Ten Things Tuesday

Mrs. Chili and her brood are on vacation in the Historic Triangle region of the U.S. As a result, we’ve been learning about this nation’s beginnings, so this week’s Ten Things will be of the Early American History variety!

~ Williamsburg was first known as Middle Plantation and was formally established in 1633.  It was the capitol of Virginia after Jamestowne and before Richmond.

~ Patrick Henry, who today is honored as one of the nation’s founding fathers, was considered a hothead and a trouble maker in his time. He eventually earned the respect of his peers but, for a long time, he was a persona non grata in polite, loyalist society.

~ Scholars speculate that, had he not died before the American Revolution ended, Peyton Randolph would likely have been elected the first president instead of Washington, so committed a patriot was the man.

~ The bulk of Colonial Williamsburg as it stands today was made possible because the pastor of the church, a Dr. W. A. R. Goodwin, convinced John D. Rockefeller, Jr. to make its restoration his pet project. In today’s dollars, Rockefeller spent over a billion buying land and restoring buildings to their 1700s appearances. Today, 88 buildings are originals; the rest are carefully researched reproductions.

~ Women were the center of domestic life in the 1700s. Though they could not receive formal education, it was the women who taught the children their letters and numbers, and who served as the spiritual caretakers of the family. The literacy rate in Colonial Williamsburg was surprisingly high among women and free blacks.

~ Despite the lack of quick communication (it often took a week or more to receive news from other colonies), events in Massachusetts and Virginia happened almost simultaneously. On April 19, 1775, the Minutemen of Massachusetts began their engagement with British forces in Lexington and Concord. Two days later, a contingent of British naval soldiers seized a quantity of gunpowder from the Williamsburg magazine, and an all out battle was narrowly averted in favor of negotiations with the British. It was hoped, though not really expected, that the colonies would not have to unite in war against the British; that each colony could negotiate with the Crown on its own.

~ Thomas Jefferson, Virginia’s second state governor, disliked the Governor’s Palace in Williamsburg so much that he had begun to draw up plans for its renovation before the state’s capitol was moved to Richmond in 1779. In 1781, the palace burned to the ground in less than three hours.

~ If you’re going to poison someone to get your inheritance, make sure you do it quickly. In 1806, George Wythe, a patriot and signer of the Declaration of Independence, was done in by his grandnephew George Wythe Sweeney, a deadbeat gambler, for the inheritance Sweeney hoped to secure. The poison worked slowly enough that Wythe was able to cut Sweeney out of his will entirely before he expired. Sweeney got away with the murder, however, because the only eyewitness to his crime was the cook, a free black woman named Lydia Broadnax. In those times - indeed, up until not too long ago - a black person could not legally testify against a white person.

~ It was illegal for bulk silver to be brought into the colonies, so colonial silversmiths were more recyclers than anything else - most of the pieces they made were created by melting down other items for the metal. It was prohibitively expensive to buy American made goods - a single, locally made coffee pot could cost more than three years’ wages. The same piece, imported from England, would likely cost about three months’ wages. The embargo against English goods - and English taxes - was an incredible sacrifice for both merchants and their customers.

~ According to the living history interpreters at the Great Hopes Plantation, slavery was an economic necessity in the colonial period. Though slavery as a concept was distasteful to many of the founding fathers - who were not ignorant of the dichotomy they created with their “all men are created equal” and christian heritage on the one hand, all the while keeping slaves bound with the other - the colonies would not have survived without the labor of these enslaved people. One is left to wonder, though, how much different our country would have been without the institution - and the war that followed a scant 100 years after our freedom from England was won.