It is not often we witness the birth of a political culture by a political entrepreneur.
When William Berkeley came to Virginia in 1642 and established his Virginia plantation, the mid-wife of Virginia’s Tidewater culture had arrived. Berkeley played the role Winthrop played in Massachusetts, and William Penn in Pennsylvania. Midwives do not create; they assist in a successful birth. When we apply the birth metaphor to a political culture, I suggest it is the midwife who joins the two vital elements of a living political culture: its spirit (values, beliefs, expectations) with political structures. Such birth perhaps inevitably entails the infusion of a new population (in-migration).
In so doing the entity that emerges is our oft-used political policy system–Virginia’s babe of the Tidewater swamps. The babe that is created, consider Oglethorpe’s Georgia colony, can be stillborn, giving way to to another birth. Enough with the birth and babe metaphor! Whatever the reaction of the reader to this awkward metaphor, it, I hope, conveys how political cultures can form and take shape. We commonly talk about political socialization and the agents of socialization as how cultures persist, but that is what happens if a political culture takes root and stays around for awhile. Here in the North American wilderness in 1650, in the swamps of Tidewater Virginia, there is no real political culture in place when Berkeley arrived. When he left in 1677, he had successfully delivered a fragile new-born political culture. The events and dynamics after he left would answer the question as to whether that political culture could survive and grow.
I argue in this module that Berkeley inherited a series of political/economic structures, processes, dynamics left over from the defunct Jamestown Company and the series of very challenged royal governors/planters/lumpen proletariat. In the vacuum of royal control that was the English Civil War, the Cromwell’s decade-long Commonwealth, and the time it took for Charles II to reassert royal control over its colonies, Berkeley was oversaw the birth of the Tidewater political culture, and left it as the principal custodian of its colony-level policy system. Make no mistake, the Tidewater political culture that developed over this extended period, was an elite-planter culture, with followers, accomplices, and the like. It provided legitimacy and ideological coherence to that grouping, which shared power with the royal governor. In the two or three decades that followed, the custodians worked out a collaboration that lasted until the American Revolution, although the last two decades were considerably tension-wracked. After the Revolution, the challenge was whether the Tidewater policy system (and its political culture) could adapt without its royal custodian to the rigors of a newly-formed American democratic, federal Republic–but we get ahead of ourselves yet again.
In the module below I will replay that birth, how Berkeley integrated a new elite which shared common values, beliefs and expectations into the pre-existing political-economic structures of pre-Berkeley Virginia. The question as to whether Berkeley consciously managed this union of a new elite and pre-existing structures to create a new policy system and all that implied (a supporting system of values, beliefs and expectations) I leave to others. There is no reason he had to have had a mental plan–and to a degree, he almost obviously did have some idea of what he was up to. But Berkeley himself was kicked out, and his biographers report he died in some despair.
Berkeley’s Inherited Political Structures
In this module we will concentrate on four political structures which Berkeley inherited and into which he infused his new Tidewater royalist elites: plantation, county/county court, the colony-level political bodies (Royal Council and House of Burgesses), and the electoral franchise. Berkeley, of course, for most of the period between 1642 and 1677 was the royal governor. His ouster and replacement by a Crown-appointed royal governor (usually a Lieutenant governor to be precise) left the governor outside of the confines of the policy system which Berkeley left behind–and it would remain so to the very end. As we proceed through the module the governor is a player, but not discussed. I am concerned that valuable after-effect of the post-Berkeley period will be lost in plain sight so I address the governor in the next paragraph.
The governor, whoever he was, had to make his deal and join the planters, impose his will, or be pushed aside. Sometimes all three will be combined in one governor. The governor, despite his potential power when the Crown would assist him, was always the odd man out in the post-Berkeley Virginia colonial policy system. That is worth remembering. Virginia’s post-Revolutionary War policy systems–at least during the Early Republic period–constitutionally would have the weakest, or near-weakest governor of all the American states. In this chapter we shall see, the Virginia Tidewater planter oligopoly struggle with the governor intensify dramatically after 1763, and a decade later it was this oligopoly that assumed considerable leadership over the budding American independence movement–at considerable odds with its royal-appointed governor. There was something mysterious about executive authority in the Virginia Tidewater policy system–as we go forward we will try to penetrate into that reluctance to embrace strong executive action–for which we owe the existence of our Bill of Rights. Again, in order for me to provide a sense of where all this leads to, I need provide insights into the future.
Plantations as Towns: the bottom level of the Tidewater policy system
Plantations were the functional equivalent of the New England town in Virginia. They were, of course, private, but their masters-owners were infused with public powers and responsibilities, slavery is a testament to that, and they were primarily economic. They were, for the most part, the economic base of that jurisdiction.
The plantation is conventionally described as self-sufficient. Possessed of such scale and population, each plantation was itself a village–as was the English manor that preceded it. Household plantations were small, but mostly we call attention to the larger ones. These large plantations, including slaves or indentured servants held several hundred residents–very much comparable to settlements in the other colonies. Each plantation required its own warehouses, residential housing, a manor house (city hall) for the owner, slave and indentured workforce quarters, stables, tool and ironworks, and a host of ancillary activities (barrel-making, leather crafts, distilleries, bakeries and gristmills).
It was natural the local Anglican (Church of England–the official state religion of Virginia) parish would set up shop nearby, and the organs of local government administration followed suit, Sharecroppers ringed the plantation, and what commercial business there was also located alongside the plantation. Roads linked the plantation to its hinterland and to neighboring plantations. By the end of the 17th century, the larger plantations were comparable to small towns in other colonies. Ironically, one might say the Tidewater developed too many mini-settlements rather than settlements of sufficient scale to develop into towns and cities. This will gave rise to the “shredded community” we discussed earlier. In the 18th century, as Virginia moved west into its interior, the role of the Tidewater plantation would diminish, and that of a jurisdictional settlement increase, and that will be discussed in a later module. In the 17th century, Tidewater plantations were the bottom level unit of the Virginia policy system.
The 1620-1640 period in Virginia, under James I royal disfavor, when Virginia was wracked by horrible Indian wars, a cesspit of killer diseases, colony-level institutions were dysfunctional uncoordinated–with virtually no resources except English law and the implied power of the King. Under his successor Charles I British rule was more tolerant of its colonies–in 1639 Charles granted permanent authorization for a locally-elected colonial legislature, the House of Burgesses–and the Royal Council became the upper house.
The fragile capacity of colony-level government meant its scope and agenda was quite limited–mostly structural, judicial, and administrative such as recording land claims. The larger point is that Virginia, to the extent it was governed at all, was governed by isolated hinterland owners of plantations. There was no intervening established and legal level of government until 1834–and that was the county/shire, which included the plantations that existed within a defined geographic area. In that the plantations were private, the county became the principal geographic unit from which plantations/towns were managed. Virginia’s pre-Berkeley colonial policy-making was scarcely more than personalistic, opportunistic, self-appoint local barons using the framework of government to achieve their aims–a sort of Arizona “Tombstone” policy-making–where Wyatt Earp is played by the Royal Governor.
Immigration actually began, in muted scale, previous to Berkeley–in the last days of the Jamestown Company. During the Harvey-era governorship (1628 to 1639) several gentry plantation elites emerged to fill its void upon its 1624 dissolution. Drawing from lower gentry second sons and aspiring sons of established English merchants, Berkeley recruited a trickle of young elites on-the-make to Virginia. Three such emigres standout from this period: William Claiborne, Samuel Mathews and William Tucker. All arrived in the early 1620’s, made their way into the domestic planter oligopoly, and eventually each took a seat on the Royal Council. William Claiborne was the most disruptive, and he played an important role throughout the Berkeley period. He was he chief architect in the little understood war of Virginia and Maryland (See Pennsylvania Chapter), and, as a Puritan sympathizer, bridged the chasm when Cromwell took over, Claiborne offers a look at the nature of colony-level policy-making before Berkeley’s arrival.
The son of a Lord Mayor from Norfolk (England) and merchant, William found his way into Virginia as a twenty-one year old surveyor in 1621. Tapping the headright program, he was awarded a 200 acre plantation, and in four years secured acreage to bring his plantation to about 1,1000 acres. This is agricultural entrepreneurism in a wild-west economy. Following the 1622 Indian war that toppled the Jamestown Company, he was appointed to the Royal Council in 1624. Trading with the Indians brought him new riches and working with a group of London merchant factors, he aspired to set up a mercantile trading company. It was at this time, as he attempted to broaden his trade range, that his war with Maryland and the Catholic Calverts began. Governor Harvey, following orders from London, opposed him, and Claiborne and Harvey duked it out from most of the next decade.
Absorbed with his Maryland-Kent Island obsession, Claiborne ranged free, staying reasonably clear of Berkeley, until 1660, but eventually lost out; Maryland survived it and went its own way. Claiborne retired to his plantation. His descendants include evangelist Jerry Falwell and fashion designer Liz Claiborne. Among the lessons we draw from Claiborne is the free-wheeling, almost swashbuckling disruptive entrepreneurism that was a hallmark of the early Virginia planter class (William Byrd I would be another example)–and how sizable land ownership allowed entry into the planter oligopoly–and from there into the Royal Council and high-level Virginia politics. In 1621 as a newly-arrived surveyor he owned 200 acres and three years later, 1,100 acres and a seat on the Royal Council.
The English Civil War began, and needless to say, the King’s interest in Virginia fell off the table completely, as did his head when he lost the Civil War in 1649. At the end of the Civil War Puritans and Cromwell took over, and the latter was not especially interested in Virginia. So during the 1650’s a sort of interregnum in royal administration occurred in Virginia, feeding as we shall see an increase in power and status of Virginia’s planter elites. These plantation elites assumed de facto control over colony administration and governance. Indeed, they attempted to reconstitute a new and amended version of the Jamestown Company, in effect reverting back to a joint-stock charter colony. Berkeley arrived–and crushed that attempt. From then on plantation elites had to work through the county and its political bodies.
The County and its Institutions: Evolution under Berkeley
Tidewater state/local policy systems very early without conscious planning fell inevitably, given the hostile wilderness character of its environment, under the sway of local elites simply by pressure of events. These local elites assumed authority over the individual counties in which they resided. With Native American conflict endemic and chronic, civilian-military-economic-political distinctions blurred and at the local level conferred social status and wealth of those large plantation owners that could survive and prosper under these conditions. They got themselves elected to the county level’s chief institution: the county court which .exercised all the powers of each branch of government. Today the label, “court” for example, confuses us–rightfully–it was not just a judicial body. In an age when well-defined separation of powers (legislative-judicial-legislative) was not well-developed or even appreciated, local policy system structures were inherently multi-functional and public-private interests were largely fused.
When Virginia’s colonial county court system was formally established in 1634 (no record of the law presently exists) it was a major step in establishing a formal policy system in the colony, as well as the first fundamental establishment in setting up a sub-colony policy system. Counties were established with each county to be governed by its “county court” composed of “justices of the peace”. Justices of the Peace were appointed by the Governor. These justices were primarily intended to render judicial/legal service, but their jurisdiction also included “The Amity, Confidence and Quiet between Men“–no doubt an odd job description for a local legislature; it did allow for the court to act in aggregate to deal with non-judicial matters. The most common duty initially assumed by the court was to register and store land claims and property titles. It also assumed jurisdiction in dealing with issues arising from those filings. In addition to the county court, the office of sheriff, and clerk were also created. Law, order, and property seems to have been the policy areas of original jurisdiction in Virginia’s initial county government. Over the next twenty-eight years (1662) ten additional counties were created [1].
In the intervening years after 1634, the powers and jurisdictions of the county courts were expanded to include: “bastard-bearing and other sexual matters (transferring them from church courts). Over the years the county court assumed more and more responsibility in handling church/parish matters, the responsibility for maintaining bridges and ferries within their boundaries, recording of mortgages, jurisdiction of civil cases below 1600 pounds of tobacco, oversee estates of orphaned minors. Sheriffs were empowered to seize assets in the event of debt foreclosure. In 1645, the Virginia Assembly authorized the county courts to serve as the court of original jurisdiction for most civil and common law cases–the Royal Council/Assembly, accordingly became more of an Appellate Court. The county was entrusted with tax collection of state taxes, for example, and the Assembly appointed county court justices as officers in the county militia, for which the justices were tasked to provide ammunition (a big deal), and weapons for the colony’s defense. Poor relief, regulation of prices and wages, and formal maintenance of roads completed the pre-1662 picture of the responsibilities of the “county court”.
County courts over the following years were tasked with more and more powers and responsibilities, expanding their scope of action and impact. Court sessions became longer, and more complex. “These ranged from regulating the local economy by licensing and fixing rates which tavern-keepers, millers, ferry operators could charge … to opening and maintaining roads and bridges within the county … to administering/implementing the county tax system … [to becoming] the major recording agency of the colony … records of virtually all land transactions were handled by the local court … court-recorded marriage licenses [and] militia duty lists … As a representative of the governor, [the sheriff] collected public and county land taxes [quitrents] paid local creditors … supervising and certifying local elections … the chief police officer … running the county jail and presiding over physical punishment [2]
In short, legislative mandates and pass-through legislation infused the agenda of county level governance, and by 1662, the fused (three-branch county court)-government that was the county had greatly expanded its tasks, responsibilities and impact over the surrounding jurisdiction. The court was indeed “the focal point of much of colonial life”, including the operation and conduct of local elections. The county courts were the intervening authority between governor and individual colonist and were the lynch pin of Virginia’s legal and administrative system. In essence the strongest, most cohesive, most policy robust level of government in the the comprehensive Virginia policy system was its individual local unit of government, the county and its county court composed of justices of the peace.
What began in 1634 as agencies of regional administration with narrowly prescribed powers emerged by 1662 as units of government whose wide authority touched the colonists lives far more immediately than did that of the Assembly or the Governor [2a]
Billings asserted this evolution in the power and responsibility of county courts had two principal consequences: The influence of the Governor, the [Royal} Council, and the General Assembly in local matters declined as the competence of the [county] justices’ statutory increased. In turn, the justices used their expanding power to translate themselves into Virginia’s ruling elite. [3].
The second dynamic was critical to understanding “the local tilt/bias” that enveloped decision-making in the House of Burgesses in particular. The Royal Council/Council of State, composed as it was of the great plantation lords was inherently wrapped up with a local tilt, and consumed from the beginning with land development as the best ED strategy to increase planter wealth by extending the tobacco economic base as far as climate and topography allowed, and preserving the plantation as a bastion of private and public authority: the manor reborn. But the Burgesses, like all legislatures could have developed, at least to some degree, perspectives that included several segments of Virginia society, and a sense of the larger “Virginia good”. But it didn’t.
The turn by plantation elites, having completed their domination over county courts and the hierarchy of elective offices, to protecting and extending their interests into Burgesses decision-making and legislation limited the ability of other elements of Virginia society to amass a sizable base, and more importantly eroded any serious development of a shared “Virginia-level” agenda. The sense that to the extent Virginia as a whole could “progress and develop” local communities could also progress and develop did not take root, largely, I suspect, because the local community was thought of as the plantation in the minds of many, probably most Burgesses delegates.
And the plantation was not thought of as all plantations–just those in the county where the delegate from which the delegate was elected. The Burgesses was clearly the secondary-reactive member of the General Assembly through both the pre-Berkeley and Berkeley years. It was only after Bacon’s Rebellion and the recall of Berkeley that Burgesses began to develop its own autonomy and perspective, and to asset it into its own legislation. By that time local counties elites were firmly lodged in the Burgesses drivers seat.
By 1660 it had become customary to regard the county as the sole unit of representation in … the colony. And an act of the Assembly in March 1661/2 finally eliminated the parish as an electoral district. Thereafter until June 1676 no man sat in the House of Burgesses who was not simultaneously a justice of the peace. The monopoly of the House membership points to the emergence of the county courts as the base for Virginia’s ruling elite. .. Not only was [the county court office of justice of the peace] a badge of success and a source of power, but it was the instrument with which successful colonists fashioned political domains for themselves and their progeny. [3a].
In this dominance of local county courts and their justices of the peace we can see the seeds for future policy systems which inherited a policy system with such a robust, concentrated, county government virtually imperious to external attack from above (and as we shall see, below). Shades of county court house gangs and county-driven political machines loom over our thoughts–but those are indeed visions of Virginia’s future. When the time comes in the Early Republic when Virginia/North Carolina split into several states (Kentucky and Tennessee) the issue of whether to continue both state’s use of the county as the electoral unit for state-wide offices would be a critical factor in determining whether Virginia’s Tidewater policy system would be adopted. Again, we have gotten ahead of ourselves–but it is critical for the reader to be sensitive to the importance of this early decentralization of Tidewater Virginia’s colonial policy system.
In any event, this decentralization affected greatly the decision-making perspective of the Burgesses. Log-rolling would arguably be the chief legislative strategy to approve legislation. Also, the fate of taxes intended to promote the general Virginia good, would be overwhelmed in the cost equation of plantation economics. From the start, as Burgesses was just beginning its development as a legislative body, its members were thought of as [local] delegates, not representatives. Virginia-level General Assembly decision-makers were driven principally by local and personal needs and interests: Virginia as a colony-level policy system was largely a local parochial, inward-looking, personalistic, plantation-focused policy-making tilt/bias.
Accordingly, during the Berkeley period, Virginia decentralized its policy system and empowered its county level to handle much of Virginia governance. The county became the workhorse of the Virginia policy system. Given the nature of the shredded community that underlay each county, real power and authority still remained with each county’s larger plantation owners. Land ownership was the key vital to enter into, and exert impact over the county’s policy system.
Besides its obvious economic power, plantation ownership made an owner eligible to take advantage if the people/workforce attraction programs which subsidized the new residents for the plantation and for the county. Keep that thought in mind. In this period the electoral franchise was remarkably open in local and colony elections. For several decades, women were allowed to vote; some did, but it appears most did not. In any case, there were no land ownership requirements for voting, although indentured servants and slaves did not enjoy the franchise until they obtained their contractual “freedom”. Numbers were very small, these were small communities, and turnout is not the same as with a New England town meeting. Voice voting came with social constraints and economic implications. The reality is the larger landlords not only exerted real day-to-day impact on their communities, but early on they took the lead in running county affairs–and they never surrendered that advantage. Part of the reason the larger landlords maintained their political hold on county-level offices and policy-making, was that they had also secured a strong position in the colony-level political and governance bodies.
By mid-1640’s the county court was entrusted to be the administrator of an increasing amount of Assembly legislation, and with enforcement of such legislation as well. “After 1648, the [county] judges recommended to the governor new members of the bench [county court], sheriffs, clerks and he complied with their recommendations. … By the 1650’s it was a customary procedure and during the 1660’s it became virtually inviolable” [4]. It was only natural, one might speculate, that to ensure a proper relationship between the legislature/governor that county could and should themselves serve as elected members of the Burgesses. “During 1640’s and 1650’s … members of local courts usually managed to ensure the election of one of their numbers. By 1660 it had become customary to regard the county as the sole unit of representation in most parts of the colony, and an Act of the Assembly of March 1661/2 finally eliminated the parish as an electoral district. Thereafter, until June 1676 no man sat in the House of Burgesses who was not simultaneously a justice of the peace“ [5] [This was Berkeley’s “Long Parliament”, alluded to in the next module]. Thus it appears from the mid-1630’s county courts were able to elect one of their membership to serve in Jamestown (House of Burgesses). By the time Berkeley arrived on the scene the practice was customary.
Precisely at the time, William Berkeley was importing his royalist elite, setting them up, usually in new frontier counties, the mechanism/process existed for the royalist elites to enter county politics, and through county courts. The favorable patronage of the Governor–into the House of Burgesses and even to the Royal Council (see p. 239) expedited assimilation into the policy system. Berkeley no doubt created a more or less loyal constituency which facilitated his long tenure as Governor, and sustained his position during Bacon’s Rebellion, but upon his abrupt and inglorious departure from governor and the colony, left in place a local policy system with immense influence on the composition of the central political institutions at the colony level. Theirs was but a symbiotic relationship.
The key drivers behind the entry and rise of this new royalist elite under Berkeley were Berkeley’s initial land grant incentive program which set up the original plantation of each newcomer, and the new plantation owner’s use of the headright system which granted additional acres as compensation for the importation of a indentured servant labor force. Free land–and workers to work the land–set up plantations of size, which an entrepreneur could go on and “scale up” in newly-open western territories. Tobacco, whatever its deficiencies–and there were many–was sufficiently stable to provide financial sustenance to reward this growth. Its financial downside as it turns out is that scale required growth for growth’s sake, simply to pay off the debt amassed. In this manner, the Virginia planter oligopoly never had available sufficient discretionary-investment capital to diversity itself out of agriculture and land development–but that story shall be told in a forthcoming module.
Evolution of the Colony-Level Policy System
In an earlier chapter, the de facto existence of what will become a House of Burgess was evident. It played a limited but important role in passage of the 1618 Greate Charter. As also described in 1639 Charles I formally institutionalized the House as the lower house of the Virginia General Assembly. Firmly anchored in the structure framework, it would be a mistake to dwell upon the House of Burgesses as the key Virginia colony-level body. It met irregularly to begin with, and the reality was that previous to 1689, the House was decidedly in a secondary position to the Royal Council-Council of State which was more active, aggressive, and powerful. During this period, legislation was approved by the General Assembly, which included both bodies. To be sure, even by 1640, the House was supportive of local interests and legislation, while the Royal Council kept its attention confined to the politics of land and tobacco production
The Council was not elected by appointed by the Governor, and it proved very early on that once appointed it was nearly impossible to be removed. The largest and most active of the plantation owners soon occupied a commanding position on the Council and after the dissolution of the Jamestown Company, it did not take long for the Council to engage in active and extremely aggressive opposition to the Governor. Governor John Harvey’s administration was the most contentious, as it appears was he. Nevertheless, Harvey imposed his vision of Virginia’s colony-level perspective which was at odds with the plantation-owner dominated Council.
Harvey pursued several economic strategies in his early years, including an attempt to diversify Virginia agriculture away from tobacco to cash crops, an attempt to develop iron ore/potash mining, workforce reforms limiting tobacco production to 2,000 plants per worker, making peace with Native Americans, and in 1634, establishment of the county system of government described previously. But in order to ensure better quality tobacco, he had tobacco burned rather than export it–and that was possible because he required its inspection previous to export. He was clearly on a collision course with the local plantation elites. But it was his position of land acquisition by powerful plantation owners after 1634 that caused his time of trouble (aside from his style of leadership/personality). To make a long and complicated story shorter and less complicated. the underlying dynamic was the land acquisition by local plantation owners. Whenever land seem available, these folk tried to grab hold of it.
After 1632, Governor Harvey, having negotiated a treaty with various Indian tribes, found himself once again in opposition to local county plantation owners who wanted to expand their land ownership into undeveloped/unsettled former Indian possessions. In 1635 Harvey faced a virtual insurrection in York County, which was unable to suppress. Harvey in that confrontation Harvey followed up with a threat of hanging Council members for treason, and the matter ended only when the former governor amassed forty musketeers, surrounded him, and calmed the Governor down.
The trigger issue was that Harvey insisted he had authority over the Council whose function was purely advisory, and, interestingly, the Council asserted authority over him. The underlying issue is that many plantation owners, especially the newcomers, wanted to resuscitate the Jamestown Company, terminate the Crown Colony administration, and bring back “planter rule” through the restored Company board of directors. Yet another land grab lay off stage if this were to happen.
“Harvey’s clashes with the Council were due, in part, the fact that the councilors were determined and not always reasonable men. The councilors furthermore were anxious that the Crown confirm ‘theire land and privilege’s’ … which was the true motive for the mutiny“ [6] Harvey, in the end, was outmaneuvered in London. There, the Lords Commissioners of Foreign Plantations (which administered England’s overseas colonies) reaffirmed the legality of the Greate Charters headright land system, with its raft of incentives and elite-biased legal protections, totally undermining Harvey’s position in opposing the Council. Thus emboldened, the Council met, expelled/drove out Harvey, sent him packing to England, where Charles II reaffirmed his governorship and sent him back–to the “delight” of the Royal Council.
In Harvey’s absence, the Council elected its own governor, John West. West seizing he moment authorized the opening up of the contested lands for sale. “In addition to the patenting (sale) of former Indian lands, the councilors and their associates [amassed] tens of thousands of acres that formerly were [Jamestown] Company lands“–in excess of 300,000 acres. Harvey upon his return unsuccessfully resisted the land grab, and again he was expelled by the Council. Governor Harvey was formally recalled, this time for good–but not before he knocked the teeth out of a Royal Council delegate with a cudgel.
The reader has no doubt gathered the point I am trying to make: the relationship between the Governor and the Royal-Council/Council of State was uneven, and fluid if not zero-sum. The Crown’s reliance on local elites after the collapse of the Jamestown Company had come to haunt the Governor and the Crown. By the time Berkeley arrived on the scene, the Royal Council was nearly autonomous of the Governor, and fully capable to resisting him if the occasion warranted. The third rail of the troubled relationship was land acquisition by planters on the Council–and other planters who could follow in the land grabbing wake. Combine this with the institutionalization of planter dominance over the newly-formed county level institutions and we see strong evidence that before 1642 a domestic planter oligopoly had developed, effectively dominated local and day-today economic and political affairs, and was in a position to assert itself against the Royal Governor.
The net result of these actions, dynamic transformations and legislation was that by the middle to late 1640’s Virginia, as summarized by Heinemann et al, had established a stable and functioning policy system: “with political institutions and land titles following English [pre-Civil War] custom. The colonial government had become more decentralized through the county system of governance, with commissioners, justices of the peace and sheriffs commanding authority in local matters. The combined effect was to make the emerging great planters, who held many of these offices, paramount in local government” [7]. What was not evident in the 1640’s was the Puritan victory in the English Civil War, the Virginia interregnum that ensued, and the incredible transformation of Virginia in that period by a new royal Governor, William Berkeley, that gathered great momentum during the 1650’s and early 1660’s.
Berkeley Steps In
Berkeley’s commanding presence, his singular determination to pursue his own agenda required it seems, that Berkeley reach some kind of accommodation with the Royal Council and its swashbuckling members. He did so as we will remember by formally renaming, and empowering the Royal Council into the Council of State, and making it in addition to all other activities and responsibilities as the upper, and dominant chamber of Virginia’s General Assembly. The House of Burgesses, a secondary power at this point, was largely ignored, and the dynamics of its takeover by county court elites continued uninterrupted–with the full cooperation of Berkeley when needed. Berkeley could appoint to the Council of State, but Burgesses was elected.
Given the shredded communities and the newly-established county government set up in the newly-settled areas populated by Berkeley’s new royalist elite, entry into county government and the hierarchy of offices which led to the county court, was almost effortless. Berkeley helped this along by appointing royalist immigrants to positions that supported him at the colony-level. He was not adverse if they entered the Royal Council, nor the House of Burgesses.
They occupied offices as Berkeley’s principal bureaucrats; many, such as William Byrd I, became his equivalent to English frontier marsh wardens, holding down the tempestuous borderlands above and beyond the Fall Line. It is probably less important in determining how conscious this strategy was than simply acknowledging that it poured the foundations for a local planter oligopoly to dominate local county institutions and economic base, and from their the higher colony-level political and policy-making bodies. First the Royal Council, with Berkeley institutionalized as the Council of State:
Virginia’s Cavalier elite gained control of [the Royal Council] during the mid-seventeenth century, and held it until the American Revolution. As early as 1660 every councilor was related to another member by blood or marriage. As late as 1775 every member was descended from a councilor who had served in 1660 … This small body functioned simultaneously as the governor’s cabinet, the upper house of the legislature, and the colony’s Supreme Court. It controlled the distribution of land, and the lion’s share went to a group of twenty-five families who monopolized two-thirds of the Council’s seats from 1680 to 1775 [8].
This small body functioned as the Governor’s cabinet, the upper house of the [Virginia] legislature and the colony’s supreme court. It controlled the distribution of land, and the lion’s share went to twenty-five families who held two-thirds of the seats in that body from 1680 to 1775. The same families also controlled other offices of power and profit: secretary, treasurer, auditor-general, receiver-general, surveyor-general … and governors of William and Mary College [the only college south of the Mason-Dixon line in that period]. … This elite gained control of the Council during the mid-seventeenth century, and retained it through the Revolution. As early as 1660, every seat on the Council was filled by members of the five related [family-networks]. As late as 1775, every member of that august body was descended from a councilor who had served in 1660 [9]
Infusion of Berkeley’s royalist elite values into Virginia’s Policy Structures
As we know from the past module, Berkeley arrived on the scene and in short order seemed to work out a deal with the restive and obnoxious Royal Council, and by implication to rest of Virginia’s planter oligopoly. Its bottom line was Berkeley got some room to try his economics-laden foreign policy, his royalist immigrant attraction program, and his various economic development initiatives. In return, he granted the Royal Council headroom to pursue its land grabs and expansion of the tobacco economy/culture, and he did nothing to oppose the “capture” of the House of Burgesses by delegates drawn from the planter oligopoly-dominated county courts. When tough times came during Cromwell’s interregnum they let him withdraw to his manor-plantation, and then trotted him out when Charles II appeared on the horizon. When Bacon’s Rebellion rocked Jamestown, the oligopoly ultimately stood behind him, and gave him the breathing space to survive a bit longer. And when Berkeley was recalled, they simply absorbed a good deal of the vacuum his departure created. And the story went on.
Arriving in sufficient numbers over three decades, this royalist elite inserted a coherent culture of elites into what had been a wild-west semi-anarchistic, semi-entrepreneurial survival of the fittest land grab that was pre-Berkeley Virginia. Where there had been no real enduring culture evident before, the royalists came with one packed in the their luggage and memories. It was Berkeley who unwittingly or more likely semi-consciously, made this aspirational culture, the political culture of the Tidewater elite by infusing the political structures of the Tidewater with a constant flow of newly arrived royalists, granting them entry into the oligopoly, favoring them with offices and more land grants/workers, these elites worked their way in very short order from their new plantations, to sheriffs, county courts, House of Burgesses, and to the Council of State. A shared grouping’s culture is, after all, only a culture; it becomes a political culture when it is included, connected to the policy system. Without doubt, Berkeley imported a culture and connected it to the Tidewater policy system.
If the reader is already aware of the Tidewater political culture, she is probably familiar with labels like “cavalier“, the royalist supporters of Charles I, who lost his head in the 1640’s English Civil War. That is the starting point for Woodard, who ascribes the formative element of the Tidewater political culture to “the younger sons of southern English gentry who aimed to reproduce the semi-feudal manorial society of the English countryside, where economic, political and social affairs were run by landed aristocrats … self-identified “Cavaliers“. The cumulative effect on Virginia from their migration was to create “a fundamentally conservative region, with a high value placed on respect for authority and tradition [conversely deference to the landed elites] and very little on equality or participation in politics”[7a]. That culture will emerge more clearly in our second module, but what will also become apparent is how that culture was early on interwoven into Virginia’s pattern of governance, a pattern that endured literally to some degree for three centuries.
In the beginning. the initial Tidewater culture was nothing more, or less, than an attempt to recreate what the royalist immigrants imagined or remembered their lives to be in Merrie old England, with the plantation a new incarnation of the dying English manor. While it came with a full suitcase of values, beliefs and expectations which commentators have described for years, the core summary, at least for our purposes at the moment, is encapsulized by their sense of political order needed to maintain the manor-plantation. That political order, needs be, must be reflected somehow, and to some degree, in the Virginia policy system. In 1650–through 1750 or so–the initial political order carried by the first generations of Berkeley’s royalist immigrants, adopted and intermarried with original planter oligopoly was well-summarized by Heinemann et al:
The tobacco planters … adhered to the concept of a hierarchical society that they or their ancestors brought with them from England. Most held to the general idea of a Great Chain of Being; at the top were God and his heavenly host; next came kings (and sometime queens) who were divinely sanctioned to rule; then a hereditary aristocracy who were followed in ascending order by wealthy-landed gentry, small independent farmers, tenant farmers, servants, and finally vagabonds, transients, criminals and the mentally ill [and last, of course, slaves] [7b]
When Berkeley’s royalist newcomers arrived at their new plantation, they almost instinctively knew how and where they had to go to establish the hierarchical order in county. Familiar with its role and operations in England, they wasted no time and making sure of their position in that institution. In very many instances, these new elites moved into new counties, indeed the number of counties trebled in the Berkeley period. With little if any institutional history, and only the rare and isolated white settler, they were the architects of county administration. “He knew that the English squire who enjoyed high social standing was the same man that enforced the law and the king’s That knowledge led him to use the office of justice of the peace do duplicate the familiar relationship in the Old Dominion. … The immigrant justices of the peace obtained their positions fairly rapidly, and having won office, they retained it until they died, retired or were elevated to higher office” [10].
This hierarchical order is hard to reconcile with most any more of a modern democracy. One could more easily recreate the manor in the plantation if the economic base required it, but absent a compelling higher authority that could command obedience, the “willing cooperation” of the general community was necessary; it takes a village to create a village. It was also hard to reconcile with the realities of Virginia’s 1650 isolated, hostile wilderness–a state of nature that did not follow the rules and manners of the English manor.
These royalists had to deal with an accommodate a certain leveling of the classes or orders, as each needed each other to some degree to survive. This, bias to equality found in these isolated wildernesses frontier geographies, meant that elections, the almost instinctive reaction of all English colonies upon arrival in North America, was the necessary vehicle to achieve the cooperation of all orders in colonial self-rule. So they royalists had to accommodate elections into this Chain of God–and Berkeley had such an accommodation up his sleeve. structures
the Nail in the Coffin — Berkeley, upon restoration to the governorship, held no elections to the Burgesses after 1661. Choosing instead to rule through a “long” Burgesses, first elected in 1662, he held not Burgesses elections until forced to by an Indian uprising and Bacon’s brewing Rebellion in 1676. Until Berkeley, the electoral franchise was open to all “freemen”, i.e. no property restrictions (with one year, 1655, an exception as a property requirement was instituted, then overturned the next year). Berkeley, however changed it in 1670, to include only “freeholders” males with property. It was changed back to freemen (1676) as a result of Bacon’s Rebellion, but with Bacon’s defeat in the same year, land restrictions on the franchise were again restored. [11].
The reason for property restrictions was crystal-clear; when forced to call for a new Burgesses election amidst Bacon’s Rebellion, a considerable number of delegates to that body were sympathetic to Bacon’s demands. As part of an interim agreement with Bacon, Berkeley agreed to his demand to re-institute the freeman, non-propertied franchise. Upon Bacon’s death and defeat, the freeman franchise went out the window–never, ever to return until 1776. The addition of property restrictions on voting was laden with long-term consequences, which, I suspect, was appreciated by Berkeley and the traditional Tidewater plantation owners who, for the most part, remained on Berkeley’s side during the Bacon affair.
The practical reality is that candidates–who themselves had to possess higher levels of property and wealth superior to the voter franchise eligibility, were plantation owners, their families and business associates, parish vestrymen, and appointed by the Burgesses) justices of the peace. That county and colony office holding went unpaid and were time-consuming created unspoken bias on who accepted public office.
The administration of indentured servant contracts, which were substantially tightened under Berkeley and the generation following, put the masters of indentured servants in the position of granting voting franchise eligibility–or not. Land ownership or sharecropper, or day hand, the paths that followed expiration of indentured contract, were decisions of the plantation owner. After the 1690’s slaves rapidly began to replace indentured servants. Former indentured servants turned into a permanent agricultural lumpen proletariat, hanging on in the Tidewater/Piedmont or drifting west toward the hostile and isolated peripheries of hinterland Virginia and North Carolina.
In any case, by the end of Berkeley’s administration (1676) the electoral franchise for county and colony elections was in the hands of “freeholders”. White men above twenty-one who owned property (25 acres of improved land and at least 100 unimproved). Otherwise one could rent but hold a life-long lease on a property. If you resided in one of the four incorporated towns, one had to own a lot or a house of a specified size. Although women could vote prior to 1699, few actually did, and even free blacks and Indians were disenfranchised by 1723. The basic pattern of the plantation Tidewater electorate to include only those sympathetic to its beliefs, economics, and values–the dissident elements and classes were excluded from the franchise if at all possible. If there were other cultures, their ability to connect to the Tidewater Virginia policy system was limited indeed–marginalized we would call it today.
Aside from large plantation owners and families, those property owners that could vote either were merchants or artisans, often residing on plantation or it the shredded community, or small planters. “Planters with a strong economic base in land and slaves had the time to devote to local and provincial politics; smaller farmers who worked alongside their slaves in the fields could ill-afford to be away for weeks or months at a time. Traditional English civic virtue also encouraged gentlemen of breeding, education and wealth to shoulder the responsibilities of public office as a duty owed to the lower orders of society who in turn treated them with deference and respect [12]. This is an important pillar of the so-called “deference culture”. a concept that in the course of this history, I will question and modify.
I would stress, however, that the realities of economic dependence on local plantation elites, plus the common norms of small town conformity, and the ties of kinship created within small isolated settlements also contributed mightily to deference. The ability of the plantation elites to administer legal violence/punishment, and to make and enforce laws made them formidable enemies, better left undisturbed. The chronic reality of non-compliance, and anomic actions and initiatives in these communities, however, could be testimony that politics could be expressed in ways other than voting, and that alternate values, beliefs and expectations remained unexpressed in these marginalized settlements. By the 1750’s only about seventy percent of the adult white males owned enough land/life-long lease to qualify to vote. The others, plus all women and freed blacks could not vote–this should be compared to Mother England, where an estimated fifteen percent could vote.
The franchise was larger the more west one resided; say it another way, the closer to the Tidewater coast, the fewer were eligible to vote [13]. In future models as Virginia’s western counties are settled, the franchise matter became more complex. Turnout, however, in colonial times was in general less than we might “romantically” like to think. Voting was by voice, at the church or county court building, and travel meant taking a good chunk of time off. Unfortunately my research has not yet uncovered specific rates, but if comparable to those estimated by Ronald Formisano for post-1790 apply to Virginia’s shredded community, it could be shockingly small [14].
A Closed Political System Dominated by an Elite Political Culture
Lest we romantically descend into thinking that rule by sage elites was a blessing to those who lived under it, and a model to be imitated, a few last thoughts.
By the mid-seventeenth century, with an electorate restricted to property holders, and a Council of State filled exclusively from royalist families, the closest one came to “democratic” government befell to the House of Burgesses. But that too was dominated by plantation owners and county justices of the peace. As late as 1758, in a Tidewater Burgesses election, a member of a royalist family and plantation owner was able to win an election without even being present in the county. “His friends put on a successful campaign … [making] expenditures in his behalf for liquors of various types. This offering of alcoholic refreshments to the voters customary in that era, was described by one observer as ‘swilling the electors with bumbo’, and by another as plying them with ‘strong grogg and scorched pigs’‘.
In any case, in that election (1758), George Washington, off in western Pennsylvania fighting a war against the French, was elected for the first time to the House of Burgesses [15]. That is the story that we will tackle in the modules after this. Going into the American Revolution, Virginia’s colony-level legislative bodies remained in the hand of local plantation elites, with the electoral franchise as limited as ever.
Historian Thomas Wertenbaker wrote “In their political capacity the leading men of the colony were frequently guilty of inexcusable and open fraud. Again and again they made use of their great influence and power to appropriate public funds to their private use, to escape the payment of taxes, and to obtain under false pretenses vast tracts of land … Such thievery were far less prevalent in Virginia during the late 17th century and during the late 18th century ‘when a high sense of honor became eventually on of the most pronounced characteristics of Virginians'” [16].
What we shall discover in the following modules is Virginia after Berkeley expanded into the Piedmont, then into the Shenandoah Valley, and western counties to the South and West. New peoples and cultures poured in. In the 18th century tobacco economics deteriorated and the plantation oligopoly adjusted their “business plan” to include western land development, taking advantage of the opportunity provided to them by migrations in their hinterland. Finally, generation change and great movements such as the Great Awakening, and the French and Indian War changed attitudes, beliefs and even values of the grandchildren of our seventeenth century planter royalist elite. Times change as they say.
Footnotes
[1] Warren M. Billings, “the Growth of Political Institutions in Virginia, 1634-1676” (William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 2, (Apr 1974)), pp. 225-42
[2] Robert Wheeler, “the County Court in Colonial Virginia” in Bruce C. Daniels (Ed), Town and County: Essays on the Structure of Local Government in the American Colonies (Wesleyan University Press, 1978), pp. 121-3
[2a] Warren M. Billings, “the Growth of Political Institutions in Virginia, 1634-1676“, p. 228
[3] Warren M. Billings, “the Growth of Political Institutions in Virginia, 1634-1676“,231-2[4]
[3a] Warren M. Billings, “the Growth of Political Institutions in Virginia, 1634-1676“, p. 235
[4] Warren M. Billings, “the Growth of Political Institutions in Virginia, 1634-1676“, p. 233
[5] Warren M. Billings, “the Growth of Political Institutions in Virginia, 1634-1676“, p. 235
[6] Virginius Dabney, Virginia: the New Dominion (University Press of Virginia, 1983), p. 41
[7] Ronald L. Heinemann, John G. Kolp. Anthony S. Parent, Jr., William G. Shade, Old Dominion, New Commonwealth, p. 39
[7a] Colin Woodward, American Nations, p. 7
[7b] Ronald L. Heinemann, John G. Kolp. Anthony S. Parent, Jr., William G. Shade, Old Dominion, New Commonwealth, p. 67
[8] David Hackett-Fischer and James C. Kelly, Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement, p. 42
[9] David Hackett-Fischer, Albion’s Seed, p. 222
[10] Warren M. Billings, “the Growth of Political Institutions in Virginia, 1634-1676“, p. 236, p. 238-9
[11] Virginius Dabney, Virginia: the New Dominion, p. 42-3
[12] Ronald L. Heinemann, John G. Kolp. Anthony S. Parent, Jr., William G. Shade, Old Dominion, New Commonwealth, p. 75.
[13] Ronald L. Heinemann, John G. Kolp. Anthony S. Parent, Jr., William G. Shade, Old Dominion, New Commonwealth, p. 74
[14] Ronald P. Formisano, the Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790’s-1840’s (Oxford University Press, 1983)
[15] Virginius Dabney, the New Dominion, p. 103
[16] Thomas J. Wertenbaker, the Shaping of Colonial Virginia (Russell & Russell, 1958), quoted in Dabney, the New Dominion, p. 51. David Hackett-Fischer reports a contemporary English description of pre-Berkeley Virginia “none but those of the meanest quality and corruptest lives went there” David Hackett-Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 210. In short Virginia’s colony-level institutions, despite the fame of its House of Burgesses, had its dark side, above and beyond slavery.
Ron W. Coan 