In November, 1620, there sailed into a quiet harbor on the coast of what is now Massachusetts a ship named the Mayflower, having on board one hundred and two English Non-conformists, men and women and with them a few children. These latest colonists held a patent from the Virginia Company and have left in writing a statement of their object: "We... having undertaken, for the glory of God and advancement of the Christian faith, and honor of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia—". The mental reservation is, of course, "where perchance we may serve God as we will!" In England there obtained in some quarters a suspicion that "they meant to make a free, popular State there." Free—Popular—Public Good! These are words that began, in the second quarter of the seventeenth century, to shine and ring. King and people had reached the verge of a great struggle. The Virginia Company was divided, as were other groups, into factions. The court party and the country party found themselves distinctly opposed. The great, crowded meetings of the Company Sessions rang with their divisions upon policies small and large. Words and phrases, comprehensive, sonorous, heavy with the future, rose and rolled beneath the roof of their great hall. There were heard amid warm discussion: Kingdom and Colony—Spain—Netherlands—France—Church and State—Papists and Schismatics—Duties, Tithes, Excise Petitions of Grievances—Representation—Right of Assembly. Several years earlier the King had cried, "Choose the Devil, but not Sir Edwyn Sandys!" Now he declared the Company "just a seminary to a seditious parliament!" All London resounded with the clash of parties and opinions.* "Last week the Earl of Warwick and the Lord Cavendish fell so foul at a Virginia... court that the lie passed and repassed.... The factions... are grown so violent that Guelfs and Ghibellines were not more animated one against another!"
* In his work on "Joint-stock Companion", vol.II, pp. 266
ff., W. R. Scott traces the history of these acute
dissensions in the Virginia Company and draws conclusions
distinctly unfavorable to the management of Sandys and his
party.—Editor.
Believing that the Company's sessions foreshadowed a "seditious parliament," James Stuart set himself with obstinacy and some cunning to the Company's undoing. The court party gave the King aid, and circumstances favored the attempt. Captain Nathaniel Butler, who had once been Governor of the Somers Islands and had now returned to England by way of Virginia, published in London "The Unmasked Face of Our Colony in Virginia", containing a savage attack upon every item of Virginian administration.
The King's Privy Council summoned the Company, or rather the "country" party, to answer these and other allegations. Southampton, Sandys, and Ferrar answered with strength and cogency. But the tide was running against them. James appointed commissioners to search out what was wrong with Virginia. Certain men were shipped to Virginia to get evidence there, as well as support from the Virginia Assembly. In this attempt they signally failed. Then to England came a Virginia member of the Virginia Council, with long letters to King and Privy Council: the Sandys-Southampton administration had done more than well for Virginia. The letters were letters of appeal. The colony hoped that "the Governors sent over might not have absolute authority, but might be restrained to the consent of the Council.... But above all they made it their most humble request that they might still retain the liberty of their General Assemblies; than which nothing could more conduce to the publick Satisfaction and publick Liberty."
In London another paper, drawn by Cavendish, was given to King and Privy Council. It answered many accusations, and among others the statement that "the Government of the companies as it then stood was democratical and tumultuous, and ought therefore to be altered, and reduced into the Hands of a few." It is of interest to hear these men speak, in the year 1623, in an England that was close to absolute monarchy, to a King who with all his house stood out for personal rule. "However, they owned that, according to his Majesty's Institution, their Government had some Show of a democratical Form; which was nevertheless, in that Case, the most just and profitable, and most conducive to the Ends and Effects aimed at thereby.... Lastly, they observed that the opposite Faction cried out loudly against Democracy, and yet called for Oligarchy; which would, as they conceived, make the Government neither of better Form, nor more monarchical."
But the dissolution of the Virginia Company was at hand. In October, 1623, the Privy Council stated that the King had "taken into his princely Consideration the distressed State of the Colony of Virginia, occasioned, as it seemed, by the Ill Government of the Company." The remedy for the ill-management lay in the reduction of the Government into fewer hands. His Majesty had resolved therefore upon the withdrawal of the Company's charter and the substitution, "with due regard for continuing and preserving the Interest of all Adventurers and private persons whatsoever," of a new order of things. The new order proved, on examination, to be the old order of rule by the Crown. Would the Company surrender the old charter and accept a new one so modeled?
The Company, through the country party, strove to gain time. They met with a succession of arbitrary measures and were finally forced to a decision. They would not surrender their charter. Then a writ of quo warranto was issued; trial before the King's Bench followed; and judgment was rendered against the Company in the spring term of 1624. Thus with clangor fell the famous Virginia Company.
That was one year. The March of the next year James Stuart, King of England, died. That young Henry who was Prince of Wales when the Susan Constant, the Goodspeed, and the Discovery sailed past a cape and named it for him Cape Henry, also had died. His younger brother Charles, for whom was named that other and opposite cape, now ascended the throne as King Charles the First of England.
In Virginia no more General Assemblies are held for four years. King Charles embarks upon "personal rule." Sir Francis Wyatt, a good Governor, is retained by commission and a Council is appointed by the King. No longer are affairs to be conducted after a fashion "democratical and tumultuous." Orders are transmitted from England; the Governor, assisted by the Council, will take into cognizance purely local needs; and when he sees some occasion he will issue a proclamation.
Wyatt, recalled finally to England; George Yeardley again, who died in a year's time; Francis West, that brother of Lord De La Warr and an ancient planter—these in quick succession sit in the Governor's chair. Following them John Pott, doctor of medicine, has his short term. Then the King sends out Sir John Harvey, avaricious and arbitrary, "so haughty and furious to the Council and the best gentlemen of the country," says Beverley, "that his tyranny grew at last insupportable."
The Company previously, and now the King, had urged upon the Virginians a diversified industry and agriculture. But Englishmen in Virginia had the familiar emigrant idea of making their fortunes. They had left England; they had taken their lives in their hands; they had suffered fevers, Indian attacks, homesickness, deprivation. They had come to Virginia to get rich. Now clapboards and sassafras, pitch, tar, and pine trees for masts, were making no fortune for Virginia shippers. How could they, these few folk far off in America, compete in products of the forest with northern Europe? As to mines of gold and silver, that first rich vision had proved a disheartening mirage. "They have great hopes that the mountains are very rich, from the discovery of a silver mine made nineteen years ago, at a place about four days' journey from the falls of James river; but they have not the means of transporting the ore." So, dissatisfied with some means of livelihood and disappointed in others, the Virginians turned to tobacco.
Every year each planter grew more tobacco; every year more ships were laden. In 1628 more than five hundred thousand pounds were sent to England, for to England it must go, and not elsewhere. There it must struggle with the best Spanish, for a long time valued above the best Virginian. Finally, however, James and after him Charles, agreed to exclude the Spanish. Virginia and the Somers Islands alone might import tobacco into England. But offsetting this, customs went up ruinously; a great lump sum must go annually to the King; the leaf must enter only at the port of London; so forth and so on. Finally Charles put forth his proposal to monopolize the industry, giving Virginia tobacco the English market but limiting its production to the amount which the Government could sell advantageously. Such a policy required cooperation from the colonists. The King therefore ordered the Governor to grant a Virginia Assembly, which in turn should dutifully enter into partnership with him—upon his terms. So the Virginia Assembly thus came back into history. It made a "Humble Answere" in which, for all its humility, the King's proposal was declined. The idea of the royal monopoly faded out, and Virginia continued on its own way.
The General Assembly, having once met, seems of its own motion to have continued meeting. The next year we find it in session at Jamestown, and resolving "that we should go three severall marches upon the Indians, at three severall times of the yeare," and also "that there be an especiall care taken by all commanders and others that the people doe repaire to their churches on the Saboth day, and to see that the penalty of one pound of tobacco for every time of absence, and 50 pounds for every month's absence... be levyed, and the delinquents to pay the same." About this time we read: "Dr. John Pott, late Governor, indicted, arraigned, and found guilty of stealing cattle, 13 jurors, 3 whereof councellors. This day wholly spent in pleading; next day, in unnecessary disputation."
These were moving times in the little colony whose population may by now have been five thousand. Harvey, the Governor, was rapacious; the King at home, autocratic. Meanwhile, signs of change and of unrest were not wanting in Europe. England was hastening toward revolution; in Germany the Thirty Years' War was in mid-career; France and Italy were racked by strife; over the world the peoples groaned under the strain of oppression. In science, too, there was promise of revolution. Harvey—not that Governor Harvey of Virginia, but a greater in England was writing upon the circulation of the blood. Galileo brooded over ideas of the movement of the earth; Kepler, over celestial harmonies and solar rule. Descartes was laying the foundation of a new philosophy.
In the meantime, far across the Atlantic, bands of Virginians went out against the Indians—who might, or might not, God knows! have put in a claim to be considered among the oppressed peoples. In Virginia the fat, black, tobacco-fields, steaming under a sun like the sun of Spain, called for and got more labor and still more labor. Every little sailing ship brought white workmen—called servants—consigned, indentured, apprenticed to many-acred planters. These, in return for their passage money, must serve Laban for a term of years, but then would receive Rachel, or at least Leah, in the shape of freedom and a small holding and provision with which to begin again their individual life. If they were ambitious and energetic they might presently be able, in turn, to import labor for their own acres. As yet, in Virginia, there were few African slaves—not more perhaps than a couple of hundred. But whenever ships brought them they were readily purchased.
In Virginia, as everywhere in time of change, there arose anomalies. Side by side persisted a romantic devotion to the King and a determination to have popular assemblies; a great sense of the rights of the white individual together with African slavery; a practical, easy-going, debonair naturalism side by side with an Established Church penalizing alike Papist, Puritan, and atheist. Even so early as this, the social tone was set that was to hold for many and many a year. The suave climate was somehow to foster alike a sense of caste and good neighborliness—class distinctions and republican ideas.
The "towns" were of the fewest and rudest—little more than small palisaded hamlets, built of frame or log, poised near the water of the river James. The genius of the land was for the plantation rather than the town. The fair and large brick or frame planter's house of a later time had not yet risen, but the system was well inaugurated that set a main or "big" house upon some fair site, with cabins clustered near it, and all surrounded, save on the river front, with far-flung acres, some planted with grain and the rest with tobacco. Up and down the river these estates were strung together by the rudest roads, mere tracks through field and wood. The cart was as yet the sole wheeled vehicle. But the Virginia planter—a horseman in England—brought over horses, bred horses, and early placed horsemanship in the catalogue of the necessary colonial virtues. At this point, however, in a land of great and lesser rivers, with a network of creeks, the boat provided the chief means of communication. Behind all, enveloping all, still spread the illimitable forest, the haunt of Indians and innumerable game.
Virginians were already preparing for an expansion to the north. There was a man in Virginia named William Claiborne. This individual—able, determined, self-reliant, energetic—had come in as a young man, with the title of surveyor-general for the Company, in the ship that brought Sir Francis Wyatt, just before the massacre of 1622. He had prospered and was now Secretary of the Province. He held lands, and was endowed with a bold, adventurous temper and a genius for business. In a few years he had established widespread trading relations with the Indians. He and the men whom he employed penetrated to the upper shores of Chesapeake, into the forest bordering Potomac and Susquehanna: Knives and hatchets, beads, trinkets, and colored cloth were changed for rich furs and various articles that the Indians could furnish. The skins thus gathered Claiborne shipped to London merchants, and was like to grow wealthy from what his trading brought.
Looking upon the future and contemplating barter on a princely scale, he set to work and obtained exhaustive licenses from the immediate Virginian authorities, and at last from the King himself. Under these grants, Claiborne began to provide settlements for his numerous traders. Far up the Chesapeake, a hundred miles or so from Point Comfort, he found an island that he liked, and named it Kent Island. Here for his men he built cabins with gardens around them, a mill and a church. He was far from the river James and the mass of his fellows, but he esteemed himself to be in Virginia and upon his own land. What came of Claiborne's enterprise the sequel has to show.
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