Page 65 - Maryland Historical Trust - Archaeology Colonial MD

CHAPTER TWO
A Character of The Province of Maryland: The Plantations
By Julia A. King
In 1681, Eleanor Butler, an Irish servant, married Charles, a “saltwater” Af- rican1, in a wooden chapel on the Charles County, Maryland plantation of William Boarman. Legal historians recall the mar-
riage because of the dire implications it had for Eleanor, who Maryland law would enslave for the act of marrying an African slave.2 For those inter- ested in social and cultural history,the marriage also has much to reveal about the nature of plantation life in the colony. Eleanor had met Charles some- time before 1679 on the Wicomico River planta- tion of Governor Thomas Notley, where she man- aged the bachelor governor’s household. Charles, one of 20 slaves on the plantation, labored in Notley’s fields and was housed in a quarter with other slaves.3 When Notley died without heirs in 1679, Eleanor and Charles were either sold or given by Charles Calvert, the Third Lord Baltimore and Maryland proprietor, to Captain William Boarman, a close friend of Baltimore’s.
In the days preceding the marriage, Eleanor had been personally warned by Baltimore of the marriage’s legal consequences for her and for her children. Eleanor, however, rejected the propri- etor’s advice to call off the wedding, informing Baltimore that “she would rather marry Charles under them circumstances than to marry his Lordship with all his Country.” Baltimore, frus- trated to the point of anger with her response, was nonetheless in attendance along with many other community elites when the wedding took place on Boarman’s plantation. Many of these elites were, like Baltimore, Roman Catholic, and so were their servants and their slaves. The mar- riage was officiated by Father Richard Hobart, a Franciscan priest who counted as his close friend Giles Brent, the son of Baltimore’s cousin and a Piscataway woman. It is entirely possible that Brent was also present at the ceremony. Captain Joshua Doyne and his wife had traveled some 15 miles to attend the wedding and Thomas Simpson’s son later remembered his mother or
father prodding him to kiss the bride.4
The Butlers’ wedding was an important social event, a spectacle even, which was recalled decades later when the couple’s descendants sued for their freedom. The social and religious mix of the participants celebrating the marriage of a servant and a slave in 1681 (despite the legal consequences for the couple) reveals intimacies unimaginable in contemporary England or even a few years later in the Maryland colony. While the English Civil War had had a profound and lasting impact on the English social hierarchy, providing “the ‘middling sort’” with “positions of unprece- dented power and influence,”5 the familiarity with which free and slave, white and black, Irish and English, and Catholic and Protestant engaged during this early period in Maryland was alto- gether different. Perhaps this familiarity was bred in part by a relative isolation. In 1678, Baltimore had told English authorities “that in most places There are not fifty houses in the space of Thirty Miles”6 and everyday travel for the majority of colonists was limited to a two- to five-mile radius,
even for those with access to a horse.7
The story of the Butlers’ wedding suggests
the mixed and fluid nature of social relations in early colonial Maryland along with evolving notions of race. The Butlers’ story also reveals a truism about colonial life in Maryland: the over- whelming majority of the immigrant population experienced this new world not in a town or in the colonial capital but on a plantation. This chapter summarizes and interprets the archaeo- logical and documentary evidence of Maryland’s 17th-century plantations, building on the work of archaeologists studying plantation life in ear- ly Maryland and synthesizing their findings in an effort to interpret the colonial experience as it was lived and perceived by its participants. The findings from this analysis challenge historical and archaeological frameworks that narrowly de- fine plantations as simply the region’s economic engines. As the archaeological evidence reveals,
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