With the Virginia Company in such sad shape–it was in its death throes–we return to the English Virginia, the colony and its reaction to the Second Powhatan War. For those interested in death throes, please consult below [999]. Our interest is, Virginia, and as the Company descended deeper and deeper into fiscal and organization hell during 1623-4, its role, function, and influence over the course of events in Virginia lessened considerably. I am not sure it can even be described as reactive.
Left to its own by London, the Company and the King, the Virginia resident Company elites, agents and hangers on, the entrepreneurs and plantation investors and their indentured servants, and the sprinkling of homestead-artisan-professional settlers had to step up to the proverbial plate and take a swing at governance. In 1622-23 it was as desperate in Virginia as it was in 1610. The Massacre devastated English Virginia as we have seen. How the English reacted to this devastation and the vacuum that was London and the Stuart dynasty is the topic of this module.
[999] Older histories tend to concentrate on these historical descriptions. They are surprisingly very detailed in several instances, but the narrative is often hard to follow, and each historian treats the matter in their own style and narrative prism. Personally, I found the most insightful that made by William Robert Scott, the Constitution and Finance of English Scottish and Irish Joint Stock Companies to 1720 (Vol II), Alpha Editions, 1910, pp. 266-297. See also Charles A. Andrews, the Colonial Period of American History, Vol. I (Yale University Press, 1934, 1964, pp. 162-205.The most concise and accurate is provided by D. Alan Williams who composed the extended introduction to Gizzard, Jr., and Boyd Smith’s Jamestown: A Colony.
It is the latter I precis in this footnote. Williams asserts that the “democratical character” of the Virginia Company shareholder meetings. By this he probably means the superficial decision-making done by Sandys through manipulated voice voting of attending shareholders. Forcing through decisions the infuriated both the King and Smythe–not to mention most shareholders, the Company lurched from crisis to crisis, scandal to scandal, threatening at each moment going over the fiscal-budgetary cliff of bankruptcy. Tobacco was deeply involved in many of these actions, which did little to make the king happy.
As Williams asserts “Nowhere are their Crown complaints with the existence or conduct of the Virginia General Assembly”. Rather his concern and outrage was roused by the ‘popularness” of Sandys corporate ‘government’. (p. liv). His summary of events and actions, pp. (liv-lvi) outline the path to his revoking the Company Virginia Charter in 1624 and formalizing them in 1625–just previous to his death. [999]
For the first time, however, Virginia Company officials on their own initiative set their own course in stabilizing affairs and conducting their war with the Powhatans. They used the institutional vehicles they had at hand (hundreds, the circuit courts, magazine, and the Council of State and Burgesses), and expanded their functions and powers, and created a new one, the militia. The latter became the foundation for future Virginia counties and their elites. To hold together and sustain continuity with the homeland, and to unify common bonds, the Anglican Church, always linked hand-in-glove-with the local Company administration, set its roots into Virginia plantation settlements, becoming over time a key agent in its development of a political culture. We shall discuss each in this module.
In this module we spend considerable time detailing what we believe are the formative years of Virginia’s colonial policy system. I assert that it it is in the Company period that the pillars for that policy system were “installed”. If ED is a policy, as we believe, than understanding the nature of the policy system is essential for understanding how, why, and who are involved in the making of ED policy. If one simply asserts that ED strategies, policies and tools are “professional, expert-derived strategies and initiatives that a “somehow” plugged into an agency or unit of government as deemed necessary, our inserting policy making into the mix injects values, politics, and ideologies into ED which distorts, confuses and partisanship into ED implementation.
I reject that position, instead asserting that it is useless to view any economic development strategy, initiative, program, or even EDO as divorced from the larger policy system. Somebody plus ED “in” and that is how an EDO uses it. Somebody funds it, supports it and attacks it. Somebody is hurt by it, or perceived to be hurt, and somebody is helped or perceived to be helped. ED programs, strategies, tools, and the EDOs that deliver them are not valueless, not neutral or objective, and despite the obvious professionalism necessary to deliver these outputs effectively, the programs are designed, monitored, and tasked with goals and motivations that reflect the policy system. They are held accountable by that policy system–unless of course policy administration delivered by “experts” need no accountability–only compliance with professional norms and dictates?
The formation of a province’s, a colony’s initial policy system is critical to its future political development, and that means the values, configuration (relative strength of elites and masses plus the demographic and geographical tilts among actors) that go into the making of a policy system usually find some way to enter and become embedded into the policy making processes and the actors that are legitimized to participate.
This is what we are viewing in this module. After 1619, twelve years after its founding, Virginia serious begins to assume responsibility for its policy system, distinguishing itself from its colonial London masters, and in so doing develops its identity, defines it legitimacy, and sets the parameters of its domestic policy making system/ processes. Bluntly and simply I argue that what comes out of the Company period will serve as the foundation for Virginia’s future policy system as it evolves over the next one hundred and fifty or so years.
So to me it is apparent that after the start of the Second Powhatan War, Virginia the Greate Charter political institutions and the economic base developed as of 1619 increasingly are taken over in meaningful ways by [English] Virginia resident policy actors. Who these policy actors are is vital to our understanding who is in charge of Virginia when the Company loses its charter in 1625, and who the Crown “inherits” as the status quo in its formation of a royal policy system in exchange for that of the joint stock corporation policy system. Accordingly, this module examines who asserted their power and actively inserted their position in the post 1621 Company policy system–and explains why and how these actors established their position to do so. For better or worse, it is apparent to me that the Second Powhatan War was primary to both questions.
No matter how hard we try to focus on Virginia political development, we cannot ignore the reality that fighting the Powhatan was first on the agenda of the English elites and settlers after 1622–through to the end of the decade (and even after). That is the point the reader should always keep in mind through this module: from the perspective of the settlers, they are at war with the Powhatans, and that war permeated policy-making as well as their personal behavior. Other factors and dynamics, of course, will enter into the policy-making picture, but the agenda is primarily tasked with achieving site control of Virginia from the Native Americans, unless and until that primary goal is displaced or other goals share its priority we can see that Virginia assumed its responsibility for participating in its own governance through necessity in dealing with the 1622 Indian-fighting primary goal.
Of special importance to an understanding of the colony’s expansion after 1624 is the Indian problem. The planters, far too many f whom recently had looked upon their dead, now had dropped all thought of missionary effort to grapple realistically with a situation that threatened their very existence. They proclaimed a settled policy of relentless warfare upon the natives, and year after year implemented it by organized destruction of towns, and crops, and other actions calculated to harass the Indians and keep them on the defensive … The council [General Assembly] in 1629 even decided to abandon a peace agreement recently made with their enemies, on the ground that a necessary vigilance could be assured only through a policy of ‘perpetual enmity’ with the Indians. [99] Frank Wesley Craven, the Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 1607-1689, (Louisiana State University Press, 1970), p. 172
After 1622 through the next generation until 1642 war with the Powhatan and Virginia political development went hand in hand. Superimposed on this policy juncture was a third dynamic, the spread of the tobacco monoculture through the Tidewater.
The three conflated, melded almost into one three-pronged thrust or strategy that dominated every action and decision, and saturated every thought and course of action. War, Plantation, Tobacco blended into a “way-of-life”, a society that evolved its own elites, masses, political behavior, and eventually their own cultures-classes. In this module we will see only the very beginning of this evolution, but it will be greatly developed in future modules.
In this module the dynamic fusion is almost transparent, virtually formless, highly reactive to events, desperate need to act, and predicated on dealing with the short-term forces that pressed upon them. They also had to keep in mind the Company and King in England, who no matter how preoccupied they were, still remained their sovereign and legal authority. Until this changed in 1625–and not even then–whatever was done in Virginia by Virginians could be undone by a simple memo “to those concerned” issued by either sovereign or Company.
Settling the Tidewater and Displacing Indians:
Plantation Conquistadores check Indian attacks and Seize Indian Land drawing upon headright and supportive provincial legislation.
I have observed several times already that from the very beginning of tobacco farming in 1613 (Shirley’s Plantation and the Dale’s Gift Hundreds) tobacco imposed a zero sum dilemma for English settlers and the resident Indian tribes. Tobacco farming was like an avalanche downhill. No matter how risky, elites, entrepreneurs, and indentured servants saw tobacco as the key to a new life and opportunity–not a gold rush, rather a tobacco rush. As incredible as it might seem to todays reader, settlers, servants, and investor-entrepreneurs gravitated toward tobacco risking starvation rather than harvesting, diversifying into staple crops. Unfortunately, Indian corn in nearby fields was a viable alternative.
I suspect one must look into the personality and driving motivation of these Virginians as the risks were considerable, including a very high risk of life and limb–and were perceived so then. Virginia was not for the faint at heart, and the do-what-it-takes mentality of an oversized male population exacted a serious toll on policy-making. We all have mental images of the 1880’s wild west, Tombstone & OK Corral, the Searchers, but I honestly believe the Virginia wild west was much wilder than their 250 year in the future counterpart. No cavalry coming to the rescue, no transcontinental train, and all the swamps your heart could desire. The power-obsessed hyper competitive personalities of “Yellowstone” pale in comparison to the cast of characters in late Company period; Beth Dutton is an amateur compared to these folk.
Starting with elite resident Company officials, tobacco fever spread to former indentured Virginia Company employees into the Jamestown hinterland. Hundreds, an administrative unit set up by conscious design of Dale, became the geographic “container” into which English private investors sent over second sons to find their fortune, and for which they were willing to finance, invest in founding their rough startup plantations.
The Greate Charter land and economic reforms with its pretensions to economic diversification, unintentionally (or not) opened the door to the budding tobacco monoculture. The headright incentive nexus opened the flood doors by incentivizing land sales and providing the workforce to clear land and plant and harvest. The last straw was the degeneration of the Virginia Company administration, particularly after 1622 alienated the Virginia resident Company elite, created a serious chasm between London and Jamestown, incentivized the resident Company elite to focus on their private land holdings (often land devoted to paying their salary) and using Company-transported (and owned) indentured servants as their workforce.
Conflating company interests with their own profit and social standing, the elite resident Company officials made common party with young emerging entrepreneurs to develop an embryonic resident political elite that managed Virginia affairs in the vacuum created by Company administrative malfeasance, internal civil war, and infusion of national politics into Virginia colonialization. These resident Company officials were the insiders with access to policy, workforce, and export connections. Around them entrepreneurs and opportunists necessarily attached themselves. Their common bond was the headright, the indenture-land incentives, and the glue that united all was their revenge against the Massacre of 1622 and their desire for Indian corn and land to fuel their economic tobacco monocultural ambitions.
In the beginning, their chief leader and role model was none other than Governor Yeardley, soon to be in late 1621, former governor Yeardley. Refusing to surrender both public lands entrusted to provide his salary, and many of the company-owned indentured servants who served on them, Yeardley turned to his estates, the Flowerdew Hundred, on which he built the first windmill in British North America.
Flowerdew was the dowry brought into his marriage with an affluent and well-connected widow, owner of a second hundred, Stanley’s Hundred. Temperance Flowerdew (her marriage name), was a widow of the original owner of Stanley’s Hundred, and now twice widowed with a second plantation, she married the thirty-two year old Yeardley in 1619, with whom she had likely borne two illegitimate children. In a simple ceremony, the former soldier of fortune, bodyguard of governors, and deputy governor himself, was quickly knighted by the King, appointed as Virginia Governor to implement the Greate Charter, and then replaced in 1621 by the son in law of George Sandys, Governor John Wyatt.
I am beginning to believe I am writing a movie script, not a history of American state and local policy-making.
In three years, Yeardley became the largest landowner in Virginia, with a huge (by the standards of those years) indentured servant workforce–a workforce that suffered only six deaths in the 1622 Massacre–and in the aftermath of the Massacre the inspiring military leader who formed and led the first expedition of revenge against the Powhatans. He is our master plantation conquistador, and the first.
In the events and the methods he used in those three years, Yeardley in microcosm set the path used by a succession of young entrepreneurs who formed in his Jamestown hinterland the core of a domestic Virginia political and economic elite that would dominate Virginia, her politics and economy, until it passed from the scene in the 1660’s. Their mantle, heritage, and often methods/career path utilized by a second elite formed by a later governor George Berkeley.
The cornerstones of this first elite were the Greate Charter headright nexus, leadership of the militia and resistance, then attack on the Powhatans for corn, land and revenge, and, of course, tobacco plantations and the export of tobacco. It is that story to which we now turn.
Governors after 1624 (or 1622) continued to issue land patents (sale titles) under the terms of the great charter of 1618. Bills of adventure and headright claims were accordingly honored, but the Charter [of the Company] had a fixed term on the rights offered that [ended] on Midsummer Day of 1615. Headright claims based on immigration prior to that date were legal enough, but claims honored for immigrants subsequently entering the colony could have rested at any time prior to 1634 on nothing but custom, and a not very old custom at that … disposed to take the fullest possible advantage of the company’s earlier ruling that occupation of the land was necessary to perfect the title … [but] such surveys as had been made were both imperfect and incomplete. [99] Frank Wesley Craven, the Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, p. 175
As it became more and more apparent to Virginians after 1623 that the Company’s future was uncertain at best, the fragility of Company ordinances and incentives more than occupied the back of investors and settlers minds. With the Company administration degenerating and preoccupied with its internal politics and Privy Council investigations, resident Company officials, if not the average settler, wanted the Company out of the picture. In turn they embraced their own estates-plantations-hundreds-after the March Massacre of 1622, to which the Company was unable to check despite its own cadre in the form of Governor Wyatt and the brother of Edwin Sandys, George, who had emigrated to Jamestown and assume leadership in James City.
George Sandys, Edwin’s brother who was sent over to Jamestown as a key official in the hundreds government, and a close relative of Governor Wyatt who replaced Yeardley in 1621, was not well-liked. A poet by profession, he may have been an astute observer, but not a focused administrator in the wild west that was the James River colony. A poet and religious scholar unlike Yeardley he was out of tune in 1623 and 1624 Virginia, which was on the edge of its existence and very much at war with its Indian neighbors. Power of action, such as it was in 1623 Virginia was left to a Virginia resident large plantation elite, composed of existing or former Company officials, and the hundreds investor-owned plantations. It was they, not the General Assembly that devised solutions and policies to literally preserve their holdings, and provide such safety and could be achieved.
In these years there formed a fusion between these plantation chieftains, the militia, tobacco entrepreneurs and the Greate Charter political institutions: the (Governor’s) Council of State and the House of Burgesses (collectively, including the Governor himself, constituting the General Assembly). Outflanked, outmuscled Governor Wyatt had to wend his own path to survival, wealth, and whatever loyalty he still possessed to the negligent, unresponsive, and broken Virginia Company.
By the end of 1623, the prestige of the Virginia Company seriously diminished and its usefulness as a colonizing agency had become greatly impaired. Affairs had reached such a pass that the colony, still bearing the scars of the massacre and in a pitiable condition from bad and insufficient food was stumbling along without guidance and without support. No money could be raised at home, all undertakings had stopped, the stream of settlers and supplies had either dwindled to very slender proportions or had ceased altogether. The [shareholders] of the company [which for all practical purposed included most residents of the colony] were so entangled in a labyrinth of charges and counter-charges that there seemed no where out of the maze. … and to many a man of the day, there must have been no other solution than to get rid of the company altogether. [99] Charles A. Andrews, the Colonial Period of American History, Vol. I (Yale University Press, 1934, 1964, p. 12
With the 1622 Massacre, the Greate Charter economic diversification was literally wiped from the Virginia Tidewater hinterland and Jamestown. With the only protection emanating from the concentrated larger plantations, mines and even fishing were too dangerous for servant or entrepreneur. To be sure, finance, settlement-related (surveying) and logistics, headquartered around Jamestown offered opportunity–which entrepreneurs like William Claiborne took advantage of; also shopkeepers and merchants able to broker import and export on their own or through the Magazine were the real Virginia gold mines.
In this almost hopeless situation, the Virginia settler, elite or servant, knew only one thing that could get him resources needed to survive one year into the next: tobacco. And to grow tobacco, even more so from scratch in a new plantation, required labor–lots of it. Wages, even for servants skyrocketed, and plantation owners gambled or hire those who “escaped” from another plantation. Extra labor would result in more crops, which could then finance the purchase of more land, and [import] more servants [through headright indenture] in a growing spiral of production and wealth. Grow tobacco to finance growing more. Growing more required larger workforce, and that meant harnessing them to the concentrated plantations owned by our emerging plantation conquistadores. That was a accomplished by making them eligible to compulsory membership in their militia–under the command of either the conquistador himself, or his appointed.
Though most holdings along the James River were still farms rather than our contemporary image of plantations, the possibilities had been demonstrated by the late 1620’s by Yeardley and Abraham Piercy [and a horde of other company officials], all of whom had access to a mixed labor force of nearly forty servants cultivating several hundred acres” was proof it of the hope. [99] Richard Middleton, Colonial America: a History, p. 65 Following this model of survival, more and more land, more labor and servants had to be brought under cultivation–and that meant seizure from the Powhatan, raiding for corn, and expansion deeper into the Tidewater and the Eastern Shore. It was as if installation of the Virginia tobacco economic base was on autopilot.
Tobacco expansion was land intensive. Within five years a tobacco field was exhausted. A relatively few settlers could open up hundreds of acres (in theory at least) of land for one small household plantation—because at this time even the larger plantations of Company officials were remarkably small in the land actually used and cleared. Handfuls of people settled around these small plantations, formed a small “settled community” of sorts, and then gradually expanded outward.
New investment pushed deeper into the hinterland by the extended boundaries of earlier plantations, pushed even more into what were increasing known as “Indian lands”. Yeardley, then a private plantation owner, for example, assembled a group of about 300-400 settlers and sent them to the eastern shore, which had not participated in the Massacre—thus extending that area under tobacco cultivation and Virginian settlement. English stole the corn because they did not want to grow it themselves, much preferring the short-term profits of tobacco export to corn and truck crops.
Had Opechancanough been more intense in his war, and more systematic in following up with sustained attacks in the next few years, it is, for what its worth, my opinion he would have driven the colony back to England, as had the Virginia Spanish colony, Nova Scotia and Maine colonies, never mind the earlier Roanoke had experienced. English troops were out of the question and the Virginia Company was not sending over an army, however small, in its fragile financial position. That was not to be. English colonization had gotten off to a rather rough start.
Instead, in the years after 1622 Virginia settlers, not the Company, nor London, seized the initiative. First stabilizing their core, albeit hollowed out, the James River plantation conquistadors, and then through constant raids, burned or stole from Indian corn fields. General warfare waged around each surviving Hundred, and the Indians were pushed back, suffered considerable hardship and loss. With each passing year, more English settlers replaced those who were lost, and slowly with the founding of new plantations and the planting of more tobacco in the older plantations pushed the English deep into Indian Tidewater lands.
The English militia, their commanders, and the small technological edge when combined with burning and seizure of Indian corn, extended the Virginia core up the James and its tributaries, and by 1626-8 resident tribes slowly abandoned their vulnerable fields, then towns. In 1628 Opechancanough signed a treaty and seemingly ending the war, or ceasefire, whatever it was brought a peace of sorts to troubled Virginia—after six years of warfare. Inconvenient, the treaty was soon repudiated by the General Assembly and its delegates from the plantations.
the Militia — How was this accomplished? Who or what provided the muscle to expand settlements, clear out the Powhatan, raid the Indian corn fields, and secure what security could be had for the new plantation? The Militia. During this time, obviously, a militia was formed by local “commander”—who was confirmed as such by the Governor. In the concentrated larger plantations which existed in these years, it is expected the commander was among the high status, largest landowners, or such competent individuals recruited by him. The office was created by an act of the General assembly passed in 1623-4, on the volition of that body, without preapproval of the Company.
The reality of a company period plantation-hundred settlement, a colony within a colony, was that the only individual whose authority was sufficient to be. or to name, a commander was the plantation owner in residence. The men who bore these military titles were the foremost in all the various departments of action represented in the colony. The list of colonels or commanders-in-chief included such influential members of the community at large as the elder William Byrd … John West of Gloucester, … William Pierce of Westmoreland … John Farrar … John Carter … Robert Beverley–[all of which will find a place in this history at some point] … The prominence of the citizens filling the different military positions … distinguished all the men occupying the same grades during every period of the seventeenth century [99] Phillip Alexander Bruce, Institutional History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, Vol. 2 (Peter Smith, 1919, 1964), pp. 24-6. The occupant of the colony’s commander-in-chief position, the defacto head of the colony’s militia–reported direct to the governor who was tasked with responsibility for the overall defense. In the second half of the century, the role was symbolic, but served the function of legitimizing the governor’s role in that vital policy area.
For example, former Governor Yeardley in 1622 until 1616 was a plantation owner of such a plantation (Flowerdew). His background is telling: a younger man, in his mid-30’s, Yeardley had been a soldier of fortune in the Netherlands, and had accompanied Governor Gates to Virginia (via Bermuda) in 1610 as the head of the Governor’s personal bodyguard. Upon the departure of Dale in 1616, Yeardley became the Deputy Governor awaiting the ill-fated Argall. He then as head of Smythe’s Hundred was recruited to replace Argall until 1621. As one might expect he seems to have played an outsized role in the 1622-26 period, and served as the model for how plantations organized and led their local militias. His 1623 raid was the inspiration behind the annual campaign of each plantation against its neighboring tribes.
The reality of Indian attack, and the graves of 1622, were inspiration enough to recruit most males to serve, wherever they were located. That was well and good, because they could not relocate, or leave town without the permission of the local “commander”– a regulation that was on the books a half a decade after. Formalized officially by a 1626 Assembly act “the commander was directed to require every person capable of bearing arms to remain on the plantation belonging to him, or to which he was attached in any character [indentured, homestead]; and should he absent himself … exceeding eight days, he was compelled to pay a fine to twenty-five pounds of tobacco for each twenty-four houses” P. 16)
In 1623-4, the Assembly tasked local commanders with the responsibility of “supplying every settlement within [the Hundred] … with a sufficient quantity of powder and shot, and other ammunition, … to see arms were kept complete … fixed and ready for use on the shortest notice”. By 1624, this individual was entitled to appoint his lieutenant(s) [99] Phillip Alexander Bruce, Institutional History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, Vol. 2 (Peter Smith, 1919, 1964), p. 15. But whatever his authority on the plantation, the commander was “king” when on a “march against the savages”, which the raids upon neighboring tribes were called.
As we shall argue, the position of commander in charge of expeditions against the Indians after the Massacre cemented the status, power and political centrality of a generation of plantation owners that would dominate the colony’s politics through 1660. These individuals were the core and the role model for generations of plantation owners that through the commander and militia position extended their cultivation of tobacco through the Tidewater, dispelling the Powhatan tribes from their lands and pushing them out of the Tidewater or into subjection. I will call these men, and those that followed him, the “plantation conquistadores”, the representatives of a style of Virginia privatism that through the seventeenth and eighteenth century became the cornerstones of Virginia policy making, and the first authors of the Tidewater political culture.
Beginning as early as 1622 when “officers assigned to command the savages in 1622 were Captains William Pierce, William Tucker, and Samuel Mathews; the first led an expedition against the Chickahominy’s, the second against the Nansemonds, and Captain Isaac Madison, one against the great Wyanokes” (p. 79). Pierce, a tobacco plantation owner, a friend of Rolfe who married his daughter in 1619 (the latter’s third marriage if you are counting). He was elected to the Burgesses in 1624, and from then on served on the Council of State–becoming a central figure in the overthrow of Governor John Harvey.
William Tucker, another plantation owner, associated with the first importation of African blacks into Virginia, was elected to the first Burgesses in 1619 and served on that body through 1634. He led the first expeditions as commander of Elizabeth City (today’s Newport News) and in a 1623 expedition it was he who set the stage for Doctor Pory’s mass poisoning of Indians at a peace meeting. Samuel Mathews, another plantation owner, became a member of Burgesses, member over two decades on the Council of State (first appointment in 1621, serving to 1644) where he led the mutiny against Governor Harvey, afterwards, serving under the auspices of the Privy Council negotiated a settlement with Maryland–while his young son served as governor. Mathews was the crown prince and eminent grise of Virginia politics through the 1630’s thru 1650’s.
Isaac Madison, BTW, was the founder of a line that generated our James Madison. He too was appointed to the Council of State in 1624.He did not figure as a fixture and driving force of Virginia politics because he died in 1624 on an expedition against the Indians in that year.
In short we can look as early as 1622 to identify the core of what would be the post-Company political elite. Its seeming breakout was its leadership of the initial expeditions against the Powhatans and neighboring tribes. That leadership was sustained through its dominance of the decentralized militia associations with the larger plantation-hundreds concentrated and infused with refugees from more isolated vulnerable or destroyed plantations deeper in the hinterland. As we ought to suspect, however, their rise also rested on their function and activity in the other dynamics that diffused the monoculture into the Tidewater. Next in line for our consideration is the tie of this core elite with access and use of the Great Charter headright incentives for land acquisition and securing the necessary workforce through its indenture program
When Yeardley returned in April 1619 as the new governor tasked with implementing the Greate Charter initiatives (it is thought he even coined the label), including the new headright system, he was a replacement for the controversial Argall, chosen at a point when Company politics was fast disintegrating. Likely he was more aligned with Gates and probably Smythe, he did well, although he frequently clashed with Sandys observer, John Pory. Yeardley, for two years implemented that reform, item by item, instruction by instruction. Yeardley, was persistent in requesting more consideration from London, more provisions, and better scheduling of new immigrants.
As Osgood asserts that strategy “involved no radical departure from that followed by the company during the later years of Dale’s administration and after the recall of Argall. It emphasized the best tendencies of that policy, expanding and improving upon it in various ways, and introducing more vigor and system than apparently had characterized the earlier methods of the company” [99] Osgood, Vol 1, p. 81. In his instructions, Sandys described this new recruitment reform entitled “adventure of the person”, which it most certainly was. [99] Andrews, Vol. 1, p. 125.
Indian-Fighting, Tobacco, Indenture, Terror and the “Plantation Conquistadores”: Edmund Morgan and the First American Boom
Headrights and the Rise of the Plantation Conquistadores– Like it or not the fortuitous onset of a new agricultural product, tobacco, quickly developed into a startup cluster that offered both sufficient volume and market demand that facilitated export and sale abroad. Land and workforce were essentials in developing the monoculture, and the timing of the headright initiative with tobacco expansion made the latter possible.
One cannot, I think, understand the founding and development of Virginia’s tobacco plantation system without including the headright which from its start became the cornerstone of the monolithic tobacco culture that would dominate its policy system over the following decades. This is very ironic in that Sandys, and the Virginia Company resisted the spread of tobacco because it meant, at the minimum, the ultimate failure of its Charter goal of economic diversification (Sandys calling it “the scurvy weed”). As explained in previous modules, the Company was simply between a rock and a hard place in its policy toward tobacco.
Becoming fused with the tobacco plantation system, the headright became the principal instrument to create the workforce of the colony, a workforce by design to be the future citizen of the corporation. Its link as an incentive to land sales to new settlers and plantation owners became the central pillar of Virginia’s people-attraction strategy. As new immigrants trickled into Virginia in these years, they replaced those killed during the Massacre and the 1622-23 starving year, and built up the militia system.
In a few years, that militia, used for raids and annual expeditions against the Powhatan, had the effect of clearing lands from Indian control, and making them available for new plantations and homesteading. As the initial lands used for tobacco exhausted, the dispelling of Indians allowed the established plantation owners to replace exhausted fields with new ones. Company owned lands, usually administered by Company officials, also were available, and the revenues for their sale were essential for domestic budgets. Although there was truly a “workforce shortage” in these years, with intense jockeying (and high wages) by plantation owners to each others servants and tenants, the headright incentive was clearly essential for the expansion of tobacco plantations.
To further encourage immigration and financial investment the Company authorized groups or individual members of the Company to set up ‘particular plantations’ of their own and man them either with servants or with tenants [likely former servants], who like the Company tenants, would work for themselves, but give a part of their proceeds [harvests] for a term of years. … In the six years [after the introduction and initial implementation of the Greate Charter] Virginia killed off between three and four thousand Englishmen. An estimated thirty-five hundred to four thousand immigrants increased the population of the colony from about one thousand in 1618 to about fifteen hundred in 1624. [99] Edmund Morgan, “The First American Boom: Virginia 1618 to 1630”, William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 2 (April, 1970), p. 170
That workforce, in 1619, was overwhelmingly indentured servants, augmented by a small core of captured Native Americans (but not black slaves which in these years, as few as there were, were used principally as household servants). Accordingly, from its start, the plantation system, and its tobacco economic base, embedded inequality—the servant workforce, whatever their composition, were at best renters, or “homesteaded” with “property” secured by an indenture contract. Immigrants who could pay their own transport over the Atlantic, and who could afford to purchase land upon arrival, were also prime beneficiaries of the headright incentive, and these entrepreneurs also were relying on servant or captive labor as well.
“Throughout the period when too man men were arriving with few supplies, the established settlers were so eager for more workers that they paid premium wages for them … In 1621 the governor and the Council [of State] set maximum wage rates [99] Edmund Morgan, “The First American Boom: Virginia 1618 to 1630”, William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 2 (April, 1970), p. 175. In the ensuing competition for servant workforce, servants on company owned land evaporated, and likely were transferred to private lands owned by company officials. Company officials, plantation owners, and even small-scale tobacco entrepreneurs could pay these higher wages because the price of tobacco during these years was sufficient to accommodate expenses of production and still yield an exciting and rewarding profit. This, Edmund Morgan, declared was America’s first “boom”, and it lasted until 1629. [99] Edmund Morgan, “The First American Boom: Virginia 1618 to 1630”,William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 2 (April, 1970), p. 177. During this “boom” Morgan asserts …
that Sandys concentration on getting men across water [the Atlantic] unwittingly played into the hands of local profiteers … Virginia differed from later American boom towns in that success depended not on acquiring the right piece of land, but on acquiring men. Land that would grow tobacco was everywhere, so abundant that people frequently did not bother at first to secure patents [title for land sale] for the amounts they were entitled to [under the headright]. Instead men rushed to stake out claims to men [mine], stole them, lured them, fought over them–and bought and sold them, bidding up the prices [wages] … The Company obligingly poured men into Virginia for the scramble [99] Edmund Morgan , “The First American Boom: Virginia 1618 to 1630”, William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 2 (April, 1970), p. 183
In this scramble those who had access to “men”, landowners who had established themselves previous to 1618, or who enjoyed by virtue of their position within the Company had the upper hand in locating workers, placing them on their plantations, and paying the higher wages. Morgan supports this assertion by citing the 1625 “census or muster” which indicated there were only 110 settler out of 740 who had arrived in Virginia previous to 1619. … fifteen [of these] planters who held ten or more servants ‘men” in 1625, only two servants out of 199 … had come before 1619.[99] Edmund Morgan , “The First American Boom: Virginia 1618 to 1630“, William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 2 (April, 1970), pp. 183-4. In other words established planters acquired workers in greater volumes than most settlers who emigrated into Virginia during these Company years.
If this were not sufficient advantage to early settlers and officials–and those whom he wished to reward– Sandys policy of allocating land for company officials, complete with a quota of company-paid for indentured servants to work such land backfired badly. When such Company officials left their positions they were supposed to turn over both land and servants back to the Company–for his successor. The governor got three thousand acres and one hundred servants, for example; others received even more.
Yeardley, for example on his retirement in 1621 turned over only a fraction of both–without any pushback from London. Incredibly, after the massacre, key officials in the Company “ransomed” English captives from the Indians, and whatever their former status were then “contracted” to them for services to pay off their ransom. Our infamous Doctor Pott, alleged to have poisoned two hundred Indians at a peace treaty meeting, ransomed a female servant and placed her under such a contract. Perhaps most impactful was Sandys failure in these years to provide sufficient supplies to feed servants on company lands. It was indeed a humanitarian act when such servants were then transferred to the officials private lands. The situation got so back, John Pory, the Colonial Secretary (and Sandys observer) reported to the Company in 1624 that Company “officers were seating [placing] men assigned to their offices’ on their private lands not upon [that] belongeth to their office, ‘so that the crop produced on these private lands of the officers ‘alwaies [always] exceeds yours [i.e. the Company] [99] Edmund Morgan, “The First American Boom: Virginia 1618 to 1630”, William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 2 (April, 1970), p. 187-8
Not surpassingly then the 1625 muster revealed the individual with the most servants were Abraham Peirsey, the Company cape merchant in charge of the Magazine, and former Governor Yeardley; both had thirty nine. Next, was George Sandys (Edwin’s brother] in charge of James City. Francis Wyatt, the governor during this period, possessed seventeen. Our military commanders, Mathews and 23, Tucker17, Pierce 13, and our favorite the Company doctor, Potts had 12. The successor to the Company Merchant, Edward Blaney, 17, and the Company ship master, Ralph Hamor 10. Of fifteen individuals with more than ten servants in 1624 ten were company officials–and eight had served on the Council of State or were governors. Morgan provides interesting detail on most of these fine folk, the core of the Company’s resident officials. For example, Yeardley’s transfer of servants and land to the estate of his new wife to avoid scandal and repayment;. So the man who Colonial Secretary Pory later claimed had arrived in Virginia in 1610, “carrying no more than his sword” was likely in 1625 to be Virginia’s most affluent planter. [99] Edmund Morgan, “The First American Boom: Virginia 1618 to 1630”, William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 2 (April, 1970), pp. 188-193.
Interestingly, the planter with the fifth highest number of servants, Daniel Gookin, had founded a plantation composed of fifty-five Irish-Scot settlers near Yorktown. He truly benefited from the headright as an immigrant settler, not a Company or military official.[Another would be Edward Bennett, a London merchant investor who sent over 600 servants (Ralph Hamor was the sea captain of his transport] over the several years in which he focused on Virginia settlement; his original plantations were hard hit by the Massacre and abandoned.]. In the aftermath of the Massacre, Gookin refused to consolidate even though a great number of his settlers had been killed (only seven survived), refused to concentrate and successfully defended his Mary Mount plantation in the following years during which sending two more ships over, he repopulated his plantation. Raising six children, and leaving behind his three inherited plantations, his namesake son, enraptured with the Puritans during the Civil War period, moved to Massachusetts, became a Major General and Commander of the Militia, rose to Speaker of the Massachusetts Assembly, wrote a history of New England.
By that time (1625), however, the plantation conquistadores had cemented their hold on Virginia’s provincial policy system—the Council of State and composition of the Burgesses’ were mostly plantation owners of more than average size and status. For the most part, the same individuals, or others of similar demographics, had risen to control over the militia and the fledgling Hundred “court” that had taken root in during the Second Powhattan War.
It seems evident that while the Virginia Company was failing in London, a number of its officers in the colony were succeeding. In order to do so, they not only rendered less than faithful service to their employer, they also reduced other Virginians to a condition which, while short of slavery, was also some distance from the freedom that Englishmen liked to consider as their birthright. The Company in 168 had inaugurated a popularly elected representative assembly [???], but the effective power for at least ten or fifteen years [after] remained in the governor and his Council. By no coincidence, the Council consisted almost entirely of the men holding large numbers of servants. Between 1619 and 1627 Hamor, Pott, Smith, Sandys [George] Tucker, Mathews and Yeardley sat on it, while Wyatt and Yeardley took turns in the governor’s chair [99] Edmund Morgan, “The First American Boom: Virginia 1618 to 1630”, William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 2 (April, 1970), p. 193
And if all this institutional, military and headright powers over indentured servants were not sufficient to ground their authority in Virginia, the plantation conquistadores were not hesitant to throw in a dash of terror. “These men, with more than an average interest in controlling the labor force, were thus enabled to maintain their personal ascendancy not only over their servants, but over all lesser men” [99] Edmund Morgan, “The First American Boom: Virginia 1618 to 1630”, William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 2 (April, 1970), p. 193. Morgan than concludes his article with five pages detailing a number of incidents, including cracking down on those who articulated their displeasure with their governance, including breaking the arms and putting an awl through his tongue of one Richard Barnes, also banished and deprived of all his civil liberties, and of another objector, John Heny got sixty whip lashes from Tucker, imprisoned and fined.
The Council of State further utilized its authority to terrorize a ship master, Richard Cornish for sodomy and when faced with complaints and criticisms ordered the whipping of individuals, pillory, cutting off of ears, and sentenced to seven years of indenture to Yeardley. George Sandys in an argument with an individual who claimed Sandys owed him got fine 200 pounds of tobacco, and “laid neck and heels” [not sure what this means-“knocked cold” perhaps] on the floor of the legislature for “lewd behavior and unreverent speche“. Governor Wyatt in his turn took possession of a “Negro servant” on the basis of his personal authority only. Peirsey and Hamor, as plantation owners, nailed the ears of several to a pillory. Yeardley sentenced a man to death for stealing a calf, [99] Edmund Morgan, “The First American Boom: Virginia 1618 to 1630”, William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 2 (April, 1970), pp. 193.-95
As to the indentured servants, they on occasion did receive some protection against owner abuse (Doctor Potts was censured}, but Morgan reports a number of serious whippings and personal abuse did occur at these times, suggesting these were indeed hard times for Virginia servants. In all, Morgan’s concluding paragraph sets the tone for the atmosphere and style of governance exercised by the Plantation Conquistadores during this period and after:
We can perhaps see then in boom-time Virginia not only the fleeting ugliness of private enterprise operating temporarily without check, not only greed magnified by opportunity, producing fortunes for a few and misery for many. We may also see Virginians beginning to move toward a system of labor that treated men as things. [99] Edmund Morgan, “The First American Boom: Virginia 1618 to 1630”, William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 2 (April, 1970), p. 198
Anglican Church: the parish in the plantation—See Osgood, Vol 2, p. 10 before and following Anglican Church See also 17th Century America, p. 116 and 166,
Several reasons prompt us to introduce religion into our history of American state and local ED. First, it was a religious age, and the founding of Virginia was still well within the period called the Protestant Reformation. Religious beliefs were core to the actions of many, and as we shall see usually saturated the development of political ideologies that became central to the future political culture of the policy system. Each colony that we dwell on in the history (Virginia, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts) while Protestant, embraced a distinctive version which greatly informed and influenced the structures and political behavior of its elites and masses.
Thirdly, pervasive in England, the parish and the vestry of the Church of England was especially relevant to Virginia and these structures simply were carried onboard the Atlantic crossing in the minds of the settlers and their leaders. Never mind, the King in his 1606 charter firmly instructed the Company to be heedful of the institution of the Church of England, and to fully expand its mission to Christianize the Native Americans it encountered. 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.
There are more practical reasons for inclusion of the Anglican Church into our history. The most salient in my view is our primary assertion that the colonial Virginia policy system that developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth century was distinctive in its bottoms-up, decentralized flow of policy-making. Lower units of government and the private sector exercise significant impact on the policy-making of higher levels–and the Anglican parish and vestry were certainly an institution of critical salience to the members of the local unit, and as we shall see central to it operation and scope of function. The Vestry, the “governance” of the local parish proved in practice over these two centuries to be a seriously important local institution that sustained and even led a view of local as the preferred level of Virginia governance.
The Vestry was responsible for the administration and operation of the local parish. It was composed of the “foremost men” residing in the parish. While there was a degree of flexibility in the definition of foremost men, wealth and social position in the parish, as well as education by a prestigious English university carried much weight. The chief officers of the vestry were the churchwardens, each of which responsible for collection of parish duties, and conducting enforcement effort regarding its religious decisions and actions. It was these folk that would bring charges to the civil court if deemed appropriate. Drunkenness, swearing, lack of attendance, and various sexual “sins”, not to mention the recording of marriages, births, deaths–vital to the determination of residency and voting– were functions performed by these folk. From this is very evident the vestry as well as the minister–who was customarily engaged in a circuit among several churches in a dispersed parish–extended their impact into the daily lives of the church membership, to a degree we today are often unappreciated concerning their centrality.
Once established in 1618-19, the Assembly, became a substitute for the English Church hierarchy–but at the logical cost of adding political office, election to the Burgesses, appointment to the Council of State, or holding office with the county court or militia to the list of attributes that defined “foremost men”. To the extent any of our plantation conquistadores held strong religious beliefs, and several did, they were natural candidates to serve on the parish vestry of their primary manor–but to the degree that most of these fine fellows had plantations in several parishes, their influence could be extended to other parishes as well. Whatever else one might say about composition of the vestry, it reinforced whatever “proto-class” distinctions existed in this pre-modern “class” hierarchy. Inequality, therefore was as evident in the structure of the Virginia Church of England, as it was in plantation ownership and political office.
In England the strength of the Church hierarchy was such that it appointed the members of the parish vestry, and more importantly provided a level of “tenure” to ministers a parish appointed which countered the almost total control of the Vestry over the affairs and tenure of parish ministers in Virginia. Whatever protection-security a minister enjoyed in Virginia was the Assembly 1619 legislation which establish “glebe land” whose produce paid the salary of the minister and supported to a degree his activities in parish administration. That the Assembly lacked any direct enforcement power or ability to monito the compliance with the legislation again showed the limitation of the public sector, compared to the English Church of England hierarchy. All these various factors, and others, on balance rendered the Virginia parish vestry more impactful, and the minister less autonomous than in England.
Combining these factors, one can understand why historian Phillip Alexander Bruce asserted that “in the long run vestries proved themselves to be, of all the public bodies in the Colony, the most tenacious of their right of independent action, and in their contentions with Governor, Commissary [Magazine], and clergy, [and] invariably turned up [to be] the victorious party. Thoroughly understanding the local interests of their parishes, they showed as a rule the determination to support these interests, whether or not their conduct was opposed to immemorial English customs, or brought them into direct conflict with the most influential personages of the Colony … They revealed themselves as the earliest defenders to spring up in Virginia of the principle of local administration free from all outside interference [99] Phillip Alexander Bruce, Institutional History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, Vol. 1, p.63.
Church and State–Because in Company-governed Virginia, the public was so undeveloped it, it could not support a literal replication of the Church of England hierarchy, and by default, when Virginia set up its public courts in the teens, they began to enforce matters, practices and issues that in England the Church hierarchy would establish its jurisdiction.–this blurred the public and religious hierarchies and injected the hundreds level circuit courts into religious affairs. Dale’s marital code of citizenry, for example, enforced “sabbatarianism” (church attendance). At the same time the shredded community, the isolation of individual plantations and homesteads rendered enforcement difficult for both the church hierarchy and the fledgling circuit court system. No where was the role of the Company more evident than its inclusion of missionary work among the Powhatan into its formal duties, and the expression of this in its Greate Charter economic development program establishing the “college”, infusing its function of leading that effort, and the role of the director of the college, a minister, George Thorpe in a leadership position.
Equally important was the reality in this era that the separation of church and state lay well into the future. What we take for granted today, and build into our way of thinking about religion and political matters is simply incorrect and inappropriate in this era. An Englishman or Englishwoman simply was expected to conform and belong to the Church of England, and those religions that did not were persecuted, or badly tolerated. Quakers, for example in Virginia had a tough time with the Company and with the royal government that followed. Puritans in the period we are tackling in this module were in better position, but were themselves in thought outsiders to the Church of England–yet very much still English.
Virginia had ben settled at a time when the religious differences of the seventeenth century had not as yet brought into question the allegiance of the vast majority of Englishmen to the Church of England. There were, of course small groups of Separatists, but Puritanism, the real forerunner of English nonconformity still represented an attempt to accomplish reforms within the Establish Church itself. Only the Separatists which included the Pilgrim Fathers had felt sufficient repression to make persecution a major factor in the decision to emigrate [99] Wesley Frank Craven, the Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, pp. 177-8
That distinction was a complicated one in this period of English history, and given the cosmopolitan composition of the Company’s many shareholders, shareholders who could emigrate to Virginia and be eligible for headright incentives (as Daniel Godkin was), meant the Company and its agents, whatever their personal beliefs and membership in the Church of England, had to find ways to tolerate communities, settlements, plantations of different faith within their policy system. What’s more, the sustenance of the Church of England and its clergy and churches were a responsibility of Company governance. The Company paid their salary, and were tasked with regulating and requiring the local community to behave in accordance with Anglican values, beliefs and morals. Lack of attendance at church, drunkenness, even swearing carried civil implications that drew response from Company officials. Acts of the General Assembly from the start concerned themselves with matters Anglican.
Our first order of business is to outline several key religious beliefs and dynamics that characterized the Anglican Church and most of its membership, and then to outline its organizational structure in Virginia. Because contemporary readers would instinctively assume a natural separation of church from state, it is essential to correct that perception. In 1626 that separation had not yet occurred, and in the period after Henry VIII the blurring of English church and state had become even more intense than under the previous Catholic sovereigns. That in large part was what the English Reformation was all about—who was the Pope of England?
Well, Henry decided it was the English sovereign. That set the tone for future English state and church relations. Virginians were required by Company law to attend the Anglican Church and provide for its financial support—and the Greate Charter legislature specified the duties of Anglican ministers and tasked them “not to give themselves to excesse in drinking, or roytt [riot], spending their tyme idelly [idle] by day and night, playing at dice, cards or other unlawful game”. [99] Ronald L. Heinemann, et al, Old Dominion, New Commonwealth (University of Virginia Press, 2007), p.33. Moreover, the Church of England was not neutral in its foreign policy.
The Church, as the result of this {English Reformation] became more completely subordinated to the Crown. The necessity of this was recognized as a means of defense not only against enemies from abroad, but against schism when it began to show itself as the result of radical Protestantism at home [in England]. The union of altar and throne then became one of the watchwords of politics and the throne occupied the leading place in the partnership. Though the Church of itself exercised great social influence, it was used to buttress the civil power in its struggles with the enemies foreign and domestic [99] Herbert L. Osgood, the American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century, Vol. 2 (Peter Smith, 1958), p. 4
Hence the actions and preaching of the Anglican Church supported the divine right presumptions of the English monarch, supported his rule, and characterized dissent as seditious and bordering on treason—which was not a good thing to be accused of in this period. Today of course you put it in your resume. In any case, since the English monarchy was still firmly grounded in its medieval nobility class structure (crisscrossed with new rich merchants and new lower nobility-gentry), the Church was part of the class-structured English ruling class or Establishment. If you are looking to these folk to lead a democratic revolution in 1626, you are about twenty or twenty-five years premature. Those dates, however, should alert the reader that conflict over the divine right king and Parliament were, as we have already discussed, a feature of Company, Crown, and Parliament relationships–a feature that would become more and more complex each passing decade.
To complicate matters more, the Anglican Church was a blend of Catholicism and Protestantism, with the former still dominating its religious practices, doctrines, and even legitimacy. It did not embrace many of the beliefs and attitudes we currently associate with the more radical Protestants of the period and after. Hence reliance on the Bible for doctrine and Truth lay in the future, and the English Church still drew much of its legitimacy both from its aristocratic class structure, but its traditions and values of English history and Catholic thought.
The Crown was placed on the King’s head by the Primate of the Church of England, and the Church was a bailiwick of its civil and social order. Who sat where in a church function, and who was “invited” to serve on the vestry were marks of a social order that went way beyond church membership. When we start talking about the tobacco plantation monoculture becoming a way of life, understand how the local parish and vestry were as important pillars of the life as was the plantation itself.
Anglicans focused more on rituals, less so on doctrine, and they left a good deal of autonomy to private thought and practices so long as they did not venture into civil or religious matters; that is how Anglicans differed from both Puritans and Quakers, for example. The Bible was an important insight into Christ’s teachings, but they were interpreted and explained by the Church ministry, not its membership. The role of the Church of England in education, maintenance of the poor, and support for the public order–not to ignore its early role in Christianizing Native Americans–extended the Church into several policy areas. Finally, the Church through its hierarchy was an alternate channel in which to pursue personal and political objectives.
The Anglican Church in Virginia was not under the jurisdiction of any particular English bishop/archbishop and that would not change until after the Restoration in 1660’s. In the period following Virginia’s founding, the Bishop of London incrementally asserted himself until Henry Compton became bishop in 1675. [see Osgood, Vol 2., p. 7]. That topic will be picked up in a later module, but for our purposes in this module, the Anglican Church in Virginia drifted, culling out a small role at certain times to temperate relations with Native Americans—but that limited missionary bent fell to the side of the road after the 1622 Massacre. In its place the Church was little more than a font of Crown orthodoxy, and while a somewhat moderate inhibitor of Protestant dissidents (Puritans-Pilgrims mostly in this period as Quakers developed after 1650), but still allowed their settlement in coastal Virginia in Charles I earliest years.
From the beginning the English Church had been predominant in Virginia … [But only with Compton in the 1670’s did the Church] seek a place of some prominence. In England the process of religious development had begun with unity and tended [over the following years] toward diversity; in the colonies the original condition was one of the widest diversity possible within Protestantism. [Until Crompton] In America the [Anglican Church] must content itself with a place of a sect among sects or to an extent overcome the conditions which had naturally grown up in the colonies. … [Hence] the Anglican reaction, which followed the Revolution in England, and of the transition to the system of royal provinces … the church should seek a larger place in colonial life, and that in undertaking them, she would lean heavily upon the support of the state [99] Osgood, Vol. 2, pp. 6-7
Forty years in our future, this unity of church and state, the close association of the Church leadership with aristocracy, English nationalism and a divine-right monarchy the Anglican Church, its ministry, and its local parish organization were so closely linked to English institutions of governance, and to the Crown that their role in Virginia was to support the Virginia civil authorities and the royal governor—and that role was enhanced in their preaching and where provided, their teaching in schools. That did not work well when Cromwell took over–but that is several modules from this one.
County Courts & Developing Reliance on Local Hundreds and the Assembly Asserts the Right to Tax—independent of the Company and Governor
The creation by Dale in the 1613-14 period of two circuit-riding county courts marked the beginning of the Company’s establishment of sub-provincial “governments” beyond that of the Jamestown council. The authority behind these early governmental-like institutions was the charters issued by the King which instructed and authorized the Company to create governments such as existed in England, and to develop law and civil rights in such manner as well. To delegate the right to create a government to a joint stock corporation, whose own “government” was its boards of directors, committees and meetings of its stockholders is awkward at best–and things were seldom at the best in early Jamestown.
The early hundreds were another such awkward invention issued by Dale to provide some geographical definition and political-judicial order to territories along the James, and to serve as a point of coordination for Jamestown’s provincial company government to manage and coordinate the colony-within-a-colony plantation. But it was soon clear, as subsequent acts confirmed, the hundreds would be the container, the vehicle from which sub-provincial company order, public safety, and economic regulation would be administered.
The county courts (1618-19) were the vehicle by which Yeardley implemented the Greate Charter political, economic, civil and religious initiatives, and it is at this time that sub-provincial “government” truly began. Such legitimacy as a company-ordered political institution could provide, was extended by the elected General Assembly to these institutions. Since nothing is more permanent than the temporary, this authority sustained Virginia sub-state government until 1902 when a new state constitution reordered Virginia local government.
As early as 1619, a form of local government had emerged in Virginia, but local government as distinct from colonial government did not take shape until the expanding population [and its dispersal into the hinterland] forced the creation of subordinate courts to exercise authority outside Jamestown. By 1624 , the [General Assembly] passed an Act creating two local courts … by 1632, five monthly courts were provided, each court to be composed of commissioners [judges] who were instructed to model their proceedings after those of the Justices of the Peace in the English Quarter Sessions. Two years later Virginia was divided into eight counties [shires] [99] Clarence L. Ver Steeg, the Formative Years, 1607-1763 (Hill and Wang, 1964), p. 70
The two hundred and eighty three years in between 1619 and 1902 gave sufficient time for these institutions, their governance traditions and and institutional underpinnings to take root. The system of sub-provincial government that evolved, therefore, owed its legitimacy to the actions of the “General Court” i.e. the provincial legislature–the General Assembly.
No doubt, anticipating future Dillion’s law ruling, sub-state jurisdictions and institutions were indeed “creatures of the state”. However decentralized Virginia governance would prove to be, it necessarily required actions of sub-state actors would need be confirmed by action of the provincial level The clumsy and bipolar sub-state system that developed in future Pennsylvania never haunted Virginia. Still, that provincial legislature, pressure by its royal governor, in all its wisdom never enacted town-founding laws until 1662. It did, however, because of the primacy of Indian-fighting, use the hundred as the vehicle to strengthen the militia, finance it, and spin off a number of select offices to supplement its effectiveness. And when the time came, regulation and facilitation of tobacco also utilized the focus provided by hundreds.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, no towns were created until after–and the bulk of what came to be known as Tidewater Virginia lacked for cities villages, and towns as the lowest unit of sub-provincial governance. Not surprisingly, whatever administration and need for order at this level fell by default to the larger plantations that dominated the economic and political base of that administrative unit, the hundred in 1620, and the county in 1632.
That said the hundred, and then the county, became the principal sub-state unit of Virginia governance. It is from this heritage the present, absolutely illogical rogue configuration of Virginia town, city and incorporated cities that best resemble counties, evolved. In short the urban jurisdictional dog that did not bark, did not create port cities as did every other colony-province or state, was the loudest dog on the colonial block.
Left between the cracks of a county level government and private plantations was a public road system that connected the isolated hundreds and their plantations. When Virginia-Tidewater expanded to include other river systems, the Rappahannock, Appomattox and Potomac, even river-based transportation provided less than convenient, timely, and least expensive connections. Each plantation nexus was left to work out its own system, retaining to some degree a measure of isolation and autonomy that further reinforced a tendency toward political decentralization.
That last point ought be emphasized: with plantation nexi so isolated and dispersed, travel to file and record matters, resolve conflicts and administer justice, not to mention vote and keep public order in its broadest senses almost required delegation of functions, and eventually authority, precluding of itself any aspiration from the provincial government. In essence, I am asserting all this is part of the inheritance of the Company period, an inheritance to which subsequent regions and policy systems adapted. Our so-called shredded community served as the womb for future Virginia political–and economic–development.
Shredded communities, lack of transportation and concentrated, centralized government were inversely related. Logically, that meant increasing population and intensified penetration of the hinterland, i.e. frontier expansion to the periphery (new homesteads, and fertile tobacco fields) required creating more counties if only to handle matters and maintain social, public, and economic growth. By 1634, the population had expanded from 1500 in 1624 to 5,000. By 1640 it had grown to about 7,500. By 1648, Governor Berkeley estimated it as 15,000. These are relatively small numbers of people, but the nature of the Virginia’s expansion was to create remote plantations on the frontier at the time, push back, and clear away Indian resistance in so doing–leaving the larger plantation owners to find new fertile fields closer to their original holdings and take advantage of border properties as well. Low density European expansion meant Indian resistance potentially had serious implications, and in its way reinforced the frontier Indian fighting and displacement that characterized the Tidewater expansion.
Inferior [county level] courts were therefore in the beginning of the year 1621 appointed in convenient places to relieve the Governor and Council of the vast burden of business and to render justice more cheap and accessible. This was the original foundation [rationale] of our County Courts. … In 1631-32 the Assembly passed an act adding five more as follows: ‘for the upper parts’, for Warwick River, for Warrosuyoake, for Elizabeth City, for Accawmackle’. Presumably since the order had been that the new courts were to be held in the remote parts of the colony, the phase ‘upper parts’ would mean the most western part of Henrico Corporation {plantation] and the Elizabeth City Court would be for the south side of Hampton Roads. [99] Martha W. Hiden, How Justice Grew Virginia Counties: An Abstract of their Formation (Jamestown Booklet No. 2, University Press of Virginia 1957, p. 3
As to their scope and jurisdictions, Robert Wheeler in his classic “the County Court in Colonial Virginia” states “the essential elements of the system were embodied in an order of March 20, 1629, to the Elizabeth City Court. The Commissioners and justices of the court were instructed to determine all suits that did not exceed one hundred pounds of tobacco, to conserve the peace, to enforce all laws and inflict appropriate punishments except when the case involved loss of life or limb, and to keep records of all these proceedings.“. Each hundreds-county were divided into parishes, and the parish vestries and their churchwardens were responsible “for maintaining the moral character of parish residents, prosecuted cases of adultery, fornication, failure to attend church, and other offenses; provided for the poor, and other taxes to support the church and ministers [99] Robert Wheeler, the County Court in Colonial Virginia in Bruce C. Daniels (Ed), Town & County: Essays on the Structure of Local Government in the American Colonies (Wesleyan University Press, 1978), pp. 112-13.
Summarize—With economic development tied to tobacco plantations, headright workforce incentives closely linked with land sales, and tobacco intensive on its use of land, Virginia was literally a land grabbing machine creating hundreds-counties as it chewed up land and moved on.
This is evident as we look into the future and to see that the two hundreds in 1619, became five in 1624, and eight counties in 1634. That morphed to ten in 1648 and twenty in 1668. Today Virginia has ninety five counties and thirty-eight independent cities which census counts as county equivalent forms of government–a total of 133, the third highest in the nation. Larger Pennsylvania has half that of Virginia, and Massachusetts about 10% of Virginia’s total.
Counties dot the Virginia administrative and governmental landscape and their appearance in 1624 and founding in 1634 expose the decided tilt in Virginia governance that had already evolved under the administration of the Virginia Company, and continued in the extended transition to royal governance by 1639. In the next section we present the argument that this assertion can be effectively supported.
the Tilt to Virginia Decentralization Makes its Appearance in 1624.
I am not adverse to skipping ahead a few years and see how historians, economic and political, see as the causes and relevant dynamics of major events and personalities lurking ahead in our future. Several stand out in my mind: (1) Virginia politics associated with the Cromwell Protectorate; (2) the arrival of Governor William Berkeley , his importation of a Second Migration, and his decline culminating in (3) Bacon Rebellion. All occur within the next half-century (or so) and are within the scope of influence of dynamics and institutions created or ramped up during the 1620’s (Pre-Company Fall, and Early Transition to Stuart administration–which at minimum lasted until 1634).
My go-to historian of this period is Warren M. Billings. His essay on the “Growth of Political Institutions in Virginia 1634-1676” and a second on “the Causes of Bacon’s Rebellion” both rest on the the role of county courts, the decentralization of Virginia policy-making, the development of a local elite writ large in the provincial institutions, Burgesses most importantly, but on the Council of State as well. One might think of this period as Virginia’s first true American policy system [99] Warren M. Billings, “the Growth of Political Institutions in Virginia, 1634 to 1676, Williams & Mary Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Apr, 1974); and Billings, the Causes of Bacon’s Rebellion: Some Suggestions, the Virginia Magazine of History & Biography, Vol. 78, No. 4 (Oct, 1970) .
Deeply impacted by English politics and the impact of Charles I, that policy system operated under its own propulsion system which, affected by, was never dominated by the goings-on in England. That policy system was decidedly bottoms-up; run and fueled by the ambitions and actors who dominated local but large plantations, and the hundreds-counties that served as their government.
Still in 1620 and the remaining years of the Company charter a certain fragility of this arrangement got in the way of sound, consistent royal government congruent with English standards and the King’s divine right assertion of royal prerogatives, including land title. In 1620, as the Company’s internal war bubbled to the surface and the King actively pressed for the removal of Sandys from his Treasurer position, the intermediary buffer between royal authority and actual administration and justice provided by the Company was revealed as tenuous at best by Virginians and even resident Company officials who now had a personal stake based on and safeguarded by the Company-instituted units of self-government. As we shall see in future modules this uncertainty persisted until 1634 and more so until 1639.
Operating within a shredded community isolation and autonomy, a “court house gang” of local elites set the agenda for provincial institutions, and due to the overlap in personnel and leadership carried out programs and initiatives they approved. Against this, the royal governor either was a sympathetic participant, or until Berkeley, checked and even “fired” by a London nexus that included the King and the Privy Council–not too shabby for a court-house gang. It gets better, and even more amazing, during the Cromwell Protectorate.
What we are doing in this module is setting the stage for the formal creation of counties in 1634. The informality of the hundreds explains why they are not appreciated, but their informality created a flexibility of how they were used. No matter how they were used, however, for militia, tobacco regulation, simple day-to-day conduct of affairs necessary to “flush the outhouses” and sell tobacco abroad, and, of course, first and foremost fight Indians and seize their land on which to set up a tobacco-based homestead or plantation nexus) these hundreds housed the future for what the counties would inherit when created in 1634. Within them bred the politics, the culture, and economics of our plantation conquistadores, who were most likely to assume key and dominant positions of authority in the provincial government.
As summarized by Billings [99]: “the Growth of Political Institutions in Virginia, 1634 to 1676, pp. 225-26, the General Assembly’s creation of a county court system of local government in 1634 set in train changes which profoundly affected the character of Virginia’s political institutions. Creation of county courts divided the functions and powers of government between the newly erected local jurisdictions, and those governmental organs already in Jamestown [seat of provincial government]. Over a thirty year period after 1634 that division was greatly enlarged by statutory additions to the county court’s responsibilities, by customs, and by local conditions.
“As the [county] court’s competence in local matters expanded, the General Assembly began to assume a more purely legislative function: the Assembly’s development, however did not keep abreast of the county courts. … When it adopted the county system of local government, the Assembly was responding to a growing colony’s need for greater efficiency in the disposition of its affairs [Inserted out of place] … Furthermore, the governor’s broad powers to direct the colony’s political life were eroded by custom and the willing acquiescence of governor’s” [to accept the determinations of the General Assembly],
“As the County Courts became important centers of power, some Virginians began to view membership on the [county court] bench as a means to satisfy their large political, social, and economic ambitions. The court system therefore became the institutional mechanism whereby grasping men used the tools of kinship, patronage, deference, and money to lay the foundations of a ruling elite that possessed the attributes of the traditional English ruling classes … The tumultuous character of politics, which Bernard Bailyn has aptly designated ‘chaotic factionalism’ combined with rapid changes in the structure of Virginia society to produce the chronic instability that marked the Old Dominion before 1676.
To set the stage for us, and our assessment of the impact of the Virginia Company impact on Virginia political and economic development, Billings acknowledges that “As early as the 1620’s, however, necessity [primarily the Indian wars] had caused some of the [county delegated] duties to devolve upon the proprietors of particular plantations, and the judges of the several monthly courts that the Assembly had created in 1624 the Growth of Political Institutions in Virginia, 1634 to 1676, pp. 226 . In other words, Billings acknowledged the initial development of this policy system had begun in the late Company period, and this development was facilitated by “necessity”, which for this history is the land grabbing tobacco nexus led by the plantation conquistadores whose fortune was tied to larger tobacco plantations on former Indian lands, and whose status and political security rested upon their control over the local county courts, and through their leaderships which dominated the provincial decision-making bodies. Watching from the margins were the greater numbers of indentured servants, small renter and and homestead tobacco subsistence agriculturalists, a grouping whose economic survival was dependent on the beneficence of the large tobacco plantation owners-plantation conquistadores. This structured inequality, whatever its unarticulated tensions, remained stable, and on the whole supportive of the conquistadores largely because of their leadership against the Indians, and their role in the sale of their tobacco abroad.
Fragility of Provincial and Company Land Titles and Assertion of Taxing Powers
At this point, 1622-23, with the crisis created by the Massacre of 1622 and the growing implosion of the Virginia Company, the necessity of acting upon questions of immediate importance and thereby acting as if the General Assembly was more a government than a corporate body of domestic Virginia Company shareholders became paramount.
Necessity creates its own legitimacy, at least a temporary one, and the General Assembly and its component elements, the Governor, Council of State, and House of Burgesses, individually and in aggregate (the General Assembly) developed into the forum-entity to exercise something akin to ultimate power in the colony, but something short of sovereign power. Well aware it lacked the latter, in deference not only to the Company, but the King and Parliament, the General Assembly, the aggregate of the three bodies meeting in a simultaneous and combined body assumed the legitimacy of necessity and acted as the colony’s final political authority of the moment.
As we have earlier indicated, the reaction to the Powhatan rebellion, in particular needs of the military, militia and public safety of its European residents broke new ground in relying and delegating instructions to the hundreds and the militias-commanders resident in each. Tobacco and religious matters were also dealt with in an attempt to maintain traditional public order and sustain the operation of the economy. Judicial proceedings were supported, and the exercise of company initiatives and enactments, notably the headright, land sales, probate and existing fiscal responsivities were also assumed.
This assertion of authority, in my mind, is natural enough given the realities. The real issue seems to be how long would this vacuum remain, and would the Company return to the status quo–assuming we properly understand just what the rather imprecise definition of the role and limits of Virginia’s participation in macro-corporate decision-making was, and whose intentions of it would prevail in the resolution of the corporate civil war.
We will leave much of the discussion of this question to a future module, but we also have to open up the different question as to how the Company period General Assembly, and its component political institutional elements, fit into, and relate with, the long-term evolution of Virginia self-government–and the “trend” to colonial autonomy and democracy in the English North America. At stake is the continuity of a succession of different policy systems that will evolve over the generations to the Revolutionary War.
Since we are aware of the course of future events, hindsight tells us that the political vacuum of 1622-23, ameliorated slightly in 1625 when the Company charter was revoked and governance by royal administration was substituted in its place. The preponderance of the vacuum, however, continued as the King appointed a resident former Company governor as his royal governor, seemingly consented to at least a temporary continuation of past company policy and decisions, but deferred any real definition of policy or governmental units until a later date–which turned out to be fifteen years later in 1639. Colonial governance in Virginia remained in that political limbo for the better part of a generation.
Accordingly, we will deal with the bulk of the vacuum issue in the next module which opens a new module series dealing with the transition of the post Company royal administration and the rise of resident self-government, and the events and transformations that developed in the course of the William Berkeley gubernatorial administration that lasted to 1676. As a prelude, this module will conclude its discussion on this matter by describing one critical and crucial element, the assertion by the General Assembly of its right to tax its citizens and residents–and to do so independent of the company, and by implication, royal governor.
Alerting the reader, the right to tax is a fundamental pillar of any policy system that will follow, we will note that in this pre-company period the General Assembly made and exercised that determination of its right to tax as a body- that such determination was not questioned by the new royal administration, and therefore left as “tradition” for future Virginia policy systems. The “temporary” in this case became permanent.
the Right to Tax, Assertion of Legislative Authority, and Segue Way to the Post Company Royal Period
Somebody had to pay for all this self-defense. Service in the militia could be drafted, but somebody had to feed it and issue it ammunition and weapons–not to mention some assistance to those with families and children. Somebody had to pay for the tools and labor of construction brigades to build the forts and palisades. The first “tax’ was likely in late 1622 or early 1623, and came in the form of a tithe of 5% levied on each “head” be it a hundred or homestead. So each estate was levied for the construction of necessary forts, and a second tax to pay for the placement of citizens on duty inside the fort (at the “Castle”). The tax was for five pounds of tobacco paid by each man, and for each servant owned by the individual. There was no asking for anybody’s permission–and no one abroad knew it happened until it was way too later to be reversed–and few in London gave it much thought given the desperation of the times.
Shortly after that a tax of ten pounds of tobacco was levied on each individual over sixteen for “maintaining a “corp” [militia] to harry “Indians”. These taxes were usually referred to as head taxes, and they should be considered as the predecessor of the future poll tax. [99] Phillip Alexander Bruce, Institutional History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century (Vol 2) (Peter Smith, 1910, 1964), pp. 22-24. The Governor, himself, imposed the tax, its terms, and also included with it the requirement for resident duty in public projects, notably the militia, construction of forts and palisades, and their staffing. Lost in this shuffle was the use of tobacco as Virginia’s principal currency for taxation. Tobacco had been used in economic transactions since it was available in Virginia–now it was official, the currency of taxation. Money may not grow on trees but it sure grew on tobacco stalks. Piece by piece an economic base and a budding policy system seem to rise from the residues of the 1622 Indian attack.
In these very early gubernatorial or Assembly actions were the seeds of even larger issues: should be governor alone be the maker of taxation policy–or should that “platform power” be shared, or even belong exclusively, to a broader legitimacy? Should Virginians have a right to share or even make the policy that should literally take money from their harvests? Those questions certainly came up in 1623.
The Virginia General Assembly in 1623 confirmed the terns of the Governor’s 1622 action by writing its own legislation to that effect. What is most interesting is the Assembly’s assertion of its right to tax was linked to the assertion that the governor–independently of his membership in the General Assembly–had a right to tax. The Assembly denied the governor of such a right, leaving by implication that the Assembly only had such a right. To foreclose that implication the General Assembly added to their legislation the stricture “no Governor should presume to lay a tax on the lands and commodities of the people, without the express authority of the House of Burgesses itself; and all sums so procured were to be expended only in such a manner as that body should prescribe” [99] Phillip Alexander Bruce, Institutional History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century (Vol 2) (Peter Smith, 1910, 1964), pp. 524.
The General Assembly was to stand behind this linkage throughout the entire of the seventeenth century. As far as they were concerned, in 1623 Virginia there was to be no taxation without representation, little matter it was as to who was doing the representation. That question in its own version was, arguably, the central issue that divided England’s divine right king from his own elected Parliament. What made it more salient to Virginians was that by late 1623 and certainly in 1624, the Virginia Company was on its last legs. A royal commission was afoot (actually on a ship) and on its way to Virginia to investigate and report on the administration and effectiveness of the Virginia Company in regards to Virginia colonization. Not inclined to fiddle while the Company burned, the Virginia Assembly met with the Commission in the course of its 1624 session, and simultaneously presented in legislation it adopted its express take on the right to tax, and the Virginia Assembly’s sole right to to approve that tax.
As reported by Charles Andrews, Virginians were likely divided on whether the Company should continue or have its charter revoked by James, in reaction to the report of the royal commission. Having said that the composition of the royal commission was very interesting; four of the five members are known to us in this history. The first was John Pory, the commission’s leader, Sandys supporter/Yeardley skeptic and Speaker of the Virginia General Assembly in its first “Greate Charter” session, John Harvey, an English entrepreneur-trader who would be governor in 1629, Abraham Peirsey (Pierce), former cape merchant of the Virginia Company and a resident plantation owner, and a up and coming plantation conquistador, Samuel Mathews Sr, only five years resident in Virginia. Before its meeting with the General Assembly, commission members made the rounds of visiting plantations and interviewing their owners.
However the Assembly mustered the consensus behind those questions, it composed a letter (entitled “Brief Declaration”), a petition for the royal commission to deliver to the Privy Council. In that petition, “it begged the [Privy] Council not to entrust the [future royal] governors [of Virginia] who were to be sent over [under the new plan of administration, embodied in the recommendation of October 8, 1623) with too much authority, but to restrain them as formerly [as had evolved in the Virginia Company period] by recognizing the right of the local council [Council of State] to act in an advisory capacity, and by allowing the colony to retain the liberty of a general assembly …” Refusing to sign its petition individually, the Assembly insisted to send it directly by its own representative to the Privy Council. Pory, however, bribed the Assembly clerk, and obtained a copy. For this the clerk was sentenced to a pillory, to which his ears would be nailed and then cut off. The sentence was commuted a bit, with only a portion of one ear cut off, and the clerk sentenced to a period in indenture. Now that’s one way to discourage leaking-but it offers insight into the rough and ready character of Virginia and Assembly politics of this period. [99] Charles A. Andrews, the Colonial Period in American History, Vol. 1, pp. 188-91. BTW John Harvey was tasked by the Commission to remain in Virginia and develop a report to James–but said report was not completed as James died in March 1625–terminating the mandate of the Commission
What is usually not mentioned is the likely cause of this reaction by the Assembly to the Governor’s enactments: a strong and adverse reaction by the plantation owners and merchants of the Hundreds. They were the first to be affected by the Governor’s 1622 imposition of taxes and the drafting of men to labor on public projects, and their summoning to guard duty along with the requirement that they draft their tenants to such duty. The governor’s early imposition of fees for services to pay for them also rankled the local folk.
In short, the 1622 action by the Governor, despite the urgency of the era, had launched a mighty tax rebellion at the hundreds level. It would appear this rebellion extending considerably beyond the displeasure of the plantation conquistadores who were resident, mostly, on the Council of State. The specification of the House of Burgesses as the custodian of the right to tax, clearly meant that only the elective membership of the House could make such a determination–as well as a determination to require compulsory public service. At that point the delegates to the Assembly were local leaders drawn from the hundreds, and principally composed of their larger plantation owners, and residents of high status, professional position or both.
In the General Assembly meeting in 1624–a meeting in which the General Assembly was preparing for the likely termination of the Virginia Company charter— one of the key acts approved by the 1624 [Company-era] Assembly asserted “the Governor shall not laye any taxes of impositiones uppon [sic] the Colony, theeire landes or comodities otherwise then by the awthoritie of the generall Assemblie, to be levied and imployed as the saide Assembly shall appoint” [99] Craven, the Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, p. 159.
While it appears somebody missed their spelling class, we should note this legislation clearly makes it explicit that the links asserted in the earlier legislation should be carried over to the future. During the transition period that followed, the links were reasserted in 1631-2 (the John Harvey period), in 1642-3, and again in 1645 (the Berkeley period). The only change made (in 1631) was to formally include the Council of State in the linkage as (presumably) an upper house of the legislature.
Clear it was also that the locals saw their legislative delegate as their link to ensure their proper treatment in the compulsions and taxes exerted upon them by the legislature itself. Accordingly, the power to tax was more than the simple power to tax, it was the clearly expressed preference dictated from below and lower divisions of government that the legislature, which they dominated, was the preferred instrument of local administration and regulation. There is little sovereignty of the people in this instruction–not at this point in American history. The “enhanced and symbolic” power to tax was, arguably, a contender for the third rail of early colonial policy-making—associated with the imposition of draft labor for public service.
Yes in 1624 the General Assembly asserted by its own authority the right for it to tax and impose duties, fees and impositions [i.e. mandates] upon lower units of the policy and individuals dwelling within them—but simultaneously it required itself to remember it was to be the guardian of the liberties of those who elected them. This action suffered no known pushback the Pory report arrived a month after the Company had its charter revoked, but the report was then delivered to the Mandeville Commission which had been entrusted to operate in the stead of the Virginia Company in a prelude to formal takeover by the King. In August it received permission from the King to appoint the current Governor Wyatt, and ‘other ‘discrete persons residing in the parts of Virginia‘, a grouping which included both Mathews and Peirsey–and other members of the Council of State. Of note, from its inception, the King’s royal administration had seemingly bought into some sort of shared “governor and council” governance. No mention was ever made by the Mandeville Commission of the General Assembly. [99] Charles A. Andrews, the Colonial Period in American History, Vol. 1, pp. 191-93
Truth be told, or as close as I can come to it, the 1624 legislation is probably more cited as the origin of the “Assembly’s” right to tax without the permission of the Company or later the king. That legislation curtailed the power of the governor (a company official in 1624) which was simply inherited with the appointment of a royal governor in 1625. Impositions, such as had been made in the Company period setting aside land (31,000 acres) for the payment of government officials and expenses incurred by them in performance of their duties, servants were indentured and then sent over to work that land, the proceeds of which produced goods, tobacco mostly, which were sold or transferred to the official reimbursing them, were also continued thereby continuing the use of the headright incentives and the economic development strategy nexus the company had pioneered.
All of these laws were appropriately reported to the Company or to officials of the King—and generated no known pushback. The Assembly reacting to the death of James, desirous of being kept into the transition loop, sent its representative, advocate to London to deliver its approved legislation and transmit petitions to the Privy Council and hopefully Charles. Wyatt’s Mandeville mandate, however, ended with the Commission, and he remained in authority with no explicit authority. In May 1625, upon hearing of the James’s death, Wyatt called the Assembly into session using vague reference to its component elements so as not to exceed his authority and attach any significance to the body so as not to rouse the reaction of an unknown new ruler.
That “Assembly” had no acknowledged position of authority in Charles’s administration, as he had not yet taken a position on the role of the Greate Charter political and economic initiatives. The Assembly sent Yeardley to London to ensure the “Brief Declaration” did not get lost in the transition. He also made requests for arms, supplies, and necessities–and a petition not to make an enactment affecting Virginia without first confirming “the right and liberty” of the General Assembly be confirmed. The Privy Council, with the exception of the last request, did acknowledge and confirm that Wyatt was to continue and for the meantime Virginia Company policies and initiatives would continue.
Andrews believed Yeardley did well while in London, but “still the king took no step looking to the reestablishment of the assembly in the colony [and] …. Wyatt who for some time had been anxious to return to England, and had the obtained the King’s permission to do so, was now superceded by Yeardley (March 14, 1626). Linked to those approvals, the King also submitted a statement that ‘being forced by many other urgent occasions in respect to his late access to the crown’ he would continue the existing form of government until he should find some more convenient means upon mature advice to give more simple directions for the same“. A list of formal instructions followed a month later from the Privy Council.
This was the first authoritative confirmation of the actions taken by Virginians, and of the status of the initiatives, regulations and procedures issued by the Virginia Company since late 1623. For nearly three full years Virginia and its governance were in a state of limbo. They emerged from this in March-April 1626 with Yeardley once again their governor. That was not to last long.
On November 13, 1627 George Yeardley died. He was about forty years old.
Assessment and Segue Way to Module Series 2
The legacy of local action, and the presumed bonds among neighbors and those who survived, no doubt kindled those former feelings of their home and local government left behind in England and that, as Craven posits, carried over after the crisis and became infused with legislative representation; “In Virginia, as in the homeland, the Englishman depended, in that area of government most intimately identified with his interests, upon officials that bore the King’s commission, but were at the same time neighbors of the men they judged” Wesley Frank Craven, the History of the Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, p. 172. If this is accurate, the source of legislative legitimacy in 1620’s Virginia was both a reliance on English traditions and a localism that infused the institutions of provincial government—much less a desire of the provincial legislature to be as parliament—that will come, but in its time.
The time for that more radical assertion, however, is not in this period. Some degree of self-governance to be sure–but no sovereignty of legislature nor of the people.
Still, as asserted by Richard Pares, “the Company had failed as a Company; even if James 1 had not dissolved it, partly for political reasons, it must have gone bankrupt, and could never have been revived as a single unit. It was fortunate indeed that the need for this [Company] was passing away at that very moment: the Virginia Company, the greatest and most expensive of all these colonial ventures [of early English colonialization] had lasted just long enough to make sure that the colony could draw breath and could build up its own capital from humbler and more dispersed [hundreds and private plantations], but in the end more solid foundations“. Richard Pares, Merchants and Planters, (Cambridge University Press, 1960), p. 13
Ron W. Coan 