Counties Not Cities or Towns

See Osgood p 90-7 for development of local sub-state system

the Substance of Virginia Local Government Emerges: Port Cities after 1650

Colony-level day-to-day policy-making was administered almost exclusively by the largest plantation owners. The Royal Council evolved into both the upper chamber of the Virginia legislature, and what constituted the colony’s formal bureaucracy. Its few clerks literally underlie all policy-making, from soup to nuts, drafting to implementing. It was they who codified and archived the laws, letters and correspondence. One can only sense the centrality and influence of these individuals, the appointment of which no doubt came from Council members.

To assist the Governor and his Royal Council, Special County “courts” were authorized to hear cases (1622). The county (shire) became the first formal unit of sub-state government. Eight were authorized by the Burgesses in 1634–but five were already sending Burgesses delegates to that august colony legislature. Counties were immediately dominated by the larger plantation owners in the region, called “commanders”.

Never a local democracy, these local “commanders” either assumed or were legislative entrusted with “all important matters of local administration, including land patents (sales), indentured servants, the price of domestic and imported  commodities, militia, Indian affairs, and gunpowder” [8]. The extent to which the rise of local elites and the creation of county government evolved hand in hand is due in no small measure to the relative isolation of Virginia’s non town/city shredded community. Literally these commanders were the only “political game” in their town:

Local government in Virginia was based on the county … The county court, because of its position as the middleman between a weak and remote central government and local inhabitants, was given broad judicial and administrative power.  … The justices who made up the court were the upper portion of an integrated social, economic and political elite who added a paternalistic flavor to county government. As the colonial period developed, these men strengthened their authority in comparison to the other two levels of government: the colony and the parish. By the end of the seventeenth century the basic system had been established … Later expansion was a response to the economic and social maturity of the colony [9]

In a later module we shall explore the rise of counties in the Virginia policy system, and develop the inevitable link between counties and the Virginia oligopoly. It is preferable that at this point we complete our discussion on why Virginia did not develop sizable urban centers, but also a meaningful export port. Export was critical to the Tidewater tobacco export base, but despite that obvious driver, Virginia politics and policy-making through 1789 could not produce, encourage or cause the formation of a port that could compete with its Tidewater rival, Maryland’s Baltimore. That absence of towns and a meaningful port set Virginia apart from most of the other colonies—and exerted a huge effect on Virginia and the Nation after the American Revolution and during the Early Republic:

the absence of towns in Virginia … [caused] historians to attribute many of the peculiarities of the Old Dominion … [:] the paucity of schools  in comparison to colonial New England, the diffusion of power in a society lacking a center comparable to Philadelphia, Boston, New York, or Charleston; a weakness of institutional religion, the decay of the traditional militia system, the absence of a merchant class–these were all consequences in part, of Virginia’s failure to develop any significant ports and towns [10].

The second century (the 1700’s) were somewhat more successful for towns and cities, but not because of Crown initiatives. Virginia was fast becoming the most populous colony in English colonial America. Settlements were reaching past the Fall Line and into the Shenandoah Valley. Town and city formation in other colonies, Pennsylvania and Maryland, but also Charleston prompted some measure of town and city formation in Virginia, if only to prevent its domination by these external cities and ports. In 1722, a charter issued by the Royal Governor (not the Crown), declared Williamsburg “a City Incorporate”–Virginia’s first. The first incorporated town (1742) was Richmond, and it made the big leagues with its incorporation as a city in 1782–under the Articles of Confederation’s Virginia state government. In the meantime, three other towns were created. Norfolk in 1682 acquired a royal charter as an incorporated city, one of three (Jamestown and Williamsburg the others).

Compare this feeble town and city-building to county formation and the case is easily made that Virginia’s central agent of local policy-making was the county. When Virginia became a state under the Articles of Confederation in 1776, there were only three incorporated towns, and three incorporated cities. In 1750 there were forty-four counties, fifty-six by 1763, and 72 by 1775 [17].

 Colonial Tidewater ED Policy-Making: Ports and Cities: the Other Part of the Urban Story

See Reps, p. 93 Big Book

The temptation to explain the Tidewater’s disinclination to urbanization has been to link it to the nature and effects of plantation agriculture economic base is persuasive, but not absolutely compelling. Agriculture was the dominant economic base of every colony in colonial America and that proved little impediment to the formation of coastal ports, and even several secondary hinterland centers. Also, New York and even Pennsylvania possessed a sizable manor-plantation based agriculture, and both developed spectacular port cities. Finally, Maryland, a Tidewater tobacco-export plantation-based policy system did not inhibit Baltimore from becoming a major North American port. Something more is afoot. I suggest it is the dynamics of Virginia’s state and local policy-making that distinguished it from the other colonies. The character and behavior of Virginia policy systems presented a significant obstacle to a colony-level economic development strategy to encourage urbanization and ports. One could make the argument that every county wanted its port. One could also assert London merchants, Parliament and the King himself pressed hard for towns for reasons unappealing to Virginia plantation owners: greater regulation and taxes, and a loss of planter autonomy.

The prevailing literature on Virginia elites, clearly dominant in Virginia’s 17th century policy system, was that they “were to the manor born”. This was particularly true after Berkeley’s infusion of royalist refugees and second sons/daughters into the plantation elites. Planter Hugh Jones commented in 1721 that “Virginians had neither the interest, nor inclinations … to cohabit in towns … every plantation affording the owner the provision of a little market” [11]. In short, planters seemingly had little attraction for creating towns which threatened their symbiotic settlements on the plantation periphery, or the county capital. This, however, does not preclude the development of a small activist planter constituency, likely larger planters, who were not averse to a larger urban center for culture, entertainment and other diversions. Charleston and Savannah functioned well serving such planter needs. Also urban centers conferred status and and offered the possibly of domestic production of manufactured goods, and the development of domestic export factors, shippers, and finance/investment from other sources. In 1705, a noted plantation owner. Robert Beverley (our Knight of the Golden Horseshoe who will opened the Shenandoah Valley for settlement) noted that Virginia lacked urban centers; it “had not any one Place of any Cohabitation among them that may reasonably bear the Name of a Town“. His explanation for this sad state of affairs was “the Advantage of many Rivers which afforded a commodious Road for shipping at every Man’s door” [12].

True, Virginia and Maryland enjoyed a goodly number of rivers and a coastline indented with inlets from which they flowed to the sea. This likely created a double-edge effect on port initiatives. If every plantation could be its own port, under the master’s control than a major port or two obviously threatened that autonomy by allowing the external world to penetrate his manorial bubble. On the other hand, if one-on-one plantation exporting did not offer economies of scale sufficient to reduce the costs of exporting, than a port offered the potential for competitive pricing. The other edge of having a goodly number of ports, one for each county for instance is this minimized the external intrusion into the plantation bubble, and may well have offered county planters an opportunity to invest and with other county planters create infrastructure and scale that could affect pricing of finance and logistics. This surplus of potential sites, however, frustrated the preference and development of any particular one. If county ports were approved by a compliant House of Burgesses, it would result in no single major coast port.

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As Virginia grew over the 17th and 18th centuries, the link between towns and plantations weakened–logically because as plantations were established in the interior, even if close to, or on rivers, the willingness and capacity of ships to move deep upriver and use widely disparate plantation wharves strengthened the formation of towns. Settlement beyond the Fall Line was literally impassable for coastal shipping. In addition. Tobacco export competitiveness meant the quality of English tobacco figured greatly into its price, and so the need to inspect and certify tobacco exports, while quite controversial, developed a small planter constituency. Tobacco regulation became a serious colony-level concern, but typically divided the planter constituency.

By the 17th century, most plantations harvested a number of different crops than tobacco, and domestic trade within Virginia and adjoining colonies became possible. Moreover, the needs of the Crown increased, in particular the need to inspect and regulate the tobacco export, and most importantly collect any taxes due on its export, and on imports. As early as the 1640’s, but certainly after the Restoration of Charles II (1660’s) some planters and the certainly the Crown actively promoted the formation of towns/ports (see below).

A series of “Town/Warehouse Acts”, lobbied for by the Crown, were approved by the Burgesses. All were eventually either repealed or died an inglorious death when few towns actually resulted. Norfolk, it should be mentioned was an exception to this, but its rise was very gradual, and did not compare to that of its Maryland rival, Baltimore. A major reason why the formal creation of towns was so unsuccessful is their linkage to tax payments and Crown revenues, and to the costs associated with warehousing. It was those more economic concerns, not the alleged anti-urbanization bias of Virginia plantation elites that frustrated Virginia’s colonial urbanization

Still, as the link between strong plantations and weak towns diminished, growth of the Virginia colony in physical size, population dispersal, and economy generated their own pressures toward town formation. A constituency grew to successfully support transforming the small town of Williamsburg into the Colony’s capital, and to make that town/city the site of governance, commercial trade, and after 1693 the site of the colony’s only institute of higher education, the College of William and Mary. Despite a town plan of some pretense, and the erection of a governor’s “palace”, Williamsburg was an indifferent, dull, and less than robust commercial center, populated chiefly by legislators when the Burgesses was in session. Even a colony capital was not able to withstand the negative dynamics associated with Virginia urbanization.

The breakthrough in town formation came only in the southern Piedmont and Shenandoah Valley when German, French and Scots-Irish poured in and set up their town centers, deep in the state’s Appalachian Valley interior. There the hold of tobacco, export, and plantation owners was appreciably more limited, and the need for migrants, especially German to service their yeoman farm households and preserve their culture and ethnicity prompted the formation of settlement/towns.

By the 1750’s settlers moved West into the Piedmont and the Valley regions of Virginia, establishing county courthouse towns as they went; along the rivers warehouse towns served the interior farmlands, and towns further East, such as Falmouth, Dumfries, and Alexandria, supplied the major needs of the new settlers. With the exception of Norfolk, all types of towns in colonial Virginia were roughly the same size containing scarcely more than a few hundred inhabitants … But these small settlements carried out the commercial and governmental functions associated with urban centers and played an important role in the colony’s economic and political life [7] David R. Goldfield and Blaine A. Brownell, Urban America: a History (2nd Ed) (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1990), p. 24.

. Berkeley’s commanding presence, his singular determination to pursue his own agenda required it seems, that Berkeley reach some kind of accommodation with the Royal Council and its swashbuckling members. He did so as we will remember by formally renaming, and empowering the Royal Council into the Council of State, and making it in addition to all other activities and responsibilities as the upper, and dominant chamber of Virginia’s General Assembly. The House of Burgesses, a secondary power at this point, was largely ignored, and the dynamics of its takeover by county court elites continued uninterrupted–with the full cooperation of Berkeley when needed. Berkeley could appoint to the Council of State, but Burgesses was elected.

Given the shredded communities and the newly-established county government set up in the newly-settled areas populated by Berkeley’s new royalist elite, entry into county government and the hierarchy of offices which led to the county court, was almost effortless. Berkeley helped this along by appointing royalist immigrants to positions that supported him at the colony-level. He was not adverse if they entered the Royal Council, nor the House of Burgesses. They occupied offices as Berkeley’s principal bureaucrats; many, such as William Byrd I, became his equivalent to English frontier marsh wardens, holding down the tempestuous borderlands above and beyond the Fall Line. It is probably less important in determining how conscious this strategy was than simply acknowledging that it poured the foundations for a local planter oligopoly to dominate local county institutions and economic base, and from their the higher colony-level political and policy-making bodies. First the Royal Council, with Berkeley institutionalized as the Council of State:

Virginia’s Cavalier elite gained control of [the Royal Council] during the mid-seventeenth century, and held it until the American Revolution. As early as 1660 every councilor was related to another member by blood or marriage.  As late as 1775 every member was descended from a councilor who had served in 1660 … This small body functioned simultaneously as the governor’s cabinet, the upper house of the legislature, and the colony’s Supreme Court. It controlled the distribution of land, and the lion’s share went to a group of twenty-five families who monopolized two-thirds of the Council’s seats from 1680 to 1775 [8].

This small body functioned as the Governor’s cabinet, the upper house of the [Virginia] legislature and the colony’s supreme court. It controlled the distribution of land, and the lion’s share went to twenty-five families who held two-thirds of the seats in that body from 1680 to 1775. The same families also controlled other offices of power and profit: secretary, treasurer, auditor-general, receiver-general, surveyor-general … and governors of William and Mary College [the only college south of the Mason-Dixon line in that period]. … This elite gained control of the Council during the mid-seventeenth century, and retained it through the Revolution. As early as 1660, every seat on the Council was filled by members of the five related [family-networks]. As late as 1775, every member of that august body was descended from a councilor who had served in 1660 [9]