Reviewed by J. Elliott Russo | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.3

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Reviewed by J. Elliott Russo | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

J. Elliott Russo, Canton, Connecticut

Colonial Chesapeake: New Perspectives. Edited by Debra Meyers and Melanie Perreault. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2006. 308 pages. $80.00 (cloth), $29.95 (paper).
The editors of this volume seek to present a "cutting-edge collection of essays" (xx) that employs new sources and new methodologies to illuminate "the racial, class, ethnic, and gender diversity that characterized life in early Maryland and Virginia" (xx). They have accordingly grouped the nine essays included in Colonial Chesapeake into four sections that loosely embrace these themes, each prefaced with editorial remarks and excerpts from relevant primary sources.	1
The volume's essays encompass an array of topics. In the first section, somewhat misleadingly labeled "Memory," pieces by Seth William Mallios and Melanie Perreault explore the earliest phases of European settlement in the Chesapeake region. Mallios employs seriate analysis to document subtle shifts in detail and emphasis in seven accounts of the 1571 killing of Jesuit missionaries, a brief yet useful exercise that identifies the fabrications and embellishments added in successive retellings to transform a story of murder into one of martyrdom. Perreault also focuses on narrative evidence in her interpretation of European-Indian conflict in early Virginia, arguing that intercultural violence at first "threatened to undermine English identity" but over time became "constructed as a way to assert Englishness" (38).	2
The second section, "Race," might well have been merged with the first, not least because the analysis of freedom petitions contributed by Thomas F. Brown and Leah C. Sims engages directly with memory and ethnic identity. Combining the two sections would also have underscored the ambiguity of the concepts of race and ethnicity in the early modern context. Brown and Sims invoke the concept of social capital to good effect in their essay, demonstrating ways in which enslaved men and women made use of community memories about an "ancestor's ethnic distinctiveness" (102) in their efforts to secure freedom. Kathleen Fawver's piece takes a methodological turn toward historical demography, using cross-sectional data extracted from the 1776 census for Harford County, Maryland, to examine family formation among enslaved and free African Americans. Fawver demonstrates that "the organization of plantations worked actively against family formation" (63) among the enslaved, and planter strategies that delayed manumission presented similar obstacles to family formation for free blacks.	3
Essays by Angelo T. Angelis and James D. Alsop constitute the third section, with "Class" identifying the category of analysis that attempts to link these two studies. In common with many scholars, Angelis interprets the events of Bacon's Rebellion with an eye toward the future; he parts company with predecessors by connecting the 1676 conflict not to the American Revolution but rather to later "regulations" (118) in North Carolina, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. His characterization of the Virginia uprising as a "careful riot" (136) emphasizes the role of men with long-standing grievances who sought a reform of government, not a revolution. Alsop shifts attention toward the Atlantic with his investigation of morbidity among the sailors of Britain's Royal Navy. With admirable determination to glean useful information from intractable sources, Alsop documents patterns of mortality and carefully speculates about the causes and consequences of morbidity on vessels that supplied naval protection to Virginia's tobacco convoys.	. . .

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