Love, Sex, and Marriage in Colonial America 1607-1800

By Charles A. Mills

A brief look at love, sex, and marriage in colonial America and the early republic.

The English colonies in North America, which were eventually to become the United States of America, developed their own idiosyncratic customs regarding love, sex, and marriage based on local circumstances. While the basis for all of these attitudes can be traced back to the Mother Country, local variations occurred because of the varying temperaments of the original settlers. The Puritans of Massachusetts had a different way of looking at sexual matters than did the more free wheeling Cavaliers of Virginia, or the trappers along the western borders of North Carolina. Then, as now, one size did not fit all.

Includes discussion of courtship, marriage, divorce, babies and birth control, transgressions, vice, plus more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charles A. Mills
• Release date: Jan 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781519931924

Charles A. Mills

Chuck Mills has a passion for history. He is the author of Hidden History of Northern Virginia, Echoes of Manassas, Historic Cemeteries of Northern Virginia and Treasure Legends of the Civil War and has written numerous newspaper and magazine articles on historical subjects. Chuck is the producer and cohost of Virginia Time Travel, a history television show that airs to some 2 million viewers in Northern Virginia. He lives on the banks of the Potomac River on land once owned by George Washington.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

The English colonies in North America, which were eventually to become the United States of America, developed their own idiosyncratic customs regarding love, sex, and marriage based on local circumstances.  While the basis for all of these attitudes can be traced back to the Mother Country, local variations occurred because of the varying temperaments of the original settlers.  The Puritans of Massachusetts had a different way of looking at sexual matters than did the more free wheeling Cavaliers of Virginia, or the trappers along the western borders of North Carolina.  Then, as now, one size did not fit all.

COURTSHIP

The first permanent English colony in North America was established at Jamestown, Virginia on May 14, 1607 by the Virginia Company of London.  The party consisted of 104 men who came to America not to settle but to become rich.  Within a short time it became apparent to the colony’s sponsors that their great venture in the New World was in danger of being wrecked, ...on the shoals of dissolute, irresponsible, manhood.  It was not until the fall of 1608 that the first gentlewoman and woman-servant arrived. The gentlewoman was already married to colonist Thomas Forrest; the servant, Ann Burrus, would soon marry John Laydon, the first marriage to be solemnized in Virginia.  More women crossed the Atlantic to Virginia and Maryland in the next several years, but they remained relatively few in number.  By 1619, the Virginia House of Burgesses, petitioning that wives as well as husbands be eligible for grants of free land, argued that in a new colony, it is not known whether man or woman be the most necessary.

The Virginia Company’s London recruiters began searching for women of marriageable age, offering free passage to Virginia and trousseaus for girls of good reputation.  New husbands reimbursed the company with 120 pounds of good leaf tobacco when they married.  The first shipment of ninety tobacco brides arrived in Jamestown in the spring of 1620. The youngest was Jane Dier, aged fifteen.  The oldest was Alice Burges, aged twenty-eight.

Some over eager British merchants, hired to provide the colonies with wives simply kidnapped any young woman who came to hand. In October 1618, a warrant was issued for one Owen Evans, who was kidnapping young women from their villages and sending them off to be sold in Virginia as indentured servants.  As time went on, most of the single women who came to the Chesapeake Bay colonies voluntarily sold themselves as indentured servants. They re-paid the cost of their passage with a term of four or five years in service. At the end, the women were supposed to receive food, clothing, and tools to give them a start in life, then emerge into a world filled with wife-hungry young men and take their pick.

Men outnumbered women by roughly six to one in the l620s and by four to one in the later decades of the 1600s. Over a quarter of the early male settlers along the Chesapeake Bay never managed to find a wife,