3. the 1630’s: Expansion of the Monoculture into the Middle Peninsula, conquistadors and the larger plantation owners achieve class conscious and fuse their local and economic power into the provincial policy system through their control of the county. The Tilt become real.
The Tobacco Monoculture “Settles In” the Tidewater: an Economic Oligarchy also settles in
By the late 1620’s two seemingly contradictory dynamics coemerged to compel a mindless and largely reactive drive to expand settlement and tobacco production in the Tidewater, i.e. maximize the settlement tobacco nexus as the foremost economic development paradigm of this period. Thus far we have concentrated on the Virginia dynamics which had evolved from its 1607 badly defined and designed settlement strategy to the Greate Charter last gasp. What we will see in the following section, however, is that environmental (English) forces also played a role. That make senses. If Virginia wanted to export its tobacco then it had to sell it, by law of James and Charles to England—which gave Virginia a monopoly position against Spanish imported tobacco and English domestic tobacco production which was declared illegal.
It was the English sovereign that determined the rights of each party in export and set the terms of its import-export. This royal approved process has been called the “tobacco contract”; as we have seen in earlier modules, that contract evolved, changed, and was threatened periodically with still more tinkering. Its core dynamic was the obvious desire of the Stuart kings to use tobacco customs or the retail tax on consumers to finance his affairs—which as we have discovered Parliament, in this policy area led by a guy named Edwin Sandys was decidedly uncomfortable, wanting its share for its own public and private purposes. A great deal of the 1620’s internal collapse of the Virginia Company is indirectly tied to this dynamic. Despite the stripping of the Company Charter, this dynamic was still playing out in post-Charter England.
Several secondary dynamics were associated with the Virginia-English tobacco trade as well. Left to its own market appeal, Spanish tobacco was the highest quality and most preferred, i.e. expensive tobacco in England. As part of the early tobacco contract, James gave the Company a monopoly over English tobacco imports. In practice this meant Spanish imported paid high customs duties, which went into the King’s pockets, not Parliaments. English domestically grown tobacco was illegal, but, surprise, many English-Welsh-Scottish planters didn’t get the memo. In the 1620’s domestic English tobacco competed against Virginia tobacco—and it did so by not paying any royal retail tax. In 1627, as we shall see, Charles, fighting with Parliament for money wanted to crack down against smuggling of Spanish tobacco (England was then at war with Spain) and crackdown on English illegal tobacco sales. Virginia tobacco was not particularly involved and the Virginia Assembly was not deeply concerned.
A second dynamic which interwove itself into the King’s 1627 tobacco edict, was the merchant-investor competition between the London merchant hegemony and the leaderships of the secondary port cities which wanted to curtail London’s hegemony by cutting out a piece of this colonialization thing for themselves. The intra port rivalries played into the Virginia Company as we have previously described—leading to a failed settlement in Maine and a subsequent decade plus activities of the Virginia Company subsidiary that reexamined in the hands of the secondary port elites. In the 1620’s, in our Massachusetts chapter, the reader will see this further evolve, and one aspect of that was the development of a new generation of colonial investor-financiers, Brenner’s New Men. These New Men will enlist and incorporate elements of the Virginia evolving planter elite, with whom they were also members, and together they will in the 1640’s and 1650’s take over Virginia politics and policy system during the Cromwell Protectorate.
It is the second dynamic we are most interested in at this point. In particular, this second dynamic lends us some background and insight into the development-formation of the larger planter elite in Virginia, and for a sub-grouping of that elite, our plantation conquistadors, who will form a joint stock corporation (the Claiborne Clique), with an elaborate and aggressive business plan for the Virginia economy, a plan largely financed by their close friends, Brenner’s New Men. At this point, we focus on the formation of the planter elite, and the oligarchy of large planters that jelled in this period and played a serious role in Virginia politics and policy-making during the 1620’s and 1630’s.
The discussion in this section will underscore the important, indeed vital, role that the “export” of Virginia tobacco played in the formation of that elite—and the tobacco monoculture that developed during the following half-century. A final benefit will be support of and provide a better understanding for, the New Men that Brenner and others assert will take over English colonial investment after the departure of the Smythe-era merchant adventurers. Boiled down, this short section “Follows the Money” that fueled English colonialism and in so doing fostered groupings of colonial elites in the different colonies.
The 1627 Royal Edict: how English politics entered into colonial development
While some observed the new King Charles actually smoking supposedly to conform to groups of smokers in his presence, the King probably wanted disliked the weed sufficiently, and was attracted to the alleged benefits of a more diversified Virginia economy, so that in 1626 he began a two year 9or so) initiative to limit the production of tobacco in Virginia–but to more to the point to curtail the import of Spanish tobacco by raising custom duties and hence raising additional revenues for himself. He also wanted to crack down on illegal English tobacco production, and smuggling in general. The first initiative in this regard was a 1626 royal command forbidding the importation into England of any tobacco by a single merchant or merchants without first obtaining a license issued by royally-appointed “commissioners” (tobacco “farmers”).
For the early Stuarts revenue was a constant struggle with a generally unsympathetic Parliament.. Ultimately tobacco taxes and colonial profits assisted the Crown in their financial struggles, but in order to collect that revenue the Crown needed to control smuggling. The creation of the General Farm of the Customs (1604) was an attempt to rationalize the system of tax collection in the ports that paid off, not just with increased revenue, but with increased lines of credit, that enabled the Crown to survive some of its battles with Parliament. While it definitely was not the intention of any of the architects of customs collection, one effect was to create a legal and protected market for tobacco. The English tobacco market was created out of the Stuart struggles with Parliament over taxes, specifically import taxes, and by the development of colonies intended to promote the English presence in the New World at the expense of Spain. [99] Ruth Savage Turpin, “the Political Economy of Tobacco in the Seventeenth Century English Atlantic” (2017), Open Access Dissertations/1648, p. 38. In addition to this Washburn added, without footnote support, that Virginia planters be restricted to no more 200 pounds of tobacco be produced by each household, and no servant could grow more than 125 pounds. In any even he further reiterated all tobacco exported from Virginia would go to England and consigned to the “farmers” authorized for that commodity.
An instruction on the matter was sent to the Council of State appointed successor to Yeardley, Francis West, who was authorized to call into session the Assembly to debate the action. This appears to have been an honest effort to secure the opinion of that body before a final action on the command was taken. The Assembly met for three or four days in March 1628. Washburn summarizes the response by the Assembly:
The Assembly thanked the King for prohibiting the importation of [untaxed-tariffed] Spanish tobacco into the English market, but cried that they would be at the mercy of covetous individuals in England if a monopoly on Virginia tobacco was allowed. They proposed, however, that since the King intended to take all their tobacco, he should agree to take at least 500,000 pounds of tobacco at 3 shillings 6 pence, the pound delivered in Virginia, or 4 shillings deliver in London. If the King was unwilling to take so much, they desire the right to export again from England to the Low Countries, Ireland, Turkey and elsewhere. As to the King’s proposal to limit tobacco cultivation … [in Virginia] they asserted … this would not be sufficient for their maintenance. As to the King’s desire [to diversify the economy] that the colonists should produce pitch and tar, pipe staves and iron, they complained that much capital was needed to put such enterprises in operation [Finally] The Assembly commissioned Sir Francis Wyatt, then in England, and two Virginians to represent them in negotiations with the King[99] Wilcomb E. Washburn, Virginia Under Charles I and Cromwell, 1625-1660 (Create Space, Independent Publishing Platform, April 14, 2016), p. 5.
The Assembly debated the matter and sent its observations back to England for consideration. The episode, however, sustained the role of the Assembly as an advisory body, and offers us an opportunity to introduce what will be an important dynamic of the 1630’s—the evolution of trade from England, tobacco trade in particular, and the individuals and actors involved. 1626-8 is a good benchmark period for use to understand the loose organization of trade, and the type of actors involved it in at the end of the Company period.
Neville Williams reports that in 1627-8 there were 354 importers of Virginia tobacco. The cast of characters importing ranged from powerful London financiers, merchant adventurers, a number of shipmasters, several gentry and aristocrats including Edwin Sandys, the Earl of Warwick, and even the former Governor Wyatt and Governor Yeardley. “Most Virginia voyages were undertaken as a common venture for considerable partnerships of merchants”. For example one voyage carried 42,626 pounds of tobacco for 33 merchants. Merchants usually spread their tobacco into several ventures to mitigate against their loss at sea. Most deposited their goods at London customs, but 24% went to other ports.
Bristol was the most prominent second port. Closely aligned with Parliament and actively a participant in the Virginia Company’s colonization in the north, Bristol attempted as best it could with a divided city council to remain on terms with the Crown. While Bristol had been more closely aligned with Massachusetts region colonization, Bristol also was a major actor in the Virginia tobacco trade, and a likely avenue of smuggling to avoid custom taxes. Its role in the trade suggests the impact of the political divide in England could, and likely did, play a role in the mechanics and financing of the tobacco trade. We shall see this later on in this module.
On the whole, in London and the outports it was in the cities and merchants interests to make regulation work and the big ports were strong enough to do so. But London and the larger ports also had sufficiently robust merchant classes to effectively avoid regulation when they choose, particularly when they regarded that regulation as unfairly favoring another port.[99] Ruth Savage Turpin, “the Political Economy of Tobacco in the Seventeenth Century English Atlantic” (2017), Open Access Dissertations/1648, p..50.
The administration of the shipment and the payment of customs suffered, it seems, from serious inefficiency and gaps, and so it is likely a good deal of the smuggling was at London, but it was known that many ships deposited their goods of back of the way inlets and small isolated areas. [99] Neville Williams, England’s Tobacco Trade in the Reign of Charles I, the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography (Vol. 65, No. 4, Oct, 1957).
The reader might note the “dog that did not bark” was the Virginia Company Magazine; by 1627, the Magazine had ceased functioning, and Virginia’s tobacco trade had passed to the private planter, merchants, shipmasters-owners, and former company officials. Involvement by the Virginia institutions, such as the Council or Assembly, were regulatory, but did not intrude upon the financing or the transportation-logistics associated with the trade.
By 1627, it certainly appears that investment capital and export trade for Virginia planters was a private matter, individual to the planter. In that league, volume and access to investment sources mattered. Anyone could grow tobacco in Virginia, but if you wanted to sell it in England you’d better make your deal with planters who exported in volume (requiring BTW lots of indentured servants) and contacts with willing English investors. If Virginia politics and policy-making were shaping up into an oligarchy, so was the tobacco economy. Would the reader be surprised if I suggested they overlapped with the latter reinforcing the former—and the former reinforcing the latter.
the Tobacco Depression Can’t Stop the Tobacco Steamroller
Up to this point we have discussed the “tobacco gazelle” and its role in dominating the Virginia economic base. Tobacco played the role of “gold” in an agricultural gold rush that was Virginia during the second decade of the Company period, and now in the post-Company transition period. There was lots of money to be made in harvesting tobacco and exporting it into the English market, and that was the real driver in our Virginia economic development macro strategy; the settlement nexus.
What is a bit surprising, seldom mentioned in the literature, is the price of tobacco declined rather significantly during this period. The price of tobacco was 27 Pence Sterling from 1616 to 1619, at which point it declined to 20 in 1621. By 1626, it fell to 10.4. In 1621 (@ 20 Pence Sterling) Virginia shipped to England about 38,500 pounds of tobacco; in 1626 when our tale begins, Virginia shipped 208,922 pounds @ 10.4. At first glance, the reader might yell out “this is not the way it is supposed to work”. Except in agriculture especially, it does work out that way—as the Populist farmers in the 1880 American West would discover. Lower prices led to increased production—which in turn meant settlement of more Tidewater, and the planting of more acreage in tobacco. Lower prices fueled the tobacco gazelle and the Tidewater settlement nexus. [99] Ruth Savage Turpin, “the Political Economy of Tobacco in the Seventeenth Century English Atlantic” (2017), Open Access Dissertations/1648, p. 84, Table 2.5
Well prices didn’t settle down in 1627 or in the next five years. By 1632 the price was 2.9, so low, it served as the base for tobacco prices during the 1630’s when it bottomed at 2.5 in 1640. Historians have long called attention to the “tobacco depression” which became a topic of great conversation and concern in 1628-9. Between 1626 prices declined to 6.5 in 1629 from 10.4, a decline to my eye would seem substantial, seemingly became a near, if not actual, crisis in Virginia by 1629. [99] Ruth Savage Turpin, “the Political Economy of Tobacco in the Seventeenth Century English Atlantic” (2017), Open Access Dissertations/1648, p. 84, Table 2.5
Things would get better in 1633 (@5) for four years before declining to the 1640 low (@2.5), but it is clear the 1630’s were not kind to Virginia tobacco. In 1630, however, Virginia shipped 331,426 pounds of tobacco, while in 1640, 1,044,544 pounds arrived in merrie olde England. Needless to say, during the decade the Tidewater settlement was in very high gear, so high the Powhatan were driven to despair, eventually leading to the Third Powhatan War in 1644. It seems bad times propelled Virginia’s tobacco expansion and had to have impacted the rise of the planter class, and I might add given some thought to some planters that maybe tobacco wasn’t the way to go. [99] Ruth Savage Turpin, “the Political Economy of Tobacco in the Seventeenth Century English Atlantic” (2017), Open Access Dissertations/1648, p. 84, Table 2.5. Certainly, the increase in production corresponded with increases in population, as about 1,210 resided in Virginia in 1625, 4,914 in 1635, and above 10,000 by 1639.
That the population doubled in a five year period, 1635-1639, a period of depressed tobacco prices, may raise an eyebrow—but we must not forget relative to British immigration to Ireland, Virginia does not fare well. Also, over 20,000 immigrated to Massachusetts in this period. There may well have been more push than pull in British immigration of this period. In any event, these are not “breakout” or take off numbers. Virginia has finally achieved a positive trajectory, a sustainable incremental growth that permeated into the relatively small Tidewater region, but its greatest growth lay in future years—not the days of the First Migration.
This crisis ought to have impacted Virginia politics and policy-making in some manner, we suspect—and it did. The Palisades Project, described below, was the equivalent of Virginia’s “New Deal”, and in some ways, it was. Whatever else it did, it cemented the economic foundation for the planter elite that was developing—and the base for the political oligarchy that was in place at the end of the 1630’s. The economic depression certainly, as we shall see, generated some disruption among those elites, and that really upset the politics of that decade.
With tobacco selling for less, the colonists responded, as typically happens in an agricultural economy, by producing more tobacco and making up the loss with increased production–which, logically, maintained a depression price for tobacco on the global market. In day-to-day life the Tidewater tobacco producer constantly needed more and more fields and areas in which to produce tobacco. This led to a way-of-life described by Billings and supported by Craven:
What came with the collapse of tobacco prices is both an expansion in tobacco plantations and tobacco production so to(make up in volume what is lost in the price), and some effort at diversification from the monoculture. Craven captures both in his observation of this period: “As is well-known the main trust of the Virginia traders after 1622 was toward the upper Chesapeake, with William Claiborne in the lead, and by mid-century toward the south and southwest with Abraham Wood and William Byrd as leaders” [99] Wesley Frank Craven, White, Red and Black, p. 66. We do see evidence of increased trading activity among several of the elite establishment, expressed in initiatives by Samuel Mathews and George Menefie. In this period land patent around the Potomac and into the north above it are being filed. Virginia is beginning to settle areas in northern Virginia and the Washington DC and Maryland’s southern eastern shore.
Still, after 1628 with the price of tobacco collapsed, Virginia’s economic base was for all appearances almost entirely tobacco-related enterprises, which in these years sold literally for “pence on the the pound”, an English equivalent of pennies on the dollar. The Virginia tobacco elite was both desperate and frightened and well aware that any increase in tobacco production resulted in declines in price. Virginia tobacco elites had a measure of flexibility in adjusting to this dynamic, but not so the smaller and household tobacco farmer. In many ways locked into tobacco production, most Virginia plantations and homesteads simply found ways to grow more tobacco, sufficient to offset the impact of price reduction.
Yet in 1629, the first year of Harvey’s governorship, while he still was in England, Virginia’s Assembly adopted several major tobacco-related initiatives. With no General Assembly meetings called into action by Virginia officials after the fall of the Company in 1625, the 1629 Assembly resulted from domestic pressures and provincial action. Tobacco was so important, it compelled an assertion of local representative governance to ameliorate the situation.
Legislation restricted each planter to cultivation of no more than 3,000 plants—and in the next year it approved further legislation reducing plantings to 2,000 plants. However, there is no evidence, I found that suggested crop control was followed by most individual planters, and since no means existed to comprehensively enforce it, we are at a loss to determine whatever effectiveness it may have had. It certainly did not inhibit an increase in production exported to England. The restrictions continued on the books for a considerable period of time, and were responsible for an early tension between Virginia tobacco planters and early Maryland planters when the latter made their appearance after 1635.[99] Clement Eaton, A History of the Old South (3rd Ed) (Macmillan Publishing Co, 1975), p. 17. If crop control had an undistinguished result, other actions adopted by the legislature were more profound in their long-term commitment to tobacco production and widen its function beyond simple export:
During the 1630’s Virginia’s governor and assembly attempted to support tobacco prices by various subtle measures (1) crop control laws; (acceptance of tobacco for public dues and taxes, and its promotion as a medium of exchange which established a monetary demand for the crop; (3) numerous encouragements and requirements to diversify farm production, and (4) the imposition in 1633 of a 64 lb duty on all newcomers who planted tobacco within one year after their arrival (This duty was repealed in 1634) [because it was a John Harvey imposed regulation with little public consensus] [99] Gary M. Pecquet, British Mercantilism and Crop Controls in the Tobacco Colonies: a Study of Rent-Seeing Costs (the Cato Journal, 2003-Researchgate)
Immigrant Configuration Shifts & Shredded Community Matures a Bit
Large land/plantation patents/titles were issued throughout this period, to domestic residents, new settlers and investment joint stock corporations. Immigrants spilled over established settlements into dispersed, hard to get to locations–secured by land purchase and headrights which enlarged the trickle of owners with indentured servants, renters, and a spate of accompanying former servants now free householders who intended to set up small homestead “plantations”. This would continue until Governor Harvey took office and restrained the issuance of headrights and land patents approvals.
Women and families became more common in this period and the “shredded community”, once nearly all male, at least was tempered by a different tone of governance, and an elevated sense of expectations that offered some constraint even in a frontier community such as the Tidewater. Housing improved in the larger plantations, and more public buildings and better churches were constructed. Even the end of the 1620’s, the boundaries of settled Tidewater were noticeably larger than 1622, With entry to other river systems overland transportation having little infrastructure of consequence, effectively isolated river system settlements from the other river systems, increasing the shredded nature of the colony, and a real limitation of Jamestown’s ability to even know what was going on, never mind control it. Conscious or not, authority and the need for local implementation, decentralized authority in Virginia.
In the newly settled areas, usually the perimeters of the existing hundreds, the settlement of adjacent river systems, the upper Chesapeake Bay, and Eastern Shore, created young, fragile privately-owned plantations-homesteads, without any formal designation as an district or governmental unit. Known only by the name applied to them by their residents, and dominated by the owners of large plantation in the area, newly settled area further blurred distinctions between the older colony-within-a-colony hundreds, older plantations, estates, new large plantation, and areas settled by small and usually subsistence homesteaders.
By the late twenties and early thirties a typical Tidewater “settlement” included several large plantations, estates of many large owner/officials, and multitude of renters, and smaller, often subsistence homesteads clustered in walking distance to a small merchant and religious center of a few buildings and a beaten path. Given the all-too-quick exhaustion of tobacco fields, to call such settlements “permanent” was a misnomer. In a decade the configuration and composition of the settlement would change. The pressure was always on the periphery as settlers moved still deeper toward the Fall Line in the Middle Peninsula
“[Local administration] problem proved to be basically one of adjustment to an economic and social pattern increasingly marked by a wide dispersal of settlement. Under the pressure of this trend in settlement the municipal scheme of local government established in 1618 gave way to practices borrowed from the English county, but the story of local administration in Virginia traces directly from that year. For then it was the colony came to be marked by a diversity of interests compelling attention to several issues of local government. Chief among these was the problem presented by adventurers [plantation investors] plans for development of their own ‘particular’ [private] plantations, and though these units [hundreds] were destined soon to disappear, the action fixing their relation to the provincial government was to leave its mark on the governmental structure of the colony for many years. [99] Wesley Frank Craven, the Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century (Louisiana State University Press, 1970), p. 166.
Stability of the local government structures was uncertain; those that persisted were often “rump” entities whose leadership was sustained by assertion of local elites or made necessary by anomic actions of individuals.
The court system, therefore became the institutional mechanism whereby grasping men used the tools of kinship, patronage, deference, and money to lay the foundations of a ruling elite that possessed the attributes of the traditional English ruling classes. This process was played out in a political arena full of petty disputes, constant bickering, vicious infighting, and occasional violence. The tumultuous character of politics, which Bernard Bailyn has aptly designated ‘chaotic factionalism’ combined with rapid changes in the structure of Virginia society to produce the chronic instability that market the Old Dominion before 1676 [99] Warren M. Billings, the Growth of Political Institutions in Virginia, 1634-1676 (William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 2,Apr, 1974) p.226
To this Craven added:
{T)hat Englishmen would always adopt identical courses is well enough disproved by the distinctive institutional patterns marking their settlements in Virginia and New England. Though there were, of course, important similarities in form, terminology, and procedure, the chief thing that bound Massachusetts and Virginia to a common institutional heritage was a thing of the spirit, a feeling for what was appropriate in a community of Englishmen.
Overshadowing all differences is the fact that these early Americans laid hold of the cardinal principle of English local administration—a somewhat unusual combination of central authority and local representation. In Virginia, as in the homeland, the Englishmen depended, in that area of government most identified with his interests, upon officials who bore the King’s commission but were at the same time neighbors of the men they judged.
It is true that the county [in Virginia] was becoming the basic electoral unit, but a right of any one community within the county to send at its own cost a separate burgess survived through several years to remind historians of the earlier and very practical rule that representation in the Assembly should be given all those communities which properly should be represented. Significantly, the privilege seems to have been used principally to demand a greater measure of local autonomy in the fields of civil and ecclesiastical administration [99] Frank Wesley Craven, the Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, pp. 171-2
In settlements established after 1630, a local “council-monthly court” assumed an important functions, fleshing out the development of an English “shire”, a title adopted from English tradition, that sometimes replaced the “hundreds”. The 1630 Virginia shire was the basis of the new county system when it was established in 1634. Local officials were formally appointed by the governor, as was the “commander”—but from lists or informal guidance provided by the shire leadership. The governor was seldom in a position to be able to unilaterally appoint local officials without their participation in the decision. Governors, all of whom owned private plantations, were likely participants one or several of these local oligarchies. Larger landowners usually owned several large plantations, and were often dispersed in several regions of the Tidewater.
Larger plantation owners had access into the decision-making of different settlements-communities, and that opened opportunity for rivalries, competition, socialization, and joint action-shared consensus. A web of social, political and economic interactions, friendships and feuds, sprang from these local settlement communities, forming a basis for activities, initiatives and governance at the provincial level. Jamestown and its provincial institutions were infused with these when its governmental bodies were convened. In any case, we can see an elite taking a tangible “form” and presence, and can uncover evidence of non-elite activities in the thirties that we did not see in the twenties.
While little appreciated, to some degree the plantation exercised some functions common to a township, and exercise important role in the local tobacco economy–not to mention maintaining public and religious order. All of which in their time will evolve and be incorporated into the way-of-life that the plantation became. Accordingly, some service delivery, self-defense, and coordination needs were assumed by the individual plantations, and, as expected, the larger and largest of the plantation owners assumed responsibility for matters and services that the hard-to-get-to hundred could not provide efficiently or effectively. The plantation therefore inadvertently assumed responsibilities as a settlement service delivery unit–acting as a “town” might in rural New England. But as we shall see, in New England, the town became the election district, and the county in New England did not. In Virginia, it was reversed.
As Ver Steeg observes, “In Massachusetts, for example, county courts were established … within a decade after the founding of the colony [in Virginia, it took twenty-seven years]. The jurisdiction over cases and the creation of county officials paralleled that of Virginia. In New England, however, the towns rather than the counties were the basis for colonial representation in the colonial legislature; moreover enforcement of economic regulations and poor relief were also more commonly exercised by the towns” [99] Clarence L. Ver Steeg, the Formative Years, 1607-1763 (Hill and Wang, 1964), pp. 72-3. Without towns of substance, those service functions formally were performed by the county in Virginia. This is the exact opposite of the Massachusetts dynamic.
The [county] courts’ creation induced a fundamental decentralization and dispersal of power within the colony’s institutional structure by splitting the powers and duties of government among the [county] courts, the Governor, and the General Assembly. Within thirty years’ time law, customs, and local conditions enlarged that division until the county courts became the branch of government with which the colonist had the most frequent contact and intimate knowledge, while the General Assembly assumed more of a purely legislative role. As local government became a focal point of the settler’s daily existence, some planters employed what family ties, influence and wealth they possessed to fashion it into an institutional device for founding a ruling elite akin to the traditional English ruling classes. In turn this elite provided the manpower from which justices of the peace, burgesses and [Council of State] councillors were drawn”[99] Warren M. Billings, Chapter 3,the Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century, pp. 69-70.
The character of authority that arose in isolated communities, in this Virginia period, were naturally based on charisma, wealth and status, previous position, even education, but also on ownership of the large plantation, around which renters, homesteaders and merchants drew their living. The commander and self-defense, plus the need for order established by the sheriff, necessarily elevated these individuals–who formally at least were nominated by local large landowners, and appointed formally by the governor. In this period we will witness the emergence of what we call the “plantation conquistadores”.
The plantation owners, most of whom had found ways in which to associate themselves with former Company officials (one of which was marrying their widows) assumed military and militia leadership during the years after 1622 had simultaneously enlarged their estates and land holding, accumulated large numbers of incentivized indentured servants for their fields and established as strong niche position in the political affairs of those areas in which they operated. They were New Men, unchecked by formal institutions, they secured a solid, if not intermittently dominant position on the Council of State.
Savagely individualistic and independent-minded, these hard to manage “cats” were herded into a sub-grouping whose core spun off an infamous “Claiborne Clique” whose proposed ventures challenged the futures of the mainstream planter class, fired royal governors. and led the transition from a royalist Virginia to a Puritan, Parliamentary Cromwell Protectorate crusade against Catholic, royalist Maryland. Seemingly fading from power with the 1661 Restoration, they and their sons-successors were a bastion of autonomy under Berkeley’s second administration—and a critical player in Bacon’s Rebellion. While their species died out late in the seventeenth century, the Second Migration inherited and occupied their mansions, estates, plantations and seized the heritage, economy, and policy institutions the First Migration had created and operated over their fifty years in power.
These tigers of militia and plantations, transformed into part-time officeholders formed a hierarchy sustained by the shredded community and export tobacco economy; they set the tone for the policies, politics, and character of the post-Company Transition and English Civil War periods; lasting well into the 1650’s they are the deplorable thugs that historians of all stripes will turn away from, in disdain and depreciation. For us they are founding fathers of future Virginia policy systems.
The thrust of these several realities and dynamics aggregated to produce a hierarchical and deferential policy system at the local level during the 1630’s. In practice that meant the larger plantations on the isolated hundred hinterland would assume several functions and responsibilities of the hundred. These large landowners, likely to become even larger landowners in the future, played a public-private role over their local adjacent settlements. This is the origin of the famous southern “colonel”, the plantation owner who in isolated geographies, assumed leadership of the local community. In short, core institutions, societal interactions and relationships between institutions and classes made famous in the golden years of the tobacco monoculture were certainly laid out in these early years.
The Palisades Project: Settlement Nexus Infused with Site Control of Indian Lands Produces Signature Economic Development Project of pre-1640 Colonial Virginia
Trump haters will turn upside down and inside out when they read below that America’s first major economic development infrastructure project was a wall intended to keep out the Powhatan, and thereby create protected acreage on which to establish homestead tobacco plantations. How this irony of ironies came to be should not be unexpected. As my first book in this series, As Two Ships Pass in the Night, consistently uncovered that war, defense, and the threat from foreign nations have generated a serious, consistent and fundamental set of projects, strategies, and programs that are at the core of modern American economic development.
Indeed, the not very well known post-WWII federal “industrial decentralization” strategy-policy transformed and disrupted the original placement of American industry by defusing it, in the name of national defense, throughout the nation and jump-starting the rise of the Sunbelt in the process.[99] Ronald W. Coan, a History of American State and Local Economic Development (Edward Elgar, London, 2017), pp. 394-397 The 1632 Palisades Project, of course, was no where as dramatic, and just as unknown, but was pretty substantial at the time; the signature project behind the anchoring and stabilization of the Virginia colony after the Second Powhatan War, developed by conflicting Virginia elites, and embraced by the king who ordered his much disliked governor to build it. The Project opened up the “Middle Peninsula” adjacent to the Falls Line, and cleared and homestead the adjoining area on which the future capital, Williamsburg was later constructed.
Background to the Palisades Project: Early Colonial Policy Design
With peace repudiated after 1629 Virginians maintained their focus on expanding their settlement and tobacco production in the Tidewater. The drought and the collapse of tobacco on the international markets were known and the response of settlers, large and small alike, was knee-jerk: increase in acreage under production and sell more volume. The departure of Francis West, and his replacement with John Potts, an Indian fighter from Yeardley years, only revealed the thin balance of opinion on the Council. With tobacco that meant a constant search for more land to cultivate. Nothing, it seems, could halt the progression of tobacco and plantations–if there was a guiding spirit underlying the Transition Period it was settlement, increased tobacco production, and export of tobacco.
That meant establishing “site control” over more and more hinterland. Site control meant warding off the Indians, providing some measure of insulation against their attack, and doing so while maintaining the Virginian ethos of isolated homeland hinterland plantations and homesteads. Built into this was the reality of an undeclared war with the Powhatan. One could challenge the risks, but even a Virginian could no longer ignore Indians in order to concentrate on tobacco as many had done in the aftermath of the onset of the Second Powhatan War. With low population densities, and no clear cut technological advantage, defense of newly settled land was paramount–the threat of an another massacre always lurked in the back, and front, of the Tidewater settler’s mind.
Site control and self defense had finally penetrated the settlement nexus. So after the middle twenties and into the late, self defense joined at the hip as it were with settlement and tobacco production. The Transition Period’s signature economic development project would be the physical expression of the settlement nexus: the largest tobacco-Indian removal infrastructure project in Virginia’s history: the Wyatt (or Yeardley)-inspired Palisades Project of 1632-4.
It is clear from the formation of the original seven counties in 1634, that English impact on the western James River area was limited, checked by the Powhatans. After the 1628 peace, local leaders debated over whether they could clear the Indians from the lower James/York Peninsula. Professor McCartney adds these plantation owners were triggered by the attack and killing of five Virginians in July of that year. They sensed one could not use the existing land patent, homesteading and indenture business model without a military fortification behind which they could establish an effective self-defense program.
Several key plantation conquistadores were more than willing to tackle the project and initiated the first serious movement up the Middle Peninsula. These plantation owners were reviving a project first conceptualized during Governor Wyatt’s last few months before he left for England in 1625-6.. Wyatt returned to England that year, but while in Virginia he received a letter informing him of various complaints regarding his, and George Sandys (Edwin’s brother), performance while in Virginia. Wyatt, apparently with little else to do, responded in a long rebuttal. One complaint to which he replied (later insinuated to have been from his predecessor, former Governor Yardley) was that Virginia’s economy was too saturated by “the worst of evils”, tobacco. Say it another way, Virginia economic base was undiversified. The power of the growing monoculture had to be checked Wyatt argued–such was the purpose of the “Palisades Project”.
Wyatt, who apparently shared George Sandys distaste, if not hatred of the weed (Wyatt was married to George Sandys daughter), agreed that tobacco was an unfortunate and undesired economic base, but he went on to argue that while hated it might be, tobacco was the only way to pay the bills of the colony and its residents. Sandys in 1625 at least, concurred and his compromise was to advocate for a more incremental and limited diversification based on growing staples so the diet of the residents could be improved, and fewer would die during the sickness season. Appealing, seemingly to Virginian self-interest, Sandys had developed an offshoot our self-sufficiency strategy that allowed tobacco, but balanced by a “grow your own” staples farming. That approach did not directly challenge tobacco, but it imposed new conditions and complications on a homestead. From this the need for a palisades would be apparent. It seems Wyatt, then governor, was onboard and made funds available to the logical recipient: the joint stock corporation that owned and operated Martins’ Hundred. That effort, Wyatt reports ended in failure when the Martin’s Hundred planation resisted his overtures.
The idea was to clear land, first of Indians, then prepared and opened for cattle, pastures, swine. After that the farm plots could be cleared and planted. “Our intent was after the Massacre to have seated the whole Colony (or most part thereof) upon the [cleared] Forrest and having runne a strong Palisado from Martins Hundred to Chesekiacque to [the] Plant Pawmunka river, and so winne all that large extent of ground to our selves, nor was there any objection against it, but that a patent of the land was granted to the Society [the joint stock corporation] of that Hundred”. That version of the project seemingly never got off the ground, however. The initiative came to naught because much of the land involved was owned by Martin’s Hundred, and, lacking the capacity to exercise eminent domain, the project died stillborn. Wyatt in his letter further added:
For as the multitudes of people and workes of glory ought to be first in in execution, so laying of a grounde work for health and plenty must be first in execution … Adde to these defense against a forrein enemy, and you will find, that extirpating of the Savages, winning of the Forrest, encrease of cattle, swine &c [?] building houses convenient for both seasons, planting garden and orchards for delight and health, setting vines and Mulberry trees, for raising these two excellent comodities of wine and silk is work enough for one in seven years”. Francis Wyatt, Letter of Sir Francis Wyatt, Governor of Virginia (the William and Mary Quarterly, Vol 6, No. 2 (April, 1926), pp.114-121. In retrospect Wyatt was saying the project’s first phase was military in nature—Indian removal—then followed by the infrastructure project, the six mile palisade, livestock, homesteading, and agriculture would follow. With the project fleshed out, Wyatt sent his letter to the Earl of Southampton–a major figure in the Virginia Company politics. Likely, the Earl passed it on to his friends and supporters, and made its way back to Virginia
That approach, congruent with London’s thought on the subject was I think, not shared by most Virginian planters, and seems not to have had the support of the Council–which predictably it did not follow. The diversification away from tobacco may have been a justification Wyatt felt compelling, but the likely authors of the strategy that actually was implement of moving up the Middle Peninsula and encapsulating the land taken within a fortified palisades was very much tied to the conquistadors on the Council of State.
With Virginians, tobacco was the centerpiece of Virginia’s economy and from their perspective, it would stay in place, and be extended as the Middle Peninsula was settled. With Yeardley back in the saddle as governor in 1626 he initiated his approach to settlement by first appointing another Council plantation conquistador, William Tucker to first establish a checkpoint at the base of the James (Point Comfort) so to secure the control of the river from outside attack by Spanish (who the English were now at war), and to further strengthen the checkpoint into a fortification and a base of supply for movement up the Middle Peninsula.
Washburn elaborates this fortified base of operations reflected Yeardley’s approach to how the Middle Peninsula to be settled in light of the reality of hostile Indians defending what had been a major stronghold and homeland of the Confederation. Recognizing the weakness created by the “shredded community” settlement by highly individualistic settlers reaching as deep into the hinterland as they could, Yeardley countered with a “planting the forest” incremental strategy of settling first the adjacent areas outside an established community, i.e. plant the forest around the settlement, and then slowly, moving outward from those fortified bases. Fortifications and concentrated populations allowed strength in numbers in an organized militia to garner a measure of security and safety that would mitigate any new surprise attack by the Powhatan. His clear intention was to inhibit individualistic settlers from “jumping” too far into the interior that defense was impossible.
To further those ends, Yeardley issued “a proclamation requiring that anyone who desired to move his place of residence within the colony must obtain prior permission from the Governor and the Council. Even to be absent for a short time from his place of residence, a planter was required to get permission from his ‘plantation commander’ Keeping to his conception of settlement from a military post by establishing one at Chiskiack–clearing that beachhead by carrying out a surprise attack on the Powhatan nearby. Each plantation was order to engage the nearby Indians on August 1, 1627, take possession of any Indian town, kill as many Indians as possible, and seize or cut down what corn they found. The attack is reported to have been successful. [99] Wilcomb E. Washburn, Virginia Under Charles I and Cromwell, 1625-1660 (Create Space, Independent Publishing Platform, April 14, 2016), p. 4.
In 1629 several prominent planters [no doubt on the Council of State] “agreed to supply a number of men for occupation of a point on the York River … in return for a grant of fifty acres of land for each man provided. [This [plan contemplated to develop] a strongly held line of settlement [about six miles] across the Peninsula from Chiskiack [modern York] to Jamestown”. [99] Wesley Frank Craven, the Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, pp. 173-4. While Potts was (acting) governor in 1630, the Council awarded six hundred acres of that land to John West, another brother of Lord Delaware, and to Captain John Utie who were each made commanders of their settlements. [99] Wilcomb E. Washburn, Virginia Under Charles I and Cromwell, 1625-1660 (Create Space, Independent Publishing Platform, April 14, 2016), p. 6.
Again, self-sufficiency-health, economic diversification, and settlement were the basis for a major project that was, in Wyatt’s view, necessary and sufficient for the Colony’s future economic development. The role-impact of the Powhatan in this project was vividly stated by Wyatt, and it is clear that in its governor’s mind settlement and conflict with the Indians were two sides of the same coin.
In 1629-30, however, with Wyatt long out of power and in England, ambitious tobacco plantation owners thought the project itself embraced tobacco the tobacco monolith and saturated any economic development-settlement initiative with its key objective; tobacco plantation owners, ditched the economic diversification objective by limiting it to cattle, swine et al, but still linking it to removal of Indians, whose end goal was access and security for plantation and homestead for tobacco planters to push deeper in the interior.
I would, however, offer a caveat to this institutionalization of the tobacco monoculture. At this point 1630, an alternative was in play, to be discussed in another module, the Kent Island trading fort led by planter-surveyor-conquistador William Claiborne. In spite of the settlement of the Middle Peninsula, the power of the tobacco monoculture–which had even defied the King’s wishes–was still not a fiat accompli.
Best described by McCartney, Wyatt’s early palisade-forest clearing project was picked up by the General Assembly in 1632. With Assembly approvals, actual construction began by March, 1633. Governor Harvey was in full bloom during this period; he did not oppose either the project or its implementation. My suspicion is the project came out of the Governor’s Council, not the Burgesses, and it is very clear that the project support was based on several dynamics: plantation security from Indian attack, aggressive Indian removal from the desired but contested land, a desire to open up yet more land for settlement, and generate momentum for development of a hamlet/town around the Fall Line (just north of present day Williamsburg). [99] Martha W. McCartney, Chapter 4: Narrative History, in A Study of Virginia Indians and Jamestown: the First Century https://www.wm.edu/as/anthropology/research/centers/airc/OurWork/npsstudy/index.php. William & Mary Arts and Sciences, Danielle Moretti-Langholz PhD, December, 2005, Chapter 4
The series of legislative acts associated with this locally derived plan/strategy was complex. It is not clear to me what path the letter followed, but it was clear that sometime in 1628 it had been pitched to the King, and for his reasons was accepted and incorporated in his personal instructions to his newly appointed royal governor, John Harvey. Harvey was instructed to convene a session of the General Assembly and secure from it its willingness to implement, and pay for, the palisades project. The deal was confirmed by an Act of the Assembly in 1632 which added a tax exemption to any freeman that would settle south of that line (which would be protected by a wall which also would be constructed).
The 1629 meeting alluded to above, in Virginia, would have occurred after the king’s instructions, but before Harvey ever arrived in Virginia—and he never started his work as governor until early 1630. So we have a good two year gap before the Assembly was convened, worked its magic, and the project commenced. In this time of political limbo, one senses the Virginia plantation owners were getting a headstart, and essentially removing the Indians, and acquiring through patent sales key land parcels relevant to the project. No surprise, the governor at the time, John Potts, seemed to be at the head of the line, and he and a number of his allies and other landowners spent the two years achieving phase one of the project. That seems confirmed by Frank Wesley Craven, who at the conclusion of a paragraph discussing Indian removal during this time period observed “Through these tactics (Indian removal), the colonists kept the area reasonably clear of Indians, and having established early in the 1630’s a frontier outpost in the proposed settlement of Chiskiack on the York River, the government finally allowed the kind of peace that is broken only by individual incidents to return” [99] Wesley, White, Red and Black, p. 55
In 1633 a second Assembly Act imposed a labor levy to construct the wall and supporting forts. Labor levies were controversial, widely disliked, disruptive, and henceforth are a significant piece of legislation. Indeed, the Legislature appealed to London for resources in the legislative action, support which was forthcoming. The labor draft of one of every forty men was employed in the clearance of forest and construction of the palisade—leading to the construction in March
Within a year several key buildings buildings were constructed. A roughly six mile continuous fortification, anchored by periodic forts, was eventually by 1636; specifically constructed between Archer’s home Creek (today’s College Creek of William and Mary fame) on the James River and stretched to Queens Creek on the York River. Intended to house a revolving garrison of draft militia, the palisades offered an early warning system to residents below. Relatively little is known about the palisades early years, other than the six mile palisade clearance was substantially completed during 1634,and rebuilt in 1646. Today scattered remains can be observed, and some land records confirm its existence.
As part of the project, land associated with the property of Martin’s Hundred joint stock corporation had to be “taken” from owners (eminent domain) who were no longer alive or present in Virginia; seventy-three settlers had been killed at Martins Hundred during the 1622 Massacre. Besides Martins’ Hundred, about 300,000 acres of land were simply seized, the land stripped of Indian ownership and title, and reclassified as Virginia colony or public ownership, and were duly recorded. The land taken was called the Middle Plantation, a site which later changed names to Williamsburg—the future capital of Virginia in 1693, and homeland of the Byrd Richmond dynasty. As soon as the palisades were completed, 1634, the James City shire or hundred in which it was located was included in the initial eight counties created in 1634–called James City County.
Less obvious, but very evident is the leadership of Potts in this initiative–likely through the Council of State. More obvious is the blurring of policy between private and public, and the direct involvement of private plantations and their ownership in the actual construction of the project. Potts patented for himself about 1200 acres of the area in 1632, acting no doubt upon the September, 1632 General Assembly legislation extending headright and land donations policy to the area. His plantation was called Harrop after his ancestral home in Cheshire England. His influence and predominance in the Middle Plantation persisted for decades after the project, and as such we can see the near simultaneous development of a personal plantation, acquisition of a strong leadership position in the area, and the role of provincial institutions in permitting this to occur.The blurring of public and private is so profound, and while not unquestioned, was unable to be checked by the forces and politics of that time.
Almost immediately “a small settlement known as the Middle Plantation sprang up midway between the heads of the College and Queens Creeks. Settlers moved into the region in considerable numbers, establishing homesteads. The nearby Chiskiack Indians withdrew from the area resettling further up in the Middle Peninsula [99]. Martha W. McCartney, Chap 4, in Danielle Morretti-Langholtz, “A Study of Virginia Indians and Jamestown: the First Century (Colonial National Historic Park, National Park Service, December, 2005).
Whatever security the palisades afforded, the Middle Plantation remained on the hinterland of the colony, and was vulnerable to Indian attack. Indeed, in 1644 in the final Third Powhatan War, the area was contested. Described by Captain Thomas Yonge in 1634, the Palisades were
a strong palisade … upon a streight between both rivers and … a sufficient force of men to defence of the same, whereby, all the lower part of Virginia have a range for their cattle, nearly fortie mile in length, and in most places twelve miles broade … The palisades is very neare six milese, bounded in by two large Creekes … in this manner to take also in all the grounde between these two rivers, and so utterly excluded the Indians from thence, which work is conceived to be extraordinary benefit to the country [99] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Plantation_(Virginia)
The true city father of the future Williamsburg was a later Council of State (and Burgesses delegate) who emigrated from England in the 1650’s (a second migration settler), John Page. Page founded a plantation in the area at that time. A local parish (Bruton) was also established on land donated by Page,. He entitled himself as Colonel John Page, he donated land for William and Mary College and was without question the strongest advocate for the founding of Williamsburg and development of the area.. Aside from his plantation and merchant businesses, Page was the Virginia agent for Royal African Company–i.e. he was a major league slave trader. He established the Page Family dynasty and is considered as a First Family of Virginia.
McCarthy assets the land around the palisades was patented (sold) privately and in very short time, new demand of land was felt in the hinterland beyond (on the other side) of the Palisades—and throughout the entire Middle Peninsula. She comments immigration at this time also reached into what will become the Northern Neck region (the Potomac River Valley). In short, the Palisades opened up a stretch of the Tideland region above and beyond the Palisades Middle Plantation. A bit remarkable was the simultaneous installation of a “shire” (the new name for a Hundred) as the core administrative entity that handled the vital land registration, eminent domain and the stripping of land from Indian title to provincial title. Through the James City shire, the construction draft and the militia draft to man the bastion were issued and implement. In 1634 James City County was created as part of the county legislation of that year. James City County inherited the completed Palisades.
For economic development professionals it is interesting to cull from this description several observations connecting the Palisades Project to a modern infrastructure project. It probably is a bridge too far to label this as “urban renewal”—it is more a fore runner of future town-building—but the overlap is noticeable. In any case, one can easily see the disruptive politics and policy making that bled into the policy design, approval and implementation.
The blurring of public and private, the joint participation in all stages of the policy, its implementation, and future benefit bespeaks that this is a public-private partnership, sloppiness and corruption seemingly an almost inevitable feature that accompanies the initiative. Eminent domain and special financing arrangements accompany the project. Of interest, at least to me, is the noticeable time gap that can often be part of the infrastructure project; while some benefits can occur relatively quickly, the more fundamental “benefits” from the infrastructure can be recognized only after several decades—seventy years in Williamsburg’s case.
Perhaps most obvious, and most disliked, is the eviction of one population and its replacement with another. It is hard to conceive of a project of this nature without that essential element—and that speaks for itself. That in a narrow or wide sense this is economic development is likely to be conceded by most, but it does expose the disruption and almost brutality of the initiative-strategy, and its innate racial and class implications. Throughout this history, there will be no end of its repetition, further exposing the dark side of progress, if such be what it is. The reader will, I suspect, not be surprised by the power and pervasiveness of the infrastructure strategy as fundamental to the practice of economic development no matter what the time period.
Hundreds Evolve Courts Become Shires, and. in the absence of Towns, Plantations Share in Local Governance and Service Delivery
the Administrative “Vehicles” that “midwifed” the Tilt: hundreds and monthly courts
In this module we stress the real beginning of Virginia’s local governance. Local governance acquired a “pulse” around 1618-19–previous to the 1634 official county formation of counties.
The variety of structurally inconsistent local councils, courts, and offices that were incrementally added to the administrative and governance of local areas during the period before 1634, left an important impact, a heritage, on the future structure and behavior of Virginia counties. Not much appreciated, these fledgling institutions of local governance recruited and trained local elites and developed within them some notion of public governance distinctive from their private rule over their plantations and workforces. By the time counties were created in 1634, these local elites had acquired the better part of ten to fifteen years of experience, expectations and an understanding of their role in Jamestown’s provincial bodies, the Council, Burgesses, and the Assembly.
Forged from necessity and opportunity, not theory or ideology, these axioms of Virginia governance were the contributions of a First Migration elite that hacked their living in the tobacco export markets, the vulgarities of tobacco production, their almost desperate need to recruit and hold a workforce, and find new fields for production–while fending off Powhatan attacks and raids, and raiding their lands for corn and staples or to throw they off land that they wanted. Tobacco, plantations, a secure and productive workforce, and what quality of life they could scratch from their rudimentary social interaction in the dispersed and isolated settlements of shredded community that was Virginia.
While we label them as elites, they were closer to the edge of survival than that term usually implies. The life they led, the values they exhibited in their daily personal and business affairs reflected a rough competition of all against all, and a lack of stable counterforces usually found in a “civilized community”. Law and order, where it existed, was not impartial, usually arbitrary, but it could record deeds, resolve disputes, handle probate, manage the electoral franchise, and regulate tobacco, fund the Anglican parish, and draft labor gangs and militia. Their mansions were very small, and until the 1630’s not much at all. Compared to their successors a hundred years in the future, they were almost peasant like in their lack of amenities and rudimentary construction. The simple act of “getting around” Virginia, or even to one’s neighbors, was more than any of us alive today would likely imagine.
The earliest unit of Company local government was the “hundred”. It was first used for the Shirley Plantation, Virginia’s first, made to Governor de la Warr (West) (1613). Others were created by Governor Dale in his various “Gifts” to Company officials, shareholders, and large investor-owner joint stock corporations (1613-16). The last were referred to as “particular” plantations, and they were co-located adjacent to other plantations in a “hundred”. It was these hundreds-communities that the first plantations, owned by high-ranking Company officials, that tobacco was first grown. Indeed, Secretary of the Colony, John Rolfe was the author of those tobacco seeds, and he grew-experimented with them–on his Dale’s grant of a plantation on Henrico Island in 1611. These Company grants formed Virginia’s first scattered settlements outside Jamestown.
After 1616 the Company permitted London investors to become shareholders and to make investments by creating new hundreds-plantations. While these various larger plantations were responsible to the provincial-level Company, they were considered as “a colony within a colony” and the plantation owners were delegated considered responsibility, service delivery functions, and most importantly oversight over their indentured servant population. These plantations “were authorized to designate a man for the government of the tenants and to invest him with requisite economic and political powers” thus comixing their economic function with those of governance. It was this tradition that would later be employed after the 1622 Massacre when these areas were authorized to appoint a militia “commander”–again blurring the personal investment with administrative governance and self-protection. [99] Wesley Frank Craven, the Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century (Louisiana State University Press, 1970), pp. 165-6
The 1619 Greate Charter reforms, implemented by newly appointed Governor Yeardley, allowed the Company to create local, circuit “monthly courts” in several of the hundreds whose distance from Jamestown precluded convenient access to their residents to Jamestown itself. The first two were set up in 1618-9–and further extended into the other settled areas as the years passed by. What coordination there was with Jamestown was through the Governor and his Council in Jamestown. The March Massacre in 1622 turned the English world upside down, led to the elimination of some hundreds, lots of individual plantations, and prompted a ordered consolidation of survivors into a few, river-based, hundreds.
Composed of survivors of the attack (plantation and new immigrant homestead owners, renters, servants) these temporary “macro” hundreds concentrated refugees in more defensible areas so to reduce vulnerability–and maximize their ability to counter attack. They built palisades, formed militia, and were governed by “commanders” appointed formally by the governor, but selected from processes unknown in the local settlement. If attack is the best defense, than the “annual” or regular expedition or raids against adjacent tribes, created new opportunities for younger charismatic leader-types to enter into the elite.
Of particular note were the soon to be prominent plantation conquistadors that rose from their militia leadership in these larger, hard-pressed, hundreds as early as 1622-3. For conquistadors like Samuel Mathews, this was their breakout in their climb to power. At their inception militias were the core of authority in the post-Massacre Tidewater, and the commander, and the annual expedition commander were more military in their nature and scope of authority. Hundreds were infused with all sorts of hierarchy, and the combining of offices and positions was common.
That attack on Indian corn fields could, and probably usually did, mean profits for the commanders, it provided them with discretionary capital to further their investment in tobacco–or other ventures as well. Even here there was no sharp distinction between public and private, and the distinction between owner, commander, council member and the general population and indentured servants was very pronounced. There was no act of the Assembly that created Virginia’s elite and mass; it evolved almost naturally from the political culture of the shredded community.
There is little sense offered in the records as to how well the the local colony-within-a-colony plantation ownership, the local monthly courts, and later the militia commanders worked together, but after 1622, the “commander” seems to have assumed not only militia duties but administrative and service delivery functions as well–as time went on each had their assistants to do the work, thus creating a decentralized bureaucracy.
That local leadership did “double duty” in the Jamestown provincial government; some elected, many appointed, created considerable overlap from the start in local and provincial elites. In short I argue the early Company “policy system” such as it was in Virginia, was not democratic by nature or practice, but hierarchical and by structure grossly unequal. When the Company fell in 1624-5, it left a local political culture, to the extent it had jelled, of deference and without meaningful opportunity to check the power of its elites, even if it had the will to do so. Isolation, in fact, was likely the best method to acquire autonomy and personal liberty.
The overriding position of the investor-owner, and likely any large plantation owners ability to be heard, no no doubt created pressures for some sort of “council”, an entity that appears to have emerged in the mid-to late twenties. These councils were later converted into local monthly courts, and were periodically approved as such by the Assembly–thus increasing the prevalence and the legitimacy of local monthly courts–which, of course, will be the nucleus of the county courts created in 1634. The first of these formal Assembly monthly court creation was the legislation of 1624, which created such entities in Elizabeth and Charles City. Those courts were headed by the Commander, “and such others as were commissioned for the purpose by the Governor [and his] Council [of State].
This local monthly court system was extended next to Accomac on the Eastern Shore, and further legislation in 1626, 1627, and 1629 created still more local monthly courts, fixing their quorums at three, and reaffirming the role and power of the commander to include maintaining the local order, i.e. the police function. By 1632, legislation empowered five of the local monthly courts, and created some order by grouping “many small precincts … into such larger units as the convenience of the community required”, p. 169 (below).
By the Act of the Assembly in 1628/1629, the number of justices was to be eight, but later it was increased to ten. Four constituted a quorum [specific members designated as eligible for a quorum]. Three other members of the bench, associated with [at least] one member of the quorum [previous parenthesis], who had different status from the other justices, formed a sufficient number to make a valid court. The person whose name appeared at the head of the list of those constituting a quorum of those constituting a quorum, probably served as presiding justice … No pay was provided for the justices [99] Martha W. Hiden, How Justice Grew Virginia Counties: an Abstract of their Formation (Jamestown Booklet #2 the University Press of Virginia, 157), p. 8
I must draw attention, however, to the process of appointing judges to the monthly court. In the period previous to 1634-1642, the governor enjoyed formal power of such appointment. However, as observed by Dr. Robert Wheeler, “the governor’s power of appointment was limited, since he selected from a list of nominations made by the [local] benches were essentially self-perpetuating. The number of appointments varied from county to county, but normally at least eight men sat at one time on the monthly sessions … Court sessions were held monthly. [99] Robert Wheeler, “the County Court in Colonial Virginia“, in Bruce C. Daniels (Ed), Town & County: Essays on the Structure of Local Government in the American Colonies (Wesleyan University Press, 1978) p. 114.
This last point of information, is central to my contention regarding the “tilt” of decision-making to the local level”. Seemingly checked by the power of the governor, lower county courts throughout the entire colonial period retained local control over the governor’s appointment through its nomination list. It is also likely, certainly in the period previous to Governor John Harvey (1629-30) that the governor was checked by the advice and consent of the Council of State, whose members were drawn precisely from local areas in which they were the predominant land owner. By 1632, Craven asserts that “provision had been made for five monthly councils [courts] of equal rank … As had been the case with the two older courts, a member of the governor’s council, headed each of the five c0mmissions and was designated one of the quorum” [99] Wesley Frank Craven, the Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, p. 169. If so, the governor’s power of appointment seems little more than the right to affix his signature to the appointment authorization. Indeed the question might be asked if whether it was the Council of State, not the governor was the key to understanding the appointment of lower “county” court judges.
Wheeler further asserts that “In the seventeenth century, the most prominent members of each county society accepted a place on the county court out of a sense of responsibility to the community“. He further observes that “It is likely these planters were precisely the men in the community whose stature ensured that their opinions would be sought in personal as well as official matters. In a local society with an integrated social, economic and political leadership, it must have come as no surprise to the residents that these men were selected to govern. [99] Robert Wheeler, “the County Court in Colonial Virginia“, p. 114
While this history is much less sympathetic to Wheeler’s generous and optimistic purpose and motivation of those who served on the county court, I am compelled to remind the reader of a logic of his comments in which he observes these same gentlemen dominated the multiple aspects and functions (including economic) of their community and local Anglican parish), their occasional drift to corruption, or at least self-interest, and maintenance of the privileged position of their counterpart, must also be assumed to have imparted its less than democratic impact on the local policy-making system. Lenin could not have designed a better system, it seems to me. Finally, the reader is reminded this oligarchical drift in local government is very present during the Transition Era–and that it was to a considerable degree inherited by the 1634 counties.
As this flexible system evolved in this years, it seems evident that it was more or less copied from the English justice of the peace county governance–which, of course, was known to Virginia residents and plantation owners. I shall defer detailed analysis and description of the court’s function and powers and present that material in a later module that combines the formal creation of the counties in 1634, with the evolution of the county courts through to the legislation of the Assembly in 1642,
To add to the local administrative mix, service delivery and coordination of local affairs became an ever-increasing problem as soon as recovery from the Massacre took shape. That meant the hundred, previously utilized more for self-defense, became infused with more administrative, economic and religious agendas.
Moreover, the function of the hundreds, especially during the Company period, as an election district was considerably muddled in the post Company period. In that the King did not explicitly embrace the provincial council (Assembly), or endorse the Burgesses as a representative legislature, the assembly and its Burgesses when it met did not adopt that title, but relied more on an “emergency” need to meet and make decisions.
To me it is fairly evident that local governance was evolving as the “tail” behind the expansion of the tobacco monocultures; entities were created to bring order and self defense as were perceived needed. Tobacco was regulated as the need for regulation became apparent–especially during the Tobacco Depression. Counties were created from existing counties (a dynamic we will explore much later in the Virginia chapter) when those areas that were deemed critical or large enough to warrant empowerment were included in legislation by the Assembly.
This is how fast-changing frontiers evolved their local governments in future American moves to the West in which local institutions were copied by residents, and later incorporated into the larger provincial system. As to who populated the leadership of these bodies, that can only be assumed charisma, status/wealth, and activists were important. Academics have been less kind; to most, the governance of this period appears almost anarchistic. It was just the opposite.
I prefer Warren Billings “almost formless structure that had served the colony’s governing authority between the fall of the London Company and the mid-1630’s [Governor John Harvey’ s period]’ [99] Warren G. Billings (Ed), The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century (Institute of Early American History and Culture, the University of North Carolina Press, 1975), p. 237; Bernard Bailyn takes Billings and turns on the steroids, describing Virginia as “a veritable anarchy … at the center of [Virginia’s] colonial society” which could be explained as “symptomatic of a profound disorganization of European society in its American setting”. Bailyn comes to the same conclusion as I, in that the “configuration of forces” in this period, “shaped the origins of American politics”, “Politics and the Social Structure in Virginia” in James Morton Smith (Ed), 17th Century America: Essays in Colonial History (University of North Carolina Press, 1959), p. 90.
While anarchy and a failed state are too negative, I think the narrative in this second Virginia module series will easily demonstrate that in this time period, Virginia was a rather wild place, with little to do with democracy, and much to do with inequality–saturated with tobacco-and an elite whose private and governmental affairs were dominated by a cast of characters that more resembles Putin’s current Russia than the birthplace of Washington and Jefferson, not to ignore John Marshall and Henry Clay.
That cast of characters more likely than not were former Virginia Company officials, or their proteges who rose to their position and power during the seven or eight years after the 1622 onslaught of the Second Powhatan War and the End of the Virginia Company in 1624. The rough characters are our plantation conquistadors, and they flourished in power because Charles I was attending to other matters. They are the elite of Virginia’s First Migration–its most important and impactful, if not its most unappreciated and unknown.
As recovery from 1622 devastation and disruption picked up, abandoned land was reclaimed, rebuilt or resettled. New investors established new hundreds, usually at a location of the investor’s choosing. When local “monthly courts” were established previous to 1634 in several of these settlements they fit into and joined with the councils established by the post-1622 hundreds, thereby creating an amalgam of local government entities that operated throughout the Tidewater.
Population dispersal and perceived Indian vulnerability placed additional pressure on the capacity of Virginia governance to provide security and to cope with the necessities of daily life and sustenance in what was still a badly diversified and shredded economic base. Virginia, lacking even the scant resources provided formerly by Company, was on its own fiscally; tobacco the currency of transactions, quitrents, and “taxes”, a function that almost superceded its export function. Tobacco was also the way Virginia provincial expenses were paid.
Jamestown provincial officials were dependent on the local fees and tobacco receipts to pay its bills, salaries, and to, as we shall see, provide military resources, palisades, and forts. In this manner, tobacco as a currency exerted a decentralizing pressure on the provincial government, and made it difficult to raise taxes as the local officials that dominated the Assembly and Burgesses membership were those who not only were going to pay it–but be forced to collect it from their neighbors.
Also to the extent any order useful for tax rolls, support of the parish, and recording lands sales and census, probate, and militia-labor gangs fleshed out the need for coordination by the specific units of local government. In short, as settlements started up and matured, local governance and some order were imposed when size compelled it.
Put all these factors together and one can summarize early local governance. We can see that in 1634 when counties were formally created, the hundred and the welter of community government forms that had functioned and evolved after the 1619 Greate Charter did not go away, but were simply incorporated into the new county, and transformed in name and accountability to that of the new county governance. When counties were created formally in 1634, they were indeed a break out point in local governance, but not in the substance and nature of the policy system. That policy system, evolved from repudiation of the Company charter in 1625, had solidified local policy making into the monthly county courts whose membership was essentially locally self-perpetuating, dominated by a member of the Council of State, and whose judges represented the cream of that county’s social, economic and political planter class.
When counties and earlier local courts” were added to these entities, they inherited a policy system with some legitimacy and consensus. The formal commencement of county in 1634 did not start on barren ground; they embraced the shared experience of the transition years. To that extent I assert that what Warren Billings describes in the below quote is largely reflective of the style of governance practiced in the post-1634 years. If anything, that style was rougher, more militaristic and hierarchy-riven than Billings describes.
As county courts [Billings is most concerned with post 1634 Virginia] became important centers of power [after 1634], some Virginians began to view membership on the [county] bench as a means to satisfy their rather large political, social and economic ambitions. The court system became the institutional mechanism whereby grasping men used the tools of kinship, patronage and deference, and money to lay the foundations of a ruling elite that possessed the attributes of the traditional ruling classes. This process was played out in a political arena full of petty disputes, constant bickering, vicious infighting, and occasional violence. The tumultous character of politics, which Bernard Bailyn has aptly designated ‘chaotic factionalism’, combined with rapid changes in the structure of Virginia society to produce the chronic instability that marked the Old Dominion before 1676. [99] Warren M. Billings, the Growth of Political Institutions in Virginia, 1634-1676 (William & Mary Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 2 (April, 1974), pp. 225-6
[As an example] If we may judge by the Berkeley Hundred, [the commander’s] responsibilities were shared with certain assistants designated for his council by the proprietors [plantation owners] and he was bound in all important decisions [save military expeditions] to accept the majority voice in that council. Thus in addition to a local magistrate whose position is suggestive of that subsequently occupied as a justice of the peace [a judicial function] there seems to have existed, in one instance at least, a body very similar to the later county court.” [[99] Wesley Frank Craven, the Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 1607-1689 (Louisiana State University Press, 1970), pp. 166-7
What must be made clear is the hundred as a entity of local government in this period was strongly tied to the plantation owner of the hundred. It was he who initially nominated the commander, and it was to him that the commander was accountable in non-military matters. While clearly the provincial Assembly and governor were superior to these hundreds, and to which they were held accountable, the link of local governance and plantation ownership was fundamental in this period. Hundreds were later consolidated and what were previously several hundreds were joined together–no doubt with some form of representation on the “council” described above.
Add to this the powerful leadership of plantation conquistadors, resident or involved in a particular hundred, we can see form the start the hundred was an imperfect unit of democratic control. When we add to that, as we later will, the role of the large plantation owners in each hundred in the growing and exporting of tobacco by renters and small household subsistence plantations, we see these local oligarchs became economic powers as well.
So there is no danger that we shall confuse New England town style democracy or Plymouth elective council with that of Virginia’s planter oligarch, military commander, vestry oligarchy, and political-religious magistrate that developed out of 1620’s Virginia. Say it another way, whatever was practiced in 1620 Plymouth Massachusetts, was not observed in 1620 Virginia. Why are these two states different? There never were the same; they began differently and they operated under different elites and their political values/culture reflected different priorities and goals.
the Role of the Assembly in this Period--The reality of Burgesses representation, however “liberal” the franchise eligibility might have been, tilted to hundreds land owners, other large landowners, and, logically, Company shareholders–this after all was a company institution, not a legislature. The 1619 Assembly was not intended as a democratic legislature by Sandys or the Company, and at that point freeholders and servants who were entitled to land at contract expiration were considered as shareholders of the Company.
Few, if anybody, saw the Assembly as a mini-Parliament, and so they set few expectations as to its need to be held accountable to representative standards pertinent to a democracy–that will develop, and more quickly than one might expect, but it will be decades in the future. Until Sandy’s death–and the last years of the twenties, there was always a slight chance the Company’s charter could be reinstated, as amended by the King.
As late as 1633 petition was made by the Virginia Company to renew its “ancient charter, and in 1640 George Sandys led another attempt.. If so, the Assembly would return to being the Virginia shareholder’s annual meeting it was it 1619. Shareholder democracy is not representative democracy. The rear-guard fight by the Virginia Company came to naught, but in the exceedingly troubled politics of the 1630’s its threat was noted by Virginians and their leadership [99] Charles Andrews, Vol. 1, p. 201.
As to the General Assembly, it was a fused body that combined the governor, his “appointive” but autonomous Council of State, and what was the Burgesses. It meant once a year normally for a short time, leaving the management of provincial affairs to the governor, as checked by the advice and (as we shall see) consent of the Council of State. Flexible though these structures may have been they contributed greatly to the “shapeless” system of policy making– the anarchy–that we earlier used to describe the governance during this transition period.
When one zooms in to the detail we see further evidence of the effects of Virginia as a political vacuum because of Charles. In his appointment of Francis West (to replace Yeardley), the king’s instruction to the new governor, who the king admitted had been “chosen [nominated?] to his office by the ‘opinions and voices of the council‘, also authorized [commanded] him to convene a general assembly to debate one issue: the tobacco contract under consideration at that time.
Wyatt did convene the assembly in March, 1628, and it met for three or four days. To Professor Charles this assembly differed only slightly from the “convention of 1625”; it differed in that it was authorized by the king, and the assembly exerted its right to tax by authorizing a levy on Virginians to pay for its costs. “But even with these differences it was essentially similar to the gathering of 1625 and, in no way a revival of the [company] assembly of 1624, for it exercised no administrative or legislative functions and as far as we know followed no form of parliamentary procedure” [99] Charles A Andrews, Vol. 1, p. 198.
The pattern was repeated in 1629 when the king appointed John Harvey as his royal governor ( departure from nomination by the Council of State). In his instructions to Harvey (August, 1628) , the king called for another convening of a “Grand Assembly” dedicated to the “purpose of providing a palisade to run from Martin’s Hundred to the York River, to guard the colony against the Indians”. No other matter was suggested to be considered. Harvey convened the Assembly on October 16, 1629, and confined its activities almost entirely to the subject named” [99] Charles A. Andrews, Vol. 1, p. 199.
In 1630, however, Andrews asserts the Assembly met on their own volition, and did so, with the possible except to 1636, every year–without instruction by the King, and no restrictions upon its deliberations or actions. Andrews believes that calling the ‘conventions’ of 1625, 1628 and 1629 “may well have seemed to the Governor and the planters, a sufficient precedent for a continuation of the practice every year, and for the resumption of the law-making powers … There is no reason to doubt that these assemblies assumed all the rights and privileges of regular representative bodies and followed each its own variety of parliamentary practice.” [99] Charles A. Andrews, Vol. 1, p. 199.
If so, 1630 would be the hallmark year for the establishment of the General Assembly as the ‘legitimate’ legislative and representative assembly of the colony. If so, however, no confirmation or even acknowledgement of that role and those functions, was made by the King until 1639.
These houses of Burgesses in Virginia passed many laws which had force in the colony, but as far as we know, only a very few of these laws were ever sent to England for confirmation, and not one of these few was ever acted upon by the Privy Council … On the contrary, there is reason to think that until 1638 no certain decision had been reached in England, as to the final form that government in Virginia should take. That the king and the Privy Council had tacitly and in a measure openly recognized the legality of the assemblies already held is clear, but that during these years since 1624 they had not decided on the definitive course to be followed seems certain also. [99] Charles A Andrews, Vol 1., pp. 199-200
We shall pick up this issue in a later module, when in 1639, the king did decide on a “definitive course”, but will conclude at this point, that until that year, the General Assembly met on its volition, with the support of the Governor, set its agenda, and took such actions as it deemed appropriate–including creation of counties, the pursuit of the palisades project, and such other activities of note.
We note the “shapeless” of Virginia’s governance posited by many historians, but also call attention that the Virginians themselves provided, to the extent they could, some important definition in the formation of their post-Company policy system. 1630, therefore, is an important year for us, as it notes the participation of a General Assembly as an independent policy making representative legislature sanctioned only by the consent and seeming consensus of Virginia colonial leadership and the electoral franchise of the Burgesses.
Ron W. Coan 