This book - Centro de Estudos Anglicanos

12THE EPISCOPALIANStance to widows, orphans, illegitimate children, and the handicapped); the hiringof lay readers to lead worship whenever ordained ministers were not available;and the financial support of clergy. 25Despite these legislative decisions and the initial enthusiasm of secular andreligious leaders in England, seventeenth-century Virginia proved to be an extraordinarilydifficult place in which to organize and govern a church. Generalsocial instability and an appalling death rate, caused by disease, malnutrition, andfrequent warfare with Indians, marked the first decades of the colony’s existence.With some aggressive recruiting, the Virginia Company poured approximately10,000 English settlers into Jamestown between 1607 and 1622, but only about20 percent were still alive in 1622. As one critic of the venture remarked, “insteadof a plantacion, Virginia will shortly get the name of a slaughterhouse.” 26 Clergysuffered at the same rate as the rest of the populace, for about two-thirds of the67 Anglican clergymen who served in Virginia between 1607 and 1660 diedwithin five years of their arrival. 27As the historian Jon Butler has observed, institutional Anglicanism experienced“its own starving time” in the colony throughout the middle decades of the seventeenthcentury. 28 Many parishes had neither a church building nor a permanentpriest, and lay readers often had to officiate at prayer on Sunday mornings. Thegeographical size of many parishes also proved to be a major obstacle, for it wasimpossible for a single priest to provide adequate supervision for a parish thatstretched over an area 30 to 100 miles long. Furthermore, in contrast to England,where a bishop exercised control over each diocese, Virginia had no bishops, andEnglish ecclesiastical authorities were unable to exercise direct jurisdiction overthe colony. Although the royal governor had the theoretical power to carry outsome of the administrative functions of a bishop, for instance, the induction ofclergymen as rectors of parishes, vestries usually resisted the governor’s attemptto exercise this authority. Vestries not only controlled the recruitment and selectionof clergy but also refused to present their clergy for induction as rectors. Asa result, vestries in Virginia were free to govern their parishes in any manner theychose. Clergy often complained about the chaos that reigned in the colony, andthey continually petitioned English leaders for increased material and financialsupport.Over time, the pursuit of wealth from the cultivation of tobacco graduallyreplaced missionary zeal as the principal motivation for settling in Virginia. Inconjunction with this shift from a religious to a commercial focus, Dutch tradersbegan to bring enslaved Africans as workers into the colony. While the initialsmall group of Africans who arrived in 1619 were probably treated about thesame as white servants, race-based slavery eventually emerged by the 1660s. TheHouse of Burgesses decreed in 1662 that, in the case of children of Africandescent, legal status depended not on that of their father (as in English law) buton that of their mother. Thus, since the child of a black slave woman had to bea slave as well, the words “Negro” and “slave” soon became synonymous. Beforethat period, Christianity and slavery had also been assumed to be incompatible,