We discussed the changing nature of frontiers this week by visiting the Frontier Culture Museum of Staunton, Virginia. The idea of the wild frontier backcountry is a strong one in American history. Many well-known historical characters, like Daniel Boone and Davy Crocket, are known as rough and tumble frontiersmen. A certain mythology exists around these characters and others, like Thomas Jefferson's father, Peter Jefferson. In our exploration of the Frontier Culture Museum, we also studied how German, Scotch Irish, and English settlers came to America. They brought their own material culture and unique style to the frontier, which was then the valley of Virginia. The frontier changed as population shifted, and we learned about this shift of people and slaves to the Southern interior states. Susan Kern's "The Material World of the Jeffersons at Shadwell," Elliot Gorn's " "Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch": The Social Significance of Fighting in the Southern Backcountry," and Gail Terry's "Sustaining the Bonds of Kinship in a Trans-Appalachian Migration, 1790-1811: The Cabell-Breckinridge Slaves Move West," provided background for our discussions this week.
Starting in the 1720s, European settlers (from England, northern Ireland, and Germany) began to arrive in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. With promises from William Penn, German settlers left there home for religious and economic reasons. Scots living in northern Ireland came to America because of trade restrictions and religious reasons. Additionally, the second sons and servants of wealthy Englishmen came to America for the hope of a better economic future. After settling western Pennsylvania, these settlers trickled down the Shenandoah Valley to western North Carolina, populating the valley along the way. At the Frontier Culture Museum, we saw old world homes (a 1710 house from Hordt, Germany, a 1730 house from Ulster, Ireland, and a 1692 hall and parlor plan house from Worchester, England) and a new world home from Rockingham County, Virginia.
On the frontier, however, not everything was idyllic as presented in the museum's introductory film. The backcountry, which changed over time as population shifted further west, was a rough area. Rough and tumble fighting, with eyes, noses, and ears as trophies, was the honor system of the backcountry. Elliot Gorn discusses this in "Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch": The Social Significance of Fighting in the Southern Backcountry." It's not that the backcountry was uncivilized and uncouth; dangerous fighting was the way that lower class members of society proved themselves. As gambling and horseracing was prominent in the Tidewater, gouging was prominent on the frontier. Though understanding gouging is important to understand the backcountry's culture, it is also important to remember that not everyone fought. Certain individuals achieved great reputations, but a small number of people actually participated in it. There were more spectators than participants.
Although he was born in the backcountry (Chesterfield County, west of Richmond, Virginia) and settled the western frontier (Albemarle County, Virginia), Peter Jefferson certainly never gouged or pulled a man's hair out. A certain mythology, however, does exist around him. Past historians have seen him as a backwoodsman and an uneducated man of the frontier. It was even said that Peter Jefferson could lift two hogsheads (one in either arm). He was thought to have great physical strength and stature. We read Susan Kern's "The Material World of the Jeffersons at Shadwell" to learn more about Peter. He had many roles in colonial society: farmer, landowner, surveyor, public office holder, and frontier settler. He was also a member of the Virginian gentry. His acquaintances wrote "Gentlemen" after his name, and he knew many powerful men intimately, like William Randolph, William Mayo, Joshua Fry, Robert Rose, Robert Brooke, and John Harvie. Marrying Isham Randolph's London born daughter Jane in 1739, he lived at Fine Creek and moved to Shadwell, along the Rivanna River as early as 1736. Although he was the father of ten children, he was constantly on the move, performing survey work across Virginia. In 1737, for example, he made a map of the Rappahannock River with Robert Brooke, helped to draw the Fairfax Line in 1746, and even made a map of the Northern Neck with Robert Brooke Jr.
Peter's plantation Shadwell was "a story and a half in height [with] four spacious ground [floor] rooms and a hall[way], with garret chambers above." The house, as well as an outside kitchen, was separated from the rest of the complex by a fence. Peter's family possessed fine furniture, including an expensive closestool, wore fancy clothes, and had a great deal of fine china and dishes. On the ten-acre area around the house, there were outbuildings, slave quarters, shops, barns, stables, and formal flower and vegetable gardens. Peter Jefferson owned about sixty slaves; his slaves were both agricultural laborers and specialized craftsmen. Although the house itself was not the five-part Palladian plan that Fiske Kimball hoped to find in 1943, Susan Kern's archeological excavations have proven that it was a home fit for gentry. The function of rooms and the division of space was important at Shadwell. "In the mid-eighteenth century, many very prosperous people lived in relatively small houses made of wood with wooden chimneys," writes Susan Kern, "even as they added specialized spaces and new furnishing for entertaining and created private rooms for family in their homes." When Peter died in 1757 at the age of fifty, he owned more than seventy-two hundred acres; his wealth was certainly in the land that he owned and passed on to his children.
The last article that we read was Gail Terry's "Sustaining the Bonds of Kinship in a Trans-Appalachian Migration, 1790-1811: The Cabell-Breckinridge Slaves Move West." The western movement of the Cabell-Breckinridge slaves, along with their masters, is an extraordinary example of how slaves can remain connected to their eastern family members. Bonds of kinships were sustained by frequent correspondence among the families of their masters. "Tell all your poor negrows fare well from me, all those [here] sends there love to yours, they are well," writes Mary Cabell in Virginia in greeting to her family and their slaves in Kentucky in 1800. The far distance between Virginia and Kentucky was thus not as far because of correspondence.
At the death of Peter Jefferson's eldest son Thomas in 1826, his slaves were auctioned to the highest bidders on the Monticello mountaintop. Many of Jefferson's slaves were transported to the South and West by their new owners. Although this movement happened later than the Cabell-Breckinridge slaves, it is an example of how slave families are torn apart, and not connected by correspondence, when they move west.
