Table of Contents:
1) Captain William Berry's Will
6) William Warman's estate
includes excerpt from 1861 Martenet map of PG Co.; excerpt from Hienton
tract map, ADC map with overlay of Berry/Berry Warman tracts
Secondary Sources:
Steve Sarson, "Landlessness and Tenancy in Early National Prince George's
County, Maryland," William & Mary Quarterly, 3(57)3, July
2000, pp. 569-598.
Subject: Review of Landlessness and Tenancy in the Early National Tobacco-Slave South for the William & Mary QuarterlyThis manuscript deserves to be published, both for what it accomplishes and for the major conceptual problem in the historiography of Early American history it represents.
The author reasonably demonstrates the complexity of assessing the resources (principally land, slaves, and inheritance) that contribute to the success, failure, or muddling existence of white led households in Maryland during the Early Republic. It is safe to say that his model will undoubtedly hold for any region in which slaves play a major role in the labor force (Kentucky for example). He has amply supported the picture drawn by students of an earlier period (Kulikoff, Walsh, Papenfuse, Stiverson) that slaves were owned by the landless and that being a tenant simply did not necessarily mean poverty and failure. The author has not, however, provided any evidence that tenant farmers were or were not any more or less independent yeoman democrats (with a small 'd') before, during, or after the period he studies. There is no evidence of the relationship between lessors and lessees, there is no evidence of an independent or dependent spirit that drives tenants away from their leaseholds or holds them fast to where the author finds them. In the period the author studies there is no major influx of new people and clearly a steady loss of existing population. Bayly Marks claims that most people just moved around locally or to adjacent counties, but she does not have the inter generational evidence to confirm or deny that in declining agricultural economies the issue is not so much whether there is land to rent as it is where can a farmer/planter of any means go to make a living.
The fundamental methodological and conceptual flaw in this piece is that what it attempts cannot be done by one person alone. To make any reasonable sense out of the lives of households living on the land in PG. county between the 1770s and the 1820s (a time of considerable change in the nature of the economy and in economic resources available to people living on the land (as opposed a proportionally smaller, but growing number of people making a living at urban occupations)) a much broader evidentiary net must be drawn. What I mean by this can best be seen in the life of an accidental landlord, a neighbor of Rosalie Calvert and Zachariah Berry, William Berry Warman. Here was the bastard son of bachelor landowner (one of the largest in PG County) who overcomes the opposition of the legitimate family, wins control over the land, thrives for while on his father's land, slaves, and tenants (Zacahariah?), is trapped by declining tobacco prices and over confidence in the future of the new Federal City, but manages to get himself elected as a Jeffersonian Republican to the Maryland House of Delegates (we always knew there were bastards in the House), invests in western lands, goes bankrupt, leaving several sons who go on to distinguished, apparently remunerative, careers in the Navy forsaking the land altogether.
What is my point? The real story of life in the new republic if it is to be written with any assurance of understanding of the nature and quality of life must follow the model of Laurel Ulrich's Midwife's Tale writ large. It must be rooted in massive genealogical and household studies over time that actually tell us something about generational mobility (geographical, social, and economic) and generational losses along the way (mortality rates within households for example), that link who people are with at least samples of what they were able to acquire and accomplish within their lifetimes (such as Papenfuse tried largely unsuccessfully with the people who had store accounts at Piscattaway in PG County).
In sum, I would argue that this essay should be published as is. The author has successfully challenged the argument that rural slave holding America was peopled by independent landowners. They may have been independent, but they clearly were a very mixed lot of small timers who probably did not own their land and were as likely to own moveable property (slaves) as they would ever be to acquire real property of their own. That this state of affairs was likely due to a land system that militated against small, privately held, land holdings is something the author fails to discuss, and may be a point that militates against the universal applicability of his model to other regions, but it is not serious enough to warrant revision. The article accomplishes what a Quarterly article should. It challenges some 'accepted' thinking, expands upon previous work to support his assertions, and leaves the reader with enough questions that perhaps a more aggressive and comprehensive study of tenantry and land ownership will be undertaken. I would just simply caution that, besides the need for many people to work together systematically on the questions raised by the article, there is also the need to refocus the study, not on the ownership of land or the lack thereof, but on what people made of the world they were born into. Bastards could and did make it, if for but a time. To my mind there seems to have been a beckoning spirit of adventure and speculation abroad on the land in the Early Republic that cuts across all regionalism and draws an undetermined number of tenants and landowners in search of a better life. Was there indeed a new and different spirit of adventure in America to which the tenants and owners of PG county fell heir, or is this but a pipe dream of another over-stimulated Shamaesque historian looking back on a world for which the evidence is too sparse or too complex to provide meaningful answers? [ecp 1/20/1999]
Margaret Law Callcott, Mistress of Riverdale. The Plantation
Letters of Rosalie Stier Calvert, 1795-1821. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1991.
Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves. The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680-1800. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986.
Edward Papenfuse, "Planter Behavior and Economic Opportunity in a Staple Economy," Agricultural History, 46(2), April 1972, pp. 297-311.
Avery O. Craven. Soil Exhaustion as a Factor in the Agircultural History of Virginia and Maryland, 1606-1860. Univrsity of Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences 13(March 1925)1, Urbana: University of Illinois, 1925