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bly-10 The eighteenth century ancestors of our Kentucky Howards were small-scale farmers and tenants of large landholders in the Northern Neck of Virginia. The land monopolization by speculators and capitalists was a rotten system for working people like the Howards. They came west to escape it. The history of the Northern Neck landlord system going back to the seventeenth-century imperialism of Charles II is summarized by Bruce Ragsdale in “Young Washington’s Virginia: Opportunity in the ‘Golden Age” of a Planter Society,” George Washington and the Virginia Backcountry (ed. Warren R. Hofstra), (Madison, Wisconsin: Madison House Publishers, 1998), pp. 53-54: |
The Young George Washington learned of opportunities in Virginia from the perspectives of the Northern Neck region, where he was born and lived most of his life. A geographical designation of the land between the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers, the Northern Neck was also the area of a proprietary grant extended by Charles Ii to seven Royalists in 1649 and held in the exclusive possession of the Fairfax family by the time of Washington’s birth. In the late seventeenth century the area attracted settlers who established estates similar to those of the lower Tidewater and followed the pattern of tobacco cultivation found along the York and James rivers. By the eighteenth century, the great planters of the Northern Neck assumed positions of leadership in the House of Burgesses, frequently served on the governor’s Council, and generally shared the political and economic assumption of the gentry planters in older settled areas. The Carters, the Lees, the Fitzhughs—families that defined the concept of a golden age—were among the prosperous residents of the Northern Neck.While the proprietors of the Northern Neck declined the opportunity to develop the area as a manor, as they might have, the system of land grants created several distinctions from the lower Tidewater. The proprietors followed the freehold pattern common to the rest of Virginia by offering patents in free and common socage, but they did not require settlement or improvement of minimum portions of each grant. Although few grants in the rest of Virginia were revoked for failure to settle or improve land, the policy of the proprietors encouraged large land patents in the Northern Neck. When Robert Carter and Thomas Lee served as resident agents for the proprietor, they patented enormous tracts—as much as two hundred thousand acres for Carter—and encouraged their friends to do the same. The planters of the Northern Neck stood out, even in land-hungry Virginia, for their fixation on speculation and the development of new lands.
The availability of concentrated landholdings in the Northern Neck attracted wealthy families but restricted options for small planters and landless young men. The consequent pressures on small planters may have been responsible for the area’s early reputation as a source of social unrest. The region was the center of opposition to the Inspection Act of 1730, which threatened to force marginal producers out of the tobacco market. The violence soon ceased, but the relative concentration of landholding in the Northern Neck continued to restrict opportunity for many. Tenancy was more common here than elsewhere in Virginia, as was the hiring out of slaves. Leasing land and slave could be viable options for a young man hoping to produce surplus crops for market and accumulate money for the purchase of land in newly settled areas, but they were also indicative of a concentration of wealth that restricted opportunities in the Tidewater for those who did not inherit land and slaves.
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