into the colony these five-and-twenty years, and which had brought Mr.
Bacon himself to Virginia, had inevitably transformed the character of
the little commonwealth. Large estates multiplied faster than small
ones. Estates descended from father to son by the rule of primogeniture
and were kept together by the strict law of entail. The ruling part in
affairs fell more and more, and as if by a sort of social law of nature,
to men who believed in aristocratic privilege in matters of government
and dreaded a democratic levelling. Being for the most part men of
breeding and of honor, they were ready to condemn quite as heartily as
Mr. Bacon himself the corrupt and headstrong ways into which Sir William
Berkeley had fallen; but they deemed revolution rather a new disease than
a good remedy, and left Mr. Bacon to find his recruits among those who
had less at stake.
Virginia’s government was singularly like the government to which
these ruling gentlemen had been accustomed at home in England; and her
most influential men were as certain to make up her governing class as
were the country gentlemen of England to procure magistracies in their
counties. The Long Assembly had made changes in the law which rendered
their supremacy more certain than ever before. The rule in respect of
every office was appointment, not election. Only the Burgesses were
elected out of all who took part in the government of the colony, and
it was fixed custom from of old to select them from the members of the
county bench, whom the governor appointed. Even they were to be chosen
henceforth, the Long Assembly had decreed, by the freeholders only, and
not by the common vote of all free residents, as before the Restoration.
Local government was altogether in the hands of the ruling class. The
vestry was the governing and directing body in every parish, and its
twelve members were to be chosen now in each parish, since the Long
Assembly’s law of 1662, not by free election, as in the old days, but
by the vote of the vestry itself, which was henceforth to fill its own
vacancies. The county courts were made up of magistrates appointed by the
governor; the sheriffs were nominated by the county courts, who always
named some one of their own number; for a long time it had been the
custom to elect one or more of the county magistrates to represent the
county in the House of Burgesses; the county militia was organized under
lieutenants,—one for each county,—who were commonly chosen from among the
members of the governor’s council. There was no place for any but men of
means and influence in such a government.
[Illustration: GOVERNOR BERKELEY CONDEMNING WILLIAM DRUMMOND TO DEATH]
It was not an exclusive aristocracy. The life of the colony was too
simple, too essentially democratic for that. Magistrates and vestrymen,
sheriffs and county lieutenants, all felt themselves neighbors and
fellows of the men they governed and took taxes of in those quiet river
neighborhoods. They were really representatives of the people they ruled,
in temper and interest, if not in estate. They knew how their neighbors
lived,—as Mr. Jefferson explained long afterwards, in behalf of the like
magistrates of his own day,—because they did not live very differently
themselves. Their motive to do their duty justly and well was the
sufficient motive of pride and self-respect, their desire for the esteem
of the people about them in the intimate life of the rural country-side.
Their rule was mild and public-spirited for the most part, more and more
so as the life of the colony settled to a fixed and stable order, and
the men who found their way into the vestry and the county magistracy
were generally men whom all esteemed and looked up to. But their rule
was the rule of men of property, in favor of maintaining authority, sure
to discountenance irregular attempts at radical reform; and Mr. Bacon’s
rebellion was the last of its kind. It had come too late, and was never
repeated.
[Illustration: A VIRGINIA VESTRY MEETING AFTER THE RESTORATION]
It was not this government of the “country gentlemen,” at any rate, that
had brought on the fatal troubles with the redskins which had stirred Mr.
Bacon to his first act of rebellion; for New England also, self-governed
and free as yet, had had her own struggle with the Indians, even more
terrible and bitter, which had ended that same eventful summer of 1676.
The New England Indians had not forgotten the fate of the Pequots; but
that was now close upon forty years ago; the terror of it was no longer
fresh, and their own situation had meantime grown a bit desperate. They
were being shut within intolerably narrow bounds, and they could not move
away from the regions where the English were slowly crowding them from
their hunting-grounds without invading the territory of other tribes who
would have no welcome for them. The white men paid for the lands they
took, but they did not permit the redmen to refuse to sell. They played
the part of masters always, and there could be no hope of better times
to come. Devoted missionaries had come among the tribes from the white
settlements and had won many of them to believe in the gospel of the true
God; but their preaching was like the telling of idle fables to most of
the reticent, intractable people of the forest, and left them untouched.
They were ready at last when a leader should arise to plot for an
uprising and a last trial of strength with the invading palefaces. Such a
leader arose in the person of Philip, the chief of the Wampanoags, whom
the English had penned up within the narrow peninsula of Good Hope by the
Bay of Narragansett. The flame which Philip kindled among the Wampanoags
promptly spread to the Narragansetts and the Nipmucks, until it burned
on every border, and New England saw a day of terror such as she had
never seen before. There was no trouble like Virginia’s. No governor
hesitated, no armed force lacked authority to do its work of protection
and attack, no levy lagged or was tardy; the country rallied to the awful
business. The fatal uprising began in June, 1675, and was ended,—for
those tribes at least,—by August, 1676, as the Pequot war had ended, with
the annihilation of the offending tribes. Those that were not killed or
taken were driven forth in hopeless flight; those that were taken were
sold as slaves in the West Indies. Thereafter there were only the tribes
in the north to reckon with. But the white men’s loss was almost as great
as that of the savages. More than one-half of the towns of Massachusetts
and Plymouth had seen the torch and the tomahawk that awful year; twelve
of them had been utterly destroyed; no fewer than six hundred buildings,
chiefly dwellings, had been burned; six hundred men had lost their lives,
and scores of women and children; debts had been piled up and damage
suffered which it would take years of bitter toil to pay and repair;
and New England was for a little like a place desolate and stricken.
But she rallied in time, as always before, and slowly worked her way to
better days, like the old days for peace and prosperity. Her dangers and
anxieties were, at any rate, lessened in one matter that had often seemed
to hold fear and danger permanently at its heart.
[Illustration: KING PHILIP’S MARK]
[Illustration: OLD HOUSE IN DOCK SQUARE, BOSTON]
The chief general _authorities_ for the history of New Jersey
in the seventeenth century are Mr. William A. Whitehead’s _East
Jersey under the Proprietary Government_, _Contributions to
East Jersey History_, and _The English in East and West Jersey,
1664-1689_, in Winsor’s _Narrative and Critical History of
America_, volume III.; Mr. Berthold Fernow’s _Middle Colonies_
in the fifth volume of Winsor; the first and second volumes of
Bancroft and the second volume of Hildreth; the second volume
of Bryant and Gay’s _Popular History of the United States_;
Andrew D. Mellick’s _Story of an Old Farm_; Austin Scott’s _New
Jersey_, in the _American Commonwealth Series_; and Francis B.
Lee’s _New Jersey as a Colony and as a State_, 4 volumes.
The chief _sources_ are to be found in the archives of the
State of New Jersey; Leaming and Spicer’s _Grants, Concessions,
and Original Constitutions of the Province of New Jersey,
1664-1682_; the _Collections_ of the New Jersey Historical
Society; and Samuel Smith’s _History of the Colony of Nova
Caesaria, or New Jersey, to 1721_.
The principal general _authorities_ for the history of the
Carolinas in the seventeenth century are Mr. J. A. Doyle’s
_English Colonies in America_, volume I.; William J. Rivers’s
_Sketch of the History of South Carolina_ and _The Carolinas_,
in the fifth volume of Winsor’s _Narrative and Critical History
of America_; the first and second volumes of Bancroft and the
second volume of Hildreth; the second volume of Bryant and
Gay’s _Popular History of the United States_; the second volume
of John Fiske’s _Old Virginia and Her Neighbours_; Dr. Francis
L. Hawks’s _History of North Carolina_; David Ramsay’s _History
of South Carolina, from its First Settlement in 1670 to the
year 1808_; François X. Martin’s _History of North Carolina,
from the Earliest Period_; and the valuable monographs, chiefly
on the history of North Carolina, to be found in the _Johns
Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science_.
The chief _sources_ for this period of the Carolinas are to be
found in the _Colonial Records of North Carolina_; Sainsbury’s
_Calendar of_ [English] _State Papers, Colonial, V._; B. R.
Carroll’s _Historical Collections of South Carolina_, which
contain, among much more material of the first importance,
Alexander Hewatt’s _Historical Account of the Rise and Progress
of the Colonies of South Carolina and Georgia_, originally
published in London in 1779, John Archdale’s account of the
development of the colony to his own day, the portion of
George Chalmers’s _Political Annals of the Present United
Colonies_ which relates to Carolina, and Locke’s _Fundamental
Constitution for Carolina_; the _Charleston Year Books_, into
which many valuable records, otherwise scattered, are brought
together; Peter Force’s _Tracts and Other Papers Relating to
the Colonies in North America_; and Ben Perley Poore’s _The
Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters, and other
Organic Laws of the United States_.
IX. PENNSYLVANIA
The troubles of Massachusetts did not end with the death of King Philip
and the extermination of the hostile tribes. That very year of blood and
terror, 1676, on the contrary, saw an old danger renewed. Mr. Edward
Randolph arrived out of England commissioned to command the authorities
of the colony to send agents over sea to answer for their assumption
of power over the settlements to the north, beyond the bounds set by
their charter, and in despite of the rights of those who were the legal
proprietors there. It was the beginning of a very serious matter. She
was to be brought to book at last for her too great independence, and
her acts as if of sovereignty over the settlements about her. Poor as
she was, after her awful struggle with the redskins, she hastened to
buy out the rights of those who claimed proprietorship in Maine and New
Hampshire (1677) for twelve hundred and fifty pounds sterling; but that
only angered the wilful King the more and hastened graver difficulties.
She was charged with illegally coining money, with persistently violating
the Navigation Acts and trading as she pleased, with exercising whatever
powers of government she desired without stopping first to find them
granted to her in her charter; and there was little defence she could
make in face of the plain facts. Again and again she sent capable agents
to England to excuse her acts and justify them; but they made little
impression upon the Privy Council or on the King’s officers, and she was
obliged in mere prudence to receive Mr. Randolph as the collector of
customs, and speak submissively of the King’s power.
[Illustration: NEW YORK CITY HALL AND DOCKS IN 1679]
At last there was an action of _quo warranto_ against her (1683), and
then a writ issued against her in the Court of Chancery, and in the
end, October 23, 1684, an adverse judgment which declared her charter
forfeited and her government returned to the crown. It was a bitter
thing, but there was this time no escape from enduring it.
The same year, 1684, Virginia returned to her normal government again, as
a royal province, and not the property of Lord Culpeper. The improvident
King had not stopped with granting to Lords Arlington and Culpeper,
in 1672, “all the dominion of land and water called Virginia,” and the
quit-rents due from all the lands already occupied there; he had gone
further, and in 1675 had appointed Lord Culpeper governor of the colony
for life. Lord Culpeper had bought out the rights of Lord Arlington,
his co-proprietor, and seemed commissioned at length to be Virginia’s
veritable sovereign master. But his career both as owner and as governor
stopped very far short of the term of his life. By 1684 the King, tired
of him, had withdrawn his commission and bought off his rights, leaving
him a proprietary title over only the “Northern Neck” of Virginia,—the
great peninsula which ran back to the mountains between the Potomac and
the Rappahannock rivers; and the colony was again directly subject to the
crown.
Lord Culpeper was little in his province even while his term as governor
lasted. Sir Henry Chicheley was generally to be found acting in his
stead,—a real Virginian, whom all esteemed a man of honor and of parts,
a resident in the colony these twenty-five years, and for long either
burgess or councillor, a neighbor and friend of the men he ruled as
deputy to his lordship. Culpeper wished to be popular, and courted the
good-will of the colonists as he could; but a man without morals could
not govern, and a man who would not stick at governing could not please
the King, and his downfall was inevitable.
[Illustration: NEW YORK ABOUT 1673]
It was in the bad times of his rule that a new disorder fell upon the
colony. In 1679 and 1680 the crops of tobacco were immense; there was
more, much more, than could be sold, and its value fell so much that
it was worth little or nothing to make purchases with,—and yet it was
the colony’s chief currency. The assembly wished to stop or limit the
planting of tobacco for a little, by statute; but the King, through the
governor, forbade the restriction; and there suddenly broke forth a new
sort of rebellion. In 1682 mobs of excited people swarmed upon plantation
after plantation, destroying the growing crops of tobacco, until what
would have filled ten thousand hogsheads had been cut up as it grew, and
two hundred plantations had been laid waste within a single county. The
armed forces of the colony stopped the riotous, lawless work at last;
three of the ringleaders were tried and hanged, and order was restored;
but it was made evident once again to what a temper things could be
brought in Virginia when her people were not allowed to regulate their
own affairs by orderly course of law; and the King’s disgust with the
rule of Lord Culpeper was not a little heightened.
[Illustration: THE STRAND, NEW YORK, 1679]
Government by proprietors did not seem to go anywhere very well. Even
Lord Baltimore found Maryland an uneasy property, and kept it only by
consummate tact and watchful management. There were elements of every
sort combined in its make-up. Not one-tenth part of its people were
of the proprietor’s creed any longer; and not many besides Catholics
were heartily and by choice of his party in affairs. At every change of
political weather there was sure to be some sudden tempest or some covert
insubordination there. In 1660 the assembly of the province, headed by
Mr. Josias Fendall, the proprietor’s own deputy, assumed sovereign power
till it should hear that the restoration of King Charles was accomplished
fact,—as the assembly in Virginia did,—thinking the new King would be
in no mind to support a proprietor whom Cromwell also had befriended.
Only when it found the King Lord Baltimore’s friend notwithstanding did
it return to its allegiance. In 1675 Cecilius Lord Baltimore died, his
only son, Charles, succeeding; and the next year one Davis and one Pate,
taking their cue from Mr. Bacon in Virginia, made bold themselves to head
an actual rebellion in arms. Their assembly, like Virginia’s, was chosen
by freeholders only, contained a majority whom the proprietor could
command and would not part with, and had ever since 1671, like Berkeley’s
favorite Long Assembly, been kept alive by adjournment,—elections,
apparently, having fallen out of favor on both sides the border. The
Indians were upon their frontier also, and the taxes went, it seemed
to the insurgents, for nothing but to pay for offices provided for the
enjoyment of the proprietor’s own kinsmen and adherents. But success in
Maryland depended upon success in Virginia. When Mr. Bacon died, the
Maryland insurgents yielded as promptly as the Virginian; Davis and Pate
went to the gallows; and there was an end of that. But there was no ease
in affairs even then. Maryland was not so readily to be kept in hand as
Virginia. Not her restless Puritans merely, but all her yeomen also, of
the rank and file, with their peculiar freedom in local government, made
her quick with the spirit as if of a fretful and aggressive democracy.
She had a class of free tenants upon many of her estates who kept alive
throughout her country-sides a form of liberty very ancient and very
vital, and who made her life, so far as they were concerned, very
different indeed from that of the country-sides of Virginia, where all
alike looked to the magistrates, the sheriffs, and the county lieutenants
for government. Many a chief estate in Maryland had its separate
organization and its separate privilege of self-government as a manor,
under the terms of the charter. In its court-leet, sitting under the
presidency of the steward, its freemen enacted their own local bye-laws,
chose their own constables and bailiffs, empanelled their own juries, and
put all petty offenders to their trial and punishment. In its court-baron
the freehold tenants sat as judges of law and fact in matters of rent,
trespass, escheat, and the transfer of lands, not only in suits among
themselves, but in the settlement of their rights as against their
immediate lord the chief of the manor as well. Here was a school of
sturdy self-assertion transplanted out of the feudal law of old England
into an air never breathed in the Middle Ages, and men of the lesser sort
were heartened in their democracy accordingly. The barons of Baltimore
had the self-confident tenants of many a miniature barony to deal with
in their province; and had occasion to discover very often how vital a
commonwealth it was that surged restless under their government.
[Illustration: A NEW YORK HOUSE IN 1679]
Newer proprietors had not the advantage of their experience, and were
always slow to see how uncommon a sort of property a colony was,—and
that the high-spirited men who undertook to settle in colonies, like
Englishmen everywhere, must be governed, if governed at all, under a free
system which took note of their real circumstances and had their assent.
Carolina furnished an example. There were, in fact, two Carolinas.
Since the abandonment of the settlements which had for a little while
struggled for a permanent foothold on the Cape Fear (1664-1667), there
was nothing but unbroken wilderness through all the long reaches of
silent forest which lay between the Albemarle country and the settlement
at Charleston,—full two hundred and sixty miles as the crow flies. There
could not well be one government for both these separated places, except
in name; and it was difficult to tell which was the harder to govern.
For almost a whole generation (1669-1698) the proprietors tried to
force their Fundamental Constitutions upon them, but made no progress
whatever in the matter. The list of proprietors was constantly changing.
Some wearied of the business and sold their shares in it, some became
bankrupt, some died. And governors changed more rapidly even than
proprietors,—no governor finding his seat very easy or being able to
please both his masters in England and the colonists in Carolina. New
proprietors brought no new wisdom, new governors no new capacity, to the
unchanging task, and the settlements took their growth after a way of
their own.
[Illustration: TITLE-PAGE OF “A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE PROVINCE OF
CAROLINA”]
The Albemarle settlers, whose region presently came to be called “North”
Carolina, were, on the whole, the more indulged. They endured many
things, it is true, of many governors,—even to open robbery at the hands
of one Seth Sothel, who bought the Earl of Clarendon’s interest in the
colony and came among them to rule as proprietor and get what he could
out of his purchase on the spot. But they drove him from the colony
in 1689, after having put up with his intolerable insolence and greed
for five years together with more than their ordinary patience. They
made their temper pretty clearly understood at last, and were suffered
to go their own way in most things, with only enough interference and
enough demands for quit-rents to keep them uncomfortably in mind of the
proprietors. The settlements about the broad Sound slowly filled, and
were not a little steadied in their ways of life by a constant increase
in the number of Quakers among them. French Protestants came also, and
made settlements of their own a little farther to the southward, in
Pamlico and on the Neuse and Trent. Swiss and Germans founded a little
hamlet at New Berne. The rich heart of the fertile country within was
still untouched. There were barely five thousand people there in the
year 1700, after forty years of growth. The proprietors had little to
show thereabout for their ambitious efforts at colony building. But
the colonists themselves took heart to believe their lot established,
and no one could doubt that here were at least communities about whose
maintenance there need be no concern. They were there to stay, and to
grow, though it were never so slowly.
[Illustration: ORIGINAL BROAD SEAL OF SOUTH CAROLINA]
There was more to be seen at the other far-away settlements in “South”
Carolina,—a town, at any rate, and a safe port of entry, such as there
was not anywhere upon the northern sounds. Charleston had been removed
in 1680 from its first site to a fine point of land which lay opposite,
where the Ashley and Cooper rivers joined to make a spacious harbor
before passing to the sea. The removal had proved a mere stage in
its growth,—a proof of its vitality. Englishmen, Irishmen, Scotsmen,
Frenchmen, Germans sought the new colony out and made their several
contributions to its founding. But the proprietors reaped little
benefit. The English and Scottish colonists were not easy men to deal
with when governors put the interests of the proprietors before the
interests of the colony, or insisted, as they were bidden to insist,
upon the enforcement of the impossible Fundamental Constitutions.
Moreover, there were troubles peculiar to the place. The Spanish were
close at hand at St. Augustine, watching their chance to attack and
destroy the settlement. The colonists invited danger of still another
kind by seizing Indians for slaves, and so exasperating the redskins.
The English-speaking colonists did not wish to admit the Frenchmen
who came among them to the full privileges upon which they insisted
for themselves; but they were very keen for their own rights, and
understood very well to what they were entitled under the charter to the
proprietors. Governors lived no more comfortably among them than among
the people of North Carolina. There were twenty-five hundred settlers in
the colony by the time the new Charleston at the confluence of the rivers
was six years old (1686), and seven thousand by the time the century was
out (1700); but the more numerous they grew, the more steadfastly did
they insist upon having no government they did not like.