MARYLAND AND VIRGINIA.
BY JUSTIN WINSOR,
_The Editor_.
MARYLAND began its career as a crown province with conditions similar
to those which had regulated its growth under the Proprietary. There
was nothing within its limits worthy the name of a town, though there
were certain places where the courts met. The people were planters,
large and small. They, with their servants, were settled, each with
land enough about him, along the extensive tide-water front of the
Chesapeake and its estuaries. Each plantation had a wharf or landing
of its own, and no commercial centre was necessary to ship or receive
merchandise. The Indians were friendly, and no sense of mutual
protection, such as prevailed farther north, compelled the settlers
to form communities. They raised tobacco,—too much of it,—and saw
hardly enough of one another to foster a stable, political union. Local
disturbances were accordingly not very promptly suppressed. Because one
was independent in his living, he came to have too little sympathy with
the independence of the mass.
Life was easy. Land and water yielded abundantly of wild game, while
swine and cattle strayed about the woods, with ear-marks and brands
to designate their owners. The people, however, had mainly to pound
their corn and do without schools, for it needs villages to institute
the convenient mill-wheel and build the school-house. The condition of
the people had hardly changed from what it was during the seventeenth
century. When the eighteenth came in, a political change had already
been wrought by the revolution which placed William and Mary on the
throne,[595] for in 1692 the Marylanders had welcomed Sir Lionel
Copley as the first royal governor. In his train came a new spirit,
or rather his coming engendered one, or gave activity to one which
had been latent. The assembly soon ordained the Protestant Episcopal
church to be the established order of a colony which before had had a
Catholic master. In time the exclusiveness relaxed a little, enough in
some fashion to exempt from restraint those who were Protestant, but
dissenters; but the Romanists soon found to their cost that there was
no relief for them. The fear of a Jacobite ascendency in the mother
country easily kept the assembly alert to discern the evils supposed to
harbinger its advent.
Down to 1715 there was a succession of royal governors, but only one
among them made any impress upon the time. This was Francis Nicholson,
a man of vigor, who was felt during a long career in America in
more than one colony. He was by commission the lieutenant-governor
under Copley; but when that governor died, Nicholson was in England.
On returning he followed his predecessor’s way in studying the
Protestants’ interests. In pursuance of this he made the Puritan
settlement at Anne Arundel, later to be known as Annapolis, the
capital,[596] and left the old Catholic St. Mary’s thereby to become a
name and a ruin.
There grew up presently an unseemly quarrel between Nicholson and
Coode, a reprobate ecclesiastic, who had earlier been a conspicuous
character in Maryland history.[597] The breach scandalized everybody;
and charge and counter-charge touching their respective morals
contaminated the atmosphere. Indeed, the indictment of Nicholson by his
enemies failed of effect by its excess of foulness. In face of all this
the governor had the merit, and even the courage, to found schools. He
also acquired with some a certain odor of sanctity, when he sent Bibles
to the sick during an epidemic, and appointed readers of them to attend
upon a sanitarium which had been established at a mineral spring in
St. Mary’s county. There was not a little need of piety somewhere, for
the church in Maryland as a rule had little of it. When Nicholson was
in turn transferred to Virginia, Nathaniel Blakiston (1699) and John
Seymour (1703) succeeded in the government. Under them there is little
of moment to note, beyond occasional inroads of the French by land and
of the pirates along the Chesapeake. Events, however, were shaping
themselves to put an end to the proprietary sway.
Charles, the third Lord Baltimore, died February 20, 1714-15, and
his title and rights descended to Benedict, his son, who had already
in anticipation renounced Catholicism. In becoming Protestant he had
secured from the Crown and its supporters an increased income in place
of the allowance that his Catholic father now denied him, out of the
revenues of the province, which were still preserved to the family.
Benedict had scarce been recognized when he also died (April 5, 1715),
and his minor son, Charles, the fifth lord, succeeded. The young
baron’s guardian, Lord Guilford, took the government, and finding to
his liking John Hart, who was then ruling the province for the king, he
recommissioned him as the representative of the Proprietary, who was
now one in religious profession with the vast majority of his people.
The return of the old master was to appearances a confirmation of the
old charter; but an inevitable change was impending.
Meanwhile the laws were revised and codified (1715), and a few years
later (1722), by solemn resolution, the lower house of the assembly
declared that the people of Maryland were entitled to all the rights
and immunities of free Englishmen, and were of necessity inheritors of
the common law of England, except so far as the laws of the province
limited the application of that fundamental right.[598] This manifesto
was the signal of a conflict between the ways that were and those
that were to be. The Proprietary and the upper house made a show of
dissenting to its views; but the old conditions were doomed. The
methods of progress, however, for a while were gentle, and on the whole
the rule of succeeding governors, Charles Calvert (1720), Benedict
Leonard Calvert (1726), and Samuel Ogle (1731), was quiet.
The press meanwhile was beginning to live, and the _Maryland Gazette_
was first published at Annapolis in 1727. A real town was founded,
though it seemed at the start to promise no more than St. Mary’s,
Annapolis, or Joppa.[599] This was Baltimore, laid out in 1730, which
grew so leisurely that in twenty years it had scarce a hundred people
in it. From 1732 to 1734 the Proprietary himself was in the province
and governed in his own person.
The almost interminable controversy with the Penns over the northern
bounds of Maryland still went on, the latter province getting the worst
of it. Even blood was shed when the Pennsylvania Germans, crossing
the line which Maryland claimed, refused to pay the Maryland taxes.
During this border turmoil, Thomas Cresap, a Maryland partisan, made
head against the Pennsylvanians, but was finally caught and carried
to Philadelphia. A truce came in the end, when, pending a decision in
England, a provisional line was run to separate settlers in actual
possession.
Maryland had other troubles beside in a depreciated paper currency, and
was not singular in it. She sought in 1733 to find a remedy by making
tobacco a legal tender.
In 1751 the rights of the Proprietary again passed, this time to
an unworthy voluptuary, destined to be the last Baron Baltimore,
Frederick, the sixth in succession, who was not known to his people
and did nothing to establish a spirit of loyalty among them. They had
now grown to be not far from a hundred and thirty thousand in number,
including multitudes of redemptioners, as immigrants who had mortgaged
their labor for their ocean passage were called, and many thousands
of transported convicts. This population paid the Proprietary in
quit-rents and dues not far from seventy-five hundred pounds annually.
[Illustration: FREDERICK, LORD BALTIMORE.
From an engraving in the _London Magazine_, June, 1768, after an
original painting of the sixth baron. He was born Feb. 6, 1731;
succeeded to the title on the death of the fifth baron, April 24, 1751.
Some accounts make him erroneously the seventh baron.]
The beginning of the French war found Horatio Sharpe[600] fresh in
office (1753) as the representative of the man to whom the people
paid this money. There was need of resources to push the conflict, in
which Maryland had common interests with Virginia and Pennsylvania.
The delegates were willing to vote grants, provided the revenue of
the Proprietary would share in the burden. This the governor refused
to consider; but as the war went on, and the western settlements were
abandoned before the Indian forays, Sharpe conceded the point, and
£40,000 were raised, partly out of a double tax upon Catholics, who
were in the main of the upper classes of the people. The question of
supplying the army lasted longer than the £40,000, and each renewal of
the controversy broadened the gulf between the governor and the lower
house. It soon grew to be observed that the delegates planned their
manœuvres with a view to overthrowing, under the stress of the times,
the government of the Proprietary. Occasionally a fit of generosity
would possess the delegates, as when they voted £50 a scalp to some
Cherokee rangers, and £1,500 to the Maryland contingent in Forbes’s
expedition against Du Quesne. It was never difficult, meantime, for
them to lapse into their policy of obstruction. So Maryland did little
to assist in the great conflict which drove the French from North
America.
When the war was practically closed, in 1760, the long dispute over the
boundary with Pennsylvania was brought to an end, substantially, upon
the agreement of 1732, by which the Proprietary of that day had been
over-reached. This fixed the limits of the present State of Delaware,
and marked the parallel which is now known as Mason and Dixon’s line.
The most powerful colony south of that line was Virginia, with whom
Maryland was also destined to have a protracted boundary dispute,
that has extended to our own time, and has been in part relegated to
the consideration of the new State, which the exigencies of the civil
war caused to be detached from the Old Dominion. What was and is the
most westerly of the head fountains of the Potomac (so the charter
described the point from which the meridian of Maryland’s western
line should run) depended on seeking that spot at the source of the
northern or southern fork of the river. The decision gave or lost to
Maryland thirty or forty square miles of rich territory. A temporary
concession on Maryland’s part, which entailed such a loss, became a
precedent which she has found it difficult to dislodge. Again, as the
line followed down the Potomac, whether it gave the bed of that river
to Virginia or to Maryland, has produced further dispute, complicated
by diversities in the maps and by assumptions of rights, but in 1877
arbitration confirmed the bed to Maryland. Changing names and shifting
and disappearing soil along the banks of the Chesapeake have also made
an uncertainty of direction in the line, as it crosses the bay to the
eastern shore. A decision upon this point has in our day gained new
interest from the values which attach to the modern oyster-beds.
* * * * *
The history of Virginia was left in an earlier chapter[601] with the
suppression of Bacon’s Rebellion. The royal governors who succeeded
Berkeley held office under Lord Culpepper, who himself assumed the
government in 1679,[602] bringing with him a general amnesty for the
actors in the late rebellion.[603] But pardon did not stop tobacco
falling in price, nor was his lordship chary of the state, to maintain
which involved grinding taxes. Towns would not grow where the people
did not wish them, and even when the assembly endeavored to compel
such settlements to thrive at fixed landing places, by what was called
a Cohabitation Act (1680), they were not to be evoked, and existed
only as ghosts in what were called “paper towns.” Tobacco, however,
would grow if only planted, and when producers continued to plant
it beyond what the mob thought proper to maintain fit prices, the
wayward populace cut off the young plants, going about from plantation
to plantation.[604] Culpepper kept up another sort of destruction
in hanging the leaders of the mob, and in telling the people that a
five-shilling piece, if it went for six, would make money plentier.
When the people insisted that his salary should be paid in the same
ratio, he revoked his somewhat frantic monetary scheme.
When Culpepper ceased to be the Proprietary, in 1684, Virginia became
a royal province, and Charles II. sent out Lord Howard of Effingham
to continue the despotic rule. The new governor had instructions not
to allow a printing-press.[605] He kept the hangman at his trade,
for plant-cutting still continued. The assembly managed to despatch
Ludwell to England to show how cruelly matters were going, and he got
there just after William and Mary were proclaimed. The representations
against Effingham sufficed to prevent the continuance of his personal
rule, but not to put an end to his commission, and he continued to
draw his salary as governor, despite his adherence to James, and after
Francis Nicholson had been sent over as his deputy (1690). The new
ruler was not unskilled in governing; but he had a temper that impelled
him sometimes in wrong ways, and an ambition that made the people
distrust him. He could cajole and domineer equally well, but he did not
always choose the fit occasion. He was perhaps wiser now than he was
when he nearly precipitated New York into a revolution; and he showed
himself to the people as if to win their affections. He encouraged
manufactures. He moved the capital from Jamestown, and created a small
conspicuousness for Williamsburg[606] as he did for Annapolis, in
Maryland. He followed up the pirates if they appeared in the bay. He
tried to induce the burgesses to vote money to join the other colonies
in the French war; but they did not care so much for maintaining
frontier posts in order to protect the northern colonies as one might
who had hopes to be one day the general governor of the English
colonies. They intrigued in such a way that he lost popularity, when
he had none too much of it. He seemed generous, if we do not narrowly
inspect his motives, when he said he would pay the Virginia share of
the war money, if the assembly did not care to, and when he gave half
of a gratuity which the assembly had given him, to help found the
college of William and Mary. This last act had a look of magnanimity,
for James Blair, who had been chiefly instrumental in getting the
college charter, and who also in a measure, as the commissary of the
Bishop of London, disputed Nicholson’s executive supremacy, had laughed
at his Excellency for his truculent ways. The governor had opposed the
“Cohabitation” policy as respects towns, and a certain Burwell affair,
in which as a lover he was not very complacent in being worsted, had
also made him enemies powerful enough to prefer charges in England
against him, and he was recalled,—later to be met in New England and
Acadia, and as Sir Francis Nicholson to govern in Carolina.
His service in Virginia was interrupted by his career in Maryland,
ending in 1698, during which Sir Edmund Andros ruled in the larger
colony. This knight’s New England experience had told on him for the
better; but it had not wholly weaned him from some of his pettish ways.
He brought with him the charter of the College of William and Mary, and
had the infelicity to find in Blair, its first president, the adversary
who was to throw him. This Scotchman was combative and stubborn
enough for his race, and equally its representative in good sense and
uprightness. Blair insisted upon his prerogatives as the representative
of the bishop, and taking the grounds of quarrel with the governor to
England he carried his point, and Nicholson was recalled from Maryland
to supply the place of Andros.
The new college graduated its first class in 1700, and at about the
same time Claude Philippe de Richebourg and his Huguenots introduced a
new strain into the blood of Virginia.
The accession of Queen Anne led to the conferring of the titular
governorship in 1704 upon George Hamilton, the Earl of Orkney, who
was to hold the office nominally for forty years. For five years the
council ruled under Edward Jenings, their president, and when, December
15, 1704, he made his proclamation of the victory of Blenheim, it was
a satisfaction to record that Colonel Parke, of Virginia, had been the
officer sent by Marlborough to convey the news to the queen.[607]
In 1710 the ablest of the royal governors came upon the scene,
Alexander Spotswood, a man now in his early prime, since he was born
in 1676. He bore a wound which he had got at this same Blenheim, for
he had a decisive, soldierly spirit. It was a new thing to have a
governor for whom the people could have any enthusiasm. He came with
a peace-offering in the shape of the writ of _habeas corpus_, a boon
the Virginians had been thus far denied. The burgesses reciprocated in
devoting £2,000 to build him a palace, as it was called, as perhaps
well they might, considering that their annual tobacco crop was now
about 20,000,000 pounds.
The happy relations between the governor and his people did not
continue long without a rupture. The executive needed money to fortify
the frontiers, and the assembly tightened the purse-strings; but they
did pass a bill to appoint rangers to scour the country at the river
heads.[608] Spotswood did the best he could with scant funds. He
managed to prevent the tributary Indians from joining the Tuscaroras
in their forays in Carolina,[609] and he induced the burgesses to take
some action on the appeals of Governor Pollock.[610] He also gave his
energy scope in developing the manufacture of iron and the growing of
vineyards, and in the stately march which he made to find out something
about the region beyond the Blue Ridge.[611] He was indeed always ready
for any work which was required.
[Illustration: ALEXANDER SPOTSWOOD.
After the engraving in the _Spotswood Letters_, vol. i., with a note
on the portraits on p. viii. His arms are on p. vii. Cf. the _Century
Magazine_, xxvii. 447.]
If his burgesses revolted, he dissolved them with a sledge-hammer kind
of rhetoric.[612] If Blackbeard, the pirate, appeared between the
capes, he sent after him men whom he could trust, and they justified
his measure of them when they came home with a bloody head on their
bowsprit.[613] He had no sooner concluded a conference with the Five
Nations, in August and September, 1722,[614] than the opposition to an
assumption which he, like the other governors, could not resist, to be
the head of the church as well as of the state, made progress enough to
secure his removal from office.[615]
During Spotswood’s time, Virginia attained to as much political
prominence as the century saw for her prior to the Revolution. The
German element, which gathered away from tide-water,[616] began to
serve as a balance to the Anglican aristocracy, which made the river
banks so powerful. The tobacco fields, while they in one sense made
that aristocracy, in another made them, in luckless seasons, slaves
of a variable market. This relation, producing financial servitude,
enforced upon them at times almost the abjectness of the African
slaves whom they employed. Above it all, however, arose a spirit of
political freedom in contrast with their monetary subjection. The
burgesses gradually acquired more and more power, and the finances
of the province which they controlled gave them opportunities which
compensated for their personal cringing to the wilful imperialism of
the tobacco market. The people lacked, too, the independence which
mechanical ingenuity gives a race. A certain shiftlessness even about
the great estates, a laziness between crops, the content to import the
commonest articles instead of making them,—all indicate this. The
amenities of living which come from towns were wanting, with perhaps
some of the vices, for an ordinary or a public house generally stood
even yet for all that constituted a settlement of neighbors. In 1728
Byrd, of Westover, speaks of Norfolk as having “most the air of a town
of any in Virginia.”
Spotswood remained in Virginia, and was a useful man after his fall
from office. He was made the deputy postmaster-general of the colonies
(1730-39), and he carried into the management of the mails the same
energy which had distinguished his earlier service, and brought
Philadelphia and Williamsburg within eight or ten days of each other.
On his estates, whether on the Rapidan near his Germans at Germanna,
or in his house at Yorktown, he kept the courtly state of his time and
rank, and showed in his household his tenderest side. His old martial
spirit arose when he was made a major-general to conduct an expedition
to the West Indies; but he died (1740) just as he was about to embark,
bequeathing his books, maps, and mathematical instruments to the
College of William and Mary.
Meanwhile, after a short service in the governor’s office by Hugh
Drysdale (1722)[617] and Robert Carter, in 1727 William Gooch took the
chair, and held it for twenty-two years. It was a time of only chance
excitement, and the province prospered in wealth and population. The
governor proved conciliatory and became a favorite of the people. He
granted toleration to the Presbyterians, who were now increasing on the
frontiers, where Mackemie and the Scotch-Irish were beginning to gain
influence, and the sturdy pioneers were thinking of the country beyond
the mountains.[618] Some of the tide-water spirit was pushing that way,
and in 1745 Lord Fairfax settled in the valley, built his Greenway
Court, and passed his life in chasing game and giving it to his guests,
with other hospitable cheer.[619] Tall and gaunt of person, sharp in
his visage and defective in his eyesight, if he had little of personal
attraction for strangers, he had the inheritance of some of the best
culture of England, and could hand to his guests a volume of the
_Spectator_, open at his own essays. Disappointed in love at an early
day, Fairfax added a desire for seclusion to a disposition naturally
eccentric. He had come to America for divertisement, and, enamored of
the country and its easy life, he had finally determined on settling on
his property. The mansion, which he had intended to erect with all the
dignity of its manorial surroundings, was never begun; but he built a
long one-story building, with sloping roof and low eaves. Here he lived
on through the Revolution, a pronounced Tory, but too respected to be
disturbed, until the news of Yorktown almost literally struck him dead
at ninety-two.
Along the river bottoms of the lowlands, while Major Mayo[620] was
laying out Richmond (1733), and while all tradition was scorned in the
establishment of the _Virginia Gazette_ (1736),[621] the ruling classes
of the great estates felt that they were more rudely jostled than ever
before, when Whitefield passed that way, harrying the church,[622] and
even splitting the communions of the Presbyterians as he journeyed in
other parts.
When Governor Gooch returned to England, in 1749, he left the council
in power, who divided (1751) the province into four military districts,
and to the command of one of them they assigned a young man of
nineteen, George Washington by name. Late in the same year (November
20, 1751) a notable character presented himself in Robert Dinwiddie,
and the College of William and Mary welcomed the new executive with
a formal address.[623] Dinwiddie had been unpopular as a surveyor
of customs, as such officers almost invariably are; and he came to
his new power in Virginia at a trying time, just as a great war was
opening, and he and the burgesses could not escape conflict on the
question of the money needed to make Virginia bear a creditable part
in that war. When it was the northern frontiers towards Canada which
were threatened, neither Maryland nor Virginia could be made to feel
the mortification that their governors felt, if the northern colonies
were left to fight alone the battles in which all the English of the
continent were interested.
[Illustration]
But the struggle was now for the thither slope of the Alleghanies and
the great water-shed of the Ohio. In this conflict Virginia presented
a frontier to be ravaged, as she soon learned to her cost. The story
of that misfortune is told in another chapter,[624] as well as of the
outbreak which Dinwiddie forced, when he sent Washington to Le Bœuf.
The exigencies of the conflict, however, were not enough to prevent
the assembly from watching jealously every move of the governor for
asking money from them; and he in turn did little to smooth the way for
their peaceable acquiescence, when he exacted unusual fees for his own
emolument. The aristocracy were still powerful, and, working upon the
fears entertained by the masses that their liberties were in danger,
all classes contrived to keep Dinwiddie in a pretty constant turmoil of
mind, a strain that, though past sixty, he bore unflinchingly. If, by
his presentation of the exigencies, he alarmed them, they would vote,
somewhat scantily, the money which he asked for: but they embarrassed
him by placing its expenditure in the hands of their own committee.
Dinwiddie was often compelled to submit to their exasperating
requirements, and was obliged to inform the Lords of Trade that there
was no help for it.
It was war indeed, but this chapter is concerned chiefly with civil
affairs. Nothing, therefore, can be said here of the disaster of
Braddock and its train of events down to the final capture of DuQuesne.
Forts were built,[625] and the Indians were pursued[626], and Virginia
incurred a debt during it all of £400,000, which she had to bear with
the concomitants of heavy taxes and a depreciated paper money. At the
end of the war, Norfolk, with its 7,000 inhabitants, was still the only
considerable town.
Dinwiddie had ruled as the deputy of Lord Albemarle. When Lord Loudon
came over in July, 1756, to assume the military command in the
colonies, he became the titular governor of Virginia; but he was never
in his province in person, and Dinwiddie ruled for him till January,
1758, when he sailed for England.
CRITICAL ESSAY ON THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION.
SINCE the enumeration of the records of Maryland was made in another
volume,[627] the Maryland Historical Society, having now in custody
the early archives of the province, has begun the printing of them,
under the editorship of Mr. William Hand Browne, three volumes of which
having been thus far published.[628] The publication committee of
that society have also made to the legislative assembly of the State
a printed report,[629] dated November 12, 1883, in which they give an
account of the efforts made in the past to care for the documents. To
this they append a _Calendar of State Archives_, many of which come
within the period covered by the present chapter.[630]
The general histories of Maryland have been characterized in another
place.[631] Of one of them, Chalmers’s, some further mention is made
in the present volume.[632] Two works of a general character have
been published since that enumeration was made. One of these is the
_Maryland_ (Boston, 1884) of William Hand Browne, a well-written
summary of the history of the palatinate prior to the Revolutionary
period.[633] Mr. Browne’s familiarity with the Maryland archives was
greatly helpful in this excellent condensation of Maryland’s history.
Mr. John A. Doyle has made special use of the colonial documents in
the Public Record Office, in the chapters (x. and xi.) which he gives
to the province in his _English in America, Virginia, Maryland and the
Carolinas_, London, 1882.
There have been some valuable papers of late embraced in the _Johns
Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science_, edited
by Professor Herbert B. Adams, which touch Maryland, particularly its
institutional history. Such are Edward Ingle’s _Parish Institutions
of Maryland_ (_Studies_, 1st series, no. vi.); John Johnson’s _Old
Maryland Manors_ (no. vii.);[634] Herbert B. Adams’s _Maryland’s
influence upon land cessions to the United States, with minor papers
on George Washington’s interest in Western lands, the Potomac Company
and a National University_ (3d series, no. 1);[635] Lewis W. Wilhelm’s
_Maryland Local Institutions, the Land System, Hundred, County, Town_
(nos. v., vi., and vii.).
The one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of
Baltimore, occurring in 1880, has produced several records. The city
commemorated the event, and printed the next year a _Memorial Volume,
1730-1880_, edited by Edward Spencer;[636] and the _Proceedings of the
Historical Society, October 12, 1880_, constitutes no. 16 of their
Publication Fund series. Mr. J. Thomas Scharf, who had published his
_Chronicles of Baltimore_ in 1874, elaborated the matter into the more
extensive _History of Baltimore City and County_, in 1881, published
at Philadelphia. There is a plan of the city showing its original
and present bounds in this last book (p. 62), as well as in the same
writer’s _History of Maryland_ (i. 416). In 1752 there was printed a
_List of families and other persons residing in Baltimore_, and this
has been thought to be the earliest directory of an American town. In
the same year there was a view of Baltimore by John Moales, engraved by
Borgum, which is the earliest we have.[637]
The coarse, hearty, and somewhat unappetizing life of the colony, as it
appeared to a London factor, who about the beginning of the eighteenth
century sought the country in quest of a cargo of tobacco, is set forth
amusingly, as well as in a warning spirit, in a rough Hudibrastic poem,
_The Sot-weed Factor, by Eben Cook, Gent._[638] (London, 1708.)
There are modern studies of the life of the last century in Lodge’s
_Short History of the English Colonies_, in the seventh chapter of
Neill’s _Terra Mariæ_, and in the last chapter of Doyle’s _English
Colonies_; but the most complete is that in the first chapter of the
second volume of Scharf’s _History of Maryland_, whose foot-notes and
those of Lodge will guide the investigator through a wide range of
authorities.[639]
Illustrations of the religious communions are given in Perry’s
_History of the American Protestant Episcopal Church_ (i. 137), in the
_Historical Collections of the American Colonial Church_ (vol. iv.),
in Anderson’s _American Colonial Church_, in Hawks’s _Ecclesiastical
Contributions_ (section on “Maryland”), and in Theodore C. Gambrall’s
_Church Life in Colonial Maryland_ (Baltimore, 1885).[640] The
spread of Presbyterianism is traced in C. A. Briggs’s _American
Presbyterianism_, p. 123.
[Illustration: MAP OF MARYLAND]
The literature of the controversy over the bounds of Maryland, so
far as it relates to the northern lines, has already been indicated
in another volume.[641] The dispute was ably followed by McMahon in
his _History of Maryland_ (vol. i. pp. 18-59), among the earlier of
the general historians, and the whole question has been surveyed by
Johnston in his _History of Cecil County_ (ch. xix.). He traces the
course of the Cresap war,[642] the progress of the chancery suit of
1735-1750.[643] The diary of one of the commissioners for running the
line in accordance with the decision, being the record of John Watson,
is preserved in the library of the Pennsylvania Historical Society.
Mr. Johnston (p. 307) also describes the line of 1760,[644] and tells
the story of the work and methods adopted by Mason and Dixon in 1763,
referring to their daily journal, one copy of which is, or was,
preserved in the Land Office, the other in the library of the Maryland
Historical Society.[645] The scientific aspects of this famous survey
are considered in the _Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society_
(1769); and a running sketch of the history of the line, by William
Darlington, is reprinted in the _Historical Magazine_ (ii. p. 37).
Another, by T. Edwards, is in _Harper’s Monthly_ (vol. liii. p. 549),
and one by A. T. McGill in the _Princeton Review_ (vol. xxxvii. p. 88).
Dunlap’s “Memoir” (see Vol. III. p. 514) is also contained in _Olden
Time_ (vol. i. p. 529).
The most recent and one of the most careful surveys of the history of
the dispute between Baltimore and Penn and of the principles involved
is in Walter B. Scaife’s “Boundary Dispute between Maryland and
Pennsylvania,” in _Pennsylvania Magazine of History_ (October, 1885, p.
241).
Chief among the maps bearing upon the question of the bounds are the
following:—
_A map of Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and East and West New
Jersey, by John Thornton_, which is without date, but probably from
1695 to 1700.[646]
_A new map of Virginia and Maryland and the improved parts of
Pennsylvania and New Jersey, revised by I. Senex, 1719._[647]
_A short account of the first settlement of the Provinces of Virginia,
Maryland, New York, and Pennsylvania by the English, to which is
annexed a map of Maryland, according to the bounds mentioned in the
charter and also of the adjacent country, anno 1630_, London, 1735.
This map is a large folding one called “A map of Virginia, according
to Capt. John Smith’s map, published anno 1606; also of the adjacent
county, called by the Dutch Niew Nederlant, anno 1630, by John Senex,
1735.”[648]
The map accompanying the agreement of July 4, 1760, between Baltimore
and Penn, is reproduced, with the text of that document, in the
_Pennsylvania Archives_, iv. (1853), p.3.
Respecting the bounds in dispute between Maryland and Virginia, the
fullest summary of claims and evidence is in the _Report and Journal
of Proceedings of the joint Commissioners to adjust the boundary
line of the States of Maryland and Virginia_, Annapolis, 1874. This
volume gives statements of the Maryland (p. 63) and Virginia (p. 233)
claims, with depositions of witnesses. The volume as deposited in
public libraries is accompanied by a coast survey chart, in which the
determined bounds are marked, with the attestation of the governor of
Maryland.[649]
[Illustration: VIRGINIA. 1738.]
It may be collated with the _Report and accompanying documents of
the Virginia Commissioners on the boundary line between Maryland
and Virginia_, Richmond, 1873, which contains the statements
of the Maryland Commissioners as well as those of the Virginia
Commissioners, the latter having a voluminous appendix of historical
documents, including a large number copied from the British Archives,
and depositions taken in 1872. The _Final Report of the Virginia
Commissioners_ (Richmond, 1874), includes a memorandum of their journal
and their correspondence (1870-72), as well as the journal of the joint
commissions of Virginia and Maryland (1872).
[Illustration: WILLIAM BYRD.
After a cut in _Harper’s Magazine_, April, 1885, p. 712, from the
original painting now at Brandon, on James River. Byrd was b. 1674, and
d. 1744.]
Respecting the bounds of Virginia and North Carolina, commissioners
on the part of both colonies were appointed in 1710,[650] but the
line was not run in its easterly portion till 1728, by commissioners
and surveyors of both governments. Col. William Byrd, one of the
commissioners of Virginia, prepared a sort of diary of the progress of
the work, which is known as a _History of the Dividing Line between
Virginia and North Carolina, as run in 1728-29_. This and other of
Byrd’s writings which have come down to us are in manuscript, in the
hand of a copyist, but interlined and corrected by Byrd himself. The
volume containing them was printed at Petersburg in 1841 (copyrighted
by Edmund Ruffin) with an anonymous editor’s preface, which states that
the last owner of it was George E. Harrison, of Brandon, and that the
family had probably been prevented from publishing the papers because
of the writer’s “great freedom of expression and of censure, often
tinctured by his strong church and state principles and prejudices;”
for Colonel Byrd was “a true and worthy inheritor of the opinions and
feelings of the old cavaliers of Virginia.” These papers were again
privately printed at Richmond, in 1866, under the editing of Thomas
H. Wynne, in two volumes, entitled _History of the Dividing Line and
other tracts, from the papers of William Byrd of Westover_. Mr. Wynne
supplies an historical introduction, and his text is more faithful
than that of 1841, since some of the asperities of the manuscript were
softened by the earlier editor. Byrd had been particularly severe on
the character of the North Carolinians, as he saw it in his intercourse
with them,[651] and not the worst of his characterizations touched
their “felicity of having nothing to do.” Byrd at the time of his
commission was a man of four and fifty, and he lived for some years
longer, not dying till 1744. He was a good specimen of the typical
Virginian aristocrat, not blind to the faults of his neighbors, and
the best sample of such learning and wit as they had,[652] while he
was not forgetful of some of the duties to the community which a large
estate imposed upon him. Among other efforts to relieve the Virginians
from their thraldom to a single staple were his attempts to encourage
the raising and manufacture of hemp.[653] One of Byrd’s companions in
the boundary expedition of 1728-29 was the Rev. Peter Fontaine, who
acted as chaplain to the party, and a draft of the line as then marked
is made in connection with some of his letters in Ann Maury’s _Memoirs
of a Huguenot Family_ (New York, 1852, 1872, p. 356).[654] In 1749 the
line was continued westerly beyond Peter’s Creek, by Joshua Fry and
Peter Jefferson, the father of Thomas Jefferson; and was still further
continued to the Tennessee River in 1778.[655]
Another question of bounds in Virginia, which it took some time to
settle, was the western limits of the northern neck, as the wedge-like
tract of territory was called which lay between the Rappahannock and
the Potomac. It had been granted by Charles II. to Lord Hopton and
others, but when bought by Lord Thomas Culpepper a new royal grant of
it was made to him in 1688.[656] It passed as a dower with Culpepper’s
daughter Catharine to Thomas, Lord Fairfax, and from him it passed
to the sixth lord, Thomas, who petitioned (1733) the king to have
commissioners appointed to run the line between the rivers. Of this
commission was William Byrd, and an account of their proceedings is
given in the second volume of the _Byrd Manuscripts_ (p. 83) as edited
by Wynne. A map of the tract was made at this time, which was called
_The Courses of the Rivers Rappahannock and Potowmack in Virginia,
as surveyed according to order in the years 1736-1737_. The bounds
established by this commission were not confirmed by the king till
1745, and other commissioners were appointed the next year to run the
line in question. The original journal of the expedition for this
purpose, kept by Maj. Thomas Lewis, is now in the possession of John
F. Lewis, lieutenant-governor of Virginia.[657] The plate of the map
already referred to was corrected to conform, and this additional title
to it was added: _A Survey of the Northern Neck of Virginia, being
the lands belonging to the Rt. Honourable Thomas Lord Fairfax, Baron
Cameron, bounded by and within the Bay of Chesapoyocke, and between
the Rivers Rappahannock and Potowmack_. Along the line which is dotted
to connect the head-spring of the southern branch of the Rappahannock
with the head-spring of the Potomac is a legend, noting that it was
determined by the king in council, April 11, 1745, that this line
should be the westerly limit of the Fairfax domain. A section of the
second state of the plate of this map is annexed in fac-simile from a
copy in Harvard College library.[658]
[Illustration: NORTHERN NECK OF VIRGINIA. 1736-1737.]
An account has been given elsewhere[659] of what has been lost and
preserved of the documentary records of Virginia.
The introduction to W. P. Palmer’s _Calendar of Virginia State Papers_,
1652-1781, summarizes the documents for the period of our present
survey which are contained in the body of that book, and they largely
concern the management of the Indians on the borders.[660] Among the
Sparks MSS. in Harvard College library are various notes and extracts
respecting Maryland and Virginia from the English records (1727-1761)
in the hand of George Chalmers, as made for his own use in writing his
_Revolt of the American Colonies_.[661]
There were various editions of the laws during the period now under
consideration. What is known as the Purvis collection, dedicated to
Effingham, was published in London in 1686; and a survey, giving _An
abridgement of the Laws in force and use in her majesty’s plantations_,
including Virginia, was printed in London in 1704. The acts after 1662
were published in London in 1728; while the first Virginia imprint on
any edition was that of W. Parks, of Williamsburg, in 1733; and John
Mercer’s _Abridgment_, published in Williamsburg four years later
(1737), was reprinted in Glasgow in 1759. The acts since 1631 were
again printed at Williamsburg in 1752.[662]
The earliest description of the country coming within the present
survey is John Clayton’s _Account of the several Observables in
Virginia_ (1688), which Force has included in the third volume of his
Tracts. A paper on the condition of Virginia in 1688 is the first
chapter in W. H. Foote’s _Sketches of Virginia_ (1850). An “Account of
the present state and government of Virginia” is in the fifth volume
(p. 124) of the _Massachusetts Hist. Soc. Collections_. The document
was presented to that society by Carter B. Harrison, of Virginia.
It seems to have been written in England in 1696-98, in the time of
Andros’ governorship, and by one who was hostile to him and who had
been in the colony.
Professor M. C. Tyler[663] speaks of the commissary, James Blair,
as “the creator of the healthiest and most extensive intellectual
influence that was felt in the Southern colonies before the
Revolution.” This influence was chiefly felt in the fruition of his
efforts to found the College of William and Mary.[664] _The Present
State of Virginia and the College, by Messieurs Hartwell, Blair and
Chilton_ (London, 1727), contains an account, in which Blair, in
Tyler’s opinion, had the chief hand. Blair’s relations to the college
have had special treatment in Foote’s _Sketches of Virginia_ (ch. ix.);
in Bishop Meade’s _Old Churches and Families of Virginia_ (vol. i.
art. xii.); and in the _Hist. of the American Episcopal Church_ (vol.
i. ch. 7), by Bishop Perry, who gives two long letters from Blair to
the governor of Virginia, after the originals preserved at Fulham
Palace. Additional material is garnered by Perry in his _Historical
Collections of the Amer. Colonial Church_, which includes a large mass
of Blair’s correspondence.[665]
[Illustration]
[Illustration: WILLIAM AND MARY COLLEGE.
After the picture given in Meade’s _Old Churches_, etc., i. 157. Cf.
Perry’s _Amer. Episc. Church_, i. 123; Gay’s _Pop. Hist. U. S._, iii.
60.
The original building was burned in 1705. The next building, which by
scarcity of funds was long in erecting, was not completed till 1723.
The above cut is of this second building. In _Scribner’s Monthly_,
Nov., 1875, are views of the building before and after rebuilding in
1859.]
While Francis Makemie was entering the lists in the interest of
“cohabitation,” gaining thereby not much respect from the tide-water
great-estate owners, and printing in London (1705) his _Plain and
friendly perswasive to the inhabitants of Virginia and Maryland for
promoting towns and cohabitation_, setting forth the loss to virtue
by the dispersal of sympathizers in religion, Robert Beverley was
publishing anonymously in London (1705) his _History and Present State
of Virginia, in four parts_. 1. _The History of the First Settlement
of Virginia, and the Government thereof, to the present time._ 2. _The
Natural Productions and Conveniences of the Country, suited to Trade
and Improvement._ 3. _The Native Indians, their Religion, Laws, and
Customs, in War and Peace._ 4. _The Present State of the Country, as to
the Polity of the Government, and the Improvements of the Land_,[666]
which, as will be seen in the last section of the title, particularly
sets forth the condition of the colony at that time, offering some
foundation for Mackemie’s arguments.[667]
[Illustration]
About twenty years later we have another exposition of the condition
of the colony in Hugh Jones’s _Present State of Virginia, giving
a particular and strict account of the Indian, English, and negro
inhabitants of that colony_, published in London in 1724.[668] Jones
was rector of Jamestown and a professor in the college at Williamsburg,
and his book was a missionary enterprise to incite attention among the
benevolent in the mother country to the necessities of the colony. “His
book,” says Tyler,[669] is one “of solid facts and solid suggestions,
written in a plain, positive style, just sufficiently tinctured with
the gentlemanly egotism of a Virginian and a churchman.”
The single staple of Virginia was the cause of constant concern,
whether of good or bad fortune, and the case was summed up in 1733,
in a tract published at London, _Case of the planters of tobacco in
Virginia, as represented by themselves, with a vindication_.[670]
Bringing the history of the colony down to about the date of the
period when Jones made his survey, Sir William Keith in 1738 published
his _History of the British Plantations in America, containing the
History of Virginia: with Remarks on the Trade and Commerce of that
Colony_.[671] Nine years later (1747) Stith published his history, but
it pertained only to the early period, and in his preface, dated at
Varina, December 10, 1746, he acknowledged his indebtedness to William
Byrd.[672]
When Burk published his _History of Virginia_ in 1804,[673] the days
of the Revolution had separated him from those that were in reality
the formative period of the Virginian character, which had grown out
of conditions, then largely a mere record. One would have expected to
find the eighteenth century developed in Burk better than it is. The
more recent authorities have studied that period more specifically,
though Bancroft does not much enlarge upon it.[674] Lodge[675] is
chiefly valuable for the conspectus he affords of the manners of the
time. Doyle in his _English in America_ (London, 1882) depends on
the “Colonial Entry Books” and “Colonial Papers” of the State Paper
Office in London. Since Howison’s,[676] the latest history is that by a
Virginian novelist, John Esten Cooke, and styled _Virginia, a history
of the people_ (Boston, 1883),[677] in which he aims to show, through
succeeding generations of Virginians, how the original characteristics
of their race have been woven into the texture of the population
from the Chesapeake to the Mississippi, as those of New England have
controlled the north from the Atlantic to the Lakes. He laments that
there has never been a study of the Southern people to the same extent
as of the Northern, and says that some of the greatest events in the
annals of the whole country need, to understand them, a contemplation
of the Virginian traits, losing sight, as he expresses it, of “the
fancied dignity of history.” Guided somewhat by this canon, the author
has modelled his narrative, dividing the periods into what he calls the
Plantation, the Colony, and the Commonwealth,—the second more than
covering the years now under consideration. He places first among his
authorities for this period _The Statutes at Large, being a Collection
of all the Laws of Virginia_, by William Walter Hening, in thirteen
volumes, as the most important authority on social affairs in Virginia.
He speaks of its unattractive title failing to suggest the character of
the work, and says, with perhaps an excess of zeal, that “as a picture
of colonial time, it has no rival in American books.”
[Illustration]
The institutional history of Virginia has of late received some
particular attention at the hands of Mr. Edward Ingle, who printed in
the _Mag. of Amer. History_ (Dec., 1884, p. 532) a paper on “County
Government in Virginia,” which he has reprinted with other papers on
the Land Tenure, the Hundreds, the English Parish in America, and the
Town, in a contribution called _Local Institutions of Virginia_, which
makes parts ii. and iii. of the third series (1885) of the _Johns
Hopkins University Studies in History and Political Science_.[678]
We are fortunate in possessing the official correspondence of the two
most notable royal governors of the eighteenth century. The letters
of Alexander Spotswood were used by Bancroft, and were then lost
sight of till they were recovered in England in 1873.[679] They are
now published in two volumes (Richmond, 1882, 1885) as _The official
letters of Alexander Spotswood, lieutenant-governor of Virginia,
1710-1722; now first printed from the manuscript in the collections
of the Virginia Historical Society, with an introduction and notes by
R. A. Brock_, constituting the initial volumes of a new series of the
_Collections_ of the Virginia Historical Society. Spotswood’s official
account of his conflict with the burgesses is printed in the _Virginia
Hist. Register_; and we best see him as a man in William Byrd’s
“Progress to the Mines,” included in Wynne’s edition of the _Byrd
Manuscripts_. Palmer draws Spotswood’s character in the introduction to
his _Calendar of Virginia State Papers_, p. xxxix.[680]
Of the other collection of letters, _The official records of Robert
Dinwiddie, lieutenant-governor of Virginia, 1751-1758; now first
printed from the manuscript in the collections of the Virginia
Historical Society, with an introduction and notes by R. A. Brock_,
Richmond, Va., 1883-84, being vols iii. and iv. of the new series of
the same _Collections_, a more special account is given in another
place.[681]
The valley of Virginia has been more written about locally than the
eastern parts. Beside the old history of Kercheval,[682] W. H. Foote
has embraced it in the second series of his _Sketches of Virginia_
(Philad., 1855), and it has recently been treated in J. Lewis Peyton’s
_History of Augusta County, Va._ (Staunton, Va., 1882), a region once
embracing the territory from the Blue Ridge to the Mississippi.
Norfolk has been made the subject of historical study, as in W. S.
Forrest’s _Norfolk and Vicinity_ (1853), but with scant attention to
the period back of its rise to commercial importance.
The ecclesiastical element forms a large part of Virginia history
in the earlier times. Some general references have been given in
another place.[683] At the opening of our present period, there
were of the established church in Virginia fifty parishes, with one
hundred churches and chapels and thirty ministers,—according to
Bray’s _Apostolic Charity_ (London, 1700).[684] The church history
has been well studied by Dr. Hawks,[685] Bishop Perry,[686] and Dr.
De Costa,[687] in this country, and by Anderson in his _History of
the Colonial Church_ (1856),—a book which Doyle calls “laborious
and trustworthy on every page.” Bishop Meade has treated the subject
locally in his _Old Churches and Families of Virginia_,[688] as has Dr.
Philip Slaughter in his _Saint George’s Parish_, _Saint Mark’s Parish_
and _Bristol Parish_,[689] and he has given a summary of the leading
churches of colonial Virginia in a section of Bishop Perry’s _Amer.
Episc. Church_ (vol. i. p. 614).
The dissenting element was chiefly among the Presbyterians, whose later
strongholds were away from the tide-water among the mountains. The
Reverend Francis Mackemie[690] had been principal leader among them,
and he was the first dissenter who had leave to preach in Virginia.
Their story is best told in C. A. Briggs’ _American Presbyterianism_
(p. 109), and in both series of W. H. Foote’s _Sketches of Virginia_
(Phil., 1850, 1855).
The Baptists in Virginia did not attain numerical importance till
within the decade preceding the American Revolution, and they had
effected scarcely any influence among the opponents of establishment
during the period now under consideration.[691] The Huguenots brought
good blood, and affected religious life rather individually than as a
body.[692]
[Illustration]
In depicting the society of Virginia during this period, we must get
what glimpses we can from not very promising sources. The spirit
which despised literature and schools was in the end dispelled, in
part at least, but it was at this time dominant enough to prevent
the writing of books; and consequently the light thrown upon social
life by literature is wanting almost entirely. The Virginians were
apparently not letter-writers and diarists, as the New Englanders
were, and while we have a wealth of correspondence in Massachusetts
to help us comprehend the habits of living, we find little or nothing
in Virginia. We meet, indeed, with some letters of the Byrds[693] and
the Fontaines,[694] and the official correspondence of Spotswood and
Dinwiddie; but the latter touch only in a casual way upon the habits
of living. A few descriptive and political tracts, like Hugh Jones’
_Present State_,[695] give us small glimpses. Later Virginia writers
like Bishop Meade[696] and Dr. Philip Slaughter,[697] have gathered up
whatever of tradition has floated down in family gossip; and Foote[698]
and Esten Cooke[699] have drawn the picture from what sources they
could command, as Irving has in his _Life of Washington_.[700] The most
elaborate survey of the subject, with philosophic impulses, has been
made by Eben Greenough Scott in his _Development of Constitutional
Liberty in the English Colonies of America_ (New York, 1882),[701]
in which he contrasts the manners of the lowland aristocracy with
those of the farmers of the valley and with the wilder life of the
frontiers.[702] The most elaborate composite of data derived from every
source is the chapter on “Virginia in 1765,” in Henry Cabot Lodge’s
_Short History of the English Colonies_, in which he depends very
largely on the survival of manners in the days when Burnaby, Anburey,
Robin, Smyth, Brissot de Warville, Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, and Weld
travelled in the country,—material which has the great disadvantage
of being derived from chance observation, with more or less of
generalization based on insufficient instances, as Dr. Dwight has
pointed out in the case of Weld at least.[703]