Gunpowder and Tea Cakes: My Journey with Felicity

Explains what it would’ve been like growing up in Felicity’s time in Williamsburg, Virginia. Topics include:

• How Williamsburg’s original residents included Indians of several tribes, each with their own culture and identity
• English colonists settled Virginia and although Indians tried to protect their land and traditions, tribal leaders struggled to make wise choices for their people in that time of great change
• Williamsburg’s population included wealthy landowners, middle-class families like the Merrimans, and poor laborers
  • Young people like Ben who weren’t wealthy often became apprentices to learn a trade
  • Others would become indentured servants by agreeing to work without pay in exchange for passage to America or to pay for a crime
  • Young girls would be indentured as maids or household workers, although some would learn a trade, such as dressmaking
• Wives and daughters of silversmiths, shoemakers, and other skilled craftsmen would help in the family business
• Slightly more than half of the Virginians were African-American
  • While a few free blacks earned their living as workers or craftspeople, most black people were enslaved workers who labored on tobacco plantations
  • Some slaves worked in towns
  • By Felicity’s time, slavery had become the foundation of Virginia’s wealth
• The cabins in the plantations’ slave quarters were small and rough, but it was still a place of refuge for field workers who worked in otherwise brutal conditions
  • Members of families living on different farms would meet in secret under the cover of darkness
  • Music helped enslaved people hold on to their traditions, express their faith, and remain hopeful that freedom would come
• The approach of the American Revolution challenged everyone in Virginia to decide their loyalties
  • Lord Dunmore, who was the governor of Virginia, ordered British marines to steal gunpowder from the Magazine
  • While Town leaders tried to keep an angry crowd from charging into the Palace, when two young men tried to break into the Magazine and were injured by a trap gun, furious citizens could not be calmed
  • Lord Dunmore and his family ended up fleeing Williamsburg