The existence of a weak executive, dependent on the people for his
authority, inevitably brought about a dispersal of power and authority
from the center to the outer edges of settlement. The explosive force
of expansion was no longer limited by the strong hand of a royal
Governor, and each increment of population in the colony and power in
the hands of the local authorities added fuel to the combustion.
One of Virginia's frontiers at this time was the Eastern Shore. It was a
frontier community because the law of the colonial government in
Jamestown rarely extended to it. The local commissioners of the county
court, later called "justices," provided what justice existed on the
Eastern Shore. But since these commissioners were sometimes the worst
offenders against the policies of the Governor, Council, and Burgesses,
justice was often sacrificed to interest, especially when Indians were
involved. The leaders on the Eastern Shore, like Edmund Scarborough,
were among the richest men and greatest landowners of the colony. They
conducted the county's business as if it were their own, which indeed it
was to a great extent. Their oppression of the Eastern Shore Indians
makes a sorry history, despite the efforts of Governor Berkeley to
restrain them. In April 1650, for example, Berkeley was forced to write
to the commissioners of Northampton asking them not to allow any land to
be taken from the Laughing King Indians. Berkeley pointed out that
during the massacre of 1644 these Indians had remained faithful to the
English. How could Virginia expect them to do the same again, asked
Berkeley, "unless we correspond with them in acts of charity and amity,
especially unless we abstain from acts of rapine and violence, which
they say we begin to do, by taking away their land from them, by
pretence of the sale of a patent."
Honest attempts were made both before and after the retirement of Sir
William Berkeley in 1652 to restrain the frontier barons in their savage
attacks on unsuspecting Indian towns. But often the law was too weak and
the guilty too strong. Neither the Indians in front of them nor the
government behind them had the power to curb their desires except in a
limited fashion. This was one of the benefits--to the frontiersmen--of
living under English law. The government could not effectively restrain
the Englishman nor protect the Indian. As a result the reckless
expansion went on into the lands of other tribes. As each new Indian
tribe was reached the same dismal pattern of subjugation or extirpation
was repeated, despite the efforts of the Governor and Council to see
that the rights of the Indians were preserved.
Every extension of settlement strengthened local rule. In May 1652 the
people of Northampton County, which comprised the whole of the Eastern
Shore of Virginia, protested to the Assembly against a tax levied on
them, asserting that since they had not sent representatives to the
Assembly since 1647, except for one Burgess in 1651, they did not think
the Assembly could tax them. They asked that they be allowed to have a
separate government and the right to try all causes in their own courts.
Although Northampton was not allowed to dissociate itself entirely from
the rest of Virginia, acts of 1654 and 1656 allowed the county to
constitute laws and customs for itself on matters dealing with Indians
and manufactures.
Virginia's most important frontier region in the 1650's was the area
along the Potomac River, although settlement went on simultaneously
westward up the James, York, and Rappahannock, southward into Carolina,
and northward up the Eastern Shore to Maryland. Sometimes individuals
obtained grants to explore, settle, and monopolize the trade of these
regions. But usually the expansion was catch as catch can. Since land
travel was still more difficult than water travel, expansion up the
Potomac, the last great unsettled tidewater river, was fastest.
Individuals who already had plantations in the older areas of settlement
around Jamestown sailed their barques up the Potomac and, without
bothering to go ashore, took the bounds of likely pieces of land. The
best spots were often the corn fields of the Indians and sometimes the
very towns where they lived. The fact that the Indians occupied the land
counted for little in the thoughts of the settlers and speculators who
flocked to the area. Following their surveys, the explorers rushed back
to James City and put in claims for the waterfront acreages, presenting
one "headright"--proof that someone had been imported into the colony by
their agency--for every fifty acres. The Patent Books of the colony
frequently show signs of fraud in the presentation of headrights.
Occasionally more land was granted than the claimant was entitled to on
the basis of the headrights he presented. But the headright system, even
imperfectly administered, remained during the Parliamentary period as
one of the elements of restraint on the unbounded desires of the
planters. Land acquisition was thus tied in a fixed ratio to population
increase. There was, as a result, some assurance that land acquired
would be populated and farmed. It was not until late in the seventeenth
century that anyone could buy land for money alone, a practice which
enabled some individuals in the eighteenth century to obtain holdings
exceeding 100,000 acres. In the middle of the seventeenth century 10,000
acres was a practical "top" limit.
At the beginning of the Commonwealth period in Virginia a number of new
counties were set up. The Assembly of April 1652 listed two new ones:
Gloucester, north of the York, and Lancaster, north of the Rappahannock.
The Assembly of November 1652 listed Surry, south of the James, for the
first time. Settlers had moved into these areas earlier when they were
parts of other counties, and in two cases the county organization may
have been set up prior to April 1652. The Assembly of July 1653, in
addition to authorizing exploration and settlement on the Roanoke and
Chowan rivers in present-day North Carolina, and exploration into the
Appalachian Mountains, ordered that a county to be called Westmoreland
should be set up west of Northumberland County on the Potomac, with
boundaries from Machodoc River to the falls of the Potomac above the
town of the Anacostan Indians. It was thus intended not only to include
in the new county all the lands of the Doeg Indians, but also those of
the Anacostans. The Assembly of November 1654 authorized the
establishment of New Kent County along both sides of the upper York
River and far up the Pamunkey and Mattaponi rivers.
The Assembly of November 1654 also authorized the three new northern
counties of Lancaster, Northumberland, and Westmoreland to march against
the Rappahannock Indians to punish various "injuries and insolencies
offered" by them. One hundred men were to be raised in Lancaster, forty
in Northumberland, and thirty in Westmoreland. The commissioners of
these counties were authorized to raise the troops, and one of their
number was appointed commander-in-chief of the expedition. He was to
march to the Rappahannock Indian town and demand and receive "such
satisfaction as he shall thinke fitt for the severall injuries done unto
the said inhabitants not using any acts of hostility but defensive in
case of assault." The charge of the war was to be borne by the three
counties concerned. This expedition was like many others that both
preceded and followed it. In each case, enormous authority and
responsibility were given to local officials who were themselves
frequently the leading oppressors of the Indians. Such expeditions not
infrequently took on the character of private wars between the big
landowners of the frontier and the Indian towns in the vicinity. The
Governor, Council, and Burgesses frequently heard the complaints of the
local settlers, but rarely the complaints of the Indians. The
authorization to the local community to administer justice to the
Indians often proved a cover for their expulsion or extirpation.
The usual grievances of the settlers against the Indians were not the
violent murders and massacres so often associated in the public mind
with Indian-white relations, but minor irritations concerning property
and animals. The settlers let their hogs run wild. The hogs would get
into the Indians' corn. The Indians would kill the hogs. The settlers
would demand satisfaction. Many acts of the Assembly testify to the fact
that shooting of wild hogs was one of the most frequent points of
dispute not only between the English and the Indians but among the
English themselves. It was one reason why early Assemblies provided
strict rules for erecting adequate fences around cultivated fields and
establishing lines of responsibility for damage caused by straying
cattle or hogs. On the frontier, however, such refinements of
civilization as fences were long in coming. What was more natural than
that the same conflicts which arose among the English in the early years
of settlement should arise between the English and the Indians on the
frontier. The tragedy was that English-Indian conflicts were not
normally settled in the courts as were conflicts between Englishmen. The
courts did deal with Indian-white conflicts to a certain extent, but, as
noted before, the local justices were often the very persons the Indians
accused of oppressing them. Sometimes the Indians were able to bring
their complaints before the General Court in Jamestown. But often the
dispute was settled in the wilderness in the traditional frontier way:
by violence. Since the settlers had weapons of violence superior to
those possessed by the Indians, it was not very frequently that the
Indians won their "case."
In the Assemblies of these years there is occasional mention of the
splitting of counties in two parts, or of the formation of new parishes.
Usually these divisions were made along rivers or streams. Such
legislation suggests that settlement was spreading back from the water
routes into the land area between streams. The early counties were
normally set up to embrace the area on both sides of watercourses, even
broad rivers like the James and York. The rivers were, in the early
period of settlement, bonds that linked the settlers on either side to
each other. It was natural that rivers should be the principal
thoroughfares of the country. But as settlement spread into the
interior, up the tributary streams that issued into the larger rivers,
the natural social unit that developed was that of communities on the
same side of the river. Hence the gradual conversion of rivers into
political boundaries.
The Assembly of March 1655, for the first time in Virginia's history,
restricted the voting privilege to "housekeepers whether freeholders,
leaseholders, or otherwise tenants." Freemen who could not qualify as
householders, even though they may have been grown sons living in their
father's house, could not vote. It is significant that this first
restriction on the right to vote in Virginia came not under a royal
governor, but under so-called "Parliamentary" rule. So unpopular was
this enactment that it was amended by an act of the Assembly of March
1656 on the grounds that "we conceive it something hard and unagreeable
to reason that any persons shall pay equall taxes and yet have no votes
in elections." Freemen were again allowed to vote provided that they did
not do so "in a tumultuous way."
The Assembly of March 1656 passed an act which attempted to solve the
Indian problem in a way that had never been tried before but has been
frequently tried since. The plan was to encourage the growth of an
acquisitive spirit among the Indians to serve as a counterweight to the
acquisitive spirit of the English. The preamble to the act asserted that
the danger of war from the Indians stemmed from two causes: "our
extreame pressures on them and theire wanting of something to hazard and
loose beside their lives." Therefore the Assembly enacted that for every
eight wolves' heads brought in by the Indians, the King or great man of
the Indians should have a cow delivered to him at the public charge.
"This will be a step to civilizing them and to making them Christians,"
the act went on; "besides it will certainly make the comanding Indians
watch over their own men that they do us no injuries, knowing that by
theire default they may be in danger of losing their estates." The
Assembly also attempted to make the lands possessed by the Indians under
the seal of the colony inalienable to the English. Otherwise, constant
pressure on the Indians by the settlers would force them over and over
again to dispose of their lands.
Many people fail to realize that the Indians of Virginia lived in
well-defined towns or settlements. It was, indeed, the Indians who lived
an "urban" life in the seventeenth century while the English settlers
were usually scattered about the countryside. The conventional picture
of the Indian roaming the forests, living solely by hunting and fishing,
is mistaken. The Indian did hunt and fish, as many of us do today. But
his support came in large measure from the corn and vegetables growing
in the fields which adjoined every Indian town. The Indians had a
close-knit and harmonious community life. They were only indirectly
touched by the white man's money economy and were usually content to
raise only what food they needed for their own consumption. They were
not infected with the restless, individualistic spirit of the white
settler who constantly worked to accumulate a monetary surplus from the
returns on his single cash crop, tobacco.
Like later attempts to destroy the group-centered society of the Indians
in favor of a self-centered society, this attempt of 1656 was not
completely successful.