main staffe of life), proceeded that great plenty of cattle
and hogs, (now innumerable) and out of which not only
New-England hath been stocked and relieved, but all others
parts of the Indies inhabited by Englishmen.
The inhabitants now finding the benefit of their industries,
began to look with delight on their increasing stocks; (as
nothing more pleasurable than profit), to take pride in
their plentifully furnished tables, to grow not onely civil,
but great observers of the Sabbath, to stand upon their
reputations, and to be ashamed of that notorious manner of
life they had formerly lived and wallowed in....
Then began the Gospel to flourish, civil, honourable, and
men of great estates flocked in; famous buildings went
forward, orchards innumerable were planted and preserved;
tradesmen set on work and encouraged, staple commodities, as
silk, flax, pot-ashes, etc., of which I shall speak further
hereafter, attempted on, and with good success brought to
perfection; so that this country which had a mean beginning,
many back friends, two ruinous and bloody massacres, hath by
God's grace out-grown all, and is become a place of pleasure
and plenty.
It may possibly be worthwhile to compare the life of Virginia during
its first two generations with the far west of the United States from
the gold-rush days of 1849 to the end of the nineteenth century. There
again, as in the Virginia of 1607, bona fide settlers of moral ideals
and stability of life prevailed in the long run and developed
self-governing states which maintained the moral code.
But Virginia had an advantage which the far west of the gold-rush days
lacked. Virginia had an Established Church which in spite of its own
problems and difficulties created a parish in every section, and
provided clergymen as far as they could be obtained. It is granted that
some at least of the clergymen were unworthy. The vestries themselves
ejected men of that kind and services could be maintained by readers.
And so the Word of God was read and prayer was offered regularly; and
every man who could read had the Ten Commandments staring him in the
face from the tablets on the wall behind the Holy Table. The individual
might scorn and sneer but in the end the Law of God became the law of
the community.
Men came to church in those early days. For one reason, the law of the
colony required it and there was the threat of punishment if absence
from church was reported to the grand jury. But there was another
reason also, even though men and women were compelled to walk five or
six miles to attend. That other reason was the loneliness of farm life
in the early days of colonial Virginia. The churchyard on a Sunday
morning was then the meeting-place of the whole community, and the only
place where all could meet on the same level. The only other meetings
were when elections were held at the Court House, every three or four
years. And men might attend the meetings of the county court; but women
could not vote, and they did not go to elections; nor were they apt to
attend meetings of the county court except in rare instances when they
were engaged in litigation. And the amount of hard liquor consumed on
election days and county court days was also a deterrent.
Before the day of parish aid societies and women's guilds, the church
service of a Sunday morning was moreover the only meeting to which
everybody might come as of right; and while at church the women
discussed affairs and neighbors within the church building the men
outside walked about or sat on stumps or logs and held their
discussions before and after the service hour.
The church with its churchyard was the public forum at which matters of
public policy and public interest were discussed. It was here also
that business was transacted; and it was here that community spirit of
fellowship, of sympathy and of understanding was developed. The
colonial government recognized all this by directing that every public
communication which had to be brought to the attention of the people as
a whole be read to the congregation of every church or chapel in the
colony. And the Church recognized the same thing by providing that such
announcements should be made immediately after the reading of the
second lesson or New Testament lesson in the morning service. The
approaching worshipper never knew what interesting announcement might
be made at that time; so there was always an element of expectancy and
suspense; perhaps an announcement of the banns of matrimony; perhaps
the reading of a new law, or of some proclamation by the Governor and
Council; perhaps the baptism of a baby, or even a marriage.
So it was that men and women of all classes came under the influence of
Christian teaching whether they would or no; and the constant teaching
and stressing of moral and Christian ideals of life had their effect in
changing and improving the character of the community life.
[Illustration: Old Church Tower, Jamestown, Virginia
Photo by Flournoy, Virginia State Chamber of Commerce]
[Illustration: Jamestown Church Communion Service
Chalice and paten given by Governor Francis Moryson, in 1661. Both
bearing the inscription: Mix not holy things with profane. _Ex dono
Francisco Morrison, Armigeri Anno Domi, 1661._
Large paten at the right given by Sir Edmund Andros, Governor, 1694.
Inscribed: _In usum Ecclesiae Jacobi-Polis. Ex dono Dni Edmundi Andros,
Equitis, Virginiae Gubernatoris, Anno Dom. MDCXCIV._
Alms basin, London, 1739. Second on the right. Inscription: For the use
of James City Parish Church. Given by the old church at Jamestown in
1758 to Bruton Parish Church.
Courtesy Miss Emily Hall]
[Illustration: COMMUNION SERVICE IN USE AT SMITH'S HUNDRED, 1618.
This three piece communion service now at St. John's Church, Elizabeth
City Parish, Hampton, Virginia, has the longest history of use in the
United States of any church silver. The set, a gift to the church
founded in 1618 at Smith's Hundred in Charles City County, was made
possible by a legacy in the will (date 1617) of Mrs. Mary Robinson of
London. Smith's Hundred renamed Southampton Hundred, 1620, was
practically wiped out in the Indian Massacre of 1622. This communion
set delivered in 1627 to the Court at Jamestown for safe keeping,
supposedly, then was given to the second Elizabeth City Church built on
Southampton (now Hampton) River. The inscription in one line on the
base of the Chalice is: _The Communion Cupp for Snt Marys Church in
Smiths Hundred in Virginia_. Hall marks on all three pieces bear London
date-letters for 1618-19.
Courtesy Mrs. L. T. Jester and Mrs. P. W. Hiden]
[Illustration: The Glebe House, Charles City County, Virginia
Courtesy Valentine Museum, Richmond]
[Illustration: Glebe House, Gloucester County, Virginia
Photo by Flournoy, Virginia State Chamber of Commerce]
[Illustration: Christ Church, Middlesex County, Virginia
Photo by Flournoy, Virginia State Chamber of Commerce]
[Illustration: Merchant's Hope Church, Prince George County, Virginia
Photo by Flournoy, Virginia State Chamber of Commerce]
[Illustration: Saint Lukes Church, Isle of Wight County, Virginia
Photo by Flournoy, Virginia State Chamber of Commerce]
[Illustration: Saint Peters Church, New Kent County, Virginia
Photo by Flournoy, Virginia State Chamber of Commerce]
[Illustration: Robert Hunt Memorial Plaque
Altar-piece. A bronze bas-relief representing the administration of the
first Anglican communion in America, June 21, 1607. George T. Brewster,
sc. Gorham Co., founders.
Courtesy Cook Collection, Valentine Museum]
[Illustration: Robert Hunt Memorial Shrine
Erected by the National Society of Colonial Dames of America in the
State of Virginia. Presented to the Diocese of Southern Virginia of the
Protestant Episcopal Church, June 15, 1922. It was placed in the
perpetual care of the Association for the Preservation of Virginia
Antiquities.
Courtesy Cook Collection, Valentine Museum and National Park Service]
CHAPTER FIVE
The Coming of the Negro
A new element came early into the life of Virginia, with permanent and
continuous hurt to the welfare of the colony and later to the
Commonwealth; an element to which the colony was compelled to adapt
itself because it did not have the power to eradicate it after men
perceived its danger. It was the element of human slavery.
The first Negro captives were brought into the port of Jamestown in the
year 1619. They were brought by a foreign ship then described as a
"Dutch" ship, but presumably a Portuguese slaver seeking the
enlargement of his market. The Portuguese had developed a market for
Negro slaves in the Spanish colonies in the Caribbean where the
enslaved Indians proved unable to perform the hard work demanded of
them. Unhappily the slavers succeeded in widening their market to
include Virginia and the other English colonies of the American
continent and in the West Indies.
The first Negroes were brought to Jamestown in 1619 and sold to English
masters as indentured servants. As such they were required to serve for
a definite number of years and after that they would become freemen
entitled to all the benefit of Virginia law. The goal set before them,
as before immigrants from France and the Netherlands, was eventual
freedom and naturalization as full citizens.
The tragedy of the Negro was that he had been procured by the
Portuguese as a captive taken in war between the native Negro tribes,
and he came into the life of Virginia utterly ignorant of every British
ideal of human freedom and government under constitutional law. He knew
nothing of the English language. The indentured Englishman or Scotsman
who was sold into service came with inherited knowledge of Anglo-Saxon
ideals of civil government and Christian faith; and the one great goal
set before him was that he could become a legal citizen of Virginia
after he completed his years of servitude. The Negro knew nothing of
all this.
There would have been little difficulty if the few Negroes in the first
ship had been all who came. The government could have provided for
their care and for their instruction in English ideals and the
Christian faith. But they were not all who came. The first indentured
Negroes proved useful as hewers of wood and drawers of water, and they
were capable of far more work in the fields than many of the
Englishmen: and so the agrarian needs of the community where all men
were farmers made the governmental authorities willing to admit more
Negroes.
The authorities must have realized at once that if Negroes were brought
into the colony in great number they could not be permitted to become
freemen after any period of indenture. That would have brought into the
life of Virginia a steadily growing population of men and women who
knew nothing of English institutions, or of the English language, or of
the Christian religion. The welfare of the colony required that if they
were to be admitted at all, they could be admitted only as servants
under a permanent status of servitude. So slavery was introduced into
the British empire; and in America the enslavement of the Negro was
permitted in New England as well as in Virginia, the Carolinas and in
Georgia.
That was the first act in the great tragedy of Negro slavery in
America. The second was that the enslavement and sale of Negroes proved
so profitable that the people of England entered into it by chartering
the Royal African Company, with authority to purchase captive Negroes
throughout a large portion of Africa which was assigned to the Company
for that purpose. At one time at least the King of England owned stock
in the Company; and he gave his instruction to the royal Governors of
American colonies that they should not permit the passage through a
colonial legislature of any act which would interfere with the right to
import Negroes and sell them into slavery within the colony.
The third act in the tragedy was that after Virginia and perhaps other
colonies had made many unavailing efforts to check or forbid by
legislation the bringing of more Negroes from Africa, the War of
American Independence was fought and won. In the Constitutional
Convention of the new sovereign states called to create a Federal Union
of them all, the representatives of Virginia and other states fought
bitterly for an immediate prohibition against further importation of
Negro slaves, only to be defeated by the cotton-growing interests of
some states and the shipping interests of others who demanded that the
trade be continued for a period of years. And so the Constitution of
the United States when first put into effect in the Federal Union
permitted for twenty years the importation of captive Negroes from
Africa and their sale into slavery.
The increase in the number of Negro slaves in those states where their
labor proved profitable brought with it the constant fear of a Negro
insurrection; a fear that continued until the ending of slavery in this
country. The presence of the Negroes and of English convicts sold into
servitude made it impossible upon any large plantation for the women
and children of the master's household ever to be left without the
protection of a slave-master who had the power of gun and lash to
protect them from harm.
The preaching of the Christian faith to the heathen Indians, which was
so strongly present in the purposes of the London Company at the first
settlement of Virginia, must have been considered when the custom of
admitting Negro slaves began but there is no recorded evidence bearing
upon that subject. If there had been a bishop in the colony he could
have made the conversion of the Negro to Christianity an important part
of a diocesan program; but without a bishop nothing could be done in
an organized way. The matter was perforce left to the consciences of
the incumbent ministers of the several parishes.
It must be remembered that every first generation of the slaves had
come to America as captives taken in war of one tribe against another.
Their languages and dialects included perhaps every language in central
and southern Africa; and their unfamiliar languages made it almost
impossible for the average citizen or his parson to do much in the way
of preaching the Christian faith; except perhaps in the observance of
the universal law of kindness.
The birth of slave children, however, removed the barrier of language,
for the children were taught English as their native tongue. The
children therefore could be taught. All teaching of children, whether
children of the master and mistress or those born as their slaves, was
considered the duty of the whole family. And the teaching of the
catechism and the duties of a Christian life to the slave children was
as important a part of the family responsibility in a Christian home as
the teaching of the children of the family itself. No clergyman of the
Church would be willing to baptize a slave child unless there were
responsible sponsors present who would assume the obligation to give
steady Christian teaching. So it became a rule of the clergy, or most
of them, that the master and mistress in the case of each such baptism
must assume the obligation to give the child Christian training. The
baptized children could then in early youth be permitted to attend the
instruction classes which were held by the incumbent minister for them.
The slave child and the master's child would share the privilege of
admission to the Sacrament of the Holy Communion when each one had
shown sufficient knowledge and understanding of right and wrong, and
had been sufficiently instructed in "the things which a Christian
should know and believe." No one knows how many or what percentage of
slave children in Virginia or elsewhere were baptized, or how many
became communicants because no record was kept. But there were enough
baptisms to create a new problem.
There was no Negro slavery in England, and it was generally understood
that when a Negro slave set foot upon the soil of England he became a
free man. Somehow that concept of freedom became linked in common
thinking with the concept of baptism into the Christian faith; and
there arose in practically every slave-holding section of the English
colonies a question whether the very act of baptizing a slave child did
not set him free from slavery. Because of that question many
slave-owners declined to permit the baptism of their slaves until the
question was settled, and consequently in every slave-owning colony it
became necessary to secure a legislative enactment establishing the
legal status of a baptized slave. The question arose in Virginia, and
in 1667 the following act was adopted by the General Assembly:
Whereas some doubts have risen whether children that are
slaves by birth, and by the charity and piety of their owners
made partakers of the blessed sacrament of baptisme, should
by virtue of their baptisme be made free; _It is enacted and
declared by this Grand Assembly and the authority thereof_,
that the conferring of baptisme doth not alter the condition
of the person as to his bondage or freedom; that diverse
masters, freed from this doubt, may more carefully endeavour
the propagation of Christianity by permitting children,
though slaves, or those of greater growth if capable to be
admitted to that sacrament.
The question was settled likewise throughout all the slave-holding
colonies of England, and human slavery was written into the laws of the
various colonies of the British empire, there to remain until the
ideals of the nineteenth century eliminated it from the constitution
and the laws of every English-speaking nation.
The following incidents, although they occurred in the first half of
the eighteenth century, outside the period covered by this booklet, are
yet of such interest in the continuing story of Negro slavery as to be
worth recording here.
In 1724 the Bishop of London, Edmund Gibson, sent a questionary to the
incumbent minister of every Anglican parish in the American colonies.
Among the questions he asked were two; one inquiring how many
"infidels," either Indians or Negroes, there were in each parish; and
two, what efforts were being made to convert them to the Christian
faith. The answers revealed a serious situation, and the need of more
definite and better organized efforts to convert the Negroes.
The first effort made by the Bishop of London was as strong a pastoral
letter as he could write upon the need of more earnest effort to bring
the Negro slaves into the Christian faith. He also prepared a pamphlet
to be used for the instruction of Negroes. His pastoral letter and his
pamphlet were sent to every incumbent minister, and copies were given
to the heads of families.
Another effort was the organization in England in 1723 by the Rev.
Thomas Bray of a company called "Dr. Bray's Associates." Dr. Thomas
Bray was the bishop's commissary to the province of Maryland. The
purpose of Dr. Bray's Associates was to establish in the colonies
schools for the education and Christian instruction of Negro children,
and it did a useful work. It did a notable work in the City of New
York, and it conducted schools in other places; one of them at
Williamsburg, in Virginia.
There was another and most unusual development in Virginia. Under the
urge of the Bishop of London's pastoral letter there came a great
increase in the number of baptisms of adult Negroes; so sudden an
increase as to cause concern to Commissary Blair and to Governor Gooch.
In some way a report had spread among the Negroes that ex-Governor
Alexander Spotswood, upon his return from a voyage to England, had
brought with him an order from the King directing that all baptized
Negro slaves be set free. The story, improbable as it was to English
ears, was believed implicitly by the Negroes and it brought many of
them to their parish clergy seeking for baptism. Time passed and there
was no movement to set the baptized Negroes free. They became
indignant, for they believed the colonial authorities had ignored the
King's order. A plot for a Negro uprising was formed; but the plot was
discovered and the ringleaders were punished.
Another incident occurred two years later. A woman slave who had been
baptized was convicted of manslaughter in the Gloucester County Court
which sentenced her to death. She thereupon plead the benefit of
clergy. Her plea brought a new problem to the courts of Virginia for
until that time no woman and no slave in the colony had ever been
permitted to plead benefit of clergy. The County Court considered the
plea and the vote was a tie between granting the plea and enforcement
of the sentence. The County Court referred the matter to the General
Court of the colony; and there again the vote resulted in a tie. The
General Court therefore referred the case to the Attorney General of
England. Meanwhile, the General Court ordered that the woman's plea be
granted, and, in order not to set a precedent in an unsettled question,
directed that she be sold out of the colony. At a subsequent meeting of
the General Assembly the matter was settled so far as Virginia was
concerned by enactment of a law that all persons convicted of a first
offense of felony, whether male or female, bond or free, might plead
benefit of clergy.
Slavery existed in the American colonies from Massachusetts and
Connecticut to Virginia and the Carolinas at the end of the seventeenth
century. It was alien to English ideals of human freedom. Yet out of it
all one tremendously important fact has come to pass. The Negro came to
America from almost every Negro tribe and dialect in central and
southern Africa; he came without any connection except his connection
with other slaves when more than one were sold to the same master. He
came into a highly developed civilization with great organized power of
leadership and government; and through the generations of slavery the
Negro in America wrought for himself a national and racial
consciousness within the sphere of American life. The American Negro
today is the most highly educated and the most advanced Negro in the
world. As such he has the opportunity to make his own contribution to
the culture and the civilization of the world. This their centuries of
slavery and repression have brought them.
CHAPTER SIX
Fighting Adverse Conditions
The political conditions in England throughout the middle of the
seventeenth century bore heavily upon Virginia in religious as well as
in civil matters. The period of civil war which began in 1642 lasted
until the King was captured by the parliamentary forces, and Archbishop
Laud, the hated persecutor of dissenters, was beheaded. After an
imprisonment of four years the king was beheaded and Oliver Cromwell
reigned as Protector of the Commonwealth. The civil war had lined up
the dissenting bodies in England, and the Presbyterian Church in
Scotland, against the King and the Church of England.
On the American scene the Puritan colonies in New England were in
hearty sympathy with the dissenters in England. In Virginia the
government and the great body of the people were in equal sympathy with
King Charles and the Established Church. It is true there were in
Virginia the goodly number of several hundred Puritan settlers. In the
Church also there was some Puritan sympathy among a small group of the
clergy. One of these, indeed, the Rev. Thomas Harrison, who became
minister of Elizabeth River Parish (Norfolk) in 1640, was presented for
trial in the county court in April 1645 "For not reading the Book of
Common Prayer, and not administering the sacrament of baptism according
to the canons and order prescribed, and for not catechizing on Sunday
in the afternoon, according to the Act of Assembly." He was banished to
Massachusetts in 1648, where he remained for two years and married.
Afterward he returned to England and was given official position in the
Commonwealth under Cromwell.