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RELIGIOUS LIFE OF VIRGINIA IN
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
The Faith of Our Fathers
By
GEORGE MACLAREN BRYDON
Historiographer of Diocese of Virginia
VIRGINIA 350TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION CORPORATION
WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
1957
COPYRIGHT(C), 1957 BY
VIRGINIA 350TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION
CORPORATION, WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
Jamestown 350th Anniversary
Historical Booklet, Number 10
CONTENTS
Introduction
Chapter Page
One Beginnings 1
Two The Colonists at Worship 6
Three Making Bricks Without Straw 12
Four Building a Christian Community 22
Five The Coming of the Negro 26
Six Fighting Adverse Conditions 34
Seven The Last Decade 42
Bibliography 46
Appendix A 47
Appendix B 48
INTRODUCTION
The settlement of Englishmen at Jamestown in 1607 was the outgrowth of
a vision of transatlantic expansion which had been growing stronger
steadily during the preceding generation. It was in the following of
that vision that Queen Elizabeth granted to a group of men headed by
Sir Walter Raleigh the authority to establish a colony upon the remote
shores of the Atlantic ocean, and out of the plans of this group came
the ill-fated colony which was started at Roanoke Island, in what is
now the State of North Carolina, in the year 1585. This colony after a
life of a few years disappeared: whether destroyed by Indian attack, or
by a Spanish fleet which resented the settlement of Englishmen in a
land that was claimed for Spain, or by famine or disease, no one knows
to this day. The one permanent result was the giving of the name
Virginia to their American land in honor of their Queen.
Following the failure of this first effort, a plan was formulated and
established by charter given by King James in the year 1606. Under this
charter companies were to be formed in order to found two English
settlements in America; one to be a colony at some point between the
34th and 41st degrees of latitude, and the other between the 38th and
45th degrees. Both companies had the widespread interest of the English
people, and both made settlements in America in the same year, 1607.
The Virginia Company established its settlement at Jamestown, from
which developed the Colony, and later the Commonwealth of Virginia, as
the first permanent English settlement in America. The Plymouth Company
made its settlement upon the coast of what is now Maine; but this
effort failed and the colonists returned home in the following year.
Permanent settlement of New England began in 1620 with the coming of
the Pilgrims to Plymouth, Massachusetts. From these two first
settlements thus widely separated, but with their common ideal of
English civilization and English concepts of freedom and
self-government, has grown the American nation of today. This nation,
while welcoming all the gifts and values which people of other nations
have brought to the enrichment and broadening of our common life, is
still basically an English or Anglo-Saxon nation.
Many impelling motives animated the men who organized the Virginia
company and labored for the establishment of a colony in America. They
wanted of course the expansion of British trade and a wider market for
British manufactures; and they naturally hoped for financial profit
from their investment in shares of stock in the companies. They
planned, also, not merely trading posts in a foreign land as in India
and elsewhere, but an extension and expansion of the empire of Great
Britain.
A most important part of their plan was to make colonies the answer to
a problem which was pressing for solution: the problem of what to do
with the increasing overplus of population in many of the cities of
England. The danger of a population too great for the land of England
to support and feed was a real one. A colony to which England could
send her overplus population as part of a greater England was a real
solution, and a better one than would be the raising of grain and
foodstuff by foreign countries to feed the hungry of Great Britain.
That men were thinking along this line appears from the action of
certain large towns in paying the expense of the voyage of young people
by the score or hundred to Virginia, and from the plan soon after the
first settlement, whereby young women of reputable families were sent
to Virginia to become wives of the colonists.
And still another motive was the religious one. The Virginia Company
kept constantly in the forefront their plan to Christianize the
Indians. Their plan as they began to put it into effect included the
establishment of parishes and the selection of fit clergymen to go
overseas; to establish a University with a college therein for Indians,
and to take Indian youths into English families to fit and prepare them
for their college. They secured from both King and Archbishop the
authority and permission to bring the expatriated Pilgrim Fathers back
under the English flag, and give them a settlement in Virginia, a plan
which failed after the Pilgrims had started for their promised new
home.
CHAPTER ONE
Beginnings
The men who came to Jamestown brought the ideals and ways of life of
the mother country; its common law, the enactments of Parliament, the
Church of their people; and as shown in the prayer written in England
which the commanding officer of the colony was required to use daily at
the setting of the watch, they hoped also that the natives of the land
might be brought into the Kingdom of God. They made petition for their
own needs, but they prayed also:
And seeing, Lord, the highest end of our plantation here is
to set up the standard and display the banner of Jesus
Christ, even here where Satan's throne is, Lord let our
labour be blessed in labouring the conversion of the
heathen; and because thou usest not to work such mighty
works by unholy means, Lord sanctifie our spirits and give
us holy hearts that so we may be thy instruments in this
most glorious work.
It is of real significance that the London Company made its first
settlement a parish after the manner of the Church of England, and
elected as its first rector the Reverend Richard Hakluyt, one of the
most noted clergymen in England, and a man who had captured the
imagination of all with his books on travel in far lands. He was
expected to remain in England and represent the needs of the colonists
and help, perhaps, to select clergymen to go to new parishes which
would be formed as settlements developed. The religious aspect of the
movement was approved by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and he approved
also the selection of the Reverend Robert Hunt who came to Jamestown as
the vicar of the parish and the pastor of the colonists.
The London Company made a provision that each new settlement should
become a parish with its own rector. The first settlements were
established by the Company itself and were called "Cities" after the
ideal and pattern of Geneva. That city, the home of John Calvin and of
the Calvinistic theology which so strongly influenced the Church of
England in the Seventeenth Century, was a self-governing unit in the
Swiss Confederation. It consisted of the city and its suburban
territory and was the prototype from which the "City" or "Hundred" in
Virginia and the "Township" or "town" in Massachusetts were formed.
There were four Cities in Virginia: James City, Charles City, The City
of Henrico, and Elizabeth City. They were boroughs at the time of the
first meeting of the General Assembly of Virginia in 1619, each one
electing its own Burgesses. And as counties now, instead of cities,
each one elects its own Delegates to the Assembly. There were four
"cities," three "hundreds," and four "plantations" represented by
Burgesses in the first Assembly in 1619, and each one was a separate
parish. Official records have long been lost but the names are known of
some six clergymen who were incumbents of parishes in Virginia between
1607 and 1619.
The London Company had a rule that every clergyman who volunteered or
was invited to go to a parish in Virginia was to be investigated as to
character and fitness, and each one of them was taken by a committee to
a church to read the service and preach a sermon as part of the
investigation.
It is not generally known, perhaps, but plans for the immediate
development of the life of the colonists included the establishment of
a university which would set aside one hall or college for the
education of Indian youth and another for the education of sons of
English families. The London Company in 1618 made a grant of ten
thousand acres of land on the north side of the James River and
immediately to the east of the present-day City of Richmond. That grant
was to be the seat of the University and was to be developed as a group
of tenant farms with the college buildings in the center. So great was
the interest throughout England in the plan that the King as the
temporal head of the Church presented the matter to the whole people of
England. In 1617 he wrote the Archbishops of Canterbury and York:
Most Reverend Father in God: Right trustie and well beloved
Counsellor, we greet you well: You have heard ere this of
the attempt of divers worthy men, our subjects, to plant in
Virginia, under the warrant of our letters of patent, people
of this Kingdom, as well as for the enlarging of our
dominions as for the propogation of the Gospel amongst
infidells; wherein there is good progress made, and hope of
further increase: so as the undertakers of that plantation
are now in hand with the erection of some churches and
schools for the education of the children of these
barbarians, which cannot but be to them a very great charge,
and above the expense which for the civil plantation doth
come to them, in which we doubt not but that you and all
others who wish well to the increase of Christian religion
will be willing to give all assistance and furtherance you
may, and therein to make experience of the zeal and devotion
of our well minded subjects; especially those of the clergy.
Wherefore we do require you, and hereby authorize you to
write your letters to the several bishops of the dioceses in
your province, that they do give order to the ministers and
other zealous men of their dioceses, both by their own
example in contribution and by exhortation to others, to
move our people within their several charges to contribute
to so good a work in as liberal a manner as they may.
Under instructions from the King offerings were to be taken in every
parish four times a year for two years, the money collected to be sent
to the bishops and by them forwarded to the treasurer of the London
Company. The treasurer reported later that more than fifteen hundred
pounds sterling had been sent to him, and later he reported additional
amounts. In that period three bequests aggregating more than a thousand
pounds sterling were reported for the Christianizing of the Indians.
Other gifts included a "communion cup with cover and a plate of silver
guilt for the bread" with communion silk and linen cloths and other
ornaments, all to be placed within a church for Indians to be built
under another bequest. This communion chalice and paten are owned
today by one of the oldest parishes in Virginia, and are in St. John's
Church, of Elizabeth City Parish, at Hampton.
On one of the ships sailing from England to the East Indies an appeal
was made by the chaplain in behalf of the university in Virginia and
gifts were made in such large amount that when they were sent to
Virginia they sufficed for the erection of "a publique free schoole" to
be connected with the university. They named it "The East India
School." The General Assembly, when it first met in July 1619, adopted
a resolution urging English families to take promising Indian youths
into their homes to teach them the fundamentals and prepare them for
the opening of the college.
The work of establishing the university was already proceeding; land
was being cleared; farm houses were being erected; more than one
hundred artisans and workmen had been sent from England and the college
buildings were under construction when on Good Friday, March 22,
1621/22, the great Indian massacre occurred. A full third of all the
English people in Virginia were killed by Indians in one fatal day. The
buildings at the university were burned to the ground, and every
English man, woman and child in every family of the artisans and
workmen was killed. The East India School was burned to the ground.
Indeed the only thing that saved the colony from utter extermination
was that Chanco, an Indian who had become a Christian, had learned of
the plot the night before the massacre and warned the Englishman,
Richard Pace, with whom he lived. Pace crossed the James River and
warned the residents of Jamestown. So it was that Jamestown and some of
the adjoining settlements were warned in time to protect themselves.
The massacre was of course a terrific catastrophe to the whole colony.
Outlying settlements had to be abandoned and the colony was engaged in
war with the Indians for several years. Then a second catastrophe
occurred. King James became dissatisfied with the independent attitude
of the London Company and personally secured its dissolution in 1624.
He then took control of Virginia as a Royal Colony and he himself
appointed the Governor and Council of the colony.
This ended all plans for the opening of the university. The King died
in the following year and his son, King Charles I, was not interested
in a university in Virginia. Nor was he or anyone else interested in
sending ministers to the colonial parishes.
The London Company, with a membership including representatives of the
Church and the universities, and of business interests and the higher
social classes, had the confidence of the people. The King did not. He
had their loyalty as their sovereign, but the spiritual and cultural
welfare of a colony overseas carried little weight amid the political
cross-currents and the self-seeking of a royal court.
CHAPTER TWO
The Colonists at Worship
There are several first-hand accounts of religious worship in the
earliest days of the Jamestown colony. Captain John Smith wrote of the
men at worship in the open air until a chapel could be erected. He
describes the scene of a celebration of the Holy Communion, with the
Holy Table standing under an old sail lashed from tree to tree, with a
bar of wood fastened between two trees as the pulpit, and men kneeling
on the ground before their first altar. Services were held daily,
according to the rules of the _Book of Common Prayer_ which they
brought with them: morning prayer and evening prayer everyday, and
sermons twice on Sunday and once during the week. The law of the Church
required the Holy Communion to be celebrated at least three times
during the year; on Christmas, Easter, and Whitsunday; and
unquestionably this law was observed at Jamestown. Many clergymen
celebrated that sacrament oftener. There can be little doubt that the
first celebration of the Holy Communion at Jamestown was on Whitsunday,
May 24th (old style) 1607, although the first one of which a record
remains was held on the third Sunday after Trinity, June 21. That was a
special celebration, held for a two-fold purpose, one, that Mr. Hunt
had been able to reconcile serious differences between certain elements
among the colonists who had been in angry strife with each other, and
second, because two of the ships which brought the colonists to
Virginia were to set sail on the following morning upon their return
trip to England.
William Strachey, writing in a report of the colony in 1610 after Lord
De la Warr had arrived as the new governor presents the following
picture:
In the midst of the market-place, a store-house, a
"Corps-du-Garde", and a pretty chapel, all which the Lord
Governour ordered to be put in good repair. The chapel was
in length sixty feet, in breadth twenty-four, and the Lord
Governour had repaired it with a chancel of cedar and a
communion table of black walnut; all the pews and pulpit
were of cedar, with fair broad windows, also of cedar, to
shut and open, as the weather shall occasion. The font was
hewen hollow like a canoa, and there were two bells in the
steeple at the west end. The Church was so cast as to be
very light within, and the Lord Governour caused it to be
kept passing sweet and trimmed up with divers flowers. There
was a sexton in charge of the church, and every morning at
the ringing of a bell by him, about ten o'clock, each man
addressed himself to prayers, and so at four of the clock
before supper. There was a sermon every Thursday and two
sermons every Sunday, the two preachers taking their weekly
turns. Every Sunday when the Lord Governour went to church
he was accompanied with all the Councillors, Captains, other
officers, and all the gentlemen, and with a guard of fifty
halberdiers, in his Lordship's livery, fair red cloaks, on
each side and behind him. The Lord Governour sat in the
choir in a green velvet chair, with a velvet cushion before
him on which he knelt, and the Council, Captains and
officers sat on each side of him, each in their place; and
when the Lord Governour returned home he was waited on in
the same manner to his house.
Reverend Alexander Whitaker, the first rector of the City of Henrico
from its foundation in 1611 until his death by drowning in 1617, and
who is still remembered as the clergyman who baptized the Indian
princess Pocahontas, after her conversion to the Christian faith,
described his services as follows:
Every Sabbath we preach in the forenoon and catechize in the
afternoon. Every Saturday at night I exercise in Sir Thomas
Dale's house. Our Church affaires be consulted on by the
minister and four of the most religious men. Once every
month we have a communion, and once every year a solemn
fast.
This method of daily and Sunday services, as the regular rule of the
Church of England, was adopted in Virginia as far as colonial
conditions would permit. But apart from Jamestown itself, and the
schools which came into existence, there would not be many parishes in
which daily services would be feasible. The people lived too far apart
on their farms. They might drive or walk three or five miles to Church
on Sundays, but could not give the time for that on work-days. The same
objection worked against having two services on Sunday. So the custom
became general of having a single service in every church and chapel
every Sunday. The statement made by Rev. Alexander Whitaker, that he
"catechized" every Sabbath afternoon, is illustrative of the usual
method of instructing young people of the parish in the Church
Catechism as preparation for admission to the Holy Communion. Such
"catechetical classes" might be held as frequently on Sunday afternoons
as the needs of the parish children, both white and Negro, might
require: or perhaps sometimes, as frequently as the zeal, or lack of
zeal of the incumbent minister might determine. When in 1724 the Bishop
of London sent a questionary to every Anglican clergyman incumbent of a
parish in America, one of the questions was, "At what times do you
Catechize the Youth of your Parish?"
* * * * *
They have builded many pretty villages, faire houses and
chapels which are growne good benefices of 120 pounds a
yeare besides their own mundall [mundane] industry.
So wrote Captain John Smith a number of years after his return to
England. There may have been an excess of imagination in describing new
and raw settlements as "faire villages," but the salary which was to be
paid to the ministers was a provable fact. Tithes from the culture of
the land by the parishioners amounted to as much as L120, and the
minister had a glebe of 100 acres from the cultivation of which his
tenants and servants through "mundall industry" might greatly increase
his income.
The London Company had carried to Virginia and fixed for the whole
duration of the colonial period the parish system of the Church of
England. Under that system each community became a parish and the
people of the parish, as the land-owners of the community, supported
the church and paid the salary of the minister by tithes from the
produce of the land. There was, however, one change from the custom in
England. There the tithes of a parish might produce a salary for the
incumbent in any amount from ten pounds to hundreds of pounds per
annum. In Virginia the amount of the salary was fixed by the General
Assembly as a definite quantity of tobacco. There was also a glebe farm
and a residence. Those who came to Virginia brought with them their
Bible and their _Book of Common Prayer_ and the Established Church of
England became the Established Church of the Colony.
The all-pervading fact to be kept in mind in connection with the
development of religious organization in Virginia is that the Church of
England itself, during the period from 1600 to the Cromwellian era
1645-1660, was in a turmoil on account of two diverse schools of
thought. One school within the Church desired to retain all the ancient
forms of creed and worship from past centuries except those which had
been perverted under the centuries of Roman Catholic domination. The
other school within the Church desired to cast out all liturgical forms
and the surplice, and also all power of the bishops. They wished to
reduce worship to the forms of Calvinistic theology. There were also
many who desired to make the Church broad enough to include both
schools. The Calvinistic party was already forming dissenting
congregations.
The Brownists, later to become the Pilgrim Fathers of New England, had
already been driven out of England; and under King James, who had
turned against the Calvinists to support the "high church" party,
ecclesiastical courts were being formed to mete out severe punishment
to leaders of dissent.
King James had declared he would "harry the dissenters" and force them
to conform to the Established Church or be driven from the country.
England's answer to that threat was to establish the colonies of
Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island and New Hampshire; and the
constantly growing power of dissent resulted in civil war, in
execution of King Charles I, in the era of the Commonwealth; and in the
abolition of _Prayer Book_ worship for fifteen years from every church
and chapel in England.
In 1606 when the Virginia Company was organized the Calvinistic party
was in power in England, and there were many Calvinists, or Puritans,
as they were then called, in the universities and elsewhere. The
Virginia Company itself was under the influence of Puritan leaders; so
much so, indeed, that this fact was one of the reasons which impelled
the King to abolish the Virginia Company. He knew the freedom of
self-government which the Company had established in Virginia and he no
longer trusted its loyalty to the Monarchy.
From the first settlement in 1607 the policy in Virginia was to let no
question arise between high-churchman and Calvinist. The earlier laws
required the minister of a parish to question every newcomer as to his
religious beliefs, but there is no record of any Protestant dissenter
or any Calvinist having been presented for trial before an
ecclesiastical court. It is of course known as an historical fact that
Sir Edwin Sandys labored long to secure from the King and the
Archbishop permission to bring the Pilgrim Fathers from Holland, under
the British flag again and establish them as a "hundred" in Virginia.
It is of record also that such permission was obtained and that the
Pilgrim Fathers set forth for the Chesapeake Bay but were diverted from
their course by storms that carried them to a place which they named
Plymouth. It is of record furthermore that the Reverend Henry Jacob,
who founded the first Independent or Baptist congregation in London,
was later forced out and came to Virginia where he found a home and
peace until his death.
Reverend Alexander Whitaker, rector of the two adjoining parishes of
Henrico and Charles City from 1611 until 1617, was the son of a famous
Puritan divine. In a letter discussing conditions in Virginia he said:
"I marvaile much--that so few of our English ministers that were so
hot against the surplis and subscription come hither where neither are
spoken of." Whitaker was rector of two parishes because William
Wickham, the minister of one parish, was not of Anglican ordination and
could not lawfully celebrate the Holy Communion. After the death of
Whitaker the Governor of Virginia requested the London Company to ask
the Archbishop of Canterbury to authorize Mr. Wickham to celebrate the
Sacrament, "there being no one else." Such authorization to a clergyman
of Presbyterian ordination could have been given by the Archbishop at
that time as it was permitted then by law. Wickham was not the only
minister of Presbyterian ordination who served as incumbent of a parish
of the Established Church in Virginia. In a report made to London in
1623 it was stated that in Virginia in 1619 "There were three ministers
with orders and two without." The "two without" were unquestionably of
Presbyterian ordination.
Among the first laws enacted in Virginia was one requiring every
minister who came into the colony to take the oath of "conformity" to
the Church of England. The law did not include laymen; it was the
minister only who was required to take the oath. Later, the laws
enacted by the General Assembly required every clergyman coming into
the colony to subscribe to the Articles of the Christian Faith
according to the Church of England and to be of Anglican ordination. By
reason of sheer inability at times to provide sufficient Anglican
clergymen for the parishes, clergymen of Presbyterian ordination were
permitted to serve in Virginia parishes; and that was true throughout
the whole seventeenth century. The last Presbyterian clergyman to hold
an Anglican parish in Virginia, Rev. Andrew Jackson of Christ Church
Parish, Lancaster County, died in 1710. Throughout the century the law
required every citizen to attend the parish church, but there was never
an ecclesiastical court in which a layman could be tried, convicted or
punished as a dissenter.
CHAPTER THREE
Making Bricks Without Straw
The colony of Virginia, after the protective and guiding influence of
the Virginia Company was taken away, found itself in an almost
impossible situation so far as religious organization was concerned.
The leaders of colonial life realized all the more clearly as time
passed that King Charles I, who succeeded his father King James I in
1625, was not the least interested in the religious welfare of the
colony. America was entirely outside the bounds of any diocese or
province in England, and consequently there was no bishop of a diocese,
or archbishop of a province with any personal responsibility for the
guidance or help of the parishes which were being organized in the
colony. The Church in Virginia was left to itself to live or to die. It
believed, according to the teachings of the Church, that bishops were
necessary for the ordination of men to the ministry and for the
performance of the spiritual rite of confirmation, whereby alone under
the law of the Church of England baptized Christians could be admitted
to the sacrament of the Holy Communion. A bishop was also necessary for
the organization and leadership of a diocese, which was the governing
body to which every parish and congregation must belong. But no bishop
was ever sent by the Church of England to Virginia or to any other part
of America throughout the entire colonial period.
The lack of a bishop left the Anglican Church, which was the
Established Church of the whole colony, unable to organize for the
enactment of its own laws or the management of its own affairs. There
being no diocesan organization the clergymen in charge of parishes had
no ecclesiastical authority over them. That fact tended to have the
effect of making each incumbent clergyman a virtually free lance with
no responsibility to an ecclesiastical superior nor community of
fellowship with other clergymen in the colony. This condition continued
until near the end of the century.
The General Assembly of Virginia followed the example of the Parliament
of England and asserted legislative authority by laws for the temporal
government of the Church. It divided the occupied territory of the
colony into parishes and it established new parishes as settlement
extended steadily to the westward. Because of this fact there was never
any section which was not part of a parish, and the usual rule when a
new county was to be created was to establish a new parish covering the
territory of the proposed county before the county was created. Church
buildings might be far apart in new parishes, but no section of
Virginia in which English people were settling was without the
established forms of religious worship.
The General Assembly enacted laws directing the election of laymen in
every parish as the governing body of the parish in temporal affairs.
That group was called the "Vestry." It had authority to buy land for
churches, churchyards and glebe farms, to erect church buildings and to
build glebe-houses as residences for ministers. It was also charged
with the care of the poor and the destitute sick, and orphaned children
within the parish, with the duty of providing new homes for these
children in responsible families. The money to pay for the land, the
buildings, the care of the sick and needy, the salary of the minister,
and other parish needs was collected from the parishioners through an
annual "tithe" of so many pounds of tobacco per poll. The vestry upon
occasion also had certain civil duties not within the scope of
religious organization.
The setting up of a vestry of laymen as temporal head of the Church in
a parish or congregation was first developed in Virginia. It was
extended later to other colonies as the Anglican Church spread through
them all, and it came over into the life of the Protestant Episcopal
Church in the United States. Great as the value of the vestry has been
to the whole Episcopal Church, the vestry in Virginia was of still
greater value, for by its extension to other colonies and states it has
given one of its most distinctive features to the Church of today.
In England, with the exception of some few parishes formed within the
past century or so, no parish has the right to elect its own rector.
The rector is usually appointed by some institution or individual
vested with that authority which is called "the advowson of a parish."
Moreover, no diocese in the Established Church of England has the power
to select its own bishop. The King as temporal head of the Church
appoints the bishops of all dioceses, and that power is exercised for
the King by his prime minister. And during the colonial period in
America the Governor of every colony other than Virginia and
Pennsylvania appointed the rector of every Anglican parish and inducted
him into office.
In Virginia the vestries of the parishes fought Governor after Governor
until they won the right for the vestry itself to choose the minister
to serve in its parish. That right has extended throughout the
Episcopal Church today and has gone further so that today the laity of
the Church have the right to representation in all diocesan conventions
and councils, and in the general convention of the Church. Thus the
laity have their part in every election of a clergyman to become the
bishop of a diocese.
In the seventeenth century the General Assembly also put into effect in
Virginia the constitutions and canons of the province of Canterbury "as
far as they can be put into effect in this country." The General
Assembly thereby made the "doctrine, discipline and worship" of the
Anglican Church of England that of the Church in Virginia as far as it
could be done without a bishop.
That was as far as the General Assembly could go. Throughout all the
seventeenth century the Established Church of Virginia consisted of a
group of parishes without connection with each other and without
central spiritual authority. There was therefore no actual power of
discipline, either of clergymen or laymen.
The situation was made all the more difficult because there was no sure
way to secure ministers. When a parish became vacant some layman in the
parish would have to write to his business agent in England, or to some
friend or relative there and ask that he find a clergyman who would
come to Virginia. Parishes, when they became vacant, remained vacant as
a rule for a year or more; sometimes very much more. The vestries early
adopted the custom of appointing godly laymen as readers whose duty it
was to assist the minister by leading the congregation in the responses
in the Church service, and in raising tunes for the singing of metrical
version of the Psalms. Later, when it was found desirable to erect
chapels of ease in populous parishes, enough readers were appointed in
every parish to permit one of them to hold morning service each Sunday
in each place of worship throughout the parish, while the minister went
his usual round of service in each church or chapel upon regular
schedule. Except in remote chapels the custom was to have service each
Sunday in every church or chapel.
The reader was authorized to conduct morning and evening prayer and to
read a printed sermon, or a "homily." He could not celebrate the
sacrament of Holy Communion. Rather frequently, and especially during
the era of the Commonwealth and the reign of Charles II, several
adjoining parishes would be vacant at the same time; and at one time
about the end of the Commonwealth period the statement was made that
there were only some ten clergymen in Virginia to serve fifty parishes.
Under such circumstances the reader was called upon to perform many
duties. He might baptize a dying child, conduct a funeral, or perform a
marriage ceremony.
There was also in those early days no way of screening out unworthy men
who appeared occasionally as clergymen in the colony; men who perhaps
had been forced out of parishes in England because of immorality or
drunkenness; and occasionally men with forged credentials. Such men
were occasionally appointed to parishes by vestries who had no way of
learning their true status; and if the man was thenceforth morally
decent and had no great fault except occasional drunkenness, he would
be allowed to stay on because of the need of a priest to celebrate the
sacraments.
The vestries protected their parishes from unworthy clergymen by the
uncanonical appointment of a minister as incumbent of a parish for a
year at a time, rather than present him canonically to the Governor of
the colony for induction into the rectorship of the parish. Under the
law of England, and under the law of the Church of England, no rector
could be forced out of a parish after induction except after an
ecclesiastical trial by the bishop or his commissary.
In 1656 John Hammond published a pamphlet entitled _Leah and Rachel_,
extolling the attractiveness of Virginia and Maryland as places of
residence at that time. He described vividly the difficulties which the
older colony had suffered in the earlier years of Charles I. He wrote:
They then began to provide and send home for Gospel
ministers, and largely contributed for their maintenance.
But Virginia savouring not handsomely in England, very few
of good conversation would adventure thither, (as thinking
it a place wherein surely the fear of God was not), yet many
came, such as wore black coats, and could babble in a
pulpet, roare in a tavern, exact from their parishioners,
and rather by their dissolutenesse destroy than feed their
flocks.
Loath was the country to be wholly without teachers, and
therefore rather retain these than to be destitute; yet
still endeavours for better in their places, which were
obtained, and these wolves in sheeps cloathing, by their
Assemblies questioned, silenced, and some forced to depart
the country.
Another problem which the Church faced in Virginia resulted from the
character of the immigrants who came to the colony. It is a well
established fact that the men who came in three ships to Jamestown in
1607 were from various strata of society in England. They all entered
James River on equality of opportunity and of danger. Some at least had
come from the higher classes of society; younger sons, perhaps, or
relatives of stockholders in the London Company, attracted to Virginia
because of the newness of the adventure and the spice of danger; sons
of professional men and men of business, intrigued by a new business
life and opportunity; men from the laboring classes and the peasantry
of rural sections. But it is extremely doubtful that the Jamestown
settlement, after its tragic first years, continued very long to be
attractive to young men seeking adventure only. Many of the families of
today who boast of their generations of ancestry in Virginia descend
from or married into the families of the men and women who came to the
colony in these earliest years of settlement, and have ancestors buried
among the unknown dead of the Jamestown cemetery and churchyard.
There were three sources from which the settlers came; and these
sources were more or less in effect throughout the whole of Virginia's
first century. First and foremost in numbers and importance were the
sons of small farmers and tenant farmers, and younger sons of the
laboring classes and small merchants. No matter how large the
population may be, always there are positions of employment with a
normal wage; but when the younger sons of a mechanic or other working
man grow to maturity where there is only one wage-producing employment
available to the family, the younger sons must seek a living from other
sources. Farms cannot be reduced below the number of acres required to
support one family. When that has been done and there are several sons,
one of them must inherit the farm and the others must seek a living
elsewhere.
The broad acres of Virginia and its equable climate attracted thousands
of such younger sons, and also others who had not been successful and
sought opportunity in a new land. The settlers came from every section
of England, and from the bleak hills of Scotland; from Wales and also
from Ireland. The English were mostly from the Anglican parishes of the
Established Church. The Scottish new-comers were accustomed to
membership in the Established Church of Scotland and they found little
difficulty in living within the Established Church of Virginia. Indeed
there is no recorded effort to establish a Presbyterian congregation in
Virginia until the last quarter of the seventeenth century. So friendly
was the feeling between the Anglicans and the Scottish Presbyterians in
the Norfolk section that Rev. James Porter of Presbyterian ordination
was the incumbent minister of the Anglican Lynnhaven Parish prior to
1676 and until his death in 1683.
A second source, certainly in the early years, was the rapidly
increasing population of the cities and towns of England. It is of
record that in the days of the London Company one town appropriated
funds sufficient to pay the expenses to Virginia of a large number of
its unemployed, and probably the same thing was done by other towns for
their unemployed. Doubtless a little "pressure" was applied in the case
of young men who had no occupation and no visible means of support. And
shanghaiing, to use a modern term, was not unknown.
A third source from which settlers came developed from the custom which
grew up in England of sending to Virginia, and later to all the
colonies, persons who had been convicted of law-breaking. At that time
there were some hundred felonies in the English code of jurisprudence
for which the sentence of death by hanging could be imposed. These
felonies included such offenses as stealing a pig or anything of
greater value than a shilling. The ruling classes of England had long
realized that punishments were too severe for offenses which today
would be misdemeanors; and in the fifteenth century an effort had been
made to mitigate the severity of punishment by an amendment of the law
of "benefit of clergy." This law was a law of Parliament which had
come down from earlier ages of the Church. Under that law an
ecclesiastical person, either priest or monk, who was charged with a
felony could not be tried by a civil court but was delivered up to the
bishop of his diocese for trial in an ecclesiastical court.
By the end of the sixteenth century Parliament had amended the benefit
of clergy law so that every free male who could read and write, upon
conviction of a first offense of felony might plead "benefit of
clergy", and upon showing that he could read a verse of Scripture, have
the penalty remitted. He was then burned in the hand with a hot iron so
that the scar thereby made would be evidence against him if he should
plead benefit of clergy a second time.
The benefit of clergy law was early written into the Virginia code and
continued in that code until after the Revolution. Harsh as was the law
it showed a real effort to ameliorate still harsher laws, and it saved
the lives in England and America of many thousands of first offenders.
The first verse of the fifty-first Psalm was so frequently presented to
be read by some convicted man or boy that it became known as the "neck
verse" because it saved a life; and many a kindly official taught a
'teen-age boy that verse so that he could "read" it when it was
presented to him.
One of the earliest records of the General Court of Virginia contains
the following entry under date January 4, 1628/29:
William Reade, aged thirteen or fourteen years, convicted of
manslaughter, when the verdict was read, and William Reade
asked what he had to say for himself, that he ought not to
die, demanded his clergy, whereupon he was delivered to the
Ordinary.
There were many such instances. In Virginia the Governor was the
Ordinary and as such had authority to accept the boy's plea, have him
read the "neck verse," and thereby permit him to go free "after the
burning."
The severity of the laws influenced the courts in many parts of England
to permit or sentence an offender to escape death by going to one of
the American colonies, and it became the custom to sentence convicted
criminals to serve for a period of years in an American colony as an
indentured servant. A great number of such "convicts" were sent to
Virginia because of the constant demand there for indentured servants
to cultivate the fields and for other duties.
Many of the convicts became useful citizens of the colony after their
terms of servitude ended; but many did not reform and in time became
such a menace that for a period after 1670 the General Assembly forbade
that any more convicts be brought into the colony.
It can be seen therefore that from the beginning the population of
Virginia grew by immigration from various sources and that not all who
came to the colony were of the best type. The New England colonies had
the advantage that their immigrants came in large part from dissenters
from the Established Church of England. They came for "conscience
sake," however, and with their concept of theocratic government the New
England colonists could make it difficult indeed for immigrants they
did not welcome. After Roger Williams had been exiled to Rhode Island
and a few Quakers had been hanged on Boston Common, it was made clear
to Baptists and Quakers, to Anglicans and to witches that Virginia was
a more favorable climate for them than Massachusetts.
In contrast to New England, Virginia was founded and developed as a
cross-section of the whole life of the British Isles, with its evil as
well as its good; with ideals of freedom of thought which made no
attempt to control a man's conscience; and with an ever growing concept
of self-government and human freedom as already developed during nearly
a thousand years and set out by the common law and the statute law of
the race. Virginia was not founded upon any theocratic concept of
government under the influence of a priestly class.
The life and community consciousness that developed in Virginia into
the distinctive customs and ways of a well organized and firmly
established commonwealth were necessarily different from those of the
colonies in New England because of the differing conditions under which
men lived. In the township system of New England a village normally
became the township center and the people lived near enough to each
other to enable them to meet frequently; to work and play together; to
transact business; and to gossip of neighborhood affairs. In Virginia
it was otherwise. In Virginia families lived on separate farms and each
farm was of necessity a community within itself. Life was geared to the
basic fact that tobacco was the money crop, and also was the real
source of the financial strength and stability of the colony. Each
family required a farm of sufficient acreage to raise tobacco as well
as food-stuff and cattle; and throughout the whole colonial period the
genius of Virginian life opposed the development of towns of greater
population than was required for a shipping point and a warehouse, for
the storing and grading of tobacco, and for a few agents of English and
Scottish merchants.
CHAPTER FOUR
Building a Christian Community
John Hammond, in his pamphlet _Leah and Rachel_ sketched briefly
conditions which existed in Virginia between the "starving time" of
1609-10 and the year 1656. His attempt was to correct an opinion widely
held in England of the lawlessness of colonial life. He interpreted the
great massacre of 1622 as the end of one phase and the beginning of
another. He showed that in each phase there was an inevitable period of
laxity of life and disregard of moral and legal conventions which was
overcome finally by the better element of citizenry. His writing
presents a dark picture of conditions, possibly too dark in some
phases; but his picture of the power of the growing colony to establish
and maintain general concepts of decency of life and conduct is
impressive.
Of the period following the great massacre he wrote:
Receiving a supply of men, ammunition and victuals out of
England, they again gathered heart, pursued their enemies,
and so often worsted them, that the Indians were glad to sue
for peace, and they, (desirous of a cessation) consented to
it.
They again began to bud forth, to spread further, to gather
wealth, which they rather profusely spent (as gotten with
ease) than providently husbanded, or aimed at any public
good; or to make a country for posterity; but from hand to
mouth, and for a present being; neglecting discoveries,
planting orchards, providing for the winter preservation of
their stocks, or thinking of anything stable or firm; and
whilst tobacco, the only commodity they had to subsist on,
bore a price, they wholly and eagerly followed that,
neglecting their very planting of corn, and much relyed on
England for the chiefest part of their provisions; so that
being not alwayes amply supplied, they were often in such
want, that their case and condition being relayted in
England, it hindred and kept off many from going thither,
who rather cast their eyes on the barren and freezing soyle
of New-England, than to joyn with such an indigent and
sottish people as were reported to be in Virginia.
Yet was not Virginia all this while without divers honest
and vertuous inhabitants, who, observing the general neglect
and licensiousnesses there, caused Assemblies to be call'd
and laws to be made tending to the glory of God, the severe
suppression of vices, and the compelling them not to neglect
(upon strickt punishments) planting and tending such
quantities of corn, as would not onely serve themselves,
their cattle and hogs plentifully, but to be enabled to
supply New-England (then in want) with such proportions, as
were extream reliefs to them in their necessities.