In response the query about Albion's Seed, the following review essay, "Perry on the Eastern Shore," appeared in Reviews in American History 20 (September 1992): 297-302 and amplifies the WMQ forum already recommended. The direct comment on Albion's Seed begins in the fifth paragraph.  I respected Jim Perry's scholarship. Twelve years after his death it is sobering to acknowledge that he'd have been fifty-two this October - and with that in mind I pass along the whole essay -- which is a review of James Russell Perry. The Formation of a Society on Virginia's Eastern Shore, 1615-1655. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1990.
---.    Jon Kukla
The late James Russell Perry's The Formation of a Society on Virginia's Eastern Shore, 1615-1655 brought to mind an adage (popular among Wisconsin high-school coaches and band directors of the mid 1960s) that genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. It took a lot of hard work (and some courage) for Jim Perry to document simple but important insights about early American social development in a succinct book that both complements and challenges received scholarly opinion about the Chesapeake colonies. Perry first reported his findings in a Johns Hopkins dissertation completed the same year that Darrett Rutman advocated network analysis for community studies;*note l* both scholars preferred documenting concrete patterns of local social. interaction in early Virginia rather than pondering reified ideals of Community. Bringing network analysis theory to Virginia's earliest continuous series of extant local records, Perry documented every known interaction between colonists on the Eastern Shore of Virginia between 1615 and 1655 on note cards stored in shoeboxes and sorted by hand-a database on a graduate student's budget in contrast to the university mainframe employed by Darrett and Anita Rutman for A Place in Time: Middlesex County, Virginia, 1650-1750 and its Explicatus (1984). "This approach requires a tedious attention to individuals and their contacts in a geographical context," Perry conceded, "but it rewards perseverance with new insights" (p. 6).
Whether shuffling and counting cards by hand or crunching numbers in a computer, however, 2 + 2 = 4. The challenges are discerning the genuine patterns in the evidence and assigning meaning to them. Sometimes genius is just recognizing the obvious. Formation of a Society on Virginia's Eastern Shore delineates day-to-day life on the Eastern Shore by tracking landowners in their travels, family and nonfamilial networks, interaction at church or court, and contacts with Native Americans as well as residents of other counties, colonies, or countries. Settlement began along shallow creeks on the bay side of the Eastern Shore and expanded northward, with new arrivals typically choosing to live near kin and near the water. By 1655 Virginians resident on the Eastern Shore numbered about one thousand. A quarter of the landowners were documented boat owners, and another 13 percent left recorded evidence of riding in someone's boat. Plantations were smaller and more densely populated near the earliest settlements (which attracted newcomers) and larger to the north where long-term residents amassed substantial tracts. People traveled on foot and neighborhoods were close: 80 percent of face-to- face meetings were among people who lived within three miles of each other. Neighbors helped tend crops, cattle, and children, and took notice of illegitimate births, abused wives or servants, and offenses against the peace. Economic networks usually paralleled those of kin and neighbors. Documented contact with outsiders was only typical of wealthy merchant planters who conducted the Eastern Shore's trade with the mainland counties, New England, England, New Netherlands, and the Low Countries.
Underrepresented in the surviving records, of course, are the ordinary lives of women, children, and laborers of all colors and status. By demonstrating the creation of social "cohesion sufficient to underpin local stability" (p. 10), however, Perry extends the social context of the story of Anthony Johnson and his family told by T. H. Breen and Stephen Innes in "Mine Owne Ground": Race and Freedom on Virginia's Eastern Shore, 1640-1676 (1980) and, perhaps, offers a base from which some enterprising scholar may attempt an early Virginia equivalent of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's explication of frontier women's networks in A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (1990). With these limits of gender, race, and status fairly in mind, Formation of a Society on Virginia's Eastern Shore nevertheless has historiographical importance because Wilbur J. Cash's The Mind of the South (1941) "continues to provide a controversial and inescapable paradigm for Southern history fifty years after its publication."*note 2*
Like the child who asked why the emperor was not wearing any clothes, Perry had the courage to ask candid questions about social development in the first half of the seventeenth century and to demolish a sociological myth, derived from Cash's early pages, that has left contemporary scholarship with its fleshy fundamentals and fallacies exposed. The Formation of a Society on Virginia's Eastern Shore forces historians to confront the origins of Chesapeake social development in the first half of the seventeenth century, where the inquiry properly commences. For several decades, metachronism, false periodization, and the fallacy of presumptive change have been parading naked before our unseeing eyes.*note 3*
Want to see the naked emperor? Check out the symposium in the April 1991 William and Mary Quarterly and remember that Perry's account of American social development on the Eastern Shore ends in 1655, when "the confluence of kin and affectional ties, neighborhood contacts, economic links, and an effective exercise of authority had created a society that could survive political conflict" (p. 225). Look at the chronology that David Hackett Fischer abstracted in his defense of Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989):
<>. The Great Migration to Massachusetts Bay, 1629-1640
<> Tidewater Virginia, settled . . . between 1640 and 1675
<> The Delaware Valley, colonized in the period 1675-1725
<> The southern backcountry, settled circa 1717-1775 *note 4*
None of this is unique to Fischer--it has been around since The Mind of the South--but whatever happened to 1607 ?
How is it that early American historians accepted this chronological sleight- of-hand? In four pages Cash sketched it as mere prologue-what "any bright Southern schoolboy can tell you offhand"-to a 440-page book challenging the Cavalier myth and the "legends. . . of the Old and the New Souths." He noted the presence of early Virginia's "minor squires, younger sons of minor squires, or adventurers who had got themselves a crest, a fine coat, and title to huge slices of the country," but he ascribed more importance to frontier farmers and laborers. Leadership in seventeenth-century Virginia, Cash wrote, "passed inevitably to rough and ready hands. While milord tarried at dice or languidly directed his even more languid workmen, his horny-palmed neighbors increasingly wrung profits from the earth, got themselves into position to extend their holdings, . . . rose steadily toward equality with him, attained it, [and] passed him." "Aristocracy in any real sense," Cash concluded, "did not develop. . . until after 1700. From the foundations built up
by his father and grandfather, a Carter, a Page, a Shirley [sic] began to tower decisively above the ruck of farmers, pyramided his holdings in land and slaves, squeezed out his smaller neighbors, . . . [and] sent his sons to William and Mary and afterward to the English universities or the law schools in London."*note 5*
Sound familiar? Surely Cash's Mind of the South prepared the soil for the almost universal acceptance of Bernard Bailyn's "Politics and Social Structure in Virginia"-arguably the most influential article in early American history since World War II-which noted that "most of Virginia's great eighteenth- century names, such as Bland, Burwell, Byrd, Carter, Digges, Ludwell, and Mason, appear in the colony for the first time within ten years either side of 1655" (emphasis added).*note 6* Scholars interested in the timing of social change in the Chesapeake colonies, however, risk two gender-related traps (one per- haps unique to Virginia) if they draw inferences from surnames.
Women in colonial Virginia, as elsewhere, typically adopted their husbands' surnames upon marriage and thereby often obscured themselves and their roles in the transmission of property and culture. As Edmund Morgan assessed the myth that had descended from W. J. Cash, it seemed "that the men who made their way to the top in the 1620s and 1630s in Virginia were unable to perpetuate their family lines; the famous first families of Virginia came to the colony later." Morgan objected that while "in a patrilineal sense this was the case," seventeenth-century Virginia was "becoming an economic matriarchy, or rather a widowarchy."*note 7* Perry reports that in virtually all in- stances for the early Eastern Shore "a relict's control over the settlement of the estate of her deceased spouse was uncontested" (p. 80).
Virginia's finest published genealogies present a second subtle trap for un- wary historians tracing patterns of social development by the frail light of males' surnames. Genealogical research is affected by the fecundity of a colonist's descendants (if there are descendants) and their genealogical curiosity (or lack of it), and there are misleading patterns in the "standard genealogical materials indexed in Swem, Virginia Historical Index"--as David Hackett Fischer described sources for part of Albion's Seed (p. 214n). Descendants of Virginia's famous tidewater plantation families commissioned or inspired genealogical research about Cash's Carters and Pages, Bailyn's "Virginia's great eighteenth-century names," and Morgan's "famous first families of Virginia [who] came to the colony later.*note 8* Late in the nineteenth century, scions of Virginia's oldest families succumbed to a pride of prior descent and in 1912 founded the Order of First Families of Virginia, open only to those who could trace ancestry to a member of the Virginia Company or a settler in Virginia prior to 1625. Heirs of immigrants after 1625 need not apply, and latecomers such as Richard and Anne Constable Lee or John Carter and his five wives make only incidental appearances in this scholarship.*note 9* The curious result of these hidden biases is an impressive genealogical literature that overemphasizes the first, third, and fourth quarters of the seventeenth century and leads scholars further into the vortex of Cash's myth while other early Virginians remain obscure for want of curious modern descendants.*note 10* The Formation of a Society on Virginia's Eastern Shore, 1615-1655 escaped Cash's myth because it is rooted directly in primary sources rather than Virginia's convenient published biographical literature--and because Jim Perry had the courage to report what he found there.
So, how typical was the early Eastern Shore? A lengthy footnote in Colonial Chesapeake Society*note 11* dismissed Perry's findings and suggested that the Eastern Shore was "atypical." But in fact, can historians yet be certain about what was typical of the early Chesapeake? Maryland's experience in its first decades of settlement offers no real guidance for the region because Lord Baltimore's colony was frequently being attacked by Virginians and its entire beleaguered population never exceeded five hundred until 1649. On the Virginia mainland, similar networks for the oldest settled areas along the James and York rivers might have been reconstructed from records sent to Richmond for safekeeping during the Civil War. There, along with many volumes of colonial deed, will, probate, and order books, most of the local records from counties such as Charles City, Elizabeth City, Gloucester, James City, New Kent, and Warwick burned when the Confederates evacuated Richmond in April 186S. York County achieved a stable society between 1634 and 1660, but the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation started its York County Project with the 1660s and worked toward the nineteenth century because documents did not survive in sufficient quantity for demographic reconstruction of the earliest population.*note 12* Time will tell, but perhaps James Russell Perry's conclusions about the Eastern Shore only seem atypical because he escaped the snares of Cash's myth. The scarcity of evidence for other Virginia localities suggests that we pay attention to what he painstakingly learned from the only extant series of continuous local records from the first half century of English settlement in the Chesapeake.
                                 <>
Born in Meriden, Connecticut, James Russell Perry died at the age of forty of AIDS-related illness on October 16, 1990. A week earlier he had held the first copy of The Formation of a Society on Virginia's Eastern Shore in his hands, and hours before his death he saw volume three of The Documentary History of the Supreme Court of the United States, 1789-1800, a project on which he worked since 1977. As an editor and fellow student of the Chesapeake's earliest decades, I saw enough of Jim Perry to know that the intellectual courage I perceive in his study of the Eastern Shore of Virginia was characteristic of his life. Before mainstream attitudes about AIDS changed dramatically last year, Perry had arranged a statement that I heard one morning while shaving. Eleven times in August 1991 announcers on National Public Radio stations throughout the country recited a list of sponsors that included, "James R. Perry whose bequest commemorates NPR's coverage of gay and lesbian is- sues." Readers need not concur with my assessment of the book that resulted from Jim Perry's inspiration and perspiration, but all the men and women practicing the craft to which he devoted his life can respect his personal courage.
NOTES
1. Darrett B. Rutman, "Community Study," Historical Methods 13 (1980): 29-32.
2. Thomas A. Underwood, "The Mind (and Physiology?) of the South," The Southern Literary Journal 24 (1991): 110; James C. Cobb, "Does Mind no Longer Matter? The South, the Nation, and The Mind of the South, 1941-1991," Journal of Southern History 57 (1991): 681- 718.
3. David Hackett Fischer, Historians' Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (1970), pp. 132-55.
4. David Hackett Fischer, "Albion and The Critics: Further Evidence and Reflection," William and Mary Quarterly 48 (1991): 260-61. The forum critics were Jack P. Greene, Virginia Dejohn Anderson, James Horn, Barry Levy, and Ned C. Landsman.
5. W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (1941), pp. 14, viii, 6, 5-8. Shirley is the name not of a prominent Virginia family but of the Charles City County plantation owned by the Hill Carter family.
6. Bernard Bailyn, "Politics and Social Structure in Virginia," in James Morton Smith, ed.,
Seventeenth-Century America: Essays in Colonial History (1959), p. 98; Jon Kukla, "Order and Chaos in Early America: Political and Social Stability in Pre-Restoration Virginia," American Historical Review 90 (1985): 297-98. The governor of Virginia compiled quite a different list of the colony's prominent families at the time: "the Percys, the Barkleys, the Wests, the Gages, the Throgmortons, Wyats, Degges, Chickeleys, Moldsworths, Morrisons, Kemps, and hundred others, which I forbear to name, lest I should misherald them in the Catalogue"; Sir William Berkeley, A Discourse and View of Virginia (London, 1663), p.3.
7. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery-American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (1975), p.166.
8. Cash, Mind of the South, p. 8; Bailyn, "Politics and Social Structure in Virginia, " p. 98; Morgan, American Slavery-American Freedom, p. 166.
9. The Order of First Families of Virginia sponsored three editions of Adventures of Purse and Person (1956, 1964, 1987). The Virginia State Library and Archives is preparing a much-needed Dictionary of Virginia Biography with subjects selected for historical (rather than genealogical) reasons.
10. E.g., Martin H. Quitt, "Immigrant Origins of the Virginia Gentry: A Study of Cultural Transmission and Innovation," William and Mary Quarterly 46 (1988): 629, 640-42; Richard Beale Davis, Intellectual Life in the Colonial South, 1585-1763 (1978), pp. 1507-1629.
11. Lois Green Carr, Philip D. Morgan, and Jean B. Russo, eds., Colonial Chesapeake Society (1988), p. 25n.
12. Conway Robinson, "Memorandum of the Records in the General Court Office [in 1829] with a statement of the condition of the same," in Henry Read McIlwaine and Jon Kukla, eds. Minutes of the Council and General Court of Colonial Virginia, 2d ed. (1979), pp. 537-44; Suzanne Smith Ray, Lyndon H. Harte III, and J. Christian Kolbe, comps., A Preliminary Guide to Pre-1904 County Records in the Archives Branch, Virginia State Library and Archives (1987): personal communication from Peter V. Bergstrom.




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