Smith vs. Wingfield: Remaking the Social Order in the Chesapeake

This article examines the clash between John Smith and Edward Maria Wingfield as an emblematic example of wider social frictions between a rising yeomanry and a declining gentry, setting the conflict in a discursive context that combined approval and condemnation of the thrifty yeoman with a traditional denigration of commerce. The article shows how Smith rose to prominence in the Virginia colony by deploying bargaining skills acquired as the eldest son of an enterprising yeoman farmer. In Smith’s hands, private bargaining becomes a practice and a discourse of legitimation, a means of overcoming his subordinate position in the social hierarchy. In the Virginia colony, trade, money and markets – a system of abstract equivalences – cause social distinctions to melt.

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