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The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation’s publication “Becoming Americans” explores the lives of real colonial Virginian families and how they approached life passages such as courtship and marriage, birth, childhood, and death.

During the colonial era, the institution of family evolved as political developments changed relationships between blacks, whites, and Native Americans. Families had to adapt as new leaders and principles redefined the status of every man.

Thesis

During the eighteenth century, customs of family life inherited from Europe underwent alterations that had a profound effect on the way family members defined themselves in relation to one another and to society at large. Gradually, these changes brought the "modern American" family into being.

The Seventeenth Century

Harsh conditions of everyday life, which made the formation of stable families difficult for the first generations of European and African immigrants, began to ease by the end of the seventeenth century. Native-American family patterns, by contrast, continued to be decimated by disease, displacement, and warfare.

The White Family

The European family was patterned after a patriarchal ideal in which the father exercised supreme authority over an extended family, at least in theory. Reality often deviated from that ideal.

The Native-American Family

European observers misunderstood traditional Native-American work roles and family relations. Interaction with Europeans further undermined the structure of the traditional Indian family and ultimately threatened its survival

The Black Family

Enslaved Africans, torn from their homeland and denied the stability of legal marriage, created distinctively African-Virginian family structures based on African concepts of extended kinships.

The Family Transformed

A more openly affectionate, child-centered family that reflected egalitarian republican sentiments and changing roles for men and women began to emerge among gentry and middling white families after the middle of the eighteenth century.

Conclusion.

The redefined American white family became accepted as an important part of the ideal for the new American nation. Notwithstanding, some white families, especially poor whites, retained their patriarchal-based status. By contrast, Native-American and African American families remained virtually unaffected by egalitarian, republican sentiments.

Epilogue: Moving Toward Today's Family

"Redefining Family"and the Becoming Americans Theme

Bibliography

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Americans today often express concern about rapid changes overtaking the American family, changes that they believe threaten the "traditional family" and the enduring moral and cultural values it is presumed to embody. At Colonial Williamsburg, we have an opportunity to shed the light of hindsight on this discussion by helping visitors understand that the family, like other human institutions, is both an agent of change and a product of ongoing historical forces.

There has never been just one type of family. African, Indian, and European peoples have each had their own traditional family structures, ceremonies, rites of passage, and taboos. The structure of family life for all groups underwent transformations during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that changed the way parents and children and husbands and wives perceived themselves one to another and in relation to the larger society. Native Americans and Africans uprooted from their traditional homelands, cut off from their customary family practices, and subjected to the will of white Virginians experienced fewer opportunities to reestablish customary family relations. They were often obliged to adapt to new circumstances or face extinction.

By the end of the eighteenth century, the white American family had begun developing a family structure that we now recognize as modern: one that was essentially nuclear, openly affectionate, child-centered, relatively egalitarian, and, at the same time, also individualistic. Such families appeared first among the gentry. Little by little, they became a model for other groups, and eventually the pattern for the modern American family, or, paradoxically, what we again often refer to as the "traditional" family.

European immigration to the Chesapeake irrevocably undermined the institution of the Indian family as disease, displacement, and intensified intertribal warfare decimated native populations. Family development among transplanted African and European peoples was likewise arrested, or at least radically skewed, by the unhealthy climate and environment of the region and the demographics of the early immigration. Endemic fevers and intestinal diseases killed young and old indiscriminately. Before 1640, European immigrants to the Chesapeake, the majority of whom were male indentured servants, had a fifty-fifty chance of dying during their first year. Men outnumbered women seven to one in the early years. Long periods of indenture delayed marriage for many immigrants. A quarter of all children died before their first birthday, and half of all marriages were ended by the death of one partner before the seventh anniversary. For African immigrants, the horrors of the Middle Passage and harsh working conditions in the New World made their plight even grimmer.

These circumstances populated the Virginia colony with many orphans, half-siblings, stepchildren, and foster parents. Because there were more men than women and because wives typically survived their husbands, white women enjoyed unusual opportunities to head households and accumulate property in their own names. One historian even speaks of a seventeenth-century "widow-archy."

The increasing institutionalization of slavery as defined by Virginia law further shaped the development of the African family. A 1662 statute decreed that the freedom or slavery of the mother determined the status of a black child. Subsequent laws restricted interracial marriage, limited the rights of free mulatto children, and encouraged the harsh punishment of slaves. Legislation further defined the differences between black and white family life and reaffirmed the power of the white master.

Conditions that adversely affected the family formation of Virginia-born black and white settlers began to improve by the end of the seventeenth century. Life expectancy rose, and the numbers of men and women grew more equal. The Virginia-born white population began to replace itself. Whites married earlier, lived longer, and produced larger numbers of surviving children. Increasingly stable conditions promoted a more normal course of family development.

Historically, the family was the basic political, religious, social, and economic unit in society, and, as such, was both a public and a private institution. It educated the young, served as the first level of government, and cared for the sick, the elderly, and the disabled. Any family that we portray here in Williamsburg was involved in one or all of these essential functions. Their specific ideas about families and their customs of family life varied with each cultural group--African, European, or Native American.

The Patriarchal Ideal

The traditional ideal of family structure that British immigrants brought to Virginia was a patriarchy where the father figure held a position of supreme authority over his wife, children, and all other dependents living in the household. This concept of authority and dependency created an inclusive definition of the family. Everyone subject to the authority of the householder was considered a member--immediate relatives, dependent kin, hired help, tenants, indentured servants, apprentices, and slaves.

Patriarchal authority served the dynastic aspirations of some wealthy Virginia planters by perpetuating the power and influence of their house and lineage. Most important was preserving intact the ownership of family lands. The customs of primogeniture (inheritance by the eldest son) and entail (legal proscription against the sale or grant of land outside the lineage) supported the dynastic ambitions of the gentry. The right of fathers to will land to their sons when they came of age or married reinforced the patriarch's authority. Daughters' inheritances and marriage gifts usually took the form of slaves and livestock rather than land.

These dynastic planter families developed extensive and interwoven kinship networks that protected family wealth and concentrated political power in family hands. The political structure of the colony reflected the bloodlines that linked its leading families all the way from county offices to the Virginia Council. For example, the extended Blair family of Williamsburg produced leaders for the college, the Council, the church, and the local courts. Additionally, kin ties connected the Blairs to many other influential families in the immediate Williamsburg community and throughout the colony.

Small planters and many artisans and shopkeepers in Williamsburg built a sense of family through work. Home and workplace were frequently housed under the same roof or in adjacent buildings. Here the patrimony bequeathed to children was the craft or business skills that earned the family's income. For people like the Geddys, the family was a production unit in which roles were determined by age and sex and where apprentices, slaves, and journeymen were no less important to economic success than parents and children.

An individual could be a member of several families during his or her lifetime. One might grow up in one family, apprentice in another, work as a journeyman or maidservant in another, set up a business, get married and become head or mistress of one's own family, and in old age become a dependent in someone else's home. When young Daniel Hoye was apprenticed to Williamsburg artisan Benjamin Powell in the early 1750s, he left the home of the Warwick County family he had been born into, moved to Williamsburg, and became part of the Powell family. After several years of service to Mr. Powell, Hoye established himself as a wheelwright, married, and started his own family.

The social, cultural, and business opportunities available in the capital attracted large numbers of single young people to Williamsburg. Apprentices, including orphan apprentices from England such as Thomas Everard and William Prentis, young single women such as Elizabeth Wythe's niece Mary Taliaferro and Betty Randolph's niece Elizabeth Harrison, and college students such as Thomas Jefferson and Nathaniel Burwell boarded with Williamsburg families for varying lengths of time. Some of them married here and remained in the Williamsburg area.

Whether as large as a family dynasty or as modest as a tradesman's household, the patriarchal system replicated the structure and reinforced the authority of the state. A father's role and responsibilities in the family mirrored in miniature the patriarchal relationship of a monarch to his people.

The Patriarchal Reality

While theory held that patriarchal authority resided in a male head of the family, reality did not always follow suit. The role of women often extended beyond their traditional domestic sphere, important as that was in its own right. Although society expected young white women to marry, several spinsters (including English milliners Margaret and Jane Hunter) established prosperous businesses in Williamsburg. Jane later married wigmaker Edward Charlton and launched a rival millinery shop across the street.

Ordinary tradesmen and small planters depended on the labor of their wives and children in the workshop or in the field. A serious illness or the death of a husband or father often reversed traditional roles and created situations where the "patriarch" of the family was in fact a woman. Clementina Rind assisted her husband, William, public printer and editor of the Virginia Gazette. Later, she assumed these duties singlehandedly during his illness and took over the printing business after William's death. At the same time, Clementina also reared their five children until her own death the following year.

While coping with the emotional stress occasioned by the loss of a husband, widows often had to deal with financial crises caused by the loss of family income. On learning that her husband's estate was deeply in debt, Elizabeth Hay, widow of Raleigh Tavern owner and keeper Anthony Hay, renounced her legacy and claimed her widow's dower (the common rights of a widow to a life interest of one-third of her husband's pre-debt property). That recourse brought greater advantageous to Elizabeth and her children. Likewise, Anne Geddy became the guardian of her children and was solely responsible for their welfare and education. As femme sole executrix of her husband's estate, she was able to bring legal action and conduct business in her own right.

Young widows in colonial Virginia typically remarried quickly; older widows often remained single and exercised the power due to heads of households. Living in Williamsburg made it easier for a widow to avoid remarriage because nearby friends provided support, and the commercial life of the town afforded economic opportunities. Widows such as midwife Catherine Blaikley and tavern keepers Jane Vobe and Christiana Campbell became successful businesswomen. Widow Ann Wager decided to leave her position as private tutor at Carter's Grove plantation to take employment as mistress of the Bray School in Williamsburg.

Women often turned to networks of family and friends during times of illness and family need. Teenager Frances Baylor Hill of Hillsborough plantation stayed with her sister during the days before her sister's death following childbirth and then was one of the family members who stood for the christening of the baby. Living in Williamsburg made such arrangements more manageable.

Although not all marriages were happy, divorce was not an alternative in colonial Virginia. Couples with marital problems had only a few choices--apply to the court for a separation (seldom requested), work out their differences, put up with them, or separate without a legal agreement.

The death of one or both parents happened frequently in the Chesapeake colonies. Virginia passed legislation that provided for the care and education of orphans as early as the 1640s. Orphans with assets received whatever education the income from their estates could sustain. When an orphan inherited no estate or one so small it could not subsidize "book education," churchwardens bound the child out to learn a trade. Guardians were held accountable for the integrity of the orphan's estate. The law and the church supported and protected marriage and family unity for the white population.

Native-American family life was both different from and transformed by contact with European culture. British observers (mostly male) regarded gender roles and marital customs among the Indians as an abdication of men's proper paternal authority, and they viewed the lavishly affectionate and seemingly permissive treatment of Indian children as an invitation to anarchy. Cultural blindness often misconstrued similarities in the customs of the two peoples. Whites, for example, took the Indians' courtship practice of presenting a prospective bride's family with skins or other goods as evidence that brides were bought like commodities even though it was commonplace for European and African suitors to be required to demonstrate they could support a family.

Most of the Indian cultures were matrilineal, meaning that family membership and descent were traced through the mother's side. Often a son in an Algonquin family had an especially strong relationship with a maternal uncle who took responsibility for much of his education. Married men had obligations to two households, to their wives and children on one hand and to their mothers' people on the other. Occasionally, Native-American women inherited positions as rulers. Though most men had only one wife, divorce seems to have been relatively easy and considerable sexual freedom was not inconsistent with the idea of marriage. Adultery resulted only when the spouse did not sanction the liaison. Relatives showed Powhatan children much affection. Punishing children by beating them was not part of Indian culture before contact with Europeans.

Work was rigidly allocated by gender. Women bore responsibility for growing crops (though men helped clear the land), erecting houses, making household utensils, carrying burdens when family moved, gathering firewood, and, of course, rearing children. Hunting, fishing, and waging war were's jobs that often took them away from home long periods. also made maintained most implements related to these activities.

Europeans viewed this division of labor in the light of their own preconceptions. They regarded Powhatan men as lazy and idle, engaged only in fishing or hunting, which they considered to be leisure activities, while the women were exploited and condemned to a life of drudgery. In fact, the economic contributions of both sexes were roughly equal, and Native Americans may not have viewed women's work as demeaning or less important than that of the men until later.

Cultural misunderstandings between Indians and whites were seldom bridged by well-meant attempts at indoctrination like those offered by instructors at the Indian School at the College of William and Mary. Indians showed little interest in attending the school; those who did soon returned to their native ways. Occasionally, successful students such as John Nettles and John Montour used their English education to aid their own people by becoming skilled interpreters. Generally speaking, Native Americans appear to have had little desire to acquire European culture, however much they valued some products of the white man's technology.

There were some mixed families of course. Frontiersmen sometimes married Indian women. Indians occasionally intermarried with blacks. But, despite some coincidental similarities, there is little evidence that Native-American attitudes and practices were consciously included in European or African family customs.

The negative impact of the Europeans on Native-American families was enormous. Disease and displacement led to high mortality and low birthrates. The establishment of white settlements disrupted the delicate system of land use on which the Indians depended. An influx of European trade goods displaced native craft technologies. The appetite of European markets for furs and hides exaggerated the importance of the hunter's role in Indian society and devalued that of the female. Native Americans responded to these disruptive influences in many different ways, from acceptance to adaptation to resistance and outright rejection. Ultimately, unremitting pressure from European newcomers meant that the less numerous and technologically disadvantaged Indians were pushed to the brink of extinction.

Yet they managed to survive, even though their indigenous cultural patterns were distorted or destroyed. In an effort to minimize European influences, the Pamunkey Indians prohibited women married to white men from living on tribal lands as long as their marriage lasted. Nonetheless, notions of patrilineal descent and other foreign customs crept in. A visitor to the Pamunkeys in 1759 found them living in traditional Yi Hakans (temporary houses made from bent saplings covered with bark or reed mats) but wearing English clothes. Thomas Jefferson wrote in his Notes on Virginia that "there remain of the Mattaponies three or four men only. . . . They have lost their language and have reduced themselves to about fifty acres of Land. . . . The Pamunkies are reduced to about 10 or 12 men. . . . The older ones among them preserved their language in a small degree, which are the last vestiges on earth as far as we know, of the Powhatan language."

The history of the African-Virginian family is the story of the struggle to rebuild stable family institutions to fill the emotional, cultural, and spiritual void created when African peoples were torn from their homelands. The hybrid family structures that resulted incorporated African, European, and distinctively African-Virginian elements.

Among the West African peoples from whom Virginia's slave population predominately derived, the ties of kinship operated at every level of society and in almost every aspect of an individual's life. Each person identified him- or herself as a member of a people, a clan, a family, and a household. A people, the national grouping, was unified by language and culture. The clan was the largest subdivision of a people, by definition a kinship grouping since every member of a clan traced descent from a common ancestor, either through the father's or the mother's line. The family included not just parents and children but also grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, and other relatives. The household was the smallest family. It was restricted to parents, children, and sometimes grandparents--what J. S. Mibiti has referred to as the "family at night."

In West African families, there was a tradition of wives being subordinate to their husbands. But authority was more dispersed than it was in patriarchal European families. Parental responsibilities such as the care and education of children were shared with a broader kin group. Grandparents and other older relatives passed on family and clan history and traditional lore. A modern West African saying, "It takes a village to raise a child," sums up this intertwining of family responsibilities.

West African kinship connections extended laterally in one dimension, binding an individual to nearly everyone in the locality, and vertically (or historically), connecting the living with departed ancestors and children yet unborn. Social behavior and familial obligations were determined by the nature of kinship links between individuals since a person could have hundreds of "fathers," "mothers," "uncles," and "brothers." As a community was regarded as an organic whole bound by intricate ties among relatives, so an individual's life within that community derived its deepest meaning from its unity with the communal existence. Physical, emotional, and spiritual growth were marked by rites of passage that signified a person's progressive integration into the corporate body of kin, both living and dead.

For Africans enslaved and transported to Virginia, this web of kinship ties that gave their lives order, meaning, and continuity was swept away. Slaves suffered a "social death," to use historian Orlando Patterson's phrase. The challenge facing transportees was how to build kinship anew in an alien land. How much these new networks were of African origin, how much patterned on European models, how much improvised from scratch to fit the exigencies of the new land and the constraints of slavery are questions much debated by historians. They probably will continue to be.

Some, like E. Franklin Frazier, believed there was little evidence that African culture exerted any influence on the African American family. "Probably never before in history," he wrote, "has a people been so completely stripped of its social heritage as the Negroes who were brought to America." Herbert Gutman made a more plausible argument when he proposed a four-stage process of destruction and rebirth: the initial West-African kinship patterns; their eradication by slavery and replacement by non-kin relationships with symbolic (or fictive) functions; the emergence of a truly African American slave family and fictive kin networks; and, finally, an extension of ideas about family into a broader concept of allegiance to the black community as a whole. Whether derived from African tradition or developed from the Virginia experience, the extended kin network and the fictive kinship concept were vitally important to African Americans.

Efforts by seventeenth-century African immigrants to form families were hindered initially by the same high rates of mortality and skewed sex ratios that Europeans experienced. Transported African women had an unusually low birthrate, possibly due to the trauma of the Middle Passage and the harsh working conditions in Virginia, to traditionally longer nursing periods among Africans that were accompanied by sexual abstinence, or to many women's unwillingness to bear children in servitude. The native-born population eventually began to replace itself. By the second quarter of the eighteenth century, slaves were living longer and in greater numbers. Concentrations of blacks on some of the larger plantations gave them the opportunity to develop a more stable family life and a degree of autonomy in their quarters.

For any slave, stability was temporal. The legal and religious institutions that promoted marriage and families for the dominant white population were indifferent or hostile to the preservation of the black family. Although masters sometimes encouraged slave marriages for their own convenience, such unions were not officially recognized by law or the established church. Some owners attempted to keep slave families together, but circumstances--bankruptcy or the master's death--could break them up at any time. Childless widow Betty Randolph's will mandated the dispersal of a large number of her slaves. In the second half of the century, slave couples were frequently separated from one another or from their children when white families relocated to the Piedmont or into growing towns like Richmond, Norfolk, Petersburg, Fredericksburg, Alexandria, and, until 1780, Williamsburg. Sometimes masters sold surplus slaves or hired them to owners who did not live in the immediate vicinity.

Despite all these obstacles and uncertainties, black men and women continued to be united by marriage ceremonies that often combined African and European traditions. Husbands and wives who were owned by different masters often lived apart. Sometimes they traveled long distances at night to visit one another. This "night-walking," an institution born of necessity, relied on a network of foot trails that became physical evidence of the family ties that bound the black community together. The Virginia Gazette printed many advertisements by masters expressing their suspicions that slaves they owned had run away to join their families. These ads testify to the fact that whites recognized the reality, if not the legality, of slave family relationships and tried to cope with runaways who were determined to preserve these connections at great personal risk.

Slaves depended on their masters for food, shelter, and health care. Enforced subservience to whites led to complex relationships of authority, obligation, and family loyalty that must have required a good bit of diplomacy, resourcefulness, and skill to negotiate safely. Rural and urban slaves who served as domestics lived in close proximity to their owners, often sleeping in the house or in nearby outbuildings. Although favored house slaves often received cast-off clothing and other gifts from their owners, they were less likely to be given the traditional Sunday off enjoyed by field hands. Always at the beck and call of their masters, they had to bargain for free time to spend with their families or to visit with friends. Town slaves had greater opportunities to choose mates and to perform services that could bring them tips.

The close proximity of their living spaces increased the influence of white and black families on one another. Children of both races played together until their serious education for adult roles began around age ten. Slave girls in their early teens provided much of the childcare in white gentry families. Slaves and whites continued to influence one another's work rhythms, living spaces, childrearing practices, speech patterns, and religious sensibilities throughout their lives.

Sometimes the interconnection between a black and white family was not only a matter of dependency but also of blood. Documentation based on a variety of sources reveals that the number of mulattoes was growing in the eighteenth century. Although laws forbade marriage between blacks and whites, interracial unions had always existed. Some voluntary relationships were based on genuine affection and were of long duration. Just as often, however, the absolute authority of masters and the powerlessness of slaves led to incidents of rape and other forms of sexual exploitation. Black women had no protection or legal recourse from these indignities. Occasionally, a mulatto child, especially if the mother and father were bound by an affectionate and long-term alliance, attained tacit acceptance or a position of favor in the white master's family. John Custis's mulatto son Jack or members of the Hemings family at Monticello come to mind.

Not all African-Virginian families were enslaved in the eighteenth century. While only a handful of free blacks lived in Williamsburg, greater numbers of free blacks resided in adjoining James City and York Counties. Though they amounted to only 3 to 4 percent of the total population in eastern Virginia, some families included both slaves and free blacks.

The laws did not apply equally to free blacks and whites. Free black women over sixteen years old were tithable until 1769, a burden from which whites were exempt because white women were not.

Williamsburg carter Matthew Ashby was the son of a white woman and a black man, a union that ultimately made him a free man. Since Matthew's mother was an indentured servant at the time of his birth, she was required to serve an additional five years. Matthew was indentured until he was thirty-one, not twenty-one, because his father was black. Matthew's wife, Ann, was a slave, so his children were slaves too. In 1769, Matthew purchased his wife and children from their owner; shortly thereafter, he petitioned the governor and Virginia Council for permission to manumit his family. The authorities acted favorably on Ashby's petition not long before his death in 1771.

The establishment of stable, emotionally and spiritually nurturing black families is a story of unremitting struggle against great odds. Slaves showed a tenacious determination to make something good out of the most unpromising circumstances. The successful formation of the African American family takes its rightful place in American history beside the other stories of heroism in the "struggle to be both free and equal."

The Family Transformed

During the course of the eighteenth century, relationships within gentry families underwent a fundamental change that set new standards that were gradually emulated throughout society. Historians sometimes call this phenomenon "the rise of the affectionate family." New ideals made hard work a virtue and upward mobility its just reward. Further, the nuclear family became the incubator of the republican ethos. Visitors to Colonial Williamsburg will see in the late-eighteenth-century family portrayed here an early reflection of the individualistic, child-centered world of today.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, marriages in gentry families were made for love more often than the unions between power families had been previously. A growing body of literature concerned with the quest for the one perfect partner reflected the growing importance of romance. Relations between family members became less formal and hierarchical and more openly emotional. The family turned inward, ceasing to be merely a microcosm of the larger society, and its public functions were gradually subordinated to its private ones. The family was increasingly regarded as a refuge from the strife and competition of the outside world, a haven for nobler principles of love, self-sacrifice, and devotion to spouses and children.

The traditional authoritarian role parents played gave way to affectionate bonds, while the relationship between husbands ad wives became more companionable. Edmund Randolph acknowledged the influence his wife had over his beliefs and attitudes. St. George Tucker wrote unabashedly emotional poetry to his wife, Frances, during their courtship and marriage and memorialized her with tender sentiments after she died.

Fathers took a more active role in day-to-day childrearing. St. George Tucker provides an excellent example. As a widower, his rules for governing the household showed Tucker's reliance on humor instead of physical punishment to mold the behavior of his children. He often referred to them playfully as "vagabonds," "rogues," "sweet brats," and even "my little monkies."

Women became more active in the spiritual direction they gave their children and servants. Obituaries of women, especially young women like Elizabeth Prentis and Frances Horrocks, emphasized the importance of faith and the value of women within a family. Death notices also reflected a more open, unrestrained grieving process.

Childhood Assumes New Importance

Along with the new emphasis on emotional values came a basic change in the way children were perceived. Infants and young children became a focus of family life and their development a source of delight to adults. Parents began to give children pet names, distinctive clothing, juvenile books, playthings, and self-consciously educational experiences. A flood of books on childcare and children's behavior tapped a growing interest in the art and science of childrearing. Parents continued to believe in the importance of raising children to be upright, moral, independent members of society, so only the way in which they were educated changed.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, families typically included six to eight children despite the fact that stillbirths and miscarriages were common for both black and white women. Fear for the health of both the newborn child and its mother was part of every childbirth experience. Lying-in was a time when female relatives and friends rallied to support this important event.

Throughout history, parents have mourned the loss of a child. It was no different in the eighteenth century. The forms grieving took became more openly emotional because the importance of the individual was broadened to include children. Landon Carter noted that his slave Winny was "greatly affected" by the loss of one of her children, as was Carter himself when, a few days later, his daughter fell ill and died while he was away. The deaths of no fewer than four of Frances and Robert Carter's children must have brought great sadness to these residents of Palace Street in Williamsburg and may have been a factor in the family's decision to move back to Nomini Hall plantation.

The design of houses reflected changing social relationships in the family: passages allowed for more privacy, beds were relegated to upstairs or back rooms, and entertainment spaces brought people together for dining and dancing. The socially driven demand for new domestic activities such as tea drinking led to the acquisition of the necessary "tools" to carry on those activities. Consumer goods such as tea equipages changed how family members--parents, children, slaves--used the home. Household servants enabled whites to devote more time to social activities.

A surplus of white men residing in the capital city may explain why some young women were successful in finding partners among higher social ranks. Successful artisan families in Williamsburg like the Powells and Geddys were able to marry their socially accomplished daughters into the lower gentry. Living in Williamsburg had other benefits. Parents who could afford to school their children in music, dance, and deportment had ready access to instructors and tutors in the social arts. While living in town, the Robert Carter family took advantage of these opportunities to enrich their children's education. After they returned to Nomini Hall, it was necessary to employ a live-in tutor and engage the services of an itinerant music and dance master.

The Williamsburg community illustrates a mix of status groups through marriages. Members of the prominent Blair family married both across and down the social scale. Blair women were linked to local merchants, artisans, and professionals through marriage connections to Armistead Burwell, Benjamin Powell, Dr. George Gilmer, and Robert Andrews. Town clerk Joseph Davenport's daughters married cabinetmaker/tavern keeper Anthony Hay, Yorktown butcher Patrick Matthews, merchants John Greenhow and William Holt, and printers Alexander Purdie and Augustine Davis.

The more openly affectionate, child-centered family that gained acceptance by the end of the eighteenth century struck a sympathetic chord with the nation's republican sentiments. The lessening of paternal authority paralleled the rejection of the patriarchal authority of the English monarch. The substitution of a more egalitarian ideal in place of a hierarchial one was mirrored in the more equal sharing of authority in the family. Successful middle-class families became more self-assured, less accepting of subordination, and more confident of their own values.

War and the New Nation Force Further Change

Family life was altered in other ways as husbands left for war while their wives at home found themselves temporarily--or sometimes permanently--single parents. St. George Tucker's letters record the strain imposed by separation. Wives' roles expanded as they assumed duties usually performed by their absent husbands. Children had to adapt to changing family conditions too. The postwar idealogy of republicanism changed people's thinking about education. Mothers were expected to take primary responsibility for instructing children in the virtues necessary to a new republic; as a consequence, girls received more education.

Some families in the new nation lost rather than gained opportunities. Deprived of land, their population reduced, and important aspects of their traditional culture under assault, Native Americans were repeatedly uprooted and often obliged to create a different family life. Slave families still lacked legal rights. Eve and her son George ran away from Betty Randolph on hearing about Dunmore's Proclamation but found small comfort for their act of courage and desperation. This slave family was later split when Betty Randolph changed her will and ordered that Eve be sold rather than given to a niece along with George. The opening of the frontier and the cotton lands farther south after the Revolution meant that separation of African American families was both distant and final.

Historian Stephanie Grauman Wolf writes, "More modest nuclear families, ones that gave each of the children a chance through education, love, and a comfortable existence . . . were, in a way, the right kind of family structure for the new nation with its emphasis on individual attainment." Wolf refers to an archetype that was beginning to emerge among some white middling and gentry families toward the end of the period we interpret at Colonial Williamsburg. Over the next two hundred years, momentous changes in American society that profoundly affected families of all economic and ethnic groups continued to take place. Westward expansion, new waves of immigration, the growth (and reduction) of economic opportunity, eight wars, the abolition of slavery, the Victorian codification of behavior, the industrialization and urbanization of America, the civil rights struggle, the women's movement, the nonconformism of the tumultuous 1960s, and changes occurring in society today have all helped shape families as we now know them and the idea of family as we think it should be. Yet, behind all the apparent differences, some characteristic and important features of the modern American family are a legacy of the eighteenth century.

"Redefining Family" and the Becoming Americans Theme

Even before the Revolution, changes in white family values and experiences heralded transformations. Those families with skills, material goods, and knowledge of the appropriate behaviors increased their opportunities for social mobility. Racism and lack of opportunity meant that Native-American and slave families' full participation in the new republic remained an unfulfilled promise. A few slaves such as "Saul, the property of George Kelly Esquire," whose petition was brought before the 1792 Virginia Assembly were granted freedom for service to the Revolutionary cause. Virginia law recognized that some marriages were not successful, so limited divorce became available here and also in the rest of the nation. After the war, educating children to participate in the new republic contributed to the optimistic expectations for the United States. The transformed white American family became a cornerstone of the American character.

Bibliography

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