Setting the Stage the Thrusting Out and Linking it to the Birth of Virginia’s Policy System
The Jamestown module series and to this point, the Transition to Royal Governance series have set the stage, finally, for the birth of the Virginia colonial had been delayed principally by the reluctance of the early Stuarts to make a final commitment to policy system so it could exercise authority to act and make policy. By 1630 that legitimacy was long overdue and as we have repeatedly related did negatively affect the course of events in Virginia. More to the point, the failure to commit meant that the drift of events and economic activities installed, if only by the “momentum of its inertia” an uncoordinated tobacco monoculture that continued to expand with every inch of ground Virginians extracted from the Powhatan. That the sovereign did not attain his goal of a diversified, more broadly productive and less vulnerable economic base, that produced stable and growing revenues for himself and England, never seemed to be a sufficient incentive for him to grant and thus move on. Earlier, I concluded Charles still held open the option in his mind that the Virginia Company could be returned to governance, thereby taking the preponderance of the colonization burden off his shoulders. By 1634 for certain, the likelihood for that alternative was fast fading into the Atlantic sunset, but by that time the drift to English Civil War made a dramatic turn with the appointment and conduct of his Laud Commission.
In a complex hybrid policy environment Virginia was brought into the “last hurrah” campaign by the Virginia Company to yet turn the tide and harness the royal recharter of Virginia, that campaign spilled over to an effort to undermine, if not replace the royal-governor Harvey, who whatever else he (and his allies-supporters) were, no friend of the Virginia Company. That also played into the increasing fear and opposition to Harvey engendered throughout the Virginia planter elite (and popular opinion). Motivated by many causes, the added effort by Charles to impose a new tobacco contract on Virginia was the last straw. By late fall 1634–definitely by very yearly 1635 all this turmoil and policy agendas combined to create the April 1635 Thrusting Out.
Probably without any pre-planning or even conscious thought, the Virginia elites from all factions employed the institutional tools at hand and began to rely upon them to carry their other agendas. In so doing, however, they necessarily had to resolve the legitimacy of these institutions in order to use them more effectively, and more importantly use them to secure maintenance of whatever agreements would be made in the course of their opposition to the tobacco contract and to stymie the tyranny of Harvey.
During the 1630’s Virginia prodded its mother country to legitimize its self-governance political structures. If granted, it would mean that for the first time Virginia possessed a set of political structures with the potential to develop into an effective durable policy system for the colony. From England’s perspective it meant Virginia could assume some of the burden for the management of a productive economic base (with exports to England), increasing its defense capacity, and simply holding back a flood of time-consuming governance that could never have been handled effectively in England.
The Thrusting Out module series is devoted to describing, explaining, and analyzing this Thrusting Out period. The politics and policy that was triggered by the “thrusting out” of royal governor John Harvey by Virginia’s planter elite were the birth process for the Virginia Policy System. Whatever else one can say, “the Deal” which we will describe solved both the Thrusting Out politics, and confirmed the legitimacy of the Virginia policy systems in as a hand-in-a-glove process that was as neat and “probably lucky as timing could have been” that could ever have been planned or premeditated.
The Importance I Attach to a “Birth” of a Policy System
For the most part American historians of Virginia have not been especially concerned with key dynamics emanating from England and their impact on Virginia which do not fit into their thematic and value-laden paradigms of how and when Virginia developed. English historians have generally reacted emphasizing their own events and paradigms and understating their effect on Virginia. I hope to assess the Thrusting Out of John Harvey by integrating English and American dynamics and focus them on how these dynamics played out in the thrusting out–and even more carried over to the political and economic development of the colony. In this instance the birth of an effective Virginia policy system has to rank in importance as a major lesson to be learned from the thrusting out. What we are seeing in Harvey’s ouster is the birth of Virginia’s colonial hybrid policy system.
The birth of a colonial policy is pretty serious stuff for a history entitled “As the Twig is Bent, So Grows the Tree”. Twigs are bent beginning at birth, if not in the womb. Likely we shall find the most significant bends in Virginia’s political and economic development around the events leading to and following a birth. We simply cannot ignore that period of a colony’s history. But, as we shall discuss in this module series, that ignoring, depreciating its birth has been a constant feature of Virginia’s colonial history.
We tackle that problem in this first module; we do so by injecting English politics and policy into Virginia’s birth. That means we have to better the understand and acknowledge the influence of the mother country on Virginia’s political and economic development. We cannot simply content ourselves with discussing what we inherited but must also grapple with how and when we inherited it. If inheriting English political-economic DNA was England’s main goal (it wasn’t, of course), England could be its own worst enemy. That its sovereign was one the edge of a civil war which he had as much, probably more so, prodded as avoided created an overall policy atmosphere that, as it turns out, played into the hands of an active and aggressive Virginia and accounted for the Deal as much as anything else.
To be fair, England was on the eve of its great civil war, and that distorted its policy-making, although we are reminded that England was placed on that edge of civil war by Stuart dynasty mishandling of its transition era dynamics that were not its fault.
But the aggressive role played by Virginia elites in 1637 1nd 1638 in the midst of this atmosphere needs to be explained and analyzed if we are to understand the birth of its policy system and how that birth shaped the behavior and predisposition, even the roles of Virginia’s political institutions, as well as the goals and expectations of the domestic elites that led them. To compound or metaphor, it was the Virginia elites who served as the midwives of the birth, a role which necessarily altered their goals and expectations, and without doubt confirmed their status and power in the future Virginia policy system.
Hence, the reader will also see how the Thrusting Out fostered and affected the rise of Virginia elites–and by default the installation of the tobacco monoculture as Virginia’s economic base. If the reader wants to know how tobacco became Virginia’s defining political and economic dynamic, it is uncovered in the Thrusting Out.
Up to this point, aside from simply surviving and coping, the settlers in Virginia could not participate in their own governance, but, while leaving most key of their governance policies to London-based decision-makers, simply by acting beforehand to make their own policy and let England react. The 1624 power to tax themselves is the best and earliest example of s to which London passively deferred. In asking for forgiveness rather than permission, the Virginians often found the English deferred to their decisions (and even their use of the Assembly as a sort of “rifled” narrowly focused legislature). This is not passive aggressive, it was the Virginians by 1635 had developed a tradition of actively involving themselves in English policy making–even if it was not always successful (Maryland). The John Harvey mutiny, conscious or not, provided the opportunity for Virginians to wring legitimacy from London and the Crown to participate in their own governance.
Suffice it to say, Massachusetts, had a different experience because of lots of different reasons–and therefore from the start, the two state governance “twigs” were bent in different directions. Events and dynamics associated with 1630-1639 Virginia offer the best opportunity to see why Virginia is dissimilar from Massachusetts (or South Carolina or any other of the colonies for that matter). The four “thrusting out” modules provide solid proof of why contemporary states and cities are different and that supports our firm belief the simplest answer to the “difference question” is that states-colonies were different at birth, and their history and experience “bent” their political-economic development in distinctive ways that further shaped and distinguished their future patterns. If you can’t or won’t understand the lessons from the birth the reader and history misses a lot, and that lends itself to distortion as one seeks to understand the path each colony took toward independence and the revolution.
So here is the road map that the reader can follow through the “Thrusting Out narrative we present in this four module series.
- The second module, simply by reading the title deals with the goings on in England.. It starts out with the “ghost” of the seemingly dead Virginia Company, coming out of the shadows to haunt the politics and policy making relevant to Virginia. This is probably new information and it is very important. The story of the Virginia Company dovetails with the decision by Charles I to turn Virginia affairs, including a determination of what its future and its governance should be, to a series of “commissions”, that were entrusted to operate the colony as well as figure out how it was to fit into England’s expectations. These commissions expose the inability and unwillingness of Charles to figure out on his own what he wanted to do with Virginia–and for that matter his other colonies. Charles emerges through his “court policy-making”, his lack of a consistent vision-goals, and the pressure of turbulence in the pre-war period to define how he expected Virginia to participate in its own self-governance–and the dysfunction that hurt Virginia and Virginians. That dysfunction underlie the conflict in Harvey’s Thrusting Out and Virginia’s failure to politically develop. This module will then follow up on the Brenner New Men introduced in an earlier module concerning William Claiborne, the New Kent initiative and Maryland. The larger picture is that England in these years is evolving a new colonial finance system that replaced the Virginia Company merchant adventurers, and provided financial sustenance to Virginia and the colonies during this period. After all someone had to fund this thing called a colony since Charles wasn’t going to do it. Say this another way, as England developed its famed finance and industrial capitalist system, the Adam Smith thing, Virginia was its ground floor. From this the reader will get a good idea why tobacco was the only thing that flourished in the turbulent four decade that followed in which these New Men took the lead.
- The third module, the longest and most developed, presents and analyzes the Thrusting Out politics and policy-making that came about because in 1628-30 Charles named John Harvey as governor of Virginia. Who is Harvey, what did he do, and how did he piss off so many Virginians–even though much of his policies made sense and probably would have been to Virginia’s advantage. It appears that personality is at least as important as policy, and Charles’s failure to legitimize Virginia’s self governance manifested itself in the lack of a commonly accepted job description, not only for the governor, but Council of State and Assembly. If the reader wants to see the proverbial war, of all, against all (Hobbes who BTW was born in the midst of this-1732), Virginia in this decade is it. What is amazing is that all this fussing triggered and unleashed Virginia politics and policy making that increasingly forced Charles to deal with his increasingly trouble colony. It also woke the spirit of self-identification within Virginia’s political structures that by fighting among themselves helped define their roles, powers, and place in the emerging Virginia policy system
- The fourth module focuses on the Virginia side of the Thrusting Out. The sequence of events, the personalities, the issues that caused it–including how Virginia processed the inputs from England discussed in the second module and then the events of April 1635 that led to Harvey taking a ship back to England, accompanied by rather hostile Virginians who put him on it. We then describe what happened in England through the end of 1635, which, sends Harvey back to Virginia-in his own good time. The ghost of Harvey’s future, however, is told in module five.
- This is the description of what happened between 1636-and January 1639 that (a) ousted Harvey once again, granted Virginia her rights of self governance, and Virginians their legal rights to own the lands, and developed a consensus as to the job descriptions of the provincial political structures–which by default embedded a hyper strong role for Virginia’s county level government. It also repelled any alternative than a tobacco monoculture, and turned Virginia’s governance over to a planter oligarchy. Hence in my opinion, 1639 is Virginia’s birthday as a colony, not 1607. Talk about policy-making as similar to sausage-making–this is as good an example as you get. We an easily see why Virginia historians do not want to snuggle up to these planter oligarchs.
The establishment, the formation-legitimization of the domestic colonial policy system is a big deal in our history. The role the John Harvey “thrusting out” played in that birth has been unappreciated in most Virginia histories, a byproduct of the failure to properly understand the importance and the contribution of the state’s First Migration. But by the end of this module, domestic elites will drag, England and its Crown into recognizing the need to grant it self-governance, and to finally acknowledge and accede to a role in the making of its own policy. The institutions that were empowered were weak and fragile in 1639, and would remain so for decades, but Virginia finally had its own domestic institutions responsible for government, economy and societal policy. Virginia had a domestic self-governing policy system.
That policy system inherited a policy systems whose structures and institutions were those of private joint stock corporation that needed some vehicle to capture and tap shareholder who had settled in Virginia, and who were in effect responsible for the company’s profits, and the proceeds to pay for its costs. Yanked into the world of a government institutions in 1622 when it was nearly wiped off the face of the earth, these institutions still run and controlled by domestic company elites kept the Virginia ship of state afloat until in 1625 they were magically transformed into government institutions by decision from an English court.
From that point on they were in a limbo because London could not figure out what it wanted to do with Virginia, nor how it should govern the place. The institutions carried on, picking up experience and bruises, but filling the vacuum as best it could, it nevertheless let the economy and society develop on their own terms, without plan or even thought, because that “big picture” macro policy making was way beyond its capacity, and since it had no legitimized job description, no legal basis on which to create and implement a vision for either.
When John Harvey was finally replaced as governor in 1639, the struggle by Virginians for a policy system had been resolved through “instructions” written by the Crown-Privy Council to a new royal governor endorsed and known to Virginians. John Harvey had indeed been fired, and his vision-job description as governor of royal-London colonial administration sent off with him. The job description of a future governor of Virginia had been among the core issues decided by the “affair” that bore his name. Still-born a strong and powerful provincial executive, a faithful implementer of the King’s agenda, and his own as well, was rejected–called tyrannical by its masterful coup leader, Samuel Mathews.
Harvey’s ouster will leave in its wake a poor, disparaging, dysfunctional Virginia governor, a filling of the vacuum it created by provincial legislative political bodies, a pronounced tendency to rely on the lower level of the policy system for overall systemic policy-making, and the development of a system-wide elite plantation planter class that will expel Governor Harvey and commence a four year tempest that will finally compel the English sovereign Charles to make and put in place a consensual domestic policy system that integrated the English and domestic policy systems into a more or less coherent hybrid colonial policy system.
When completed in 1642 this system truly ends the hegemony of the Virginia Company and the chaotic period that was its transition into a more permanent and relatively stable relationship between England and Virginia.
Ron W. Coan 