Villages and small towns dotted the rural landscape of seventeenth-century England, but in the Chesapeake towns were few and far between. Instead, tobacco farms occupied small clearings surrounded by hundreds of acres of wilderness. Since tobacco was a labor-intensive crop that quickly exhausted the fertility of the soil, each farmer cultivated only 5 or 10 percent of his land at any one time. Tobacco planters sought land that fronted a navigable river in order to minimize the work of transporting the heavy barrels of tobacco onto ships. A settled region thus resembled a lacework of farms stitched around waterways.

Most Chesapeake colonists were nominally Protestants. Attendance at Sunday services and conformity to the doctrines of the Church of England were required of all English men and women. Few clergymen migrated to the Chesapeake, however, and too few of those who did were models of piety. Certainly, some colonists took their religion seriously. Church courts punished fornicators, censured blasphemers, and served notice on parishioners who spent Sundays “goeing a fishing.” But on the whole, religion did not awaken the zeal of Chesapeake settlers, certainly not as it did the zeal of New England settlers in these same years (as discussed in “Church, Covenant, and Conformity” in chapter 4). The religion of the Chesapeake colonists was Anglican, but their faith lay in the turbulent, competitive, high-stakes gamble of survival as tobacco planters.

The situation was similar in the Catholic colony of Maryland. In 1632, England’s King Charles I granted his Catholic friend Lord Baltimore about six and a half million acres in the northern Chesapeake region. Lord Baltimore intended to create a refuge for Catholics, who suffered severe discrimination in England. He fitted out two ships, the Ark and the Dove; gathered about 150 settlers; and sent them to the new colony, where they arrived on March 25, 1634. However, Maryland failed to live up to Baltimore’s hopes. The colony’s population grew very slowly for twenty years, and most settlers were Protestants rather than Catholics. The religious turmoil of the Puritan Revolution in England (see “Religious Controversies and Economic Changes” in chapter 4) spilled across the Atlantic, creating conflict between Maryland’s few Catholics—most of them wealthy and prominent—and the Protestant majority, most of them neither wealthy nor prominent. Maryland’s leaders hoped to attract decent people as servants, unlike those in Virginia who were described by one Marylander as “the scumme of the people, . . . vagrants and runnewayes from their m[aste]rs, deabauched, idle, lazie squanderers, [and] jaylbirds.” During the 1660s, however, Maryland began to attract settlers very much like Virginia’s, and most of them were Protestants. Although Catholics and the Catholic faith continued to exert influence in Maryland, the colony’s society, economy, politics, and culture became nearly indistinguishable from Virginia’s. Both colonies shared a devotion to tobacco, the true faith of the Chesapeake.