them. James appointed commissioners to search out what was wrong with Virginia. Certain men were shipped to Virginia to get evidence there, as well as support from the Virginia Assembly. In this attempt they signally failed. Then to England came a Virginia member of the Virginia Council, with long letters to King and Privy Council: the Sandys-Southampton administration had done more than well for Virginia. The letters were letters of appeal. The colony hoped that “the Governors sent over might not have absolute authority, but might be restrained to the consent of the Council . . . . But above all they made it their most humble request that they might still retain the liberty of their General Assemblies; than which nothing could more conduce to the publick Satisfaction and publick Liberty.”
In London another paper, drawn by Cavendish, was given to King and Privy Council. It answered many accusations, and among others the statement that “the Government of the companies as it then stood was democratical and tumultuous, and ought therefore to be altered, and reduced into the Hands of a few.” It is of interest to hear these men speak, in the year 1623, in an England that was close to absolute monarchy, to a King who with all his house stood out for personal rule. “However, they owned that, according to his Majesty’s Institution, their Government had some Show of a democratical Form; which was nevertheless, in that Case, the most just and profitable, and most conducive to the Ends and Effects aimed at thereby . . . . Lastly, they observed that the opposite Faction cried out loudly against Democracy, and yet called for Oligarchy; which would, as they conceived, make the Government neither of better Form, nor more monarchical.”
But the dissolution of the Virginia Company was at hand. In October, 1623, the Privy Council stated that the King had “taken into his princely Consideration the distressed State of the Colony of Virginia, occasioned, as it seemed, by the Ill Government of the Company.” The remedy for the ill-management lay in the reduction of the Government into fewer hands. His Majesty had resolved therefore upon the withdrawal of the Company’s charter and the substitution, “with due regard for continuing and preserving the Interest of all Adventurers and private persons whatsoever,” of a new order of things. The new order proved, on examination, to be the old order of rule by the Crown. Would the Company surrender the old charter and accept a new one so modeled?
The Company, through the country party, strove to gain time. They met with a succession of arbitrary measures and were finally forced to a decision. They would not surrender their charter. Then a writ of quo warranto was issued; trial before the King’s Bench followed; and judgment was rendered against the Company in the spring term of 1624. Thus with clangor fell the famous Virginia Company.
That was one year. The March of the next year James Stuart, King of England, died. That young Henry who was Prince of Wales when the Susan Constant, the Goodspeed, and the Discovery sailed past a cape and named it for him Cape Henry, also had died. His younger brother Charles, for whom was named that other and opposite cape, now ascended the throne as King Charles the First of England.
In Virginia no more General Assemblies are held for four years. King Charles embarks upon “personal rule.” Sir Francis Wyatt, a good Governor, is retained by commission and a Council is appointed by the King. No longer are affairs to be conducted after a fashion “democratical and tumultuous.” Orders are transmitted from England; the Governor, assisted by the Council, will take into cognizance purely local needs; and when he sees some
occasion he will issue a proclamation.
Wyatt, recalled finally to England; George Yeardley again, who died in a year’s time; Francis West, that brother of Lord De La Warr and an ancient planter — these in quick succession sit in the Governor’s chair. Following them John Pott, doctor of medicine, has his short term. Then the King sends out Sir John Harvey, avaricious and arbitrary, “so haughty and furious to the Council and the best gentlemen of the country,” says Beverley, “that his tyranny grew at last insupportable.”
The Company previously, and now the King, had urged upon the Virginians a diversified industry and agriculture. But Englishmen in Virginia had the familiar emigrant idea of making their fortunes. They had left England; they had taken their lives in their hands; they had suffered fevers, Indian attacks, homesickness, deprivation. They had come to Virginia to get rich. Now clapboards and sassafras, pitch, tar, and pine trees for masts, were making no fortune for Virginia shippers. How could they, these few folk far off in America, compete in products of the forest with northern Europe? As to mines of gold and silver, that first rich vision had proved a disheartening mirage. “They have great hopes that the mountains are very rich, from the discovery of a silver mine made nineteen years ago, at a place about four days’ journey from the falls of James river; but they have not the means of transporting the ore.” So, dissatisfied with some means of livelihood and disappointed in others, the Virginians turned to tobacco.
Every year each planter grew more tobacco; every year more ships were laden. In 1628 more than five hundred thousand pounds were sent to England, for to England it must go, and not elsewhere. There it must struggle with the best Spanish, for a long time valued above the best Virginian. Finally, however, James and after him Charles, agreed to exclude the Spanish. Virginia and the Somers Islands alone might import tobacco into England. But offsetting this, customs went up ruinously; a great lump sum must go annually to the King; the leaf must enter only at the port of London; so forth and so on. Finally Charles put forth his proposal to monopolize the industry, giving Virginia tobacco the English market but limiting its production to the amount which the Government could sell advantageously. Such a policy required cooperation from the colonists. The King therefore ordered the Governor to grant a Virginia Assembly, which in turn should dutifully enter into partnership with him — upon his terms. So the Virginia Assembly thus came back into history. It made a “Humble Answere” in which, for all its humility, the King’s proposal was declined. The idea of the royal monopoly faded out, and Virginia continued on its own way.
The General Assembly, having once met, seems of its own motion to have continued meeting. The next year we find it in session at Jamestown, and resolving “that we should go three severall marches upon the Indians, at three severall times of the yeare,” and also “that there be an especiall care taken by all commanders and others that the people doe repaire to their churches on the Saboth day, and to see that the penalty of one pound of tobacco for every time of absence, and 50 pounds for every month’s absence . . . be levyed, and the delinquents to pay the same.” About this time we read: “Dr. John Pott, late Governor, indicted, arraigned, and found guilty of stealing cattle, 13 jurors, 3 whereof councellors. This day wholly spent in pleading; next day, in unnecessary disputation.”
These were moving times in the little colony whose population may by now have been five thousand. Harvey, the Governor, was rapacious; the King at home, autocratic. Meanwhile, signs of change and of unrest were not wanting in Europe. England was hastening toward revolution; in Germany the Thirty Years’ War was in mid-career; France and Italy were racked by strife; over the world the peoples groaned under the strain of oppression. In science, too, there was promise of revolution. Harvey–not that Governor Harvey of Virginia, but a greater in England was writing upon the circulation of the blood. Galileo brooded over ideas of the movement of the earth; Kepler, over celestial harmonies and solar rule. Descartes was laying the foundation of a new philosophy.
In the meantime, far across the Atlantic, bands of Virginians went out against the Indians — who might, or might not, God knows! have put in a claim to be considered among the oppressed peoples. In Virginia the fat, black, tobacco-fields, steaming under a sun like the sun of Spain, called for and got more labor and still more labor. Every little sailing ship brought white workmen — called servants — consigned, indentured, apprenticed to many-acred planters. These, in return for their passage money, must serve Laban for a term of years, but then would receive Rachel, or at least Leah, in the shape of freedom and a small holding and provision with which to begin again their individual life. If they were ambitious and energetic they might presently be able, in turn, to import labor for their own acres. As yet, in Virginia, there were few African slaves — not more perhaps than a couple of hundred. But whenever ships brought them they were readily purchased.
In Virginia, as everywhere in time of change, there arose anomalies. Side by side persisted a romantic devotion to the King and a determination to have popular assemblies; a great sense of the rights of the white individual together with African slavery; a practical, easy-going, debonair naturalism side by side with an Established Church penalizing alike Papist, Puritan, and atheist. Even so early as this, the social tone was set that was to hold for many and many a year. The suave climate was somehow to foster alike a sense of caste and good neighborliness — class distinctions and republican ideas.
The “towns” were of the fewest and rudest — little more than small palisaded hamlets, built of frame or log, poised near the water of the river James. The genius of the land was for the plantation rather than the town. The fair and large brick or frame planter’s house of a later time had not yet risen, but the system was well inaugurated that set a main or “big” house upon some fair site, with cabins clustered near it, and all surrounded, save on the river front, with far-flung acres, some planted with grain and the rest with tobacco. Up and down the river these estates were strung together by the rudest roads, mere tracks through field and wood. The cart was as yet the sole wheeled vehicle. But the Virginia planter — a horseman in England — brought over horses, bred horses, and early placed horsemanship in the catalogue of the necessary colonial virtues. At this point, however, in a land of great and lesser rivers, with a network of creeks, the boat provided the chief means of communication. Behind all, enveloping all, still spread the illimitable forest, the haunt of Indians and innumerable game.
Virginians were already preparing for an expansion to the north. There was a man in Virginia named William Claiborne. This individual–able, determined, self-reliant, energetic–had come in as a young man, with the title of surveyorgeneral for the Company, in the ship that brought Sir Francis Wyatt, just before the massacre of 1622. He had prospered and was now Secretary of the Province. He held lands, and was endowed with a bold, adventurous temper and a genius for business. In a few years he had established widespread trading relations with the Indians. He and the men whom he employed penetrated to the upper shores of Chesapeake, into the forest bordering Potomac and Susquehanna: Knives and hatchets, beads, trinkets, and colored cloth were changed for rich furs and various articles that the Indians could furnish. The skins thus gathered Claiborne shipped to London merchants, and was like to grow wealthy from what his trading brought.
Looking upon the future and contemplating barter on a princely scale, he set to work and obtained exhaustive licenses from the immediate Virginian authorities, and at last from the King himself. Under these grants, Claiborne began to provide settlements for his numerous traders. Far up the Chesapeake, a hundred miles or so from Point Comfort, he found an island that he liked, and named it Kent Island. Here for his men he built cabins with gardens around them, a mill and a church. He was far from the river James and the mass of his fellows, but he esteemed himself to be in Virginia and upon his own land. What came of Claiborne’s enterprise the sequel has to show.
CHAPTER IX. MARYLAND
There now enters upon the scene in Virginia a man of middle age, not without experience in planting colonies, by name George Calvert, first Lord Baltimore. Of Flemish ancestry, born in Yorkshire, scholar at Oxford, traveler, clerk of the Privy Council, a Secretary of State under James, member of the House of Commons, member of the Virginia Company, he knew many of the ramifications of life. A man of worth and weight, he was placed by temperament and education upon the side of the court party and the Crown in the growing contest over rights. About the year 1625, under what influence is not known, he had openly professed the Roman Catholic faith — and that took courage in the seventeenth century, in England!
Some years before, Calvert had obtained from the Crown a grant of a part of Newfoundland, had named it Avalon, and had built great hopes upon its settlement. But the northern winter had worked against him. He knew, for he had resided there himself with his family in that harsh clime. “From the middle of October to the middle of May there is a sad fare of winter on all this land.” He is writing to King Charles, and he goes on to say “I have had strong temptations to leave all proceedings in plantations . . . but my inclination carrying me naturally to these kind of works . . . I am determined to commit this place to fishermen that are able to encounter storms and hard weather, and to remove myself with some forty persons to your Majesty’s dominion of Virginia where, if your Majesty will please to grant me a precinct of land . . . I shall endeavour to the utmost of my power, to deserve it.”
With his immediate following he thereupon does sail far southward. In October, 1629, he comes in between the capes, past Point Comfort and so up to Jamestown — to the embarrassment of that capital, as will soon be evident.
Here in Church of England Virginia was a “popish recusant!” Here was an old “court party” man, one of James’s commissioners, a person of rank and prestige, known, for all his recusancy, to be in favor with the present King. Here was the Proprietary of Avalon, guessed to be dissatisfied with his chilly holding, on the scent perhaps of balmier, easier things!
The Assembly was in session when Lord Baltimore came to Jamestown. All arrivers in Virginia must take the oath of supremacy. The Assembly proposed this to the visitor who, as Roman Catholic, could not take it, and said as much, but offered his own declaration of friendliness to the powers that were. This was declined. Debate followed, ending with a request from the Assembly that the visitor depart from Virginia. Some harshness of speech ensued, but hospitality and the amenities fairly saved the situation. One Thomas Tindall was pilloried for “giving my lord Baltimore the lie and threatening to knock him down.” Baltimore thereupon set sail, but not, perhaps, until he had gained that knowledge of conditions which he desired.
In England he found the King willing to make him a large grant, with no less powers than had clothed him in Avalon. Territory should be taken from the old Virginia; it must be of unsettled land — Indians of course not counting. Baltimore first thought of the stretch south of the river James between Virginia and Spanish Florida–a fair land of woods and streams, of good harbors, and summer weather. But suddenly William Claiborne was found to be in London, sent there by the Virginians, with representations in his pocket. Virginia was already settled and had the intention herself of expanding to the south.
Baltimore, the King, and the Privy Council weighed the matter. Westward, the blue mountains closed the prospect. Was the South Sea just beyond their sunset slopes, or was it much farther away, over unknown lands, than the first adventurers had guessed? Either way, too rugged hardship marked the west! East rolled the ocean. North, then? It were well to step in before those Hollanders about the mouth of the Hudson should cast nets to the south. Baltimore accordingly asked for a grant north of the Potomac.
He received a huge territory, stretching over what is now Maryland, Delaware, and a part of Pennsylvania. The Potomac, from source to mouth, with a line across Chesapeake and the Eastern Shore to the ocean formed his southern frontier; his northern was the fortieth parallel, from the ocean across country to the due point above the springs of the Potomac. Over this great expanse he became “true and absolute lord and proprietary,” holding fealty to England, but otherwise at liberty to rule in his own domain with every power of feudal duke or prince. The King had his allegiance, likewise a fifth part of gold or silver found within his lands. All persons going to dwell in his palatinate were to have “rights and liberties of Englishmen.” But, this aside, he was lord paramount. The new country received the name Terra Mariae — Maryland — for Henrietta Maria, then Queen of England.
Here was a new land and a Lord Proprietor with kingly powers. Virginians seated on the James promptly petitioned King Charles not to do them wrong by so dividing their portion of the earth. But King and Privy Council answered only that Virginia and Maryland must “assist each other on all occasions as becometh fellow-subjects.” William Claiborne, indeed, continued with a determined voice to cry out that lands given to Baltimore were not, as had been claimed, unsettled, seeing that he himself had under patent a town on Kent Island and another at the mouth of the Susquehanna.
Baltimore was a reflective man, a dreamer in the good sense of the term, and religiously minded. At the height of seeming good fortune he could write:
“All things, my lord, in this world pass away . . . . They are but lent us till God please to call for them back again, that we may not esteem anything our own, or set our hearts upon anything but Him alone, who only remains forever.” Like his King, Baltimore could carry far his prerogative and privilege, maintaining the while not a few degrees of inner freedom. Like all men, here he was bound, and here he was free.
Baltimore’s desire was for “enlarging his Majesty’s Empire,” and at the same time to provide in Maryland a refuge for his fellow Catholics. These were now in England so disabled and limited that their status might fairly be called that of a persecuted people. The mounting Puritanism promised no improvement. The King himself had no fierce antagonism to the old religion, but it was beginning to be seen that Charles and Charles’s realm were two different things. A haven should be provided before the storm blackened further. Baltimore thus saw put into his hands a high and holy opportunity, and made no doubt that it was God-given. His charter, indeed, seemed to contemplate an established church, for it gave to Baltimore the patronage of all churches and chapels which were to be “consecrated according to the ecclesiastical laws of our kingdom of England”; nevertheless, no interpretation of the charter was to be made prejudicial to “God’s holy and true Christian religion.” What was Christian and what was prejudicial was, fortunately for him, left undefined. No obstacles were placed before a Catholic emigration.
Baltimore had this idea and perhaps a still wider one: a land — Mary’s land — where all Christians might foregather, brothers and sisters in one home! Religious tolerance — practical separation of Church and State — that was a broad idea for his age, a generous idea for a Roman Catholic of a time not so far removed from the mediaeval. True, wherever he went and whatever might be his own thought and feeling, he would still have for overlord a Protestant sovereign, and the words of his charter forbade him to make laws repugnant to the laws of England. But Maryland was distant, and wise management might do much. Catholics, Anglicans, Puritans, Dissidents, and Nonconformists of almost any physiognomy, might come and be at home, unpunished for variations in belief.
Only the personal friendship of England’s King and the tact and suave sagacity of the Proprietary himself could have procured the signing of this charter, since it was known — as it was to all who cared to busy themselves with the matter — that here was a Catholic meaning to take other Catholics, together with other scarcely less abominable sectaries, out of the reach of Recusancy Acts and religious pains and penalties, to set them free in England-in-America; and, raising there a state on the novel basis of free religion, perhaps to convert the heathen to all manner of errors, and embark on mischiefs far too large for definition. Taking things as they were in the world, remembering acts of the Catholic Church in the not distant past, the ill-disposed might find some color for the agitation which presently did arise. Baltimore was known to be in correspondence with English Jesuits, and it soon appeared that Jesuit priests were to accompany the first colonists. At that time the Society of Jesus loomed large both politically and educationally. Many may have thought that there threatened a Rome in America. But, however that may have been, there was small chance for any successful opposition to the charter, since Parliament had been dissolved by the King, not to be summoned again for eleven years. The Privy Council was subservient, and, as the Sovereign was his friend, Baltimore saw the signing of the charter assured and began to gather together his first colonists. Then, somewhat suddenly, in April, 1632, he sickened, and died at the age of fifty-three.
His son, Cecil Calvert, second Lord Baltimore, took up his father’s work. This young man, likewise able and sagacious, and at every step in his father’s confidence, could and did proceed even in detail according to what had been planned. All his father’s rights had descended to him; in Maryland he was Proprietary with as ample power as ever a Count Palatine had enjoyed. He took up the advantage and the burden.
The father’s idea had been to go with his colonists to Maryland, and this it seems that the son also meant to do. But now, in London, there deepened a clamor against such Catholic enterprise. Once he were away, lips would be at the King’s ear. And with England so restless, in a turmoil of new thought, it might even arise that King and Privy Council would find trouble in acting after their will, good though that might be. The second Baltimore therefore remained in England to safeguard his charter and his interests.
The family of Baltimore was an able one. Cecil Calvert had two brothers, Leonard and George, and these would go to Maryland in his place. Leonard he made Governor and Lieutenant-general, and appointed him councilor. Ships were made ready — the Ark of three hundred tons and the Dove of fifty. The colonists went aboard at Gravesend, where these ships rode at anchor. Of the company a great number were Protestants, willing to take land, if their condition were bettered so, with Catholics. Difficulties of many kinds kept them all long at the mouth of the Thames, but at last, late in November, 1633, the Ark and the Dove set sail. Touching at the Isle of Wight, they took aboard two Jesuit priests, Father White and Father Altham, and a number of other colonists. Baltimore reported that the expedition consisted of “two of my brothers with very near twenty other gentlemen of very good fashion, and three hundred labouring men well provided in all things.”
These ships, with the first Marylanders, went by the old West Indies sea route. We find them resting at Barbados; then they swung to the north and, in February, 1634, came to Point Comfort in Virginia. Here they took supplies, being treated by Sir John Harvey (who had received a letter from the King) with “courtesy and humanity.” Without long tarrying, for they were sick now for land of their own, they sailed on up the great bay, the Chesapeake.
Soon they reached the mouth of the Potomac — a river much greater than any of them, save shipmasters and mariners, had ever seen — and into this turned the Ark and the Dove. After a few leagues of sailing up the wide stream, they came upon an islet covered with trees, leafless, for spring had hardly broken. The ships dropped anchor; the boats were lowered; the people went ashore. Here the Calverts claimed Maryland “for our Savior and for our Sovereign Lord the King of England,” and here they heard Mass. St. Clement’s they called the island.
But it was too small for a home. The Ark was left at anchor, while Leonard Calvert went exploring with the Dove. Up the Potomac some distance he went, but at the last he wisely determined to choose for their first town a site nearer the sea. The Dove turned and came back to the Ark, and both sailed on down the stream from St. Clement’s Isle. Before long they came to the mouth of a tributary stream flowing in from the north. The Dove, going forth again, entered this river, which presently the party named the River St. George. Soon they came to a high bank with trees tinged with the foliage of advancing spring. Here upon this bank the English found an Indian village and a small Algonquin group, in the course of extinction by their formidable Iroquois neighbors, the giant Susquehannocks. The white men landed, bearing a store of hatchets, gewgaws, and colored cloth. The first Lord Baltimore, having had opportunity enough for observing savages, had probably handed on to his sagacious sons his conclusions as to ways of dealing with the natives of the forest. And the undeniable logic of events was at last teaching the English how to colonize. Englishmen on Roanoke Island, Englishmen on the banks of the James, Englishmen in that first New England colony, had borne the weight of early inexperience and all the catalogue of woes that follow ignorance. All these early colonists alike had been quickly entangled in strife with the people whom they found in the land.
First they fell on their knees,
And then on the Aborigines.
But by now much water had passed the mill. The thinking kind, the wiser sort, might perceive more things than one, and among these the fact that savages had a sense of justice and would even fight against injustice, real or fancied.
The Calverts, through their interpreter, conferred with the inhabitants of this Indian village. Would they sell lands where the white men might peaceably settle, under their given word to deal in friendly wise with the red men? Many hatchets and axes and much cloth would be given in return.
To a sylvan people store of hatchets and axes had a value beyond many fields of the boundless earth. The Dove appeared before them, too, at the psychological moment. They had just discussed removing, bag and baggage, from the proximity of the Iroquois. In the end, these Indians sold to the English their village huts, their cleared and planted fields, and miles of surrounding forest. Moreover they stayed long enough in friendship with the newcomers to teach them many things of value. Then they departed, leaving with the English a clear title to as much land as they could handle, at least for some time to come. Later, with other Indians, as with these, the Calverts pursued a conciliatory policy. They were aided by the fact that the Susquehannocks to the north, who might have given trouble, were involved in war with yet more northerly tribes, and could pay scant attention to the incoming white men. But even so, the Calverts proved, as William Penn proved later, that men may live at peace with men, honestly and honorably, even though hue of skin and plane of development differ.
Now the Ark joins the Dove in the River St. George. The pieces of ordnance are fired; the colonists disembark; and on the 27th of March, 1634, the Indian village, now English, becomes St. Mary’s.
On the whole how advantageously are they placed! There is peace with the Indians. Huts, lodges, are already built, fields already cleared or planted. The site is high and healthful. They have at first few dissensions among themselves. Nor are they entirely alone or isolated in the New World. There is a New England to the north of them and a Virginia to the south. From the one they get in the autumn salted fish, from the other store of swine and cattle. Famine and pestilence are far from them. They build a “fort” and perhaps a stockade, but there are none of the stealthy deaths given by arrow and tomahawk in the north, nor are there any of the Spanish alarms that terrified the south. From the first they have with them women and children. They know that their settlement is “home.” Soon other ships and colonists follow the Ark and the Dove to St. Mary’s, and the history of this middle colony is well begun.
In Virginia, meantime, there was jealousy enough of the new colony, taking as it did territory held to be Virginian and renaming it, not for the old, independent, Protestant, virgin queen, but for a French, Catholic, queen consort — even settling it with believers in the Mass and bringing in Jesuits! It was, says a Jamestown settler, “accounted a crime almost as heinous as treason to favour, nay to speak well of that colony.” Beside the Virginian folk as a whole, one man, in particular, William Claiborne, nursed an individual grievance. He had it from Governor Calvert that he might dwell on in Kent Island, trading from there, but only under license from the Lord Proprietor and as an inhabitant of Maryland, not of Virginia. Claiborne, with the Assembly at Jamestown secretly on his side, resisted this interference with his rights, and, as he continued to trade with a high hand, he soon fell under suspicion of stirring up the Indians against the Marylanders.
At the time, this quarrel rang loud through Maryland and Virginia, and even echoed across the Atlantic. Leonard Calvert had a trading-boat of Claiborne’s seized in the Patuxent River. Thereupon Claiborne’s men, with the shallop Cockatrice, in retaliation attacked Maryland pinnaces and lost both their lives and their boat. For several years Maryland and Kent Island continued intermittently to make petty war on each other. At last, in 1638, Calvert took the island by main force and hanged for piracy a captain of Claiborne’s. The Maryland Assembly brought the trader under a Bill of Attainder; and a little later, in England, the Lords Commissioners of Foreign Plantations formally awarded Kent Island to the Lord Proprietor. Thus defeated, Claiborne, nursing his wrath, moved down the bay to Virginia.
CHAPTER X. CHURCH AND KINGDOM
Virginia, all this time, with Maryland a thorn in her side, was wrestling with an autocratic governor, John Harvey. This avaricious tyrant sowed the wind until in 1635 he was like to reap the whirlwind. Though he was the King’s Governor and in good odor in England, where rested the overpower to which Virginia must bow, yet in this year Virginia blew upon her courage until it was glowing and laid rude hands upon him. We read: “An Assembly to be called to receive complaints against Sr. John Harvey, on the petition of many inhabitants, to meet 7th of May.” But, before that month was come, the Council, seizing opportunity, acted for the whole. Immediately below the entry above quoted appears: “On the 28th of April, 1635, Sr. John Harvey thrust out of his government, and Capt. John West acts as Governor till the King’s pleasure known.”*
* Hening’s “Statutes” vol. I p. 223.
So Virginia began her course as rebel against political evils! It is of interest to note that Nicholas Martian, one of the men found active against the Governor, was an ancestor of George Washington.
Harvey, thrust out, took first ship for England, and there also sailed commissioners from the Virginia Assembly with a declaration of wrongs for the King’s ear. But when they came to England, they found that the King’s ear was for the Governor whom he had given to the Virginians and whom they, with audacious disobedience, had deposed. Back should go Sir John Harvey, still governing Virginia; back without audience the so-called commissioners, happy to escape a merited hanging! Again to Jamestown sailed Harvey. In silence Virginia received him, and while he remained Governor no Assembly sat.
But having asserted his authority, the King in a few years’ time was willing to recall his unwelcome representative. So in 1639 Governor Harvey vanishes from the scene, and in comes the well-liked Sir Francis Wyatt as Governor for the second time. For two years he remains, and is then superseded by Sir William Berkeley, a notable figure in Virginia for many years to come. The population was now perhaps ten thousand, both English born and Virginians born of English parents. A few hundred negroes moved in the tobacco fields. More would be brought in and yet more. And now above a million pounds of tobacco were going annually to England.
The century was predominantly one of inner and outer religious conflict. What went on at home in England reechoed in Virginia. The new Governor was a dyed-in-the-wool Cavalier, utterly stubborn for King and Church. The Assemblies likewise leaned that way, as presumably did the mass of the people. It was ordered in 1631: “That there bee a uniformitie throughout this colony both in substance and circumstance to the cannons and constitutions of the church of England as neere as may bee, and that every person yeald readie obedience unto them uppon penaltie of the paynes and forfeitures in that case appoynted.” And, indeed, the pains and forfeitures threatened were savage enough.
Official Virginia, loyal to the Established Church, was jealous and fearful of Papistry and looked askance at Puritanism. It frowned upon these and upon agnosticisms, atheisms, pantheisms, religious doubts, and alterations in judgment — upon anything, in short, that seemed to push a finger against Church and Kingdom. Yet in this Virginia, governed by Sir William Berkeley, a gentleman more cavalier than the Cavaliers, more royalist than the King, more churchly than the Church, there lived not a few Puritans and Dissidents, going on as best they might with Established Church and fiery King’s men. Certain parishes were predominantly Puritan; certain ministers were known to have leanings away from surplices and genuflections and to hold that Archbishop Laud was some kin to the Pope. In 1642, to reenforce these ministers, came three more from New England, actively averse to conformity. But Governor and Council and the majority of the Burgesses will have none of that. The Assembly of 1643 takes sharp action.
For the preservation of the puritie of doctrine and unitie of the church, IT IS ENACTED that all ministers whatsoever which shall reside in the collony are to be conformable to the orders and constitutions of the church of England, and the laws therein established, and not otherwise to be admitted to teach or preach publickly or privately. And that the Gov. and Counsel do take care that all nonconformists upon notice of them shall be compelled to depart the collony with all conveniencie. And so in consequence out of Virginia, to New England where Independents were welcome, or to Maryland where any Christian might dwell, went these tainted ministers. But there stayed behind Puritan and nonconforming minds in the bodies of many parishioners. They must hold their tongues, indeed, and outwardly conform — but they watched lynx-eyed for their opportunity and a more favorable fortune.
Having launched thunderbolts against schismatics of this sort, Berkeley, himself active and powerful, with the Council almost wholly of his party and the House of Burgesses dominantly so, turned his attention to “popish recusants.” Of these there were few or none dwelling in Virginia. Let them then not attempt to come from Maryland! The rulers of the colony legislated with vigor: papists may not hold any public place; all statutes against them shall be duly executed; popish priests by chance or intent arriving within the bounds of Virginia shall be given five days’ warning, and, if at the end of this time they are yet upon Virginian soil, action shall be brought against them. Berkeley sweeps with an impatient broom.
The Kingdom is cared for not less than the Church in Virginia. Any and all persons coming into the colony by land and by sea shall have administered to them the Oath of Supremacy and Allegiance. “Which if any shall refuse to take,” the commander of the fort at Point Comfort shall “committ him or them to prison.” Foreigners in birth and tongue, foreigners in thought, must have found the place and time narrow indeed.
On the eve of civil war there arose on the part of some in England a project to revive and restore the old Virginia Company by procuring from Charles, now deep in troubles of his own, a renewal of the old letters patent and the transference of the direct government of the colony into the hands of a reorganized and vast corporation. Virginia, which a score of years before had defended the Company, now protested vigorously, and, with regard to the long view of things, it may be thought wisely. The project died a natural death. The petition sent from Virginia shows plainly enough the pen of Berkeley. There are a multitude of reasons why Virginia should not pass from King to Company, among which these are worthy of note: “We may not admit of so unnatural a distance as a Company will interpose between his sacred majesty and us his subjects from whose immediate protection we have received so many royal favours and gracious blessings. For, by such admissions, we shall degenerate from the condition of our birth, being naturalized under a monarchical government and not a popular and tumultuary government depending upon the greatest number of votes of persons of several humours and dispositions.”
When this paper reached England, it came to a country at civil war. The Long Parliament was in session. Stafford had been beheaded, the Star Chamber swept away, the Grand Remonstrance presented. On Edgehill bloomed flowers that would soon be trampled by Rupert’s cavalry. In Virginia the Assembly took notice of these “unkind differences now in England,” and provided by tithing for the Governor’s pension and allowance, which were for the present suspended and endangered by the troubles at home. That the forces banded against the Lord’s anointed would prove victorious must at this time have appeared preposterously unlikely to the fiery Governor and the ultra-loyal Virginia whom he led. The Puritans and Independents in Virginia — estimated a little earlier at “a thousand strong” and now, for all the acts against them, probably stronger yet — were to be found chiefly in the parishes of Isle of Wight and Nansemond, but had representatives from the Falls to the Eastern Shore. What these Virginians thought of the “unkind differences” does not appear in the record, but probably there was thought enough and secret hopes.
In 1644, the year of Marston Moor, Virginia, too, saw battle and sudden and bloody death. That Opechancanough who had succeeded Powhatan was now one hundred years old, hardly able to walk or to see, dwelling harmlessly in a village upon the upper Pamunkey. All the Indians were broken and dispersed; serious danger was not to be thought of. Then, of a sudden, the flame leaped again. There fell from the blue sky a massacre directed against the outlying plantations. Three hundred men, women, and children were killed by the Indians. With fury the white men attacked in return. They sent bodies of horse into the untouched western forests. They chased and slew without mercy. In 1646 Opechancanough, brought a prisoner to Jamestown, ended his long tale of years by a shot from one of his keepers. The Indians were beaten, and, lacking such another leader, made no more organized and general attacks. But for long years a kind of border warfare still went on.
Even Maryland, tolerant and just as was the Calvert policy, did not altogether escape Indian troubles. She had to contend with no such able chief as Opechancanough, and she suffered no sweeping massacres. But after the first idyllic year or so there set in a small, constant friction. So fast did the Maryland colonists arrive that soon there was pressure of population beyond those first purchased bounds. The more thoughtful among the Indians may well have taken alarm lest their villages and hunting-grounds might not endure these inroads. Ere long the English in Maryland were placing “centinells” over fields where men worked, and providing penalties for those who sold the savages firearms. But at no time did young Maryland suffer the Indian woes that had vexed young Virginia.
Nor did Maryland escape the clash of interests which beset the beginnings of representative assemblies in all proprietary provinces. The second, like the first, Lord Baltimore, was a believer in kings and aristocracies, in a natural division of human society into masters and men. His effort was to plant intact in Maryland a feudal order. He would be Palatine, the King his suzerain. In Maryland the great planters, in effect his barons, should live upon estates, manorial in size and with manorial rights. The laboring men — the impecunious adventurers whom these greater adventurers brought out — would form a tenantry, the Lord Proprietary’s men’s men. It is true that, according to charter, provision was made for an Assembly. Here were to sit “freemen of the province,” that is to say, all white males who were not in the position of indentured servants. But with the Proprietary, and not with the Assembly, would rest primarily the lawmaking power. The Lord Proprietary would propose legislation, and the freemen of the country would debate, in a measure advise, represent, act as consultants, and finally confirm. Baltimore was prepared to be a benevolent lord, wise, fatherly.
In 1635 met the first Assembly, Leonard Calvert and his Council sitting with the burgesses, and this gathering of freemen proceeded to inaugurate legislation. There was passed a string of enactments which presumably dealt with immediate wants at St. Mary’s, and which, the Assembly recognized, must have the Lord Proprietary’s assent. A copy was therefore sent by the first ship to leave. So long were the voyages and so slow the procedure in England that it was 1637 before Baltimore’s veto upon the Assembly’s laws reached Maryland. It would seem that he did not disapprove so much of the laws themselves as of the bold initiative of the Assembly, for he at once sent over twelve bills of his own drafting. Leonard Calvert was instructed to bring all freemen together in Assembly and present for their acceptance the substituted legislation.
Early in 1638 this Maryland Assembly met. The Governor put before it for adoption the Proprietary’s laws. The vote was taken. Governor and some others were for, the remainder of the Assembly unanimously against, the proposed legislation. There followed a year or two of struggle over this question, but in the end the Proprietary in effect acknowledged defeat. The colonists, through their Assembly, might thereafter propose laws to meet their exigencies, and Governor Calvert, acting for his brother, should approve or veto according to need.
When civil war between King and Parliament broke out in England, sentiment in Maryland as in Virginia inclined toward the King. But that Puritan, Non-conformist, and republican element that was in both colonies might be expected to gain if, at home in England, the Parliamentary party gained. A Royal Governor or a Lord Proprietary’s Governor might alike be perplexed by the political turmoil in the mother country. Leonard Calvert felt the need of first-hand consultation with his brother. Leaving Giles Brent in his place, he sailed for England, talked there with Baltimore himself, perplexed and filled with foreboding, and returned to Maryland not greatly wiser than when he went.
Maryland was soon convulsed by disorders which in many ways reflected the unsettled conditions in England. A London ship, commanded by Richard Ingle, a Puritan and a staunch upholder of the cause of Parliament, arrived before St. Mary’s, where he gave great offense by his blatant remarks about the King and Rupert, “that Prince Rogue.” Though he was promptly arrested on the charge of treason, he managed to escape and soon left the loyal colony far astern.
In the meantime Leonard Calvert had come back to Maryland, where he found confusion and a growing heat and faction and side-taking of a bitter sort. To add to the turmoil, William Claiborne, among whose dominant traits was an inability to recognize defeat, was making attempts upon Kent Island. Calvert was not long at St. Mary’s ere Ingle sailed in again with letters-of-marque from the Long Parliament. Ingle and his men landed and quickly found out the Protestant moiety of the colonists. There followed an actual insurrection, the Marylanders joining with Ingle and much aided by Claiborne, who now retook Kent Island. The insurgents then captured St. Mary’s and forced the Governor to flee to Virginia. For two years Ingle ruled and plundered, sequestrating goods of the Proprietary’s adherents, and deporting in irons Jesuit priests. At the end of this time Calvert reappeared, and behind him a troop gathered in Virginia. Now it was Ingle’s turn to flee. Regaining his ship, he made sail for England, and Maryland settled down again to the ancient order. The Governor then reduced Kent Island. Claiborne, again defeated, retired to Virginia, whence he sailed for England.
In 1647 Leonard Calvert died. Until the Proprietary’s will should be known, Thomas Greene acted as Governor. Over in England, Lord Baltimore stood at the parting of the ways. The King’s cause had a hopeless look. Roundhead and Parliament were making way in a mighty tide. Baltimore was marked for a royalist and a Catholic. If the tide rose farther, he might lose Maryland. A sagacious mind, he proceeded to do all that he could, short of denying his every belief, to placate his enemies. He appointed as Governor of Maryland William Stone, a Puritan, and into the Council, numbering five members, he put three Puritans. On the other hand the interests of his Maryland Catholics must not be endangered. He required of the new Governor not to molest any person “professing to believe in Jesus Christ, and in particular any Roman Catholic.” In this way he thought that, right and left, he might provide against persecution.
Under these complex influences the Maryland Assembly passed in 1649 an Act concerning Religion. It reveals, upon the one hand, Christendom’s mercilessness toward the freethinker — in which mercilessness, whether through conviction or policy, Baltimore acquiesced — and, on the other hand, that aspiration toward friendship within the Christian fold which is even yet hardly more than a pious wish, and which in the seventeenth century could have been felt by very few. To Baltimore and the Assembly of Maryland belongs, not the glory of inaugurating an era of wide toleration for men and women of all beliefs or disbeliefs, whether Christian or not, but the real though lesser glory of establishing entire toleration among the divisions within the Christian circle itself. According to the Act,*
“Whatsoever person or persons within this Province and the Islands thereunto belonging, shall from henceforth blaspheme God, that is curse him, or deny our Saviour Jesus Christ to bee the sonne of God, or shall deny the holy Trinity, . . . or the Godhead of any of the said three persons of the Trinity, or the unity of the Godhead, or shall use or utter any reproachful speeches, words or language concerning the said Holy Trinity, or any of the said three persons thereof, shall be punished with death and confiscation or forfeiture of all his or her lands and goods to the Lord Proprietary and his heires . . . . Whatsoever person or persons shall from henceforth use or utter any reproachfull words, or speeches, concerning the blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of our Saviour, or the holy Apostles or Evangelists, or any of them, shall in such case for the first offence forfeit to the said Lord Proprietary and his heires the sum of five pound sterling . . . . Whatsoever person shall henceforth upon any occasion . . . declare, call, or denominate any person or persons whatsoever inhabiting, residing, traffiqueing, trading or comerceing within this Province, or within any of the Ports, Harbors, Creeks or Havens to the same belonging, an heritick, Scismatick, Idolator, puritan, Independant, Presbiterian, popish priest, Jesuite, Jesuited papist, Lutheran, Calvenist, Anabaptist, Brownist, Antinomian, Barrowist, Roundhead, Sepatist, or any other name or term in a reproachful manner relating to matter of Religion, shall for every such Offence forfeit . . . the sum of tenne shillings sterling . . . .
“Whereas the inforceing of the conscience in matters of Religion hath frequently fallen out to be of dangerous Consequence in those commonwealths where it hath been practised, . . . be it therefore also by the Lord Proprietary with the advice and consent of this Assembly, ordeyned and enacted . . . that no person or persons whatsoever within this Province . . .professing to beleive in Jesus Christ, shall from henceforth bee any waies troubled, molested or discountenanced for or in respect of his or her religion nor in the free exercise thereof . . . nor anyway compelled to the beleif or exercise of any other Religion against his or her consent, soe as they be not unfaithfull to the Lord Proprietary or molest or conspire against the civill Government . . .”
* “Archives of Maryland, Proceedings and Acts of the General Assembly”, vol. I, pp. 244-247.
CHAPTER XI. COMMONWEALTH AND RESTORATION
On the 30th of January, 1649, before the palace of Whitehall, Charles the First of England was beheaded. In Virginia the event fell with a shock. Even those within the colony who were Cromwell’s men rather than Charles’s men seem to have recoiled from this act. Presently, too, came fleeing royalists from overseas, to add their passionate voices to those of the royalists in Virginia. Many came, “nobility, clergy and gentry, men of the first rate.” A thousand are said to have arrived in the year after the King’s death.
In October the Virginia Assembly met. Parliament men — and now these were walking with head in the air — might regret the execution of the past January, and yet be prepared to assert that with the fall of the kingdom fell all powers and offices named and decreed by the hapless monarch. What was a passionate royalist government doing in Virginia now that England was a Commonwealth? The passionate government answered for itself in acts passed by this Assembly. With swelling words, with a tragic accent, it denounced the late happenings in England and all the Roundhead wickedness that led up to them. It proclaimed loyalty to “his sacred Majesty that now is” — that is, to Charles Stuart, afterwards Charles the Second, then a refugee on the Continent. Finally it enacted that any who defended the late proceedings, or in the least affected to question “the undoubted and inherent right of his Majesty that now is to the Collony of Virginia” should be held guilty of high treason; and that “reporters and divulgers” of rumors tending to change of government should be punished “even to severity.”
Berkeley’s words may be detected in these acts of the Assembly. In no great time the Cavalier Governor conferred with Colonel Henry Norwood, one of the royalist refugees to Virginia. Norwood thereupon sailed away upon a Dutch ship and came to Holland, where he found “his Majesty that now is.” Here he knelt, and invited that same Majesty to visit his dominion of Virginia, and, if he liked it, there to rest, sovereign of the Virginian people. But Charles still hoped to be sovereign in England and would not cross the seas. He sent, however, to Sir William Berkeley a renewal of his Governor’s commission, and appointed Norwood Treasurer of Virginia, and said, doubtless, many gay and pleasant things.
In Virginia there continued to appear from England adherents of the ancient regime. Men, women, and children came until to a considerable degree the tone of society rang Cavalier. This immigration, now lighter, now heavier, continued through a rather prolonged period. There came now to Virginia families whose names are often met in the later history of the land. Now Washingtons appear, with Randolphs, Carys, Skipwiths, Brodnaxes, Tylers, Masons, Madisons, Monroes, and many more. These persons are not without means; they bring with them servants; they are in high favor with Governor and Council; they acquire large tracts of virgin land; they bring in indentured labor; they purchase African slaves; they cultivate tobacco. From being English country gentlemen they turn easily to become Virginia planters.
But the Virginia Assembly had thrown a gauntlet before the victorious Commonwealth; and the Long Parliament now declared the colony to be in contumacy, assembled and dispatched ships against her, and laid an embargo upon trade with the rebellious daughter. In January of 1652 English ships appeared off Point Comfort. Four Commissioners of the Commonwealth were aboard, of whom that strong man Claiborne was one. After issuing a proclamation to quiet the fears of the people, the Commissioners made their way to Jamestown. Here was found the indomitable Berkeley and his Council in a state of active preparation, cannon trained. But, when all was said, the Commissioners had brought wisely moderate terms: submit because submit they must, acknowledge the Commonwealth, and, that done, rest unmolested! If resistance continued, there were enough Parliament men in Virginia to make an army. Indentured servants and slaves should receive freedom in exchange for support to the Commonwealth. The ships would come up from Point Comfort, and a determined war would be on. What Sir William Berkeley personally said has not survived. But after consultation upon consultation Virginia surrendered to the commonwealth.
Berkeley stepped from the Governor’s chair, retiring in wrath and bitterness of heart to his house at Greenspring. In his place sat Richard Bennett, one of the Commissioners. Claiborne was made Secretary. King’s men went out of office; Parliament men came in. But there was no persecution. In the bland and wide Virginia air minds failed to come into hard and frequent collision. For all the ferocities of the statute books, acute suffering for difference of opinion, whether political or religious, did not bulk large in the life of early Virginia.
The Commissioners, after the reduction of Virginia, had a like part to play with Maryland. At St. Mary’s, as at Jamestown, they demanded and at length received submission to the Commonwealth. There was here the less trouble owing to Baltimore’s foresight in appointing to the office of Governor William Stone, whose opinions, political and religious, accorded with those of revolutionary England. Yet the Governor could not bring himself to forget his oath to Lord Baltimore and agree to the demand of the Commissioners that he should administer the Government in the name of “the Keepers of the Liberties of England.” After some hesitation the Commissioners decided to respect his scruples and allow him to govern in the name of the Lord Proprietary, as he had solemnly promised.
In Virginia and in Maryland the Commonwealth and the Lord Protector stand where stood the Kingdom and the King. Many are far better satisfied than they were before; and the confirmed royalist consumes his grumbling in his own circle. The old, exhausting quarrel seems laid to rest. But within this wider peace breaks out suddenly an interior strife. Virginia would, if she could, have back all her old northward territory. In 1652 Bennett’s Government goes so far as to petition Parliament to unseat the Catholic Proprietary of Maryland and make whole again the ancient Virginia. The hand of Claiborne, that remarkable and persistent man, may be seen in this.
In Maryland, Puritans and Independents were settled chiefly about the rivers Severn and Patuxent and in a village called Providence, afterwards Annapolis. These now saw their chance to throw off the Proprietary’s rule and to come directly under that of the Commonwealth. So thinking, they put themselves into communication with Bennett and Claiborne. In 1654 Stone charged the Commissioners with having promoted “faction, sedition, and rebellion against the Lord Baltimore.” The charge was well founded. Claiborne and Bennett assumed that they were yet Parliament Commissioners, empowered to bring “all plantations within the Bay of Chesapeake to their due obedience to the Parliament and Commonwealth of England.” And they were indeed set against the Lord Baltimore. Claiborne would head the Puritans of Providence; and a troop should be raised in Virginia and march northward. The Commissioners actually advanced upon St. Mary’s, and with so superior a force that Stone surrendered, and a Puritan Government was inaugurated. A Puritan Assembly met, debarring any Catholics. Presently it passed an act annulling the Proprietary’s Act of Toleration. Professors of the religion of Rome should “be restrained from the exercise thereof.” The hand of the law was to fall heavily upon “popery, prelacy, or licentiousness of opinion.” Thus was intolerance alive again in the only land where she had seemed to die!
In England now there was hardly a Parliament, but only the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell. Content with Baltimore’s recognition of the Protectorate, Cromwell was not prepared to back, in their independent action, the Commissioners of that now dissolved Parliament. Baltimore made sure of this, and then dispatched messengers overseas to Stone, bidding him do all that lay in him to retake Maryland. Stone thereupon gathered several hundred men and a fleet of small sailing craft, with which he pushed up the bay to the Severn. In the meantime the Puritans had not been idle, but had themselves raised a body of men and had taken over the Golden Lyon, an armed merchantman lying before their town. On the 24th of March, 1655, the two forces met in the Battle of the Severn. “In the name of God, fall on!” cried the men of Providence, and “Hey for St. Mary’s!” cried the others. The battle was won by the Providence men. They slew or wounded fifty of the St. Mary’s men and desperately wounded Stone himself and took many prisoners, ten of whom were afterwards condemned to death and four were actually executed.
Now followed a period of up and down, the Commissioners and the Proprietary alike appealing to the Lord Protector for some expression of his “determinate will.” Both sides received encouragement inasmuch as he decided for neither. His own authority being denied by neither, Cromwell may have preferred to hold these distant factions in a canceling, neutralizing posture. But far weightier matters, in fact, were occupying his mind. In 1657, weary of her “very sad, distracted, and unsettled condition,” Maryland herself proceeded — Puritan, Prelatist, and Catholic together — to agree henceforth to disagree. Toleration viewed in retrospect appears dimly to have been seen for the angel that it was. Maryland would return to the Proprietary’s rule, provided there should be complete indemnity for political offenses and a solemn promise that the Toleration Act of 1649 should never be repealed. This without a smile Baltimore promised. Articles were signed; a new Assembly composed of all manner of Christians was called; and Maryland returned for a time to her first allegiance.
Quiet years, on the whole, follow in Virginia under the Commonwealth. The three Governors of this period — Bennett, Digges, and Mathews are all chosen by the Assembly, which, but for the Navigation Laws,* might almost forget the Home Government. Then Oliver Cromwell dies; and, after an interval, back to England come the Stuarts. Charles II is proclaimed King. And back into office in Virginia is brought that staunch old monarchist, Sir William Berkeley — first by a royalist Assembly and presently by commission from the new King.
* See Editor’s Note on the Navigation Laws at the end of this volume.
Then Virginia had her Long Parliament or Assembly. In 1661, in the first gush of the Restoration, there was elected a House of Burgesses so congenial to Berkeley’s mind that he wished to see it perpetuated. For fifteen years therefore he held it in being, with adjournments from one year into another and with sharp refusals to listen to any demand for new elections. Yet this demand grew, and still the Governor shut the door in the face of the people and looked imperiously forth from the window. His temper, always fiery, now burned vindictive; his zeal for King and Church and the high prerogatives of the Governor of Virginia became a consuming passion.
When Berkeley first came to Virginia, and again for a moment in the flare of the Restoration, his popularity had been real, but for long now it had dwindled. He belonged to an earlier time, and he held fast to old ideas that were decaying at the heart. A bigot for the royal power, a man of class with a contempt for the generality and its clumsily expressed needs, he grew in narrowness as he grew in years. Berkeley could in these later times write home, though with some exaggeration: “I thank God there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience into the world and printing has divulged them, and libels against the best governments! God keep us from both!” But that was the soured zealot for absolutism — William Berkeley the man was fond enough of books and himself had written plays.
The spirit of the time was reactionary in Virginia as it was reactionary in England. Harsh servant and slave laws were passed. A prison was to be erected in each county; provision was made for pillory and stocks and duckingstool; the Quakers were to be proceeded against; the Baptists who refused to bring children to baptism were to suffer. Then at last in 1670 came restriction of the franchise:
“Act III. ELECTION OF BURGESSES BY WHOM. WHEREAS the usuall way of chuseing burgesses by the votes of all persons who having served their tyme are freemen of this country who haveing little interest in the country doe oftener make tumults at the election to the disturbance of his Majestie’s peace, than by their discretions in their votes provide for the conservation thereof, by makeing choyce of persons fitly qualifyed for the discharge of soe greate a trust, And whereas the lawes of England grant a voyce in such election only to such as by their estates real or personall have interest enough to tye them to the endeavour of the publique good; IT IS HEREBY ENACTED, that none but freeholders and housekeepers who only are answerable to the publique for the levies shall hereafter have a voice in the election of any burgesses in this country.”
*Hening’s “Statutes”, vol. II, p. 280.
Three years later another woe befell the colony. That same Charles II — to whom in misfortune Virginia had so adhered that for her loyalty she had received the name of the Old Dominion — now granted “all that entire tract, territory, region, and dominion of land and water commonly called Virginia, together with the territory of Accomack,” to Lord Culpeper and the Earl of Arlington. For thirty-one years they were to hold it, paying to the King the slight annual rent of forty shillings. They were not to disturb the colonists in any guaranteed right of life or land or goods, but for the rest they might farm Virginia. The country cried out in anger. The Assembly hurried commissioners on board a ship in port and sent them to England to besiege the ear of the King.
Distress and discontent increased, with good reason, among the mass of the Virginians. The King in England, his councilors, and Parliament, played an unfatherly role, while in Virginia economic hardships pressed ever harder and the administration became more and more oppressive. By 1676 the gunpowder of popular indignation was laid right and left, awaiting the match.
CHAPTER XII. NATHANIEL BACON
To add to the uncertainty of life in Virginia, Indian troubles flared up again. In and around the main settlements the white man was safe enough from savage attack. But it was not so on the edge of the English world, where the white hue ran thin, where small clusters of folk and even single families built cabins of logs and made lonely clearings in the wilderness.
Not far from where now rises Washington the Susquehannocks had taken possession of an old fort. These Indians, once in league with the Iroquois but now quarreling violently with that confederacy, had been defeated and were in a mood of undiscriminating bitterness and vengeance. They began to waylay and butcher white men and women and children. In self protection Maryland and Virginia organized in common an expedition against the Indian stronghold. In the deep woods beyond the Potomac, red men and white came to a parley. The Susquehannocks sent envoys. There was wrong on both sides. A dispute arose. The white men, waxing angry, slew the envoys — an evil deed which their own color in Maryland and in Virginia reprehended and repudiated. But the harm was done. From the Potomac to the James Indians listened to Indian eloquence, reciting the evils that from the first the white man had brought. Then the red man, in increasing numbers, fell upon the outlying settlements of the pioneers.
In Virginia there soon arose a popular clamor for effective action. Call out the militia of every county! March against the Indians! Act! But the Governor was old, of an ill temper now, and most suspicious of popular gatherings for any purpose whatsoever. He temporized, delayed, refused all appeals until the Assembly should meet.
Dislike of Berkeley and his ways and a growing sense of injury and oppression began to quiver hard in the Virginian frame. The King was no longer popular, nor Sir William Berkeley, nor were the most of the Council, nor many of the burgesses of that Long Assembly. There arose a loud demand for a new election and for changes in public policy.
Where a part of Richmond now stands, there stretched at that time a tract of fields and hills and a clear winding creek, held by a young planter named Nathaniel Bacon, an Englishman of that family which produced “the wisest, greatest, meanest of mankind.” The planter himself lived farther down the river. But he had at this place an overseer and some indentured laborers. This Nathaniel Bacon was a newcomer in Virginia — young man who had been entered in Gray’s Inn, who had traveled, who was rumored to have run through much of his own estate. He had a cousin, also named Nathaniel Bacon, who had come fifteen years earlier to Virginia “a very rich, politic man and childless,” and whose representations had perhaps drawn the younger Bacon to Virginia. At any rate he was here, and at the age of twenty-eight the owner of much land and the possessor of a seat in the Council. But, though he sat in the Council, he was hardly of the mind of the Governor and those who supported him.
It was in the spring of 1676 that there began a series of Indian attacks directed against the plantations and the outlying cabins of the region above the Falls of the Far West. Among the victims were men of Bacon’s plantation, for his overseer and several of his servants were slain. The news of this massacre of his men set their young master afire. Even a less hideous tale might have done it, for he was of a bold and ardent nature.
Riding up the forest tracks, a company of planters from the threatened neighborhood gathered together. “Let us make a troop and take fire and sword among them!” There lacked a commander. “Mr. Bacon, you command!” Very good; and Mr. Bacon, who is a born orator, made a speech dealing with the “grievances of the times.” Very good indeed; but still there lacked the Governor’s commission. “Send a swift messenger to Jamestown for it!”
The messenger went and returned. No commission. Mr. Bacon had made an unpleasant impression upon Sir William Berkeley. This young man, the Governor said, was “popularly inclined” — had “a constitution not consistent with” all that Berkeley stood for. Bacon and his neighbors listened with bent brows to their envoy’s report. Murmurs began and deepened. “Shall we stand idly here considering formalities, while the redskins murder?” Commission or no commission, they would march; and in the end, march they did — a considerable troop — to the up-river country, with the tall, young, eloquent man at their head.
News reached the Governor at Jamestown that they were marching. In a tight-lipped rage he issued a proclamation and sent it after them. They and their leader were acting illegally, usurping military powers that belonged elsewhere! Let them disband, disperse to their dwellings, or beware action of the rightful powers! Troubled in mind, some disbanded and dispersed, but threescore at least would by no means do so. Nor would the young man “of precipitate disposition” who headed the troop. He rode on into the forest after the Indians, and the others followed him. Here were the Falls of the Far West, and here on a hill the Indians had a “fort.” This the Virginia planters attacked. The hills above the James echoed to the sound of the small, desperate fray. In the end the red men were routed. Some were slain; some were taken prisoner; others escaped into the deep woods stretching westward.
In the meantime another force of horsemen had been gathered. It was headed by Berkeley and was addressed to the pursuit and apprehension of Nathaniel Bacon, who had thus defied authority. But before Berkeley could move far, fire broke out around him. The grievances of the people were many and just, and not without a family resemblance to those that precipitated the Revolution a hundred years later. Not Bacon alone, but many others who were in despair of any good under their present masters were ready for heroic measures. Berkeley found himself ringed about by a genuine popular revolt. He therefore lacked the time now to pursue Nathaniel Bacon, but spurred back to Jamestown there to deal as best he might with dangerous affairs. At Jamestown, willy-nilly, the old Governor was forced to promise reforms. The Long Assembly should be dissolved and a new Assembly, more conformable to the wishes of the people, should come into being ready to consider all their troubles. So writs went out; and there presently followed a hot and turbulent election, in which that “restricted franchise” of the Long Assembly was often defied and in part set aside. Men without property presented themselves, gave their voices, and were counted. Bacon, who had by now achieved an immense popularity, was chosen burgess for Henricus County.
In the June weather Bacon sailed down to Jamestown, with a number of those who had backed him in that assumption of power to raise troops and go against the Indians. When he came to Jamestown it was to find the high sheriff waiting for him by the Governor’s orders. He was put under arrest. Hot discussion followed. But the people were for the moment in the ascendent, and Bacon should not be sacrificed. A compromise was reached. Bacon was technically guilty of “unlawful, mutinous and rebellious practises.” If, on his knees before Governor, Council, and Burgesses, he would acknowledge as much and promise henceforth to be his Majesty’s obedient servant, he and those implicated with him should be pardoned. He himself might be readmitted to the Council, and all in Virginia should be as it had been. He should even have the commission he had acted without to go and fight against the Indians.
Bacon thereupon made his submission upon his knees, promising that henceforth he would “demean himself dutifully, faithfully, and peaceably.” Formally forgiven, he was restored to his place in the Virginia Council. An eyewitness reports that presently he saw “Mr. Bacon on his quondam seat with the Governor and Council, which seemed a marvellous indulgence to one whom he had so lately proscribed as a rebel.” The Assembly of 1676 was of a different temper and opinion from that of the Long Assembly. It was an insurgent body, composed to a large degree of mere freemen and small planters, with a few of the richer, more influential sort who nevertheless queried that old divine right of rule. Berkeley thought that he had good reason to doubt this Assembly’s intentions, once it gave itself rein. He directs it therefore to confine its attention to Indian troubles. It did, indeed, legislate on Indian affairs by passing an elaborate act for the prosecution of the war. An army of a thousand white men was to be raised. Bacon was to be commander-in-chief. All manner of precautions were to be taken. But this matter disposed of, the Assembly thereupon turned to “the redressing several grievances the country was then labouring under; and motions were made for inspecting the public revenues, the collectors’ accounts,” and so forth. The Governor thundered; friends of the old order obstructed; but the Assembly went on its way, reforming here and reforming there. It even went so far as to repeal the preceding Assembly’s legislation regarding the franchise. All white males who are freemen were now privileged to vote, “together with the freeholders and housekeepers.”
A certain member wanted some detail of procedure retained because it was customary. “Tis true it has been customary,” answered another, “but if we have any bad customs amongst us, we are come here to mend ’em!” “Whereupon,” says the contemporary narrator, “the house was set in a laughter.” But after so considerable an amount of mending there threatened a standstill. What was to come next? Could men go further — as they had gone further in England not so many years ago? Reform had come to an apparent impasse. While it thus hesitated, the old party gained in life.
Bacon, now petitioning for his promised commission against the Indians, seems to have reached the conclusion that the Governor might promise but meant not to perform, and not only so, but that in Jamestown his very life was in danger. He had “intimation that the Governor’s generosity in pardoning him and restoring him to his place in the Council were no other than previous wheedles to amuse him.”
In Jamestown lived one whom a chronicler paints for us as “thoughtful Mr. Lawrence.” This gentleman was an Oxford scholar, noted for “wit, learning, and sobriety . . . nicely honest, affable, and without blemish in his conversation and dealings.” Thus friends declared, though foes said of him quite other things. At any rate, having emigrated to Virginia and married there, he had presently acquired, because of a lawsuit over land in which he held himself to be unjustly and shabbily treated through influences of the Governor, an inveterate prejudice against that ruler. He calls him in short “an old, treacherous villain.” Lawrence and his wife, not being rich, kept a tavern at Jamestown, and there Bacon lodged, probably having been thrown with Lawrence before this. Persons are found who hold that Lawrence was the brain, Bacon the arm, of the discontent in Virginia. There was also Mr. William Drummond, who will be met with in the account of Carolina. He was a “sober Scotch gentleman of good repute” — but no more than Lawrence on good terms with the Governor of Virginia.
On a morning in June, when the Assembly met, it was observed that Nathaniel Bacon was not in his place in the Council — nor was he to be found in the building, nor even in Jamestown itself, though Berkeley had Lawrence’s inn searched for him. He had left the town — gone up the river in his sloop to his plantation at Curles Neck “to visit his wife, who, as she informed him, was indisposed.” In truth it appears that Bacon had gone for the purpose of gathering together some six hundred up-river men. Or perhaps they themselves had come together and, needing a leader, had turned naturally to the man who was under the frown of an unpopular Governor and all the Governor’s supporters in Virginia. At any rate Bacon was presently seen at the head of no inconsiderable army for a colony of less than fifty thousand souls. Those with him were only up-river men; but he must have known that he could gather besides from every part of the country. Given some initial success, he might even set all Virginia ablaze. Down the river he marched, he and his six hundred, and in the summer heat entered Jamestown and drew up before the Capitol. The space in front of this building was packed with the Jamestown folk and with the six hundred. Bacon, a guard behind him, advanced to the central door, to find William Berkeley standing there shaking with rage. The old royalist has courage. He tears open his silken vest and fine shirt and faces the young man who, though trained in the law of the realm, is now filling that law with a hundred wounds. He raises a passionate voice. “Here! Shoot me! ‘Fore God, a fair mark — a fair mark! Shoot!”
Bacon will not shoot him, but will have that promised commission to go against the Indians. Those behind him lift and shake their guns. “We will have it! We will have it!” Governor and Council retire to consider the demand. If Berkeley is passionate and at times violent, so is Bacon in his own way, for an eye-witness has to say that “he displayed outrageous postures of his head, arms, body and legs, often tossing his hand from his sword to his hat,” and that outside the door he had cried: “Damn my blood! I’ll kill Governor, Council, Assembly and all, and then I’ll sheathe my sword in my own heart’s blood!” He is no dour, determined, unwordy revolutionist like the Scotch Drummond, nor still and subtle like “the thoughtful Mr. Lawrence.” He is young and hot, a man of oratory and outward acts. Yet is he a patriot and intelligent upon broad public needs. When presently he makes a speech to the excited Assembly, it has for subject-matter “preserving our lives from the Indians, inspecting the public revenues, the exorbitant taxes, and redressing the grievances and calamities of that deplorable country.” It has quite the ring of young men’s speeches in British colonies a century later!
The Governor and his party gave in perforce. Bacon got his commission and an Act of Indemnity for all chance political offenses. General and Commander-in-chief against the Indians — so was he styled. Moreover, the Burgesses, with an alarmed thought toward England, drew up an explanatory memorial for Charles II’s perusal. This paper journeyed forth upon the first ship to sail, but it had for traveling companion a letter secretly sent from the Governor to the King. The two communications were painted in opposite colors. “I have,” says Berkeley, “for above thirty years governed the most flourishing country the sun ever shone over, but am now encompassed with rebellion like waters.”
CHAPTER XIII. REBELLION AND CHANGE
Bacon with an increased army now rode out once more against the Indians. He made a rendezvous on the upper York — the old Pamunkey — and to this center he gathered horsemen until there may have been with him not far from a thousand mounted men. From here he sent detachments against the red men’s villages in all the upper troubled country, and afar into the sunset woods where the pioneer’s cabin had not yet been builded. He acted with vigor. The Indians could not stand against his horsemen and concerted measures, and back they fell before the white men, westward again; or, if they stayed in the ever dwindling villages, they gave hostages and oaths of peace. Quiet seemed to descend once more upon the border.
But, if the frontier seemed peaceful, Virginia behind the border was a bubbling cauldron. Bacon had now become a hero of the people, a Siegfried capable of slaying the dragon. Nor were Lawrence and Drummond idle, nor others of their way of thinking. The Indian troubles might soon be settled, but why not go further, marching against other troubles, more subtle and long-continuing, and threatening all the future?
In the midst of this speculation and promise of change, the Governor, feeling the storm, dissolved the Assembly, proclaimed Bacon and his adherents rebels and traitors, and made a desperate attempt to raise an army for use against the new-fangledness of the time. This last he could not do. Private interest led many planters to side with him, and there was a fair amount of passionate conviction matching his own, that his Majesty the King and the forces of law and order were being withstood, and without just cause. But the mass of the people cried out to his speeches, “Bacon! Bacon!” As the popular leader had been warned from Jamestown by news of personal danger, so in his turn Berkeley seems to have believed that his own liberty was threatened. With suddenness he departed the place, boarded a sloop, and was “wafted over Chesapeake Bay thirty miles to Accomac.” The news of the Governor’s flight, producing both alarm in one party and enthusiasm in the other, tended to precipitate the crisis. Though the Indian trouble might by now be called adjusted, Bacon, far up the York, did not disband his men. He turned and with them marched down country, not to Jamestown, but to a hamlet called Middle Plantation, where later was to grow the town of Williamsburg. Here he camped, and here took counsel with Lawrence and Drummond and others, and here addressed, with a curious, lofty eloquence, the throng that began to gather. Hence, too, he issued a “Declaration,” recounting the misdeeds of those lately in power, protesting against the terms rebel and traitor as applied to himself and his followers, who are only in arms to protect his Majesty’s demesne and subjects, and calling on those who are well disposed to reform to join him at Middle Plantation, there to consider the state of the country which had been brought into a bad way by “Sir William’s doting and irregular actings.”
Upon his proclamation many did come to Middle Plantation, great planters and small, men just freed from indentured service, holders of no land and little land and much land, men of all grades of weight and consideration and all degrees of revolutionary will, from Drummond — with a reported speech, “I am in overshoes; I will be in overboots!” and a wife Sarah who snapped a stick in two with the cry, “I care no more for the power of England than for this broken straw!” — to those who would be revolutionary as long as, and only when, it seemed safe to be so.
How much of revolution, despite that speech about his Majesty’s demesne and subjects, was in Bacon’s mind, or in Richard Lawrence’s mind and William Drummond’s mind, or in the mind of their staunchest supporters, may hardly now be resolved. Perhaps as much as was in the mind of Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and George Mason a century later.
The Governor was in Accomac, breathing fire and slaughter, though as yet without brand or sword with which to put his ardent desires into execution. But he and the constituted order were not without friends and supporters. He had, as his opponents saw, a number of “wicked and pernicious counsellors, aides and assistants against the commonalty in these our cruel commotions.” Moreover — and a great moreover is that! — it was everywhere bruited that he had sent to England, to the King, “for two thousand Red Coates.” Perhaps the King — perhaps England — will take his view, and, not consulting the good of Virginia, send the Red Coats! What then?
Bacon, as a measure of opposition, proposed “a test or recognition,” to be signed by those here at Middle Plantation who earnestly do wish the good of Virginia. It was a bold test! Not only should they covenant to give no aid to the whilom?? Governor against this new general and army, but if ships should bring the Red Coats they were to withstand them. There is little wonder that “this bugbear did marvellously startle” that body of Virginia horsemen, those progressive gentlemen planters, and others. Yet in the end, after violent contentions, the assembly at Middle Plantation drew up and signed a remarkable paper, the “Oath at Middle Plantation.” Historically, it is linked on the one hand with that “thrusting out of his government” of Sir John Harvey in Charles I’s time, and on the other with Virginian proceedings a hundred years later under the third George. If his Majesty had been, as it was rumored, wrongly informed that Virginia was in rebellion; if, acting upon that misinformation, he sent troops against his loyal Virginians — who were armed only against an evil Governor and intolerable woes then these same good loyalists would “oppose and suppress all forces whatsoever of that nature, until such time as the King be fully informed of the state of the case.” What was to happen if the King, being informed, still supported Berkeley and sent other Red Coats was not taken into consideration.
This paper, being drawn, was the more quickly signed because there arrived, in the midst of the debate, a fresh Indian alarm. Attack threatened a fort upon the York — whence the Governor had seen fit to remove arms and ammunition! The news came most opportunely for Bacon. “There were no more discourses.” The major portion of the large assemblage signed.
The old Government in Virginia was thus denied. But it was held that government there must be, and that the people of Virginia through representatives must arrange for it. Writs of election, made as usual in the King’s name, and signed by Bacon and by those members of the Council who were of the revolt, went forth to all counties. The Assembly thus provided was to meet at Jamestown in September.
So much business done, off rode Bacon and his men to put down this latest rising of the Indians. Not only these but red men in a new quarter, tribes south of the James, kept them employed for weeks to come. Nor were they unmindful of that proud old man, Sir William Berkeley, over on the Eastern Shore, a well-peopled region where traveling by boat and by sandy road was sufficiently easy. Bacon, Lawrence, and Drummond finally decided to take Sir William captive and to bring him back to Jamestown. For this purpose they dispatched a ship across the Bay, with two hundred and fifty men, under the command of Giles Bland, “a man of courage and haughty bearing,” and “no great admirer of Sir William’s goodness.” The ship proceeded to the Accomac shore, anchored in some bight, and sent ashore men to treat with the Governor. But the Governor turned the tables on them. He made himself captor, instead of being made captive. Bland and his lieutenants were taken, whereupon their following surrendered into Berkeley’s hands. Bland’s second in command was hanged; Bland himself was held in irons.
Now Berkeley’s star was climbing. In Accomac he gathered so many that, with those who had fled with him and later recruits who crossed the Bay, he had perhaps a thousand men. He stowed these upon the ship of the ill-fated Bland and upon a number of sloops. With seventeen sail in all, the old Governor set his face west and south towards the mouth of the James.
In that river, on the 7th of September, 1676, there appeared this fleet of the King’s Governor, set on retaking Virginia. Jamestown had notice. The Bacon faction held the place with perhaps eight hundred men, Colonel Hansford at their head. Summoned by Berkeley to surrender, Hansford refused, but that same night, by advice of Lawrence and Drummond, evacuated the place, drawing his force off toward the York. The next day, emptied of all but a few citizens, Jamestown received the old Governor and his army.
The tidings found Bacon on the upper York. Acting with his accustomed energy, he sent out, far and wide, ringing appeals to the country to rouse itself, for men to join him and march to the defeat of the old tyrant. Numbers did come in. He moved with “marvelous celerity.” When he had, for the time and place, a large force of rebels, he marched, by stream and plantation, tobacco field and forest, forge and mill, through the early autumn country to Jamestown. Civil war was on.
Across the narrow neck of the Jamestown peninsula had been thrown a sort of fortification with ditch, earthwork, and palisade. Before this Bacon now sounded trumpets. No answer coming, but the mouths of cannon appearing at intervals above the breastwork, the “rebel” general halted, encamped his men, and proceeded to construct siege lines of his own. The work must be done exposed to Sir William’s iron shot.
Now comes a strange and discreditable incident. Patriots, revolutionists, who on the whole would serve human progress, have yet, as have we all, dark spots and seamy sides. Bacon’s parties of workmen were threatened, hindered, driven from their task by Berkeley’s guns. Bacon had a curious, unadmirable idea. He sent horsemen to neighboring loyalist plantations to gather up and bring to camp, not the planters — for they are with Berkeley in Jamestown — but the planters’ wives. Here are Mistress Bacon (wife of the elder Nathaniel Bacon), Mistress Bray; Mistress Ballard, Mistress Page, and others. Protesting, these ladies enter Bacon’s camp, who sends one as envoy into the town with the message that, if Berkeley attacks, the whole number of women shall be placed as shield to Bacon’s men who build earthworks.
He was as good — or as bad — as his word. At the first show of action against his workmen these royalist women were placed in the front and were kept there until Bacon had made his counter-line of defense. Sir William Berkeley had great faults, but at times — not always — he displayed chivalry. For that day “the ladies’ white aprons” guarded General Bacon and all his works. The next day, the defenses completed, this “white garde” was withdrawn.
Berkeley waited no longer but, though now at a disadvantage, opened fire and charged with his men through gate and over earthworks. The battle that followed was short and decisive. Berkeley’s chance-gathered army was no match for Bacon’s seasoned Indian fighters and for desperate men who knew that they must win or be hanged for traitors. The Governor’s force wavered and, unable to stand its ground, turned and fled, leaving behind some dead and wounded. Then Bacon, who also had cannon, opened upon the town and the ships that rode before it. In the night the King’s Governor embarked for the second time and with him, in that armada from the Eastern Shore, the greater part of the force he had gathered. When dawn came, Bacon saw that the ships, large and small, were gone, sailing back to Accomac. Bacon and his following thus came peaceably into Jamestown, but with the somewhat fell determination to burn the place. It should “harbor no more rogues.” What Bacon, Lawrence, Drummond, Hansford, and others really hoped — whether they forecasted a republican Virginia finally at peace and prosperous — whether they saw in a vision a new capital, perhaps at Middle Plantation, perhaps at the Falls of the Far West, a capital that should be without old, tyrannic memories — cannot now be said. However it all may be, they put torch to the old capital town and soon saw it consumed, for it was no great place, and not hard to burn.
Jamestown had hardly ceased to smoke when news came that loyalists under Colonel Brent were gathering in northern counties. Bacon, now ill but energetic to the end, turned with promptness to meet this new alarm. He crossed the York and marched northward through Gloucester County. But the rival forces did not come to a fight. Brent’s men deserted by the double handful. They came into Bacon’s ranks “resolving with the Persians to go and worship the rising sun.” Or, hanging fire, reluctant to commit themselves either way, they melted from Brent, running homeward by every road. Bacon, with an enlarged, not lessened army, drew back into Gloucester. Revolutionary fortunes shone fair in prospect. Yet it was but the moment of brief, deceptive bloom before decay and fall.
At this critical moment Bacon fell sick and died. Some said that he was poisoned, but that has never been proved. The illness that had attacked him during his siege of Jamestown and that held on after his victory seems to have sufficed for his taking off. In Gloucester County he “surrendered up that fort he was no longer able to keep, into the hands of that grim and all-conquering Captaine Death.” His body was buried, says the old account, “but where deposited till the Generall day not knowne, only to those who are resolutely silent in that particular.”
With Bacon’s death there fell to pieces all this hopeful or unhopeful movement. Lawrence might have a subtle head and Drummond the courage to persevere; Hansford, Cheeseman, Bland, and others might have varied abilities. But the passionate and determined Bacon had been the organ of action; Bacon’s the eloquence that could bring to the cause men with property to give as well as men with life to lose. It is a question how soon, had Bacon not died, must have failed his attempt at revolution, desperate because so premature.
Back came Berkeley from Accomac, his turbulent enemy thus removed. All who from the first had held with the King’s Governor now rode emboldened. Many who had shouted more or less loudly for the rising star, now that it was so untimely set, made easy obeisance to the old sun. A great number who had wavered in the wind now declared that they had done no such thing, but had always stood steadfast for the ancient powers.
The old Governor, who might once have been magnanimous, was changed for the worse. He had been withstood; he would punish. He now gave full rein to his passionate temper, his bigotry for the throne, and his feeling of personal wrong. He began in Virginia to outlaw and arrest rebels, and to doom them to hasty trials and executions. There was no longer a united army to meet, but only groups and individuals striving for safety in flight or hiding. Hansford was early taken and hanged with two lieutenants of Bacon, Wilford and Farlow. Cheeseman died in prison. Drummond was taken in the swamps of the Chickahominy and carried before the Governor. Berkeley brought his hands together. “Mr. Drummond, you are very welcome! I am more glad to see you than any man in Virginia! Mr. Drummond you shall be hanged in half an hour!” Not in half an hour, but on the same day he was hanged, imperturbable Scot to the last. Lawrence, held by many to have been more than Bacon the true author of the attempt, either put an end to himself or escaped northward, for he disappears from history. “The last account of Mr. Lawrence was from an uppermost plantation whence he and four other desperadoes with horses, pistols, etc., marched away in a snow ankle deep.” They “were thought to have cast themselves into a branch of some river, rather than to be treated like Drummond.” Thus came to early and untimely end the ringleaders of Bacon’s Rebellion. In all, by the Governor’s command, thirty-seven men suffered death by hanging.
There comes to us, down the centuries, the comment of that King for whom Berkeley was so zealous, a man who fell behind his colonial Governor in singleness of interest but excelled him in good nature. “That old fool,” said the second Charles, “has hanged more men in that naked country than I have done for the murder of my father!”
That letter which Berkeley had written some months before to his sovereign about the “waters of rebellion” was now seen to have borne fruit. In January, while the Governor was yet running down fugitives, confiscating lands, and hanging “traitors,” a small fleet from England sailed in, bringing a regiment of “Red Coates,” and with them three commissioners charged with the duty of bringing order out of confusion. These commissioners, bearing the King’s proclamation of pardon to all upon submission, were kinder than the irascible and vindictive Governor of Virginia, and they succeeded at last in restraining his fury. They made their report to England, and after some months obtained a second royal proclamation censuring Berkeley’s vengeful course, “so derogatory to our princely clemency,” abrogating the Assembly’s more violent acts, and extending full pardon to all concerned in the late “rebellion,” saving only the arch-rebel Bacon — to whom perhaps it now made little difference if they pardoned him or not.
But with this piece of good nature, so characteristic of the second Charles, there came neither to the King in person nor to England as a whole any appreciation of the true ills behind the Virginian revolt, nor any attempt to relieve them. Along with the King’s first proclamation came instructions for the Governor. “You shall be no more obliged to call an Assembly once every year, but only once in two years . . . . Also whensoever the Assembly is called fourteen days shall be the time prefixed for their sitting and no longer.” And the narrowed franchise that Bacon’s Assembly had widened is narrowed again. “You shall take care that the members of the Assembly be elected only by freeholders, as being more agreeable to the custom of England.” Nor is the grant to Culpeper and Arlington revoked. Nor, wider and deeper, are the Navigation Laws in any wise bettered. No more than before, no more indeed than a century later, is there any conception that the child exists no more for the parent than the parent for the child.
Sir William Berkeley’s loyalty had in the end overshot itself. His zeal fatigued the King, and in 1677 he was recalled to England. As Governor of Virginia he had been long popular at first but in his old age detested. He had great personal courage, fidelity, and generosity for those things that ran with the current of a deep and narrow soul. He passes from the New World stage, a marked and tragic figure. Behind him his vengeances displeased even loyalist Virginia, willing on the whole to let bygones be bygones among neighbors and kindred. It is said that; when his ship went down the river, bonfires were lighted and cannon and muskets fired for joy. And so beyond the eastward horizon fades the old reactionary.
Herbert Jeffreys and then Sir Henry Chicheley follow Berkeley as Governors of Virginia; they are succeeded by Lord Culpeper and he by Lord Howard of Effingham. King Charles dies and James the Second rules in England. Culpeper and Effingham play the Governor merely for what they can get for themselves out of Virginia.* The price of tobacco goes down, down. The crops are too large; the old poor remedies of letting much acreage go unplanted, or destroying and burning where the measure of production is exceeded, and of petitions to the King, are all resorted to, but they procure little relief. Virginia cannot be called prosperous. England hears that the people are still disaffected and unquiet and England stolidly wonders why.
* In 1684 the Crown purchased from Culpeper all his rights except in the Northern Neck.
During the reign of the second Charles, Maryland had suffered from political unrest somewhat less than Virginia. The autocracy of Maryland was more benevolent and more temperate than that of her southern neighbor. The name of Calvert is a better symbol of wisdom than the name of Berkeley. Cecil Calvert, second Lord Baltimore, dying in 1675, has a fair niche in the temple of human enlightenment. His son Charles succeeded, third Lord Baltimore and Lord Proprietary of Maryland. Well-intentioned, this Calvert lacked something of the ability of either his father or his grandfather. Though he lived in Maryland while his father had lived in England, his government was not as wise as his father’s had been.
But in Maryland, even before the death of Cecil Calvert, inherent evils were beginning to form of themselves a visible body. In Maryland, as in Virginia, there set in after the Restoration a period of reaction, of callous rule in the interests of an oligarchy. In 1669 a “packed” Council and an “aristocratic” Assembly procured a restriction of the franchise similar to that introduced into Virginia. As in Virginia, an Assembly deemed of the right political hue was kept in being by the device of adjournment from year to year. In Maryland, as in Virginia, public officials were guilty of corruption and graft. In 1676 there seems to have lacked for revolt, in Maryland, only the immediate provocative of acute Indian troubles and such leaders as Bacon, Lawrence, and Drummond. The new Lord Baltimore being for the time in England, his deputy writes him that never were any “more replete with malignancy and frenzy than our people were about August last, and they wanted but a monstrous head to their monstrous body.” Two leaders indeed appeared, Davis and Pate by name, but having neither the standing nor the strength of the Virginia rebels, they were finally taken and hanged. What supporters they had dispersed, and the specter of armed insurrection passed away.
The third Lord Baltimore, like his father, found difficulty in preserving the integrity of his domain. His father had been involved in a long wrangle over the alleged invasion of Maryland by the Dutch. Since then, New Netherland had passed into English hands. Now there occurred another encroachment on the territory of Maryland. This time the invader was an Englishman named William Penn. Just as the idea of a New World freedom for Catholics had appealed to the first Lord Baltimore, so now to William Penn, the Quaker, came the thought of freedom there for the Society of Friends. The second Charles owed an old debt to Penn’s father. He paid it in 1681 by giving to the son, whom he liked, a province in America. Little by little, in order to gain for Penn access to the sea, the terms of his grant were widened until it included, beside the huge Pennsylvanian region, the tract that is now Delaware, which was then claimed by Baltimore. Maryland protested against the grant to Penn, as Virginia had protested against the grant to Baltimore — and equally in vain. England was early set upon the road to many colonies in America, destined later to become many States. One by one they were carved out of the first great unity.
In 1685 the tolerant Charles the Second died. James the Second, a Catholic, ruled England for about three years, and then fled before the Revolution of 1688. William and Mary, sovereigns of a Protestant England, came to the throne. We have seen that the Proprietary of Maryland and his numerous kinsmen and personal adherents were Catholics. Approximately one in eight of other Marylanders were fellows in that faith. Another eighth of the people held with the Church of England. The rest, the mass of the folk, were dissenters from that Church. And now all the Protestant elements together — the Quakers excepted — solidified into political and religious opposition to the Proprietary’s rule. Baltimore, still in England, had immediately, upon the accession of William and Mary, dispatched orders to the Maryland Council to proclaim them King and Queen. But his messenger died at sea, and there was delay in sending another. In Maryland the Council would not proclaim the new sovereigns without instructions, and it was even rumored that Catholic Maryland meant to withstand the new order.
In effect the old days were over. The Protestants, Churchmen and Dissenters alike, proceeded to organize under a new leader, one John Coode. They formed “An Association in arms for the defense of the Protestant religion, and for asserting the right of King William and Queen Mary to the Province of Maryland and all the English Dominions.” Now followed a confused time of accusations and counter-accusations, with assertions that Maryland Catholics were conspiring with the Indians to perpetrate a new St. Bartholomew massacre of Protestants, and hot counter-assertions that this is “a sleveless fear and imagination fomented by the artifice of some ill-minded persons.” In the end Coode assembled a force of something less than a thousand men and marched against St. Mary’s. The Council, which had gathered there, surrendered, and the Association for the Defense found itself in power. It proceeded to call a convention and to memorialize the King and Queen, who in the end approved its course. Maryland passed under the immediate government of the Crown. Lord Baltimore might still receive quit-rents and customs, but his governmental rights were absorbed into the monarchy. Sir Lionel Copley came out as Royal Governor, and a new order began in Maryland.
The heyday of Catholic freedom was past. England would have a Protestant America. Episcopalians were greatly in the minority, but their Church now became dominant over both Catholic and Dissenter, and where the freethinker raised his head he was smitten down. Catholic and Dissenter and all alike were taxed to keep stable the Established Church. The old tolerance, such as it was, was over. Maryland paced even with the rest of the world.
Presently the old capital of St. Mary’s was abandoned. The government removed to the banks of the Severn, to Providence — soon, when Anne should be Queen, to be renamed Annapolis. In vain the inhabitants of St. Mary’s remonstrated. The center of political gravity in Maryland had shifted.
The third Lord Baltimore died in 1715. His son Benedict, fourth lord, turned from the Catholic Church and became a member of the Church of England. Dying presently, he left a young son, Charles, fifth Lord Baltimore, to be brought up in the fold of the Established Church. Reconciled now to the dominant creed, with a Maryland where Catholics were heavily penalized, Baltimore resumed the government under favor of the Crown. But it was a government with a difference. In Maryland, as everywhere, the people were beginning to hold the reins. Not again the old lord and the old underling! For years to come the lords would say that they governed, but strong life arose beneath, around, and above their governing.
Maryland had by 1715 within her bounds more than forty thousand white men and nearly ten thousand black men. She still planted and shipped tobacco, but presently found how well she might raise wheat, and that it, too, was valuable to send away in exchange for all kinds of manufactured things. Thus Maryland began to be a land of wheat still more than a land of tobacco.
For the rest, conditions of life in Maryland paralleled pretty closely those in Virginia. Maryland was almost wholly rural; her plantations and farms were reached with difficulty by roads hardly more than bridle-paths, or with ease by sailboat and rowboat along the innumerable waterways. Though here and there manors — large, easygoing, patriarchal places, with vague, feudal ways and customs — were to be found, the moderate sized plantation was the rule. Here stood, in sight usually of blue water, the planter’s dwelling of brick or wood. Around it grew up the typical outhouses, household offices, and storerooms; farther away yet clustered the cabin quarters alike of slaves and indentured labor. Then stretched the fields of corn and wheat, the fields of tobacco. Here, at river or bay side, was the home wharf or landing. Here the tobacco was rolled in casks; here rattled the anchor of the ship that was to take it to England and bring in return a thousand and one manufactured articles. There were no factories in Maryland or Virginia. Yet artisans were found among the plantation laborers — “carpenters, coopers, sawyers, blacksmiths, tanners, curriers, shoemakers, spinners, weavers, and knitters.” Throughout the colonies, as in every new country, men and women, besides being agriculturists, produced homemade much that men, women, and children needed. But many other articles and all luxuries came in the ships from overseas, and the harvest of the fields paid the account.
CHAPTER XIV. THE CAROLINAS
The first settlers on the banks of the James River, looking from beneath their hands southward over plain land and a haze of endless forests, called that unexplored country South Virginia. It stretched away to those rivers and bays, to that island of Roanoke, whence had fled Raleigh’s settlers. Beyond that, said the James River men, was Florida. Time passed, and the region of South Virginia was occasionally spoken of as Carolina, though whether that name was drawn from Charles the First of England, or whether those old unfortunate Huguenots in Florida had used it with reference to Charles the Ninth of France, is not certainly known.
South Virginia lay huge, unknown, unsettled. The only exception was the country immediately below the southern banks of the lower James with the promontory that partially closed in Chesapeake Bay. Virginia, growing fast, at last sent her children into this region. In 1653 the Assembly enacted: “Upon the petition of Roger Green, clarke, on the behalfe of himselfe and inhabitants of Nansemund river, It is ordered by this present Grand Assembly that tenn thousand acres of land be granted unto one hundred such persons who shall first seate on Moratuck or Roanoke river and the land lying upon the south side of Choan river and the ranches thereof, Provided that such seaters settle advantageously for security and be sufficiently furnished with amunition and strength . . . .”
Green and his men, well furnished presumably with firelocks, bullets, and powder-horns, went into this hinterland. At intervals there followed other hardy folk. Quakers, subject to persecution in old Virginia, fled into these wilds. The name Carolina grew to mean backwoods, frontiersman’s land. Here were forest and stream, Indian and bear and wolf, blue waters of sound and sea, long outward lying reefs and shoals and islets, fertile soil and a clime neither hot nor cold. Slowly the people increased in number. Families left settled Virginia for the wilderness; men without families came there for reasons good and bad. Their cabins, their tiny hamlets were far apart; they practised a hazardous agriculture; they hunted, fished, and traded with the Indians. The isolation of these settlers bred or increased their personal independence, while it robbed them of that smoothness to be gained where the social particles rub together. This part of South Virginia was soon to be called North Carolina.
Far down the coast was Cape Fear. In the year of the Restoration a handful of New England men came here in a ship and made a settlement which, not prospering, was ere long abandoned. But New Englanders traded still in South Virginia as along other coasts. Seafarers, they entered at this inlet and at that, crossed the wide blue sounds, and, anchoring in mouths of rivers, purchased from the settlers their forest commodities. Then over they ran to the West Indies, and got in exchange sugar and rum and molasses, with which again they traded for tobacco in Carolina, in Virginia, and in Maryland. These ships went often to New Providence in the Bahamas and to Barbados. There began, through trade and other circumstances, a special connection between the long coast line and these islands that were peopled by the English. The restored Kingdom of England had many adherents to reward. Land in America, islands and main, formed the obvious Fortunatus’s purse. As the second Charles had divided Virginia for the benefit of Arlington and Culpeper, so now, in 1663, to “our right trusty and right well-beloved cousins and counsellors, Edward, Earl of Clarendon, our High Chancellor of England, and George, Duke of Albemarle, Master of our Horse and CaptainGeneral of all our Forces, our right trusty and well-beloved William, Lord Craven, John, Lord Berkeley, our right trusty and well-beloved counsellor, Anthony, Lord Ashley, Chancellor of our Exchequer, Sir George Carteret, Knight and Baronet, ViceChamberlain of our Household, and our trusty and well-beloved Sir William Berkeley, Knight, and Sir John Colleton, Knight and Baronet,” he gave South Virginia, henceforth called the Carolinas, a region occupying five degrees of latitude, and stretching indefinitely from the seacoast toward the setting sun.
This huge territory became, like Maryland, a province or palatinate. In Maryland was one Proprietary; in Carolina there were eight, though for distinction the senior of the eight was called the Palatine. As in Maryland, the Proprietaries had princely rights. They owed allegiance to England, and a small quit-rent went to the King. They were supposed to govern, in the main, by English law and to uphold the religion of England. They were to make laws at their discretion, with “the advice, assent, and approbation of the freemen, or of their deputies, who were to be assembled from time to time as seemed best.”
John Locke, who wrote the “Essay Concerning Human Understanding”, wrote also, with Ashley at his side, “The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, in number a Hundred and Twenty, agreed upon by the Palatine and Lords Proprietors, to remain the sacred and unalterable form and Rule of government of Carolina forever.”
“Forever” is a long word with ofttimes a short history. The Lords Proprietors have left their names upon the maps of North and South Carolina. There are Albemarle Sound and the Ashley and Cooper rivers, Clarendon, Hyde, Carteret, Craven, and Colleton Counties. But their Fundamental Constitutions, “in number a hundred and twenty,” written by Locke in 1669, are almost all as dead as the leaves of the Carolina forest falling in the autumn of that year.
The grant included that territory settled by Roger Green and his men. Among the Proprietors sat Sir William Berkeley, Governor of Virginia, the only lord of Carolina actually upon American ground. Following instructions from his seven fellows Berkeley now declared this region separated from Virginia and attached to Carolina. He christened it Albemarle. Strangely enough, he sent as Governor that Scotchman, William Drummond, whom some years later he would hang. Drummond should have a Council of six and an Assembly of freemen that might inaugurate legislation having to do with local matters but must submit its acts to the Proprietaries for veto or approval. This was the settlement in Carolina of Albemarle, back country to Virginia, gatherer thence of many that were hardy and sound, many that were unfortunate, and many that were shiftless and untamed. An uncouth nurse of a turbulent democracy was Albemarle.
Cape Fear, far down the deeply frayed coast, seemed a proper place to which to send a colony. The intrusive Massachusetts men were gone. But “gentlemen and merchants” of Barbados were interested. It is a far cry from Barbados to the Carolina shore, but so is it a far cry from England. Many royalists had fled to Barbados during the old troubles, so that its English population was considerable. A number may have welcomed the chance to leave their small island for the immense continent; and an English trading port as far south as Cape Fear must have had a general appeal. So, in 1665, came Englishmen from Barbados and made, up the Cape Fear River, a settlement which they named Clarendon, with John Yeamans of Barbados as Governor. But the colony did not prosper. There arose the typical colonial troubles — sickness, dissensions, improvidence, quarrels with the aborigines. Nor was the site the best obtainable. The settlers finally abandoned the place and scattered to various points along the northern coast.
In 1669 the Lords Proprietaries sent out from England three ships, the Carolina, the Port Royal, and the Albemarle, with about a hundred colonists aboard. Taking the old sea road, they came at last to Barbados, and here the Albemarle, seized by a storm, was wrecked. The two other ships, with a Barbados sloop, sailed on anal were approaching the Bahamas when another hurricane destroyed the Port Royal. The Carolina, however, pushed on with the sloop, reached Bermuda, and rested there; then, together with a small ship purchased in these islands, she turned west by south and came in March of 1670 to the good harbor of Port Royal, South Carolina.
Southward from the harbor where the ships rode, stretched old Florida, held by the Spaniards. There was the Spanish town, St. Augustine. Thence Spanish ships might put forth and descend upon the English newcomers. The colonists after debate concluded to set some further space between them and lands of Spain. The ships put again to sea, beat northward a few leagues, and at last entered a harbor into which emptied two rivers, presently to be called the Ashley and the Cooper. Up the Ashley they went a little way, anchored, and the colonists going ashore began to build upon the west bank of the river a town which for the King they named Charles Town. Ten years later this place was abandoned in favor of the more convenient point of land between the two rivers. Here then was builded the second and more enduring Charles Town–Charleston, as we call it now, in South Carolina.
Colonists came fast to this Carolina lying south. Barbados sent many; England, Scotland, and Ireland contributed a share; there came Huguenots from France, and a certain number of Germans. In ten years after the first settling the population numbered twelve hundred, and this presently doubled and went on to increase. The early times were taken up with the wrestle with the forest, with the Indians, with Spanish alarms, with incompetent governors, with the Lords Proprietaries’ Fundamental Constitutions, and with the restrictions which English Navigation Laws imposed upon English colonies. What grains and vegetables and tobacco they could grow, what cattle and swine they could breed and export, preoccupied the minds of these pioneer farmers. There were struggling for growth a rough agriculture and a hampered trade with Barbados, Virginia, and New England — trade likewise with the buccaneers who swarmed in the West Indian waters.
Five hundred good reasons allowed, and had long allowed, free bootery to flourish in American seas. Gross governmental faults, Navigation Acts, and a hundred petty and great oppressions, general poverty, adventurousness, lawlessness, and sympathy of mishandled folk with lawlessness, all combined to keep Brother of the Coast, Buccaneer, and Filibuster alive, and their ships upon all seas. Many were no worse than smugglers; others were robbers with violence; and a few had a dash of the fiend. All nations had sons in the business. England to the south in America had just the ragged coast line, with its off-lying islands and islets, liked by all this gentry, whether smuggler or pirate outright. Through much of the seventeenth century the settlers on these shores never violently disapproved of the pirate. He was often a “good fellow.” He brought in needed articles without dues, and had Spanish gold in his pouch. He was shrugged over and traded with.
He came ashore to Charles Town, and they traded with him there. At one time Charles Town got the name of “Rogue’s Harbor.” But that was not forever, nor indeed, as years are counted, for long. Better and better emigrants arrived, to add to the good already there. The better type prevailed, and gave its tone to the place. There set in, on the Ashley and Cooper rivers, a fair urban life that yet persists.
South Carolina was trying tobacco and wheat. But in the last years of the seventeenth century a ship touching at Charleston left there a bag of Madagascar rice. Planted, it gave increase that was planted again. Suddenly it was found that this was the crop for low-lying Carolina. Rice became her staple, as was tobacco of Virginia.
For the rice-fields South Carolina soon wanted African slaves, and they were consequently brought in numbers, in English ships. There began, in this part of the world, even more than in Virginia, the system of large plantations and the accompanying aristocratic structure of society. But in Virginia the planter families lived broadcast over the land, each upon its own plantation. In South Carolina, to escape heat and sickness, the planters of rice and indigo gave over to employees the care of their great holdings and lived themselves in pleasant Charleston. These plantations, with their great gangs of slaves under overseers, differed at many points from the more kindly, semi-patriarchal life of the Virginian plantation. To South Carolina came also the indentured white laborer, but the black was imported in increasing numbers.
From the first in the Carolinas there had been promised fair freedom for the unorthodox. The charters provided, says an early Governor, “an overplus power to grant liberty of conscience, although at home was a hot persecuting time.” Huguenots, Independents, Quakers, dissenters of many kinds, found on the whole refuge and harbor. In every colony soon began the struggle by the dominant color and caste toward political liberty. King, Company, Lords Proprietaries, might strive to rule from over the seas. But the new land fast bred a practical rough freedom. The English settlers came out from a land where political change was in the air. The stream was set toward the crumbling of feudalism, the rise of democracy. In the New World, circumstances favoring, the stream became a tidal river. Governors, councils, assemblies, might use a misleading phraseology of a quaint servility toward the constituted powers in England. Tory parties might at times seem to color the land their own hue. But there always ran, though often roughly and with turbulence, a set of the stream against autocracy.
In Carolina, South and North, by the Ashley and Cooper rivers, and in that region called Albemarle, just back of Virginia, there arose and went on, through the remainder of the seventeenth century and in the eighteenth, struggles with the Lords Proprietaries and the Governors that these named, and behind this a more covert struggle with the Crown. The details differed, but the issues involved were much the same in North and South Carolina. The struggle lasted for the threescore and odd years of the proprietary government and renewed itself upon occasion after 1729 when the Carolinas became royal colonies. Later, it was swept, a strong affluent, into the great general stream of colonial revolt, culminating in the Revolution.
Into North Carolina, beside the border population entering through Virginia and containing much of a backwoods and derelict nature, came many Huguenots, the best of folk, and industrious Swiss, and Germans from the Rhine. Then the Scotch began to come in numbers, and families of Scotch descent from the north of Ireland. The tone of society consequently changed from that of the early days. The ruffian and the shiftless sank to the bottom. There grew up in North Carolina a people, agricultural but without great plantations, hardworking and freedom-loving.
South Carolina, on the other hand, had great plantations, a town society, suave and polished, a learned clergy, an aristocratic cast to life. For long, both North and South clung to the sea-line and to the lower stretches of rivers where the ships could come in. Only by degrees did English colonial life push back into the forests away from the sea, to the hills, and finally across the mountains.
CHAPTER XV. ALEXANDER SPOTSWOOD
In the spring of 1689, Virginians flocked to Jamestown to hear William and Mary proclaimed Lord and Lady of Virginia. The next year there entered, as LieutenantGovernor, Francis Nicholson, an odd character in whom an immediate violence of temper went with a statesmanlike conception of things to be. Two years he governed here, then was transferred to Maryland, and then in seven years came back to the James. He had not been liked there, but while he was gone Virginia had endured in his stead Sir Edmund Andros. That had been swapping the witch for the devil. Virginia in 1698 seems to have welcomed the returning Nicholson.
Jamestown had been hastily rebuilt, after Bacon’s burning, and then by accident burned again. The word malaria was not in use, but all knew that there had always been sickness on that low spit running out from the marshes. The place might well seem haunted, so many had suffered there and died there. Poetical imagination might have evoked a piece of sad pageantry — starving times, massacres, quarrels, executions, cruel and unusual punishments, gliding Indians. A practical question, however, faced the inhabitants, and all were willing to make elsewhere a new capital city.
Seven miles back from the James, about halfway over to the blue York, stood that cluster of houses called Middle Plantation, where Bacon’s men had taken his Oath. There was planned and builded Williamsburg, which was to be for nearly a hundred years the capital of Virginia. It was named for King William, and there was in the minds of some loyal colonists the notion, eventually abandoned, of running the streets in the lines of a huge W and M. The long main street was called Duke of Gloucester Street, for the short-lived son of that Anne who was soon to become Queen. At one end of this thoroughfare stood a fair brick capitol. At the other end nearly a mile away rose the brick William and Mary College. Its story is worth the telling.
The formal acquisition of knowledge had long been a problem in Virginia. Adult colonists came with their education, much or little, gained already in the mother country. In most cases, doubtless, it was little, but in many cases it was much. Books were brought in with other household furnishing. When there began to be native-born Virginians, these children received from parents and kindred some manner of training. Ministers were supposed to catechise and teach. Well-to-do and educated parents brought over tutors. Promising sons were sent to England to school and university. But the lack of means to knowledge for the mass of the colony began to be painfully apparent.
In the time of Charles the First one Benjamin Symms had left his means for the founding of a free school in Elizabeth County, and his action had been solemnly approved by the Assembly. By degrees there appeared other similar