Convoluted Politics, the Outsider John Harvey, Claiborne’s Merchant-Plantation Conquistador-London Investor Kent Island Commercial Venture, the King’s Contrasting Commissions and Reaction of Virginia Landowners, Fragmentation of the Planter Elites, Birth/Settlement of the Maryland Colony, and the 1635 Ouster of Royal Governor John Harvey: 1631-35

Enter Governor John Harvey: the Outsider’s Baggage, Let’s Agree We Don’t like the Governor

—Phase II: Anxious Planters (Craven 17th,196, Brenner, 129) & Dorset Commission: Zombie Virginia Company Politics Haunts Tobacco Road, 1632-1633

Maryland, Claiborne, Merchant Investors (Franz 66ff, Brenner 125-9) & John Harvey Fragment the Pivot, 1632-1633

1634 Planters and Merchants Polarize (Brenner–Tobacco Politics, Franz 129ff)- the Laud Commission (Andrews 408-12, Maryland Settlement & Counties: 1634-March 1635

Phase III: Polarization Yields to Unity of Action. Claiborne (Craven 17th 197): the Coup (Thrusting) & Pivot Breaks Apart: 1635

Conquistadors in Council of State, Planters in the Assembly: Localism & Tobacco Fears Drive Policy-Making: 1635-37 (Jamestown,51)

Phase IV: He’s Back-and Fired Again; An Unbelievable Interlude of Nasty Politics, 1637-1639. Andrews 204, McCartney,,p3,

Phase V: 1639-1642-Plantation Conquistadors and Planters Fashion a Rough Consensus & Charles Accepts It

II

Maryland and Virginia: Phase I Pre-1632

When the 1632 Virginia Burgesses met, among its new members was a fellow from Kent Island. Today Kent Island would be known mostly for MD 50’s from Annapolis’s long bridge over the Chesapeake Bay to Maryland’s eastern shore, about fifteen miles downstream from Baltimore. Why is a representative from a district so far to the north of Jamestown serving in Virginia’s provincial legislature? The answer to that question opens up a chapter in Virginia (and Maryland’s) history that is poorly understood, and not well-appreciated for its oversized impact on the political, and economic, development of both provinces/states.

Tobacco “Planters” and Claiborne’s Merchant Conquistadors

At that time, the power to watch was, believe it or not, a collection of Virginia Company–yes I said Virginia Company–cliques that were aggressively advocating reforming the still functioning Company (it was still in charge of Bermuda), and re-issuing a new amended charter that would return Virginia to Virginia Company administration. William Alexander was a member, and the Claiborne Clique came to believe they too would be well-served if the Virginia Company was resurrected. Even the King, whatever his fleeting attention could be harnessed, seemed prone to bring it back to life. The possibility that the Company could be revived offered several options to the new Claiborne trading venture corporations, but we shall defer that to the next section.

In any event, while private letters circulated, and despite a reluctance to be a formal party to the Company’s return to Virginia, the Claiborne Clique was perceived by Virginia planters, watching from afar, as a perceived beneficiary of a new Virginia Company–and to them that was not a good thing. What Claiborne wanted to do with his Kent Island venture was very much not to their liking. We will deal with that issue shortly also.

All of which should impress upon the reader the Kent Island Claiborne project was one of several pursued by the firm, and that the individual partners had their own projects, skillsets and priorities; deeply embedded into Court, Privy Council, and merchant politics it was not going to be hard to distract these investors, who were at root tacticians with a loose grand strategy based on fleeting opportunities. Alexander, in particular, will be a key member of both the Dorset and Laud Commissions, which, given their conflicting focus and perspective, suggest an opportunist flexibility that, as we shall see, shall not serve the Pivot well over the next several years.

(4) in the same year the arbitrary ripping from its boundaries of a brand new colony, Maryland, whose Catholic roots infuriated the Virginians, and whose economic hopes challenged the new trade, finance and commercial venture and competitors for tobacco export. If nothing else, Maryland fractured the Merchant-Plantation relationship, split Claiborne off from the other merchant conquistadors, and instead transferred their hostility toward Harvey whom they could not bend to their vision–and whose policy preferences hit hard against the settlement-tobacco plantation expansion nexus. Kent Island was in the end, contested for five years, finally taken over by Maryland;

(5) the reaction to which generated through 1633 resistance, cleavages, and rivalries which were rocked and shocked by the abrupt termination of the Dorset Commission and its replacement by a new, perceived as hostile royal commission, the Laud Commission, which repudiated the Dorset Commission Virginia Company charter, and raised fears of Virginians that their land ownership and rights to servants secured by Company headrights were seriously at risk of royal takeover as had been done in the Irish Ulster County Plantation;

(6) the focal point of such contentious politics and policies fell by default on Governor John Harvey, who true to the Crown, and congruent with his outside perspective-vision. proved not simply an opponent to Virginia interests, but a “traitor” to them, culminating in April 1635 with a unified Merchant-Conquistador and Plantation Planter elite staging a coup which sent Harvey back to London–fired by the Virginia Council of State and supported by its House of Burgesses. The two bodies then elected their new governor, a plantation conquistador-planter Francis West.

(2) this commercial venture threatened the great majority of tobacco plantation owners, large and small, who feared the return of a Virginia Company-like commercial elite that could through its export and supply provisioning monopolies could crush their economic viability and imperil their voice in Virginia governance. The ostensible lightning rod of these fears either took the form of the return in some form of the Virginia Company “magazine” (in the hands of the merchant-conquistador elite), or even worse, the imposition by the king of a tobacco exporting monopoly which he controlled. They wanted free trade, use of Dutch shipping, and the autonomy of export for each plantation owner;

In that post-1990 contemporary historians downplay, if not ignore this period completely, its significance has been pushed to the margins. Earlier literature was well aware of this policy tumult, and reasonably aware of its implications in the foundation of the long-term Virginia plantation paradigm. That literature, however, tended to concentrate on one or two of the above dynamics-factors, and come to conclusions that did not reflect the many moving parts that clashed in this tumultous period.

Their unifying strand which almost all agree, that the bond that bound these factions and opposing groups to unite in the ouster of the royal governor was the fear that change in England, carried out by a royal governor could-would strip Virginians of their land ownership and deprive them of their indentured workforce–ending any and all hope of their tobacco entrepreneurial dreams, and robbing them of their hard-earned homesteads and estates.

In our terms, they feared royal government would crush their settlement nexus, transforming them into pawns of royal dictates. It is without doubt, as we shall see in the next module that issue was at the core of the politics and policy-making that followed through 1639, and was the essential core element of the consensual Virginia paradigm that emerged after 1639–and that underlie Virginia for the remainder of its colonial history.

This history accepts and incorporates this traditional distillation of this period. We do, however, call out the implications of that consensus, in particular, the failure of the merchant-conquistador commercial vision to pivot away from tobacco meant, almost by definition, the unquestioned victory of the plantation-tobacco export monoculture and the political structures, cultures, way of life that sustained it for the next several hundred years. Virginia did have a choice in the structure of its economic base; it had a real and functioning alternative it could have pursued–but didn’t because the politics that wreaked their havoc in these years disturbed and finally crushed that alternative history.

Another important implication is the turn in the politics of the merchant plantation conquistadors from royalist sympathies to Puritan and Parliamentarian. That shift will be important during the English Civil War, but more so in the Cromwell Protectorate. Finally, of considerable importance to our history, Virginia’s preference for a weak governor, and the preservation of its local tilt in policy-making emerges also from the paradigm consensus forged during these years.

Claiborne’s enterprise was a departure from the tobacco monoculture, even though it incorporated that monoculture in its business plan. It was at heart a logistics-transportation, finance-based business that linked the tobacco with the outside world, and the outside world with tobacco and Virginia settlement. That it originated from the plantation conquistador element-but by no means a significant portion of them–was not remarkable in and of itself. The nature of export, and the need to import provisions to live on and work with required from somebody to develop a focus, expertise, and transportation and contracts, and the need to create an export hub to connect to the global market. The conquistadors attracted to Claiborne, like Claiborne, were well-connected and educated, with built in kinship linkages to the resources needed.

Craven 22-26

See Brenner pp. 113-116

The great bulk of Virginia planters, as we shall see did not enjoy these advantages, but any Virginian planter who wanted to export his tobacco himself had to enter those troubled waters.

Accordingly, hidden in plain sight we see a catalyst behind the formation of a new sector and set of occupations

Harvey, as had been the Virginia Company, was not at all happy with the tobacco monoculture, nor the pressure it placed on Virginia policy to engage in territorial expansion, i.e. our settlement nexus which by its nature created unstable, if not hostile Indian relations. Like the proverbial stream roller, however, tobacco farming attracted immigrants and investment into Virginia, and without doubt part of its allure was its gazelle nature that stimulated constant demand and high prices–prices that production of staples and food crops could never hope to match. So, given the chance, starting around 1616, when Virginia expanded from Jamestown to the hinterland, tobacco followed. The first questions are why and who.

The fifteen years between 1616 and 1631 when Claiborne founded Kent Island, and launched his venture set up the backbone of the tobacco monoculture: the tobacco planter. To understand that sector and the people who were engaged in it, we first need to bring the reader back to the seventeenth century. Farms then were called plantations–whatever their size. Plantations today convey scale; this is absolutely incorrect in regards to seventeenth century tobacco plantations. Even the big ones were remarkably small, and that was because land had to be cleared (picture yourself clearing a virgin field-forest-swampland with a rough hatchet.

When I watched the mini-series Jamestown one constantly sees images of the new planter looking over a virgin ground that is his headright–and the next scene is him planting, and the next harvesting. In thirty seconds the field is cleared, planted, harvested, and ready for export. Who are we kidding! Clearing meant only an acre of two a year could be cleared, unless you could throw an army at it–and workforce was always the chief limiting factor in the spread of the tobacco monoculture.

Whether you were rich and could obtain headrights by paying the transportation for indentured servants, or poor with a few brothers or an occasional wife and family members resident, only a handful of workers were involved. Plantations that were hundreds of acres were small, initially an acre or two, if one isolates the planted area. The mansion or home was small and rough also. That was a hidden advantage for Company officials that got land grants and indentured servants from the company resources–they could use the company magazine for imported goods, they were first to obtain their fellow Company official, John Rolfe’s seeds, and employ in their private estates ten to twenty indentured servants.

This was the nucleus for the large planter class that developed during the next fifteen years. In fact, by the time the Company lost its charter, these folk were well along in the establishment of estates, in the hundreds they set up, and by the nature of tobacco, had confronted the chief evil of tobacco (its destruction of the soil) by spinning off new fields in the land grant, and obtaining new land grants to start up new plantations in various hundreds or settlements.

Because they managed indentured servants, they administered their contracts and upon expiration, they could recruit new freeholders to become renters of their fields–responsible for clearing them, or in essence employing them as colonial sharecroppers. Otherwise, the new freeholder had to come up with capital for tools, staples, and whatever to develop their own contracted acreage. Thus company officials had prime access to a steady stream of expired indentured servants to follow them into their new plantations. This is why Indian warfare got so intertwined with settlement; these new freeholders in the end needed the mass of a clustered settlement to form a militia unit capable to resisting, if not attacking nearby tribes, or raiding them for corn and staples.

As Brenner details, however, from Harvey’s perspective (and London’s) his reasons for action were reasonable:

The rapid growth of tobacco production put a high premium on land … As a result [domestic planters] demand[ed] that the size of the colony be increased, and to seek special land grants [headright] … Naturally enough, the merchant-council clique [Claiborne, Tucker, Thomason group] was especially active on this score. However, by the mid-1630’s they had run up against the implacable opposition of Governor … Harvey, who was pursuing a land policy diametrically opposed to their own … because he wanted to avoid costly military mobilizations and to minimize catastrophic military conflicts … [he] sought, above all, to maintain peace with the Indians. But unless the Indians were destroyed, the planters could not expand the colony at the desired pace. Harvey had also been stingy about granting land to the planters [in his five years he old signed off on nine headright and land sales contracts]. Finally as the King’s servant, Harvey had fully backed Charles I’s grant [of Maryland] to Cecilius Calvert … a direct affront to Virginian planter expansionist ambitions. [99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 140-1

Dependence upon the larger plantation owner with access to resources fostered political dependence –however liberal the Virginia franchise was (and it was remarkably liberal even by today’s standards). The plantation settlement was no Eden that fostered democracy or an equalitarian community. What it did foster was a colony in which larger landowners dominated smaller ones, and the great bulk were renters or workers, even if freeholders, for the big guy. Not surprisingly the larger of the big guys got themselves appointed to the Council of State, and the middle rank elected to the House of Burgesses, and to the local courts-council.

As we have seen, this was all in place by the time Harvey become governor. Harvey’s land and anti-company proclivities therefore tied in nearly all who needed land to raise tobacco–providing a solid base of support in each plantation settlement against Harvey, while paradoxically, considerable resentment against the privileged large planters. In this sense the larger planters in each settlement complex-hundred-shire, whatever their rivalries, had a need to join together, develop a shared society, to manage their community, and find a way to work out their differences.

So we have come full loop to see how a larger planter class naturally developed by the time of Harvey. It was this planter grouping that developed very serious concerns with Claiborne’s venture–and his corporation’s mastery over exporting and importing, logistics and finance, and its centralized export of their tobacco on which they were absolutely dependent. Wherever the planter class resided in settled Tidewater it looked with a measure of fear at the prospect of having to deal with this new corporation controlling their life.

The Claiborne Clique might be able to get its act together to pass key legislation in the Council of State, but the Burgesses was another matter entirely–and the Council of State, composed of a great number of members not directly tied into the Clique was able to check and stop legislation. In this effort, interestingly, Harvey, however disliked, was an ally. In large measure, both Harvey and the non-Claiborne planter class secured their strength from their dominance of local offices, and accordingly, we see the key legislation in 1632 and 1634 that developed and then created a series of empowered county governments. We also see a measure of separation from the Council of State and the House of Burgesses.

Claiborne’s venture inadvertently served as catalyst for political institutionalization as a defense to preserve the core element of planter wealth and status: the individual plantation. To defend their plantations the planter class resisted Claiborne and united with Harvey when they were threatened, but the former used Harvey to strengthen their dominance over the individual settlements and the aggregation of settlements-plantation within their county.

, consciously and unconsciously created in 1631, a particular and inconsistent provincial policy-making mode or approach persisted through 1634. Unstable, that approach erupted in 1635 and a new and different approach replaced it into 1639. In the remainder of this section we shall explore in greater detail the issues, concerns and dynamics of these years, demonstrating how the planter class took positions counter to the Claiborne Clique, but also uncover issues and concerns that separated them from their ally Governor John Harvey. In a latter section we shall then describe how the Claiborne Clique and the Planter class joined in the ouster of Harvey–and in the following sections set up a policy system that rejected the Claiborne venture, and united the Conquistador largest planters in a shared policy system that will serve as the core for Virginia’s extended colonial years through to, during, and after the American Revolution.

Return of the Virginia Company-Dorset Commission, the King’s proposed tobacco contract, the use of Dutch ships and the financial relations developed by each plantation owner (i.e. the decentralization of export and import)–and Maryland and Claiborne’s isolation from his former allies, after the Claiborne Clique fractured piece by piece during the three years, under attack from Maryland and the King. Left in the shadows, of course, is the small planter, the renter, indentured servant.

Finally, and in many ways especially important, was the general state of tobacco in Virginia, and in particular the depression in tobacco prices that had taken place since 1628-9. If one looks at tobacco production statistics it is very evident that in absolute tons exported, Virginia tonnage had exploded in the twenties and even in the thirties. But that statistic was deceiving. “From early on , the bulk of the planters faced two interrelated problems; on the one hand, plummeting tobacco prices, resulting from what seemed to be an infinitely elastic supply; on the other hand, the relatively high cost of provisions, reflecting the restricted amounts brought in by the merchants who controlled the trade. The result was widespread planter debt”. [99] Robert Brenner, p. 129

Simply put, the planters had responded to lower tobacco prices by expanding production and selling more tonnage at a lower price. Overproduction reduced prices still lower, and forced planters to concentrate even more on tobacco, foregoing staples–thereby increasing their dependence on Indian corn, however obtained. More land was needed, more servants for a workforce required, and more provisions were necessary. Who, the reader may ask were among the principal merchants who exploited the provisioning and benefited from its profits–once again as Brenner observes “it was the special ability of the new merchant leadership and their friends on the Virginia Council to take advantage of the intensifying pressures within the Virginia tobacco economy” [99] Robert Brenner, p. 129. To put some names on these evil weevils, the merchants were Thomason, Claiborne, Tucker, and now Mathews who had joined with them.

[In search of] avenues of opportunity for new investors seeking the chance to break into the English commercial system … men [who] were often merchants or from middling gentry families … locked out of the more lucrative trade of the East indies by established London merchant [adventurers like Smythe] and spurred by the excitement of the tobacco market traveled to the colony where they cornered both the market and the government. William Claiborne, Samuel Mathews and William Tucker were examples to these emerging elites who obtained seats on the Council of State. Organizing their interests into syndicates they began gaining title to or patenting the land acquired from the hundreds, formerly under company dominion–and the new lands seized from the Indians [99] Ronald Heinemann, John G. Kolp, Anthony S. Parent Jr., and William G Shade, Old Dominion, New Commonwealth: a History of Virginia, 1607-2007 (University of Virginia Press, 2007), p. 34

The Claiborne Clique were primary examples of what Brenner calls “the new merchants” who had replaced the old now gone merchant-adventurers such as Thomas Smythe, Earl of Warwick and his cohorts. The lesson they had learned from the failure of the Virginia Company was to move on, stick to their knitting by concentrating on the British East India Company and developing more a trading post colonial experience than a permanent settlement. Smythe had died, Edwin Sandys not long after, but these men’s departure left a vacuum in the Virginia merchant community. That the stockholder-based Virginia Company could no longer find investors in Virginia, had been the basic reason why the Company failed in the first place. The merchants that replaced them “were for the most part men of obscure origins … who enjoyed the advantage of first hand acquaintance with the colonies, either as ship masters or actual settlers” [99] Wesley Frank Craven, White, Red, and Black: the Seventeenth Century Virginia (W. W. Norton & Company, 1971), pp. 22-3

There is a “big picture” that provides a measure of clarity to the developing split between the typical tobacco planter of size and the budding colonial merchant adventurers who were replacing the established old school merchant adventurers associated with the Virginia Company. Stuart Bruchey valuable perspective calls attention to the key function of acquiring capital for Virginia’s domestic investment; in essence, lacking a currency, and without even the minimal support provided by the traditional London merchant community, where did post Virginia Company get its investment capital?

Bruchey posits that “the private plantations, a method of uniting English capital, the labor of indentured servant or slave, and the resident management of the planter, emerged from these failures” [of merchant adventurers and Virginia Company]. ‘Venture’ and ‘Capital’, previously united in the person of the English absentee investor [Company shareholder or Merchants settling up the Hundreds plantations], split off from each other: the venturer now came in person to America to manage his enterprise and drew upon English capital in the form of mercantile credit [99] Stuart Bruchey, the Roots of American Economic Growth: 1607-1861 (Harper Torchbooks,1968), p. 32.

In essence, Bruchey argues the plantation as the basic unit of production, finance, and government was the vehicle by which colonialist obtained they capital in the form of loans and credit. In this we can see how the plantation provided the muscle for the “tilt” in Virginia governance–and we can see how the plantation owner, the vortex of that fused dynamic, became an economic and political elite, but an elite that owed its existence and such prosperity as it could hack from the wilderness on debt and credit from London, principally.

That debt, limiting as it was in the 1630’s, grew with each passing decade and depression in tobacco prices. By the end of the golden era of Virginia planters, around the 1740’s and 1750’s, it grew to be a serious burden, a chain binding tobacco planting and elite status to British (Scottish) factors that had become unsustainable. In breaking this chain, we will see Virginia planters, switching away from tobacco, commencing trans-Appalachian land development in development corporations, and those who did not (Jefferson for example) degenerating into a sort of permanent fiscal instability verging on bankruptcy. That fiscal instability stood at the bottom of the elite unrest that expressed itself in the drift to independence and revolution of the post 1760’s Virginia. In time, it would lead to the great shift away from tobacco by Virginians in the 1830’s and 1840’s.

Thus the decentralization of Virginia investment capital, issued to plantation owners by foreign creditors, led to creation of a Virginia elite that based its fortunes, fragile though they might be, on both debt and tobacco grown on their individual plantations. Those plantations, the bastion of their economic power were harnessed early on–as we can see by the very early 1630’s, to the weak and very fragile political institutions left over the defunct Virginia Company, to the institutions of governance in post-Company Virginia.

With the plantation owners as the equivalent of a modern political boss, a durable style of politics and governance was launched in Virginia– a style, that I assert, continued through the Byrd political machine of the mid and even late twentieth century. As the twig was bent in the decades following the transition from the Virginia Company, we see it developing into a more solid branch-trunk through the remainder of the colonial period. It was to the plantation that Berkeley will turn as he settles royalist refugees in the Northern Neck, the Fall Line and Piedmont–and that plantation was as tied to the credit of the British factors as it was to the Tidewater establishment that other royalists refugees took over through marriage or the dying out of the First Generation planter elite.

Every so often the reader must bear with me as I rave on in futuristic impacts. Skepticism is appropriate, but in our history we encounter “turning points”, now long forgotten, when one path or another is chosen and the other left behind. The Claiborne vs. Planters paths is a good example. Accordingly I move deeper into understanding the “planter’s path” to see how that path could exert certain planter behaviors that would be precluded by following the Claiborne path.

Therefore, another attribute of routing foreign investment/credit through plantation owners was that the the bulk of Virginia’s capital for economic growth was linked to tobacco, the plantation and its workforce, and the prosperity and stability of its ownership. Such decentralized capital investment fortified the position and influence of the emerging planter class. While not without its weaknesses (debt) and its fragility (export prices/logistics, i.e. war) the decentralized flow of capital strengthened the autonomy of action that allowed individual plantation owners to construct each his own way of life, in his estate and countryside, and, with vigor, to be able to withstand pressures to displace him and his fellow planters by shifting the power balance from local to provincial, and, less noticed to dare to ignore the well-known wishes of English colonial trade agencies.

That this autonomy becomes observable in the early 1630’s suggest it grew out of the flux and transition from the demise of the Virginia Company, and the emergence of a new merchant class that replaces the merchant adventurers of that Company. McCusker & Menard observe how that autonomy would frustrate the ends of early English colonial trade policy, creating in Virginia something akin to a 17th century free trade zone:

It should not be at all surprising that colonial interests, intent on controlling their own economy to benefit themselves, sometimes did things that conflicted with metropolitan interests [English colonial trade regulations]. The earliest governmental measures taken by the colonies were in the pre-1650 era, when few, if any, imperial regulations were in force. The colonists most intensive period of activity in this regard, from the late 1630’s to the mid-1640’s, was conditioned by the breakdown of English government during the Civil War. This was accompanied in the colonies by a severe depression from which only they could and did deliver themselves–or so they thought. Thus the colonists accustomed to managing on their own, largely ignored the Act of 1651 (First Navigation Act], and they paid scant attention to it when it reappeared in 1660 [Second Navigation Act]. By then Massachusetts, Virginia, Barbados and the other colonies could point to mercantilist theory and to several decades of practice, which they believed entitled them to considerable autonomy in their economic affairs [99] John J. McCusker & Russell R. Menard, the Economy of British America. 1707-1789 (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, University of North Carolina Press), 1985-1991), p. 48

It is this autonomy that in Virginia’s case, also allowed the planter elite to oppose the royal governor, ignore (for a considerable awhile) English colonial trade policy, and in reality, not only depose our John Harvey, but put our hero, Governor William Berkeley in forced retirement for almost a decade. It was this autonomy that Cromwell activated in his attack on Catholic Maryland in the 1650’s, and it was this reformed grouping that resisted future royal governors to the very end of 1775.

One might hypothesize that it was this autonomy that got Virginia, the Ohio Company, a royal governor who had “gone native”, and George Washington into triggering the French and Indian War through their actions at Fort Necessity, i.e. downtown Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. The flow of investment capital to plantation owners allowed them to develop and exercise a particular bi-polar sense of “freedom and liberty” that amazingly brought 1790 democracy to the new American nation.

the Exercise of Autonomy and Planter Opposition to Claiborne & Revamped Virginia Company

Whatever its heritage and past mal-administration, the possibility the return of a reformed company, updated to reflect the 1631 realities, would put an end to the paralyzing insecurity the King had injected into land titles, stability of governance institutions (Council, Burgesses, Assembly and shire decentralization), and the awarding of past and future headrights. So it was, with considerable joy when news was received in early November that the Dorset Commission recommended return of a charter to a reformed Virginia Company. This was true for both the planters at large, and the conquistadors-now merchants of the Claiborne Clique. Why? The bond that each shared in the viability of their land titles, their workforce indenture contracts, and a certain measure of security over their own affairs imparted by the political institutions left behind by the Company, institutions whose powers remained unspecified and at risk from a king who would not commit publicly to their continuance. That he had repudiated the equivalents in 1609 Irish Ulster Plantation was still in the back of their uneasy minds. So as Thornton suggests despite the open and obvious conflict between the Claiborne Clique and the resident planter class, they both wanted a restoration of Virginia Company rule to finally end what seemed to be an indefinite, almost existential insecurity:

Despite the fact that the relationship between the two factions seems clear, we may well ask why the Virginians were anxious to achieve the restoration of the Company. [The planters in particular] would hardly profit after all, from the reestablishment of the trade monopoly. The answer … seems to lie in the peculiar value which the Virginians placed upon their estates and other property [indentured servants] to accumulate which they had undergone so many hardships. The rules of Virginia in this period were men who held their high position by virtue of their ability to gouge wealth from the hostile environment. The ownership of property represented for them, many of whom came from relatively humble [or middling] backgrounds the attainment of a measure of security-and security was a desperately sought goal on the frontier. Even the most well-to-do among the [Claiborne Clique] were not wealthy. Most of them held estates of three to five hundred acres, much of the land uncultivated. Other Virginians held even smaller plots … In such a situation the cool calculation of the London businessman seeking profits gave way to the feverish race for the accumulation of the trappings of stability, security and social attainment. The chief among these trappings was land. Its acquisition provided psychological rewards quite apart from any economic benefits [99] J. Mills Thornton III, the Thrusting Out of Harvey, (the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 76, No. 1,Jan 1968)p. 20, quote p.22

In this we can hear echoes of such a psychological bond two hundred thirty years later with Scarlet O’Hara (and her father] and their plantation Tara–as Dad tells her “land is the only thing in the world worth fighting for … because it is the only thing that lasts“. [It is very interesting to contrast that with the Native American conception of land ownership]

As Pares notes the decentralization of investment flows from the Virginia Company to the individual plantation owners-investors began during the Company period and was tied into the use of Hundreds by the Company as an investment scheme (“a colony within a colony”) to attract investor-owned joint stock corporations to open up new territory, import a workforce, and establish an economic base.

The [Virginia] company had ceased to exist as a single enterprise [that enjoyed an exclusive monopoly over economic investment], and had begun to dissolve into separate commercial joint stocks and separate colonies: each year’s magazine, or corporate cargo for the company, was financed by a different set of subscribers from the last, and side by side with the common enterprise of the company, there were some thirty or forty ‘private plantations’, financed by groups of subscribers of whom some were members of the original company, while others were not. When the company itself was taken away [stripped of its charter], some of these sub-companies survived, and when they too dissolved, the colonists contrived to carry on the plantation [hundreds] by themselves [99] Richard Pares, Merchant and Planters (Economic History Review at the University Press (Cambridge), 1960), p.13.

Under pressure emanating from its flirtation with bankruptcy, and its inability to attract conventional merchant-adventurer investment the headright incentive was intended to empower an investor group to pay its own way to bring in/sustain a workforce and hack a plantation out of the hinterland. To this end, the investor group was empowered with authority that was for all practical purposes, governmental, i.e. commanders, and representation in the shareholder annual meetings, the General Assembly.

Accordingly, the private plantation, housed in a larger administrative-financial-governance unit, the Hundred, became not just the workhorse of Virginia’s economic base, but its equivalent of a community, isolated from other private plantations, and very much on its own. By the early 1630’s (after about fifteen years of development, experiment, and reaction to events) the plantation housed the controlling elite of politics and economy, and a visible leadership we have labeled as the plantation conquistadores–activists who personified the various elements of Virginia’s settlement nexus: seizure of land from tribes, self-defense from tribes, amassing larger and larger multiple plantations from widows, new lands, and acquisition of older ones–and entry into the provincial political institutions, the Burgesses, and chiefly the Council of State.

Dominant, visible, violent at times, and powerful in the impact on Virginia governance and Indian affairs, the conquistadores were a subset of plantation owners. Not all plantation owners were conquistadors, most were quite content in establishing and expanding their own network of plantations and managing the day-to-day problems of clearing, production, harvest, and export. By today’s expectations, they were of middling size, with small to moderate workforces composed of freeholders, renters, sharecroppers, and indentured servants/slaves.

It was these hundreds of plantations that were the mainstay of the economic base, and the potential members of the emerging Virginia planter class. By the nature of the tobacco beast that devoured soil rapidly, and compelled frequent movement into new fields, if not plantations, the volatility of plantation ownership was huge–and it necessarily, if not inevitably, led to a concentration of larger owners over time–with the unfortunate falling into the non-owner class. The nature and character of the plantation, that it in essence substituted for the town and settlement, must be understood. While it grew and evolved through the seventeenth century, becoming more robust, defined, and differentiated in the eighteenth, from the start the plantation possessed characteristics that it carried into the American Revolution and beyond:

The plantation differentiated Virginia agriculture from that of other communities in old England or the Northern and Middle colonies. The plantation made the Chesapeake society unique. Unlike the traditional American farm [homestead], a tobacco estate was virtually a little society in itself. Out of thousands of acres, owned by well-to-do planters, only small areas were actually cleared and under cultivation at one time; most of their lands were still forest. Moreover each large holding was usually divided into several units in order to secure more efficient production: one would contain the ‘mansion house’ where dwelt the owner and his family, others, similarly composed were operated by overseers or leased by white tenant farmers. Each unit, or ‘quarter’ had its gang [workforce]… Rounding out the population of the plantation were a few white indentured servants, who customarily performed the tasks requiring highly skilled artisans [eg, blacksmiths] [99] Carl Bridenbaugh, Seat of Empire: the Political Role of Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg (Colonial Williamsburg, Henry Holt& Co, 1958), p. 4

Size, whatever its disadvantages, meant more security, and status, and in the end, the expression “follow the money”, i.e. securing the capital to beat one’s competition and plant next years crop was the make or break factor. Knowing capital investors, or acquiring access to them by kinship, luck, location, or simple creativity was the path to entry into the planter class that was forming by the 1630’s. To accent the security each plantation developed self-sufficiency to the degree it could afford and technology permitted. Access to export, the pier on an accessible and secure waterway was king in the Tidewater.

With storage units nestled nearby, the pier accessed ships, ship captains with access to investors/workforce, and provided volume as all nearby tobacco farmers could contract with the plantation owner for its use–and access, directly or indirectly to his financing. Ships cruised the rivers, bringing provisions/people in, and carrying tobacco out. Ships, their owners and the captains, were the middlemen for investment, indenture, and export and import. The distinction between ship captain and plantation land owner melted with time (consider Ralph Hamor).

1. Economic Change and Clashing Between Emerging Classes Cause Institutional Political Development

The Dorset Commission became the lightning rod and generator of Virginia political action and concern. The Commission was awarded the responsibility for the determination of the colony’s future, kicking Virginians–and Harvey–into the margins. It was clear from its beginning the Dorset Commission was loaded up with pro-Virginia Company shareholders, past officials, and those, like its “customs farmer” chair John Wolstenholme who saw an opportunity to regain control over the Virginia colony and in particular the “monopoly over its trade”. Within a matter of a few months, the Dorset Commission announced its recommendation to reissue a revamped charter to the Virginia Company.

Of great concern was the membership of Lord Chichester (and several associated with him), governor of the Irish Ulster Plantation. Chichester in Ireland had faced a similar situation years before, and he had proposed and carried out the systematic takeover of Irish held lands in Ulster, evicting all former owners regardless of their social status. The fate of the Irish farmer was most horrendous, and over a decade they were simply deprived of the exercise of their rights as Englishmen as they tried legally to resist the dispossession. The peers that replaced Irish peers were mostly merchants and adventurers. As Thornton observes “it was only natural… that the appointment of the [Dorset] commissioners aroused considerable apprehension among the Virginians“.

Simply put Virginian landowners feared they would suffer the same fate as had befallen the Irish landlords and freeholders [99] J Mills Thornton III, “the Thrusting out of Governor Harvey: a Seventeenth Century Rebellion”, the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 76, No. 1 (January, 1968), p. 14. With this dire future, the resurrection of the Virginia Company, an action which seemed likely at that time, was much more the preferred direction–whatever the Virginians thought of the Company period and the Company officials, the return of the Virginia Company offered the security of the Company recognizing the legitimacy and legal rights of its past actions and decisions in Virginia. It was no great love for the Company period, or loyalty to it that prompted their willingness to be governed by the Company again.

The reaction in Virginia, save for Harvey, was calming. That news, received by Mathews in December, prompted him and the Clique on the Council of State to carve out an agreement with Harvey ending the policy bickering within the Council of State that disrupted governance badly, which, if continued, might reflect itself on the actions of the Dorset Commission as it prepared the Virginia Company charter for implementation. It was at this point, however, that the concerns of the planter community regarding the Claiborne Clique’s northern venture became paramount.

Their fear was that Harvey, earlier in 1631, had sent to the Dorset Commission his opposition to Claiborne’s Council of State-approved trade monopoly to a corporation established by the Clique to conduct its trade in its northern venture. This monopoly prevented any non-Clique Virginia planters from “seeking our best market” [by using Dutch ships] if they were to utilize the magazine of the new Claiborne Company. In his opposition to this, Harvey sarcastically attacked Tucker’s proposed provisioning “magazine” that set, what Harvey regarded as, absurdly low prices for the monopoly’s purchase of tobacco from Virginians. allowing its sale in England at markedly higher prices. Harvey’s fear was the Dorset Commission could come to an agreement with the Clique and convey its powers to the latter.

The clique, knowing Harvey’s position, wanted to pacify (and distract) Harvey. So Mathews entered into negotiations to end the bitter and polarizing opposition of the Council of State to the governor’s actions and agenda. Mathews likely hoped the offer to set Harvey free to pursue his agenda in the General Assembly about to be convened, Harvey would have the opportunity to achieve some of his desired goals, and accordingly would be inclined to restrain his advocacy to the Dorset Commission on the Virginia Company matter.

That opportunity to act freely, when offered the opportunity by Mathews, “was joyously [received] … and a formal statement of accord was drawn up” [99] Thornton, pp. 19-20. The agreement produced a harvest of legislation that we will discuss below. It should be mentioned, however, the agreement did little to latent the tension that had existed between Harvey’s agenda and the Clique within the Council. The Council did take as positive the acceptance of the Council’s position regarding the role of the Council relative to the governor’s decision-making. While Harvey continued to advocate the king for change in his powers vis-à-vis the Council, in day-to-day action from that point on he abided by the Council’s demand they were equal partners in the vote with the Governor, but that the governor did enjoy a veto.

The 1631 decision to set in motion the creation of a new charter for the Virginia Company, however, rapidly bogged down. “Dorset, having the ear of the king, had the initial advantage … and on November 25, was able to gain a royal order to the attorney general to proceed to draw up a new charter. The opponents to the project, however, quickly submitted a lengthy negative argument to the throne. This document cause the king, not noted for his decisiveness to postpone final decision on the Dorset report” [99] J Mills Thornton III, “the Thrusting out of Governor Harvey: a Seventeenth Century Rebellion”, the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 76, No. 1 (January, 1968), p. 15. The basis for the issuance of the new charter was the recommendation of the Dorset Commission, “that a new Virginia Company be created to take the place of the old, with all the latter’s rights, goods, liberties and privileges, saving to the king, however, ‘the supreme and royal power of the government” [99] Charles A. Andrews, the Colonial Period of American History: the Settlements, Vol 1, p. 201

Lost in the discussion was the decision to reissue a new Virginia Company charter was not the only recommendation of the Commission. The Commission also recommended the governance of Virginia be retained by the king personally, and it also proposed a governance system in which ” a president and council be named in England to have general oversight of the colony; that a governor and council [of state] in the colony be continued to have a general oversight of local affairs; and that the governor, council, and planters meeting [Burgesses] in their general assembly … should be authorized to make laws ‘ correspondent to the lawes of England, and but probationary onely until confirmed [in London]. [99] Charles A. Andrews, the Colonial Period of American History: the Settlements, Vol 1, p. 201

The reader is forgiven if she believes that somehow these two recommendations conflict with each other. I think so too. How was the new Virginia Company charter to be reconciled with royal government–both of which seemingly were concurrent in their exercise of authority–is simply left unanswered. Unsurprisingly Andrews than comments “So many and so vigorous were the protests against the recommendations of the commission … that suggestion went no further, and no Virginia Company was ever formed. The Proposal [to reissue the Virginia Company charter] was [eventually] rejected … , as it had been before because it was ‘altogether inconvenient for his Majesties service both here and there” [99] Charles A. Andrews, the Colonial Period of American History: the Settlements, Vol 1, p. 201. In 1633 and even in 1640, the Company itself would submit petitions for a new charter, requests were went nowhere also.

This meant the recommendation stood, but the development of a new charter was suspended indefinitely. That opened up an extended period in which the players could make their case to Dorset, and, of course to the king. The Dorset Commission still continued its exercise of authority over Virginia [and the other colonies] and became the pivot point for handling the discussion associated with its first set of recommendations. In short it was not clear what the status of the first recommendations was, nor how temporary was the stall in implementation of a Virginia Company charter. Everything was “on the table”; its just that no one could find the table.

The Clique, up to this point, took no known formal position on the matter, although private correspondence clearly demonstrates a lack of fear regarding the Company’s return to power, and some sympathy. Having just concluded its own “Maryland” agreement which securing its Maryland trade monopoly and tobacco pricing, as well as “magazine-like provisioning store on Kent Island, enjoyed its own access and membership on the Commission but abstained from any visible action or comment. Seemingly it felt comfortable in the issuance of a new charter to the Virginia Company, and likely was hopeful of securing an enhanced position in the new Company’s organization.

Yet in 1632, with the Dorset Commission’s decision to revive the Virginia Company Virginia’s elite could move on to other matters The authority to administer the colony, until the charter was signed, lay within the purview of the Dorsett Council. Hence, in this interim period of James’s indecision (which lasted to 1634), Virginians lobbied and reported to the Commission and Harvey wrote it for guidance and accountability. So that favorable items would be included in the charter, and unfavorable ones like monopolies on tobacco magazine pricing would not, the Commission was the place to advocate. Accordingly from very early 1632 we can see the Council of State and the Assembly (dominated by Burgesses, Harvey and dissident Council of State members) take opposing positions on powers of the revamped Virginia Company regarding the exercise of monopolistic pricing/regulation over tobacco exports, and domination and pricing of the “provisions” or import of goods for Virginian consumption and use. The Company magazine was the focal point of interest to the Clique, and the great fear of both the planters and Harvey.

If there was a surprise in the clash between Clique and Planters, it was that the Maryland-focused Claiborne Clique was able to exert commanding influence on the Council of State decisions. Always a minority of the Council, the Clique mustered the power of being composed of the largest tobacco exporters in Virginia. Probably equally important the Clique was highly motivated and focused on the Maryland venture to make the time and effort to attend its meetings and not infrequently muscle its way on the voting. Whatever was going on behind the scenes, the Council approved a special commission and awarded to it several monopolies and accommodated Kent Island by extending the electoral franchise and its entry into the Burgesses. More to the point, the Clique was able to secure rights to send petitions and letters regarding the revamped Virginia Company to the Dorset Commission.

The Clique already dominated Virginia’s tobacco export by virtue of their scale of production or their ability to develop and utilize tobacco export infrastructure to reinforce their position and bring to heel many smaller uses who could not export effectively individually without their assistance. Without doubt the key power their ability to favorably access the headright powers to secure indentured labor. Harvey’s restraint on issuing new land and headright approvals for royal owned lands, seemingly to the advantage of the non-Clique planters, actually reinforced the status quo dominance of the Clique, and sharpened the competition for sale of existing land titles that were beyond the control of Harvey.

Still in early 1632, with the Assembly in session, the Assembly seized the initial advantage to advocate its position and program to the Commission. In a formal position in early March, they developed a robust and specific program, accompanied by requests for decisions from the Commission. Stressed by the decline in tobacco prices, a drought, and the insecurity of being a minority European in an isolated Native American wilderness, the Assembly planters were already highly apprehensive regarding the Claiborne Maryland venture.

The fear of Clique control over a London-based Company magazine was as close to an absolute hell as they could imagine. With their proven ability to affect Council decision-making, the Clique struck fear into the planter community, and with the Assembly as their only effective means to protect themselves from a possible Clique monopoly they had to act fast to ensure the Dorset Commission did not grant the Virginia Company, or the Claiborne Clique, powers over a new Company magazine-or for tobacco export regulations.

On March 6, 1632, the Assembly approved a petition to the Dorset Commission, in which they outlined the planter position on the matter. Brenner summarizes that position as expressed in the petition:

Their program was straightforward: to use the Virginia Assembly to put limits on tobacco production and [therefore] keep up tobacco prices; so far as possible to compel planters to produce their own supplies [thus limiting the need for provisions], especially food within the colony; and to overcome their dependence on the merchants [Claiborne Clique] by destroying privileged trading syndicates, and especially by opening up the colony to free trade, in particular with the Dutch [by using Dutch ships in contravention to English colonial policy]. In attempting to implement these measures the planters had no doubt that their main obstacle was that small group of merchant-planter-councilors [on the Council of State, i.e. the Claiborne Clique] that in these years was attempting to secure a stranglehold on the tobacco economy [99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 130

In the petition the Assembly further explained that their rising debt levels was tied to the export of tobacco, and that absent restrictions on production by the Assembly, the logic was for individual planters to increase volume thereby further lowering the price and raising their debt levels. They pointedly attacked those who sought to make them “a slave to other men’s purses“, and specifically targeted, by name, Captain William Tucker.

It was clear that “in the back of the planter’s mind” was the approved magazine allowed to the Claiborne Kent Island venture could be in a position to be adopted by the Dorset Commission–that meant the Claiborne Clique could provision not only of its commission-approved territories, but the larger colony itself. To add substance and specificity to their position, the Assembly approved the setting of a minimum price for tobacco, and they asked the Dorset Commission to approve it. If the Commission did this, Virginia planters would be in position to restrict tobacco production and move to diversity their crop into staples and food for provisioning. [99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 130-1 In short, the planters, using the Burgesses and Assembly, had coalesced and had matured sufficiently to realize–and act–to regulate themselves.

Amazingly on the very same day, March 6, 1632, “the Council took the additional step of making it clear to the Dorset Commission that it supported restricting the trade in Virginia tobacco to the English market–on the very same day the Assembly petitioned for free trade. The battle between the Council and the Assembly commenced.

Predictably, the Claiborne Clique reacted, using the Council of State and direct access to the Dorset Commission as their vehicles. Several months after the March Assembly petition, the Council approved a monopoly, the sole right to market (export) the entire colony’s tobacco crop to a new syndicate or joint stock corporation for three years. The corporation’s governance consisted of members of the Clique, including as principals Tucker, Thomson and ally, the large merchant planter partner, Thomas Stone.

At the time of action all were members of the Council of State and Claiborne was the colony’s Secretary of State. However, they did it, the Council secured the signature of an apparently unwilling Governor Harvey, making it a legal commission. In his letter to the Privy Council forwarding the act to the Privy, Harvey urged them to reject the act, insinuating they had compelled him by virtue of their existing stranglehold of export to sign the Council act. In that letter Harvey asserted the act created “an official monopoly … to use their powerful market position to extract exorbitant profits from the planters” [99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 131

Pulling off what could be described as coup over the Virginia economy, the Clique was able to further flesh out their program so to achieve the desired powers in the reconstituted Virginia Company. They wanted to secure from the Dorset Commission a company in London that would enjoy a monopoly of trade with and to England from which would be excluded all non-English ships, merchants, and factors (anti Dutch), a power which allowed them to effectively set the price from sellers for such tobacco and other goods. If the planters wanted free trade with Dutch and use of Dutch ships as a means to add competition into the pricing of tobacco, the Clique had countered with their own monopoly and powers to set prices for the Virginia Company.

In mid-1633, following a strong lobbying effort from ten Virginia planters (several members of the Assembly), the Privy Council revoked the legislation approved by the Council establishing the Tucker et all monopoly. In response in August, William Tucker wrote the Privy Council “asking that the Virginia Company be resurrected and demanding that the government take action [i.e. enforce] to exclude the Dutch from Virginia commerce. Referring the matter to a committee and meeting with Tucker, Stone and other Clique members, the Privy Council, however, did exclude the Dutch from trade with Virginia. However, no decision was made on the charter for the Virginia Company, and the matter was again deferred. In March 1634, the King replaced the Dorset Commission with a new Commission, headed by Archbishop Laud. The Virginia Company charter was never issued.

The clash between emerging and divergent economic classes, combined with the jockeying and clashes with Governor Harvey, created an awkward but noticeable development in the identity and use of the the two political institutions (Council of State and Assembly-Burgesses), and the authority of the governor as an independent, and dominating, actor in policy-making. The issues were serious and fundamental to the configuration of Virginia’s future economic base. They also presented an opportunity for a path away from an near exclusive monopoly of plantation tobacco export-a breaking up of the tobacco monoculture. The Claiborne venture was a real opportunity, that in 1631 was not a pie-in-the-sky concept-path doomed to failure. But whatever wound up happening, the Claiborne venture stirred up politics and economic interests to cause the use of the existing political institutions in ways that genuinely enhanced their role in serious policy making, and established different constituencies for the two branches of the Assembly, setting them apart from the governor–and each other.

At this point we are only midway in this political-economic development episode. As we continue the tale of the ouster of John Harvey–through 1638-9–there will be more to add. But the reader no doubt is appreciating the importance of the clash between the Council of State and the Assembly-Burgesses as a potentially critical opportunity for a different economic and political future for Virginia. At this point the battle is fought in London, with the Dorset Commission as the representative of the sovereign. It is already evident the Commission is not able to quickly resolve the divergent issues, and is unable to definitively proceed to the reincorporation of the Virginia Company–something is getting in the way of its coming to a decision. Accordingly, in a section ahead we will return to that topic. In the interim period before a decision on the Virginia Company and its powers is made, Governor John Harvey is once again injected incrementally into the role of a major player in Virginia’s policy system.

2. John Harvey 1632 Thru 1634

With Virginia’s future in the hands of the Dorset Commission, Harvey was pushed off to the margins of Virginia policy-making–not at all to his liking or congruent with his personality. In some ways, privately mostly, he gave voice his concerns. What rankled most, it seems, was his recent compliance with his 1631″monopoly tobacco concession” made to the Claiborne venture (see above for specifics).

After the Dorset Commission announced its decision (1632) to restart the Virginia Company charter, Harvey, for his own reasons, stridently took issue with the Claiborne monopoly concession, in ways congruent with the planter’s petition to the Commission. In so doing he attacked by name members of the Claiborne Clique, calling attention to the exorbitant profits likely to accrue. In addition, Harvey’s natural instincts led him to advocate a free trade policy, using Dutch shipping when necessary to reduce export costs and increase Virginia prosperity.

As the gap between the Claiborne Clique (and the Council of State) and planter class (Burgesses) increased in the three years between 1632 and 1634, Harvey largely sided with the Virginia tobacco planters. So despite his even greater unpopularity, Harvey acquired some leverage with which to conduct his agenda. As we have already commented, and will describe in other modules, some of Harvey’s agenda was quite responsible, and for his reasons, in particular, he raised the capacity and effectiveness of Virginia hundreds–now shire–system of local government, for example. Not popular with Virginians, Harvey’s Indian relations were vastly superior to that desired by the Clique and the general population. His ideas on regulating tobacco to restrict quantity, and to raise its quality through inspection were economically sound. His efforts to diversity the economy, while lacking the scale to transform the economic base, were a step in the right direction.

But during 1633, it became more clearer with each ship bearing news from London, that the Dorset Commission, at first managing the pushback from its Virginia Company decision, then breaking into a series of sub-committees with many agendas diverting attention on the Virginia Company–including the tumult unleashed about Maryland, that the Dorset Commission was losing steam, with the King drifting away into other matters besides Virginia. Fading off into the shadows of Court politics, the fate of the Virginia Company became ever more uncertain. In that atmosphere, anxieties returned, and that took away the edge and leeway Harvey had enjoyed as an on the margin governor. As Dorset weakened Harvey became more salient to Virginians–and no one really liked what they saw.

Perhaps the most persistent irritant was Harvey’s differences with Virginian–and the conquistador dominant Council of State, was his Indian policy. That issue never really went away, with incidents from time to time, the externalities of the Palisades Project. The conquistadors “desired to pursue a vigorously aggressive, expansionist policy toward the Indians, thus opening up new regions to white settlement. Harvey on the other hand, sought to make peace with the surrounding tribes and to formalize the territorial status quo”.

On top of this was Harvey’s imposition of a restriction on new use of the headright. “During Harvey’s first four years, he granted but one single headright … and that patent was granted in special circumstances since its recipient, Robert Felgate (a member of the Claiborne Clique) had agreed to settled in Chiskiack, the most dangerous region of the Peninsula”. Both of these policies challenged fundamentally the program, the way of life that both the conquistadors and the planters in general stood for and were pressing for each day. Harvey’s leeway narrowed and the in March 1634, after a short stay, two ships, the Ark and the Dove, set off to the north, settling a colony at St Mary’s in March. The Claiborne Clique’s war against that colony, waged as it had been in London’s Court and Privy politics, now was just a few miles away from Kent Island.

The short stay in Jamestown did no good, for Harvey, the Clique, nor the general population. On board, the two ships transported a new colonial government and governor, Leonard Calvert, brother of Lord Calvert (Cecil), his administration, and an activist settler Thomas Cornwallis (one of sixteen “gentlemen-adventurers” that Virginia would come to know in the following years. Also on board were two Jesuit priests intending to set up a mission to propagate the Catholic faith among the tribes. While most of the settlers were Protestant, there were around three hundred settlers. Calvert carried with him a set of instructions from the King to give to Harvey–and those instructions were to launch a series of actions that tore the roof off Virginia politics.

I sense the King recognized any settlement of Maryland by Calvert would heighten Claiborne’s opposition to the venture–and jeopardize its success. I suspect his royal majesty would have been sufficiently aware Virginian anti-Catholic settlement would seriously rankle Virginia’s Anglicans, Catholicism being in that community a fire bell in the night and a source of an almost militaristic displeasure. Likely, he also knew Virginians were displeased with carving out of their territory into a new and a bit roguish independent, inherently rival neighbor colony. Accordingly he turned to Harvey and instructed him to assist Maryland in their needs. In its first years, he expected Virginia to help Maryland deal with its self-sufficiency; Virginia should help out and send provisions. That caused an uproar in Virginia.

Unmentioned, but one must suspect, implied, was that Harvey was to “keep a lid” on Claiborne, New Kent, and the mechanizations of the Clique. Harvey followed his instructions, in part because his loyalty to his sovereign included a humanitarian impulse to feed and protect the vulnerable colony. Harvey recognized the King’s grant of a colony to Calvert, whatever its wisdom, was the law of the land- the colony was “legal”. From that point on the territory contracted to the Claiborne Clique, Kent Island in particular, was legally that of Maryland, not Virginia.

Claiborne as we shall see shortly entered into a path of active resistance–including military action and privateering. That Claiborne enjoyed the silent, and not too silent, support of his fellow Clique members in the Council of State was to be expected. Accordingly, over the next months drifting into 1635, Mathews, in particular, confronted Harvey personally on this and other relevant matters–and in response Harvey sent a well-known missive to the (former) Chair of the Dorset Commission that Mathews was active, “stirring up combinations” in opposition to Maryland, and him. So did Claiborne, who, as the Secretary of State, carried an official position within Virginia’s government. Claiborne used that position in defense of Kent Island and his corporate venture. Accordingly, in 1634, Harvey fired Claiborne, and named Richard Kemp to replace him as Secretary of State. That as we shall see was a turning point in the relations of the Clique with Harvey

3. the Laud Commission Replaces the Dorset Commission (May, 1634)

Begin Here on -Continue to carry out the politics of Virginia till the coup–Laud Commission in May, the July creation of shires and headright instructions by Laud in Thrusting and Franz.

4. Pre-Coup Maryland-Related Politics

We have already laid out our case why the creation of Maryland, carved out from Virginia without warning or sensitivity, seriously impacts the latter’s (and former as well) political and economic development. True, it happened a long time ago so forget about it and move on. But wielding the metaphor in my book’s title yet one more time–it did bend the twigs of both state trees. The timing, from Virginia’s perspective, was not good. It’s policy and class system was finally taking shape, and while the internal conflict generated sharpened the role, functions and constituencies of its political structures-institutions, the injection of Maryland as a polarizing issue added one complicating dynamic which confused the development, as well as facilitated it.

In this section, I am most concerned with how Maryland added one more log on the fire that was limiting the power of the royal governor. It was a really big log, and because of Claiborne that log burned on for more than thirty odd years. A struggle that long had several phases, and the one we deal with now is the phase between the initial actual settlement of Maryland by Calvert (his son, Cecilius), and the collapse of the Claiborne, Thomason venture around 1638-9, and step back of Claiborne from Virginia politics (the time period in which Harvey’s two administrations (1630-1635, and 1637 to 1639) played out).

By the time this phase is over, the structure and alliance put, together in 1630-31, broke apart, shifted focus–and ended forever any possibility for a merchant-finance-trading-logistics pivot away from Virginia’s tobacco monoculture. From that point on, whatever Claiborne was trying to do with the wreak that was his original business plan between 1644 and 1660, we shall deal with later. Here, the period before the coup of Harvey in the spring of 1635 is primary–and the remainder being either, depending on the reader’s inclination, kicking a dead horse, or putting to rest the first phase of Claiborne’s Maryland venture.

The mechanics of Lord Calvert (son of the George Calvert who maneuvered the charter from the King, but died just previous to its final signing) are of little interest to our purposes.

Suffice it to say Lord Calvert II put together the resources to found a colony, assembled a group of settlers (ironically more Protestant than Catholic), and chartered two vessels, the Ark and the Dove, and finally made his way to St Mary’s (near Annapolis) and set up shop in the winter-spring of 1634. The founding of the colony meant that Claiborne could no longer continue the development of his Kent Island trading post unmolested by Calvert. The post was successful in demonstrating proof of concept regarding the business plan, but the realities of starting a settlement from scratch, with its own distinctive economic base, were too expensive relative to the revenues and profits generated by the scale of an initial fur-trading economy.

This is ironic in that the Virginia planter were mobilized against him Tucker, who had financed a good deal of the Kent Island settlement, because of the exploitation in tobacco and provisioning goods prices that fermented an almost existential fear among planters they would lose their independence to the trading clique. Lacking an accountant, I cannot resolve how these two “realities” came to be, but they did.

When the settlement occurred Claiborne wasted no time in challenging its legality, and taking action to limit its success and effectiveness. From the start, the reader should acknowledge that plantation conquistador, now merchant adventurer, Claiborne was also the Secretary of the Virginia Colony, its Surveyor General, a member of the Governor’s Council (allegedly its single most powerful member), and one of the very top Tobacco production and export plantation owners. His partners sat on both the Dorset and Laud Commissions.

The Claiborne Clique that governed the joint stock corporation which operated Kent Island, could it so choose, develop a formidable opposition to Calvert and St. Mary’s. But it didn’t! Claiborne, for the most part, was left to fend with Maryland alone. The Governor’s Council could have stalled Harvey, possibly, but for more than a year it didn’t. Mathews, it seems, was the swing player, and it would take awhile to bring him on board.

As for his London friends and relatives that joined in partnership around Kent Island, they spent more time protecting and sort outing their many varied interests, than they spent protecting Claiborne’s. With friends like these one doesn’t need enemies. For example, membership on the two Commissions allowed the investment partners to begin, if not complete, their shift to Calvert and his colony, and to switch from Virginia to the new colony for their venture. In their mind, as asserted by Andrews, the Claiborne venture was “in no sense a Virginia undertaking” [99] Andrews, Vol 1, pp. 302-07

Claiborne would have none of that. That no one in London, including the King, was willing to render a definitive opinion on the relationship of Calvert’s colony charter to Claiborne’s trading monopoly commission, the matter found is way to the slow pace of legal action in the English system; it would take years for that decision to be issued. That almost everyone, save Claiborne, saw the underlying reality as Maryland charter was superior probably explains why Claiborne was more or less on his own. Even the King was unwilling to take a stand; he asked Calvert not to attack Claiborne or Kent Island, a request that was not accepted nor implemented in Maryland [99] Grizzard Jr, et al, Jamestown Colony, “William Claiborne“, p. 51.

What complicated matters greatly was that the second Lord Calvert was less the religious advocate than his father, and much more the economic developer. The second Lord Calvert realized the potential of the fur trade, and the possibilities that the trade could achieve. Calvert’s first actions on arrival in St. Mary’s was to hire Henry Fleet, Claiborne’s chief competitor in the venture, and begin direct negotiations with the Indians. It was clear from the start of St Mary’s that fur trading with the Indians was part of the colony’s business plan.

The latter proved very complicated as the Susquehannock were not upset with Claiborne, save that Claiborne was not able to buy and market all the beaver pelts they gathered. They associated the Catholic Marylanders and their Jesuits with the Spanish–and there was no love or trust there. So Claiborne had a leg up with his Indian allies, and he sought to use them to (1) not trade with Calvert & Fleet, and (2) engage and resist the Maryland trading ventures and protect Kent Island, militarily if need be. Too smart to do the latter, Claiborne attempt to lead a group of them in a military assault, saying that he would drive Calvert our to his settlement “even if he had to do it with the Indians in a canoe” [99] Fausz, pp. 67-8.

And here we have it, the first major confrontation of Claiborne and Harvey–and was it a doozy. Harvey was in no position or mood to allow Virginia’s Secretary of the Colony to lead an armed insurrection against Maryland using Indians to boot. He arrested Claiborne and stripped him of his offices in Virginia government. The charge was “animating, practizing (sic) and conspiring with the Indians to supplant the Marylanders” [99] Fausz, p. 68. Harvey did not seem to have the support of the Governor’s Council in the arrest of Claiborne, nor did he share their sympathy with resisting Calvert. But Claiborne was put under arrest anyway, and Harvey appointed Claiborne’s successor, Richard Kemp. The governor’s decisions were not contested.

The immediate impact was Claiborne’s Kent Island settlers took up Claiborne’s cause and actively resisted Calvert and his colony–at least in the sense they would not back away from their fur trade business and vowed to defend themselves from any Maryland attempt to assert sovereignty. Claiborne, himself, was arrested and confined to his estates, but he appears to have assumed some direction over his followers on Kent Island.

Claiborne and his associates had only a trading license, while the title to Kent Island … unquestionably belonged to Lord Baltimore. The latter’s approach to Claiborne was conciliatory, but unyielding in the demand that his title be recognized. Claiborne’s rejection of these advances was partly inspired by strong anti-Catholic convictions. … But Virginia could advance no legal claim to Kent Island, and there must have been some [Virginians] who hesitated to back Claiborne too far lest they lend comfort and support to the old Virginia adventurers [the conquistador-laden Claiborne Clique], who in their current effort to revive the [Virginia Company’s] charter. attacked the validity of Baltimore’s grant. Thus the quarrel continued primarily between Claiborne and Baltimore, both of whom pursued it with uncompromising stubbornness. [99] Wesley Frank Craven, the Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, p. 197.

From the start, Calvert’s Maryland-based leadership did not reflect London-based Lord Calvert’s diplomacy. Maryland, despite the King’s request to defer any action against Claiborne. Truth be told Maryland’s local colony leadership exhibited much of the autonomy and cuss-headedness found among the Virginia elites:

[London-based] Governor Calvert tried unsuccessfully to balance the opportunistic desires of headstrong colonial neighbors with the sometimes idealistic expectations of a distant proprietor who did not fully appreciate local conditions or his brother (the lieutenant governor in residence) {limited] loyalty. Councilor [on the Maryland Council of State] Thomas Cornwallis, Maryland’s leading entrepreneur and top military commander [i.e. merchant conquistador] came closest to the model of the Virginia oligarchs, but [Cornwallis’s] pursuit of self interest often conflicted with Lord Baltimore’s policies and the public’s greater good. With an absentee proprietor almost constantly preoccupied with defending his charter [in London] and trusted appointees focused on making their own fortunes, Maryland and the Calvert alliance suffered from leaders who were divided by duties, distance, and individual distractions. [99] J. Frederick Fausz, Merging and Emerging Worlds in Lois Green Carr, et al, Colonial Chesapeake Society, p. 70

The local Maryland leadership, within two months of landing had negotiated and concluded a fur-trading alliance with the Algonquian Piscataway’s, the overlords of a Confederacy noticeably weaker than Claiborne’s Susquehannock alliance. The object was beaver pelts, but compared to Claiborne Maryland lacked middlemen and access to transatlantic markets–and the English merchant community. To make matters worse for the Marylanders, the Piscataway were deer, not beaver hunters, who had little expertise in the Pennsylvania-Ohio and Great Lakes beaver. The object of this alliance was to displace the Claiborne alliance and simply take over the business plan he had pioneered. Without realizing it, the two English colonial conquistadors were injecting their Indian neighbors with contrasting visions of beaver riches that would, within a handful of years, propel them as serious actors in the northern “beaver wars” of the Iroquois and Algonquian kin. Neither would do well in those multi-decade wars.

Plus, tucked into the alliance were missionary Jesuits, who converted elements of the Piscataway to Catholicism. The Susquehannock were at war with the Algonquian, had already established their beaver trade with Claiborne and the English-Protestants and were not willing to work with the Marylanders. The practical result of these dynamics was that Claiborne and his Kent Island trading venture could, and did, sustain themselves despite the resistance of the Maryland colony. Maryland attacked first, seizing one of Claiborne’s trading vessels, and confiscated some Kent Island trade goods. Governor Harvey did not support these actions, and to the contrary, met with the Marylanders, expressed support for their colony, and provided some assistance to their self-sufficiency efforts [99] J. Frederick Fausz, Merging and Emerging Worlds in Lois Green Carr, et al, Colonial Chesapeake Society (University of North Carolina Press, 1988), p.70-71.

The Kent Islanders struck back in late April 1635, and again on May 10. The series of battles, Claiborne losing the first, and Claiborne winning the second. Several were killed. Five days after the latter, the coup against Governor Harvey commenced.

Claiborne was able to hold Kent Island, Harvey was out, and a friendly to Claiborne Governor’s Council was in power. But it ought be said, that many planters, sympathetic to an extent, did not support Claiborne’s “reckless action” to defend Kent Island as an extension of Virginia. The actual shedding of Virginian blood, however, provoked the patriotism of Virginians and added a virulent anti-Catholicism both of which were turned on Governor Harvey.

Begin Here on Sunday: 5. the King’s Tobacco Contract, the closing of the Chasm between Claiborne Clique and the Planters and the Coup

which necessarily inhibited a unified Council of State position against Harvey. Samuel Mathews further compounded affairs by exhibiting a streak of independence of action. Allied with the merchant-conquistadors on the Maryland venture, he was prone to his own view of matters in other areas. Internal rivalries among both planters and conquistadors injected a bit of volatility as well. To that one can add a general unwillingness of planters as a grouping to engage in politics to the detriment of their plantation and tobacco holdings.

Planters wanted free trade [which Harvey did not as all trade was required to go through England, using English shipping], but which

Moreover, most Virginia planters used Dutch ships to export [English-built/owned ships were few and far between], and the Claiborne clique had taken private and public position against that.

Hence, through 1633, and into 1634 Harvey, intensely disliked, was able to wiggle his way through and around policy initiatives. In 1634, however, the settlement of Maryland by Calvert, the termination of the Dorset Commission and the installation of the radically different Laud Commission placed additional pressures on Harvey, leaving him with less room to maneuver, an increasingly united opposition, and a need to support the unpopular actions and programs of His Majesty. In 1634 Maryland boiled over, but, perhaps even more upsetting to Virginia planters was, the king’s 1635 proposal to require selling of tobacco to the Crown–i.e. a change in the “tobacco contract” which had been haggled out in 1624-8. The last matter had to be regarded as the “third rail” of Virginia politics.

While many historians will identify a “trigger” that led to the Harvey ouster it is my position there were several triggers. Maryland, its settlement and Claiborne’s struggle with Harvey over Kent Island, a major episode of which occurred five days before the ouster is a candidate, it is also clear the king’s preposition to end the traditional tobacco contract on top of the Laud Commission’s lack of sympathy with the exercise of Virginia autonomy, generated enhanced fears that the Virginia Company land titles, and the headrights issued during its administration, were in jeopardy. The Laud decision against the Dorset imposed revival of the Virginia Company fragmented that clique’s internal politics, with the London merchants pursuing new angles in the their colonization plan–and Claiborne going off the cliff in his opposition to Harvey and Maryland, meant that venture was on life support at best.

The commercial pivot from tobacco by significant elements of the plantation conquistador group for all practical purposes had fallen off the policy table. In my estimation, all these combined when council John Potts commenced what soon appeared to be a negotiated strategy to oust Harvey–which predictably generated a response by Harvey that united the Council, and the Burgesses to action.

[A Brief Comment] Before we provide more context to this first year we must take a moment to present in advance the flow of our argument in the next sections. This section will describe the Pre-Maryland phase of the Harvey-Council conflict–a period between 1630 and the midst and end of 1632. In that midst the King will issue a charter to form–from the bowels of Virginia if you will–to establish a new colony, our very own Maryland. That action, so fundamental to Virginia and her interests, not to mention a wild complication to the ambitions of the Virginia elite, changed the nature and, if possible, the intensity of the Council’s opposition to Harvey–and vice versa.

Calvert settles his colony

The reader is seeing the birth of a colony from a perspective not usually developed in a traditional colonial history; we see it through Virginia’s eyes and interests. We will counter balance this bias with footnotes and some observations, but our reference point is the impact of Maryland on Virginia. Having lived in Maryland for eight years, I am sure Marylanders will not mind. [End of Comment]

The Governor’s timing was terrible. The King, upon whom Harvey was accountable, was in the midst of one of the more turbulent periods in the pre-Civil War. If ever Charles was engaged elsewhere than Virginia, this was it. The Thirty Years War was in its typical fury of devastation, war, and fragmentation. Charles conflict with Parliament over finances and his divine right style came to a head in 1629, and it resulted in his sending Parliament packing yet again. That did nothing but make worse his fiscal and financial situation–and he was about to enter into yet another battle with the “bishops” of the Anglican Church. Lord Calvert was critical to his first problem, and made more complicated his second. In June 1632 he issued the charter to Calvert–and Harvey was along for the ride that followed. Peter Ackroyd cites the assessment of a contemporary, the earl of Clarendon to describe the policy-making unleashed by the arrival of Charles I in 1626:

His insecurity led him to adopt the suggestions, or yield to the influence, of men who where less capable than himself. He never really discerned the merits or vices of those around him; he tended to confide in those who were merely boasters and adventurers while ignoring those of real, if silent, merit. The [Privy] council about him consisted of professional courtiers, many of whom had been close to his father, while the others were friends or trusted servants. The principal decisions, however were derived from full council to selective small groups or committees; suspicion and jealousy were therefore rife. [Peter Ackroyd, Rebellion: the History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution (Thomas Dunne Books, 2014), p. 108

Expand on Commission: Dorset to Laud

Enter Lord Calvert and the Maryland Colony

On June 20,1632, the page turned. In June of that year, Charles issued a patent for a new colony, Maryland, to Catholic, Lord Calvert. That colonial patent stripped lands from within Virginia’s Virginia Company charter which had been transferred to the royal colony in 1625 and had been part of Virginia for the almost eight years after–and gave them to Calvert and Maryland. Kent Island was squarely in the middle of Maryland, only a few miles from the first settlement of Maryland which was founded in February, 1634.

It is from 1632 that Virginia and Maryland affairs saturated the politics and development of each colony; lost in this four decade tussle was Virginia’s path-breaking pivot away from an exclusive reliance on the tobacco monoculture, led by, of all things, Virginia’s plantation conquistadors, who had amazingly made their peace with an Indian tribe and in a joint economic movement opened up a less brutal path to Indian relations. Maryland’s birth was a Caesarian section by the King, and that necessitates an explanation of how we treat this birth of a colony in our history in this chapter.

Kent Island and John Harvey: the Pivot Busts

Kent Island, the jewel in Claiborne’s business plan is the first Maryland-related topic dealt with in this module. From there we shall move to its link with Governor John Harvey, and from that we shall complete our story with the coalescing of the plantation conquistadors, their leadership, and their position on the Council of State. To provide the necessary context, I will briefly outline the evens that detail the birth and initial settlement of Maryland.

Sir George Calvert, First Lord of Baltimore, an Irish peerage, a shareholder of the Virginia Company, a member of its New England Council, and the founder of a settlement-colony in Newfoundland (1620-1623) had an obvious long and consistent involvement in early English colonization. A Catholic he found favor with Charles’s Catholic queen. The Newfoundland colony was the first English proprietary colony, with its charter to Calvert personally, not to a corporate board of directors. Calvert, of course, formed a board under his control. Calvert was closely associated with a particular type of proprietary charter, the palatine lordship, which was mirrored on the power and authority of the medieval lord proprietor. So long as he remained in the good favor or the king, the lord proprietor of such a colony could run his colony with the greatest amount of personal autonomy in the pursuit of his wealth and policy values [99] Taken from Wesley Frank Craven, Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, pp. 186-7, and Charles A. Andrews, Colonial Period of American History, Vol. 2, p. 195ff). Calvert a Catholic, as the reader is well-aware want a sanctuary colony for Catholics–religious toleration was the vehicle to best accomplish that.

After the Virginia Company experience, the proprietary colony was the charter of choice by the Stuart dynasty thereafter. That meant English colonization was an ‘insider’s game”, with access to the royal court, and from there to the Privy Council was the policy-making approach. Frozen out of this, of course, was Parliament and Merchant-Adventurers, and what was built in was personalistic bordering on corrupt motivations, nepotism and friends, and active assistance in the King’s independence from Parliament through loans and such–on which the king depended to literally pay the bills of his court, and various initiatives.

Calvert started out as Oxford graduate to clerk on the Privy Council, elected to Parliament in 1609, (to 1624), he gravitated to appointment of personal secretary to the all-powerful, deal-meister Robert Cecil. By that point Calvert was active in colonization and through 1629 spent a good deal of his time, money and effort into the Newfoundland-Avalon colony. It was an uphill struggle in Canada, and by 1629 Calvert was ready to close it down (after the King returned Canadian French holdings to France) and in its place set up a new colony on the southern Atlantic coast–Carolinas.

As a preliminary step to scout out the territory, Calvert and his wife moved to Virginia in 1629. Calvert got caught up with the king’s dominance over the Anglican Church, and when he got to Virginia he refused to take the “oath of supremacy’ as required by English and Virginia law; that alerted Virginia elites to his Catholicism, considered an extreme heresy in the colony. His refusal greatly complicated his stay in Virginia, and intensified his desire to found a Catholic colony in North America. He left Virginia, returned to England, and started an active pursuit of such a colony, intended at that time to be in the Carolinas. Of considerable note, while in Virginia, Calvert became well aware of Claiborne’s business plan–and could see with his own eyes the potential profitability of the beaver trade. Having built up a good deal of the King’s favor through loans, the King had an open year.

As Calvert pressed the king for a new charter in the Carolinas, the King got his own ideas on where Calvert’s colony should be located. Irritating him to no end were the Dutch in New York, their intrusion into the Connecticut River, and in New Jersey-Delaware River. There their entrepreneurs and their superior trade and shipping meant continual loss of trade and revenues to England and its king. Accordingly, on the King’s initiative, Calvert’s colony was relocated to what is today’s Maryland. The shift in location was evident to Claiborne’s company investors who were located in London. Claiborne himself went to London to argue against it.

That the King had authorized a license to Claiborne and Company to key portions of the new colony was simply protected by the king’s supposed whisperings to Calvert that he should leave Kent Island alone to Claiborne. Whether that would have ever worked is anyone’s guess, but after granting the charter to Calvert in 1632, Calvert died as the charter was in process of acquiring the royal seals, and according was inherited by his son, the Second Lord of Baltimore, Cornelius Calvert. It was Cornelius then who ran the colony from 1632 onward. Lord Cornelius it must be said was also well aware of Kent Island, and of Claiborne’s business plan–and from his beginning it was incorporated into his settlement business plan. When the first settlement, St Mary’s was founded in February 1634, Kent Island had a bulls-eye as in a target attached to it. While Claiborne possessed a trading license, it was not land title included in a colony charter. It was very evident to all that unless altered by the King, Claiborne had been upended, legally at least. While Virginia had treated Kent Island as a Virginia settlement, the King’s charter ended that–and despite the Council of State’s position on the matter (which at that point did not have a built in majority for asserting that position), John Harvey as governor followed the King’s law and his intentions that Virginia cooperate with the new colony. Claiborne, almost overnight, was in the minority and outflanked by the governor. Nevertheless, Claiborne never stopped resisting the Maryland colony, and preventing it from taking over Kent Island, while it continued to use the island as its trading post as originally intended. Possession, as he would have said, is nine-tenths of the law. Maryland at first was mindful of Claiborne’s betrayed ambitions, it never backed away from its position that Kent Island was part of Maryland. Claiborne countered with his “Declaration” defending his possession and asserting his trading rights and possession of Kent Island–several of our plantation conquistadors signed it. Claiborne also sent over proof that Calvert had refused to take the loyalty oath, and his anti-Papism nostrums greatly influenced popular opinion on that matter-an opinion that whatever their loyalty to the King thought the new colony’s possession of former Virginia land as of ill-consequence to Virginia. Through 1634, then the Virginia-Maryland issue festered among masses and elites in Virginia.

While it was intended to open up Maryland immigration to Catholics, and today that is an important descriptor of the colony, it was never intended to be a Catholic colony. “It appears that from the first, Protestants outnumbered Catholics in the Maryland colony” [99] Taken from Wesley Frank Craven, Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, p. 193. Like Virginia, it was, of necessity, an economic venture as well. Maryland too had its self-sufficiency needs, and its business plan, while allowing Jesuits in to convert the Indians, had a serious economic plank that focused on tobacco and the beaver trade.

In its first weeks, Maryland hired Henry Fleet, the Potomac-based beaver trader and forerunner of Claiborne. Included was its version of the Virginia headright incentive system and settlement nexus strategy. It was also intended to trade with Virginia for staples and equipment, and the cooperation of Virginia with the fragile newstart colony was regarded as important elements in their avoiding the ominous “starving time” that Virginia had enjoyed. St Mary’s was chosen as its harbor was regarded as one of the best in the upper Chesapeake

In 1635 all hell broke out in Virginia and Kent Island.

Begin Here

Begin Here

Trading with the Indians brought him new riches and working with a group of London merchant factors, he aspired to set up a mercantile trading company. It was at this time, as he attempted to broaden his trading range, that his war with Maryland and the Catholic Calverts began. Governor Harvey, following orders from London, opposed him, and Claiborne and Harvey duked it out from most of the next decade.

Absorbed with his Maryland-Kent Island obsession, Claiborne ranged free, staying reasonably clear of Berkeley, until 1660, but eventually lost out; Maryland survived it and went its own way. Claiborne retired to his plantation. His descendants include evangelist Jerry Falwell and fashion designer Liz Claiborne. Among the lessons we draw from Claiborne is the free-wheeling, almost swashbuckling disruptive entrepreneurism that was a hallmark of the early Virginia planter class (William Byrd I would be another example)–and how sizable land ownership allowed entry into the planter oligopoly–and from there into the Royal Council and high-level Virginia politics.

In response, Claiborne publicly declared his trading commission and his Kent Island trading settlement were not part of the Maryland grant, and that his first loyalty was to the King, and Virginia. He vowed to oppose any oversight from Maryland, See Fausz pp66ff for Claiborne’s post 1632 advocacy, arrest by Harvey and stripped of his posts.

and, as would be expected, a year later a Maryland official and his forces intercepted at least one of Claiborne’s trading vessels. Claiborne’s relief expedition, however, was defeated by the Maryland forces (April and May 1635) in battle, with three Virginians killed.

Enter new Virginia governor John Harvey, who, just previous to the naval battle, declared Virginia in support of the Maryland colony and pledged its assistance in supporting its new settlements—following his instructions from the King. Harvey also unilaterally stripped Claiborne of his position as Virginia’s Secretary of State. We shall discuss the ramifications of this below. The battle for Kent Island continued, however, with Claiborne, taking advantage of the ouster of Harvey from the governorship, maintained his control over the settlement and trading post there. A series of legal actions followed and were not resolved until a decision of the Privy Council until 1638 that sovereignty lay with Maryland and shortly after, Maryland assumed formal, and actual, control of the island.

Claiborne was not through, however. But we shall pick up that tale in a later section of this module.

of the Harvey Affair

The Governor John Harvey Affair: “the thrusting out” or The Shootout at OK Corral: 1634 Virginia Style starring Samuel Mathews, John Harvey and George Menefie with Charles I playing Wyatt Earp.

The reader should note the situation with Maryland began before Harvey became governor, and Maryland’s Phase I overlapped Harvey’s administration, and carried over through 1638—when Harvey will be reappointed governor, only to be fired by the King shortly after. Maryland, may arguably have been the most important single backdrop issue in the struggle between Virginia’s post-Company-fall establishment, but it ought be realized it was only one of many significant issues that wracked the politics between the Governor’s Council and Governor John Harvey. No assertion is made that Maryland “caused” the “thrusting out of Harvey”, but its effects surely cannot be downplayed. The Maryland issue may have activated and diffused anti-Harvey opinion among the general population, certainly into freeman politics.

Having already discussed William Claiborne’s buckaroo adventures in what was becoming Maryland, demonstrating the willingness of the Council and the General Assembly to back him, elect him to Secretary of State, create a Burgess district for a Kent Island representative, we can see the Greate Charter institutions of government were already heading off on their own, somewhat independent of London, and thought much of using governmental powers to achieve personal goals and monetary ambitions. If Claiborne was the political leader of this grouping, as he likely was, the Council wanted the same for themselves, and they realized upon first meeting him and dealing with him that they weren’t going to get it. Harvey did not enjoy any honeymoon, and it appears he did not seek one.

In a nutshell, frustration and opposition crystallized around this power relationship between the governor and the Council of State. The position, taken by Harvey, in regards to Virginia favoring the creation of a new colony of Maryland to its north, and the King’s insistence Virginia provide it such support as necessary for its survival, was zero-sum to that argued by Secretary of State Claiborne (and member of the Council), and a position he shared with a great majority of that body. The Maryland issue came to a head in 1635, and Harvey’s resolute support of Maryland, and the King’s position, led him to abruptly “fire” Claiborne as Secretary of State—a position to which he had been elected by the Council of State. Warren M. Billings (Ed), the Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 1975), pp. 238

“Harvey’s clashes with the Council were due, in part, the fact that the councilors were determined and not always reasonable men. The councilors furthermore were anxious that the Crown confirm ‘theire land and priviledges’ … which was the true motive for the mutiny“ [6] https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/county_formation_during_the_colonial_period#start_entry. It may have the the underlying motive, but the trigger issue was likely Maryland. A naval engagement between a Maryland flotilla and Claiborne’s Kent Island fleet on April 23, 1635 resulted in several Virginians killed and wounded. “Only five days after the Claiborne-Mathews Council faction forcibly expelled Governor Harvey from office, charging him with ‘Treason, for … betray(ing) theyr Forte into the hands of theyr enemies of Marylande'” [99] J Frederick Fausz, “Merging and Emerging Worlds: Anglo-Indian Interest Groups and the Development of the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake”, in Lois Green Carr, Philip D. Morgan, and Jean B. Russo, Colonial Chesapeake Society (Eds) (Early American History and Culture, University of North Carolina Press, 1988), p.71

Shortly after this, it became evident this action was not popular in other quarters as well as the Council. At an event in York County, the governor was present when several speakers took strong exception of several of the governor’s actions. In what was a typical reaction of the Governor, he went into a rage (several years earlier he had hit a Councilor [Richard Stephens, Dabney, p. 42] with a cudgel in the midst of a discussion-argument, thereby knocking out several teeth as well as the Councilor. That in 1630’s the governor was afforded the right and status to do so, seems to have prevented any further fight at that moment. But this did not obtain at the York event.

He demanded the arrest of the opposing speakers, arrested them without charges, and said publicly at the time they would be told what the charges were “at the gallows”. [99] Virginius Dabney, Virginia: the New Dominion (University Press of Virginia. 1971),pp. 40-1; and Warren M. Billings (Ed), the Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 1975), pp. 238-9

Returning to Jamestown he convened the Governor’s Council and demanded those arrested be tried under martial law. The Council refused, and insisted the usual legal action be taken that protected English civil liberties. What followed, as described by Dabney, is what is now referred to as “the thrusting out of Harvey”.

After having heard the response of the Council “His Excellancy [Harvey] engaged in a vehement dispute with that arm of government, during which he punched Councillor Menefie, and exclaimed “I arrest you on suspicion of treason to His Majesty” [to which] “retorted Councillor Samuel Mathews “And wee the like to you Sir” “as he and Councillor John Utie seized the governor. Dr Pott signaled through a window, and forty musketeers surrounded the house.

Essentially this was a coup. One might say cooler heads prevailed, but I suspect the fight simply ran out of steam. A compromise seems to have been reached where the Council wrote out its charges, and packed Harvey off on the next boat to England. The Council of State thereupon elected arguably its most preeminent member, John West as Governor. Once in England, Harvey’s case was heard, and although Harvey admitted during the trial that he had exerted authority over the Council, the decision by the Privy Council was to support Harvey and send him back to Virginia as governor again—with new instructions which did not clearly state which of the two parties in fact had superiority in the matter. It took a year, until 1637, before Harvey returned to Virginia.

The Privy Council also ordered the arrest of Councilors Mathews, Utie, West, and William Pierce. Harvey wasted no time in doing so, confiscating their property and possessions. “And wee the like to you Sirs” Harvey may have said before he sent them packing on the next boat, to be tried for their actions. At their trial in 1639, the four were acquitted, and the Privy Council replaced Harvey with former governor Francis Wyatt, who served unit February , 1641. Wyatt, as you will remember, was married to George Sandys daughter—and was closely, very closely connected to the Sandy’s faction of the Virginia Company. Go figure that? The behind the scenes regarding this decision is not known, at least by me, but from that point on Samuel Mathews seems to have created a lasting and favorable regard among the Privy Council and the King’s entourage. This will set the stage for events in the 1650’s.

Harvey’s Second Administration

When Harvey returned as Governor the principal policy item on his agenda, other than revenge against the “thrusters”, was an expansion of Jamestown as a port and capitol. This was apparently under royal instruction. An earlier law, in February 1632, Harvey, under some pressure from the Crown, secured the Assembly’s approval of Jamestown as Virginia’s sole port of entry, and a 1633 law authorized the town’s shopkeeper to oversee the province’s official weights and measures, and declared a land grant “for housing an garden plots”. Neither of these laws seemed to have much effect (John Repp asserted that it “resulted in further enlargement in” Jamestown [99] John W. Reps, the Making of Urban America: a History of City Planning in the United States (Princeton University Press, 1965), p.93. Harvey’s quick and abrupt dismissal his “urban” initiative seems to have left with him. The “urban” agenda would be picked up by Governor Berkeley during his administration, and we will return to it then.

Drawing upon these early actions he confirmed in 1638/9 that a dozen new stores were operating, and other fine buildings, including a brick house and a brick church, and secured from the Legislature an authorization to build a State House—which in part due to his abrupt departure was never constructed, and in its stead Harvey’s own house was purchased with the funds and the house turned into a hotel-tenement [99] Warren M. Billings, Sir William Berkeley and the Forging of Colonial Virginia (Louisiana State University Press, 2004), pp. 43-4 “compelled craftsmen to work their trades [presumably stop growing tobacco] and to refrain from growing tobacco. Harvey upon his return also unsuccessfully resisted the land grab.

The trigger issue was that Harvey insisted he had authority over the Council whose function was purely advisory, and, interestingly, the Council asserted authority over him. The underlying issue is that many plantation owners, especially the newcomers, wanted to resuscitate the Jamestown Company, terminate the Crown Colony administration, and bring back “planter rule” through the restored Company board of directors. Yet another land grab lay off stage if this were to happen.

In the end. Harvey was outmaneuvered in London. There, the Lords Commissioners of Foreign Plantations (which administered England’s overseas colonies) reaffirmed the legality of the Greate Charters headright land system, with its raft of incentives and elite-biased legal protections, totally undermining Harvey’s position in opposing the Council.

Why the Privy Council seemingly acted against its own interests says much about the state of court politics and affairs—and the fast accelerating political crisis that led to the civil war erupting in 1642. As an interesting thought to keep in the back of the reader’s mind, was that the Governor’s Council prisoners sent to London for trial (and who stayed there several years) seems to have impressed the Privy Council/Parliamentary members. Mathews in particular will play an interesting and impactful role in London until his death, in London, in 1657.

Thus emboldened, the Council met, expelled/drove out Harvey, sent him packing to England, where Charles II reaffirmed his governorship and sent him back–to the “delight” of the Royal Council.

In Harvey’s absence, the Council elected its own governor, John West. West seizing he moment authorized the opening up of the contested lands for sale. “In addition to the patenting (sale) of former Indian lands, the councilors and their associates [amassed] tens of thousands of acres that formerly were [Jamestown] Company lands“–in excess of 300,000 acres. Harvey upon his return unsuccessfully resisted the land grab, and again he was expelled by the Council. Governor Harvey was formally recalled, this time for good–but not before he knocked the teeth out of a Royal Council delegate with a cudgel.

The reader has no doubt gathered the point I am trying to make: the relationship between the Governor and the Royal-Council/Council of State was uneven, and fluid if not zero-sum. The Crown’s reliance on local elites after the collapse of the Jamestown Company had come to haunt the Governor and the Crown. By the time Berkeley arrived on the scene, the Royal Council was nearly autonomous of the Governor, and fully capable to resisting him if the occasion warranted.

The third rail of the troubled relationship was land acquisition by planters on the Council–and other planters who could follow in the land grabbing wake. Combine this with the institutionalization of planter dominance over the newly-formed county level institutions and we see strong evidence that before 1642 a domestic planter oligopoly had developed, effectively dominated local and day-today economic and political affairs, and was in a position to assert itself against the Royal Governor.

The net result of these actions, dynamic transformations and legislation was that by the middle to late 1640’s Virginia, as summarized by Heinemann et al, had established a stable and functioning policy system: “with political institutions and land titles following English [pre-Civil War] custom. The colonial government had become more decentralized through the county system of governance, with commissioners, justices of the peace and sheriffs commanding authority in local matters. The combined effect was to make the emerging great planters, who held many of these offices, paramount in local government” [7].

Also in the background is the King’s failure to address, to define Virginia governance. He still has not made up his mind, and would not do so until 1639. His temporary 1626 missive is still in effect thru the entirety of the Harvey affair. Because of this insecurity as to who can do what, the provincial level Greate Charter political institutions (Legislature, Council of State, Burgesses) are walking on glass, although they have displayed a willingness after 1629 to assert their preferences into law—which has not yet received any royal pushback.

The disenfranchised Virginia Company establishment has run the show pretty much on its own terms, and provincial politics has been very much an insiders game until 1630 when Harvey showed up in the governor’s office. Serious, intense, young (he is about twenty-nine) ship captain, with a past history of having an impact on the termination of the company charter does not seem to be the perfect fit for the job and while he had several fine accomplishments (peace with at least one Indian tribe, installation of a county-level system of governance, Jamestown modernization, and some attempt to diversify the economy beyond tobacco), his insensitivity to the locals, his personal bearing and arrogance polarized Virginia opinion around Maryland, the safety of land titles made in the Company period, his inability to reconcile his leadership with the Company’s Greate Charter political institutions, and the controversial peace with the Indians. His only ally was the King, remote and distant, and as it turned out, fickle.

The wild and woolly, opportunistic, almost thuggish character of the Jamestown Company policy-making was not drawn from a mature political culture, but from the serendipity of the kinds of people attracted into a remote and dangerous wilderness 3000 nautical miles from European civilization. The “colonists” that populated Virginia during this period were the original “wild bunch”, male mostly, and lots of indentured folk. Effective governance, i.e. law and order, was non-existent, and the demographics of the colony (little schooling, few women and functioning family households) did little to enhance its civility. This was a hostile wilderness and Virginia was close to being a semi-organized anarchy, making the 1880’s Dodge City”, cattle wars, and Billie the Kid look pretty amateurish.

I could talk about a policy system, elites, policy-making and economic development strategies, but it would be silly to try to make those concepts fit into this period. In this rough and ready period, Plantations, therefore, not yeoman subsistence/hardscrabble homesteads, became the core economic unit of Virginia’s new economic base. Each freeman agricultural entrepreneur endeavored to become a plantation owner. What followed would have made Darwin proud. No one survived and thrived.

That is why this is referred to as Virginia’s First Migration—and why those who studied the development of Virginia society and its political culture see modern Virginia as arising from a Second Migration, achieving its golden age of plantations and plantation “cavaliers” in the period after 1720 or so and central to that was the settlement of the Piedmont. The next module series will introduce its founding and its founder, Governor William Berkeley. He will follow our Governor Wyatt in 1642.

Then why do I spend so much time on this period? Cement takes time to harden, and the Virginia Company left behind several important pillars of the future Virginia policy system, economic base, and political culture, and these pillars, poured before 1624 hardened during these seventeen years before the appointment of Berkeley. They became fixtures with which Berkeley had to incorporate into his new Virginia. Berkeley will be much more understandable once we realize what he inherited from the Virginia Company.

A caution to the reader, therefore. A near non-existent policy system can have lasting consequences on a developing polity, economy, and political culture. Virginia’s post-Company period is not alone in demonstrating this impact; settling the Siberian frontier, and America’s settlement of the trans-Mississippi West were not without their heritage and legacy. Where would we be without John Wayne movies or John Brown, the James brothers and bleeding Kansas-Nebraska settlement.

Several of these pillars are essential components of our approach to our history: its Greate Charter provincial political structures and relationships between these structures; its local sub-provincial policy system, leadership and societal organization, and the configuration of its local economic base; and the profound impact of its monoculture-single crop economic base on its societal structure and composition. That dynamic played a foundational role in the evolution of Virginia’s Tidewater political culture.

With the Cat out of the Bag, the King Consents Post Harvey Virginia

From March-April 1626 to January 1639, King Charles did not provide his “permanent” instructions on how to govern his royal colony. In January 1639, conveyed in the instructions to Governor Wyatt (and reconfirmed in his instructions to Governor Berkeley in 1641) he rose above his divine right nature and conveyed on Virginia a limited right of self-governance. Wyatt and the Governor’s Council were instructed

“at least once a year or oftener, if urgent occasion shall require, to summon the burgessses of all and singuar plantations [the expression used in the Greate Charter], which together with the Governor and the Council, shall have power to make acts and laws for the government of that plantation [colony] … as near as may be to the laws of England, in which assembly the governor was to have a negative voice [veto].

Moving on, the King finally took a load of the minds of Virginia landowners. In the same instructions he granted “full recognition … to the previous proceedings of the planters, and a popular assembly ‘chosen by freemen or freeholders in the colony’, was permanently settled as an essential part of this , the first colony in the king’s land. This precedence was extended to all colonies that followed, granting to all the right to share in the making of laws, the levying of taxes, and the taking into consideration the many things, chiefly of a local and prudential nature. Charles A. Andrews, the Colonial Period in American History, the Settlements, Vol. 1, pp. 204-5.

On a less noble consequence by the King of land patents full recognition, was his recognition of headrights, taken to including all granted after 1625, and confirming those granted by the Company previous to that. As summarized by Craven the King gave permission (as early as 1634) to honor headrights for immigrants entering Virginia after 1624. It was that missive that likely prompted Governor West to issue a horde of headrights during 1635-6. (estimated by Craven to be about 2,000 headrights for about 300 land patents) [99] Wesley Frank Craven, White, Red and Black, p. 10.

The Crown’s reliance on local elites after the collapse of the Jamestown Company had come to haunt the Governor and the Crown. By the time Berkeley arrived on the scene in 1642, the Governor’s Council was nearly autonomous of the Governor, and fully capable to resisting him if the occasion warranted. The third rail of this troubled relationship was land acquisition by planters on the Council–and other planters who could follow in the land grabbing wake.

Combine this with the institutionalization of planter dominance over the newly-formed county level institutions and we see strong evidence that before 1642 a domestic planter oligopoly had taken some shape, was actively involved in local and day-today economic and political affairs, This may be the critical take away from this module that the period after the company’s fall in 1624 and previous to Berkeley’ arrival in 1642 had solidified the foundation of Virginia’s governance by its planter oligopoly, subject to whatever the Governor was able to secure with the acquisence. The central issue in this contentious relationship was land, who owned it, and the profits attained by its use.

It certainly played a major role in his fight with the Governor’s Council and it fueled the reaction to his being “thrust out” that in the late 1630’s sent four members of the Governor’s Council back to England, in chains so to speak, to await trial by the Star Court (I am not making this up). On the last years before the Civil War, James made an other imponderable decision, and would reverse himself, and order Harvey in 1642 to leave Virginia and be replaced by John West (another brother from the Virginia Company West family (Baron De La Warre), very possibly one of the ringleaders of Harvey’s ouster. If you followed this—stop-quit reading while you are ahead because you are in for a surprise.

How Have Historians Reacted to the Character of the Virginia Policy-making

From our last module, we know Virginia can be understood as being all about plantation conquistador dominant oligarchy based on the expansion of tobacco and plantations at the expense of the Tidewater Powhatan, left alone in their tobacco fetish by the absent and much preoccupied Charles I. If the 1620’s had witnessed the rise of the plantation conquistadores, the relentless increase in Tidewater lands, taken in one way or another from the Powhatan, and brought under tobacco cultivation in free holder subsistence land, large plantations, and the indentured and renter lands that followed in their wake.

We also saw, as described in the last module, a monumental and durable establishment of fragile, if isolated and yet complex, local sub-provincial system of “government” that resulted from the relentless expansion of the shredded Virginia community. From hundred in 1613, to counties in 1634, the level of government on which the colony and its settlers most relied was that closes to them. It was there we could find our plantation conquistadores in their entrepreneurial home fiefs. That will be the first topic we will examine in this module which focuses chiefly on the period of the 1630’s.

In essence the politics and players of the all to soon English Civil War overlapped into Virginia’s political development. Not only did the politics of Maryland’s founding bleed into the oligarchs campaign against Harvey, but they set up a distinct Virginian foreign policy to their new neighbor. Intra colonial competition, rivalry and contested ambitions carried over not only through the 1640’s, but erupted into an actual Virginian invasion and takeover of Maryland during Cromwell’s Protectorate in the 1650’s. While we will discuss most of this in later modules, the first phase of Maryland’s entry into Virginia politics will be discussed, and the fate of its conquistadores outlined.

Finally, we shall reintroduce our royal majesty, Charles I, who, in the midst of this first stage in the English Civil War (the Invasion of England by Scotland) finally made some decisions that got Virginia’s political and economic houses in some order. In 1634, he provided a hint of where he would wind up, but only in 1639 did he make his final commitments to Virginia governance. It is from this point on, that we can finally talk about Virginia’s political development, its autonomy and its position in the Stuart colonial framework. From that point on Virginia institutions possessed a key measure of legitimacy from the English government.

Edmund Morgan, in his article of Virginia as a boom town, sets up and summarized the general state of affairs that Harvey inherited–i.e. he describes the 1630 punchbowl:

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 [the] 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 1618 had inaugurated a popularly elected representative assembly [I must stress that is counter to the position taken in this history], but the effective power for at least ten or fifteen years longer remained in the governor and his Council [of State].

By no coincidence the Council almost entirely of the men holding large numbers of servants [most of which acquired through land ownership and headright incentive]. Between 1619 and 1627, Hamor, Pott, Smyth, Sandys [George], Tucker, Mathews and Yeardley sat on it while Wyatt and Yeardley took turns in the governor’s chair. These men with a more than 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. Whether operating under the Company, or after 1625, under the king, they met every challenge to their authority with a rigor not exceeded by what we know of the earlier absolute government [1607-1612] of John Smith or Thomas Dale [99] Edmund S. Morgan, “the First American Boom: Virginia 1618 to 1630 (William & Mary Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 2 (April 1970), p. 193

From the perspective of this rogue and raucous post Company Virginia elite, John Harvey, outsider though he might be, was not an unknown. Harvey back in 1623-5 had “identified himself with the faction that had successfully sought the collapse of the Company”, and whatever the feelings the individual members of Virginia’s elite were in regards to the Company or its future, the simple reality to them was the stripping of the charter from the Company meant a serious challenge to their existing land ownership, contract with their labor force, and the future expansion of the tobacco monoculture.

Bailyn defines the situation as: The private interests of this group, which had assumed control of public office by virtue not of inherited status, but of newly acquired and strenuously maintained economic eminence, were pursued with little interference from traditional restraints imposed on a responsible ruling class. Engaged in an effort to establish themselves in a land they sought as specific ends [i.e. agenda goals]: autonomous local jurisdiction, an aggressive expansion of settlement and trading enterprises, unrestricted access to land, and at every stage the legal endorsement of [past land] acquisitions . .. [99] Bernard Bailyn, “Politics and Social Structure in Virginia”, in 17^th Century America: Essays in Colonial History, James Morton Smith (Ed), University of North Carolina Press, 1959), p. 96 By 1630, the Virginia second generation tobacco elite, with their army of indentured servants in their service, were more concerned with carrying out their own expansion plans rather than a holistic comprehensive provincial-royal perspective that Governor John Harvey carried as if a chip on his shoulder.