A Place in Time: Middlesex County, Virginia, 1650-1750

by Darrett B. Rutman, Anita H. Rutman

Describes the social and economic conditions in Virginia during the hundred years prior to the Revolution, and examines how the county developed

Genres: History

292 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Darrett Bruce Rutman was a historian of early America.

Reviews

[David Nichols · Rating 4 out of 5]

After decades of research on Middlesex County, Virginia, and careful analysis of data on over 12,000 people who lived there between the 1660s and the 1740s, Darrett and Anita Rutman published this provocative study, which challenged conventional scholarly wisdom about colonial Virginia. Historians like Edmund Morgan and T.H. Breen had characterized early Virginia as a privatized, de-institutionalized society dominated by independent plantations. The Rutmans demonstrated that in one significant part, at least, seventeenth century Virginia was a collection of neighborhoods and communities resembling contemporary New England. Middlesex County was initially settled by whites who probably knew one another, and its growing white population subsequently developed a web of “face-to-face relationships” that bound them into a county-wide community. Neighbors often had blood or marital ties to one another (one woman the Rutmans studied, Elizabeth Minor, was thus related to three-fourths of the people in her neighborhood), or partnered with one another in business, and men from across the county interacted with one another in church, during militia musters and at court days. Social differences certainly existed, with some whites becoming mired in poverty while wealthy, well-educated elite families dominated the county. However, material differences between classes, particularly in dress and housing, remained relatively small in the seventeenth century. Public office-holding provided the colonists with their most important ranking system, one in which even middling Virginians could rise to prominence if they were sufficiently prudent and “solvent” (152).

Like the New England town studies of the early 1970s, A PLACE IN TIME ultimately becomes a declension narrative. Once wealthier Middlesex residents began introducing large numbers of slaves into the county in the 1680s and '90s, the gap between rich and poor whites became a gulf. The latter could not afford to make the long-term investment in slave labor, nor afford to buy land whose price slave-owners were bidding up. By the early 1700s the richest families in the county had ninety times as much wealth as the poorest, and by the 1720s those poorer white familes were moving out. Meanwhile, the establishment of the market town of Urbanna led to the creation of a small local merchant class, whose full-time devotion to tobacco marketing freed the planter class to devote themselves to tobacco cultivation, managing (i.e., exploiting) their slave workforce, and conspicuous consumption.

This was an oft-repeated story in colonial and early national America: the rough equality of a new frontier society collapsing as the rich got richer and opportunities for the poor and middling sorts declined. The new twist that the Rutmans impart to this story relates to the relationship between slavery and social stability: Edmund Morgan argued (in AMERICAN SLAVERY, AMERICAN FREEDOM) that the shift to slavery actually brought greater stability and solidarity to Virginia's white population, while the Rutmans suggest that it led to greater social differentiation, displacement of the poor, and (most likely) to growing resentment against the rich. Small wonder that when Morgan presented some of his research findings at a professional conference in the early '70s, Darrett Rutman rose to protest that “These are not my Virginians!” True enough.

**

Postscript: An interesting sidenote: the Rutman's findings in this book largely confirm Thomas Wertenbacher and Thad Tate’s argument that Virginia was “essentially a yeoman democracy...undermined by an increase in slave labor." Wertenbacher made this argument in a three volume history of 17th-century Virginia published between 1910 and 1922.

[Dan Gorman · Rating 3 out of 5]

White settlers in seventeenth-century Virginia created proto-neighborhoods, coming together for economic and political activity when they attended church or visited a town’s retail center. Authors Darrett and Anita Rutman have shown that, from a twentieth-century social scientist’s perspective, a community did exist in Middlesex County, contrary to colonial writers, referenced in the book’s introduction, who fretted about a lack of community. The creation of a slaveholding planter elite ruptured the communal structure, so that the wealthy whites were isolated from and scornful of poor-to-middling whites. The slave economy’s upending of the initial settler form of community is interesting, but the fact that Virginia’s geography shaped the organization of neighborhoods doesn’t strike me as the most remarkable historic discovery. Students will appreciate the granular details of rural colonial life, while historians will get a kick out of the statistics content, done with 1970s–80s computers. Kathleen Brown's "Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, & Anxious Patriarchs" makes many of the same points, sans the quantitative material, but with a more comprehensive treatment of Virginian history. The Rutmans' biggest omission is their choice to totally exclude questions of culture and values; they focus only on social practices. Brown's book conveys how much the Rutmans missed with their dogged social history approach.

[Cordellya Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book explains how and why the transition from indentured labor to mass slavery occurred on the tobacco plantations of Virginia. If you love American History, this is a great read.