DID THOMAS OTTOWELL PURCHASE A SECOND WIFE?

If you can find a complete copy of the below mentioned article, it is well worth the read! It can be found online, but only through a site where you must pay a membership fee (or find a library that has a subscription) so that you may print out and read the whole article.

I have a copy of the article, but it won't allow me to reproduce it here. For some reason it just won't go through. I can print it out, but even if I try and scan and post the pages to this blog, it won't allow it. Not sure how that works.

The First American Boom: Virginia 1618 – 1630

Author: Edmund S. Morgan

Source: The William and Mary Quarterly, April 1971

Volume: 28, No. 2, Pages 169 – 198

Published by: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture

Another good source of some information – although it is very brief and lacks detail – is the article at:https://thehistoryjunkie.com/jamestown-colony-facts/

Jamestown Colony Facts: Economic and Population Boom

Virginia’s population grew rapidly from 1618 until 1622, rising from a few hundred to nearly 1,400 people. Wheat was also grown in Virginia starting in 1618.

1619: First Democratic Assembly

The Inside of the current Jamestown Church, upon the general site of the original and the location where the first law in America was made

On June 30, 1619, Slovak and Polish artisans [who had been enticed to come to the colony by the Virginia Company] conducted the first labor strike for democratic rights in Jamestown. The British Crown overturned the legislation in the Virginia House of Burgesses in its first meeting and granted the workers equal voting rights on July 21, 1619. Afterward, the labor strike ended and the artisans resumed their work.

The House of Burgesses, the first legislature of elected representatives in America, met in the Jamestown Church. One of their first laws was to set a minimum price for the sale of tobacco and set forth plans for the creation of the first ironworks of the colony. This legislative group was the predecessor of the modern Virginia General Assembly.

1619: First Africans

In August 1619 “20 and odd Negros” arrived on the Dutch Man-of-War ship at Jamestown colony. This is the earliest record of Black people in colonial America  These colonists were freemen and indentured servants.  At this time the slave trade between Africa and the English colonies had not yet been established.

Records from 1623 and 1624 listed the African inhabitants of the colony as servants, not slaves. In the case of William Tucker, the first Black person born in the colonies, freedom was his bright right.

*[The “Dutch” ship was actually an English privateer ship operating under a Dutch letter of marque. It was used for raiding non-English ships and taking their goods from them. This ship was the White Lion;  which brought the first Africans to the English colony of Virginia in 1619, a year before the arrival of the Mayflower in New England].

1620: More craftsmen from Germany and Italy arrive

By 1620, more German settlers from Hamburg, Germany, who were recruited by the Virginia Company set up and operated one of the first sawmills in the region.

Among the Germans were several other skilled craftsmen carpenters, and pitch/tar/soap-ash makers, who produced some of the colony’s first exports of these products. The Italians included a team of glassmakers.

1621: Arrival of marriageable women

During 1621 fifty-seven unmarried women sailed to Virginia under the auspices of the Virginia Company, which paid for their transport and provided them with a small bundle of clothing and other goods to take with them. A colonist who married one of the women would be responsible for repaying the Virginia Company for his wife’s transport and provisions. [Any man who wished to marry one of these women had to buy her. The money paid back the Virginia Company for expenses in getting the women to the colony]. The women traveled on three ships, The Marmaduke, the Warwick, and Tyger.

Many of the women were not “maids” but widows. Some others were children. Priscilla, the eight-year-old daughter of Joanne Palmer, who traveled with her mother and her new stepfather, Thomas Palmer, on the Tyger. Some were women who were traveling with family or relatives: Ursula Clawson, “kinswoman” of ancient planter Richard Pace, traveled with Pace and his wife on the Marmaduke.

Ann Jackson also came on the Marmaduke, in the company of her brother John Jackson, both of them bound for Martin’s Hundred. Ann Jackson was one of the women taken captive by the Powhatans during the Indian Massacre of 1622. She was not returned until 1630. The Council ordered that she should be sent back to England on the first available ship, perhaps because she was suffering from the consequences of her long captivity.

Some of the women sent to Virginia did marry. Most disappeared from the records—perhaps killed in the massacre, perhaps dead from other causes or they returned to England. In other words, they shared the fate of most of their fellow colonists”

Bringing “maidens” [women of good character] to be wives didn't work for most men. Not enough of them were brought over, and most men could not afford to pay the price for one. Many of the men in the colony were there for a short time, then after they made their money, they moved on and married women either back in England or elsewhere. Then they settled down in other places besides the Virgina Colony area. Or, they were barely getting by on what they were able to grow on their land in tobacco, so there was no way they could afford to purchase a wife.

Even if a man made money growing and selling tobacco, he often didn't reap the rewards. There were ships that would sail up the James River and anchor in the river. These ships sold liquor and possibly prostitutes services. These ships were the ones that made the money! They would collect harvested tobacco from the colonists, then sail back to England and sell it for money.

Basically, the “Boom Years” of the Jamestown Colony was like the “wild west”! Very similar in how things happened.

Men came in to make get-rich-quick then left. The Virginia Colony brought in women to try and get the men to put down roots after their indentured servitude was complete – that is if they survived it or were able to resist trading it for liquor on the “river boats” that anchored in the James River.

The Virginia Company wanted to create a community in the region, and to do this they needed “families” to start homesteads and farm, etc. and have children, etc. What really seems to have begun to helped people stay in the area was when in 1619 the ability for colonists to OWN their own land, and plant and sell the crops began. Landownership was the key factor. Instead of the Virginia Company owning the land – on which “tennents” worked; similar to the shear cropper system in the post Civil War South.

From what I have looked at, it seems that Thomas Ottowell did NOT purchase a wife. He most likely did not have the money to do so – at least not when the women were first brought over from England.

He is said to have married a second time a widow: Margaret (Dauson) Grimes in about 1630, possibly in Jamestown Colony area in Virginia. I would assume he married her after he had fulfilled his indentured servant time. More digging will hopefully turn up more information.