In November, 1620, there sailed into a quiet harbor on the coast of what
is now Massachusetts a ship named the Mayflower, having on board one
hundred and two English Non-conformists, men and women and with them
a few children. These latest colonists held a patent from the Virginia
Company and have left in writing a statement of their object: "We...
having undertaken, for the glory of God and advancement of the Christian
faith, and honor of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first
colony in the northern parts of Virginia--". The mental reservation is,
of course, "where perchance we may serve God as we will!" In England
there obtained in some quarters a suspicion that "they meant to make a
free, popular State there." Free--Popular--Public Good! These are words
that began, in the second quarter of the seventeenth century, to shine
and ring. King and people had reached the verge of a great struggle. The
Virginia Company was divided, as were other groups, into factions. The
court party and the country party found themselves distinctly opposed.
The great, crowded meetings of the Company Sessions rang with
their divisions upon policies small and large. Words and phrases,
comprehensive, sonorous, heavy with the future, rose and rolled beneath
the roof of their great hall. There were heard amid warm discussion:
Kingdom and Colony--Spain--Netherlands--France--Church and
State--Papists and Schismatics--Duties, Tithes, Excise Petitions of
Grievances--Representation--Right of Assembly. Several years earlier
the King had cried, "Choose the Devil, but not Sir Edwyn Sandys!" Now
he declared the Company "just a seminary to a seditious parliament!" All
London resounded with the clash of parties and opinions.* "Last week
the Earl of Warwick and the Lord Cavendish fell so foul at a Virginia...
court that the lie passed and repassed.... The factions... are grown so
violent that Guelfs and Ghibellines were not more animated one against
another!"
* In his work on "Joint-stock Companion", vol.II, pp. 266
ff., W. R. Scott traces the history of these acute
dissensions in the Virginia Company and draws conclusions
distinctly unfavorable to the management of Sandys and his
party.--Editor.
Believing that the Company's sessions foreshadowed a "seditious
parliament," James Stuart set himself with obstinacy and some cunning
to the Company's undoing. The court party gave the King aid, and
circumstances favored the attempt. Captain Nathaniel Butler, who had
once been Governor of the Somers Islands and had now returned to England
by way of Virginia, published in London "The Unmasked Face of Our Colony
in Virginia", containing a savage attack upon every item of Virginian
administration.
The King's Privy Council summoned the Company, or rather the "country"
party, to answer these and other allegations. Southampton, Sandys, and
Ferrar answered with strength and cogency. But the tide was running
against 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 surveyor-general 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.