The Virginia of George Washington's boyhood

The Virginia of George Washington’s boyhood was a place without cities or towns, a vast area with no means of communication except what came down the forest paths or up the rivers. There were no trades, no industries, no occupations other than that which was needed for planting and serving the plantations. It was a quiet life, but a hard and monotonous one, and one which is difficult for us to imagine.

The population of Virginia was not yet half a million. Almost half of that population was black slaves, and half of the whites had come to the colony as indentured servants or after having been sold to the planters as convict laborers.

Most of Virginia’s population gathered near water, close to the bays and rivers where it was possible for a ship from England to dock directly at a plantation to take on hogsheads of tobacco and off-load the luxury goods and staples available nowhere in the colonies. As the land stretched to the Blue Ridge and beyond, the ties of society stretched thinner and thinner until it disappeared into the lands of the Indians, the roadless forest, and the unknown.

The most densely populated area in Virginia was the seaport of Norfolk, which had only 6,000 people.

The village of Williamsburg was the capital, containing the public buildings and the College of William and Mary but not much else. Other than these two towns, the few other places marked on a map as a town were usually nothing more than a few traders’ shops and houses clustered next to a courthouse or church.

The mail came down from the North every other week and left once a month from Virginia to go further south. No newspaper existed in the colony until George Washington was four years old.

Essentially the only contact and commerce available came with the English tobacco ships, tacking their way up and down the rivers, dropping off news and manufactured goods and picking up gossip and raw materials. Travelers among the colonies were rare for the good reason that all travel involved difficult trips by boat, foot or horseback. No roads yet existed that were suitable for stagecoach or wagon travel.

There was also little possibility for movement between the classes of people in Virginia. As mentioned, half of the people were slaves and although their treatment was better at this time than probably at any other until after the War Between the States, they were still a commodity to be imprisoned by their color and never to be entitled to freedom or accorded respect as a peer of any non-slave.

During Washington’s childhood, white indentured servants and convict laborers were subject to essentially the same living conditions and laws as the slaves, regardless of whether they were convicts or redemptioners, but there the similarity between white and black labor ceased. The white laborers knew that someday they and their children would be out from under their bonds.

Most of the free white population were the working people who were the scrub farmers, the hunters, the pioneers, the traders and merchants who worked as free men with their own hands on land owned or claimed by them. They lived in homes built with their own hands, or perhaps with the help of the one or two servants they might own or have indentured.

The clergy were pretty much alone in the professional class as there was little need for lawyers until the Revolution, and doctors were practically non-existent in Colonial Virginia.

These were the working people of the Virginia colony during George Washington’s boyhood.

Sharman’s column runs every Tuesday. He lives in Madison.