FAMILY ROLE DURING SLAVERY

Family Role during Slavery



Family Role during Slavery

COLONIAL ANGLO-AMERICAN FAMILY NETWORKS, 1680-1774

Using John Donelson's family as a case study, this chapter illustrates how kinship and family networks facilitated frontier economic ventures, especially land speculation, prior to the American Revolution. The political relationship between the colony of Virginia and the Cherokees prior to and during the Seven Years War, the early networking strategies of the Donelson family, and the effects of land speculation on Virginia/Cherokee diplomacy following the Seven Years War illustrate how the drive of land speculating families for more land complicated the trading and military alliance of Virginia with the Cherokees1.

The history of John Donelson, his family, and their collective economic and political strategies in Virginia and the Cumberland region of Tennessee provide much more than triumphalist pioneer tales.

The Donelson family is representative of, rather than exceptional to, the experience of families who embraced land speculation as the key to their economic advancement and utilized their network of familial obligations to facilitate that investment. Other families that utilized kinship networks to capitalize on land speculation and other frontier speculative ventures include the Washington, Henry, Blount, Carter, and Byrd families of Virginia and North Carolina. Family served as the basis upon which larger political, ideological, and economic networks were built. This chapter highlights how kinship networks facilitated land speculation, despite British attempts to curtail it and the tensions it created with neighboring Indians.

Born between 1718 and 1725, John Donelson, like his father and grandfather before him, was a colonial landowner. In the 1730s southwestern Virginia had attracted large land speculators, such as William Byrd, who bought up hundreds of thousands of acres for the purpose of settling Scotch-Irish, German, and Swiss immigrants in the area. During the 1740s smaller land speculators, including Donelson, bought tens of thousands of acres each. In 1744 John Donelson moved to southwestern Virginia from Accomac County. To gain additional profits from land speculation in the region, including his own, Donelson became county surveyor for Halifax County, and later, when the county split into two, for Pittsylvania County. By 1774 Donelson owned at least 1,019 acres of land, eighteen slaves, and an iron works or bloomery. Donelson ranked among the political, economic, and social elite of Southwest Virginia. John Donelson was one of many who sought to capitalize on the acquisition of Indian lands and who set up businesses in newly opened regions. Land speculators in Virginia bought up as much land as possible to take advantage of the needs of planters whose tobacco crops had exhausted the soil on their current land-holdings. Henceforth, Anglo-American Virginians considered the title to those lands cleared. Although Donelson's land speculation was timid compared to land barons like the Byrd family, political pressure from land speculators, as well as their willingness to transgress Indian boundaries, pushed Virginia's politicians to repeatedly seek treaties with Indian nations that would open up lands to Anglo-American settlement.

Cherokees and Virginians during the Seven Years War

The British government had established itself ...