Everything we know of the time and the people reinforces the belief that the planters of Virginia—the only ones who could afford large outlays in silver—bought their plate in London rather than having it made by smiths of the colony. To the older generation of planters England was “home.” They were bound to the mother country by ties of sentiment and culture. Their church was the Church of England, their books and songs were English books and songs, and English-made goods were to them obviously better than the country-made variety.

So strong was this preference for wares imported from London that it persisted through the various nonimportation associations and buy-American movements. In Williamsburg, curiously enough, the leading silversmiths seem to have been less enthusiastic “associators” than were tradesmen elsewhere—certainly less enthusiastic than such leaders of the planter group as George Washington.

Washington, whose preference for British goods was as strong as anyone’s, nevertheless sponsored the nonimportation agreement adopted at the Raleigh Tavern in May 1769. James Geddy, Jr., in a newspaper advertisement of that September, declared that he had

now on hand a neat assortment of country made GOLD and SILVER WORK, which he will sell at the lowest rates for cash, or exchange for old gold or silver. As he has not imported any jewellery this season, he flatters himself he will meet with encouragement, especially from those Ladies and Gentlemen who are friends to the association.

Geddy, however, did not subscribe himself as a member of the Association until July of 1770, and only three months later he ventured to advertise, along with country-made wares, “a small, but neat assortment, of imported JEWELLERY (ordered before the association took place).”

The boycotting of British goods, however, was a political technique adopted for a particular purpose—to put pressure on Parliament to repeal the Townshend duties or other offensive legislation. When that purpose was accomplished, or seemed certain to be, the old preferences for imported goods reasserted themselves. Thus we find Washington in August 1770 ordering from London a quantity of expensive clothing and some jewelry “if the Act of Parliament Imposing a Duty upon Tea, Paper, &ca, for the purpose of raising a Revenue in America shoud [sic] be Totally repeald before the above goods are shipped.” And by the next spring Geddy was again advertising goods just imported from London.

Throughout the colonial period it was generally more convenient for Virginia planters to acquire high quality goods in London than in Virginia. This was a consequence of the narrowly channeled two-way trade between the great plantations of the Chesapeake Bay and the great commission-merchant warehouses along the Thames. The planters grew and exported enormous quantities of tobacco, almost all of it sent to London and sold there. Against the proceeds they ordered whatever they needed and wanted of manufactured necessities and luxuries: textiles, clothing, furniture, hardware, ceramics, glass, and silver.

To the planter aristocrats, silver plate (not to be confused with plated silverware) performed three functions at once. It was a form of stable investment, easily watched over, easily identified in case of theft, and easily converted into cash if needed. In the absence of safe-deposit boxes or bank vaults, silver in daily use was as safe a form of “savings” as the times offered. Secondly, plate was a form of social ostentation in which all members of the group indulged to a greater or lesser degree. Finally, plate was useful in the proper serving of the owners and their guests; a well-to-do planter would have thought it impossible to get along without quantities of food and drink on his table, and almost as unthinkable not to have some silver articles on the table, too.

Although only the wealthy families possessed an occasional large and elaborate silver piece of London manufacture—such as epergnes and monteiths—many Virginians not of the planter aristocracy did own silver. Alexander Purdie, for example, one proprietor of the Virginia Gazette, owned real estate, nine slaves, and 130 ounces of plate when he died. Other professional men and even artisans in colonial Virginia also owned silver in amounts that seem large in contrast to what their modern counterparts generally possess.

One other circumstance that helps explain the dearth of silver articles made in Williamsburg was the scarcity of raw material. There simply was not very much silver or gold in Virginia for colonial craftsmen to work with. Despite the great hopes of the early Jamestown settlers—hopes that in Captain John Smith’s day nearly cost the settlement its life—no silver has ever been mined in Virginia, and precious little gold. For his raw material, the colonial Virginia silversmith thus had to depend on imports.

Precious metal might come into the silversmith’s hands in any of three forms. One was bullion, bars of the virgin metal fresh from the mines and refineries of Mexico or Peru. Another was in the form of minted coins of various countries. The third consisted of silver or gold articles already wrought, but available for one reason or another to be melted down and reworked.

Perhaps in the seventeenth century a certain amount of bullion reached the English colonies from the Spanish Main in pirate ships. But there is no reason to suppose that this flow continued in the eighteenth century—and certainly not into Virginia. Governor Spotswood’s expedition in 1718 had returned with Blackbeard’s head swinging from a bowsprit and his followers in irons, most of them to be hanged afterward at Williamsburg.

Of course, pirates would as soon have coin as bullion, and pirate ships sometimes found haven in colonial ports, especially in those where no official inquired how poor sailor men suddenly acquired such great wealth. Some said that the colonial officials of North Carolina, New England, New York, and even Pennsylvania could be encouraged to look the other way on such occasions. At any rate, a sizable amount of silver coin entered the colonies in this fashion, at least in the seventeenth century.

Little of this lucre came directly into Virginia, but for other reasons than the attitude of the governors. The rural colonies of the South could offer neither the concealing refuge of large cities nor the lusty recreation that such cities in the middle and northern colonies promised to pleasure-hungry sailors.

In the eighteenth century, however, some coins from France, Spain, Portugal, Arabia, Mexico, and Peru did arrive and circulate in Virginia—pieces of eight, doubloons, pistoles, pistareens, crusadoes, and “dog dollars.” The last, thought to be Dutch in origin, were so called from the crude representation of a lion on one face. Curiously, there were few British crowns, half-crowns, or shillings.

Despite this variety, coined money was by no means plentiful in the colonies in the eighteenth century. The scarcity of specie, in fact, was one of the strongest colonial arguments against the stamp tax in 1765. Nevertheless, coins of known weight and fineness provided the colonial silversmith with a fairly reliable source of raw material.

The third possible source—plate to be melted down and reworked—was less certain as to quantity but of trustworthy quality. Customers who wanted articles of silver made in the newest fashion often had to provide the smith with raw material—usually an equal weight of plate in the older style. If the old pieces had been wrought in England the mark either of a lion passant or the seated figure of Britannia attested to the fineness of the metal used.

But this source was of little help to the smiths of Williamsburg. Although Virginia probably contained as much concentrated wealth and as much plate as any other colony, the Virginians who held most of it leaned toward England in heart and pocketbook. If they wanted their silver refashioned, where more logical to have it done than in London—where fashions were made and where the pieces had been wrought in the first place.