The upper Rappahannock Valley on the Piedmont central plateau warrants a special treatment. Through it was made the initial entry over the Blue Ridge mountains and into the bountiful Shenandoah Valley. That entry was forged by a hybrid economic development strategy–personal wealth-creating land development by one man, Lieutenant Governor Alexander Spotswood
Spotswood, arriving in 1710 as (Lieutenant) Governor, deserves two separate discussions: the first outlines his varied economic development initiatives salient to our history and to the colonial policy system; the second will briefly elaborate on his opening up of the Shenandoah, and his private economic development initiatives conducted on his plantation-estate. He conducted the latter because he was ousted from the governorship by the domestic Tidewater royalist families thru the Council of State.
The political context that Spotswood inherited in 1710 was complex, and it eventually did him in. For the better part of two decades after Berkeley’s ouster, the Royal Council under the leadership pf William Byrd I, and the Burgesses–the oligopoly–continuously feuded with the Governor and Crown over matters and policy of colonial administration.
As indicated previously, the Crown was in a reformist mood and was trying to bring Virginia’s land ownership and land development programs under control. he Council of State simply refused to cooperate. In addition to planter opposition, religious ramifications associated with William and Mary’s Glorious Revolution resulted in the appointment of George Blair as head of Virginia’s Anglican Church. A political powerhouse in London, a close friend of John Locke who directed the Board of Trade, Blair immediately established a controversial college in Virginia (surprise, William and Mary) and gathered a considerable measure of control over the local parishes. A succession of would-be strong governors fussed with Blair, and the Royal Council–and each was tossed out and sent packing. Spotswood was the third, and when he came, in 1710, he faced a twice victorious Blair and a Royal Council determined to resist any further incursions of their power by the Governor.
Who is Alexander Spotswood? A rising, non-aristocratic star, whose occupational vehicle was the military, Spotswood became a “protégé” of the famous and powerful Marlborough. Spotswood fought bravely and well with him at Blenheim, and in turn was awarded the lieutenant governorship. Spotswood’s intention from the start was to acquire wealth, and enter the ranks of the lesser nobility. On his arrival in Virginia he was the first to occupy the new governor’s mansion in the new capital at Williamsburg (established in 1698). He married into a Virginian planter family in 1725, and his great grand-daughter would marry Patrick Henry, by whom she birthed eleven children. Spotswood came to Virginia to make his fortune and establish himself firmly in Britain’s aristocratic order–this and his distinctive leadership style required the establishment of a manor. Spotswood initiated a series of economic development initiatives and strategies, some of which carried the by-product of creating personal wealth.
Upon his arrival in Virginia, Spotswood’s initial assignment was to implement the Board of Trade’s land development anti-corruption program–a clean up campaign that had contributed to the ouster of the past two governors. The new lieutenant governor, however. soon realized that campaign struck hard against the royalist plantation hegemony that dominated the domestic politics of Virginia. He got nowhere quickly, and early on in regards to land development, Spotswood seemingly decided if you can’t beat them join them. As early as 1713 he led the passage of legislation facilitating and establishing the legal parameters of land development in the Piedmont.
The statute fostered rapid development, and forbade speculators to hold large tracts of undeveloped land for long periods. Settlers in the new counties of the Piedmont were also exempted from taxes for ten years, another spur to swift occupation. They did not favor speculators or absentee landlords, and in 1713 they passed a law requiring property owners to cultivate three acres out of every fifty in their possession on the pain of forfeiture. [10] .
In contravention of existing Crown policy, Spotswood in 1714 surreptitiously acquired acreage (ten square miles) in Piedmont’s Rappahannock river valley, near today’s Culpeper VA (his clerks bought it and then later transferred title to him). His intention was to establish a fort and a settlement to secure the area against Indian attack, but also, it seems, to take advantage of an iron ore mining deposits discovered in 1712. That story will be told in the next paragraphs. Other planter families joined in and Spotswood did what he could to encourage Piedmont settlement–and its settlement by the patriarchy” : By 1727 the line of settlement had nearly reached the Blue Ridge …Spotswood many of the best lands went to well-connected gentry families in grants of 1,000 to 15,000 acres [8], p.100. That initial purchase was followed up by his 1720 land grant deal with the patriarchs in the Council and Burgesses in which he acquired the entirety of what is today Spotsylvania County–about 86,000 acres which then overlapped Piedmont, Blue Ridge and land in the Shenandoah Valley.
Spotswood and the grandees of Virginia created a distinctive culture in the Piedmont. .. The [Piedmont] expansion was not merely a replication of tidewater culture. The healthier climate of the Piedmont made for stronger families and tighter kinship nets. … the proportion of slaves in the Piedmont was smaller than in the Tidewater–rising rapidly to 40 and 45 percent, but remaining in that range for many years. … By the mid eighteenth century the Piedmont had become the dominant region of Virginia [replacing] the Tidewater as the leading hearth of Virginia’s hegemonic culture [11].
Spotswood’s had to deal with the ever restive Native Americans, and stop the incessant raiding and terror unleashed by pirates along the North Carolina and Virginia coast. Despite his military background, maybe because of it, he like Alexander Knox in the future Washington administration, approached the Indian question as a matter to be negotiated–not settled by military conquest. The resident Indians had themselves been earlier subjugated by the Iroquois, and Spotswood had the unique opportunity to deal with one set of chiefs, and one tribe. Since the Iroquois did not consider Virginia as its home, they were willing to negotiate a treaty.
The apex of his Indian policy was Spotswood’s successful negotiation of a 1722 treaty with the Iroquois in Albany, NY. Sadly, the treaty by no means resolved conflict with Iroquois, who annually would conduct a Shenandoah raid anyway, and when their control was later broken, meant the subjugated tribes felt free to let loose their pent-up fury. Spotswood’s treaty, however, did yield the benefit of “legally” acquiring much of the Shenandoah Valley. Immediately he set up a series of forts and trading posts, as had Berkeley–more on that below. The Indian-Shenandoah matter was only finally resolved late in the 1730’s by one of Spotswood’s successors, Governor, William Gooch.
It is worth note that during this period Spotswood sent a naval expedition to North Carolina, and among its exploits the expedition defeated and killed Blackbeard the pirate.
Spotswood’s “Western” Settlements–The initial-break-through settlement of the Shenandoah Valley is credited to Governor Alexander Spotswood(1714). Spotswood saw opportunity in “them there hills” and believing a carrot was better than a stick, caused the approval of his Virginia Indian Act. by the Council f State and Burgesses–against their will. The Act set up a state-chartered corporation, the Virginia Indian Company, which was entrusted with a monopoly in the conduct of trade with Native Americans and whose secondary mission was to educate and Christianize Native Americans. According to the Act, trade would be conducted at a post established at Christanna, which Spotswood built personally. Built alongside, was a schoolhouse which quickly was populated by seventy Native Americans taught by an English instructor. In 1717, however, the King, hearing from a very dissatisfied House of Burgesses, brought the latter venture to a screaming halt. Spotswood’s Indian Act was an important element of his vision to open up Virginia to settlement and to develop economically this valuable, fertile and resource-rich geography.
In any event, also in 1714, a second prong of Spotswood’s ED strategy became apparent. Importing from England, forty-two German miners to Germanna VA to work iron mines recently discovered. Spotswood, who constructed his “palatial manor” there, founded the settlement. The Germans involved in Spotswood’s “iron and Germanna” initiatives were German Reformed Church (called Redemptionist), and were purchased (indentured) by Spotswood for an aggregate total of 150 pounds “for the lot”. There were nine families at the start, the first purchase was for 40 workers. They built a five-sided fort, and individual houses for each family, a corresponding sheds for the livestock. They brought a minister with them, and were “deeply religious”. A bit on the miserly side, they lived in near poverty. Dissatisfied with Spotswood, when their indenture expired in 1721 they packed up lock, stock, and hog and settled a new town, Germantown in the foothills of the Blue Ridge. Spotswood replaced them with a second purchase, of seventy from the Palatinate.
Between 1716 and 1720 Spotswood oversaw construction of the Tubal Works, a cold-blast charcoal blast furnace that produced pig iron from which a variety of instruments and tools were made for both domestic and export. He also encouraged the startup of gristmills. Calling the settlement, Germanna, a clumsy concoction of Germany and Queen Anna, he made it the capital of the new Spotsylvania County in 1720. That venture ran into serious resistance from his own Royal Council, chock full of Tidewater royalist land speculators, who likely resented his obvious conflict of interest, and did not look with favor on his non-agricultural initiative and importation of Germans. Spotswood’s initial import of Germans is the first entry of German immigrants, in volume, into Virginia.
When Spotswood’s was replaced a year later, he made Germanna his first retirement home. After the contract for the first German miners expired in 1721, at least twelve household left Germanna and moved into Germantown in Fauquier County–the Shenandoah Valley. Spotswood replaced them with black slaves at the Tubal Works, and then imported a second wave of about eighty Germans from the Wuerttemberg-Baden/Palatine. In retirement he actively managed the mines and forges. His hoped-for goal was to jump-start a new cluster of ironworks that could produce instruments, axes, plows, kettles and the like. In 1732 at Massaponax, Spotswood probably built America’s first foundry.
Finally, it was Spotswood who personally led a small expedition (or a large group on a hunting vacation) across the Blue Ridge into the Shenandoah in 1716. While he hunted (carried around on a elaborate “chaise”, he and his gentlemen friends drank fine wind and hunted daily. Still, Spotswood very much intended the expedition as a colonial era economic development project–and a settlement barrier against further French incursions.
The trip consumed about 438 miles, took four weeks, and each sixty-two participants at the end received a golden horseshoe from the governor. From that point on the Shenandoah was in play for white settlement. It was the Germans who took the first advantage. That “Golden Horseshoe Expedition” which encouraged “gentlemen to venture backwards” became a founding myth of Virginia, and its participants were regarded as early “pioneers”, changing the nature and character of our convention definition of pioneers, and as the participants aged they were afforded celebrity status in Virginia society.
(As a last mention of Spotswood, it was Spotswood, who in retirement prevailed upon the King to appoint him Deputy Postmaster General of the Colonies. Serving in that post between 1730 and 1741 in his new home in the Shenandoah, Spotswood appointed a certain Benjamin Franklin as Postmaster of Philadelphia)
Spotswood’s Downfall: Clash with the Patriarchy
A major, almost existential, problem given the dominance of tobacco as Virginia’s economic base, Spotswood confronted was the maturation and threatened decline in the critical tobacco market. Global pricing was competitive and new tobacco from other lands was better quality, and its logistics were less costly. Virginia plantation exporting was inefficient, riddled with little corruptions. So Spotswood set up a series of warehouses to centralize tobacco export, and at the warehouses he lodged an “quality” inspection system.
Quality meant less tobacco shipped, and only the promise that the higher quality would yield higher prices. Planters resisted intensely, and like his predecessors Spotswood was in trouble with the planter oligopoly. Creatively, he solved the problem, he thought, by appointing a great majority of the Royal Council and Burgesses to positions as tobacco inspectors–where they could, of course, charge a fee for their generous services. That got the legislation through all right, but created a major uproar in the rank and file planter class.
Forced to call an election to the Burgesses, all but one of Spotswood’s inspectors and Burgesses lost the election–and the Council and Burgesses was full of legislators determined to overturn the Tobacco legislation. Further negotiations in the next couple of years, only worsened matters with new elections delivering even stronger opposition. He finally just sent the Burgesses home, determined to replicate Berkeley autocracy. He did by “executive order” seize the right to appoint sheriffs and county clerks–a key bastion of oligopoly’s power over local government, which made matters even worse.
Blair was on the move as well, and delegations from each party went off to London determined to end Spotswood’s hated Indian trading posts and the Tobacco inspection. Back in Williamsburg, Spotswood struck a deal with the Burgesses–he would commit to lifetime residence in Virginia–i.e. become one of them–and in the next election he developed a faction allied to him. If you can’t beat them, join them he struck a deal with the Council and Burgesses for a sizable number of land grants–partially because the French were active on the border and he needed a Virginia buffer zone, complete with militia from the settlers–and partially because he was granted 86,000 acres in the Shenandoah/upper Piedmont–the county called Spotsylvania today. All seemed well, and everybody seemed happy, when unexpectedly, a new governor arrived on the scene in 1722. Blair and the Royal Council had their third governor’s scalp. Spotswood retired to his new estate and lands–and began his career as an private economic developer [12].
As a final note, Spotswood was eventually succeeded by another Royal Lieutenant Governor, William Gooch (1727-49) who picked up the loose ends of Spotswood’s various initiatives, including the Tobacco Inspection Act and western land development with considerable success. Gooch also continued Spotswood’s rationale for the latter: as necessary for Virginia’s defense against the French and Indians–it is Gooch who presided over the settlement of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, and who dealt with the two great migrations of German and Scots-Irish.
Footnotes
[8] See Previous Module
[10] Ronald J. Heinemann, John G. Kolk, Anthony S. Parent Jr., and William G. Shade, Old Dominion, New Commonwealth (University of Virginia Press, 2007), pp. 78-9
[11] David Hackett Fischer and James C. Kelly, Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement (University of Virginia Press, 2000), pp. 100-1
[12] Ronald j. Heinemann, John G. Kolk, Anthony S. Parent Jr., and William G. Shade, Old Dominion, New Commonwealth (University of Virginia Press, 2007), pp. 79-80
Ron W. Coan 