6

Elizabeth Ashbridge:

5

Jane Turell:

5

TOTAL

31 pages

Mary Cooper, overview and diary entries, from Newsday, Inc.

Eliza Pinckney, biography from the National Women's History Museum

Mary Jemison's narrative, full text, from Project Gutenberg

Mary Jemison on the Revolution, from History Matters

Elizabeth Ashbridge, biography from the Heath Anthology of American Literature, biographies:

Elizabeth Ashbridge's narrative, full text, from Sewanee, Dept. of American Studies

Jane Colman Turell, biography, from the Heath Anthology of American Literature

Images:
- John Valentine Haidt, Young Moravian Girl, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, #1987.32. Permission pending.
- Joseph Badger, portrait of Rebecca Orne (Mrs. Joseph Cabot), 1757. Worcester Art Museum, #1971.101. Permission pending.
- Joseph Badger, Isaac Winslow and His Family, oil on canvas, 1755 (detail). Museum of Fine Arts Boston, #42.684. Permission pending.
- Page from the diary of Mary Cooper (including 13 July 1769). Newsday, Inc., at xml.newsday.com/community/guide/lihistory/. Permission pending.
- Photo postcard with conjectural depiction of Mary Jemison at age 90 in 1831, captioned "White Woman of the Genesee," in Exploring Letchworth Park History, personal website of Tom Cook & Tom Breslin at www.letchworthparkhistory.com/lpa66.html. Permission pending.

*PDF file - You will need software on your computer that allows you to read and print Portable Document Format (PDF) files, such as Adobe Acrobat Reader. If you do not have this software, you may download it FREE from Adobe's Web site.

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5. Women, in PEOPLES, Becoming American: The British Atlantic Colonies, 1690-1763, Primary Resources in U.S. History and Literature, Toolbox Library, National Humanities Center

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5. - Mary Cooper records five years as a Long Island farmwife, 1768-1773 (PDF) - Eliza Lucas Pinckney records her management of South Carolina plantations, 1749-1762 (PDF) - Mary Jemison recalls her capture and adoption by Seneca Indians, 1758-1780s - Elizabeth Ashbridge recounts her path to becoming a Quaker, 1730s - Jane Turell pens a spiritual journey through grief, 1720s-1735 (PDF) "I find it requires great care, attention and activity to attend properly to a Carolina Estate, tho' but a moderate one, to do ones duty and make it turn to account .

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Early Virginia

The first women in colonial Virginia were Virginia Indians. Because of their regular interactions with the English colonists, scholars know the most about the Algonquian-speaking Indians of Tsenacomoco. In early Virginia Indian society, gender roles were clearly defined because men and women needed to work as partners to survive. Women bore and cared for children and prepared food, but they also ; foraged for additional ; built ; made , mats, baskets, household implements, and furnishings; and collected firewood. Indian women were not restricted to the home, as English women often were; they were required to travel on foot and by canoe outside their homes and . Men hunted, , and participated in political and military councils. Although Virginia Indian chiefs, or weroances, were almost always men, the position was inherited through the female line. ( Cockacoeske and were important weroansquas, or women chiefs.)

Little is known about the education that Indian girls received, but they likely learned from the example provided by their elders. A girl was expected to learn how to perform her assigned tasks before reaching a marriageable age; her skill level determined her desirability as a marriage partner. Men initiated courtship, but women could decline offers of marriage. If a spouse was captured or killed, men and women alike were encouraged to . (For example, the first marriage of Pocahontas, daughter of the paramount chief , likely ended after she was captured by the English and held at Jamestown.)

Women at Jamestown

The first two English women to arrive in Virginia came in mid-October 1608 as part of the so-called Second Supply of colonists. Mistress Forrest made the journey with her husband, Thomas Forrest, and her maid, Ann Burras. Thomas Forrest was the first colonist to have authority over both his wife and a dependent member of his household. Before the end of 1608, Ann Burras married John Laydon, a laborer and one of the original settlers. English women continued to trickle into the colony after Forrest and Burras's arrival, although a concerted effort to increase the English female population of Virginia was not made until 1619.

The colonists at Jamestown hoped to recreate in Virginia the patriarchal social structure they had known in England, where a man had authority over his wife and all dependent members of his household. This structure was fortified by the doctrine of coverture, which affirmed that a woman, once married, was totally subsumed, or "covered," under her husband's person. A married woman, or feme covert, had no legal status; did not control any property, even if she brought it to the marriage; and ceded to her husband full rights to all incomes and wages she earned. A single adult woman, whether unmarried or widowed, was considered a feme sole. She could buy and sell property and engage in contracts and other business and legal transactions.

In early Virginia, the strictest definition of coverture was rarely applied. Disease, food shortages, and conflict with the Indians disrupted the roles that European men and women typically played. Conditions within James Fort were dismal because there were not enough women to do the necessary domestic work, and men often refused to do what they perceived as women's work, including doing laundry, cleaning house, and cultivating corn, which they had seen Indian women do. In England, women did not grow the main crop and spent most of their time in or near their home.

The Virginia colony began to stabilize after Pocahontas married the English colonist in 1614. Their marriage effectively ended the First Anglo-Powhatan War (1609-1614) and initiated a period of peace during which the English greatly expanded their settlements, established plantations along the James River, and grew and exported tobacco. In 1619, officials of the Virginia Company of London decided to recruit respectable women to, as Company treasurer Sir Edwin Sandys put it, "make wifes to the inhabitants and by that meanes to make the men there more setled and lesse moveable." Married landowners, as heads of households with authority over their wives and children, would add stability to life in the colony. Their wives would work in the home, produce food in their gardens, and raise children. Ninety "younge, handsome and honestly educated maydes" were shipped to the colony in 1620. In 1621, the Virginia Company sent fifty-seven marriageable women between the ages of fifteen and twenty-eight. A wife procured in this manner cost 120 pounds of tobacco per head-six times the cost of a male indentured servant.

Gender and the Establishment of Virginia Society

As the historian James Horn notes, seventeenth-century Virginia was an immigrant society. Men and women left England for a variety of reasons-some to acquire land and others, such as convict laborers, because they had no other option. Although male migrants outnumbered female migrants six to one, immigrants of both sexes shared certain characteristics: they hoped to improve their economic standing and they were, for the most part, young and single. Most started their new lives in the colony as indentured servants, exchanging four to seven years of work for paid passage to the New World.

Like their male counterparts, female indentured servants faced harsh conditions once they arrived in Virginia. Many who migrated to the Chesapeake were unable to acclimate to their new surroundings, became sick, and died. Those who survived labored in tobacco fields for their masters (some of whom physically and sexually abused their servants) until their time of service was complete.

A woman who had completed her indenture was likely to find a husband: for most of the seventeenth century, men outnumbered women in Virginia by a ratio of three or four to one. But in Virginia, marriage did not necessarily exempt a woman from performing agricultural work in addition to her domestic tasks. Even the women who had been shipped to the colony in the 1620s specifically to become wives found themselves working alongside laborers who were white and black, free and unfree. To the English, the fact that planters' wives worked in the fields was a sign of social instability-an indication that Virginia's settlers had not established "proper," gender-based work roles.

Some women-especially those who combined modest wealth and entrepreneurial skills-operated almost like men. Dutch settler Anna Varlett Hack Boot carried on extensive trading activities throughout the Atlantic, while single and as a married woman, mostly with other Dutch merchants. The same was true of Anne Toft, who traded fish and tobacco with Dutch and English merchants. In the 1660s Toft, as a single woman, accumulated thousands of acres of land in Virginia, Maryland, and Jamaica. While Toft and Boot were exceptional, they were not the only women in seventeenth-century Virginia who bought and sold land, engaged in small-scale trading, and went to court to protect their investments.

Legislating Social Roles Based on Gender and Race

The progression of Virginia law in the seventeenth century makes clear that colonial leaders did not want white women to perform agricultural labor. In 1643, for example, the General Assembly that African women were tithable, or eligible to be taxed, as white and black men were. This distinction may reflect lawmakers' expectation that African women would be field laborers, thus contributing to the colony's wealth, and European women would remain in the domestic sphere. The legislators hoped their decision to limit white women to domestic work would further stabilize the colony's social order and give husbands more authority and control over their wives.

Male authority in early Virginia-based on reputation, not family tradition-was fragile, and women did not always submit to it. Specifically, some women used words to improve their reputations, to acquire a small degree of power in their communities, and even to express political opinions. They questioned males' ability to govern and used gossip to control stories about themselves and their neighbors. This type of disorderly speech was a threat to colonial officials. In December 1662, the General Assembly passed a law stating that a "brabling" (quarrelsome or riotous) wife could be ducked, or plunged underwater, as punishment for slandering her husband or neighbors. The statute trivialized female communication and freed husbands from the burden of paying a fine for their wives' behavior.

At the same legislative session, the General Assembly turned its attention to the status of Africans in Virginia. Although many planters who purchased Africans held these individuals as lifelong slaves, no law guaranteed a colonist's right to do so. Some men also questioned whether a black child born in Virginia was a slave. The lawmakers (men who owned the majority of Africans in Virginia) determined that "all children borne in this country shalbe held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother"-that is, a child born to an enslaved woman would also be a slave for his or her lifetime. In addition to securing colonists' right to own an individual as property, this law made African women the key to the expansion of slavery in Virginia. The General Assembly also attempted to limit the size of the colony's free black population by imposing harsh punishments on interracial couples and white women who gave birth to mulatto children. By establishing white participation in interracial relationships as the transgression, the scholar Kathleen M. Brown has argued, the General Assembly cast Africans in the role of moral corruptor, distancing African women in the colony even further from white women.

Extant county court records indicate that mothers of free black and mulatto children took it upon themselves to learn about the colony's laws and protect the fragile freedom of their children. Elizabeth Banks, of York County, a white indentured servant, arranged to have her mulatto daughters, Ann and Mary, bound out to planters who lived a short distance from her. As an adult, Mary Banks appeared before York County's justices of the peace to make similar arrangements for her children, Hannah and Elizabeth. These women and other mothers of free black and mulatto boys and girls negotiated apprenticeships, secured food and shelter, and labored so there would be money to buy necessities for their families.

Order and Disorder in the Late Seventeenth Century

The events of Bacon's Rebellion (1676-1677), and the role that female voices played in them, highlight the instability of Virginia society in the late seventeenth century. By this time, the men at the top of Virginia's social and economic order controlled much of the colony's wealth. They owned thousands of acres of land, had indentured servants and slaves who labored for their benefit, and had wives and children over whom they had authority. In contrast, many of the men at the bottom of the social order had neither land nor a wife. As tobacco prices dropped due to overproduction, it became harder for these individuals to support themselves.

Discontent with their position, many of these men eagerly joined Nathaniel Bacon when he challenged Governor Sir William Berkeley for control of the colony in 1676. Berkeley had branded Bacon a rebel, and as such, Bacon could not attend meetings of the county court or parish churches to recruit supporters. Instead, women such as Lydia Cheesman, , and Sarah Drummond openly challenged the governor's authority, spread word of Bacon's plans, and urged their husbands to enlist with the rebel. (The historian Stephen Saunders Webb has described these women as "news wives.") Other women demonstrated their loyalty to the governor and especially to his wife, Lady Frances Culpeper Stephens Berkeley, who spoke out in support of her husband and even sailed to England to present his side of story to Charles II.

In part because of the efforts of news wives, hundreds joined Bacon's army. Among them were indentured servants and slaves to whom Bacon had promised freedom in exchange for their participation. This coming together of free men, indentured servants, slaves, and women threatened the security of Virginia's nascent patriarchy. After the rebellion collapsed in 1677, the colony's leaders passed legislation to suppress any future alliances. A series of laws passed in the last quarter of the seventeenth century increased restrictions on slaves, while the "Act of Reliefe" penalized those who "shall presume to speake, write, disperse or publish by words, writeing or otherwise, any matter or thing tending to rebellion." First offenders had to pay a fine of 1,000 pounds of tobacco and stand in the stocks for two hours-unless they were married women, or femes covert, who had to pay the fine or endure twenty lashes to the bare back.

"Good Wives" in the Eighteenth Century

By the end of the seventeenth century, one's role in Virginia society depended on both gender and race. Black women, whether enslaved or free, occupied a position at the bottom of the social and economic ladder. They could not fulfill the English ideal of the good wife because they were primarily agricultural laborers. In contrast, white females could be good wives even if they spent some time tending tobacco plants.

A good wife in early eighteenth-century Virginia had different responsibilities from her counterpart in England. In Virginia, as in England, a good wife cared for her children, cooked, cleaned, tended the garden, and managed the work done by a staff of domestics. But unlike that of her English counterpart, a Virginia wife's staff included enslaved men, women, and children. Learning how to manage who had recently been imported into the colony from Africa was an additional challenge for white Virginians of either sex. To them, these slaves were different from the enslaved men, women, and children who had been born in Virginia. Most of the new slaves did not speak English, and many had ritual scarification and body piercings.

Extant documents indicate that some husbands and wives of the gentry class struggled to determine who was in control of the household. The planter elite believed they needed to impose their authority on their wives and to manage the domestic work in their homes. The need to control one's wife was crucial because failure to manage a woman was a sign that a man was not in control of his life. William Byrd II, for example, recorded his frustration on the occasions when his wife, Lucy Parke Byrd, did not submit to his authority. Byrd challenged her husband, perhaps in part because she wanted to direct the work of the slaves who labored in their home. It was uncertain exactly what work was to be done by a good wife if her husband owned slaves to labor for their benefit.

By the second quarter of the eighteenth century, however, the role and duties of a good wife in Virginia were clearer. An elite woman's main responsibility was to prepare her children to be members of Virginia's gentry. In addition to providing instruction in reading, writing, arithmetic, and religion, gentry wives made sure that their sons and daughters knew proper etiquette, how to converse with guests, and how to . The wife of a prosperous planter also taught her children how to manage enslaved laborers, including the personal slave who would tend to their daily needs. Establishing these behaviors helped gentry families maintain their power, which was consolidated largely through marriage.

While the patriarchal ideal dominated both theory and practice by the mid-eighteenth century, a minority of adult women operated successfully outside this norm. This was especially true of widows, who as feme soles continued to buy and sell land, negotiate contracts, and manage households with servants and slaves. A majority of widows remarried, but many did not, preferring instead to remain single and independent. In some areas of Virginia, these widows and other single women were a significant economic force, representing up to 15 percent of the landowners and owning nearly 20 percent of the land.

Women also participated in the political life of the colony even though they had no official role. While it is possible that a few wealthy widows may have in the seventeenth century, made clear that this was a male-only activity. Women did, however, help enfranchise men through land they brought to a marriage and this in turn gave some of them indirect power to influence the voting behavior of their husbands. Candidates, too, understood that treating wives with cordiality and respect might impact the outcome of an election.

Middling, Poor, and Enslaved Women in the Eighteenth Century

Middling and poor women also worked to make sure that their children were ready for adulthood. They taught sons and daughters the basic math and writing skills that would enable them to keep accounts and manage their households or plantations. By mid-century, some middling and poor females decided to move to one of the colony's urban areas, such as Williamsburg or Norfolk, where they might run taverns, work as milliners, become midwives, or wash and mend clothes. Christiana Campbell and kept two of Williamsburg's most popular taverns and counted the colony's leaders, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, among their customers. Catherine Rathell and sisters Margaret and Jane Hunter (later Jane Charlton) opened shops that helped Williamsburg residents and visitors to keep up with the latest British fashions. The midwife Catherine Blaikley used a red morocco pocketbook to hold money, receipts, and notes. When she died in 1771 the Virginia Gazette reported that Blaikley had delivered more than 3,000 babies born to white and black women in the Williamsburg area. Ann Ashby (also known as Ann Jones), a free black woman, laundered clothing, repaired torn garments, and knit stockings for her customers. Although Rathell, Hunter, Charlton, Blaikley, and Ashby worked to support themselves and their families, their actions did not challenge gender roles because their businesses were an extension of the domestic work performed by women.

By the mid-eighteenth century, the majority of enslaved people in Virginia had been born in the colony. They spoke English and knew how to negotiate with their owners to gain small concessions in work demands, food, and clothing. In the eyes of the law, however, black women were supposed to perform strenuous agricultural labor and increase their masters' wealth by bearing children. Most slave owners gave little thought to the stability of their slaves' domestic lives, often dividing families to turn a profit. They also divided enslaved families in their wills if it would benefit their heirs. Nevertheless, enslaved mothers made an effort to teach their children about slavery and to preserve their culture.

The Move toward Revolution

Women's lives changed between the end of the French and Indian War (1754-1763) and the issuance of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. When Virginia's burgesses and merchants pledged not to import specified goods as a way to protest taxes imposed by Great Britain, some women also promised to do without these items. The decision not to import material objects not only gave women an opportunity to express their political views, it also changed the daily work done by many women because they had to learn how to produce items they previously purchased from British merchants. Elite wives also taught some enslaved women how to make soap and candles. Other female slaves learned how to spin thread and weave cloth. Seamstresses turned the Virginia cloth into clothing that colonists wore to protest "taxation without representation." It became a sign of honor to wear clothes made in Virginia from cloth spun in the colony.

Once Virginians declared their independence from Great Britain, women of all classes found their lives changed. Wives of both Patriots and Loyalists learned how to operate households during times of food shortages and high prices. Some Loyalist families decided to leave Virginia and once they arrived in England, the women in these households learned how to adapt to the gender expectations in their new country. Wives of Continental soldiers functioned as the heads of their households while their husbands were gone. For some enslaved women, Dunmore's Proclamation (1775) offered a chance to seize independence and begin life as free women. Whether Virginia women spent the Revolution in America or in England, they continued to perform domestic work, raise their children, and add stability to their societies.

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Women in Colonial Virginia - Encyclopedia Virginia

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Early Virginia Fictiliuvaforu in quibus cibucoquunt (The Beauty of the Earthenware Vessels in Which They Cook Food) The first women in colonial Virginia were Virginia Indians. Because of their regular interactions with the English colonists, scholars know the most about the Algonquian-speaking Indians of Tsenacomoco.

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Link also under "Great Britain"

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Early Virginia

The first women in colonial Virginia were Virginia Indians. Because of their regular interactions with the English colonists, scholars know the most about the Algonquian-speaking Indians of Tsenacomoco. In early Virginia Indian society, gender roles were clearly defined because men and women needed to work as partners to survive. Women bore and cared for children and prepared food, but they also ; foraged for additional ; built ; made , mats, baskets, household implements, and furnishings; and collected firewood. Indian women were not restricted to the home, as English women often were; they were required to travel on foot and by canoe outside their homes and . Men hunted, , and participated in political and military councils. Although Virginia Indian chiefs, or weroances, were almost always men, the position was inherited through the female line. ( Cockacoeske and were important weroansquas, or women chiefs.)

Little is known about the education that Indian girls received, but they likely learned from the example provided by their elders. A girl was expected to learn how to perform her assigned tasks before reaching a marriageable age; her skill level determined her desirability as a marriage partner. Men initiated courtship, but women could decline offers of marriage. If a spouse was captured or killed, men and women alike were encouraged to . (For example, the first marriage of Pocahontas, daughter of the paramount chief , likely ended after she was captured by the English and held at Jamestown.)

Women at Jamestown

The first two English women to arrive in Virginia came in mid-October 1608 as part of the so-called Second Supply of colonists. Mistress Forrest made the journey with her husband, Thomas Forrest, and her maid, Ann Burras. Thomas Forrest was the first colonist to have authority over both his wife and a dependent member of his household. Before the end of 1608, Ann Burras married John Laydon, a laborer and one of the original settlers. English women continued to trickle into the colony after Forrest and Burras's arrival, although a concerted effort to increase the English female population of Virginia was not made until 1619.

The colonists at Jamestown hoped to recreate in Virginia the patriarchal social structure they had known in England, where a man had authority over his wife and all dependent members of his household. This structure was fortified by the doctrine of coverture, which affirmed that a woman, once married, was totally subsumed, or "covered," under her husband's person. A married woman, or feme covert, had no legal status; did not control any property, even if she brought it to the marriage; and ceded to her husband full rights to all incomes and wages she earned. A single adult woman, whether unmarried or widowed, was considered a feme sole. She could buy and sell property and engage in contracts and other business and legal transactions.

In early Virginia, the strictest definition of coverture was rarely applied. Disease, food shortages, and conflict with the Indians disrupted the roles that European men and women typically played. Conditions within James Fort were dismal because there were not enough women to do the necessary domestic work, and men often refused to do what they perceived as women's work, including doing laundry, cleaning house, and cultivating corn, which they had seen Indian women do. In England, women did not grow the main crop and spent most of their time in or near their home.

The Virginia colony began to stabilize after Pocahontas married the English colonist in 1614. Their marriage effectively ended the First Anglo-Powhatan War (1609-1614) and initiated a period of peace during which the English greatly expanded their settlements, established plantations along the James River, and grew and exported tobacco. In 1619, officials of the Virginia Company of London decided to recruit respectable women to, as Company treasurer Sir Edwin Sandys put it, "make wifes to the inhabitants and by that meanes to make the men there more setled and lesse moveable." Married landowners, as heads of households with authority over their wives and children, would add stability to life in the colony. Their wives would work in the home, produce food in their gardens, and raise children. Ninety "younge, handsome and honestly educated maydes" were shipped to the colony in 1620. In 1621, the Virginia Company sent fifty-seven marriageable women between the ages of fifteen and twenty-eight. A wife procured in this manner cost 120 pounds of tobacco per head-six times the cost of a male indentured servant.

Gender and the Establishment of Virginia Society

As the historian James Horn notes, seventeenth-century Virginia was an immigrant society. Men and women left England for a variety of reasons-some to acquire land and others, such as convict laborers, because they had no other option. Although male migrants outnumbered female migrants six to one, immigrants of both sexes shared certain characteristics: they hoped to improve their economic standing and they were, for the most part, young and single. Most started their new lives in the colony as indentured servants, exchanging four to seven years of work for paid passage to the New World.

Like their male counterparts, female indentured servants faced harsh conditions once they arrived in Virginia. Many who migrated to the Chesapeake were unable to acclimate to their new surroundings, became sick, and died. Those who survived labored in tobacco fields for their masters (some of whom physically and sexually abused their servants) until their time of service was complete.

A woman who had completed her indenture was likely to find a husband: for most of the seventeenth century, men outnumbered women in Virginia by a ratio of three or four to one. But in Virginia, marriage did not necessarily exempt a woman from performing agricultural work in addition to her domestic tasks. Even the women who had been shipped to the colony in the 1620s specifically to become wives found themselves working alongside laborers who were white and black, free and unfree. To the English, the fact that planters' wives worked in the fields was a sign of social instability-an indication that Virginia's settlers had not established "proper," gender-based work roles.

Some women-especially those who combined modest wealth and entrepreneurial skills-operated almost like men. Dutch settler Anna Varlett Hack Boot carried on extensive trading activities throughout the Atlantic, while single and as a married woman, mostly with other Dutch merchants. The same was true of Anne Toft, who traded fish and tobacco with Dutch and English merchants. In the 1660s Toft, as a single woman, accumulated thousands of acres of land in Virginia, Maryland, and Jamaica. While Toft and Boot were exceptional, they were not the only women in seventeenth-century Virginia who bought and sold land, engaged in small-scale trading, and went to court to protect their investments.

Legislating Social Roles Based on Gender and Race

The progression of Virginia law in the seventeenth century makes clear that colonial leaders did not want white women to perform agricultural labor. In 1643, for example, the General Assembly that African women were tithable, or eligible to be taxed, as white and black men were. This distinction may reflect lawmakers' expectation that African women would be field laborers, thus contributing to the colony's wealth, and European women would remain in the domestic sphere. The legislators hoped their decision to limit white women to domestic work would further stabilize the colony's social order and give husbands more authority and control over their wives.

Male authority in early Virginia-based on reputation, not family tradition-was fragile, and women did not always submit to it. Specifically, some women used words to improve their reputations, to acquire a small degree of power in their communities, and even to express political opinions. They questioned males' ability to govern and used gossip to control stories about themselves and their neighbors. This type of disorderly speech was a threat to colonial officials. In December 1662, the General Assembly passed a law stating that a "brabling" (quarrelsome or riotous) wife could be ducked, or plunged underwater, as punishment for slandering her husband or neighbors. The statute trivialized female communication and freed husbands from the burden of paying a fine for their wives' behavior.

At the same legislative session, the General Assembly turned its attention to the status of Africans in Virginia. Although many planters who purchased Africans held these individuals as lifelong slaves, no law guaranteed a colonist's right to do so. Some men also questioned whether a black child born in Virginia was a slave. The lawmakers (men who owned the majority of Africans in Virginia) determined that "all children borne in this country shalbe held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother"-that is, a child born to an enslaved woman would also be a slave for his or her lifetime. In addition to securing colonists' right to own an individual as property, this law made African women the key to the expansion of slavery in Virginia. The General Assembly also attempted to limit the size of the colony's free black population by imposing harsh punishments on interracial couples and white women who gave birth to mulatto children. By establishing white participation in interracial relationships as the transgression, the scholar Kathleen M. Brown has argued, the General Assembly cast Africans in the role of moral corruptor, distancing African women in the colony even further from white women.

Extant county court records indicate that mothers of free black and mulatto children took it upon themselves to learn about the colony's laws and protect the fragile freedom of their children. Elizabeth Banks, of York County, a white indentured servant, arranged to have her mulatto daughters, Ann and Mary, bound out to planters who lived a short distance from her. As an adult, Mary Banks appeared before York County's justices of the peace to make similar arrangements for her children, Hannah and Elizabeth. These women and other mothers of free black and mulatto boys and girls negotiated apprenticeships, secured food and shelter, and labored so there would be money to buy necessities for their families.

Order and Disorder in the Late Seventeenth Century

The events of Bacon's Rebellion (1676-1677), and the role that female voices played in them, highlight the instability of Virginia society in the late seventeenth century. By this time, the men at the top of Virginia's social and economic order controlled much of the colony's wealth. They owned thousands of acres of land, had indentured servants and slaves who labored for their benefit, and had wives and children over whom they had authority. In contrast, many of the men at the bottom of the social order had neither land nor a wife. As tobacco prices dropped due to overproduction, it became harder for these individuals to support themselves.

Discontent with their position, many of these men eagerly joined Nathaniel Bacon when he challenged Governor Sir William Berkeley for control of the colony in 1676. Berkeley had branded Bacon a rebel, and as such, Bacon could not attend meetings of the county court or parish churches to recruit supporters. Instead, women such as Lydia Cheesman, , and Sarah Drummond openly challenged the governor's authority, spread word of Bacon's plans, and urged their husbands to enlist with the rebel. (The historian Stephen Saunders Webb has described these women as "news wives.") Other women demonstrated their loyalty to the governor and especially to his wife, Lady Frances Culpeper Stephens Berkeley, who spoke out in support of her husband and even sailed to England to present his side of story to Charles II.

In part because of the efforts of news wives, hundreds joined Bacon's army. Among them were indentured servants and slaves to whom Bacon had promised freedom in exchange for their participation. This coming together of free men, indentured servants, slaves, and women threatened the security of Virginia's nascent patriarchy. After the rebellion collapsed in 1677, the colony's leaders passed legislation to suppress any future alliances. A series of laws passed in the last quarter of the seventeenth century increased restrictions on slaves, while the "Act of Reliefe" penalized those who "shall presume to speake, write, disperse or publish by words, writeing or otherwise, any matter or thing tending to rebellion." First offenders had to pay a fine of 1,000 pounds of tobacco and stand in the stocks for two hours-unless they were married women, or femes covert, who had to pay the fine or endure twenty lashes to the bare back.

"Good Wives" in the Eighteenth Century

By the end of the seventeenth century, one's role in Virginia society depended on both gender and race. Black women, whether enslaved or free, occupied a position at the bottom of the social and economic ladder. They could not fulfill the English ideal of the good wife because they were primarily agricultural laborers. In contrast, white females could be good wives even if they spent some time tending tobacco plants.

A good wife in early eighteenth-century Virginia had different responsibilities from her counterpart in England. In Virginia, as in England, a good wife cared for her children, cooked, cleaned, tended the garden, and managed the work done by a staff of domestics. But unlike that of her English counterpart, a Virginia wife's staff included enslaved men, women, and children. Learning how to manage who had recently been imported into the colony from Africa was an additional challenge for white Virginians of either sex. To them, these slaves were different from the enslaved men, women, and children who had been born in Virginia. Most of the new slaves did not speak English, and many had ritual scarification and body piercings.

Extant documents indicate that some husbands and wives of the gentry class struggled to determine who was in control of the household. The planter elite believed they needed to impose their authority on their wives and to manage the domestic work in their homes. The need to control one's wife was crucial because failure to manage a woman was a sign that a man was not in control of his life. William Byrd II, for example, recorded his frustration on the occasions when his wife, Lucy Parke Byrd, did not submit to his authority. Byrd challenged her husband, perhaps in part because she wanted to direct the work of the slaves who labored in their home. It was uncertain exactly what work was to be done by a good wife if her husband owned slaves to labor for their benefit.

By the second quarter of the eighteenth century, however, the role and duties of a good wife in Virginia were clearer. An elite woman's main responsibility was to prepare her children to be members of Virginia's gentry. In addition to providing instruction in reading, writing, arithmetic, and religion, gentry wives made sure that their sons and daughters knew proper etiquette, how to converse with guests, and how to . The wife of a prosperous planter also taught her children how to manage enslaved laborers, including the personal slave who would tend to their daily needs. Establishing these behaviors helped gentry families maintain their power, which was consolidated largely through marriage.

While the patriarchal ideal dominated both theory and practice by the mid-eighteenth century, a minority of adult women operated successfully outside this norm. This was especially true of widows, who as feme soles continued to buy and sell land, negotiate contracts, and manage households with servants and slaves. A majority of widows remarried, but many did not, preferring instead to remain single and independent. In some areas of Virginia, these widows and other single women were a significant economic force, representing up to 15 percent of the landowners and owning nearly 20 percent of the land.

Women also participated in the political life of the colony even though they had no official role. While it is possible that a few wealthy widows may have in the seventeenth century, made clear that this was a male-only activity. Women did, however, help enfranchise men through land they brought to a marriage and this in turn gave some of them indirect power to influence the voting behavior of their husbands. Candidates, too, understood that treating wives with cordiality and respect might impact the outcome of an election.

Middling, Poor, and Enslaved Women in the Eighteenth Century

Middling and poor women also worked to make sure that their children were ready for adulthood. They taught sons and daughters the basic math and writing skills that would enable them to keep accounts and manage their households or plantations. By mid-century, some middling and poor females decided to move to one of the colony's urban areas, such as Williamsburg or Norfolk, where they might run taverns, work as milliners, become midwives, or wash and mend clothes. Christiana Campbell and kept two of Williamsburg's most popular taverns and counted the colony's leaders, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, among their customers. Catherine Rathell and sisters Margaret and Jane Hunter (later Jane Charlton) opened shops that helped Williamsburg residents and visitors to keep up with the latest British fashions. The midwife Catherine Blaikley used a red morocco pocketbook to hold money, receipts, and notes. When she died in 1771 the Virginia Gazette reported that Blaikley had delivered more than 3,000 babies born to white and black women in the Williamsburg area. Ann Ashby (also known as Ann Jones), a free black woman, laundered clothing, repaired torn garments, and knit stockings for her customers. Although Rathell, Hunter, Charlton, Blaikley, and Ashby worked to support themselves and their families, their actions did not challenge gender roles because their businesses were an extension of the domestic work performed by women.

By the mid-eighteenth century, the majority of enslaved people in Virginia had been born in the colony. They spoke English and knew how to negotiate with their owners to gain small concessions in work demands, food, and clothing. In the eyes of the law, however, black women were supposed to perform strenuous agricultural labor and increase their masters' wealth by bearing children. Most slave owners gave little thought to the stability of their slaves' domestic lives, often dividing families to turn a profit. They also divided enslaved families in their wills if it would benefit their heirs. Nevertheless, enslaved mothers made an effort to teach their children about slavery and to preserve their culture.

The Move toward Revolution

Women's lives changed between the end of the French and Indian War (1754-1763) and the issuance of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. When Virginia's burgesses and merchants pledged not to import specified goods as a way to protest taxes imposed by Great Britain, some women also promised to do without these items. The decision not to import material objects not only gave women an opportunity to express their political views, it also changed the daily work done by many women because they had to learn how to produce items they previously purchased from British merchants. Elite wives also taught some enslaved women how to make soap and candles. Other female slaves learned how to spin thread and weave cloth. Seamstresses turned the Virginia cloth into clothing that colonists wore to protest "taxation without representation." It became a sign of honor to wear clothes made in Virginia from cloth spun in the colony.

Once Virginians declared their independence from Great Britain, women of all classes found their lives changed. Wives of both Patriots and Loyalists learned how to operate households during times of food shortages and high prices. Some Loyalist families decided to leave Virginia and once they arrived in England, the women in these households learned how to adapt to the gender expectations in their new country. Wives of Continental soldiers functioned as the heads of their households while their husbands were gone. For some enslaved women, Dunmore's Proclamation (1775) offered a chance to seize independence and begin life as free women. Whether Virginia women spent the Revolution in America or in England, they continued to perform domestic work, raise their children, and add stability to their societies.

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Women in Colonial Virginia - Encyclopedia Virginia

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Early Virginia Fictiliuvaforu in quibus cibucoquunt (The Beauty of the Earthenware Vessels in Which They Cook Food) The first women in colonial Virginia were Virginia Indians. Because of their regular interactions with the English colonists, scholars know the most about the Algonquian-speaking Indians of Tsenacomoco.

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Dennis and Hannah Holland: Indentured Servitude in the Maryland Colony

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Dennis and Hannah Holland: Indentured Servitude in the Maryland Colony

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Life Story: Dennis and Hannah Holland A cycle of indentured servitude in colonial Maryland This is the story of a mother and daughter in Maryland who became trapped in a perpetuating cycle of indenture and transgression. Content Warning: This life story addresses sexual assault.

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Legislating Reproduction & Racial Difference in Colonial Virginia

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Legislating Reproduction & Racial Difference in Colonial Virginia

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Legislating Reproduction and Racial Difference in Virginia

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Legislating Reproduction and Racial Difference The Virginia colony laws collected here demonstrate how the colonial government used legislation about women to shore up race-based slavery. Content Warning: This resource alludes to sexual assault. Document Text Summary

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Witchcraft in Bermuda Document Text Summary 1651 An assize and general gaol delivery held at St. Georges from the nineteenth day of May to the 22nd days of the same month. Captain Josias Foster Governor, These opening lines explain

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Refiguring Women in Early American History

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Refiguring Women in Early American History

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JSTOR is a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources.

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In Colonial Complexions, historian Sharon Block examines how Anglo-Americans built racial ideologies out of descriptions of physical appearance. By analyzing...

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Virginia's Early Relations with Native Americans

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Virginia's Early Relations with Native Americans

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Those living in the area where Jamestown was settled must have had mixed feelings about the arrival of the English in 1607. One of their first reactions was hostility based on their previous experience with Spanish explorers along their coastline. They attacked one of the ships before the English actually landed. Yet they soon began to offer food and hospitality to the newcomers. At first, Powhatan, leader of a confederation of tribes around the Chesapeake Bay, hoped to absorb the newcomers through hospitality and his offerings of food. As the colonists searched for instant wealth, they neglected planting corn and other work necessary to make their colony self-sufficient. They therefore grew more and more dependent on the indigenous people for food.

Virgina
Discovery and Exploration

As the colony's fortunes deteriorated during its first two years, Captain John Smith's leadership saved the colony. Part of this leadership involved exploring the area and establishing trade with local people. Unfortunately for the Native Americans, Smith believed that the English should treat them as the Spanish had: to compel them to "drudgery, work, and slavery," so English colonists could live "like Soldiers upon the fruit of their labor." Thus, when his negotiations for food occasionally failed, Smith took what he wanted by force.

By 1609, Powhatan realized that the English intended to stay. Moreover, he was disappointed that the English did not return his hospitality nor would they marry Native American women. He knew that the English "invade my people, possess my country." Native Americans thus began attacking settlers, killing their livestock, and burning such crops as they planted. All the while, Powhatan claimed he simply could not control the young men who were committing these acts without his knowledge or permission. Keep in mind, however, that Powhatan's reactions and statements were reported by John Smith, hardly an unbiased observer.

In the next decade, the colonists conducted search and destroy raids on Native American settlements. They burned villages and corn crops (ironic, in that the English were often starving). Both sides committed atrocities against the other. Powhatan was finally forced into a truce of sorts. Colonists captured Powhatan's favorite daughter, Pocahontas, who soon married John Rolfe. Their marriage did help relations between Native Americans and colonists.

With the reorganization of the colony under Sir Edwin Sandys, liberal land policies led to dispersion of English settlements along the James River. Increasing cultivation of tobacco required more land (since tobacco wore out the soil in three or four years) and clearing forest areas to make land fit for planting. Expanding English settlements meant more encroachment on Native American lands and somewhat greater contact with Native Americans. It also left settlers more vulnerable to attack. By this time, the Native American fully realized what continued English presence in Virginia meant--more plantations, the felling of more forests, the killing of more game--in sum, a greater threat to their way of life. The self-proclaimed humanitarian efforts of people like George Thorpe--who sought to convert Indian children to Christianity through education--did not help either. Finally, the deaths of Powhatan and Pocahontas further hastened hostilities.

The Native Americans, led by Powhatan's brother Opechancanough, bided their time. Pretending friendship, they were waiting for an opportunity to strike the English and dislodge them from Virginia. In early 1622, they struck. In all, nearly 350 colonists were killed; Jamestown itself was saved only by the warning of an Native American Christian convert. One result was an ever-hardening English attitude toward the Native American. Another was bloody reprisals against local tribes.

For additional documents related to these topics, it is probably best to focus on John Smith's Generall Historie of Virginia and Peter Force's collection of tracts. Both these items are in The Capital and the Bay. Another good source of information is the Records of the Virginia Company, in the Thomas Jefferson Papers. In addition to browsing these sources, use the terms found in the documents to the right of the page.

Documents

John Smith Appointed to Manage "All Things Abroad," 1607

John Smith Captured by the Pamunkey Indians, 1607

Captain Newport Visits Powhatan, 1607

John Smith Attempts to Suppress the Indians Around Jamestown, 1608

The "Coronation" of Powhatan, 1608

John Smith and Powhatan Exchange Views, 1608

The Virginia Company's Instructions to Sir Thomas Gates Concerning the Natives, May 1609

Powhatan Takes Advantage of "The Starving Time," 1609-1610

Converting Indians to Christianity Justifies English Colonization, 1610

Powhatan's Daughter, Pocahontas, Taken Prisoner, 1612

Pocahontas Marries John Rolfe, 1613

John Rolfe Reports to Edwin Sandys Concerning Indians, 1619

George Thorpe and John Pory to Sir Edwin Sandys, May 15, 1621

A Relation of the Barbarous Massacre, 1622

How the Massacre Was Good for the Plantation, 1622

A Proposal for Subjugating the Indians,

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Virginia's Early Relations with Native Americans | Colonial Settlement, 1600s - 1763 | U.S. History Primary Source Timeline | Classroom Materials at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress

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Those living in the area where Jamestown was settled must have had mixed feelings about the arrival of the English in 1607. One of their first reactions was hostility based on their previous experience with Spanish explorers along their coastline.

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Virginia's Early Relations with Native Americans 

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Virginia's Early Relations with Native Americans 

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Those living in the area where Jamestown was settled must have had mixed feelings about the arrival of the English in 1607. One of their first reactions was hostility based on their previous experience with Spanish explorers along their coastline. They attacked one of the ships before the English actually landed. Yet they soon began to offer food and hospitality to the newcomers. At first, Powhatan, leader of a confederation of tribes around the Chesapeake Bay, hoped to absorb the newcomers through hospitality and his offerings of food. As the colonists searched for instant wealth, they neglected planting corn and other work necessary to make their colony self-sufficient. They therefore grew more and more dependent on the indigenous people for food.

Virgina
Discovery and Exploration

As the colony's fortunes deteriorated during its first two years, Captain John Smith's leadership saved the colony. Part of this leadership involved exploring the area and establishing trade with local people. Unfortunately for the Native Americans, Smith believed that the English should treat them as the Spanish had: to compel them to "drudgery, work, and slavery," so English colonists could live "like Soldiers upon the fruit of their labor." Thus, when his negotiations for food occasionally failed, Smith took what he wanted by force.

By 1609, Powhatan realized that the English intended to stay. Moreover, he was disappointed that the English did not return his hospitality nor would they marry Native American women. He knew that the English "invade my people, possess my country." Native Americans thus began attacking settlers, killing their livestock, and burning such crops as they planted. All the while, Powhatan claimed he simply could not control the young men who were committing these acts without his knowledge or permission. Keep in mind, however, that Powhatan's reactions and statements were reported by John Smith, hardly an unbiased observer.

In the next decade, the colonists conducted search and destroy raids on Native American settlements. They burned villages and corn crops (ironic, in that the English were often starving). Both sides committed atrocities against the other. Powhatan was finally forced into a truce of sorts. Colonists captured Powhatan's favorite daughter, Pocahontas, who soon married John Rolfe. Their marriage did help relations between Native Americans and colonists.

With the reorganization of the colony under Sir Edwin Sandys, liberal land policies led to dispersion of English settlements along the James River. Increasing cultivation of tobacco required more land (since tobacco wore out the soil in three or four years) and clearing forest areas to make land fit for planting. Expanding English settlements meant more encroachment on Native American lands and somewhat greater contact with Native Americans. It also left settlers more vulnerable to attack. By this time, the Native American fully realized what continued English presence in Virginia meant--more plantations, the felling of more forests, the killing of more game--in sum, a greater threat to their way of life. The self-proclaimed humanitarian efforts of people like George Thorpe--who sought to convert Indian children to Christianity through education--did not help either. Finally, the deaths of Powhatan and Pocahontas further hastened hostilities.

The Native Americans, led by Powhatan's brother Opechancanough, bided their time. Pretending friendship, they were waiting for an opportunity to strike the English and dislodge them from Virginia. In early 1622, they struck. In all, nearly 350 colonists were killed; Jamestown itself was saved only by the warning of an Native American Christian convert. One result was an ever-hardening English attitude toward the Native American. Another was bloody reprisals against local tribes.

For additional documents related to these topics, it is probably best to focus on John Smith's Generall Historie of Virginia and Peter Force's collection of tracts. Both these items are in The Capital and the Bay. Another good source of information is the Records of the Virginia Company, in the Thomas Jefferson Papers. In addition to browsing these sources, use the terms found in the documents to the right of the page.

Documents

John Smith Appointed to Manage "All Things Abroad," 1607

John Smith Captured by the Pamunkey Indians, 1607

Captain Newport Visits Powhatan, 1607

John Smith Attempts to Suppress the Indians Around Jamestown, 1608

The "Coronation" of Powhatan, 1608

John Smith and Powhatan Exchange Views, 1608

The Virginia Company's Instructions to Sir Thomas Gates Concerning the Natives, May 1609

Powhatan Takes Advantage of "The Starving Time," 1609-1610

Converting Indians to Christianity Justifies English Colonization, 1610

Powhatan's Daughter, Pocahontas, Taken Prisoner, 1612

Pocahontas Marries John Rolfe, 1613

John Rolfe Reports to Edwin Sandys Concerning Indians, 1619

George Thorpe and John Pory to Sir Edwin Sandys, May 15, 1621

A Relation of the Barbarous Massacre, 1622

How the Massacre Was Good for the Plantation, 1622

A Proposal for Subjugating the Indians,

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Virginia's Early Relations with Native Americans | Colonial Settlement, 1600s - 1763 | U.S. History Primary Source Timeline | Classroom Materials at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress

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Those living in the area where Jamestown was settled must have had mixed feelings about the arrival of the English in 1607. One of their first reactions was hostility based on their previous experience with Spanish explorers along their coastline.

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Resources including women

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Find out how Virtual Jamestown is being used in the class room. A number of teaching scenarios are listed here, including new role-playing strategies>.

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R. Wilkinson, artist. The ballance [sic] of power. 1781. Cartoon Prints, British Photograph Collection. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Before the French Revolution, the American Revolution changed the course of history. While many of the political theories that influenced the American Revolution also played a role in the French Revolution, the unique history of both nations led to different interpretations. The correspondence and amity between American leaders of the Revolution and their French contemporaries is well documented and much debated. In the decade of 1789-1799 American sympathies bounced back and forth between loyalty toward Britain and sympathy for the Revolution. Many Americans had an underlying belief in the British system of government and their Protestant worldview. Other Americans felt an affinity for French republican ideals and gratitude for their support during the American Revolution (ironically from the Monarch of France, Louis XVI). At the national level, the French Revolution underscored the ideological polarity between the Federalists (George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and John Adams) and the Republicans (Thomas Jefferson and James Madison). As the French Revolution became increasingly violent and anti-religious, Americans viewed it more critically and relations between France and America entered a steep decline. Although there was little interaction between the women of France and America during these years, it is worth noting the contemporary American crusaders on the other side of the Atlantic. Times of war and revolution can temporarily jumble the clear boxes in society that revolve around class, race and gender. New agendas were in play and to some extent, established boundaries were being questioned. This prompted a reevaluation (albeit Machiavellian) of groups that had been previously dismissed. In the case of enslaved men and women, the established power was purely exploitative. Men of color for example, might be offered a slippery bargain of some degree of liberation, often revolving around the notion of citizenship, in return for their support (although the American government was reluctant to arm black men). In the American Revolution the British were actually more successful than the Patriots in recruiting enslaved men (especially in the south). Although their promises of freedom were intended to disrupt the American economy rather than free slaves, they were often more generous with their terms. The situation of women would depend on their class, race and family situation. In America, white married women with children might be asked to take up employment to make ends meet while their husbands were away. If a woman did not have children she might accompany her husband to the front and serve as a kind of nurse or housekeeper doing laundry and watching over the camp. Such opportunities for African-American women were complicated by a number of factors including, most importantly, their status as free or enslaved. Native Americans, or American Indians also figured into the Revolution and were in a similarly precarious position being courted and betrayed in equal measure on all sides. Because accounts are often written by those in power, and during a time when views were less progressive, the perspective is almost always slanted to see women and minorities in a utilitarian light rather than view them as individuals- much less as equals. This presents an enormous challenge for historians and researchers who struggle to find first-hand accounts or writings by these individuals and piece together their diverse and unjust experiences. As this awareness grows, further research and new publications will follow. For example. recent scholarship by authors such as Sally Roesch Wagner has already begun to bring to light the influence of indigenous women of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) in the long march toward women's suffrage.

To find more works by or about Women in the American Revolution search: United States--History--Revolution, 1775-1783--Women and for general information on women in American history and the beginnings of the American Suffrage movement see the guide: American Women: A Guide to Women's History Resources at the Library of Congress.

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Research Guides: Women in the French Revolution: A Resource Guide: Women in the American Revolution

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Before the French Revolution, the American Revolution changed the course of history. While many of the political theories that influenced the American Revolution also played a role in the French Revolution, the unique history of both nations led to different interpretations.

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Discovering American Women's History Online

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Early 17th Century

All references to the Women's Rights Movement in the United States begin with the First Women's Rights Convention in 1848. I think that is wrong. I believe the movement began long before that. In fact, I believe it began the moment Mary Chilton set foot on Plymouth Rock.

History's Forgotten Women
What about the Women on the Mayflower? Were these not brave women? Did they not brave the uncertainties of the New World-never knowing what dangers they would encounter? Did they not play a vital role in building the New England Colonies? Did they not work alongside the men to create this great country of ours?

Why have women been left out of history? Were men that frightened to allow women to enjoy basic human rights? Were they afraid that women would usurp their power? That women would take control and make a mess of things? I just do not get it!

In the American Colonies, women were taught to read so they could read the Bible. They were rarely taught to write their own names. Unless they had strong mothers and enlightened fathers, that was the extent of their education. Many people believed that women were feeble-minded, and incapable of learning beyond the basics.

We have Pilgrim Fathers, but no Pilgrim Mothers. We have Fathers of our Country, but no Mothers. Until recent times, historians have been male, and they obviously made a conscious effort to omit women from history.

Women's Rights in the Early Seventeenth Century
In early colonial society, women had no standing in the eyes of the law. They could not vote or hold any office in government. Women had no political rights and were without political representation. Women often could not speak out, their husbands spoke for them. Men virtually owned their wives as they did their material possessions. Their homes and their children were not theirs. They belonged to their husbands.

Property Rights
Property rights included the legal rights to acquire, own, sell and transfer property, to collect and keep rents, to keep one's wages, to make contracts and bring lawsuits-provided she was unmarried. The moment she said "I do," all of those rights passed to her husband. She became one with him, and basically ceased to exist.

Widows Had Many Rights
Many widows consciously chose to remain single after the deaths of their husbands, although there was intense social pressure to remarry. Legally, married women were regarded as representatives of their husbands, but widows were recognized as agents in their own right. A widow could inherit her deceased husband's property, run his business, keep her wages, buy and sell property, collect and keep rents, and file lawsuits-provided she was smart enough to remain unmarried.

I ask you, were these brave women not fighting for their rights?

Elizabeth Warren
Unlike the majority of Plymouth Colony women, Elizabeth Warren's name appeared regularly in the records during the 45 years she was a widow. In 1635, her name appeared in the records as a totally independent agent. In 1652, a petition against Elizabeth was filed in court. Someone had questioned her right to the land she had deeded to her son-in-law. A panel of judges found that Elizabeth:

... shall enjoy all the rest of her lands and all of them to whom she hath already at any time heretofore disposed any part thereof by gift, sale or otherwise, or shall hereafter do the same, to them and their heirs for ever without any trouble or molestation.

I believe it is likely that Elizabeth remained a widow so she did not have to give up her rights.

Anne Marbury Hutchinson fought for the right to worship as she chose and to voice her opinions at religious meetings her own home. She made the mistake of criticizing the Puritan ministers of Massachusetts Bay Colony. For that sin, she was put on trial for heresy, becoming the first female defendant in a Massachusetts court. She defended herself admirably-no man was brave enough to speak up for her-but in the end she was excommunicated from the Puritan church, and banished from the Colony.

Anne Dudley Bradstreet was unusually well educated for her time-tutored in history, several languages, and literature. Her husband held several government positions, and his political duties involved traveling to other colonies. Anne spent her lonely days and nights reading her father's collection of books and educating her children. In the process, she learned a great deal about religion, science, history, the arts, and medicine.

She was particularly fond of poetry, and she began to write some verse, but kept her work a secret. The Puritans frowned upon women who stepped out of their place in society. Her writing suggests that she believed that the search for knowledge was against God's will, and that women should be relegated to traditional roles. Yet she continued to read and learn.

She clearly valued knowledge, and could well be considered an early feminist. She was the first American poet, and her first collection of poems was the first book written by a woman to be published in the United States. Her work serves as a testament to the struggles of a Puritan wife against the hardships of New England colonial life.

Mary Barrett Dyer
Mary's husband, William, appears to have been more tolerant of his wife than most Puritan men. The Dyers became early supporters of Anne Marbury Hutchinson. When Anne was excommunicated, Mary Dyer walked out of the church with her. When Hutchinson was banished from Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1638, the Dyers followed Anne to Rhode Island. They helped to found the new colony at Providence, which was founded on the principle of religious freedom.

The Dyers later became Quakers and returned to Massachusetts Bay Colony. The governor there was extremely intolerant of religious dissention. He wanted only one religion in the Colony-Puritanism. Mary was arrested and banished from the Colony, but she always returned, hoping to gain converts to her new religion. She paid the supreme sacrifice on June 1, 1660, when she was hanged by the neck until dead.

Women's Rights Movement?
So, maybe these few women are just not enough to constitute a women's rights movement, but there must be hundreds, maybe thousands, we know nothing about. They were building a country, giving birth to dozens of children, raising food to feed to their families, and untold other backbreaking work.

They did not have time to record their daily lives. They were too busy caring for others. Though I wish they had been able to tell us more about themselves, I value highly what they left behind. They inspire me, and make writing this blog very rewarding.

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Colonial Women's Rights Movement | History of American Women

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Early 17th Century All references to the Women's Rights Movement in the United States begin with the First Women's Rights Convention in 1848. I think that is wrong. I believe the movement began long before that. In fact, I believe it began the moment Mary Chilton set foot on Plymouth Rock.

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Teachers' Zone | Canadian Museum of History

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Think Like a Historian: Working with Primary Source Evidence

This package guides teachers and students through the basics of applying Peter Seixas and Tom Morton's Big Six Historical Thinking Concepts to the different types of historical primary sources that are frequently found in museums.

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Teachers' Zone | Canadian Museum of History

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This package guides teachers and students through the basics of applying Peter Seixas and Tom Morton's Big Six Historical Thinking Concepts to the different types of historical primary sources that are frequently found in museums.

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Social Groups | Virtual Museum of New France

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What was New France’s society like? Did it reflect French society under the Ancien Régime? Or was it different? If so, why was it not identical to the society from which it originated? In this article on social groups, Arnaud Bessière answers these questions and many others.

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Social Groups

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Teachers' Zone | Canadian Museum of History

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Religious symbols, like this statuette, were common in New France. Do you see symbols related to any religion in your everyday life? What have you seen? Share your thoughts with a partner.

Do you know what this statuette is made of? What do the materials tell you about the importance of this object?

Answer: It's made of wood with gold leaf. Gold is a precious and expensive metal, which suggests that this object was important, or that it symbolized something important.

THINK

Religious symbols, like this statuette, were common in New France. Do you see symbols related to any religion in your everyday life? What have you seen? Share your thoughts with a partner.

LOOK

Do you know what this statuette is made of? What do the materials tell you about the importance of this object?

Answer: It's made of wood with gold leaf. Gold is a precious and expensive metal, which suggests that this object was important, or that it symbolized something important.

Details

Materials

Credit / Object Number Canadian Museum of History, 2002.125.62

Historical Context

Choose one of the three levels below to match your needs.

Religion was very important in a Catholic society like New France.

People often had religious symbols in their homes, such as this statuette of Mary and Jesus.

People also wore crucifixes and medallions to express their faith.

Essential arrow-down-white

This statuette is of Mary and Jesus, two central figures in Catholicism.

Religion was very important in a Catholic society like New France. People would show their devotion by displaying religious symbols such as statues in their homes, or by wearing crucifixes and medallions.

This statuette is of Mary and Jesus, two central figures in Catholicism.

Religion was very important in a Catholic society like New France. It influenced most aspects of daily life, and would define French-Canadian identity long after the French regime ended.

Colonists furnished their churches, and often their homes, with religious symbols, such as this statuette. It was also common for the people of New France to wear medallions and crucifixes as emblems of personal devotion.

Summary Essential In-Depth

Religion was very important in a Catholic society like New France.

People often had religious symbols in their homes, such as this statuette of Mary and Jesus.

People also wore crucifixes and medallions to express their faith.

This statuette is of Mary and Jesus, two central figures in Catholicism.

Religion was very important in a Catholic society like New France. People would show their devotion by displaying religious symbols such as statues in their homes, or by wearing crucifixes and medallions.

This statuette is of Mary and Jesus, two central figures in Catholicism.

Religion was very important in a Catholic society like New France. It influenced most aspects of daily life, and would define French-Canadian identity long after the French regime ended.

Colonists furnished their churches, and often their homes, with religious symbols, such as this statuette. It was also common for the people of New France to wear medallions and crucifixes as emblems of personal devotion.

Summary

Religion was very important in a Catholic society like New France.

People often had religious symbols in their homes, such as this statuette of Mary and Jesus.

People also wore crucifixes and medallions to express their faith.

Essential

This statuette is of Mary and Jesus, two central figures in Catholicism.

Religion was very important in a Catholic society like New France. People would show their devotion by displaying religious symbols such as statues in their homes, or by wearing crucifixes and medallions.

In-Depth

This statuette is of Mary and Jesus, two central figures in Catholicism.

Religion was very important in a Catholic society like New France. It influenced most aspects of daily life, and would define French-Canadian identity long after the French regime ended.

Colonists furnished their churches, and often their homes, with religious symbols, such as this statuette. It was also common for the people of New France to wear medallions and crucifixes as emblems of personal devotion.

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Teachers' Zone | Canadian Museum of History

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This statuette is of Mary and Jesus, two central figures in Catholicism. Religion was very important in a Catholic society like New France. People would show their devotion by displaying religious symbols such as statues in their homes, or by wearing crucifixes and medallions.

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Kateri Tekakwitha: First Native American Catholic Saint

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Kateri Tekakwitha: First Native American Catholic Saint

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Kateri Tekakwitha: First Catholic Native American saint

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The first ever Native American saint has been canonised by the Roman Catholic Church in a ceremony at the Vatican. Kateri Tekakwitha - sometimes known as Lily of the Mohawks - died more than 300 years ago, but is thought by some to have performed a miracle as recently as 2006.

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| Part Of Women in Colonial America

Up next, Cornell University History professor Mary Beth Norton discusses women's roles in colonial America. She argues that there were elite and... read more

Up next, Cornell University History professor Mary Beth Norton discusses women's roles in colonial America. She argues that there were elite and influential women, but that they are often overlooked by historians and the general public. Professor Norton also discusses the Salem witch trials of 1692 and her book on the subject, In the Devil's Snare.

This 30 minute program took place at the Organization of American Historians meeting in Milwaukee. close

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C-SPAN.org offers links to books featured on the C-SPAN networks to make it simpler for viewers to purchase them. C-SPAN has agreements with retailers that share a small percentage of your purchase price with our network. For example, as an Amazon Associate, C-SPAN earns money from your qualifying purchases. However, C-SPAN only receives this revenue if your book purchase is made using the links on this page.

Any revenue realized from this program goes into a general account to help fund C-SPAN operations.

Please note that questions regarding fulfillment, customer service, privacy policies, or issues relating to your book orders should be directed to the Webmaster or administrator of the specific bookseller's site and are their sole responsibility.

C-SPAN.org offers links to books featured on the C-SPAN networks to make it simpler for viewers to purchase them. C-SPAN has agreements with retailers that share a small percentage of your purchase price with our network. For example, as an Amazon Associate, C-SPAN earns money from your qualifying purchases. However, C-SPAN only receives this revenue if your book purchase is made using the links on this page.

Any revenue realized from this program goes into a general account to help fund C-SPAN operations.

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Up next, Cornell University History professor Mary Beth Norton discusses women's roles in colonial America. She argues that there were elite and influential women, but that they are often overlooked by historians and the general public. Professor Norton also discusses the Salem witch trials of 1692 and her book on the subject, [In the Devil's Snare].

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[A Mexican catechism in Testerian hieroglyphs]

Show Content

Colonial North America at Harvard Library provides access to remarkable and wide-ranging materials digitized as part of an ongoing, multi-year project. When complete, the project will make available to the world approximately 650,000 digitized pages of all known archival and manuscript materials in the Harvard Library that relate to 17th- and 18th-century North America. Each item is connected to countless stories-of lives lived quietly and extravagantly, of encounters peaceful and volatile, and of places near and far - providing an opportunity to travel back in time, to rethink familiar stories, and to discover new ones.

European exploration and colonialism in North America took place over several centuries and affected the lives of millions of people across multiple continents. The breadth and scope of these materials reflect this long history and its many dimensions. Over 200 years of colonial era history are represented in this digitized collection, and the diversity in focus, format, and content reflects the complexities of the era in which the materials were created. The items extend well beyond New England to Canada, other areas of North America, and South America; to Atlantic islands and across the Atlantic Ocean to Great Britain, continental Europe, and parts of Africa. Curated features on the website provide a deeper look at several topical areas and suggest ways of approaching the use of different kinds of materials to gain new insights. This website is updated regularly, so please check back for newly digitized content and features.

The circles on the map below are live links. Click on them to discover examples of the types and locations of material in this collection available from around the world. The hand-colored background map is Novissima totius terrarum orbis tabula (ca.1690). The double hemispherical map of the world shows Australia as Hollandia Nova with an unmapped east coast. The globes are surrounded by colored illustrations of figures and animals of the Zodiac.

Explore Further!

These selections illustrate just some of the numerous geographic regions represented throughout the collection...

Show Content

A Closer Look

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Colonial North America at Harvard Library

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A Mexican catechism in Testerian hieroglyphs] Show Content Colonial North America at Harvard Library provides access to remarkable and wide-ranging materials digitized as part of an ongoing, multi-year project. When complete, the project will make available to the world approximately 650,000 digitized pages of all known archival and manuscript materials in the Harvard Library that relate to 17th- and 18th-century North America.

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The National Endowment for the Humanities

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"Nir" was the single word she could remember from an Anishinaabe childhood that had ended when Haudenosaunee warriors took her captive. She thus repeated that word, "with all her might," to make her would-be captor aware that she was in fact one of them. "This word saved her life." In pronouncing that single syllable, she literally asserted her selfhood: "me me me." More importantly, she proclaimed the significant lines of family and community that tied her simultaneously to two peoples now at war. Such connections mattered. For her, they meant life and belonging. She ended up rejoining the Anishinaabeg. She married an Anishinaabe man and had several children with him. Yet she may have spoken her native language with an accent, and she may have brought Haudenosaunee customs, from ways of making pots to ways of raising children, with her.

I was amazed when I first read this story. I was perusing the many (73 to be exact) volumes of Jesuit Relations, the published reports of the French missionaries who came to the area around the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes in the seventeenth century. This woman was never named, but her story clearly struck one of the Jesuits, Father Buteux, who wrote it down.

It is so rare for the voices of women like this one to present themselves in sources accessible to historians. Yet here was one such woman, making her voice heard over the centuries, just as she had in that critical moment of war and crisis. Her tale also showed her to be a hardy survivor, a self-sacrificing mother both to her own children and to orphans, a healer, and a skilled farmer. Women in early America did so many things. She ended up losing her Anishinaabe husband and children to epidemics that ravaged Native communities in this era, but she then became a mother to "five little children that she ha[d] saved" from an epidemic. She cultivated "a fine, large field of Indian corn." Yet before the harvest came, hunger plagued her household. One day, Father Buteux came to find her "quite despondent and in tears." She told him that "I have for a long time been accustomed to pass whole days without eating, . . . working in my field and taking nothing,-but I cannot hear these children cry with hunger, without being touched." "'This,' said she, 'is the cause of my tears.'" Such a claim was a powerful (and successful) way to appeal to French sympathies (tears were likely to be more effective with French audiences than with stoical Anishinaabe ones) and to gain a redistribution of resources. The French provided her with food. This account also reveals the ways in which women were relentlessly familiar with the heavy responsibilities of working in fields and taking care of children, even those of other people. Her remarkable resilience etched itself even onto the reports from the Jesuits, though her name did not.

People tend to think that colonial American women were Pilgrims or witches. Most were neither. Even if they were wives and mothers and in charge of households, as this woman was, they were not untouched by the cold, wide world. The devastations and wars, as well as the slavery and migration, of colonialism affected their worlds and lives profoundly, forcing them to do more than just raise children and keep house. Women in early America played many roles. They were survivors, diplomats, killers, rulers, rebels, and slaves. Historians have been busily uncovering this variety for some decades now, but it remains too often obscure in the popular imagination.

Pocahontas is the only colonial Native woman most Americans can name. In our current political climate, this name has become a putdown. Before that, she was a Disney princess in a scanty deerskin dress, hugging Grandmother Willow. Neither of these aspects captures the rich complexity of this woman's trajectory. Pocahontas was a diplomat, mediator, and an important political player in her own right in the early seventeenth century. John Smith, one of the first governors of the English colony of Jamestown, claimed he would have been killed had it not been for her critical intervention. She was the daughter of a powerful leader, Powhatan. As Smith had it, "in that darke night [she] came through the irksome woods," evidently risking her life to alert Smith and his men to her father's plans to kill them. Smith and his crew offered her gifts of English goods to thank her, but "with the teares running downe her cheekes," she declined, saying that "if Powhatan should know it, she were but dead."

Smith portrayed Pocahontas's act of filial disobedience as one of understandable love for Smith and his men, a weak woman made strong by her unexpected, but welcome, loyalty to the English. Disney has followed suit, making it seem as if Pocahontas saved Smith out of romantic love for the handsome Englishman. In fact, scholars now think her intervention was part of a highly orchestrated ritual, designed to force Smith and his men to acknowledge their dependence on Powhatan and his family, in order to integrate them into a world governed by Natives. Even after this dramatic meeting, Pocahontas's role in this unfolding early American history was far from over. She was a cultural broker, accepting baptism (possibly under duress) as a Christian named Rebecca, and marrying an Englishman, John Rolfe. She went with him to England (again, possibly not her choice), where she was at the center of complicated diplomatic maneuvers.

Pocahontas met Queen Elizabeth I and attended masques. She even had her portrait painted, looking every inch the well-heeled lady, with a fine feathered hat and a stiff white ruff. She holds a fan, just as Queen Elizabeth did (as in the "Darnley portrait" at the National Portrait Gallery in London). You can see an engraving of Pocahontas by Simon van de Passe, as well as a portrait based on it, at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Her painting, which parallels others of Queen Elizabeth (such as Nicholas Hilliard's "ermine portrait") always surprises my undergraduates, who grew up on the deerskin-clad film version. This aristocratic Pocahontas demonstrates her extraordinary ability to cross cultures as an intelligent and multi-lingual diplomat and translator, able to move between worlds with grace and skill. It also shows that English people did not always see Indians as "naked savages."

Like so many other Native Americans, Pocahontas's life was cut short by epidemic disease, probably smallpox, contracted during her time in England. Too many other Indians died at the hands of settlers, very occasionally women themselves. One such celebrated killer was Hannah Duston, whose Haverhill, Massachusetts, house was attacked by Wabenaki Indians in a raid in 1697. According to Cotton Mather, who wrote her story, Duston had given birth only five days earlier, and warriors killed the baby. During her captivity, after marching more than one hundred miles, she organized two other captives, another woman and a boy, to attack and kill their captors: "all furnishing themselves with hatchets . . .
they struck such home blows upon the heads of their sleeping oppressors." Ten of the twelve Native Americans in this household-two men, two women, and six children-perished in this counterattack. The mother of a slain baby thus became a child-killer herself. Yet the settlers of Boston celebrated Duston, both on her return and in their histories. It was acceptable for a woman to assume such an aggressive masculine role in times of war and crisis, when she could become a "deputy husband," to use Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's phrase. Such role reversals were supposed to be merely temporary; the ideal remained of a household headed by a husband, with the good wife as a helpmeet.

In the normal course of life, women who appeared to overstep the bounds of wifely submission were far less palatable to New England Protestants. One such woman was Mistress Ann Hibbens, the wife of a wealthy Massachusetts merchant. She seems to have had run-ins with tradesmen as well as with her husband, William, in the 1630s. Her pastor, John Wilson, denounced her as a bad wife "against the institution of God . . . and [to] the evil example of diverse other wives." And, concerning her husband, the pastor continued, "You have against nature usurped authority over him, grieved his spirit, and carried yourself as if he was a nobody, as if his wisdom were not to be compared to yours." When Hibbens justified her actions on the basis that, in Genesis, God had commanded Abraham to "hearken unto" his wife Sarah, this defense only got her into more trouble. Wilson berated her: "You have . . . [also] expressed it to be your judgement that husbands must hearken unto their wives and be guided by them in all things." For her insolence, she was excommunicated, forbidden to communicate with any but her immediate family, "for the destruction of your proud flesh [and] for the humbling of your soul."

Another Sarah provoked New England authorities a few decades later in 1668. This wife and mother of four, Sarah Ahhanton, appeared in court, defending herself against charges leveled by her aggrieved husband that "shee did sometimes speak alone with Joseph, a married man." Although her husband had "corrected" (that is, beaten) her repeatedly, she continued to meet with Joseph. A few weeks later, Sarah and Joseph ran away. However, Sarah was a Christian Indian who had married and lived under English law. New England settlers did not allow divorce for unhappily married couples, but Native laws did. So when Sarah and Joseph absconded to a nearby community of non-Christian Indians, they seemed to be rejecting both her marriage and English law. To some English people, here was proof that even "civilized" Christian Natives might return to "barbarity." In fact, Sarah eventually came back to her husband and begged forgiveness for her "sinne" from him and New England magistrates. For Christian Indians and others, her story then became one of redemption, though she was punished with a severe whipping and public shaming. All kinds of missionaries in all kinds of places worked to impose Christian models of gender organization, marriage, and child-rearing on Native women and men. Francis Le Jau, a clergyman for the Society of the Propagation of the Gospel in South Carolina in the early eighteenth century, declared that "I also tell them whom I baptize, The Christian Religion does not allow plurality of Wives, nor any changing of them." Some Indians like Sarah Ahhanton seem to have accepted such mores in theory, although they did not always live them in practice. Others rejected them outright, sometimes with violence.

Le Jau directed his message of Christianity and monogamy at both Native Americans and African Americans. Yet Anglo-American law did not in fact recognize marriages, common though they were, between enslaved people. African women suffered twice over in slavery. The Atlantic slave trade dramatically altered the nature of slavery; it also transformed the nature of marriage and family life. In the British colonies, especially, slavery came to be a matrilineal system, in which children inherited the condition of slavery from their mothers. This situation depended on an older understanding in English law in which illegitimate children traced descent through mothers. This posed unique challenges for enslaved women and their families. Enslaved women suffered vulnerability to violence of all sorts, including sexual violence. Too many masters, overseers, and others viewed such women as "nasty wenches," sexually available, regardless of their consent or family situation. Their children, some the result of force, then inherited their grim condition of slavery. An enslaved husband lacked power to stop a master from raping his wife or selling his children. An enslaved wife could not protect herself or her children from violence or separation.

Enslaved African-American men and women, however, could and did act as husbands and wives, to protect and build their families. Even masters and mistresses recognized marriages among enslaved people, even if the law did not. Ads for runaway slaves placed by masters seeking their return refer to a husband suspected of "lurking" around the plantation where his wife lived. The grim reality of violence, sexual and otherwise, and enforced separation, as well as their omnipresent spectres, imposed a particular burden on these families. Yet family life could flourish among enslaved people, ameliorating at least some of its horrors. On September 30, 1739, an eighteen-year-old Virginia-born woman named Moll ran away with her Angolan husband, Roger. They escaped with only the clothing on their backs; Moll was "very big with Child." In this case, it is likely the couple was eager to start a family in freedom, and their flight was prompted by her pregnancy. The master who advertised for their return a month later was subsequently the father-in-law to the revolutionary patriot who demanded "liberty or death," Patrick Henry. But Henry was hardly the first Virginian to make this challenging choice.

Languages of liberty and slavery underpinned American political and domestic orders; connections between the two were sometimes uncomfortably close. When the marriage of a New Hampshire couple, Eunice and John Davis, broke down in 1762, John placed an ad in the local newspaper to disavow any debts his wife contracted in his name: a common practice at the time. He also took the opportunity to denounce Eunice's behavior publicly, complaining that she "has absented herself from me, without just Cause, and refuses to live with me, tho' often requested, and has left three small Children in a very unnatural Manner." Rather surprisingly, Eunice herself then replied publicly: "If I am your Wife, I am not your Slave, and little thought when I acknowledg'd you as my Husband, that you would pretend to assume an unreasonable POWER to tyrannize and insult over me; and that without any just Cause." In distinguishing between marriage and slavery, and launching critiques of tyranny in household relations, white women, in particular, carved out new opportunities for themselves well in advance of the American Revolution, which would put tyranny in the spotlight. Yet race came to matter in new and pernicious ways. In part, expanded prospects for some women depended on constrained ones for others. New household configurations underpinned novel orders of gender, race, and power. Some women, namely white ones, were considered ineligible for slavery, while others, whether Native American or African, were considered "naturally" suited to it. For them, tyranny and insults were the order of life, though all too rarely could they document and make public their unhappiness.

Some me's, then, remain all too hard to hear. Women like Eunice Davis could by the end of the colonial period register discontent, at least occasionally, in newspapers, letters, and courts. Others, like Moll, could not do so very easily; they lacked the ability to record their tales for posterity. Ads for runaways, condemning their flying feet, remain one of the few available sources for their difficult lives. This differential access to power through records, as well as the chaos of history, means the terrible loss of significant stories and sources. Still, those me 's and their rich contexts, however faint, are important, even when-perhaps especially when-they are muffled. As the tale of the Anishinaabe widow suggests, catastrophe, epidemics, war, and mobility upended families and communities, but they did not obliterate them. Women persisted in working hard to protect themselves and their families and to assert their rights and their selfhood, even as structures of law, slavery, and colonialism arrayed against them.

A longer version of this essay appears in The Oxford Handbook of American Women's and Gender History, eds. Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor and Lisa G. Materson.

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"Nir" was the single word she could remember from an Anishinaabe childhood that had ended when Haudenosaunee warriors took her captive. She thus repeated that word, "with all her might," to make her would-be captor aware that she was in fact one of them. "This word saved her life."

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Black Women's Fugitivity in Colonial America

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Black Women's Fugitivity in Colonial America

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Black Women’s Fugitivity in Colonial America | AAIHS

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“Husbands, wives, and families sold indiscriminately to different purchasers, are violently separated; probably never to meet again,” 1853. (Photo: New York Public Library) Lucia, a fourteen-year-old young girl transported to the Georgia Lowcountry during the 1760s, brought with her a ...

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During the 18th century, women's work was extremely difficult, exhausting, and under appreciated. Most colonial women were homemakers who cooked meals, made clothing, and doctored their family as well as cleaned, made household goods to use and sell, took care of their animals, maintained a cook fire and tended the kitchen gardens. Middle class and wealthy women also shared some of these chores in their households, but they often had servants to help them.

Both men and women had great social pressure on them to marry. Young girls were often married by the age of 13 or 14. Women who were not married by the age of 25 were socially humiliated. Women married mostly for social and economic reasons, not for romantic ones. Once married, a woman became the legal property or chattel of her husband. Married women had no control of their earnings, inheritance, property, and also could not appear in court as a witness or vote. Husbands could legally beat their wives. If a woman ran away from her husband, she was considered a thief because she was stealing the clothes she was wearing and herself. If a man murdered his wife, he would be hung. If a woman murdered her husband, she would be burned alive.

Widows were better off. They had control over their property, but could only receive up to one-third of her late husband's property. A widow could also vote in some areas, but often widows were not aware of this fact or chose not to vote. In addition, widows were pressured to get married as soon as possible. In some colonies, laws were proposed that forced widows to marry within 7 years after their husband's death. Widows, however, were often married within a year if not sooner.

Given the difficult life that most colonial women faced, it should not be surprising that many frontier women, when captured in Indian raids chose not to return to their communities and spent the rest of their lives as adopted members of the tribe by whom they were captured. Follow this link for the story of one such captive.

Colonial housewives and cooks began their days very early by modern standards. They built the fire, carried water, gathered fresh fruits and vegetables for the day's meals from the kitchen garden, got meat from the smokehouse, and prepared breakfast. This meal usually consisted of mush with milk, which was sweetened with molasses. The mid-day meal, dinner, was the heaviest, generally served between noon and 3 pm. This meal was commonly a stew, the ingredients of which varied with the seasons. The advantage of serving stew was that it required little tending from the housewife and required only one pot. Puddings could also be steamed in fabric bags suspended above the cooking pot of stew. Individual portions of meat and vegetables were uncommon in the colonies until the 1700's, and then were had by well-to-do colonists. Supper, the evening meal, was generally warmed up leftovers.

Women trained girls to be wives and mothers by having them help around the house. Girls helped with cooking, preserving food, caring for children, cleaning the house, washing clothes and gardening. They milked cows, churned butter, and made cheese. Girls' work was important to cloth making. After the men and boys grew flax and sheared sheep, girls and single women did the spinning, knitting, sewing, and sometimes weaving. Girls spun wool and flax so that it could be woven into fabric or knitted into socks, hats, scarves, and mittens. They usually brought yarn to weavers to have cloth woven and they used the cloth to make clothing and sacks. Girls sewed by hand, with strong, tiny stitches that would hold clothes together during many washings over years of wear. Most girls became wives and mothers who worked on the farm and in the house. Some became midwives, servants, tavernkeepers, or school mistresses. Girls could not go to college.

Every Colonial housewife made a supply of candles in autumn. Candle rods, each with a row of wicks, were made by repeatedly dipping in big iron kettles of boiling water and melted tallow. This was an all-day, back-breaking job. Better candles were made by pouring the tallow into pewter molds, which made produced 6 to 24 candles. Store bought cotton twist, flax fibers, or the silky down from milkweed pods were used as wicks.

The Quilting Bee was an imporant means of socializing for colonial and pioneer women (and men). Through the winter months, the women would piece their quilt tops. Since there was no central heating in these homes, there was usually only one main heated room that was too crowded during the winter months for a quilt frame to be assembled. When the weather became warmer, an invitation was sent to the surrounding neighbors for the quilting bee. On the day of the quilting bee, the quilters would arrive early and begin marking the quilt top which had been put into the quilt frame by the hostess. Very often, plates, thimbles, and tea cups were used to mark the quilting patterns. The quilters would then being to quilt the top while exchanging conversation. The quilt had to be finished before the husbands showed up in the late afternoon when dinner was served to all. The hostess was given a chance to show off her cooking skills. After dinner, there was very often a square dance or country dance with fiddles accompanying the dancers. The quilting bee was an important part of the social life of these people and was surpassed only by religious gatherings.

You can learn a tremendous amount about the daily life of a woman from our period of study by following this link and reading Martha Ballard's Diary.

© 1 October 2001, Portland State University

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During the 18th century, women's work was extremely difficult, exhausting, and under appreciated. Most colonial women were homemakers who cooked meals, made clothing, and doctored their family as well as cleaned, made household goods to use and sell, took care of their animals, maintained a cook fire and tended the kitchen gardens.

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To Make Ends Meet:  Colonial Williamsburg

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To Make Ends Meet:  Colonial Williamsburg

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To Make Ends Meet: Working Women in the 18th Century

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Explore the life of the working women in the 18th century. Learn how female participation in the workforce enabled America to become an economic superpower.

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Digital History: Varying Themes on Men's and Women's Roles in Colonial America

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Digital History: Varying Themes on Men's and Women's Roles in Colonial America

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Digital History> Topics> Private Life

Digital History TOPIC ID 84

There was a significant regional variation in men's and women's familial roles in colonial America. In Puritan New England, a patriarchal conception of family life began to break down as early as the 1670s, whereas in the Chesapeake colonies of Maryland and Virginia, a more patriarchal structure of relationships did not truly emerge until the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Moran, 1991).

Many Puritan men in the first and second generations aspired to become family patriarchs. Likening their 'errand in the wilderness' to the ancient Hebrews' 40 years of wandering in the desert, the first generation sought to recreate a hierarchical form of family life that was disintegrating in England itself. These men tended to conceive of the family in dynastic and corporate terms. They wanted to keep their children near by and pass on their patrimony from one generation to the next (Ditz, 1986; Greven, 1970; Shammas, Salmon, & Dahlin, 1987).

This stress on family continuity was apparent in their naming patterns, their economic strategies, and their inheritance practices. Compared to other English-speaking people, they were more likely to name their first-born sons after themselves. Viewing the family as a cooperate economic enterprise, they exercised strict control over their children, particularly their sons. They closely supervised apprenticeships, offered explicit instructions to their children (even when they reached adulthood), monitored sexual contacts, and took an active role in courtship and marriage (Ditz, 1986; Fischer, 1989; Greven, 1970; Norton, 1996; Shammas, Salmon, & Dahlin, 1987).

Demographic circumstances that were truly unique made this patriarchal role attainable. Because of its cold winters and low population density, seventeenth-century New England was perhaps the most healthful region in the world at the time. After an initial period of high mortality, life expectancy quickly rose to levels comparable to our own. Prolonged life expectancy allowed a clearly delineated age structure to emerge (Mintz & Kellogg, 1988).

Other demographic circumstances also contributed to a patriarchal conception of men's roles. Husbands tended to be significantly older than their wives--four or five years older on average--and sought to look older still by wearing white wigs and elaborate waistcoats. Since virtually all women married (between 95 and 98 percent), it was a nearly universal experience for a woman to transfer subordination to a father to subordination to a husband (without the interruption of a period of relative freedom, which antebellum Americans called girlhood, when young women worked temporarily outside a home) (Ulrich, 1982).

Few institutions competed with a father's authority. Despite laws requiring the establishment of schools, most children were educated informally, and while older children were temporarily put out as servants or apprentices between seven and twelve, most adolescents lived at home under their father's watchful eye. Available evidence suggests that fathers did indeed play an active role in decisions involving choice of an occupation and courtship and marriage. To maintain control, fathers usually refused to pass legal title to land to their sons until death, keeping their offspring dependent for years, delaying full adulthood autonomy until sons reached middle age (Ditz, 1986; Greven, 1970; Shammas, Salmon, & Dahlin, 1987).

Yet it is striking how quickly this patriarchal blueprint frayed. As early as the second or third generation, high rates of fertility and increased geographical mobility began to undermine the patriarchal order. Fathers no longer had sufficient land to keep sons at home and sons lacked sufficient incentives to stay. Increased occupational choice and new economic opportunities in seaports and commercial towns drew many young men away from the parental home, undermining patriarchal authority. A separate adolescent subculture, free from adult control, began to emerge, as young men joined militia companies, voluntary associations, and religious groups. The external controls imposed by churches, courts, and parents on children's sexual behavior all lost effectiveness, a development apparent in a sharp increase in illegitimate births and pre-nuptial pregnancies. Fathers also increasingly lost the ability to control the timing of their children's marriages (Mintz & Kellogg, 1988).

Class, regional, ethnic, and religious differences characterized women's and men's familial roles and relationships during the colonial era. The families created by Quakers in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware, were far less authoritarian and patriarchal than those in New England. Not nearly as anxious as the Puritans about 'infant depravity' or 'original sin,' Quakers sought to sustain childhood 'innocence' by raising their children in a warm and nurturing environment. Unlike the New England Puritans, Quakers also emphasized early autonomy for children. They provided daughters with an early dowry and sons with sufficient land to provide a basis for early independence. Quaker families placed a far greater stress on maternal nurture than did Puritan families (Fischer, 1989; Levy, 1988).

In the Chesapeake colonies of Maryland and Virginia, in stark contrast to New England, the trend was toward increased paternal authority, not its diminishment. A key reason for this shift was demographic. The further south one looks, the more unbalanced the sex ratio and the higher the death rate. In New England, the sex ratio was relatively even, with men outnumbering women three to two in the first generation. But in New Netherlands, there were two men for every one female and the ratio was six to one in the Chesapeake. Whereas the New England population became self-sustaining as early as the 1630s, New Jersey and Pennsylvania did not achieve this until the 1660s to the 1680s and Virginia until after 1700 (Kulikoff, 1986; Rutman & Rutman, 1984).

During the seventeenth century, a high death rate and an unbalanced sex ratio made it impossible to establish the kind of the stable, patriarchal family that took root in New England. In the Chesapeake region, half of all marriages were broken by death within seven or eight years and half of all children lost their fathers before marrying. Death rates were so high that a parent's remarriage was often dissolved by death before a child reached adulthood. Under these circumstances, most families in the Chesapeake were highly complex units consisting of a complicated assortments of step-parents, step-children, wards, and half-brothers and sisters. The high death rate contributed to a society which attached relatively more importance to the extended kinship network and less to the nuclear family. As late as the American Revolution, few men in the southern colonies could be confident of directly passing property to their sons. And even in the twentieth century, southern families have been much more likely than their northern counterparts to use surnames as first names, underscoring the continuing importance of extended family identity (Kulikoff, 1986; Rutman & Rutman, 1984; Wyatt-Brown, 1982).

Between 1690 and 1760, as the death rate declined, the sex ratio grew more balanced, and marriages survived longer, a more stable set of patriarchal family relationships began to emerge in the Chesapeake colonies. Yet the nature of patriarchy was quite different in the Chesapeake than in New England. Outwardly, relations between fathers and children were even more hierarchical than in New England, with many southern sons addressing their father in letters as 'Sir' or 'Dear Sir.' And certainly many planters tried to mold their sons into gentlemen and influence their offspring's education and marriage decisions. But it is also clear that parental indulgence, lax discipline, and early independence characterized many planters' relationships with their offspring. It seems likely that the more indulgent patriarchy of the Chesapeake region was an ironic by-product of slavery, because social control energies were diverted away from their own children to racial control (Greven, 1977; Moran, 1991).

Marital relations, too, appear to have blended together an odd mixture of patriarchy and wifely independence. The age difference between husbands and wives was far greater in the southern colonies than elsewhere. Prior to 1700, a man would usually marry in his mid-20s while most women married by 17. The female age of first marriage rose during the eighteenth century, but remained far lower than in the northern colonies. Yet if the age gap discouraged close companionship between spouses, the law extended greater legal and property rights to women than was true in New England. Puritan lawmakers considered marital unity under the husband a prerequisite of social stability, and eliminated English common law protections that assumed that husbands and wives had separate interests such as separate estates for women, dower interest, prenuptial contracts, and suits in equity. In contrast, in Maryland, South Carolina, and Virginia, where the death rate was higher and widows were more likely to be left with young children, women received greater protections for personal and real property. It is not a surprise, given these circumstances, that southern marital relations seem to have been more strife-ridden. In a famous incident in Virginia in 1687, Sarah Harrison disrupted her wedding to Dr. James Blair, the future founder of William and Mary College by refusing to promise to obey her husband (Fischer, 1989).

Yet for all the regional differences in familial roles, it seems clear that ideologically and economically, colonial Americans generally attached greater significance to the father-son relationship than to spousal or mother-child relations. In all regions, colonial fathers were preoccupied with preserving, transmitting, and increasing the familial patrimony. They not only spent a great deal of time and energy to arranging apprenticeships and monitoring sexual behavior, but also attached far more attention than subsequent parents onto courtship and inheritance (Wood, 1992).

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Digital History> Topics> Private Life Digital History TOPIC ID 84 There was a significant regional variation in men's and women's familial roles in colonial America. In Puritan New England, a patriarchal conception of family life began to break down as early as the 1670s, whereas in the Chesapeake colonies of Maryland and Virginia, a more patriarchal structure of relationships did not truly emerge until the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Moran, 1991).

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The Life of a Colonial Wife | History of American Women

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A Woman’s Place Because most colonial women married, the term good wife came into existence and a code of ethics developed that would govern female life in New England from 1650 to 1750. Good wives had legal rights in colonial America, and actually had more freedom than nineteenth-century women woul…

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Chronicles of American Women: Your History Makers

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Terrell A. Crow, 2006
Additional research provided by Ansley Herring Wegner.

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Women- Part 2: Women’s Roles in Precolonial and Colonial North Carolina | NCpedia

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This article is from the Encyclopedia of North Carolina edited by William S. Powell. Copyright © 2006 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher. For personal use and not for further distribution. Please submit permission requests for other use directly to the pub…

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Women in Colonial America Were More Powerful Than We Give Them Credit For

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Esther Edwards Burr’s journal gives us one of the few records of female life in colonial America. Here’s what it reveals.

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American Battlefield Trust: Remembering the Ladies

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American Battlefield Trust: Remembering the Ladies

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In the late March of 1776, as the Second Continental Congress gathered to debate the merits of independence from Great Britain, Abagail Smith Adams wrote to her...

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In 1942, at the age of 17, Maria Tallchief moved to New York City to pursue her dreams of becoming a dancer. With luck, grit, and determination she joined the famed Ballet Russe Monte Carlo as an apprentice and moved quickly through the ranks, dancing first in the corps de ballet and later performing leading roles.  Tallchief is widely considered America's first major prima ballerina.

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A renowned leader in women's history education, the National Women's History Museum brings to life the countless untold stories of women throughout history and serves as a space for all to inspire, experience, collaborate, and amplify women's impact.

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Ona Judge:  Enslaved Woman at Mount Vernon

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Ona Judge:  Enslaved Woman at Mount Vernon

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On January 1, 1847, the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator published a letter from Reverend Benjamin Chase describing his recent visit with an elderly African American woman near Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The woman, Ona Judge Staines, had fled enslavement at the Washingtons' household fifty years earlier. Staines's account of her dramatic quest for freedom represents a rare moment when the voice of a person (formerly) enslaved at Mount Vernon appears in the historical record.

Ona Judge, often referenced by the Washingtons as Oney, was born at Mount Vernon around 1774. She was the daughter of Betty, an enslaved seamstress living on Mansion House Farm, and Andrew Judge, a white English tailor whom Washington hired from 1772 to 1784. Ona was later described as "a light mulatto girl, much freckled" and "almost white." Like many other slaves of mixed-race descent, she received a post in the household: at age ten, she became Martha Washington's personal maid. Like her mother, Ona was skilled at sewing, "the perfect mistress of her needle." Also, like her mother, Ona and her younger sister Delphy belonged to the Custis estate, and so would pass to Martha Washington's heirs upon the latter's death.

When George Washington was elected president, fifteen-year-old Ona Judge traveled with seven other enslaved people to the executive residence, first in New York and then in Philadelphia. She was among the enslaved people whom Washington secretly rotated out of the latter city in order to evade the 1780 Pennsylvania emancipation law. Washington asked his secretary to accomplish this rotation "under pretext that may deceive both them and the Public."

During Washington's presidency, Judge continued her daily work waiting on Martha Washington-helping her bathe and dress, cleaning and mending her clothing, organizing her personal belongings, and anything else her she required. However, in the bustling capital city of Philadelphia, life was dramatically different for her and the other enslaved people from Mount Vernon. Judge received nominal cash from Washington on several occasions to go see a play, the circus, and the "tumbling feats." Her visible position in the household meant that she received a regular supply of high-quality clothing. Washington's account book notes purchases for her gowns, shoes, stockings, and bonnets. The city's large free black and Quaker abolitionist communities also offered the young woman new ideas, new connections, and new opportunities to escape.

On May 21, 1796, as the Washingtons prepared to return to Mount Vernon for the summer, Ona Judge fled. As she recalled in 1845, "Whilst they were packing up to go to Virginia, I was packing to go, I didn't know where; for I knew that if I went back to Virginia, I should never get my liberty. I had friends among the colored people of Philadelphia, had my things carried there beforehand, and left Washington's house while they were eating dinner."

Two days later, Frederick Kitt-the hired steward at the executive residence-placed an advertisement in the Philadelphia Gazette and Daily Advertiser announcing that "Oney Judge" had "absconded" from the president's house and offering a $10 reward for her recapture. Kitt described the young woman's "very black eyes and bushy black hair," noting that she was "of middle stature, slender, and delicately formed." She had "many changes of good clothes, all sorts," Kitt warned and might be trying to pass as a free woman, escaping on a ship leaving the port of Philadelphia.

Kitt's advertisement stated that Judge had run off with "no provocation," but her later interview revealed that she had two reasons for running away. First, "she wanted to be free," and second, she had overheard that she would soon be given to Martha Washington's eldest granddaughter, Eliza Parke Custis Law, who was known to have a fierce temper. Judge "was determined," she recalled, "never to be her slave."

Kitt was right about one thing: after leaving the Washingtons' household, Ona Judge secured passage on the Nancy, a ship commanded by Captain John Bolles and bound for Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Judge never revealed Bolles's name until after he died, "lest they should punish him for bringing me away."

Meanwhile, George Washington was stewing. The young woman was owned by the estate of Martha Washington's first husband, Daniel Parke Custis not Washington. This meant he would be responsible for reimbursing the Custis estate were she not recovered. He also faced pressure from Martha, who was distressed at the loss of a maid who, Washington claimed, "was brought up and treated more like a child than a Servant." Apparently unable to comprehend why she would flee, Washington believed that Judge had been "seduced and enticed away" by a Frenchman.

Even in New Hampshire, Judge was not safe. Just a few months after arriving, she was recognized on the street by a friend of Martha's youngest granddaughter, Nelly Parke Custis. Word of the escapee's whereabouts reached George Washington, who enlisted the help of Joseph Whipple, the customs collector in Portsmouth. Whipple found Judge and tried to convince her to board a ship for Philadelphia. Judge replied that she would readily return, but only if the Washingtons promised to free her after their deaths. Otherwise, she said, "she should rather suffer death than return to Slavery & liable to be sold or given to any other person." There was no seduction by a Frenchman, she assured Whipple, but rather "a thirst for compleat freedom . . . had been her only motive for absconding."

When Washington learned of Judge's request, he was furious. His response to her proposed deal reveals the tension between his stated antislavery principles and the reality of being a slave owner. He fumed to Whipple: "To enter into such a compromise with her, as she suggested to you, is totally inadmissible . . . for however well disposed I might be to a gradual abolition, or even to an entire emancipation of that description of People (if the latter was in itself practicable at this moment) it would neither be politic or just to reward unfaithfulness with a premature preference; and thereby discontent before hand the minds of all her fellow-servants who by their steady attachments are far more deserving than herself of favor."

Because of the federal Fugitive Slave Law, which Washington had signed in 1793, slave owners retained the legal right to recapture enslaved people who escaped across state lines, if necessary with force. As president, Washington knew that using violent measures to seize an enslaved woman who had runaway could anger antislavery residents of northern states. He asked Whipple to continue efforts to recapture Judge, but only if it would not "excite a mob or riot" in Portsmouth, where abolitionist sentiments ran high. If Whipple made further attempts to capture her, Judge evaded them. In January 1797, she married Jack Staines, a free black sailor. The couple went on to have three children: Eliza, Will, and Nancy.

In August 1799, Washington made one more attempt to find and recapture Ona Judge. When Martha's nephew Burwell Bassett Jr. traveled to New Hampshire on business, Washington enlisted his help. Bassett successfully located Judge in Portsmouth and tried to persuade her to return, but again she refused. Though Washington had asked Bassett to avoid any methods that were "unpleasant" or "troublesome," Bassett was determined to take the young woman by force. When he announced his plans over dinner at the home of John Langdon, the U.S. senator from New Hampshire, a sympathetic Langdon secretly sent a messenger to warn Judge. With her husband at sea and one-year-old Eliza in her arms, Judge hired a horse and carriage to take her to the home of a friend, a free black woman named Nancy Jack, eight miles from Portsmouth in Greenland, New Hampshire. Bassett returned to Virginia empty-handed.

After Washington's death in December 1799, Judge said, the family "never troubled me any more." She nevertheless remained a fugitive: the Custis estate could legally recapture her and her children at any time. When Judge was interviewed in the 1840s, she was still living at Nancy Jack's home in Greenland. Legally considered a "pauper," she received support from Rockingham County. Her husband had died in 1803, and her two daughters had predeceased her as well. Despite these sorrows, she told her interviewer how her life had changed for the better since arriving in New Hampshire: "She says that she never received the least mental or moral instruction, of any kind, while she remained in Washington's family. But, after she came to Portsmouth, she learned to read; and when Elias Smith first preached in Portsmouth, she professes to have been converted to Christianity."

Ona likely never again saw her Mount Vernon family. Her mother, Betty, died in January 1795. In 1802, her younger sister Delphy was inherited by Eliza Parke Custis Law, the fate that Ona had fled to avoid.

Ona Judge's determination to escape slavery eclipsed any regret over leaving. As one interviewer noted: "When asked if she is not sorry she left Washington, as she has labored so much harder since, than before, her reply is, 'No, I am free, and have, I trust been made a child of God by the means.'" Ona Judge Staines died in 1848.

Jessie MacLeod
Associate Curator
George Washington's Mount Vernon
Notes:
If not specifically cited, biographical and genealogical information about enslaved people has been drawn from Washington's 1786 and 1799 slave lists: George Washington, Diary, Feb. 18, 1786, and "Washington's Slave List," 1799, The Papers of George Washington, Digital Edition, ed. Theodore J. Crackel, Edward G. Lengel, et al. (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, Rotunda, 2008); the Mount Vernon slavery database, which compiles references to the estate's enslaved people; and the files of Mary V. Thompson, Mount Vernon's research historian.

1 Benjamin Chase, letter to the editor, The Liberator, Jan. 1, 1847, quoted in Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies, ed. John W. Blassingame (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 248-50.

2 Lund Washington to GW, Oct. 15, 1775, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-02-02-0164, Lund Washington to GW, Oct 22, 1775, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-02-02-0193, and Lund Washington, Account Book [microform], 1762-1786, Washington Library.

3 Chase, letter to the editor, 1847; Frederick Kitt, "Advertisement," Pennsylvania Gazette and Universal Daily Advertiser, May 24, 1796.

4 GW to Oliver Wolcott, Sept. 1, 1796, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/99-01-02-00910.

5 GW to Tobias Lear, Apr. 12, 1791, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-08-02-0062.

6 See "References to People from the Presidential Household Account Books," The President's House in Philadelphia, accessed March 7, 2016, ushistory.org/presidentshouse/history/references.htm.

7 T. H. Adams, "Washington's Runaway Slave, and How Portsmouth Freed Her," Granite (NH) Freeman, May 22, 1845, reprinted in Frank W. Miller, Portsmouth New Hampshire Weekly, June 2, 1877.

8 Kitt, Advertisement, Pennsylvania Gazette, May 24, 1796.

9 Kitt, Advertisement; Adams, "Washington's Runaway Slave."

10 Adams, "Washington's Runaway Slave."

11 GW to Oliver Wolcott, Sept. 1, 1796.

12 Joseph Whipple to Oliver Wolcott, Oct. 4, 1796, quoted in Fritz Hirschfeld, George Washington and Slavery: A Documentary Portrayal (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), 114-15.

13 GW to Joseph Whipple, Nov. 28, 1796, quoted in Hirschfeld, George Washington and Slavery, 115-16.

14 GW to Joseph Whipple, Nov. 28, 1796, quoted in Hirschfeld, George Washington and Slavery, 115-16.

15 GW to Burwell Bassett Jr., Aug. 11, 1799, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/06-04-02-0197.

16 Chase, letter to the editor, 1847.

17 Chase, letter to the editor, 1847.

18 "Drafts of Negros," Peter Family Archives, Washington Library.

19 Adams, "Washington's Runaway Slave."

An archived version of this entry can be found here.

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On January 1, 1847, the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator published a letter from Reverend Benjamin Chase describing his recent visit with an elderly African American woman near Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The woman, Ona Judge Staines, had fled enslavement at the Washingtons' household fifty years earlier.

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Caroline Branham: George Washington's Housemaid and Seamstress

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Caroline Branham: George Washington's Housemaid and Seamstress

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In June 1796, George Washington sent instructions to his farm manager William Pearce for preparing the Mount Vernon Mansion for the family's arrival from Philadelphia. He told Pearce to have the rooms in the servants' hall cleaned and the beds put in order, to attach a lock on the door, and to "order Caroline, or whoever has the charge of those rooms, to suffer no person to sleep, or even to go into it, without express orders from her Mistress or myself."

Washington's reference to the enslaved housemaid Caroline Branham illuminates the role she played in cleaning, maintaining, and protecting the rooms of the Mansion and its associated structures. Caroline, Molly, Charlotte, and other enslaved housemaids faced a relentless cycle of domestic work: lighting fires, making beds, washing clothes and linens, sweeping and scrubbing floors, and dusting furniture, among many other duties. George Washington expected them to be productive even when not performing household work. Branham was also a seamstress, sewing household linens and such clothing as shirts and shifts for her fellow enslaved workers.

The recollections of Hannah Taylor, a resident of Alexandria, provide an intimate glimpse of Branham's role in the house. As a seven-year-old girl, Taylor accidentally fell asleep in Washington's carriage when it was in Alexandria for repairs. She did not awaken until the carriage arrived at Mount Vernon, at which point it was late and stormy, prompting the Washingtons to insist that she stay the night (they sent an enslaved messenger to alert her parents). After dining with the family, Taylor told an interviewer years later, "Caroline Brannum, a colored maid . . . took her to a little room at the head of the stairway. She then brought a copper warming-pan, the first Hannah had ever seen, and ran it between the sheets of the bed, and produced a nightgown of Miss Nelly's and put it on the little girl . . . . She was covered up and tucked in the feather bed, and Caroline left the candle burning until Hannah had gone to sleep." The next morning, " Mrs. Washington told Caroline to have a brick heated and put in the coach, which was waiting at the door to take Hannah home to Alexandria."

Given the large number of visitors each year, Branham had many guests-not to mention the Washington family-for whom to fetch warming pans, light fires and candles, provide fresh jugs of water for washing, and empty chamber pots. One of her daily duties was lighting the fire in the Washingtons' bedchamber each morning at dawn. On December 14, 1799, she entered the room to discover that George Washington was ill. Martha dispatched her to wake Washington's secretary Tobias Lear, who sent for a doctor. Branham remained nearby throughout the day as Washington's condition worsened. When he died late that evening, she was one of four enslaved people in the room.

Caroline Branham was married to Peter Hardiman, an enslaved groom whom Washington rented for £12 per year from David Stuart, who had married the widow of Martha's son, John (Jacky) Parke Custis. Though there was no guarantee they could stay together, Caroline and Peter benefited from Washington's preference to keep enslaved families intact. In 1788 Washington wrote to Stuart that he was hiring Peter that year "as well on acc[oun]t of my Jacks, Stud Horses, Mares, etc., as because he seems unwilling to part with his wife and Children." By that time the couple had two children, two-year-old Wilson and one-year-old Rachel. They later had at least six more: Jemima, Leanthe, Polly, Peter, Austin, and Daniel.

After Martha Washington's death in 1802, Caroline Branham and her children were inherited by George Washington Parke Custis. Peter Hardiman was also inherited by Custis, allowing the family to stay together.

Jessie MacLeodAssociate Curator

George Washington's Mount Vernon
Notes:
If not specifically cited, biographical and genealogical information about enslaved people has been drawn from Washington's 1786 and 1799 slave lists: George Washington, Diary, Feb. 18, 1786, and "Washington's Slave List," 1799, Founders Online, National Archives. [Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Digital Edition, ed. Theodore J. Crackel, Edward G. Lengel, et al. (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, Rotunda, 2008)]; the Mount Vernon slavery database, which compiles references to the estate's enslaved people; and the files of Mary V. Thompson, Mount Vernon's research historian.

1. George Washington to William Pearce, June 5, 1796, in The Writings of George Washington, from the Original Manuscript Sources, 1745-1799, ed. John C. Fitzpatrick, (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1931-44), 35:79.

2. Mary G. Powell, The History of Old Alexandria, Virginia, From July 13, 1749, to May 24, 1861 (Richmond, VA: William Byrd Press, 1928), 76-78.

3. Tobias Lear, "The last illness and Death of General Washington, Journal Account," Dec. 15, 1799, National Archives, Founders Online, [Original source: The Papers of George Washington].

4. Credit entries, Sept. 24, 1792 and July 2, 1793, Ledger Book 2, 1772-93, George Washington Papers, 1741-99, Series 5: Financial Papers, 1750-96, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, folios 345R, 368R (images 689, 735) memory.loc.gov/ammem/gwhtml/gwseries5.html; George Washington, entry for Aug. 18, 1797, Cash Memoranda, Sept. 29, 1794-Aug. 31, 1797 [photostats], vol. 29-A, Washington Library, from original manuscripts at John Carter Brown Library, Providence, RI, p. 30a; George Washington, entry for June 3, 1799, Cash Memoranda, Sept. 1, 1797-Dec. 3, 1799 [photostats], vol. 31-A, Washington Library, from original manuscripts at John Carter Brown Library, Providence, RI, p. 96.

5. George Washington to David Stuart, Jan. 22, 1788, National Archives, Founders Online, [Original source: The Papers of George Washington].

6. "List of the different Drafts of Negros" [ca. 1802], in scrapbook, box 34, Peter Family Archives, Washington Library.

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In June 1796, George Washington sent instructions to his farm manager William Pearce for preparing the Mount Vernon Mansion for the family's arrival from Philadelphia.

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Doll and the other people forced to move had to adjust to a new life-and a new community-on Washington's plantation. Martha Dandridge Custis brought to her marriage to George Washington, as part of her "dower" or widow's share of her first husband's estate. Many of the "dower" slaves remained on Custis properties, but about 20 household workers and craftsmen were taken to Mount Vernon from their previous home in New Kent County, Virginia.1

As the estate's cook for many years, Doll worked long hours in the kitchen preparing the hoecakes, smoked hams, and other Washington family favorites. It is likely that Martha Washington installed Doll as cook because she was familiar with the enslaved woman's skills. Mount Vernon's steady stream of visitors meant that Doll frequently had to prepare large and elaborate meals. She would have worked closely with Martha to plan each day's menu and monitor ingredients. Though under Martha's occasional surveillance, the kitchen was Doll's domain. She passed on her expertise to her daughter Lucy, who succeeded her mother as one of the estate's cooks.

By the 1780s, Doll no longer had a formal work assignment. Then in her sixties, she likely assisted with knitting and mending, tasks that Washington often assigned to elderly enslaved workers. She continued to use the kitchen to distill rose and mint water for medicinal purposes and to dry fruits such as cherries. She also sold chickens and ducks to George Washington, as did many enslaved people on the estate.

Doll was the matriarch of one of the largest extended families within Mount Vernon's enslaved community. In 1799 she had five children-George, Doll, Lucy, Peter, and Alce-as well as fourteen grandchildren and at least four great-grandchildren living on the estate. Her daughter Lucy married Frank Lee, the enslaved butler. Her grandson Christopher Sheels became Washington's personal valet.

Because she was owned by the Custis estate, Doll remained enslaved after Martha Washington's death. She may have been inherited by Elizabeth (Eliza) Parke Custis Law or George Washington Parke Custis. On the list of the division of the enslaved people owned by the Custis estate, both inherited a "Doll" or "Dolly" valued at just $5, a low figure indicating that the women were elderly. By 1802 Doll would have been eighty-one years old.

Jessie MacLeodAssociate Curator

George Washington's Mount Vernon
Notes:
If not specifically cited, biographical and genealogical information about enslaved people has been drawn from Washington's 1786 and 1799 slave lists: George Washington, Diary, Feb. 18, 1786, and "Washington's Slave List," 1799, Founders Online, National Archives. [Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Digital Edition, ed. Theodore J. Crackel, Edward G. Lengel, et al. (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, Rotunda, 2008)]; the Mount Vernon slavery database, which compiles references to the estate's enslaved people; and the files of Mary V. Thompson, Mount Vernon's research historian.

1. Memorandum, " List of Artisans and Household Slaves in the Estate" [ca. 1759], Settlement of the Daniel Parke Custis Estate, Schedule III-C, National Archives, Founders Online, [Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Digital Edition].

2. In Washington's 1786 list of enslaved workers, he describes Doll as "almost past service." Hercules and Nathan are listed as the estate's cooks. Diary, Feb. 18, 1786, National Archives, Founders Online, [Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Digital Edition].

3. , ; Martha Washington to Fanny Bassett Washington, May 24, 1795, in Joseph E. Fields, George Washington to Anthony Whitting, May 12, 1793 National Archives, Founders Online, [Original source: Worthy Partner: The Papers of Martha Washington (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994) The Papers of George Washington, Digital Edition]. , 287-88.

4. Doll was a common name among enslaved women, making it difficult to track her fate.

5. "Drafts of Negros," Peter Family Archives, Washington Library.

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Doll and the other people forced to move had to adjust to a new life-and a new community-on Washington's plantation. Martha Dandridge Custis brought to her marriage to George Washington, as part of her "dower" or widow's share of her first husband's estate.

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On Sunday, April 1, 1792, at Mount Vernon's Muddy Hole Farm, an enslaved boy named William felt a sharp pain in his back. Two days later, the twelve-year-old fell ill, becoming "senseless and speechless." The boy's mother, a field-worker named Kate, spent a week caring for him in the family's small cabin. A white doctor was sent for, but on Saturday, April 7 William died. The farm manager described the event to Washington, noting that "his death I much regreted because he was a promising Boy." The sorrow of Kate-and her husband, Will, the boy's father-was not recorded.

Two years later Will, an enslaved overseer, approached George Washington with a request. His wife, Kate, wanted to be the "Granny," or midwife, to the estate's enslaved women. Washington usually paid a white woman to perform this job. Several of Kate's five children were delivered by Susanna Bishop, the wife of one of Washington's hired servants. Kate argued, however, "that she was full as well qualified for this purpose as those into whose hands it was entrusted and to whom [Washington] was paying twelve or 15 pounds a year."

Washington asked his farm manager to look into Kate's credentials and give her the job if she were qualified. There are no surviving records of payments to Kate for attending births, but in 1799 she was given twenty-five cents for the purchase of scissors "to cut the tongues of young children," a reference to fixing tongue-tie, a common oral deformity in infants.

Kate's bold request hints at the social dynamics governing relationships both within the enslaved population and between Washington and those he enslaved. By asking to become the midwife for other enslaved women, Kate ensured that this important role was undertaken by a member of their own community, not an outsider. Her approach to Washington, through her husband's position as overseer, suggests assertiveness and knowledge that Washington would be receptive. Indeed, this incident and others suggest that Washington recognized competence and skill, even among those he enslaved.

Kate was a common name among enslaved women, so it is difficult to trace her identity. She may be the enslaved woman valued at £30 whom Washington inherited from his elder half-brother Lawrence in 1754. As George Washington's property, Kate and her living children-Molly, Virgin, and Kate-became free in 1801 through the provision in his will. Described as "old" on the 1799 list of enslaved people, Kate would have received clothing and food from Washington's estate for the rest of her life, per the terms of his will. Because her husband, Will, belonged to the Custis estate, he remained enslaved. He was inherited by one of Martha Washington 's grandchildren.

Jessie MacLeodAssociate Curator

George Washington's Mount Vernon
Notes
If not specifically cited, biographical and genealogical information about enslaved people has been drawn from Washington's 1786 and 1799 slave lists: George Washington, Diary, Feb. 18, 1786, and "Washington's Slave List," 1799, Founders Online, National Archives. [Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Digital Edition, ed. Theodore J. Crackel, Edward G. Lengel, et al. (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, Rotunda, 2008)]; the Mount Vernon slavery database, which compiles references to the estate's enslaved people; and the files of Mary V. Thompson, Mount Vernon's research historian.

1. "George Augustine Washington to George Washington, 8-9 April 1792," Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-10-02-0136.

2. "George Washington to William Pearce, 17 August 1794," Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-16-02-0392.

3. Credit entry for Feb. 6, 1799, Mount Vernon Distillery and Fishery Ledger, Washington Library (RM-297).

4. George Washington, Memorandum, "A Division of the Negros . . . of the deceasd Majr Lawrence Washington," 10 December 1754, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-01-02-0115-0003.

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On Sunday, April 1, 1792, at Mount Vernon's Muddy Hole Farm, an enslaved boy named William felt a sharp pain in his back. Two days later, the twelve-year-old fell ill, becoming "senseless and speechless." The boy's mother, a field-worker named Kate, spent a week caring for him in the family's small cabin.

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In early July 1798 at Dogue Run Farm, thirty-five-year-old Priscilla gave birth to Christopher, her sixth living child. Both were enslaved by George Washington.

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Nancy Carter Quander:  Freed at Mount Vernon

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Nancy Carter Quander:  Freed at Mount Vernon

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On November 16, 1835, the Alexandria Gazette ran a story about a visit to George Washington's new tomb, which had been constructed at Mount Vernon four years earlier. A reporter on the scene observed, "Eleven colored men were industriously employed in levelling the earth, and turfing around the sepulcher. . . . They stated they were a few of the many slaves freed by General George Washington, and they had offered their services upon this last and melancholy occasion, as the only return in their power to make to the remains of the man who had been more than a father to them; and they should continue their labors as long as anything should be pointed out for them to do. . . . I trust their names will not be forgotten, and that the circumstance here mentioned may be a recommendation to them during life."1

The reporter then recorded their identities: Sambo Anderson, William Anderson, Berkley Clark, William Hayes, Dick Jasper, Morris Jasper, George Lear, William Moss, Joe Richardson, Levi Richardson, Joseph Smith, and Nancy Quander-the only woman-who cooked for the men while they worked.

Nancy was eleven years old in 1799, when George Washington made a list of all the enslaved people on his plantation. She lived on River Farm with her mother, Suckey Bay, a field-worker. Nancy's father, an enslaved man with the last name of Carter, lived at the plantation of Washington's closest neighbor, Abednego Adams. Nancy had two siblings who also lived on River Farm: Rose, who was twenty-eight in 1799, and a four-year-old sister also listed as Nancy on Washington's census. (It is unclear why these two girls have the same name.) Because Suckey Bay belonged to George Washington directly, she and her children were among those freed in January 1801, by Martha Washington, following the provision in her husband's will.

We know only snippets about Nancy's life after freedom. Sometime in the next ten years, she married Charles Quander, a free black man from Maryland. Quander belonged to one of the oldest African American families in the country, descending from a man named Amkwando, who had been captured in present-day Ghana and brought to the American colonies enslaved prior to 1684. Nancy and Charles Quander had three children: Gracy, born about 1811; Elizabeth, born about 1815; and Osmond, born about 1825.

Virginia law required that free African Americans like the Quanders register with local authorities every three years to obtain a certificate of freedom. The burden of proof rested on free people: those who did not have the proper registration could be detained as fugitive slaves. Registration records consisted primarily of name, age, a report of how the individual became free (whether by birth or manumission), and a detailed physical description including skin color, height, build, hair, countenance, and any noticeable scars or marks. The records that survive (covering just a handful of years) are often brief, occasionally error ridden, and always from the perspective of white record keepers. They nevertheless remain a valuable resource for learning about the free black population of nineteenth-century Virginia.

In 1831 the Fairfax County Register of Free Blacks described Nancy's eldest daughter, Gracy, as "a black Girl about twenty years of age five feet and an half inch high prominent cheek bones, pleasant Countenance a scar on the first finger of the left hand." The entry went on to say that Gracy was "the daughter of Nancy a free woman emancipated by Genl. Washington." In 1836 Nancy's daughter Elizabeth-then married to William Hayes-was listed in Alexandria records as "four feet five and a half inches high, about Twenty one years of age of a dark Complexion, a scar on the right Cheek prominent features, considerably marked with the Small pox." Elizabeth's entry also states that she gained her freedom through her mother, who was freed by George Washington.

When Nancy Quander returned to Mount Vernon in 1835 to support the men caring for the tomb, she was joined by her son-in-law William Hayes and her nephew George Lear (son of her sister Rose). Neither of these men had been enslaved at Mount Vernon. In fact, five of the twelve people mentioned in the Alexandria Gazette article were the children of people formerly enslaved at Mount Vernon and had been born free after Washington's death. Their return underlines the deep impact of Mount Vernon on their families' collective memories, even after emancipation.

Jessie MacLeodAssociate Curator

George Washington's Mount Vernon

Notes:

If not specifically cited, biographical and genealogical information about enslaved people has been drawn from Washington's 1786 and 1799 slave lists: George Washington, Diary, Feb. 18, 1786, and "Washington's Slave List," 1799, Founders Online, National Archives. [Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Digital Edition, ed. Theodore J. Crackel, Edward G. Lengel, et al. (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, Rotunda, 2008)]; the Mount Vernon slavery database, which compiles references to the estate's enslaved people; and the files of Mary V. Thompson, Mount Vernon's research historian.

1. Alexandria Gazette, Nov. 16, 1835, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85025007/1835-11-16/ed-1/seq-3/.

2. "Washington's Slave List," 1799, n7, Founders Online, National Archives. [Original source: The Papers of George Washington]

3. Interview of Rohulamin Quander, July 1985, in Telling Histories: A Collection of Transcribed Interviews of Quander Family Members . . ., ed. Rohulamin Quander (Washington, DC: Quander Historical Society, 1998), 1:3-8.

4. Gracy Quander, register no. 137 (1831) and Elizabeth Hayes, register no. 23 (1836), in Donald Sweig, ed., "Registrations of Free Negroes Commencing September Court 1822, Book No. 2" and "Register of Free Blacks 1835 in Book 3": Being the Full Text of the Two Extant Volumes, 1822-1861, of Registrations of Free Blacks Now in the County Courthouse, Fairfax, Virginia (Fairfax, VA: History Section, Office of Comprehensive Planning,Fairfax County, 1977), pp. 63, 113.

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On November 16, 1835, the Alexandria Gazette ran a story about a visit to George Washington's new tomb, which had been constructed at Mount Vernon four years earlier. A reporter on the scene observed, "Eleven colored men were industriously employed in levelling the earth, and turfing around the sepulcher. .

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Kitty: Dairy Maid and Spinner at Mount Vernon

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Kitty: Dairy Maid and Spinner at Mount Vernon

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In the first years of the nineteenth century, the enslaved community of Mount Vernon was split apart not once, but twice. When he wrote his will in July 1799, George Washington anticipated the heartache that would arise when he freed the enslaved people belonging to him. Many were married to people owned by the Custis estate, whom he did not have the legal power to free. For this reason, he delayed the manumission of his enslaved workers until Martha's death, hoping to lessen the blow to enslaved families whose members had intermarried. "To emancipate them during her life," he wrote, "would, tho' earnestly wished by me, be attended with such insuperable difficulties on account of their intermixture by Marriages with the dower Negroes, as to excite the most painful sensations."1

On January 1, 1801, Martha Washington chose to accelerate the emancipation provision, perhaps fearing for her safety in an environment in which the freedom of many depended upon her death. Her action freed about 120 of Mount Vernon's enslaved people, but those owned by the Custis estate (numbering more than 150) remained in bondage. When Martha died just over a year later, the remaining enslaved individuals at Mount Vernon were divided among the Custis heirs.

Kitty, an enslaved milkmaid and spinner at Mansion House Farm, was deeply affected by these transitions. Her husband, Isaac, Mount Vernon's head carpenter, was owned by George Washington and thus received his freedom in 1801. Because Kitty was a dower slave, her nine daughters and seven grandchildren all belonged to the Custis estate and remained enslaved. As a free man, Isaac may have stayed close to Mount Vernon to be near his family.

In 1802 the family was separated yet again. At Martha Washington's death, Kitty and her children were dispersed among Martha's four grandchildren: Eliza Parke Custis Law, Martha Parke Custis Peter, Nelly Parke Custis Lewis, and George Washington Parke Custis. The grandchildren likely negotiated, selecting the enslaved people they wanted while ensuring that the value of each heir's portion remained comparable. By law, these people were property to be apportioned like any other item in the estate.

The negotiations generated a document with four lists, one for each grandchild. Duplication of common names makes it difficult to assign an identity to each person, but the document nevertheless remains our best source for tracking the fate of Mount Vernon's enslaved community. The four lists give names of enslaved people next to the monetary values assigned to each individual. In most cases, young children were kept with their mothers. Older children and other family members were often split up.

Kitty's family experienced this separation on a large scale, with at least one family member likely going to each of the four Custis grandchildren. The valuations assigned to them by the list maker appear in parentheses. Kitty (£50) and her two youngest children, thirteen-year-old Barbara (£40, listed as "Barbary") and nine-year-old Levina (£5, listed as "Lavinia"), were assigned to Eliza Parke Custis Law, who lived with her husband, Thomas Law, in Washington, D.C. (the Laws would separate in 1804 and later divorce). The description "invalid" next to Levina's name likely accounts for a low monetary valuation. We do not know what injury or illness the young girl had sustained to warrant this designation.

Kitty's eldest daughters, thirty-year-old Sinah (£80) and twenty-eight-year-old Mima (£65), were likely inherited by Nelly Parke Custis Lewis, who with her husband, Lawrence Lewis, built Woodlawn plantation on land formerly part of Mount Vernon. Sinah's five-year-old daughter, Nancy (£30), accompanied her mother, while Sinah's husband, Ben-a miller-was owned by Washington and freed in 1801. Mima was joined by her three young sons, John (£35), Randolph (£20), and Isaac (£6), but not her husband, Godfrey (£100), a carter, who was assigned to Martha Parke Custis Peter's lot.

Three of Kitty and Isaac's daughters were also inherited by Martha Peter, who went on to build Tudor Place in Georgetown: twenty-four-year-old Lucy (£65) and her children Burwell (£25) and Hannah (£15); twenty-year-old Letty (£70) and her daughter Tracy (£12); and eighteen-year-old Nancy (£60).

Grace (£60), twenty-two years old, was apparently the only member of her family to be sent to the estate of George Washington Parke Custis in Arlington, Virginia. Grace's assignment also meant more distant separation from her husband, Juba, who was enslaved at Tobias Lear 's Walnut Tree Farm, just upriver from Mount Vernon.

Kitty's third daughter, Alla, does not appear on the 1802 list. In letters and weekly reports from the 1790s, Washington's overseers frequently noted that Alla was ill. She may have died in the three years between Washington's 1799 census and the 1802 division.

After 1802 Kitty and her immediate family lived in five different places, from Washington, D.C., to Virginia. All but one member-her husband, Isaac-remained enslaved. We have no records of their lives after this point. Despite Washington's desire to minimize the "painful sensations" of separating Mount Vernon's enslaved families, those like Kitty's endured them nonetheless.

Jessie MacLeodAssociate Curator

George Washington's Mount Vernon
Notes:
If not specifically cited, biographical and genealogical information about enslaved people has been drawn from Washington's 1786 and 1799 slave lists: George Washington, Diary, Feb. 18, 1786, and "Washington's Slave List," 1799, Founders Online, National Archives. [Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Digital Edition, ed. Theodore J. Crackel, Edward G. Lengel, et al. (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, Rotunda, 2008)]; the Mount Vernon slavery database, which compiles references to the estate's enslaved people; and the files of Mary V. Thompson, Mount Vernon's research historian.

1. George Washington, Last Will and Testament, July 9, 1799, Founders Online, National Archives. [Original source: The Papers of George Washington].

2. Abigail Adams referenced Martha's fear in a letter to a friend after visiting Mount Vernon: "in the state in which they [the Washington slaves] were left by the General, to be free at her death, she did not feel as tho her Life was safe in their Hands, many of whom would be told that it was [in] their interest to get rid of her-She therefore was advised to set them all free at the close of the year"; Adams to Mary Cranch, Dec. 21, 1800, quoted in Fritz Hirschfeld, George Washington and Slavery: A Documentary Portrayal (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1997), 213-14.

3. "List of the different Drafts of Negros" [ca. 1802], in scrapbook, box 34, Peter Family Archives, Washington Library.

4. See, for example, Anthony Whitting to George Washington, Jan. 15-16, 1792, Founders Online, National Archives. [Original source: The Papers of George Washington]; William Pearce to George Washington, Weekly Reports, Aug. 3, 1793 and July 11, 1795, in George Washington Papers, 1741-97, Series 4: General Correspondence, 1697-1799, Library of Congress, Washington, DC; James Anderson to George Washington, Weekly Report, Sept. 15, 1798, Morristown National Historical Park, Morristown, NJ; Mount Vernon slavery database.

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In the first years of the nineteenth century, the enslaved community of Mount Vernon was split apart not once, but twice. When he wrote his will in July 1799, George Washington anticipated the heartache that would arise when he freed the enslaved people belonging to him.

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Resource

ENCYCLOPEDIC ENTRY

Though experiences varied, women and children in colonial America had many responsibilities and activities, mostly domestic, and few rights in the general society.

Subjects

Social Studies, U.S. History

Image

Dutch Family New York 1700s

The freedoms and responsibilities afforded to white American women and children in the colonial era varied depending on their socioeconomic background. Here, a Dutch colonial family from a privileged background illustrated sitting around their tea table.

Photograph of woodcut by North Wind Picture Archives

In colonial America, the experiences of women and children varied widely, among ethnic and social groups, and from colony to colony. They had fewer rights than women and children do today, yet they had many responsibilities and activities that contributed to their families and communities.

The first European women who came to the Southern colonies were indentured servants, arriving in the Jamestown colony in the early 1600s. Though the "ideal" European family was headed by a man who presided over his family and business while his wife only worked inside the home, this model did not work well in the early Southern colonies. Merely surviving was difficult, so all hands were needed to ensure that the colony could continue. As a result, the social structure flattened a bit, with land-owning men and women doing the same work of farming and building settlements (alongside their servants and those they had enslaved, who were working on the same projects). As the Southern colonies became more established, society reverted to the European model, and white women began focusing on running the household, and managing servants and those they had enslaved. This was not true in every colony, however. The people who founded the northern colonies, like the Puritans, adhered to strict religious rules, and brought their European gender roles into the new world from the very start.

Regardless of the colony in which they lived, white women in colonial America had many responsibilities. They oversaw managing the household, including baking, sewing, educating the children, producing soap and candles, and more. In the 18th century, social classes began evolving, and a new "middling" class arose. Sometimes women in that class would help their husbands in their careers as tavern owners, tradesmen, or businessmen. However, white women still had few rights. They could not vote, and they lost all their property in marriage (though women had some property rights). Childbearing in colonial times was dangerous, and women and children often died during childbirth.

White children in colonial America also had many responsibilities. In most colonies, they were taught to read by their parents, usually so they could study the Bible (the Christian holy book). Boys learned additional skills so they could go into business, farming, or trade, while girls learned household skills which varied depending on the family's social status. For example, a girl from a higher class-a privileged socioeconomic background-would learn etiquette and manners, hosting guests, and dancing, while a girl from a lower class-a resource-poor background-would learn practical skills like soap-making. There was also time for play in middling and high-class families. Children played with board games, puzzles, and cards, and did activities like rolling hoops and playing an early version of bowling. Overall, the main goal of parents in colonial America was to prepare their children for adulthood.

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Though experiences varied, women and children in colonial America had many responsibilities and activities, mostly domestic, and few rights in the general society.

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English Colonies Key Ideas 1. The English common law practice of coverture limited the legal and economic opportunities of married women in the English colonies. 2. English colonial courts actively enforced gender roles and women's subordination. 3. The knowledge enslaved women brought to

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Gender, Race and Class in Colonial America

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Gender, Race and Class in Colonial America

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The Role of Women in the Colonies

Women played an integral role in the development of colonial America, despite having few legal rights.

Learning Objectives

Discuss the role of women in the colonies

Key Takeaways

Key Points

The experiences of women during the colonial era varied greatly from colony to colony and among different ethnic groups.

Among Puritan settlers in New England, wives almost never worked in the fields with their husbands. In German communities in Pennsylvania, however, many women worked in fields and stables.

Generally, colonial women were expected to be subservient to their fathers until they married, at which point they became subservient to their husbands.

As the values of the American Enlightenment were imported from Britain, slightly more liberal conceptions weakened the view that husbands were natural "rulers" over their wives; however, women continued to have very few rights.

The typical woman in colonial America was expected to run a household and attend to domestic duties such as spinning, sewing, preserving food, animal husbandry, cooking, cleaning, and raising children.

Martha Ballard was an American midwife and healer whose diary, in which she wrote thousands of entries over nearly three decades, has provided historians with invaluable insight into the lives of women in the colonial era.

Key Terms

husbandry: The management and care of farm animals by humans.

Puritan: A group of English Reformed Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries who sought to reform the Church of England from all Roman Catholic practices.

The Status of Women Throughout the Colonies

The experiences of women during the colonial era varied greatly from colony to colony and among different ethnic groups. In New England, for example, the Puritan settlers brought their strong religious values with them to the New World, which dictated that a woman be subordinate to her husband and dedicate herself to rearing "God-fearing" children to the best of her ability. Among Puritan settlers in New England, wives almost never worked in the fields with their husbands. In German communities in Pennsylvania, however, many women worked in fields and stables. German and Dutch immigrants granted women more control over property, which was not permitted in the local English law. Unlike English colonial wives, German and Dutch wives owned their own clothes and other items and were also given the ability to write wills disposing of the property brought into the marriage.

Often, women were taught to read so that they could learn the Bible, but few were taught to write, as it was thought there was no reason for a woman to know how to write. A colonial woman was expected to be subservient to her father until she married, at which point she became subservient to her husband. Ministers often told their congregations that women were inferior to men and more inclined to sin and err.

Much later during the colonial experience, as the values of the American Enlightenment were imported from Britain, the philosophies of such thinkers as John Locke weakened the view that husbands were natural "rulers" over their wives and replaced them with a (slightly) more liberal conception of marriage. However, women continued to have very few rights. They were not allowed to vote and lost most control of their property (if they had any to begin with) in marriage. They could not divorce, and even single women could not make contracts, sue anyone, or be sued, at least until the late 18th century.

In 1756, Lydia Chapin Taft of Uxbridge, Massachusetts, became the only colonial woman known to vote, casting a vote in the local town hall meeting in place of her deceased husband. From 1775 until 1807, the state constitution in New Jersey permitted all persons worth 50 pounds who resided in the state for one year to vote; free black people and single women therefore had the vote until 1807, but not married women, as their property ownership was invariably limited.

The Role of Housewife

The typical woman in colonial America was expected to run a household and attend to domestic duties such as spinning, sewing, preserving food, animal husbandry, cooking, cleaning, and raising children. Families tended to be large, and childbearing could be dangerous prior to advancements in medicine and health care. A responsible housewife was supposed to be resourceful with her family's budget, which led to manufactured goods being a vital contribution to the success of a household. Home manufactured goods such as dairy products and textiles were usually created by women, while the woman's husband was the owner of the goods and received whatever money they sold for.

When necessary, it was the responsibility of the colonial housewife to help her husband in agriculture or artisanal endeavors. Mothers were also responsible for the spiritual and civic well-being of their children. In the colonial era, the commonly held idea was that good housewives would raise good children who would become upstanding citizens in the community. As a wife, the woman was to be dutiful, obedient, faithful, and subservient to her husband. Legal statutes and societal norms allowed for husbands to exert power over their wives, which could result in violent circumstances. Some housewives were able to file for divorces, but these instances were not the norm.

The Diary of Martha Ballard

Martha Moore Ballard (1735-1812) was an American midwife and healer who is known for keeping a diary during the latter half of her life, with thousands of entries over nearly three decades. This diary has provided historians with invaluable insight into the lives of women in the colonial era.

From when she was 50 (1785) until her death in 1812, Martha Ballard kept a diary that recorded her work and domestic life in Hallowell on the Kennebec River, District of Maine. The log of daily events, written with a quill pen and homemade ink, records numerous babies delivered and illnesses treated as she traveled by horse or canoe around the Massachusetts frontier in what is today the state of Maine. Ballard delivered 816 babies over the years that she wrote her diary and was present at more than 1,000 births. Her diary also records her administering medicines and remedies, which she made from local plants and occasionally from ingredients bought from a local physician. Ballard was sometimes called to observe autopsies, and she also took testimonies from unwed mothers that were used in paternity suits. In addition to her medical and judicial responsibilities, Ballard frequently carried out tasks such as trading, weaving, and social visits.

The Salem Witch Trials

The Salem witch trials of 1692 were the earliest examples of mass hysteria in the country.

Learning Objectives

Evaluate what the Salem witch trials reveal about the role of religion and the role of women in the colonies

Key Takeaways

Key Points

The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts between 1692 and 1693.

The trials resulted in the executions of 20 people, 14 of them women. All but one were hanged; five others (including two infant children) died in prison.

What happened in colonial America was not unique, but rather an example of the much broader phenomenon of witch trials that occurred during the early modern period throughout England and France.

Women were more susceptible to suspicions of witchcraft because they were perceived, in Puritan society, to have weaker constitutions that were more likely to be inhabited by the Devil.

Initially, those accused of witchcraft tended to be outcasts in some way or another, but as the trials went on, even citizens in good standing were not immune from accusations.

Key Terms

Puritans: A group of English Reformed Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries who sought to reform the Church of England from all Roman Catholic practices.

due process: The requirement that the state must respect all legal rights that are owed to a person.

Introduction

The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. The trials resulted in the executions of 20 people, 14 of them women and all but one by hanging. Five others (including two infant children) died in prison.

Twelve other women had previously been executed for witchcraft in Massachusetts and Connecticut during the 17th century. The episode is one of colonial America's most notorious cases of mass hysteria. It has been used in political rhetoric and popular literature as a vivid cautionary tale about the dangers of isolationism, religious extremism, false accusations, and lapses in due process. What happened in colonial America was not unique, but rather an example of the much broader phenomenon of witch trials that occurred during the early modern period throughout England and France.

Puritan Beliefs and Witchcraft

Like many other Europeans, the Puritans of New England believed in the supernatural. Every event in the colonies appeared to be a sign of God's mercy or judgment, and it was commonly believed that witches allied themselves with the Devil to carry out evil deeds or cause deliberate harm. Events such as the sickness or death of children, the loss of cattle, and other catastrophes were often blamed on the work of witches.

Women were more susceptible to suspicions of witchcraft because they were perceived, in Puritan society, to have weaker constitutions that were more likely to be inhabited by the Devil. Women healers with knowledge of herbal remedies-things that could often deemed "pagan" by Puritans-were particularly at risk of being accused of witchcraft.

Hundreds were accused of witchcraft including townspeople whose habits or appearance bothered their neighbors or who appeared threatening for any reason. Women made up the vast majority of suspects and those who were executed. Prior to 1692, there had been rumors of witchcraft in villages neighboring Salem Village and other towns. Cotton Mather, a minister of Boston's North Church (not to be confused with the later Anglican North Church associated with Paul Revere), was a prolific publisher of pamphlets, including some that expressed his belief in witchcraft.

The Salem Trials

In Salem Village, in February 1692, Betty Parris, age 9, and her cousin Abigail Williams, age 11, began to have fits in which they screamed, threw things, uttered strange sounds, crawled under furniture, and contorted themselves into peculiar positions. A doctor could find no physical evidence of any ailment, and other young women in the village began to exhibit similar behaviors. Colonists suspected witchcraft and accusations began to spread.

The first three people accused and arrested for allegedly causing the afflictions were Sarah Good (a homeless beggar), Sarah Osborne (a woman who rarely attended church), and Tituba (an African or American Indian slave). Each of these women was a kind of outcast and exhibited many of the character traits typical of the "usual suspects" for witchcraft accusations. They were left to defend themselves.

Throughout the year, more women and some men were arrested, including citizens in good standing, and colonists began to fear that anyone could be a witch. Many of the accusers who prosecuted the suspected witches had been traumatized by the American Indian wars on the frontier and by unprecedented political and cultural changes in New England. Relying on their belief in witchcraft to help make sense of their changing world, Puritan authorities executed 20 people and caused the deaths of several others before the trials were over.

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Women played an integral role in the development of colonial America, despite having few legal rights. Discuss the role of women in the colonies Key Points The experiences of women during the colonial era varied greatly from colony to colony and among different ethnic groups.

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The women were responsible for preparing the food for their family. In colonial times this duty went far beyond shopping in a grocery store and putting a meal in the oven. In the colonies most...

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Week #1 - Lesson Plans for Early Settlements

Teacher Information

When these lessons were originally created, they could be followed day-by-day. This is no longer true. Here's why.

These lesson plans were originally written for a different set of Tennessee Standards. Some lessons are spot on with the new standards and others are not.

I have stripped the lessons plans of textbook pages numbers (since different school systems use different textbooks and the pages are different in the updated textbooks).

Broken links that originally went to information, games, and videos have been deleted.

So that my website does not repeat information, I have placed links to texts on my website for students to read. I left the bulleted points in the first few lessons.

In place of providing instructions for activities, I have also added links to locations on my website where instructions can be found. (Google doesn't like websites that repeat information.)

Due to the deletions, some lessons appear really long and others really short.

Day 1 The Lost Colony & The Jamestown Colony

Vocabulary

cash crop

colonial

Mayflower Compact

tolerance

Lecture - Reasons why English came to America (Lesson 1)

to practice religion they choose

to bring Christ to "savages"

British judges sent people who had commented crimes

business people came to buy items like furs and tobacco

farmers - chance to have own land

Lecture on Jamestown (Lesson 2)

****Stress the reasons for locating Jamestown on the James River.

First Colony in America that Survived

Virginia Company sent three ships of settlers to New World in December 1607

in Virginia named settlement Jamestown in honor of English King James

came to set up trade between New World and England

105 men and boys led by John Smith

built a fort near river that flowed in Chesapeake Bay

named river James after King James

fort was built on a swamp which contained mosquitoes carrying a deadly malaria virus

Powhatan Indians lived in that part of Virginia

14,000 Indians lived in Chesapeake Bay when English came

settlers did not build permanent houses or grow food, not good hunters

many English died from disease and starvation

1608 Smith elected president of colony's council

Smith went back to England in 1609 after being badly burnt in a gun powder explosion

suffered worst winter (fire, drought, disease, Indian attacks, and little food)

almost destroyed the colony

Pocahontas brought the settlers corn to eat

1610 Thomas De La Warr, new governor arrived with 3 ships of supplies

wanted more settlers to come

gave new settlers 50 acres of free land

Indians unhappy with this

Pocahontas captured and held in Jamestown

converted to Christianity

8 year peace came with the marriage of Pocahontas to John Rolfe, a tobacco grower in 1614

John Rolfe and Pocahontas visited London

Pocahontas died before returning to her home

Activities (Pocahontas)

Read about Pocahontas

Book - Pocahontas Princess of the River Tribes

Show 500 Nations video about Pocahontas (15 minutes)

Sequence story of Pocahontas with sentence strips (from Literature Unit Pocahontas pages 12-13)
OR
Have students retell the story using stick puppets (from Literature Unit Pocahontas pages 18-19).

Coloring picture of Pocahontas, Captain Smith, and Powhatan from Educational Coloring Book of the Colonies

Activities (Jamestown)

Day 2 The Plymouth Colony (Pilgrims) Lesson 3

Vocabulary

cash crop

colonial

Mayflower Compact

tolerance

Lecture on or read sections of the book . . . If You Sailed on the Mayflower in 1620 (Pages 10-26)

Pilgrims wanted to break away from the Church of England.

Pilgrims were jailed and fined in England for starting their own church.

Pilgrims were afraid to stay in England so went to Holland in 1608.

lived in Holland 12 years

not happy in Hollandbought ship Speedwell to go to America

ship small and old

needed second ship

so made an agreement with businessmen in England

businessmen got Pilgrims a ship Mayflower and bought food and supplies

in return Pilgrims agreed to work for the businessmen for 7 years

agreed to send furs and lumber from the New World

102 people left from England

given land in what is now New York

Speedwell became leaky and had to return to England

some passengers stayed behind in England - others crowded on Mayflower

Activities

#1 BrainPop http://www.brainpop.com/socialstudies/culture/thanksgiving/

#2 What was it like to travel on the Mayflower?

Tape off an area 8 by 8 feet on the floor.

Have eleven children stand in the space.

Discuss how crowded they feel.

Next serve a meal of beef jerky, soda crackers, cheese and water. Tell the students that the Pilgrims ate a lot of dried salted meat, hard crackers called hard tack, and cheese on the Mayflower. Discuss that preserving food was necessary and that slating and drying were the best methods available in 1620.

Continue lecture or continue reading . . . If You Sailed on the Mayflower in 1620 (Pages 27 - 30)

Show poster of the Mayflower.

Activity

Fill a one-liter plastic bottle about half full with mineral oil. Add a few drops of food coloring, and then fill the rest of the bottle with water. Add a small plastic object to represent the Mayflower.

Screw the top on tightly and tape.

Ask the students to make waves by shaking, rocking, and rolling the bottle.

Discussion

Does the plastic object ride the waves or sink?

How do you think the Pilgrims felt during the storms they had while on the Mayflower?

Continue Lecture

Pilgrims landed near Cape Cod in Massachusetts

settlement started in 1620

Have students read the mini-book The Pilgrims by Barnacle, Ship's Cat of the Mayflower.

Show the video American History for Children: Early Settlers: The Pilgrims and the Mayflower.

Lecture on the Mayflower Compact

Once the people aboard the Mayflower realized that the terms of their agreement applied to Virginia, and not to New England, where they were, the leaders wrote the Mayflower Compact. The document was signed on ship within sight of land. The compact stated

that they would remain united

make laws for the general good of the new colony

The Mayflower Compact was a form of government for the colony.Show Video American History for Children: Early Settlers: The Story of the Mayflower Compact Make Pilgrim costumes (coif for girls and hat for boys)Lecture or continue reading . . . If You Sailed on the Mayflower in 1620 (Pages 43 - 56, 72, 74-80)

on November 11, 1620 after 66 days Pilgrims came to Cape Cod

first winter struggled to build shelter

in two or three months half of the people died

half the people who survived were children

only four women lived

called new settlement Plimoth Plantation

Additional Activities

Make Pilgrim costumes (coif for girls and hat for boys).

Show one of the following videos

Plimoth Plantation (30 minutes)

Inspector Gadget's Fieldtrip Plimoth Plantation 15 minutes (excellent)

Animated Hero Classics: The Story of Thanksgiving (30 minutes)

American History for Children: Early Settlers: Squanto and the First Thanksgiving

Read play and act out play in costumes A Native American Welcome

Coloring picture of Pilgrims from Educational Coloring Book of the Colonies

Day 3 Massachusetts Bay Colony (Puritans) Lesson 4

Vocabulary

Lecture Notes

Puritans wanted to "purify" or make clean the Church of England

did not want to move away from the church (as the Pilgrims) wanted to change some of its ways

treated badly in England because of beliefs

came to Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630

Puritans wanted only one religion to be practiced in the New World

some Puritans thought their leaders were acting just as badly as the King of England

John Mason took group of people from Massachusetts Bay Colony to find more fertile farming land (too rocky in Massachusetts) and to worship freely

settled in Portsmouth and found New Hampshire Colony

Activities

Day 4 New Netherland & New France

Vocabulary

cash crop

colonial

Mayflower Compact

tolerance

Learn about the beaver. What was this animal like? Why was its fur so highly prized? What did the French make from the beavers' fur?

Map Activities

Instructional Fair, Inc. #IF8552 U. S. Map Skills pages 15-17

United States and Its Neighbors Chapter 7, Building Geography Skills page 47

Life in Colonial America "Land Claims in North America by 1670"

Bartering

Activity

Make a model of a canoe

Day 5 Review and Test

Review
Test
Go to Week #2

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When these lessons were originally created, they could be followed day-by-day. This is no longer true. Here's why. These lesson plans were originally written for a different set of Tennessee Standards. Some lessons are spot on with the new standards and others are not.

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The Influence of Women During the Revolution

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The Influence of Women During the Revolution