The Tobacco-Plantation South in the Early American Atlantic World

S. Sarson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349294121, 9780230111899
• eBook ISBN: 9781137116567
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

A look at the extensive inequality and individualism in Prince George's County, Maryland, and the wider tobacco south, this book draws on colonial historiography to take a groundbreaking approach and examines the profound impacts of the structure of the international tobacco trade on local life.

C H A P T E R 1

“THE WAY TO MAKE A HUGE FORTUNE”: THE PLANTERS

TO SERVE OR NOT TO SERVE?

As one of the grandees of Prince George’s County, Maryland, George Calvert was expected by his peers to perform public duties. He was duly offered offices, or the chance to run for them, and often more prestigious ones than most of his neighbors. He usually refused them, however. On July 16, 1805, John Read Magruder, Jr., the clerk of the county Levy Court, told a familiar enough story when he wrote that “George Calvert, who was appointed one of the Judges of the second Election District having refused to accept the appointment the Court appoint Hazel Beall in his place.”¹ In 1816, Calvert seems to have considered possible public service, but his wife, Rosalie, actively discouraged him from accepting the nomination of his Federalist Party friends for the Governorship of Maryland on the grounds that he should not be distracted from business affairs by the pursuit or attainment of public office.²

George Calvert occasionally accepted Levy Court requests to help maintain and improve Prince George’s County’s transport facilities. His record of performance, however, was mixed. On July 18, 1810, the Court “authorized” the master of Riversdale plantation and his wealthy planter friend and neighbor, Richard Tasker Lowndes, “to contract with some Person or Persons for building a Stone Arch to a Bridge on the Stage Road between Bladensburg and the City of Washington in Rock Creek Hundred in a Sum not exceeding two hundred dollars.” On the same day, the court requested Calvert and Richard Ross to arrange the “repairing a Bridge over the Paint Branch . . . in a sum not exceeding forty dollars.”³ In these instances, nothing seems to have gone wrong. Perhaps partnership with Lowndes, a county court stalwart, ensured that things got done. On July 25, 1809, however, the court asked Calvert and Thomas Bowie “to contract with some Person or Persons to repair the Bridge over the Eastern Branch at the South end of the Town of Bladensburgh” for $150 or less, and to arrange “the repairing of a Causeway and erecting two Bridges over the Eastern Branch adjoining the Town of Bladensburgh at the north end of the Town” for $100 or less. On these occasions the two men seem to have failed to do as they were asked, for the court repeated the requests on August 6, 1812. That same August day, the court also authorized Calvert and Lowndes to contract with someone to build “a bridge over the Eastern Branch at Bladensburgh near the late Mr [Benjamin] Lowndes Granary” for $150 or less.⁴ There is, however, a unique entry in the Levy Court Proceedings made one year later. The court ordered Thomas Bowie “to ascertain the dimensions of the Bridge at Bladensburg lately built by Mr. Calvert and examine the Work carefully and that he report to this Court the size of the said bridge and his Judgment as to the execution of the Work and the value thereof.”⁵ No record of any such report survives, but the court clearly suspected that something was wrong. If the job was badly done, it might or might not have been George Calvert’s fault. But the Levy Court never asked Mr. Calvert for any further favors.

George and Rosalie Calvert rarely sacrificed their personal interests for any greater public good. Like other planters, they benefitted materially from roads and bridges that eased access to the county’s warehouses and wharves, where their tobacco would be inspected and stored before being loaded and taken down the Patuxent and Potomac rivers to Chesapeake Bay and then either up to Baltimore or down to the Atlantic Ocean and then to their markets overseas. But it seems that sometimes they felt that if someone else did the work of building and maintaining those roads and bridges for them, so much the better. When they did give way to the interest of others, though, they made themselves a deal out of it. When the Baltimore-Washington Turnpike was first proposed in 1807, for example, the Calverts opposed it running through their land, rather as David Craufurd had opposed another road in 1799. “Yesterday people came by here to survey and fix the right-of-way,” as the mistress of Riversdale wrote with manifest irritation at what she apparently regarded as rank impertinence by the public authorities, “and they dared to mark it all through this property, passing very close to the stables. We will oppose this and it is only by force that they will obtain my consent. If they would make it on the other side of the Eastern Branch, it would be a great benefit for us, giving us an excellent road to Washington and Baltimore which would greatly diminish the distance.”⁶ Interestingly, while the benefits of her alternative plan would have accrued to others as well as the Calverts, Rosalie could only express them in terms of an individualistic “us,” seemingly referring only to her own family. Nor did she express any concern about the inconvenience caused by the road running through someone else’s land.

The Baltimore-Washington Turnpike eventually went through the Riversdale side of the Eastern Branch, but it clearly did so with the Calverts’ say so. George was, handily enough, elected President of the Turnpike Company on March 12, 1813, evidently willing to take on quasi-public duties in an incorporated commercial company that had the power to affect his interests and offered him opportunities to make money.⁷ George Calvert and his associates also got other friends and neighbors of theirs involved, and did so under the authority of the Prince George’s Court Levy Court. As the clerk of the court noted, on February 25, 1815, “Upon the application of the President, Managers and Company of the Washington Baltimore Turnpike Road the Court appoint[s] Richard T. Lowndes, John Chew, Sr., and William Dudley Digges Commissioners under an Act of December Session 1813 chapter 77.”⁸ Calvert probably thereby ensured he was minimally inconvenienced by the road, but maximally enriched by it. Toll charges were 6¼ cents per 10 miles for a single horse and rider, 12½ cents for a one-horse chaise with two wheels, 25 cents for a two-horse coach with four wheels, and 37½ cents for a four-horse coach with four wheels. The Calverts and Rosalie’s father, Henri Joseph Stier, owned a 15 percent share of the road. Rosalie Calvert expected eventually to make 10½ percent annual profits from the $10,000 she and her husband invested in it, and for the $5,000 she invested in it for her father, a tidy sum when loans and bank investments usually yielded 5 or 6 percent.⁹ So, the price of the Calverts’ acceptance of the road running through their land was a bit over $1,000 per year for her own family and another annual $750 for her father.

PLANTERS’ WEALTH

The Calverts were members of a small elite of large planters whose landholdings were at least 2,000 acres in size, and thus large enough to support the labor of 50 slaves or more. Out of 1,712 free heads of household in Prince George’s County in 1800, only 15 owned this much land. In 1810, 17 out of 1,620 heads of heads of household did so, and in 1820 the number was 12 out of 1,795. Large planters like George Calvert therefore represented just about 1 percent of all free household heads. Yet, as small as they were in number and as a proportion of the population, large planters owned almost 15 percent of taxable wealth held by resident household heads in 1800, nearly 20 percent in 1810, and just over 18 percent of it in 1820. They also owned just over a quarter of the land owned by resident householders in 1800 and 1810, and just under a quarter of it in 1820. Large planters collectively owned almost 55,000 acres of land in 1800, over 53,000 acres in 1810, and 45,000 acres in 1820, in line with their diminished numbers in the latter year.¹⁰

Even within the elite of large planters, there was a wide range in size of landholdings. Thomas Snowden was the county’s largest landowner in 1800, with 9,568¼ acres, and next was Edward Henry Calvert, brother of George, with 8,591½ acres. Both owned considerably more than Samuel Snowden, who, with 5,703½ acres, was the third largest landowner. All others in the class of large planters owned less than 4,000 acres, including George Calvert, although, as we shall soon see, he went on by 1820 to become Prince George’s largest landowner and richest man by far. I have not differentiated Edward Calvert or the Snowdens from other large planters, however, because the value of their landholdings was not much greater, if at all, than that of others with 2,000-plus acres. The taxable values of the land, including improvements, held by Thomas Snowden, Edward Henry Calvert, and Samuel Snowden amounted, respectively, to $10,218.97, $10,296.08, and $4,595.63.¹¹ The mean value of landholdings in the whole large planter class was $6,337.49. It seems, then, that larger proportions of the largest holdings lay in food crops, fallow, or forest, or were otherwise not exploited to the max. As we shall see in chapter 3, many large planters held land in reserve for one reason or another.

Smaller and middling planters, those with landholdings of at least 800 acres but under 2,000 acres and thus capable of employing 20–49 slaves as agricultural laborers, were also wealthy and shared the economic imperatives and behaviors of large planters. Indeed, if we look at their numbers and property holdings and then add the figures together for all planters large and small, we can see just how highly concentrated property ownership was in this older, long-settled corner of the tobacco-plantation south. Smaller and middling planters formed only another small minority of Prince Georgian free people. Numbering 54 in 1800, 43 in 1810, and 48 in 1820, they constituted 3.2 percent of free county householders in 1800 and 2.7 percent in both 1810 and 1820. Yet they owned 28.2 percent of taxable wealth in 1800, 24.1 percent in 1810, and 26.3 percent in 1820. They also altogether held nearly 63,000 acres of land in 1800, over 52,000 in 1810, and close to 57,000 in 1820. That is they held nearly 29 percent of county land in 1800 and 1820, and almost a quarter of it 1810. These figures mean that all planters, large, middling, and small, numbered 69 in 1800 and 60 in both 1810 and 1820, forming just about 4 percent of all free householders in 1800 and 1810, and 3.4 percent in 1820. Yet they held 43.1 percent of taxable wealth in 1800, 43.6 percent in 1810, and 44.5 percent in 1820. And in those years they collectively owned over 100,000 acres of land, or respectively 53.8 percent, 49.3 percent, and 50.7 percent of Prince Georgian land owned by resident household heads.

Not surprisingly, almost all planters were slaveholders. Of the 15 large planters of 1800, 14 held slaves. In 1810 and 1820 respectively, all 17 and all 12 large planters were slaveholders. The exception in 1800 was Samuel Snowden, a planter whose ideas about slavery were evidently affected by enlightened times. On February 4, 1780, Snowden set 35 of his slaves “Absolutely free from the date hereof” and another 36 younger ones “free that is the males when they arrive to the age of twenty one years old and the Females when they Arive to the age of Eighteen.” There was apparently some ambiguity or legal doubt over this manumission, which Snowden took the trouble to sort out. On August 3, 1785, he recorded the manumission of the 26 younger slaves for a second time “for the more affectually securing unto the said Negroes their freedom.”¹² However, although quite a few Chesapeake planters manumitted their slaves, not least George Washington of course, the large majority did not.

Prince Georgian large planters held an average of 59 slaves each in 1800 (or 63, discounting Samuel Snowden), 48 in 1810, and 76 in 1820, the fluctuations suggesting they rented and bought and sold enslaved people on a regular basis as part of economic management strategies. Most smaller and middling planters held slaves too: 52 of 54 in 1800; 38 of 43 in 1810; and 44 of 48 in 1820. They held an average of 38 slaves each in 1800 (39 counting only the owners), 33 in 1810 (37 counting owners only), and 31 in 1820 (or 34 among owners only). More significantly, planters held lower proportions of the county’s enslaved people than they did other forms of property. In 1800, 1810, and 1820 respectively, they held 37.9 percent, 32.7 percent, and 36.6 percent of slaves, or around and just over a third of slaves compared to around or over half the land. This phenomenon reflects the fact that, contrary to Jeffersonian notions of the social-economic nature of the early national Upper South, ownership of slaves was more widespread and more equitable than ownership of land. As will be detailed in subsequent chapters, large majorities of yeomen farmers, small majorities of smallholders, and large minorities of nonlandowners were slaveholders.

Upward mobility into these groups seems usually to have been a result of inheritance rather than a function of an open economic system, as Allan Kulikoff found was the case in the eighteenth century. Downward mobility was infrequent, and when it did happen it seems usually to have been part of the process of perpetuating family fortunes. Among the seven large planters who survived to 1810, six remained large planters and one became a more modest planter. John Waring, the only downwardly mobile large planter, held 2,146 acres of land in 1800, plus 88 slaves and a total taxable wealth of $12,254.74. Even in 1810, he still held an impressive 1,681¾ acres, 57 slaves, and total wealth of $14,373.01 (local tax assessors increased the taxable value of real property significantly in 1801, thus inflating the overall taxable wealth of landowners—see the Appendix for further details).¹³ What is most likely in this instance is that John Waring was passing on property to his children as they got married and struck out on t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction The “chosen people”: Agrarian Myths and Messier Realities
• Prologue “The interest of the county”: Prince George’s County Levy Court and Local Politics, Economy, and Society
• 1   “The way to make a huge fortune”: The Planters
• 2   “One must differentiate oneself a little”: Planter Gentility, Economy, Dynasty, and Politics
• 3   “I don’t stand to the will”: Yeomen Farmers and Smallholders
• 4   “Being allowed the liberty”: Tenant Farmers and Artisans
• 5   “The Torment with the Servants”: Wage Workers, Servants, and Slaves
• Epilogue “Objects of distress”: The Poor and the Destitute
• Appendix A Statistical Analysis of Wealth Distribution and Mobility
• Statistical Tables
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index