Sarah Drummond (d. by 28 April 1696), principal in a court case, was probably related to Edward Prescott, who bequeathed to her a half-acre lot in James City County in 1662. Her birth name, the date and place of her birth, and the names of her parents are not known. Early in the 1650s she married William Drummond, who from 1664 to 1667 served as governor of Albemarle County in the Province of Carolina, a colony on Albemarle Sound that later became North Carolina. They had two sons, two daughters, and at least one other child. They lived in Virginia on property called the Governor's Land, in James City County, which her husband leased from Governor Sir William Berkeley.

Drummond and her husband actively supported Bacon's Rebellion of 1676. When warned that the king might send an army to Virginia to put down the rebellion, she reportedly broke a straw or small stick in two and declared, "I value the power of England no more than that." Berkeley hanged her husband on 20 January 1677 and confiscated his property, and later the governor's widow, Frances Culpeper Stephens Berkeley, seized crops and other goods from the Governor's Land. Drummond began a determined campaign to reclaim the property. She went to England, obtained letters of administration for her husband's estate from the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, and petitioned the Committee for Trade and Plantations to have the property restored to her. She charged that the governor had illegally executed her husband without a jury trial and alleged that the actions of the Berkeleys had left her and her five children starving in the woods. The committee recommended that Charles II order the property restored to Drummond, and on 22 October 1677 the king issued instructions accordingly.

Drummond then returned to Virginia and sued Frances Berkeley to recover the property she had removed from the Governor's Land plantation. When the royal directive was presented to the General Court in Jamestown in June 1678, it ignited a firestorm. Berkeley's allies on the court believed that Drummond's husband had had a fair trial and that her claims were invalid because the Governor's Land legally belonged to the governor, not to the Drummonds, and that the governor's widow should therefore have been able to remove property that Drummond's husband had forfeited as a result of his conviction and execution for treason. Drummond's son-in-law Samuel Swann acted as her attorney and eventually obtained a verdict in her favor, but the full record of the court's proceedings does not survive. The bitterness between Drummond and Berkeley lasted until their deaths. The two intelligent, strong-willed women usually got what they wanted in a society dominated by men.

In addition to allowing her to recover at least some of her husband's estate, Drummond's petitions, letters, and lawsuit also provided later historians with evidence on which to base an interpretation of Sir William Berkeley's behavior during and after the rebellion that severely stained his reputation.

Drummond executed a power of attorney to one of her sons on 10 October 1679 to recover property and money owed to her in what became North Carolina. Her name last appears in a dated public record on a 1683 list of people who leased parts of the Governor's Land. The date of Sarah Drummond's death is not recorded, but she may have died at her son-in-law's plantation at Swann's Point, in Surry County, where she was buried sometime before 28 April 1696.

Sources Consulted:
Wilcomb E. Washburn, "The Humble Petition of Sarah Drummond," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 13 (1956): 354–375; petitions to and reports of Committee for Trade and Plantations, Public Record Office (PRO) Colonial Office Papers (CO) 1/41, fols. 208–211, National Archives, Kew, Eng.; petitions to the king and Privy Council, PRO CO 1/41, fol. 242, PRO Privy Council Register 2/66, 133–135, 156; petitions and letters to governor and records of Council and General Court in PRO CO 1/42, fols. 1, 180, 290–293, PRO CO 5/1371, fols. 264–273, Henry R. McIlwaine, ed., Minutes of the Council and General Court of Colonial Virginia, 2d ed. (1979), 519, 521, 534, and Herbert R. Paschal, ed., "George Bancroft's 'Lost Notes' on the General Court Records of Seventeenth-Century Virginia," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 91 (1983): 358 (quotation); William Waller Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature, in the Year 1619… (1809–1823), 2:558; copy of power of attorney to John Drummond, 10 Oct. 1679, Accession 27430, Library of Virginia; John Soane, survey of land for Thomas Culpeper, baron Culpeper of Thoresway, 1683, William Salt Library, Stafford, Eng. (copy at Rockefeller Library, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Williamsburg, Va.); reference by son-in-law to burial site in Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 38 (1920): 31.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Virginia Bernhard.

How to cite this page:
Virginia Bernhard,"Sarah Drummond (d. by 1696)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2016 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Drummond_Sarah, accessed [today's date]).

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