Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lecture by Kristalyn Shefveland

In the late seventeenth century, Virginia colonist Edmund Scarburgh and his mistress Ann Toft owned and sold many Native laborers as indentured servants and slaves. A man of great ambition, Scarburgh engaged in economic activities throughout the Chesapeake, New England, New York, the Netherlands, and England. His occupations included county burgess, surveyor-general (1655-1670), amateur physician, maritime shipping and trade, the production of goods, namely tobacco and salt, and the brokering of Native laborers. All told, Scarburgh held 75,000 total acres of land and innumerable tithable English, African, and Native servants and
slaves. By understanding the types of labor and the economic activities of the Scarburgh and Toft plantations, this lecture will address the importance of Native labor to the early Virginia plantation economy and examine the personal and professional relationship of Toft and Scarburgh, power brokers of the Eastern Shore.