Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit: Plantation Management in the Colonial Chesapeake, 1607 - 1763

Lorena S. Walsh

UNC Press Books, 2010 - History - 704 pages

Lorena Walsh offers an enlightening history of plantation management in the Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland, ranging from the founding of Jamestown to the close of the Seven Years' War and the end of the "Golden Age" of colonial Chesapeake agriculture.

Walsh focuses on the operation of more than thirty individual plantations and on the decisions that large planters made about how they would run their farms. She argues that, in the mid-seventeenth century, Chesapeake planter elites deliberately chose to embrace slavery. Prior to 1763 the primary reason for large planters' debt was their purchase of capital assets--especially slaves--early in their careers. In the later stages of their careers, chronic indebtedness was rare.

Walsh's narrative incorporates stories about the planters themselves, including family dynamics and relationships with enslaved workers. Accounts of personal and family fortunes among the privileged minority and the less well documented accounts of the suffering, resistance, and occasional minor victories of the enslaved workers add a personal dimension to more concrete measures of planter success or failure.
Lorena Walsh offers an enlightening history of plantation management in the Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland, ranging from the founding of Jamestown to the close of the Seven Years' War and the end of the "Golden Age" of colonial Chesapeake agriculture.

Contents

• Introduction: 1
• CHAPTER 1 The Plantation Economy Begins 16071639: 25
• CHAPTER 2 The Age of the Small Planter 16401679: 122
• Virginia 16801729: 194
• Maryland the Periphery and Regional Divergence 16801729: 293
• Southern Virginia 17301763: 394
• Rappahannock and Potomac Virginia 17301763: 472
• CHAPTER 7 Maryland the Periphery and Agricultural Change 17301763: 539
• CHAPTER 8 Reassessing the Golden Age: 624
• Epilogue: 633
• Appendix 1 Tobacco Crop Shares per Laborer: 639
• Appendix 2 Corn Crop Shares per Laborer: 658
• Appendix 3 Wheat Crop Shares per Laborer: 667
• Index: 675

About the author

Lorena S. Walsh was for twenty-seven years a historian at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. She is author of From Calabar to Carter's Grove: The History of a Virginia Slave Community and coauthor of Robert Cole's World: Agriculture and Society in Early Maryland(UNC Press).

Bibliographic information

• Title: Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit: Plantation Management in the Colonial Chesapeake, 1607 - 1763; Colonial Williamsburg studies in Chesapeake history and culture; Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American Hist; Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia Series
• Author: Lorena S. Walsh
• Contributor: Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: UNC Press Books, 2010
• ISBN: 0807832340, 9780807832349
• Length: 704 pages
• Subjects: Business & Economics / Economic History; History / United States / Colonial Period (1600-1775); History / United States / State & Local / South (AL, AR, FL, GA, KY, LA, MS, NC, SC, TN, VA, WV)