Life for all but the most affluent planters was by modern standards uncomfortable. Houses were mostly one - and two-room affairs that were small, dark, and crowded. Furniture and utensils were sparse and crudely made. Chairs were rare; if a family possessed one it was reserved for the head of the house. People sat, slept, and ate on benches and planks. The typical dining table (the term itself was not in use) was made of two boards covered, if by anything, with a “board cloth.” Toilets and plumbing of any kind were unknown; even chamber pots, which eliminated the nighttime trek to the outhouse, were beyond the reach of poorer families.
Clothes were equally crude and, since soap was expensive, rarely washed and therefore foul-smelling and often infested with vermin. Food was plentiful.
A painting by Sidney King of a home in Jamestown around 1650.
Corn, served as bread, hominy, pancakes, and in various other forms, was the chief staple. Beef, pork, and game, usually boiled with various vegetables over an open fire, were also staples.
White women (even indentured ones) rarely worked in the fields. Their responsibilities included tending to farm animals, making butter and cheese, pickling and preserving, spinning and sewing, and, of course, caring for children, which often involved orphans and stepchildren because of the fragility of life in the region. For exceptional women, the labor shortage created opportunities. Some managed large plantations; Eliza Lucas ran three in South Carolina for her absent father while still in her teens, and after the death of her husband, Charles Pinckney, she managed his extensive property holdings.
Southern children were not usually subjected to as strict discipline as were children in New England, but the difference was relative. Formal schooling for all but the rich was nonexistent; the rural character of society made the maintenance of schools prohibitively expensive. Whatever most children learned, they got from their parents or other relatives. A large percentage of Southerners were illiterate. As in other regions, children were put to some kind of useful work at an early age.
More well-to-do, “middling” planters had more comfortable lifestyles, but they still lived in relatively crowded quarters, having perhaps three rooms to house a family of four or five and a couple of servants. To sleep between sheets in a soft bed under blankets and quilts was a luxury. Food in greater variety and abundance was another indication of a higher standard of living.
Until the early eighteenth century only a handful achieved real affluence. (The richest by far was Robert “King” Carter of Lancaster County, Virginia, who at the time of his death in 1732 owned
1,000 slaves and 300,000 acres.) Those fortunate few (masters of several plantations and many slaves) lived in solid, two-story houses of six or more rooms, furnished with English and other imported carpets, chairs, tables, wardrobes, chests, china, and silver. When the occasion warranted, the men wore fine broadcloth, the women the latest (or more likely the next-to-latest) fashions. Some even sent their children abroad for schooling. The founding of the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1693 was an effort to provide the region with its own institution of higher learning, mainly in order to train clergymen. For decades, however, the College of William and Mary was not much more than a grammar school. Lawyers were relatively numerous, though rarely learned in the law. Doctors were so scarce that one sick planter wrote a letter to his brother in England describing his symptoms and asking him to consult a physician and let him know the diagnosis.
No matter what their station, southern families led relatively isolated lives. Churches, which might be expected to serve as centers of community life, were few and far between. By the middle of the eighteenth century the Anglican Church was the “established” religion, its ministers supported by public funds. The Virginia assembly had made attendance at Anglican services compulsory in 1619. In Maryland, Lord Baltimore’s Toleration Act did not survive the settlement in the colony of large numbers of militant puritans. It was repealed in 1654, reenacted in 1657, then repealed again in 1692 when the Anglican Church was established.
Social events of any kind were great occasions. Births, marriages, and especially funerals called for much feasting; if there were neither heirs nor debts to satisfy, it was possible to “consume” the entire contents of a modest estate in celebrating the deceased’s passing. (At one Maryland funeral the guests were provided with fifty-five gallons of an alcoholic concoction composed of brandy, cider, and sugar.)
Even the most successful planters were conserving types, not idle grandees chiefly concerned with conspicuous display. The vast, undeveloped country encouraged them to produce and then invest their savings in more production. William Byrd II (1674-1744), one of the richest men in Virginia, habitually rose before dawn. Besides his tobacco fields, he operated a sawmill and a grist mill, prospected for iron and coal, and engaged in the Indian trade.
World History
