Baptizing Matilda

This month Elizabeth Jackson gives a piece of her mind to Martha Corbin (Turberville) of Portobago on the Rappahannock River and reports on a special event at Stratford. Working with letters from yesteryear we realize emphatically that the 'Devil is in the details,' and often those details lie just beyond our grasp. In consequence we float the known and the suspected to the surface and work assiduously on swelling their numbers by cracking the not-yet-known. This month's letter hums with all the above. If you have additional information about Elizabeth Jackson or Nancy Lawson, email us at steffey@stratfordhall.org

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Transcript

Stratford Mail

II.

Welcome to Stratford Mail, a Production of Stratford Hall Historic Preserve, where we give voice to Stratford Hall’s people, places and past to engage, educate, and inspire. Find us on the web at stratfordhall.org. I’m Director of Research Dr. Gordon Blaine Steffey.

This month we read a letter from a woman whose story remains mostly mysterious to us, about a woman well-known to us. The letter carries a month and day but no year, and posts from Stratford Hall to Portobago in what was Essex county, Virginia.  

Letters have an appeal that other forms of writing struggle to match. Their color and texture help us to descend from the stratospheric view of history to just over the shoulder of the writers who are neck deep in living. Part of the appeal of letters is that we recognize in even the most historically and culturally distant letter ordinary human stuff that looks a lot like our ordinary human stuff. During the 18th century revolutionary struggle, letter writing was a critical tool in the organization and coordination of resistance efforts and public onboarding, but letters continued to serve the mundane purpose of simply letting folks know about goings-on in the immediate orbit of the letter-writer. Letters that survive the devastations of time because of their connection to important persons or momentous events don’t necessarily escape unscathed. Persons and references once known stand just beyond the reach of knowledge, for now, frustrating and enticing researchers. This month’s Letter is ripe with knowns and not-yet-knowns:        

"To Miss Martha Corbin, Potobac. Stratford, September the 27. Dear Miss. I gladly embrace this opportunity of writing to you to put you in mind that there is such a being as my Selfe. I did not think you two would have slited me so, your Little cosen matilda was made a cristan the 25 of September the godmothers was mrs. Washingtonmiss becy taloe miss molly Washington miss Nancy Lawson Stod proxse for miss nelly Lee and I for mrs. Fauquer, godfathers was col. Taloe  mr. Robert Carter, mrs. Washington  Col. Frank Lee, the Esqr, mrs Washington and your ant Lee Dessers there love to you I am your very humble Servant, Elizabeth Jackson."

Recipient Martha Corbin was the granddaughter of Richard Lee III of London, the older brother of Thomas Lee of Stratford. Martha received this letter at Portobago, her birth family’s plantation on the southside of the Rappahannock river in what was Essex and now Caroline County, a superhighway in the tobacco trade. 

The letter was preserved in Dr. Edmund Jennings Lee’s 1895 publication Lee of Virginia, where he identifies letter-writer Elizabeth Jackson as the ‘housekeeper’ at Stratford, a claim that‘s difficult to corroborate because we have no independent confirmation of it. At the same time, Elizabeth’s report on her proxy role in a home religious ritual suggests that she was a paid member of the Stratford household. Elizabeth may (and this is speculative) may have been born Elizabeth Fleming before marriage to Thaddeus Jackson, whose roots in Westmoreland county could well have brought the family into contact with the Lees.    

The letter is written in unpolished English, and it is difficult to know whether the word transcribed dessers results from inability to decipher the original script or is some kind of shorthand. The letter nevertheless opens with a stern rebuke for Martha Corbin. Elizabeth reminds Martha: I exist, and your behavior hasn’t been reflective of that. Apparently their relationship was somewhat closer in the past than now and Elizabeth has been surprised by what she perceives as a personal slight. I did not think that you too would have done this, she says (possibly indicating that others had behaved similarly). Is the slight a response to some change in Elizabeth’s life? Is it somehow related to the christening she debriefs to Martha? These are among the not-yet-knowns.  

Elizabeth spends more than half the letter on the christening of Martha’s cousin Matilda Ludwell Lee, daughter of Philip Ludwell Lee and Elizabeth Steptoe Lee (later Fendall) of Stratford Hall. This helps us to date the letter. With only a few fascinating exceptions to be Lee was to be Anglican, and Anglicans practiced infant baptism on the first or second Sunday after birth. Matilda was therefore a September baby; the year is unclear, likely 1766 but possibly as early as 1764. 

Like most elite families in Virginia the sons and daughters of Stratford received their Christian identities through baptism at home, in the Great Hall, which ran counter to a published 1632 statute: And all preachings, administringe of the communion baptizing of children and marriages shall be done in church except in cases of necessitie (Statutes at Large, Vol. 1: 183, ed. Hening, 1823). 

In 1719 the Representative of the Bishop of London in the American Colonies, Rev. James Blair, complained of “deviations” from ideal practice, among which he listed: “we are obliged to Baptize … at private houses.” Lee family friend Colonel Landon Carter of Sabine Hall complained bitterly when Reverend Isaac Giberne rejected his request for a home baptism. But why would home baptism cause friction with the Church? Because it decentered church power; It drained authority away from churches where ministers held sway and pooled it around the grand houses and working plantations where gentry, the Lees, the Washingtons, the Carters, reigned supreme. Like another of Blair’s deviations (home burial), home baptism quietly but insistently suggested the household rather than the church was the headwater of Christian identity and practice. 

Matilda became a Christian in the Lee family home, on Lee family land, in a gown stitched by her grandmother, Hannah Ludwell Lee, and worn by her father, aunts, and uncles at their baptisms, and was ritually dipped in water held by a silver montieth or other luxury basin that belonged to the house of Lee rather than the house God. “Matilda Ludwell Lee, I baptize thee, in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.” 

Home baptism cut across one of the big ideas behind baptism, namely, that the household of birth is replaced by the household of God, into which the infant is adopted. “We yield thee hearty thanks, most merciful Father, that it hath pleased thee to regenerate this Infant with thy Holy Spirit, to receive her for thine own Child by adoption, and to incorporate her into thy holy Church.” The thankful We in the Great Hall of Stratford was narrower, less diverse, than the We spoken at the nearby Pope’s Creek Church. And we can scarcely glimpse behind either We the multiracial, multireligious society that Virginia already was. 

Baptism at home affirmed and reinforced the social order into which Matilda was born. Baptism represented not just a spiritual rebirth but a social birth, an opportunity for family, friends, and allies to gather and to forge and temper social networks that nourished elite families in the colony. Blood, business, and politics were reflected and foreshadowed in the roster of godparents who promised the presiding minister to steer Matilda on the Christian path. 

The Washingtons of Bushfield, the Tayloes of Mt Airy, the Carters of Nomony Hall, Catharine, wife to Francis Fauquier, Lieutenant Governor of Virginia Colony, Matilda’s uncle Francis Lightfoot Lee (soon to be married to Matilda’s godparent Miss Becky Tayloe), and cousin Richard Lee of nearby Lee Hall all stand godparent in person or by proxy to baby Matilda. 

The network of her father’s relationships now embraced her. The Anglican Christianity she imbibed was no immediate threat to the social order from which she would profit and others would suffer. What must Elizabeth Jackson have thought? Elizabeth, who just in that moment was submerged in the identity of another, Catharine Fauquier, what must she have thought of the advantage, affluence, and influence concentrated in that great hall? 

Perhaps she was thinking even then how to pique Martha Corbin’s attention with this event? But perhaps she was thinking how beautiful baby Matilda looked in her grandmother’s linen gown; or perhaps her mind strayed to her duties during the sumptuous feasting that must inevitably follow this ritual, the long day ahead? But for these few lines, Elizabeth is lost in thought. 

Through Matilda’s marriage to her cousin Henry Lee III, Light Horse Harry of the Continental Army, the Lees of Stratford and the Lees of Leesylvania will join, and Stratford becomes the birthplace of Robert Edward Lee through Harry’s second wife. But that’s a topic for a different day. Thank you for following Stratford Mail. From Stratford Hall Historic Preserve in Westmoreland County Virginia, where the linen gown in which Matilda was baptized is now on exhibit, I’m Director of Research Dr. Gordon Blaine Steffey.  

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Credits:
Music is William Ross Chernoff's "In Shadows"
AI voices courtesy of Play.ht and Murf.ai (except Dr. Steffey)

© Dr. Gordon Blaine Steffey, 2023

 *for more information on religion in 18th century Virginia, see the excellent A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith by Dr. Lauren F. Winner