governor twice, and with good repute; in 1630, Sir John Harvey
succeeded the former. He was the champion of monopolists; he would
divide the land among a few, and keep the rest in subjection. He fought
with the legislature from the first; he could not wring their rights
from them, but he distressed and irritated the colony, levying
arbitrary fines, and browbeating all and sundry with the brutality of
an ungoverned temper. His chief patron was Lord Baltimore, a Roman
Catholic, and therefore disfavored by the Protestant colony, who would
not suffer him to plant in their domain. He bought a patent authorizing
him to establish a colony in the northern part of Virginia, which was
afterward called Maryland, being cut off from the older colony; and
this diminution of their territory much displeased the Virginians. But
Harvey supported him throughout; and permitted mass to be said in
Virginia. He likewise prevented the settlers from carrying on the
border warfare with the Indians, lest it should disturb his perquisites
from the fur trade. Violent scenes took place in the hall of assembly,
and hard words were given and exchanged; the planters were men of hot
passions, and the conduct of the governor became intolerable to them.
Matters came to a head during the last week in April of 1635. An
unauthorized gathering in York complained of an unjust tax and of other
malfeasances; whereupon Harvey cried mutiny, and had the leaders
arrested. But the boot was on the other leg. Several members of
council, with a company of musketeers at their back, came to his house;
Matthews, with whom the governor had lately had a fierce quarrel, and
the other planters, tramped into the broad hall of the dwelling, with
swords in their hands and threatening looks, and confronted him. John
Utie brought down his hand with staggering force on his shoulder,
exclaiming, "I arrest you for treason!" "How, for treason?" queried the
frightened governor. "You have betrayed our forts to our enemies of
Maryland," replied several stern voices. Harvey glanced from one to
another; in the background were the musketeers; plainly this was no
time for trifling. He offered to do whatever they demanded. They
required the release of prisoners, which was immediately done, and bade
him prepare to answer before the assembly. They would listen to no
arguments and no excuses; he was told by Matthews, with a menacing
look, that the people would have none of him. "You intend no less than
the subversion of Maryland," protested Harvey; but he promised to
return to England, and John West, who had already acted as ad-interim
governor while Harvey was on his way to Virginia, was at once elected
in his place.
This incident showed of what stuff the Virginians were made. It was an
early breaking-out of the American spirit, which would never brook
tyranny. In offering violence to the king's governor they imperiled
their own lives; but their blood was up, and they heeded no danger.
When Harvey presented himself before Charles at the privy council, his
majesty remarked that he must be sent back at all hazards, because the
sending him to England had been an assumption on the colonists' part of
regal power; and, tobacco or no tobacco, the line must be drawn there.
If the charges against him were sustained, he might stay but a day; if
not, his term should be extended beyond the original commission. A new
commission was given him, and back he went; but this shuttlecock
experience seems to have quelled his spirit, and we hear no more of
quarrels with the Virginia council. Wyatt relieved him in 1639; and in
1642 came Sir William Berkeley. This man, who was born about the
beginning of the century, was twice governor; his present term, lasting
ten years, was followed by a nine years' interval; reappointed again in
1660, he was in power when the rebellion broke out which was led by
Nathaniel Bacon. Little is known of him outside of his American record;
in his first term, under Charles I., he acted simply as the creature of
that monarch, and aroused no special animosities on his own account:
during the reign of Cromwell, he disappeared; but when Charles II.
ascended the throne, Berkeley, though then an old man, was thought to
be fitted by his previous experience for the Virginia post, and was
returned thither. But years seemed to have soured his disposition, and
lessened his prudence, and, as we shall see, his bloodthirsty conduct
after Bacon's death was the occasion of his recall in disgrace; and he
died, like Andros more than half a century later, with the curse of a
people on his grave.
But his first appearance was auspicious; he brought instructions
designed to increase the reign of law and order in the colony, without
infringing upon its existing liberties. Allegiance to God and the king
were enjoined, additional courts were provided for, traffic with the
Indians was regulated, annual assemblies, with a negative voice upon
their acts by the governor, were commanded. The only discordant note in
the instructions referred to the conditions of maritime trade,
afterward known in history as the Navigation Acts. The colony desired
free trade, which, as it had no manufactures, was obviously to its
benefit. But it was as obviously to the interest of the king that he
alone should enjoy the right of controlling all imports into the
colony, and absorbing all its exports; and his rulings were framed to
secure that end. But for the present the Acts were not carried into
effect; and, on the other hand, the prospect was held out that there
should be no taxation except what was voted by the people themselves;
and their contention that they, who knew the conditions and needs of
their colonial existence, were better able to regulate it than those at
home, was allowed. By way of evincing their recognition of this
courtesy, the assembly passed among other laws, one against toleration
of any other than the episcopalian form of worship; and when Charles
was beheaded, in 1649, it voted to retain Berkeley in office. But when
in the next year, the fugitive son of the dead king undertook to issue
a commission confirming him in his place, Parliament intervened.
Virginia was brought to her bearings; and the Navigation Acts were
brought up again. Cromwell, no less than Charles, appreciated the
advantages of a monopoly.
Restrictions on commerce, first imposed by Spain, were first resisted
by the Dutch, with the result of rendering them the leading maritime
power. Cromwell wished to appropriate or share this advantage; but
instead of adopting the means employed for that purpose by the Dutch,
he decreed that none but English ships should trade with the English
colonies, and that foreign ships should bring to England only the
products of their own countries. The restriction did little harm to
Virginia, so long as England was able to take all her products, and to
supply all her needs; but it brought on war with Holland, in which both
the moral and the naval advantage was on the side of the Dutch. But
England acquired a foothold in the West Indies, and her policy was
maintained. Virginia asked that she should have representatives to act
for her in England, and when a body of commissioners was appointed to
examine colonial questions, among them were Richard Bennett and William
Clairborne, both of them colonists, and men of force and ability. In
the sequel, the liberties of the colony were enlarged, and Bennett was
made governor by vote of the assembly itself, which continued to elect
governors during the ascendency of Parliament in England. When Richard
Cromwell, who had succeeded the great Protector, resigned his office,
the Virginia burgesses chose Sir William Berkeley to rule over them,
and he acknowledged their authority. Meanwhile the Navigation Acts were
so little enforced that smuggling was hardly illegal; and, in 1658, the
colonists actually invited foreign nations to deal with them. This was
the period of Virginia's greatest freedom before the Revolution. The
suffrage was in the hands of all taxpayers; in religious matters, all
restrictions except those against the Quakers were removed; loyalists
and roundheads mingled amicably in planting and legislation, and the
differences which had arrayed them against one another in England were
forgotten. The population increased to thirty thousand, and the
inhabitants developed among themselves an ardent patriotism. It is not
surprising. Their country was one of the richest and loveliest in the
world; everything which impairs the enjoyment of life was eliminated or
minimized; hucksters, pettifoggers and bigots were scarce as June
snowflakes; indentured servants, on their emancipation, were speedily
given the suffrage; it might almost be said that a man might do
whatever he pleased, within the limits of criminal law. Assuredly,
personal liberty was far greater at this epoch, in Virginia, than it is
today in New York City or Chicago. The instinct of the Virginians, in
matters of governing, was so far as possible to let themselves alone;
the planters, in the seclusion of their estates, were practically
subject to no law but their own pleasure. There was probably no place
in the civilized world where so much intelligent happiness was to be
had as in Virginia during the years immediately preceding the
Restoration.
What would have been the political result had the absence of all
artificial pressure indefinitely continued? Two tendencies were
observable, working, apparently, in opposite directions. On one side
were the planters, many of them aristocratic by origin as well as by
circumstance; who lived in affluence, were friendly to the established
church, enjoyed a liberal education, and naturally assumed the reins of
power. The law which gave fifty acres of land to the settler who
imported an emigrant, while it made for the enlargement of estates,
created also a large number of tenants and dependants, who would be
likely to support their patrons and proprietors, who exercised so much
control over their welfare. These dependants found the conditions of
existence comfortable, and even after they had become their own
masters, they would be likely to consult the wishes of the men who had
been the occasion of their good fortune. Neither education nor
religious instruction were so readily obtainable as to threaten to
render such a class discontented with their condition by opening to
them hitherto unknown gates of advantage; and the suffrage, when by
ownership of private property they had qualified themselves to exercise
it, would at once appease their independent instincts, and at the same
time make them willing, in using it, to follow the lead or suggestion
of men so superior to them in intelligence and in political sagacity.
From this standpoint, then, it seemed probable that a self-governing
community of the special kind existing in Virginia would drift toward
an aristocratic form of rule.
But the matter could be regarded in another way. Free suffrage is a
power having a principle of life within itself; it creates in the mind
that which did not before exist, and educates its possessor first by
prompting him to ask himself of what improvement his condition is
susceptible, and then by forcing him to review his desire by the light
of its realization--by practical experience of its effects, in other
words: a method whose teachings are more thorough and convincing than
any school or college is able to supply. The use of the ballot, in
short, as a means of instruction in the problems of government, takes
the place of anything else; it will of itself build up a people both
capable of conducting their own affairs, and resolved to do so. The
plebeians of Virginia, therefore, who began by being poor and ignorant
emigrants, or indentured servants, to whom the planters accorded such
privileges because it had never occurred to them that a plebeian can
ever become anything else--these men, unconsciously to themselves,
perhaps, were on the road which leads to democracy. The time would come
when they would cease to follow the lead of the planters; when their
interests and the planters' would clash. In that collision, their
numbers would give them the victory. With a similar community planted
in the old world, such might not be the issue; the strong influence of
tradition would combat it, and the surrounding pressure of settled
countries, which offered no escape or asylum for the man of radical
ideas. But the boundaries of Virginia were the untrammeled wilderness;
any man who could not have his will in the colony had this limitless
expanse at his disposal; there could be no finality for him in the
decrees of assemblies, if he possessed the courage of his convictions
in sufficient measure to make him match himself against the red man,
and be independent not only of any special form of society, but of
society itself. The consciousness of this would hearten him to
entertain free thoughts, and to strive for their embodiment. It was
partly this, no doubt, which, in the Seventeenth Century, drove
hundreds of Ishmaels into the interior, where they became the Daniel
Boones and the Davy Crocketts of legend and romance. So, although
Virginia was as little likely as any of the colonies to breed a
democracy, yet even there it was a more than possible outcome of the
situation, even with no outside stimulus. But the old world, because it
desired the oppression of America, was to become the immediate agent of
its emancipation.
There was rejoicing in Virginia when Charles II. acceded to power; on
the part of the planters, because they saw opportunity for political
distinction; on the part of the plebeians, as the expression of a
loyalty to kingship which centuries had made instinctive in them.
Berkeley, putting himself in line with the predominant feeling,
summoned the assembly in the name of the king, thus announcing without
rebuke the termination of the era of self-government. The members who
were elected were mostly royalists. They met in 1661. It was found that
the Navigation Acts, which had been a dead letter ever since their
passage, were to be revived in full force; and the increase of the
colony in the meanwhile made them more than ever unwelcome. The exports
were much larger than before, and unless the colony could have a free
market for them the profits must be materially lessened. And again,
since England was the only country from which the Virginian could
purchase supplies, her merchants could charge him what they pleased.
This was galling alike to royalists and roundheads in Virginia, and
quickly healed the breach, such as it was, between the parties.
Charles's true policy would have been to widen the gulf between them;
instead of that, he forced them into each other's arms. It was
determined to send Berkeley to England to ask relief; he accepted the
commission, but his sympathies were not with the colonists, and he
obtained nothing. Evidently, there could be no relief but in
independence, and it was still a hundred years too early for that. The
exasperation which this state of things produced in the great
landowners did more for the cause of democracy than could decades of
peaceful evolution. But the colonists could no longer have things their
own way. Liberal laws were repealed, and intolerance and oppression
took their place. Heretics were persecuted; the power of the church in
civil affairs was increased; and fines and taxes on the industry of the
colony were wanton and excessive. The king of England directly ruled
Virginia. The people were forced to pay Berkeley a thousand pounds
sterling as his salary, and he declared he ought to get three times as
much even as that. His true character was beginning to appear. The
judges were appointed by the king, and the license thus given them
resulted in a petty despotism; when an official wanted money, he caused
a tax to be levied for the amount. Appeals were vain, and ere long were
prohibited. The assembly, partisans of the king, declared themselves
permanent, so that all chance for the people to be better represented
was gone, and as the members fixed their own pay, and fixed it at a
preposterous figure, the colony began to groan in earnest. But worse
was to come. The suffrage was restricted to freeholders and
householders, and at a stroke, all but a fraction of the colonists were
deprived of any voice in their own government. The spread of education,
never adequate, was stopped altogether. "I thank God there are no free
schools nor printing," Sir William Berkeley was able to say, "and I
hope we shall not have, these hundred years; for learning has brought
disobedience and heresy and sects into the world, and printing has
divulged them, and libels against the best government. God keep us from
both!" This was a succinct and full formulation of the spirit which has
ever tended to make the earth a hell for its inhabitants. "The
ministers," added the governor, "should pray oftener, and preach less."
But he spake in all solemnity; there was not the ghost of a sense of
humor in his whole insufferable carcass.
The downward course was not to stop here. Charles, with the
freehandedness of a highwayman, presented two of his favorites, in
1673, for a term of one and thirty years, with the entire colony! This
act stirred even the soddenness of the legislature. At the time of
their election, a dozen years before, they had been royalists indeed,
but men of honor, intending the good of the colony; and had tried, as
we saw, to stop the enforcement of the Navigation Acts. But when they
discovered that they could continue themselves in office indefinitely,
with such salary as they chose to demand, they soon became indifferent
about the Navigation Acts, or anything else which respected the welfare
and happiness of their fellows. Let the common folk do the work, and
the better sort enjoy the proceeds: that was the true and only
respectable arrangement. We may say that it sounds like a return to the
dark ages; but perhaps if we enter into our closets and question
ourselves closely, we shall find that precisely the same principles for
which Berkeley and his assembly stood in 1673, are both avowed and
carried into effect in this same country, in the very year of grace
which is now passing over us. A nation, even in America, takes a great
deal of teaching.
But the generosity of Charles startled the assembly out of their
porcine indifference, for it threatened to bring to bear upon them the
same practices by which they had destroyed the happiness of the colony.
If the king had given over to these two men all sovereignty in
Virginia, what was to prevent these gentlemen from dissolving the
assembly, who had become, as it were, incorporate with their seats, and
had hoped to die in them--and ruling the country and them without any
legislative medium whatever? Accordingly, with gruntings of dismay,
they chose three agents to sail forthwith to England, and expostulate
with the merry monarch. The expostulation was couched in the most
servile terms, as of men who love to be kicked, but hope to live, if
only to be kicked again. Might the colony, they concluded, be permitted
to buy itself out of the hands of its new owners, at their own price?
And might the people of Virginia be free from any tax not approved by
their assembly? That was the sum of their petition.
The king let his lawyers talk over the matter, and, when they reported
favorably, good-naturedly said, "So let it be, then!" and permitted a
charter to be drawn up. But before the broad seal could be affixed to
it he altered his mind, for causes satisfactory to him, and the envoys
were sent home, poorer than they came. But before relating what awaited
them there, we must advert briefly to the doings of George Calvert,
Lord Baltimore in the Irish peerage, in his new country of Maryland.
CHAPTER SIXTH
CATHOLIC, PHILOSOPHER, AND REBEL
The first Lord Baltimore, whose family name was Calvert, was a
Yorkshireman, born at the town of Kipling in 1580. He entered
Parliament in his thirtieth year, and was James's Secretary of State
ten years later. He was a man of large, tranquil nature, philosophic,
charitable, loving peace; but these qualities were fused by a concrete
tendency of thought, which made him a man of action, and determined
that action in the direction of practical schemes of benevolence. The
contemporary interest in America as a possible arena of enterprise and
Mecca of religious and political dissenters, attracted his sympathetic
attention; and when, in 1625, being then five-and-forty years of age,
he found in the Roman Catholic communion a refuge from the clamor of
warring sects, and as an immediate consequence tendered his resignation
as secretary to the head of the Church of England, he found himself
with leisure to put his designs in execution. He had, upon his
conversion, been raised to the rank of Baron Baltimore in the peerage
of Ireland; and his change of faith in no degree forfeited him the
favor of the king. When therefore he asked for a charter to found a
colony in Avalon, in Newfoundland, it was at once granted, and the
colony was sent out; but his visits to it in 1627 and 1629 convinced
him that the climate was too inclement for his purposes, and he
requested that it might be transferred to the northern parts of
Virginia, which he had visited on his way to England. This too was
permitted; but before the new charter had been sealed Lord Baltimore
died. The patent thereupon passed to his son Cecil, who was also a
Catholic. He devoted his life to carrying out his father's designs. The
characters of the two men were, in their larger elements, not
dissimilar; and the sequel showed that colonial enterprise could be
better achieved by one man of kindly and liberal disposition, and
persistent resolve, than by a corporation, some of whose members were
sure to thwart the wishes of others. Conditions of wider scope than the
settlement of Maryland obstructed and delayed its proprietor's plans;
conflicts and changes of government in England, and jealousy and
violence on the part of Virginia, had their influence; but this quiet,
benign, resolute young man (who was but seven-and-twenty when the grant
made him sovereign of a kingdom) never lost his temper or swerved from
his aim: overcame, apparently without an effort, the disabilities which
might have been expected to hamper the professor of a faith as little
consonant with the creed of the two Charleses as of Cromwell; was as
well regarded, politically, by cavaliers as by roundheads; and finally
established his ownership and control of his heritage, and, after a
beneficent rule of over forty years, died in peace and honor with his
people and the world. The story of colonial Maryland has a flavor of
its own, and throws still further light on the subject of popular
self-government--the source and solution of American history.