suppose that that simple community, only just now begun, was ready for
an elaborate government, which, among other things, proposed to change
very radically the free tenure of the land into a sort of feudal holding
under hereditary nobles; but they meant to establish their system when
they could, and were in too great haste, it turned out, to believe that
parts of it could at once be made to apply. Even yet “Carolina” had no
settlements except those at Albemarle. In 1660 a few families from
Massachusetts, looking for some betterment of fortune, had established
themselves near the mouth of the Cape Fear River, purchasing their
lands from the Indians; but they had left the place disheartened in
1663, the very year the lords proprietors got their first grant from
the crown. News of the grant stimulated some of the English who were in
the Barbadoes to attempt the same thing that the Massachusetts men had
attempted. In May, 1664, they began a settlement upon a new site, far up
the spreading stream of the Cape Fear. But three years were enough for
them also; in 1667 they, too, were gone, and the river country was again
empty.
It proved no light matter to govern even the little settlements
at Albemarle. The publication there of the formidable Fundamental
Constitutions in 1673, when the proprietors seemed bent upon putting them
at any rate partially into operation, disturbed the as yet unfettered
settlers very deeply,—for they loved and meant to have a free life in
the wilderness. Though they had been promised freedom of belief and
worship, these Constitutions, as published among them, threatened to
make every man pay for the maintenance of the Church of England as an
established church. Moreover, the air was at that very time full of
disquieting rumors. News came that the King had given all of Virginia to
Lords Arlington and Culpeper,—not to rule, indeed, but to own; and it
was said that the proprietors of Carolina meant to divide the province
among themselves, and give the Albemarle country to Sir William Berkeley,
whom they would have exceedingly disrelished as their master, being
quit, as they had hoped, of Virginia’s imperious governor. Worst of all,
the governor whom the proprietors had sent them sided with the King’s
officers in enforcing the Navigation Acts, whose enforcement would spoil
their trade. They sold their timber and their cattle very freely to
shrewd skippers out of New England, who brought them what they needed
from the ports of the Puritan colonies, got their timber and cattle,
disposed of them in the West Indies, and came back again thence with good
cargoes of sugar, rum, and molasses, for which they took tobacco, to be
sold at home for export into England,—all without license from the crown
and in plain defiance of the Acts.
The colonists preferred their trade to the laws of Parliament, and their
freedom to the laws of the lords proprietors. Moreover, the very charter
under which the proprietors acted had given their lordships the right
to make laws and constitutions only “by and with the advice, consent,
and approbation of the freemen” of the colony, or their representatives;
and these new regulations had never been so approved or ratified. The
temper of resistance among the colonists proved more than the agents
of the lords proprietors could manage; and for almost ten years after
the publication of the “Constitutions” the settlers at Albemarle took
leave to have their own way upon every critical occasion. In 1675 their
governor, Carteret, Stephens’s successor, went to England in a sort
of despair, to explain that he was not allowed to govern. In 1677 the
colonists seized the collector of the revenues, and several thousand
pounds of the revenue with him, because he tried to break up their
trade with New England and the West Indies. They were quieter without a
governor than with one, and meant to obey authority only on their own
terms.
The proprietors were to find that it was not much easier to govern
settlements of their own planting than to govern the rough-and-ready
hamlets at Albemarle, which had been set up without them. By August,
1669, the month after they signed the first draft of their Fundamental
Constitutions, they had an expedition ready to go into the southern
parts of Carolina and plant a colony which should be worth helping and
worth governing; and by April of the next year it was actually planted.
There had been many disasters to face by the way. The settlers had
been kept a long time at the Barbadoes, to repair their ships and get
supplies, and colonists to recruit their number; and they had come away
from the islands with Colonel William Sayle, a man stricken in years,
for governor, instead of Sir John Yeamans, who knew the coast and was in
the full vigor of manhood. The aged soldier who took them to their place
of settlement had founded a colony of Presbyterians in the Barbadoes
twenty years ago, and still showed not a little of the steadfastness and
strength of purpose that had marked him for a leader then; but he was
too old for this new task, and died the next year in the doing of it.
The place chosen for the settlement was a pleasing bluff within the fair
Kiawah River,—which they presently called the Ashley, in honor of the
distinguished nobleman for whom Mr. Locke had written the Fundamental
Constitutions. Their settlement they called Charlestown; and there they
lived for ten years without notable incident, except that Sir John
Yeamans, who was their governor from 1671-1674, brought negro slaves
with him when he came from the Barbadoes in 1672. Mr. Joseph West was
governor most of the time during the first years of settlement, and ruled
very sensibly, assisted by a council of which the freemen of the colony
elected a part. Things went quietly enough until the proprietors and
the government at home bestirred themselves to enforce the Fundamental
Constitutions and the laws of trade.
[Illustration: EARL OF SHAFTESBURY]
It was no mere perverseness of temper or mere love of license that set
the colonists so stubbornly against the plans and the authority of their
governors. It was rather their practical sense and their knowledge of
their own necessities. They knew that, if they were to thrive at all,
they must be let live as they could in the wilderness, as the actual
and inevitable conditions of their own lives permitted, not cramped by
elaborate constitutions or by the rigid restrictions imposed by the
Parliament’s laws of trade, but with a freedom suitable to their rough
and simple ways of living. Virginia herself, for all she was so much
older, so staid and loyal, was moved to revolt almost as easily as
Albemarle and Charlestown when put upon more grossly than she could bear.
She was herself in rebellion at the very time the men at Albemarle were
openly defying their governor to put into force among them the laws which
forbade their trade with the Indies.
Virginians had seen their burdens and their grievances against the
government alike of their governor and of the King grow ominously heavier
and heavier ever since the Restoration, which they had once deemed
so happy an event, until at last the condition in which they found
themselves seemed quite intolerable. Sir William Berkeley was no longer
the manly, approachable gentleman he had been in the earlier time of his
first governorship,—bluff and wilful, but neither bitter nor brutal.
The long days of his enforced retirement, while the Commonwealth stood
(1652-1660), had soured his temper and alienated him from the life of the
colony; and he had come out of it to take up the government again, not a
Virginian, like the chief Cavalier gentlemen about him, who now accounted
Virginia their home and neighborhood, but a harsh and arbitrary servant
of the crown and of his own interests, ready to fall into a rage at the
slightest contradiction, suave only when he meant to strike.
[Illustration: ST. PETER’S CHURCH, KENT COUNTY, VIRGINIA]
The change was not obvious at first; but it became evident enough ere
long. The King recommended mere place hunters and adventurers to Sir
William for appointment in Virginia, wishing to be rid of them, or to
pay his personal obligations at Virginia’s cost. Sir William put them in
office in the colony, and along with them his own friends, kinsmen, and
favorites, until councillors, sheriffs, magistrates, surveyors, customs
clerks, the whole civil service of Virginia, seemed a body of covetous
placemen who meant to thrive whether justice were done and the laws kept
or not. Nor was that the worst of it. It was next to impossible for the
small planter, or for any man who did not thrive exceedingly, to pay the
growing taxes and the innumerable petty exactions which were demanded
of him to pay these men, satisfy the King’s collectors, and maintain
the expensive government of the colony. The Navigation Acts forbade the
colonists to send their tobacco anywhere but to England, in English
ships, and so the English skippers could demand what freight they pleased
and the English merchants could buy the tobacco at such prices as suited
them. The same Acts forbade any goods to be brought into the colonies
except from England, and so the English merchants could exact what they
chose for the supplies they sent and the skippers could get their return
freight charges. There was no coin in Virginia, or next to none; tobacco
itself, her principal crop, served as money, and when it was worth little
and the goods it was used to pay for were worth a great deal, it was hard
to live at all, and poverty seemed a thing enacted and enforced.
[Illustration: TITLE-PAGE OF INCREASE MATHER’S “BRIEF HISTORY OF THE WARR
WITH THE INDIANS”]
[Illustration: TITLE-PAGE OF MRS. APHRA BEHN’S “WIDDOW RANTER”]
Time had been, before the meddlesome Acts of Navigation, when the Dutch
ships which came in at the river paid five shillings on every anchor of
brandy they brought in, and ten shillings on every hogshead of tobacco
they took out; and the money had been appropriated to make good the
defence of the frontier against the Indians. But no Dutch skippers came
in since the Acts, and that charge also fell upon the poor planters.
“It hath so impoverished them,” declared Mr. Bland, of London (1677),
looking for the sake of untrammelled trade into these matters, “that they
scarce can recover wherewith to cover their nakedness.” Taxes were not
levied upon the land, so that each man might pay in proportion to his
property, but by the poll, each man alike, and every servant assessed
with his master; so that the poor man bore the chief burden, and sweated
under it intolerably. His tobacco, with the diminishing price the English
merchants put upon it, was all he had to pay with, and seemed every leaf
of it to go to the tax gatherer,—who got his office by favor, and himself
took ten _per cent._ of what he collected. Members of the governor’s
council were exempt from the poll tax, with ten servants apiece, and
yet were paid salaries out of the taxes. The government seemed a thing
planned for the support and behoof of “the grandees” of the governor’s
court, the men of the Virginian democracy said, and their discontent
grew with their numbers. Their numbers grew fast enough. There were
six thousand white indentured servants in the colony. Every year quite
fifteen hundred of these saw the hoped-for end of their term of service
come, and were given fifty acres of land apiece to shift for themselves
and join the ranks of taxpayers. When the price of tobacco fell, one
evil year, to a halfpenny a pound, Mr. Ludwell declared to the governor
that nothing but “faith in the mercy of God, loyalty to the King, and
affection for the government” restrained them from rebellion. And their
affection for the government cooled fast enough.
The restrictions put upon the carrying trade had but the other day
been made complete in their kind. In 1672 an act for the still “better
securing of the plantation trade” had forbidden even a coastwise trade
among the colonies themselves, or with the English Bermudas, in sugar,
tobacco, cotton, wool, indigo, or any other of the enumerated articles of
the former Acts, except they were first taken into England, or paid at
the port of export the duties levied at the English wharves.
As if poverty, and heavy taxes to make it the more burdensome, were not
enough, deep anxiety lest Virginia should lose even the forms of her
liberty was added, and finally war with the Indians, to make the measure
full to overflowing. It was useless to appeal to the House of Burgesses
for a redress of grievances, because Sir William Berkeley would allow no
election of a new House. For fifteen years he kept alive the House which
had been chosen in 1661, at the time of the Restoration. It was made up
of hearty partisans of the King’s government, as was natural, having been
chosen when it was, and was quite ready to follow Sir William’s lead in
most things. He would adjourn its sessions from time to time, but would
not dissolve it; and so there were no elections at all. The Burgesses
themselves were content enough to prolong its life, and keep the governor
in good humor by their votes. Each member received two hundred and
fifty pounds of tobacco for every day he spent in the assembly, to keep
himself, his servant, and a horse; every committee of the assembly had
its paid clerk and money out of the colonial treasury for its liquors;
and there was oftentimes more profit to be got out of a long session than
out of diligent tobacco planting at home.
[Illustration: LORD CULPEPER]
In 1673 came the news that the King had given all Virginia to Lords
Arlington and Culpeper, to be their proprietary province, like Carolina
and New Jersey, and several gentlemen had to be sent over to England
in haste to plead, intrigue, and protest, as if for the very life of
the colony, against such a usurpation. Their lordships kept the royal
quit-rents, spite of all opposition, and a new poll tax of sixty
pounds of tobacco a head had to be levied to pay the expenses of the
commissioners sent to plead the colony’s case against them. And then,
in 1675, when affairs seemed most darkened and confused by selfish and
arbitrary action both at home and over sea, there came hot trouble with
the Indians, which the governor refused either to deal with himself or
allow others to settle.
It was that that brought the explosion. A sort of desperate wrath took
possession of the stronger and more daring spirits of the colony, and
they presently found a leader who gave Sir William good cause to fear
what might come of their anger. The governor ought to have remembered
that other year of blood, 1644, when last the Indians were on the
war-path, and how sad a blow it had dealt the colony. True, there had
then been scarcely ten thousand people in Virginia, and there were now
no doubt close upon fifty thousand, armed and able in all ordinary
straits to take care of themselves. It was not likely the Indians could
strike very far within the borders or threaten the heart of the colony.
But men and women and children lived on the borders no less than at the
heart of the colony. Precious lives could be wasted there as well as
elsewhere,—plain people, no doubt, but Englishmen,—and the colonists were
not likely to stand tamely by and look on at the massacre of their own
people. No doubt the Indians had been unwisely, unjustly dealt with and
provoked, goaded to hostile acts by attacks upon one tribe for what, it
may be, another had done; such things had too often happened, and the
colonists were not over-careful to avoid them. But that was no reason
for refusing to put a force into the field to stop the massacres. What
was the governor’s scruple? He alone could grant licenses to trade with
the Indians, and he did not grant them for nothing. It was something
more than a surmise that he shared the profits of the trade, and let the
traders sell what they would to the savages, though it were firearms and
powder and shot, against the laws of the colony, to make the profits
worth while. Did he hesitate to interrupt his lucrative fur trade with
the redmen; or was he reluctant to put any armed force into the field for
fear of what it might do for the redress of grievances within the colony
after the danger from the Indians had been made an end of? Whatever his
motive, he would not act, and could not, he said, until the assembly came
together for its regular meeting in March, 1676. Meanwhile scores of
people had been murdered, plantation after plantation had been destroyed
(sixty in a single county within a space of little more than two weeks),
and the border was desolate and terror-stricken. And even when March
came and the meeting of the Burgesses, Berkeley played them false. The
assembly met, the “Long Assembly” elected fifteen years ago,—met for the
last time, as it turned out,—and voted to send a force of five hundred
men against the savages; but Berkeley disbanded the little army before it
could take the field; and defence was again abandoned.
[Illustration: ON THE WAR-PATH]
Here was more than could be endured; and there were men in Virginia who
were ready to defy the governor and get their rights by arms. Nathaniel
Bacon had sworn with a hot oath that if the redskins meddled with him
he would harry them, commission or no commission; and he kept his
threat. He was of the hot blood that dares a great independence. He was
great-grandson of Sir Thomas Bacon, of Friston Hall, Suffolk, cousin
to the great Lord Bacon, of whose fame the world had been full these
fifty years; and though he was but nine-and-twenty, study at the Inns of
Court and much travel in foreign lands had added to his gentle breeding
the popular manners and the easy self-confidence of a man of the world
before he turned his back upon England and came with his young wife to be
a planter on James River in Virginia. In May news came that the Indians
had attacked his own upper plantation and had murdered his overseer and
one of his favorite servants; and he did not hesitate what to do. A
company of armed and mounted men begged him to go with them against the
redskins, and he led them forth upon their bloody errand without law or
license, member of the governor’s council and magistrate though he was.
He sent to ask the governor for a commission, indeed, but he did not turn
back, or lose his armed following either, when word was brought that the
governor had refused it, and had proclaimed him and all with him to be
outlaws. It was flat rebellion; but Bacon’s pulse only quickened at that,
and Virginia for a little while seemed his to command.
He put a stirring tragedy upon the stage there in the quiet colony with
its sombre forests, and played it out with a dash and daring that must
take every generous man’s imagination who remembers how fair and winning
a figure the young leader made through all those uneasy days, and how
irresistibly he caught the eye and the fancy with the proud way in which
he carried himself, lithe and tall and dark of skin, and that melancholy
light in his dusky eyes, a man of action and of passion,—such passion
as it moves and wins other men to look upon. That was a summer to be
remembered in which he pushed to the front in affairs,—and most of all
its sad ending.
[Illustration: TITLE-PAGE OF ELIOT’S ALGONQUIN VERSION OF THE NEW
TESTAMENT]
Berkeley found that he could not openly treat Bacon as a rebel without
kindling a flame of discontent on every hand among the colonists. He was
obliged to dissolve the “Long Assembly,” call a new one, admit Bacon
himself to a seat in it, hear his bad administration debated, and consent
at last to the levying of an effective force to fight the Indians. But
what he could not do openly he tried to do secretly and by treachery. One
night while the assembly still sat Nathaniel Bacon fled from Jamestown,
warned that his life was in danger. He returned with six hundred men at
his back and compelled the governor to give him a commission. Once more
he was proclaimed an outlaw, and all his followers outlaws with him, the
moment he had turned his back and plunged into the Indian country; and a
war for protection turned to civil war.
Bacon’s blows were quick and terrible, and more to be feared than
his biting speech. He had well nigh exterminated the Indian tribe of
Susquehannocks before he heard of or heeded his outlawry. Then he turned
in his hot anger against the government itself, as if it had declared
war upon him. He required and took of his followers an oath to resist
not only the governor, but the very troops of the King himself should
they come, until wrongs should be righted; and Berkeley was driven, a
fugitive, to the far counties beyond the Bay. When he returned with a
motley force to Jamestown he was driven forth again, and Jamestown was
burned. Only Bacon’s death ended the ugly business. As autumn approached
he sickened and died (the first day of October, 1676), overcome by the
passion of action and of feeling, and the exhausting life of the camp and
the field; and his followers dispersed.
[Illustration: NATHANIEL BACON AND HIS FOLLOWERS BURNING JAMESTOWN]
He had gone too far. At first, rank and file, no doubt, had been with
him, men of substance with the rest, for the right to live and to better
the government; but most of the chief planters had held aloof even then;
and as he went on they were more and more alienated. It became more and
more an affair of the rabble, of the men who were poor and desperate
and had nothing to lose. When he burned Jamestown he also sacked the
plantations of the greater land-owners thereabouts, knowing them to
be his enemies; and he died with the spirit of the outlaw too much
kindled within him by the lawless work he had done, almost determined to
withstand the King as well as the governor, and to make those who had not
joined him pay for his work of resistance and reform,—no longer merely
a champion of reasonable reformation, but a revolutionist. Nothing less
could have alienated his friends, broken his party, and given Berkeley
his full time of revenge against those whose cause had been just.
That revenge was only too complete. A fleet arrived out of England
in January, 1677, with a regiment of the King’s troops aboard, and
commissioners to settle the troubles in the colony to the re-establishing
of order; and the commissioners had themselves to rebuke and restrain the
insensate bitterness of the maddened governor. He had set the hangman to
work before they came, and by the time January was out had sent more than
twenty persons to the gallows for their participation in the rebellion;
among the rest William Drummond, the capable Scotsman whom he had deputed
to be the first governor of the settlements at Albemarle, and who had
governed very quietly there, knowing the men he had to deal with, but
who was now in Virginia again, Mr. Bacon’s friend and counsellor. “As
I live,” cried the King, when he learned the news from Virginia, “the
old fool has put to death more people in that naked country than I did
for the murder of my father”; and he showed little patience when the old
man came home to make his peace. The King would not see him, and the
broken governor was dead,—of chagrin, men said,—by midsummer (1677).
Virginia was rid of him; forgot how well she had liked him at first;
and remembered without compunction how her people had celebrated his
departure with bonfires and the booming of cannon.
It was in that year, 1677, when Virginia’s rebellion was over and her
chief rebels hanged, that the heady settlers at Albemarle rose against
the proprietors and the Acts of trade, thrust their governor out, and
seized three thousand pounds of the customs revenue. They were but four
thousand people, all told, but they were all of one mind, and did what
Mr. Bacon could not do. For two years they governed themselves, upon such
a model as might have pleased Virginia’s rebel. William Drummond, who had
lived among them, had led Mr. Bacon to hope, and half expect, that these
Albemarle men would send him aid and make common cause with him against
the power of a royal governor and rich land-owners; but they had saved
their strength for themselves. They took little thought for Virginia; and
they could not have helped Mr. Bacon to succeed had they wished to help
him. He had rebelled against powers which were already firmly established
and which were to dominate Virginia throughout all the rest of her youth,
and of her growth to maturity.
[Illustration: TITLE-PAGE OF “STRANGE NEWS FROM VIRGINIA”]