Geddy, however, did not subscribe himself as a member of the Association until July of 1770, and only three months later he ventured to advertise, along with country-made wares, “a small, but neat assortment, of imported JEWELLERY (ordered before the association took place).”
The boycotting of British goods, however, was a political technique adopted for a particular purpose—to put pressure on Parliament to repeal the Townshend duties or other offensive legislation. When that purpose was accomplished, or seemed certain to be, the old preferences for imported goods reasserted themselves. Thus we find Washington in August 1770 ordering from London a quantity of expensive clothing and some jewelry “if the Act of Parliament Imposing a Duty upon Tea, Paper, &ca, for the purpose of raising a Revenue in America shoud [sic] be Totally repeald before the above goods are shipped.” And by the next spring Geddy was again advertising goods just imported from London.
Throughout the colonial period it was generally more convenient for Virginia planters to acquire high quality goods in London than in Virginia. This was a consequence of the narrowly channeled two-way trade between the great plantations of the Chesapeake Bay and the great commission-merchant warehouses along the Thames. The planters grew and exported enormous quantities of tobacco, almost all of it sent to London and sold there. Against the proceeds they ordered whatever they needed and wanted of manufactured necessities and luxuries: textiles, clothing, furniture, hardware, ceramics, glass, and silver.
To the planter aristocrats, silver plate (not to be confused with plated silverware) performed three functions at once. It was a form of stable investment, easily watched over, easily identified in case of theft, and easily converted into cash if needed. In the absence of safe-deposit boxes or bank vaults, silver in daily use was as safe a form of “savings” as the times offered. Secondly, plate was a form of social ostentation in which all members of the group indulged to a greater or lesser degree. Finally, plate was useful in the proper serving of the owners and their guests; a well-to-do planter would have thought it impossible to get along without quantities of food and drink on his table, and almost as unthinkable not to have some silver articles on the table, too.
Although only the wealthy families possessed an occasional large and elaborate silver piece of London manufacture—such as epergnes and monteiths—many Virginians not of the planter aristocracy did own silver. Alexander Purdie, for example, one proprietor of the Virginia Gazette, owned real estate, nine slaves, and 130 ounces of plate when he died. Other professional men and even artisans in colonial Virginia also owned silver in amounts that seem large in contrast to what their modern counterparts generally possess.
One other circumstance that helps explain the dearth of silver articles made in Williamsburg was the scarcity of raw material. There simply was not very much silver or gold in Virginia for colonial craftsmen to work with. Despite the great hopes of the early Jamestown settlers—hopes that in Captain John Smith’s day nearly cost the settlement its life—no silver has ever been mined in Virginia, and precious little gold. For his raw material, the colonial Virginia silversmith thus had to depend on imports.
Precious metal might come into the silversmith’s hands in any of three forms. One was bullion, bars of the virgin metal fresh from the mines and refineries of Mexico or Peru. Another was in the form of minted coins of various countries. The third consisted of silver or gold articles already wrought, but available for one reason or another to be melted down and reworked.
Perhaps in the seventeenth century a certain amount of bullion reached the English colonies from the Spanish Main in pirate ships. But there is no reason to suppose that this flow continued in the eighteenth century—and certainly not into Virginia. Governor Spotswood’s expedition in 1718 had returned with Blackbeard’s head swinging from a bowsprit and his followers in irons, most of them to be hanged afterward at Williamsburg.
Of course, pirates would as soon have coin as bullion, and pirate ships sometimes found haven in colonial ports, especially in those where no official inquired how poor sailor men suddenly acquired such great wealth. Some said that the colonial officials of North Carolina, New England, New York, and even Pennsylvania could be encouraged to look the other way on such occasions. At any rate, a sizable amount of silver coin entered the colonies in this fashion, at least in the seventeenth century.
Little of this lucre came directly into Virginia, but for other reasons than the attitude of the governors. The rural colonies of the South could offer neither the concealing refuge of large cities nor the lusty recreation that such cities in the middle and northern colonies promised to pleasure-hungry sailors.