New Men

Manliness in Early America

Thomas A. Foster

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780814728222
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia americana temprana

In 1782, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur wrote, “What then, is the American, this new man? He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced.” In casting aside their European mores, these pioneers, de Crèvecoeur implied, were the very embodiment of a new culture, society, economy, and political system. But to what extent did manliness shape early America's character and institutions? And what roles did race, ethnicity, and class play in forming masculinity?

Thomas A. Foster and his contributors grapple with these questions in New Men, showcasing how colonial and Revolutionary conditions gave rise to new standards of British American manliness. Focusing on Indian, African, and European masculinities in British America from earliest Jamestown through the Revolutionary era, and addressing such topics that range from slavery to philanthropy, and from satire to warfare, the essays in this anthology collectively demonstrate how the economic, political, social, cultural, and religious conditions of early America shaped and were shaped by ideals of masculinity.

Contributors: Susan Abram, Tyler Boulware, Kathleen Brown, Trevor Burnard, Toby L. Ditz, Carolyn Eastman, Benjamin Irvin, Janet Moore Lindman, John Gilbert McCurdy, Mary Beth Norton, Ann Marie Plane, Jessica Choppin Roney, and Natalie A. Zacek.

I
Settlement

1
Gentlemen and Soldiers

Competing Visions of Manhood in Early Jamestown

JOHN GILBERT MCCURDY

On May 14, 1607, 104 men and boys landed on a small peninsula in the Chesapeake and established Jamestown. The colonists sailed not for themselves but for the Virginia Company, whose shareholders were financing this foray into the New World. Consistent with the company’s instructions, the colonists organized a government, built a settlement, and made contact with the indigenous people. Almost immediately, however, Jamestown was on the brink of collapse. Starvation and disease struck first, followed by internal dissention and war with the Powhatan Indians. In the decade that followed, the Virginia Company continued to resupply Jamestown and send hundreds of new colonists, but large numbers continued to die and no one could find gold or any other resource that might profit the investors. Hoping to salvage the colony as well as his own investment, Sir Edwin Sandys took control of the Virginia Company in 1619 and implemented a series of changes. For Sandys, the colony’s problem was that it contained too many men. Too many men led to too much fighting and ultimately diverted the colonists from their original mission of enriching the Virginia Company. “For the remedying of that mischiefe,” Sandys demanded that the company send young women for the men to marry, as “wifes, children and familie might make them lesse moueable and settle them.”¹

Four centuries have passed since the settlement of Jamestown. While Sir Edwin was ultimately unsuccessful at rescuing the company’s fortunes, the colony survived to become the first permanent English settlement in the New World. The recent quadricentennial celebrations of Jamestown’s founding testify to the continued relevance of the settlement and its place at the beginning of American history. Nor is Jamestown just a fixation of the popular imagination. In recent years, professional historians have continued to unearth—literally and figuratively—new meaning from the Virginia colony, such as the origins of American racism and the creation of an Atlantic world.² Studies of Jamestown have also proved instrumental to understanding gender at the beginning of American history. As historians like Mary Beth Norton and Kathleen Brown have demonstrated, gender was critical to the conquest and subjugation of the native Virginians. It also informed concepts of power, dividing the English settlers along the lines of social rank, and was even used in the justification of African American slavery. As these historians have been careful to note, divisions of gender did not only separate men from women; they were also used by men to suppress other men and to deny them power in the early Chesapeake.³

It is possible to build on this work to gain a better understanding of the struggles that beset early Jamestown. Although historians have sought to understand the experience of the first female colonists, we actually learn much more from a gendered analysis of the colony’s male population.⁴ After all, early Jamestown was decidedly a man’s world. The first English women did not arrive until September 1608—more than sixteen months after settle-ment—and they remained a distinct minority for the next decade, totaling only three percent of the population in 1613.⁵ Yet the problem may not have been as simple as too many men. While Sir Edwin Sandys treated all male colonists the same, it is now widely accepted that manhood is anything but monolithic. Instead, distinct variations exist, sometimes peacefully coexisting and other times leading to conflict. Nor is manhood static. It has changed markedly over time, shifting in response to political and economic trends.⁶ In early Jamestown, the varieties of manhood were particularly contentious because the very concept of manhood was undergoing significant revision and change.

The key to understanding manhood in early Jamestown is to recognize first that the colony was established as a military outpost. Concerned with the extraction of resources and fearful of a hostile native population, the Virginia Company purposely outfitted the early colony like an army unit. It organized the colonists as soldiers, settling them in a fort and denying them the comforts of civilian life such as private property and political rights. Individual interests were subordinated to the mission of the company. Nine of the eleven men who led the colony between 1607 and 1619 had considerable experience leading troops into battle.⁷ Indeed, the military mission partly explains the limited number of women in the early colony.⁸

Studies of gender in the contemporary military have concluded that part of the process of making one a soldier is to inculcate him with the values of hegemonic masculinity. New recruits are taught that they must be strong, aggressive, unemotional, and refuse to complain. Any sign of weakness is dismissed as effeminate or homosexual.⁹ Building on these observations, Marcia Kovitz has suggested that notions of military masculinity have not always been constant, but rather they changed dramatically with the rise of the state and the centralization of authority.¹⁰ At the moment when Jamestown was settled, the English military was undergoing a profound transition. Labeled the “military revolution” by scholars, the change reordered the weapons, organization, and ideas of war.¹¹ The constructions of manhood in early Jamestown reflected these changing ideas. The earliest settlers brought with them medieval notions of military masculinity that stressed the importance of social status to military rank and preserved the right of men to resist their mistreatment, while later leaders rejected these ideas and attempted to enshrine a modern military masculinity that prized obedience and promotion through the ranks. These contrasting interpretations led to conflict, thus destabilizing the colony.

This chapter explores gender in early Jamestown; specifically, how conflicting ideas of manhood arising from changes in the military led to conflict among the settlers. Although race often affected gender in the early Chesapeake, here only English manhood is considered, partly for brevity and partly because the colonists insisted that men of color were not really men. In sum, understanding the different interpretations of manhood at the beginning of American history helps us to understand the struggles of the first English colonists and to appreciate the ways in which different interpretations of manhood can divide society.

Social Rank and Military Manhood

For much of medieval English history, manhood was tied to mastery. A man was defined by economic independence as well as his ability to assert control over dependents. In the typical life course, a boy left home in his early teens to begin an apprenticeship or work as a servant in husbandry, and thus became a dependent of a master who housed, fed, and disciplined him. It was only when he completed his apprenticeship, received his inheritance, or saved up enough money to purchase land that a boy became a man. Only then could he begin the process of taking on dependents of his own: a wife, children, servants, and apprentices. Notions of domestic mastery also permeated the society as a whole. Kari Boyd McBride has written that the late medieval country estate remained the symbol of English society writ large, with its “static, hierarchical, socioeconomic structure.”¹² Authority flowed from the monarch to the aristocracy and from the aristocracy to the people. A small landholder was expected to defer to his social betters and recognize that his manhood was naturally inferior to that of an aristocrat.

Two early Jamestown leaders exemplified this medieval notion of manhood based on rank and title: Edward Maria Wingfield and George Percy. The eldest son of a distinguished family, Wingfield had a position in society secured by birth. His father was a member of Parliament, although his early death meant that Wingfield was largely raised by his Uncle Jacques. Jacques Wingfield held several high positions in Ireland, including membership in the Irish Privy Council, and he no doubt helped secure young Wingfield’s entrance into law school at Lincoln’s Inn. While still a young man, Wingfield briefly held a seat in Parliament and governed the Kimbolton School. George Percy also hailed from a distinguished background. The son of the Earl of Northumberland, Percy attended Oxford before completing a degree in law at the Middle Temple. To be sure, neither Wingfield nor Percy inherited great riches, but their social position was sufficient to allow them to obtain officers’ commissions in the English army.¹³

The military long had been a noble profession for the well-born of English society. Under feudalism, the aristocracy was required to assemble troops from among the people and lead them into battle when the kingdom was threatened. In the High Middle Ages, the image of the knight atop a horse was the very embodiment of masculinity.¹⁴ Leadership positions in the military remained the exclusive preserve of the nobility and an expression of manhood well into the sixteenth century, although by the time Wingfield and Percy entered the army, the officers’ corps was increasingly populated by sons of the gentry or younger sons of the nobility whose families purchased them an officers’ commissions in place of a landed estate.¹⁵ The fact that Wingfield’s father was dead and Percy was not an eldest son probably influenced their decision to join the military. Once in the army, mastery— and thus manhood—was secure. Entering the service as captains, both men immediately acquired a company of infantry to command. They expected the same respect from these men that a lord received from his villeins.

Moreover, Wingfield and Percy entered the army at a moment of great opportunity. Beginning in the reign of Henry VIII, England entered a series of wars in Europe and Ireland that increased in intensity over the course of the sixteenth century. By the 1590s, Queen Elizabeth had committed tens of thousands of troops to fighting two large-scale conflicts: the Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604) in the Low Countries and the Nine Years’ War (1594–1603) in Ireland. These conflicts provided ample opportunities for young captains to make a name for themselves.¹⁶ Wingfield and Percy held leadership positions in both Ireland and the Netherlands in the decades before they ventured to America. Henry J. Webb has observed that captains in the Elizabethan army, “often having no knowledge of military discipline, conducted their army affairs as they might have conducted their civilian lives.” Lacking any professional training for the military, many captains went to war to line their pockets, and often abandoned their companies so that they could spend more time “in great towns feasting, banqueting, and carousing with their dames.”¹⁷ While it is unclear whether Wingfield or Percy engaged in such shenanigans, both men did use military service as a means to an end. In Ireland and the Low Countries, they ingratiated themselves with men like Sir Fernando Gorges and Ralph Lane who promoted English colonization, and began scheming for ways to parlay their military experience into colonial profit.

While the well-born saw the military as a vehicle for maintaining their social position, and along with it their manhood, the lesser-born viewed the army as an opportunity for adventure and a vehicle to demonstrate their manhood. Over the course of the sixteenth century, manhood in England was in the midst of a prolonged and profound crisis. The cause of the troubles was an economic transformation by which manorialism was slowly replaced by agrarian capitalism. The accompanying enclosure of open fields and engrossing of farms forced tens of thousands of people off their lands. A simultaneous population explosion drove wages down and food prices up, leading to mass unemployment and dislocation. By 1600, some thirty percent of England was destitute. Although this prolonged financial calamity affected all segments of the population, young men took the brunt of it. They were forced to seek work far from the towns of their birth, effectively ending the feudal loyalties that underscored much of medieval domestic arrangements. Instead of being dutiful tillers of the soil, they became “masterless men” who roamed the countryside seeking work or charity. In short, the medieval feudal order that guaranteed Wingfield and Percy a place atop the society was verging on collapse just as they came of age.¹⁸

The economic crisis inhibited the path to manhood for many young Britons. Bereft of steady income or property, more and more young men were unable to establish independent households and thus delayed marriage and family formation. Age at first marriage crept steadily upward as the hard times continued, topping twenty-nine for men in the second half of the sixteenth century, with one in five having not married by the age of forty.¹⁹ As men remained single longer, they found themselves increasingly exploited by a government that mandated they obtain yearlong labor contracts. A generation of men in their late twenties and early thirties thus found themselves in a demeaning and subordinate position at the age at which they expected to attain mastery. Accordingly, men at the middle and bottom of English society were increasingly desperate for a new means to demonstrate manhood.

Many of these men looked to the military. In cultures the world over and dating back millennia, warfare has been an effective path to manhood. More than any other activity, combat effectively separates the men from the boys as well as the men from the women. A ritualized cycle of leaving home, t...