John Harvey’s First Administration:
a Policy-Making Approach
Throughout these many modules offered thus far, the reader has been harassed by the constant reference to the term policy-system. On top of that I have defined economic development as a policy, one policy out of many that could be singed out for attention. Policy systems generate policies (or not); how and why they do so explains much about the policy issue and the system that produced it. Wonderful, exclaims the reader; now move on. Since that’s not going to happen, let’s move on and demonstrate with a specific policy-making narrative that demonstrates the utility of the approach
. This module delves into the making of Virginia’s colonial policy system, and our story about John Harvey’s Thrusting Out has the potential of being the classic in the birth of a mercantile era hybrid colonial policy system.
On a less conceptual level, that of historical description and analysis, the Thrusting Out is fascinating, if complex. The classic approach to the John Harvey affair, to which we are much indebted, is represented by J. Mills Thornton’s “Thrusting Out“. Thornton’s perspective characterized Harvey as the protagonist, if not the chief provocateur, in a play-drama that stands out in the history of Virginia’s first migration.
But, however, central, Harvey is the victim of much larger dynamics, our innumerable moving parts, that originate from England as well as from the past Virginia Company and its transfer to royal administration. He clearly gives weight to both sides of the Atlantic-split Virginia policy system. In his apt description Harvey clashes with much more than political opponents, but with a budding political culture that is stressed by Charles’s refusal or inability to deal with the issues that touch deep into the heart, certainly the soul of the the average Virginian. Written in 1968, Thornton was years ahead of future commentators.
In my rehash, Harvey is a major actor-player, who is the catalyst that jumpstarted Virginia’s distinctive policy system. His failure became the first serious instance of Virginia’s weakening of its provincial executive, and the disruption he cause, felt at the lowest level of Virginia’s shredded and decentralized policy system, brought Virginia several steps closer to its distinctive local tilt in its evolving policy system. In this module, the reader will begin to see how those bends in the twig were built into the disrupted provincial-level policy system. The reader may also see the fleshing out of the 1619 Greate Charter policy system and the fragile emergence of separate branches, each with their own structures, they develop identities and constituencies as they combat each other to achieve their different policy goals. That this essentially internal struggle finally led to the Charles’s acknowledgement of self-governance in his Virginia colony, i.e. giving legal birth to Virginia’s policy system, is a spectacular bonus.
That the creation of a neighboring colony from Virginia’s loins, deeply affected that development certainly makes the story more complex, but it offers an opportunity how policy-making can, like a pinball, bounce off, react to other policies–like two boats crossing each other’s wake, the ride is more rough and the course of the boat somewhat diverted. That a good deal of the conflict with Maryland will be economic in nature, is also a valuable addition to our focus. It does alert the reader that birthing policy systems can be not only extended in time, but also can involve serious systemic change and redirection by its sovereign London-based hybrid policy system.
Policy-wise What Specifically is Going On?
It has been obvious thus far that the Greate Charter initiative barely got off on a rough, choppy, and ill-focused start in 1619 when he hit a wall in the sudden, near fatal Indian attack that launched the Second Powhatan War. Much of what Sandys intended was left literally dead in the plantations and fields along the James River, and from that point on the policy system reacted. For many reasons that evolution was dominated by capacity-building of structures created by the Virginia Company previous to 1622: the provincial structures set in place by the Greate Charter, and the hundreds (based on investor plantations) from 1613.
The [Virginia] company had ceased to exist as a single enterprise [that enjoyed an exclusive monopoly over economic investment], and had begun to dissolve into separate commercial joint stocks and separate colonies: each year’s magazine, or corporate cargo for the company, was financed by a different set of subscribers from the last, and side by side with the common enterprise of the company, there were some thirty or forty ‘private plantations’, financed by groups of subscribers of whom some were members of the original company, while others were not. When the company itself was taken away [stripped of its charter], some of these sub-companies survived, and when they too dissolved, the colonists contrived to carry on the plantation [hundreds] by themselves [99] Richard Pares, Merchant and Planters (Economic History Review at the University Press (Cambridge), 1960), p.13.
The province formally asserted its prerogatives over the hundreds and the monthly courts, but the shredded community and isolation exerted considerable impact on the colony’s ability to centralize its administration and assert a coherent and sustained leadership over its plantation clusters and hundreds-shires. Accordingly, the lower levels, first to feel the impact of Indian war and dwindling food and gunpowder supplies became home base of the plantation conquistadors, and the primacy of tobacco production and export lodged considerable autonomous power in the hands of those larger plantation owners who enjoyed a pier and access to capital fanciers.
The point of the last paragraph simply is John Harvey inherited an administrative system so decentralized it presented an installed barrier to any aspirations he had to be a “real” governor. Once he left Jamestown there was little the office of governor directly controlled–or paid for. Taxes and fees set in Jamestown were collected by authorities at the lower levels; any regulation, such as tobacco regulation, was also administered by locals.
A governor strutting about in a James River-adjacent “hundred-county” issuing orders and securing Assembly legislation, was pretty much on his own in securing compliance. Status always helped in this day and age, but it demanded he be present on the scene, and had local support when was not there. The plantation conquistador and the network of larger plantation owners in a shredded cluster settlement had the support and influence over the local authorities to do what they willed after he left the area. Say it another way, the Council of State membership was more in charge outside of Jamestown than the governor.
Before Harvey, the governor, including Wyatt, in order to set up a local presence, deferred to Council members in their plantation cluster dominion. By 1630, the most developed political structure was the Council of State, and through the post-1622 pre-Harvey period, the governors, royal or company-appointed, had to work through and with the Council of State. In this subtle manner we can see the planter-conquistador oligarchy entrench itself into the policy process. If the reader is looking for an answer as to why (and how) an political oligarchy emerged as the dominant political force in colonial Virginia, this is it. We do not have to wait until the cavalier southern plantation leaders take charge in the latter third of the seventeenth century. To look ahead, Virginia was never Massachusetts–not Pennsylvania–the birthing process of each was seriously different.
This is what Harvey stepped into in 1630. What this module describes, the Thrusting Out narrative, is how Harvey was unable, and unwilling to live with that policy system, and his actions, personality, behaviors seriously disrupted the Virginia policy system, and with each passing year was chronically unable to deal with or adapt to the changes of that year. He would have some ebb and flow over the five years of his first administration, but net-net things got worse each year.
So when he started out the Council, in league with the resident-governor was in change–if anybody was, that is. The Assembly (which also included the governor and Council plus the House of Burgesses) had a distinctive and semi-legislative role, but it met very infrequently (once a year–if that–and for very short periods of time, perhaps less than a week. A centerpiece of our commentary is that it lacked legitimacy to exist–never mind make decisions and policy. It had to be called into session by somebody, and usually it was the king. Its powers and organization were not acknowledged nor delimited by any “constitution”, and its leadership, whatever emerged when it met, was fluid, and could be checked by a united Council whose members could vote. That the Burgesses were not clones of the Council was evident very early on, but until 1630 there were few-no issues or events of such strength and character that led to Burgesses challenge of the Council–at least that historians have uncovered. So the Assembly sort of tagged along, dealing with what was presented to it. That all changes in the course of this module.
A second set of dynamics of interest in the Thrusting Out is the role, power, and centrality of the governor within the provincial and lower government hierarchy. By now it is no secret to the reader the Thrusting Out limited the power–and status–of the governor, raised questions and issues regarding the office’s capacity to provide compelling leadership across policy issues, and to lead, never mind, dominate the policy agenda. That the governor was “central” is evident as reported by historians; he is usually credited with this or that which happened at one time or another.
He is the chief administrator of the provincial system, and is in close contact with local levels and the militia in particular. In many ways his administrative powers gave sustenance to his position, but when he acted on his own, John West’s Powhatan treaty of 1628 for example, he was reversed in very short order–and probably ignored at the local level. Pre-1630 his relationship to the Council was submerged in the lack of records that are available. I would summarize the governor overall as the first of equals with the Council, and the chief implementer of the Council-Governor made policy. Harvey aspired to a lot more than this.
From the start Harvey seems to have realized that he had to rule through the Assembly, if he was to establish any dominance over the local levels. Harvey’s veto was rarely used, and the Assembly, until the last years of the seventeenth century always met in the same room as the governor and Council. Osgood does concede that “except in the administration of Harvey, we find in early Virginia no instances of prolonged strife between the different branches of the legislature [99] p. 88. We see changes in this as early as 1630, and certain by 1632. What follows during 1632 and 1633 is a real break from the past.
That made his presiding over the March 1630 Assembly his first prominent action. There he would launch in miniature his agenda, and secure its approval from a larger and more diversified body, although composed of plantation owners as was the Council, the latter were more war lords or feudal barons. With the Assembly the governor could deal with the “mainstream planter proto-class”, each with their local network. We will see Harvey attempt to use the Assembly as a check on the Council, and as the willing instrument of his policy agenda. That in aggregate with other dynamics, will expose the emergence of a proto-planter class that will fragment into at least two major factions, each seeking to lodge its power base in either the Council or the Burgesses. That both factions retained the ability to unite around issues that threatened the interests of the planter oligarchy will also be apparent in the Thrusting Out. But what we see is how the institutions of provincial government were instruments in the defense and advancement of different agendas that reflected differently composed constituencies.
For the first time, in 1630 an outsider to the shredded community tobacco monoculture was governor. His ambition was to establish an independent base of authority over the larger colony policy system. As we tell the tale of John Harvey, I think it helpful to realize the importance of Harvey as the first attempt since 1618, conscious or not, to inject new dynamics into the governance nexus that had evolved, more or less on its own prodded by events, ambitions–and the developing monoculture itself. We ought to also realize Harvey’s perspective and his agenda, simply by virtue he had both exceeded the intentions of his sovereign. The task he had set for himself almost inevitably meant both a power structure with the dominant Virginia power bosses, and to risk that his assumptions of royal prerogative were premature in this early Stuart colonialism. My sense is that from day one in Virginia, Harvey’s only hope was the Assembly. The “treaty’ engineered by Mathews, ironically opened the doors for that strategy. What no one could foresee is that the Assembly once awakened would seek out its own role and relationship with other branches and become the instrument of the dominant mainstream planter class as it existed in the 1630’s. That it would receive the acknowledgement of the king as legitimate and its actions, still largely undefined, were legal, meant a full-fledged Virginia policy system had been created.
But events in London shifted that deck of cards more than once in the decade.
Just as disruptive were the ambitions of William Claiborne’s, buckaroo Kent Island adventure business plan, and the Claiborne Clique coalition of large landowners and exporters, both conquistador and planter-merchant. Their recognition of the importance of mastering the politics within the Council of State to achieve focused approvals on matters central to the coalition turned the Council into an active proponent behind a plan that if implemented meant a coup within the emerging oligarchy, and perhaps more important a larger more diversified economic base. His London-based plan of financing and securing monopolies was not put into place until 1630, and the Dorsett Commission in 1631 gave to it a credence it had lacked to that point. From 1632, the game was on, in London and Jamestown.
Harvey was in London through most of 1629, but from early 1630 he was far away in Jamestown. Likely he was unaware of the tendencies and plots behind the revival of the Virginia Company that matured only after he started his Virginia administration. It is my belied Harvey was not a natural big league politician, but as a former young sea captain a victim of his past experience. With limited London contacts and experience, he was actually at the mercy of the Virginia oligarchs associated with the Claiborne Clique.
He was dependent upon his proteges to which he reported. He probably enjoyed few insights from those disposed to him in London. To a degree, we ought consider Harvey an outsider to London policy-making. In this suffocating atmosphere, Harvey’s definition of “public good”, an important and positive element of his agenda, could not find sufficient oxygen to breathe, and it was only London’s indifference and preoccupations that gave him latitude to pursue it.
Claiborne through to and into 1632 demonstrated that he could secure the Council’s support, and even the support of the General Assembly. He held legitimately approved trading monopolies from the Council; he had been elected to the second most critical office, the Secretary of the Colony in 1626–a position he would hold until 1634). The Council also created a Burgesses district for a Kent Island representative, and set up a local government.
The Claiborne Clique had developed their own back door into the King’s Court and Privy Council factions while maintaining an exceptionally strong hold over the Council of State, seemingly through Mathews and Utie. What we also should note these were precisely the reasons why he received the support of Thomason, Cloberry, and his fellow investors. Local dominance over the political bodies was indeed an essential part of their business plan.
Claiborne was in London from 1629-31. His access and contacts, his use of London as a basis for power in Virginia, began before Harvey assumed governorship in 1630. If Claiborne was the political leader of this grouping (as opposed to Tucker and Mathews), as he likely was, his absence had little effect on its solidarity as Mathews, and Tucker if needed could muster the votes to carry the day. The glue that kept the oligarchy together in the Council always was that its members, when their time came ,would get their share of the same benefits others had received. That the Clique included the most significant tobacco exporters who potential could offer benefits or restraints on smaller exporters, no doubt “sweetened the pot”.
Accordingly, Harvey was not the only contender for power in 1630. If Harvey wanted to take away the punchbowl, the Claiborne Clique, by nature of its business plan, was hell bent to tip over the Virginia economic base in a coup that potentially placed other tobacco exporters, and all Virginia residents in an economically dependent situation. While it took a year or two, the resistance of the “mainstream Virginia planters” came to recognize the threat against their budding oligarchy and took action accordingly beginning in 1632.
In short, from its own midst the planters had developed a disrupter grouping that threatened those not included in its cabal. That disruption erupted when the Dorset Commission issued its report to restore a revamped charter to the Virginia Company. When Claiborne set foot back in Kent Island in late 1631, with his new London-approved trading commission, complete with a new batch of English settlers, and the potential deal for the Virginia Company Magazine he handed to Harvey and the mainstream planter group an apparent fiat accompli.
The scramble of drivers, motivations and moving parts accelerated accordingly as 1631-2 played out. Hopefully, by this point, the reader can sense where I am going as I relate the Thrusting Out narrative in this module. There is much going on in the Thrusting Out; Harvey’s personality, played a major role, but more to the point, he was presiding over a volcano of ambitions and cross directions that arose because both England and Virginia were simultaneous arriving at potential turning points in their evolution. Saying it another way: his timing was terrible.
With this background in place, the next section details Harvey’s first steps in 1630, and carry him and the background politics into the critical 1632-34 period. During this time events played out in London, and they reached a boiling point in early to mid-1634. At that point we enter into the final phase of the “thrusting out of Governor John Harvey”–in the next module. In the meantime the reader will enjoy the contest of Virginia policies and the breakdown of Virginia’s fragile-half developed policy-making system.
Who Was John Harvey? What Happened in Virginia During his First Administration?
John Harvey was no stranger to Virginia when he arrived as governor in late 1629. Who was he? How did he get to be governor? What did Harvey do in his first administration? What Problems Did he Encounter Relevant to the Thrusting Out? How did his administration Intensify the Need to Better Define Virginia’s Self-Governance? These are all questions inherent in this narrative.
The reader understands John Harvey was appointed Virginia governor by Charles I, a consequence of Governor Yeardley’s unexpected demise in 1627. While formally appointed in 1628 Harvey remained in England for some time, more than a year to arrange his affairs. Upon reaching Virginia in late 1629, our friend John became seriously ill (as was common to new immigrants). The first record of his Virginia service was his presiding over the March 1630 General Assembly. His role and impact previous to that date does not seem to have been significant. The reader should be aware Harvey had previous Virginia-relevant experience, and the manner by which he became governor displays the weakness inherent in Court politics of those years.
Born in 1581 or 1582, Harvey’s parents were shipowners in Dorsetshire on England’s southern coast. John’s brother became a merchant, working his way into the honor and position of procurer of foods and wines for the household of James I. John Harvey, on the other hand, worked in the shipping “department” of the family’s business. As a very young man, engaged in transporting settlers to Virginia Company’s Virginia, he was yet another example of the second son and Virginia opportunity dynamic that spawned Virginia’s Virginia Company period. Harvey, and his father, were shareholders.
In gratitude for his role in populating the colony, the Virginia Company granted John Harvey about 200 acres for his personal estate. It also meant Harvey had early first hand experience with Jamestown and the Virginia Company bureaucracy. Probably with intention, Harvey played himself into the politics surrounding the collapse of the Virginia Company between 1621 and 1624. Working as a protégé of contending players in the company’s civil war, he also no doubt played his hand directly to James through his family–at least to the extent they had some name and status recognition.
Harvey’s family association with King James figured into the King’s decision to appoint Harvey chair of an Virginia Company commission—at minimum he was not perceived by the King as closely associated with the Sandys faction. John Pym was certainly regarded as that faction’s representative on the commission. His individual charge was to investigate and report on the condition and state of affairs in Virginia in 1623-4; it was to be a report, bordering on an investigation, of the Company’s actual performance in Virginia. His report was expected to include observations, recommendations pertaining to Virginia possible future at this key juncture.
The commission and its report was intended to be an element of a larger review of the Company’s charter, and it led into the Mandeville Commission’s course of action. Harvey stayed behind in Virginia, while the committee’s leadership reported back to London while John Pym returned to make the report to Mandeville. Harvey’s tour of Virginia included Samuel Mathews. The two had to have gotten to know each other as they jointly conducted their investigation in Virginia. Harvey probably made his later report on his own; he likely prepared the report on the way back to England.
Both the Pym Report and Harvey’s report ‘s to the Mandeville Commission did little to tone down James’ determination to radically change the accountability of the Corporation to royal authority; their tone, very critical of the Company and its administration (especially when combined with the domestic Virginia commentary), was, on the other hand, optimistic that a “go” could be made of the colony—and the latter served as served as bottom line not to terminate the colonial effort with the repudiation of the Virginia Company charter.
Still as a lone wolf, Harvey’s report invited comment and some bad feelings, particularly in Virginia, and among the Sandys; faction. Associated with the revocation of the Virginia Company Charter, Harvey was then appointed by the King to the Governor’s Council (Virginia’s Council of State). Whose idea that was I don’t know, but it suggests a bit of a careerist opportunism or a reward from the King. In any case there is no record, previous to his appearance as governor in late 1629, that Harvey ever served actively on the Governor’s Council. [99] https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/harvey-sir-john-ca-1581-or-1582-by-1650/. It certainly, however, strongly suggests that relatively early on John Harvey had caught the eye of James.
Upon completing the report and undertaking an add-on report Harvey submitted his report alone and personally (in 1625) apart from the Pym Report in 1624. After the Report, according to Osgood, Harvey, held a position in the English navy. Thus Harvey did not participate in, or share in the evolution of the Governors Council into the Council of State during the period intervening his arrival as Governor in 1629. Thus he remained an outsider, three thousand miles distant. [99] For a more detailed account, see Charles A. Andrews, the Colonial Period in American History, Vol. 1: Settlement, pp. 189ff.
As to how Harvey maneuvered himself into the gubernatorial appointment. L. H. Roper suggests that the “prickly and self-important John Harvey became governor … [by] seizing the chance for advancement … to hitch his star as firmly as he could to the socio-political center of the early Stuart world, the monarch. The reader should be aware Harvey had pivoted away from James after his death in 1625, and captured the attention of his somewhat wayward son, Charles.
Osgood characterizes “Appointments under the English government throughout our colonial period were secured largely through privilege, influence and favoritism. Merit, impersonally considered played some part, but in a large proportion of cases it was subordinate in most cases it could be but roughly ascertained and figured only in connection of motives of a more personal sort. These considerations go far to explain the inferior character of many colonial appointments … a few royal governors rendered excellent service to the crown and the colonists. Of the less acceptable class among them, John Harvey of Virginia was an example” [99] Herbert Osgood. the American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, Vol, 3, pp. 96-7
Roper adds:
Harvey [had] entered Virginia’s affairs as early as August 1623 when he accepted an appointment–possibly obtained through the offices of the diplomat Sir Dudley Carleton–to the commission appointed by the Privy Council [see above paragraphs] to investigate the nature of the damage inflicted on they colony by the Indian attack…While rendering this service, [Harvey] identified himself as a soldier in the Virginia Company faction headed by the Earl of Warwick…Having become convinced of Harvey’s experience [in Virginia because of this report], the government rewarded him with membership on the Council [of State–which he never attended during that period], a knighthood, and on 12 September, 1628 the governorship of the colony” [99] L. H. Roper, the English Empire in America, 1602-1658 (Routledge, 2016), pp. 108-9. James got him on the Council of State, but it was Charles who knighted him and appointed him governor.
Harvey, however, reflecting his alliance with Warwick and the Richs, did little to temper his lack of regard for the Sandys faction and its administration of the colony after 1619.
So Harvey’s distance from both the disruptive post-Massacre company politics in London and involvement in domestic Virginia governance was a distinct negative in Virginia. Harvey’s published and known views on the Company during Sandys tenure, contrasted with the position taken by the Assembly in 1624. While Virginians in these years were always of two minds concerning the Company and its future in Virginia, Harvey, an outsider despite his Virginia estate and short residencies, was not on favorable terms with former Company officials who infested the Governor’s Council in the post-Massacre period. There is little reason to believe that Harvey enjoyed any meaningful level of support from Virginians in 1629 when he arrived as governor.
When he got started as governor it became evident that his instructions from the King provided Harvey several specific tasks, the Palisades Project, for one. But the wording of the instructions issued to Harvey was consistent with that of Wyatt and Yeardley–his predecessors– and it was also applied to Wyatt and Berkeley after 1639. Craven asserts Harvey’s instructions were essentially mirror images of the instructions sent by the Company to its governor, which were then incorporated by the Privy Council when they took over in 1624-5. In their consistency one would expect some understanding of how London viewed the governor’s role. Craven summarizes it as:
The rule of the company’s later days [bound] the governor by a majority vote of the council, with a casting vote in case of a tie [not quite a veto], was continued. As before the council held the authority to fill temporarily vacancies in the governor’s chair arising from death or other cause by election, aright exercised no less three times within a decade of the company’s fall. Governor and council continued [throughout the period] to act as the chief administrative agency of the colony, to set in quarterly sessions as a superior court, and to join with the burgesses in forming a general assembly … The joining of governor and council in one commission with provision for majority rule presented, in the absence of the company’s former and close superintendence, a very real question as to the extent of the governor’s independent powers [99] Wesley Frank Craven, Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, p. 155
One might, however, realize that while Potts was doing “his thing” when Harvey was in town, sick or ill, but watched Potts and the oligarchy in action. He witnessed treatment of their servants and the residents in the community-settlements they dominated. This rough and tumble frontier politics sanctioned arbitrary authoritative ruff-necked actions, and was manor-medieval in its style of law–even more so than England was at that time. Harvey, an alleged owner of an obnoxious and arrogant personality, knew well how to respond to that environment; but he possessed one distinction that distinguished him from the great predominance of the Virginia governing elite—he was an outsider to it–and nobody resented outsiders more than Potts.
At the outset Harvey was ready to submit his own agenda to the Assembly called into session for March 1630. That brings up another Roper question as to whether Harvey properly understood his own powers and role in Virginia during this period.
Harvey’s difficulties arose from his miscalculation of royal support for his position, which may have naturally arisen from the diffusion of authority that existed in the government of Virginia and in the English empire at this time. By virtue of his office, he should have constituted the primary point of contact between the Privy Council and the locality [Virginia]. It remained unclear, however, just how much authority–and respect- a colonial governor commanded at this time. The former ship’s captain might have regarded himself as the viceregent of the king–the equivalent of the Lord Deputy of Ireland–but it was by no means clear that anyone else shared this lofty view of the position. The creation of Dorset’s Commission on Virginia and the [later Laud] Commission on Plantations (with its own Virginia subcommittee) moreover created alternative channels that enabled Claiborne and his friends to outflank even those who held royal office. [99] L. H. Roper, the English Empire in America, 1602-1658 (Routledge, Number 7, 2009), p. 112.
If Harvey was no more viewed in London than as an administrative arm and linkage to the Virginia policy sub-system, with the Dorset and Laud Commissions as the fundament organs entrusted with Virginia affairs, one can see the king was to a considerable degree relieved of the charge he was meddling and not providing the definition of the parameters of Virginia’s policy subsystem, tasks he had entrusted, certainly to the Dorset, and less obviously to Laud Commission which seems more tilted to actual operations and administration; it does seem, however, dedicated itself, the county system as an example, to increasing the capacity of the resident policy sub-system.
Harvey, however, never willingly bought into the past framework. Harvey from the start of his administration in early 1630, Harvey added to crown-imposed assignments, supplementing them with his own agenda, and infusing his governance style with his own elevated and empowered gubernatorial job description. For the next four years, he clashed with and was often pushed back by the Council and on other frequent occasions independently took actions on critical policy issues without consensual support from that body. In a nutshell he acted, when he could, as a governor independent of the council, who was empowered to go beyond the specific items in his instructions, as updated by the King’s missives.
To be sure, this had some precedent in Virginia’s past. Wyatt, in the desperate post-1622 days, had departed from company policy and instructions pursuing matters were viewed as essential–pushing the Assembly to assert its right to levy taxes and fees was a prominent example. During these years the collapse of the Company in conjunction with the Second Powhatan War left Virginia very much on its own; the survival of the colony was understandably paramount, and timely permission to act was not possible.
Yeardley too was not always in step with London wishes and priorities–and the Assembly when it met, while deferential in tone, never seems to have been unwilling to let London know what it thought. In short, past practices did not seem a solid ground for Harvey’s vision of Governor. While Harvey did not understand the accepted Virginia decision-making procedures, he probably did enjoy some leeway in adding agenda items congruent with the King’s policy and English law. He was expected to take a lead in shaping policy and solving local and Virginia problems.
In Harvey’s mind, as supported by his numerous correspondence on the topic with his proteges, and the manner in which he presented decisions to the Council, the governor seemed empowered to make decisions separately and autonomously of the Council. At best he seems to have acted as the Council had an advisory capacity only. That clashed horribly with the office and past accepted practices since 1622. (See Craven, p. 153ff). More on that later on in this module.
the Evolved Role of the State Council and Governor
What is more apparent in hindsight is that London, be it the Company or James and Charles, had set up and lived with the Virginia decision-making process a decade previous to Harvey. This framework, beginning with the company, and continuing through James and Charles, viewed the Council more than advisory, but linked the Council with the governor, and together a decision would be made. That this would potentially heavily affect such agendas as not included in the King’s instructions. It certainly would bring into question independent actions by the governor, and those for which he could not secure a majority in the Council.
Harvey did not understand that Charles put governor and council in the same pot. Harvey never got the support from London or Charles on his exercise of an independent and aggressive position as governor. Nor did Charles have an particular desire to set up a “legislature” except when he called the assembly into session for a particular issue or matter, nor did he expect a royal governor to construct and impose a gubernatorial personal agenda unilaterally. In his, and the Privy Council’s mind, the decisions of consequence came from a fused Council and Governor decision-making-which, saving a tie vote meant the governor was potentially able to be checked by the Council.
Charles wanted most of all was a governor who kept things quiet and followed his orders and priorities– keep the tobacco customs duties flowing to England, and implement his directives and instructions. For the larger questions concerning Virginia, His Majesty’s “commissions” were tasked with that. Holding the fort, however, was not what Harvey had in mind. He constantly tried to write his own job description. His sad lot today is that it is hard to fathom whether his efforts to follow his king’s orders and priorities, or his out of step, hand-crafted insensitive job description is what put him on the boat to England—twice. What Shakespeare could have done with a character such as Harvey!
The reader can see before Harvey set foot in Virginia as governor, his future administration, if it can be called as such, suffered from the lack of definition in the powers processes, and relationships among the three institutions set up in the Greate Charter back in 1619.
We can also see the origins of a weak governor, with divided executive entities. That from time to time provincial decision-making meant being called into session of an elected assembly–which included the Council and Governor–forming a fused government–only added an unpredictable layer of different actors. That these various entities could be construed as separate branches of a government, is more than a half-century in the future. While that seems natural today, it was not then. As I mentioned at some point previous, John Locke, the theorist identified with separate branches, was only BORN in 1632.
Accordingly, the reader might, as he or she struggles through this module, see the first stirrings of separate bodies, each with their own constituencies, agendas, and processes-powers. This is fine so long as the actors of the period are not infused with this perspective–and the goings on that emanate from the fused decision-making are not regarded as legitimate or appropriate to the period.
From the start, however, as we shall see, Harvey’s aggressive definition of governor triggered a politics and policy-making style that was not simply contentious, but viewed as requiring more precise and firm delimitation of powers, limits, accountability congruent with each type of actor. That many in Virginia viewed the role of the Assembly, in ways we link today as legislative, is somewhat presumptive of a future evolution in which these bodies developed into full-fledged political institutions. What was more important in 1632 was conformity to the past mode of decision-making in Jamestown–a mode made acceptable by the reality the governor was either one of them, or willing to live with their ambitions and perspectives, i.e. “went to some degree native”.
Harvey and the Council of State Bent the Virginia Executive “Branch” Twig
Harvey’s perceived job description, and its deviation from the reality of what Charles and the Virginians wanted or could live with was a symptom of a much larger issue. Charles’s failure to flesh out the self-governance of Virginia left the latter ill-defined and in constant, needless flux. From day one in 1630 it seems the crux of this flux and a lack of consensus on the policy process was expressed within the Council of State. This is unfortunate for us for few if any records exist that allow us to tap into the civil war that developed in 1630 and 1631 between the governor and the Council.
When confronted with the Harvey-1630 Council clash, the Council had evolved to an institution whose members were not elected, but formerly appointed, by the King from suggestions offered by the Council through the governor. Once appointed, a member was nearly impossible to be removed. Attendance was weak and sporadic previous to 1629, probably a combination of its members preoccupation with their own private affairs in their shredded community isolated plantation empire, and because they shared a consensus and a heritage of past company experience and contacts with the governor that reduced their fear of actions that threatened their autonomy, independence and plans..
After the Company’s fall, the institutions and their membership simply continued on, without the active involvement of the Crown or its administrators. Craven reports that the nature and composition of the Governor’s Council had “little changed except for certain extensions of its power traceable to a failure of the King’s ministers to maintain the same alert oversight of its actions as had the company. The rule of the company’s later days binding the governor by a majority vote of the council, with a casting vote in case of a tie, was continued [99] Wesley Frank Craven, The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 1607-1689 (Louisiana State University Press, 1970), p. 154.
Bailyn defined the situation as:
The private interests of this group, which had assumed control of public office by virtue not of inherited status, but of newly acquired and strenuously maintained economic eminence, were pursued with little interference from traditional restraints imposed on a responsible ruling class. Engaged in an effort to establish themselves in a land they sought as specific ends [i.e. agenda goals]: autonomous local jurisdiction, an aggressive expansion of settlement and trading enterprises, unrestricted access to land, and at every stage the legal endorsement of [past land] acquisitions . ..
From his first appearance in Virginia, Sir John Harvey threatened the interests of this group. While still in England he had identified himself with the faction that had successfully sought the collapse of the Company, and thus his mere presence in Virginia was a threat to the legal basis of land grants made under the Company’s charter” [99] Bernard Bailyn, “Politics and Social Structure in Virginia”, in 17th Century America: Essays in Colonial History, James Morton Smith (Ed), University of North Carolina Press, 1959), p. 96
Sympathy with the Bailyn point of view, while correct in its depreciation of the character of the First Migration elite, seems to believe nothing good could come from this period. I contend that precisely in 1632 we can see the first tentative steps to genuine Virginia political development. In that year the half-formed provincial government got a pulse, probably the first since 1624-5. That pulse gave some life to those ill-defined political structures so long neglected by Charles.
The fault for creating and continuing an ill-designed governor-Council structural relationship lay with the Virginia Company and Charles. Again, Charles’s failure to define the parameters of royal governance, put in place the roles and the rules that governed Virginia’s domestic political structures inherited from the Company period. No one in London picked up the slack and addressed that deficiency. No one was going to play nice in the playground without the sovereign’s active role. In its subtle way, his Privy Council monitored the procedures and decisions of the resident government such as to avoid explosions and maintain the peace between the two wings of the hybrid policy system.
It would be a mistake to think the House of Burgesses was the key Virginia colony-level body during the 1630’s. It met irregularly to begin with, and the reality was that previous to 1689, the House was decidedly in a secondary position to the Governor’s Council/Council of State which was more active, aggressive, and powerful. For most of the seventeenth century, legislation was approved, but for the most part not made, by the General Assembly, which included both the governor and the Council. Virginia’s prime decision-maker was the governor-council nexus. In this period the council ought not to be considered as the upper body of the legislature that will evolve several decades in the future.
The problem for historians, including myself, is that the oligarchy that populated the Council, did not generate any sort of approval for their character, their rather bold-faced use of public powers for personal benefit, their transparent abuse of their residents and constituencies, and their rather obvious style that bespoke of a mean-spirited manor lord simply does not foster any warmth. Their agenda, while capable of some level of comprehensive Virginia-wide governance and responsible policy-making, was too often saturated with personal ambition, the quest for individual profit regardless of consequences, land-grubbing and headright snatching that was sustained largely because it was shared by its members.
John Harvey when he arrived in Jamestown found, except for the Council, a half-formed provincial government whose enforcement and administrative capacity rested almost entirely on its local governments in the county-shire. With an Assembly pushed off into the margins of decision-making–more a reactor to the Council-governor than an maker of its own policy. The governor’s powers over the local governance, be it court, vestry, or militia, was slim at best and “dotted line”. To the extent the governor had an agenda that needed implementation, either the Council became the instrument, or the governor was on his own with the local authorities.
The Council too, lined so tightly to the governor, acted more like the commission form of government found today in some local jurisdictions, was not prone to work apart from the governor, but to operate “through” him. His consensus in the matter not only provided some insulation from London, but sustained administrative muscle and coordination in its implementation. With the governor as a partner, each Council member could guide the implementation of an ordinance through his local area of interest. This ensured his influence and safeguarded his interests. Stretching the imagination a bit, one could view this administrative style of a geographic–rather than functional–commission style government.
The commission style of decision-making is, I believe, not regarded highly by most commentators-although some voters perceive it as its own check on a too aggressive government. Its failures are easily apparent; is also an open invitation to uncoordinated, inconsistent and fractured decision-making that is prone to administrative fiefdoms. In Virginia of this period it was prone to the ambitions of its more powerful and well-placed members, and was central to their dominance over the local districts of their interest. In its way, it too is half-formed, with little capacity aside from its local dominance over the militia and the county offices of its membership. If anything the Council intensified Virginia’s tilt to the local level.
Within the Council log-rolling and trade-offs, poor attendance, and a lack of commitment to the institution and Virginia-wide comprehensive policy, did not distinguish its policy-making. A powerful member, with a highly individualized plan of action, had no hesitation in using the Council to his advantage. For example, while he lobbied in London for over two years (William Claiborne), yet was able to hold the Council majority for his agenda arguably reveals the Council was not yet a true government body, but more a vehicle for the agenda of an oligarchical elite. There seems no equivalent of a Cato or even Cicero in this happy homestead. John Harvey did not fill the bill either.
We have already set the stage behind Governor Harvey’s confrontation with the Council of State. in my opinion, Harvey, whether it be personality or a heart-felt commitment to impose necessary changes, truly saw the governorship in different terms than past practices and the established tradition specified in his instructional job description issued by the King. It was clear, from the first day they met together that the Governor and Council were on different paths and thinking.
It was likely a very bad start for Harvey, and left a bad, if confused taste in the mouth’s of Virginia planters. Roper asserts there had been no obvious friction between Harvey and the powerful plantation conquistadors before Harvey’s entry as governor [99] L. H. Roper, the English Empire in America, 1602-1658, P. 109 , but friction seems to have been felt quickly after Harvey exercised his powers and imposed his–and the King’s agenda in the March 1630 session of the General Assembly.
I suspect the disparity between past practices was evident and generated reaction from the first meeting of Harvey and the Council–but there is no record of the event. Harvey’s temperament likely added a strong odor of personal contempt for them. Moreover, while lacking direct evidence from the Council of State records, I suspect his moderating of these meetings revealed a headstrong backing of an agenda of his making. On return to their plantations and settlements from Jamestown, Council of State members likely did little to keep their opposition secret.
In any event, Roper confirms that by March, 1631 in a letter to his benefactor Carleton that he was at odds with the Council, particularly Mathews and Peirsey:
Despite the king’s “gracious letter for the strengthening of my commission which I have often showed them’, they continued ‘this malignity against me [which Harvey interpreted as] “nothing but factions, seeking to carry all matters, rather for their own ends, then either seeking the general good, or doing right to particular men” [99] L. H. Roper, the English Empire in America, 1602-1658, P. 109
Andrews, does note, however, that, in his communications with the King, Harvey constantly and consistently called attention to the King’s not having rendered a final determination on the nature of Virginia governance, and pleading in return that he enjoy the King’s support in his actions until such would occur [99] Charles M. Andrews, the Colonial Period of American History: the Settlements, Volume I (pp. 203-4).
Many Virginians, however, Harvey’s deference to the King as a challenge to the primacy of tobacco, and their right to grow it as they saw fit. For this to make sense we ought remember the King’s tobacco contracts, contested by the Assembly, would have imposed a more London-centered tobacco nexus. The status quo, on the other hand, allowed considerable planter autonomy. Harvey got caught in the middle through little fault of his own.
Harvey’s structural Virginian problem in carrying out his imagined job description was the so-called Governor’s Council–not the Assembly. In its battle with Harvey, the individual members of the Council not only confronted his initiatives, but hugely contested Harvey’s view on the role and powers of the governor and the role of the Council. In what turned out to be a near-decade long struggle with Harvey, the Council willingly distanced itself from the governor, and consciously or not drifted into new ground, as the consummate lawmaker for the province.
This enlarged sense of their own importance started their activist members down a road that was as out of tune with their sovereign’s wishes as was Harvey’s. In their desire for autonomous policy making roles, several in the Claiborne Clique, but also others like Francis West, bypassed the Virginia institutions and instead headed to London for satisfaction. Considering Charles wanted as little responsibility for the governance of the colony as realistic–wishing wholeheartedly to spin that off to almost anything resident in London–the Council was knocking at the wrong door. They would come to realize that in 1639.
The King’s chosen, and appointed, macro governance institutions was the Dorsett Commission. Its formation and membership reflected a London constituency with interest in Virginia governance–and to them Charles had entrusted its short-term governance while it worked out in accordance with his wishes a long term solution. The obvious problem was the governed were not all that happy with the short term decisions of either the Commission as embodied in its Report, or the actions of his appointed, if erratic, temperamental and ambitious governor.
Through the first year of his governance, 1630, continual intense fights with the Council made it clear that not only did the two disagree on policy and strategy, but Harvey did not agree with the previous role the Council had assumed in regards to the exercise of the governor’s powers. The pre-Harvey Council–and past governors as well–shared a view that the Governor’s power was limited by the right of the Council to advise (i.e. no contested unilateral action by the governor, unless ordered by the king), and also “consent” by the Council, by a majority vote, to the action itself. It was a jointly issued decision.
Harvey did not accept this, rather he seems to have acknowledged only that the Council had a right to be consulted, and was intended to offer advice to the Governor, who was, in Harvey’s mind, free to reject or accept. Harvey, I think, never really bought into, in practice, a style of governance that could reliably secure the Council’s support. If the Council was at permanent war with the Powhatan, Harvey was at permanent war with the Council. As reported by Alexander:
members of his Council, who were bitterly hostile to him on account of his unscrupulous conduct in general, and his support for the Baltimore patent [Maryland] in particular, boldly adverred that he was only authrized [sic] to do what they advised and approved; and that his only independent power lay in his privilege of casting the decisive vote when there was a tie. Harvey on the other hand, loudly asserted that his Councilors were mere assistants whose opinions he could accept or as he saw fit; and that he possessed an incontrovertible right as the King’s representative to carry out his own wishes, purposes and plans, unaffected by any opinion which the Council might entertain, provided that they were not inconsistent with the injunctions of [his] Commission [as governor] and Instructions [99] Phillip Alexander Bruce, Institutional History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, Vol 2. p. 318.
Craven reports that the nature and composition of the Governor’s Council had “little changed [over the years] except for certain extensions of its power traceable to a failure of the King’s ministers to maintain the same alert oversight of its actions as had the company. The rule of the company’s later days binding the governor by a majority vote of the council, with a casting vote in case of a tie, was continued [99] Wesley Frank Craven, The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 1607-1689 (Louisiana State University Press, 1970), p. 154.
To make matters complex, through 1630 and early 1632, the Council itself fractured. Its decision-making closely reflected the consensus of those who attended its sessions, tightly bound to its quorum of those in attendance. While we do not have attendance records, nor even a schedule of Council meetings, it would seem that in this period Mathews and Tucker proved very effective.
With Harvey engaged in his initiatives (implementing the March 1630 Assembly initiatives, his fight with Potts, his Indian peace entreaties, and his economic diversification and tobacco regulation) Mathews and Tucker railroaded through the Council several critical initiatives that empowered the Claiborne business plan, and set it up for its positioning to be the revitalized Virginia Company Magazine.
In London the Claiborne advocates and the New Men enjoyed access with which the Claiborne opposition could not contest. There is no evidence I have found that Harvey willingly supported the Claiborne initiative, but he too seemed unable to throw a monkey wrench into the Dorset Report recommendations. Near year’s end something of a stalemate had developed. It continued into 1632–and persisted to the eve of the issuance of the Dorset Commission report.
So over a year, Harvey was already writing home with considerable “indignation” regarding the “waywardness and oppositions” of the Council and its members. Throughout the first year, “the antagonisms had become so intense that a formal peace treaty had to be drawn up between Harvey and the Council” [99] Bernard Bailyn, “Politics and the Social Structure in Virginia” in James Morton Smith (Ed), 17th Century America: Essays in Colonial History, p. 97. By the end of the year (1631), to break the stalemate, negotiations began and in 1632 an agreement was reached to allow Harvey to proceed with his agenda before the 1632 Assembly.
The clique, knowing Harvey’s position, wanted to pacify (and distract) Harvey. So Mathews entered into negotiations to end the bitter and polarizing opposition of the Council of State to the governor’s actions and agenda. Mathews likely hoped the offer to set Harvey free to pursue his agenda in the General Assembly about to be convened, Harvey would have the opportunity to achieve some of his desired goals, and accordingly would be inclined to restrain his advocacy to the Dorset Commission on the Virginia Company matter.
That opportunity to act freely, when offered the opportunity by Mathews, “was joyously [received] … and a formal statement of accord was drawn up” [99] Thornton, pp. 19-20. The agreement produced a harvest of legislation that we will discuss below. It should be mentioned, however, the agreement did little to latent the tension that had existed between Harvey’s agenda and the Clique within the Council. In return, Harvey consented to operate in accordance with the Council’s interpretation of the Governor-Council relationship.
Of course, Harvey’s almost immediate response to the “peace treaty” was to write the King and ask for formal empowerment by him over the Council–which was not forthcoming. The King did not react. No surprise, nothing permanent resulted from the peace treaty, but it did open a window, breaking the impasse just enough for Harvey to once again introduce his agenda to the March 1632 Assembly. It was also distraction enough that Harvey, by this time having to confront the awkward role he was called on to play in supporting the king’s grant to Catholic Calvert, and the carving out of Maryland from Virginia’s loins.
This peace treaty within the Governor’s Council had more to do with Claiborne’s Kent Island venture and the behind the scenes preference or a favorable Dorset Commission decision to return the Virginia Company to power. In other words, it was a backdoor tactic to enhance a favorable decision made in London, a decision that would have greatly benefited the Claiborne Clique and Brenner’s New Men. Policy-making regarding the Virginia Company and its Magazine was not made by Jamestown, but by London intrigues.
In early 1632, and for the next year and a half or so, the two hybrid systems did battle in London, a battle that caused paralysis in the Dorset, maximizing the King’s frustration, so that in early 1634 he had abandoned the Dorsett Commission and created a replacement, the Laud. In the interim, the folk in Virginia both banged their head on the London wall of paralysis, and, activated their opposition and interests through the feeble, half-formed political institutions left behind by the Virginia Company: the Greate Charter framework of domestic governance. Remarkably, as we shall see, the Claiborne protagonists mostly controlled the Council, and their opposition turned to the only other institutions available, the Assembly, and the governor they so disliked and distrusted. This is the story within the story of the Thrusting Out.
The heart of the problem in 1632 was the governor-council decision-making nexus. The inability of the Governor’s Council to work cooperatively with a royal governor bespoke something more profound that an obnoxious governor clashing with a wild bunch, greedy land and fur grabbers. It was a visible expression of a fundamental failure of the Stuart hybrid colonial policy system that created both sets of tensions (land tenure and the capacity of its structures to govern effectively) that inevitably, if left unresolved, underlay the tumult that was the 1630’s.
The reality of 1630 is that Harvey, intended or not, opened up visible evidence the Virginia domestic government could not work well under internal stress. if the King wanted stable Virginia domestic governance he needed to define its institutions and processes. He was hoping one or another of his Commissions would do it, he does not seem to have strongly advocated it do so. Accordingly we drift from the Dorset to the Laud Commissions, and from there to the Thrusting Out of John Harvey. The lack of consensus on Harvey’s job description and style of administration, important though it was, overlapped with still another early initiative by Harvey: his attack on the former governor.
Scapegoating Former Governor Pott
No sooner than he arrived, Harvey got into a fight with the previous governor, (Doctor) John Pott. Well-liked (described by Dabney as “a convivial soul and a somewhat mysterious character“, and Virginia’s chief medicine man of long standing [99] Virginius Dabney, Virginia: the New Dominion (University Press of Virginia, 1971), p. 40, Keep in mind Potts was the governor Harvey replaced. Pott enjoyed high status as an Oxford M.A who had become a byword in his medical service to the river settlements of Virginia, and, large landowner-tobacco producer who had arguably become a popular plantation conquistador. As a the colony’s chief medic in the various post-Massacre Indian raids and expeditions of the Second Powhatan War, he had acquired notoriety and some scandal. A sobering and inciteful thought: when Pott was elected governor in 1628 he was about thirty-three years of age; John Harvey his nemesis was about forty-six.
Part of Potts (or Pott) mystique is that he was truly an educated medical Surgeon, trained and a protégé of one of England’s best. He was recruited by the Virginia Company and arrived in Virginia in 1619. From the start Virginia’s chief medical officer, doctor as well as surgeon–the latter his claim to fame.
He developed competence in treating what we today believe was typhoid, the so-called summer seasoning, and throughout his tenure as chief medical officer through 1628 “The doctor regularly kept patients in his own home, where his wife served as a nurse. He commissioned a boat which he sailed up and down the James River to make house calls at various outlying settlements. His typical fee for one of these calls was 30lbs of tobacco.[99] Charles E. Horton, Jr and Charles E. Horton MD, (Bulletin of New York Academy of Medicine, 1983, Vol. 59) p. 680.
Of note, surgeons in the English seventeenth century social hierarchy, were of lesser standing than physicians–to some extent due to the occupation practiced mostly in battle zones and involved the rather distasteful daily work of cutting open with minimal painkillers individuals of any class or standing. Contemporary American surgeons view Pott as an important contributor to the rise of surgeons in America, and to the status of physicians in America because Potts “through his service to colonists … earned the reputation traditionally given to physicians in Great Britain. The colonists in Virginia respected the surgeons and viewed them as doctors, which allowed surgeons to stand on equal ground with physicians”, [99] John D. Ehrhardt, Jr & J. Patrick O’Leary, MD the Rise of the Surgeon in Seventeenth Century Virginia Colony (the American Surgeon, Vol 84, Issue 6 (June 2018).
Possibly because of his relative youth, Potts possessed a personality not usually attributed to a man of his high status. A certain George Sandys, treasurer of the colony and brother to Edwin, wrote Pott was “more of a boon companion than quite comported with his dignity … at first he kept company too much with his inferiors, who hung upon him while his good liquor lasted” [99] Charles E. Horton, Jr and Charles E. Horton MD, (Bulletin of New York Academy of Medicine, 1983, Vol. 59) pp. 678-85. That good nature seems to have affected not only his style and dedication to his medical duties, but his style of politics that was, if nothing else, emotion-laden.
Pott survived the infamous first day of the Second Powhatan War, and from that point on is said to have developed a formidable hatred of the Powhatan. As medical officer and surgeon he participated in several military expeditions conducted in the years that followed. During one of these raids, in 1623 or 1624, he may (or may not) supplied poisons to conquistador William Tucker who tricked a large number of Powhatans into a peace conference during which Tucker spiked the wine given to the Powhatan, resulting in the death of hundreds of Indians. If Pott did provide the poison, a plausible case was made at his future trial that he was not on the expedition at all and the use of the poison was by Tucker.
Accused by none less than the Earl of Warwick of masterminding the faux peace incident, London was in a bit of an uproar that permitted the Earl of Warwick to successfully expel Pott from the Governor’s Council, and commence a formal investigation. The investigation cleared Pott, as stated above. Pott was not present at the poisonings, and he was restored to the Council in 1626. No worse for wear, Pott was elected by the Council to replace Francis West as Governor in 1628. [99] See Grizzard et all, Jamestown Colony: a Political, Social, and Cultural History (ABC-CLIO), 2007), p.133 He also immediately repudiated West’s recent peace treaty and espoused his version of a “permanent war” with the Powhatan. He also was a major, if not dominant advocate in the opening up of the Middle Peninsula–which as we know led to the Palisades Project.
Pott, whatever his virtues as a doctor, apparently held onto property of his neighbors. He held little regard for neighbor’s animals that wandered into his land. One legal suit for a contested pig involved his close partner in the action, Samuel Mathews. Potts would be sued by several neighbors and Harvey seized upon these chronic laws suits as justification for his actions against Pott. It was Potts’ treatment of freeholder, MS Jane Dickenson caught traction with Virginians.
Dickenson, after being captured by Powhatan, was ransomed by Potts, who required her to enter into indenture to pay for costs expended (two pounds of glass beads) for her ransom. After ten months in such indenture, a court terminated her contract and set her free. Potts treatment of his own apprentices also landed him in court, where one apprentice won. Potts was notorious, in his cavalier treatment of free holders and indentured servants.
Harvey probably fixated on Pott because of Pott’s ability to confuse private gain with public good–which, I would add was a fault of Harvey’s. Not well hidden, and not very different from the behavior of the other conquistadors the Council of State was populated by such misbehavior–made famous by Yeardley in past years. There are numerous letters and court records to support that assertion. Potts may not have been anything special among that dubious cast of characters. But he did catch Harvey’s attention notwithstanding.
Another part of the reason was Pott, immediately previous to his surrender of the governor’s office to Harvey, filled unexpired commissions of sixteen “commanders” of the militia–setting up a bloc of local support beyond the reach of the governor. (It was Pott’s command to the local militia that prompted the local militia to seize hold of Harvey during the 1635 coup–which will be shortly described). It is possible that Harvey, while incapacitated when he first arrived developed an intense distaste for Potts, and attributed to him much of his disregard for the quality of administration and policy priorities of the Council that he observed.
Still Pott was the wrong man with which to start a fight. Harvey couldn’t have picked a worse target for his frustration with “insiders”. The fight developed into a series of clashes on several levels, including his personal behavior, and his policy differences with the governor. It also may have overlapped into Harvey’s effort to garner revenues to use for his pay and expenses. Charles Horton asserted at the time that Harvey “took an immediate dislike to his predecessor and determined to ruin the popular physician” [99] Charles E. Horton, Jr and Charles E. Horton MD, (Bulletin of New York Academy of Medicine, 1983, Vol. 59) p. 682.
Harvey, citing a number of the above charges, dismissed Potts from the Council (although he had no authority to do so) and formally charged him with “wilful murther [murder], marking other men’s cattell as his owne, and killing their hogs“. He threw Pott in jail. Pott declined help from those who paid his bail and stayed in jail until his trial (making him a martyr and celebrity). Harvey played a heavy hand in the selection of the jury, which not surprisingly found him guilty. Sentenced to be confined to his plantation (Harrop), which ironically was the central land holding associated with the sovereign-supported Palisades Project, and somehow Harvey wound up formally confiscated Potts’ plantation. That was a bridge too far.
At this point the reaction to this personal assault on the former Governor was at its height. It no doubt intensified because Pott was the chief surgeon of the colony, and his absence in the performance of his duties was noticed up and down the James. While Harvey was pressing for the exile–banishment of Pott from Virginia–his wife, ill and of weak health, traveled to London, pressed his case–successfully. The King ordered the pardon of Potts, the return of his estate, and the resumption of his medical duties. Potts, however, was not returned to the Governor’s Council. That the King supported Pott, not his royal governor, speaks to the insensitivity of Charles’s decision-making and his rather uneven grasp of choosing the right people to support.
No worry, however, the reader has not yet seen the last of Pott.
The most chronic and widely shared policy item in the Pott-Harvey dispute was Harvey’s insistence to make peace with a warring tribe of Indians. Pott’s long-standing hatred of the Powhatan, and his policy position of leading to the rejection of West’s 1628 Indian treaty, overlapped with the serious of civil actions discussed above. The members of the Council did not support Harvey against Pott, and displayed considerable emotion resisting it. Harvey did find some local advisors, but was unable to drive a wedge in the Council.
As Harvey went forth and concluded a reasonably successful treaty with the tribe anyway, the Indian policy polarized Virginians. Nothing was more guaranteed to mobilize the plantation conquistadors than the Powhatan War and its role in hinterland settlement. Into this morass of a policy issue, an issue which played on and off with each raid or incident throughout his first administration, Harvey’s first year in office, after the March 1630 Assembly could have been his most dysfunctional. Policy-making by the Council seems to have broken down almost completely. We lack records and so we cannot delve deeper but almost every source substantiates by late 1630 and early 1631 the provincial government was at war with itself.
However, damaging the fight was for Harvey overall, Harvey’s takeover of the Pott estate, given Harvey’s prior remarks on the topic of repossessing company land back in 1624-5, reinforced the perception that Harvey indeed was determined to repossess landholdings of the Virginia elite, as was ongoing in the Ulster Plantation. Land patents-sales approvals were linked to the vital workforce headrights obtained by all settler but, for the general user Harvey suspended his approval of both.
I do not know what sympathies Harvey had for the Ulster Plantation strategy, or the degree to which Harvey acted on his own in seizing the Pott plantation to build up his own personal holdings and wealth, but matters became conflated in the minds of many Virginians.
In his first year in office Harvey brought Virginia self-governance to a noisy standstill.
the Dorset Commission and Revitalized Virginia Company as Catalyst: Clashes between the Council of State and the Assembly exposed cleavages among Virginia planters
The reader must be advised at this point that historians have found these years before 1635 as hard to detail. Records are scarce, imprecise, and secondary materials, with relatively few exceptions similar. The lack of detail has allowed, perhaps required, historians to create their scenario of what motivated the politics during this very important few years. In presenting our new view of the period, I have relied on a great number of these different themes and have wove them into my own. None the less, Thornton is our main source, but Osgood offers useful information as does Andrews and Craven–and of course, Brenner & Roper.
The problem is that each of these authors stress or focus on different themes, and seldom, save for Thornton, consider the several issues and themes as they unfurled, and how they interrelated. Chronology and time sequences are difficult to construct, as narratives “smush” their themes to maximize their cohesiveness and press their case. Like Hercule Poirot we need to deconstruct as best we can the sequence of actions and dynamics as we interweave the different dynamics and events into a coherent tale that takes us to the thrusting out in 1635.
The perspective and approach offered in this and the following modules emphasizes that chronological evolution of the Virginia policy system with emphasis on its associated class-elite-political culture development. In this way we can trace the political and economic development of each of our selected three states. This is my story within story: how the thrusting out catalyzed the political development of Virginia.
Several constants emerge. Harvey is the principal focus. His personality and arbitrariness negatively, or ineffectually, plays into each theme. Harvey was decisive, but polarizing, arrogant, and occasionally brutal (he attacked a Council of State member at a session with a cane-cudgel, and beat him severely (1632). Osgood, I think, offers a reasonable perspective on his behavior. He observes that by 1631, Harvey got virtually no support for his embroidered gubernatorial job description in London or Jamestown.
Osgood summarizes Harvey’s authority as governor was repeatedly, and consistently, restated by London. On each occasion London asserted Harvey’s position as governor was linked to the Council. Harvey did not enjoy autonomous power without the support of the Council. Council decisions were made by “the greater number of them among whom the governor was always to be one … Apparently the only distinction given to Harvey was that his name appeared at the head of the list, and he was designated as governor. Discretion was not granted to the governor alone … Instead the early commissions bound the governor by the advice of the council and were intended to necessitate his full cooperation with them [thus]… it lessened the prestige of the governor and increased the political authority of the councilors“. In that Harvey did not always conform to this state relationship, taking executive actions on his own, seemingly constructing his own agendas, Osgood suggests “was an important cause of the civil troubles of the Harvey administration” as the governor exerted himself “to the utmost to get free from the restraints which it imposed”. [99] Herbert Osgood, pp. 86-7
Finally, Osgood states by 1630 the Assembly was called into session each year “for the most part”. Its acts were subject to veto by the governor and the Privy Council–but as Andrews almost obsessively comments its role was never defined, nor were its parameters outlined, and hence it always acted in some fear of the consequences and reactions from London and the King. The only issue the Assembly took a lead was tobacco, and in particular reacting to the King’s consistent attempts to turn it to his own ends, not those of the Virginia planters. On tobacco the Assembly, and the Council also, shared what seems an already unbreakable commitment to its expansion.
The other constant that emerges from the sources is the disruption caused by the grant to Calvert and the Maryland colony. Osgood asserts this disruption was primary in the thrusting out. He is not alone. Osgood makes no reference to the Claiborne Clique and its polarizing business plan. But Claiborne cannot be ignored. Claiborne is one of the more powerful members of the Council, Secretary of the Colony, and in the first two years of Harvey’s administration, he was in London advocating and securing passage of his initiative.
Claiborne is usually wrapped up in the Maryland Kent Island initiative–but Claiborne aside in London, I now focus on how Maryland played into the larger political development of Virginia. I suggest Maryland played a critical role in developing the class identity of Virginia planters, and simultaneous fragmenting that identity between the mainstream planters and the Claiborne Clique. It is at this point between late 1630 and early 1632 we can see the first meaningful set of actions whose purpose was either to limit, if not break, the hold of the tobacco monoculture on Virginia by Virginians themselves by creating an enlarged and revitalized Virginia Company magazine, or to oppose that vision-action by the mainstream planters.
It is at this point we see some distinction among historians on what followed. Except by Thornton and perhaps Craven & Roper, the effects of London policy-making for many commentators are but distractions from the real story: opposition to Harvey. The revitalization and revamping of the Virginia Company presented by the Dorsett Commission in 1632 was for all practical purposes revolutionary, but its effects on Virginia provincial politics were minimal. Certainly the return of the Virginia Company as the governance of the colony was no small matter but how it played into the stalemate with Harvey is not interwoven with its Virginia politics. We differ..
The revamped Company, London officials once again, for better or worse, directly impart their vision–and background politics–into Virginia’s affairs and development. The King would, as he so badly desired, be one step removed from Virginia, and in that gap, the Virginia Company would insert a more commercial vision and base its operations in Virginia with its olde Greate Charter corporate governance. In this the Claiborne Clique and Brenner’s New Men saw an opportunity that could have transformed not only the pure agricultural path the colony had heretofore followed, but indirectly would have altered the development of its political institutions radically. The bulk of Virginia’s “Mainstream Planters” almost instinctively realized these implications and this is the tale of how they reacted to them in 1631-4.
Claiborne’s initiative was based in large part on fur trading with the Indians–and it embraced potentially all English holdings in North America. Secondarily it rested on “supply”, the provisioning of the colonies with imported goods–as well as the export of their goods. In other words, it would exercise a primary impact on Virginia’s economic base.
That required a port city, and Kent Island was likely to be it. But even more threatening, perhaps, was that its finance and logistics core, meant the development of new occupations that were not closely associated with tobacco, export, or even the shredded community agricultural base. If successful over time a new occupational configuration could logically follow: the introduction of a middle class, artisans, professionals, merchants and the like whose interests were greater and wider than tobacco agriculture.
Claiborne’s enterprise was a departure from the tobacco monoculture, even though it incorporated that monoculture in its business plan. It was at heart a logistics-transportation, finance-based business that linked the tobacco with the outside world, and the outside world with tobacco and Virginia settlement. That it originated from the plantation conquistador element-but by no means a significant portion of them–was not remarkable in and of itself. The nature of export, and the need to import provisions to live on and work with required from somebody to develop a focus, expertise, and transportation and contracts, and the need to create an export hub to connect to the global market. Accordingly, hidden in plain sight we see a catalyst behind the formation of a new sector and set of occupations
To the reader this “what if” may be taken as a sort of alternative history. Perhaps it is. But as I shall discuss in our Massachusetts chapter, what is a primary distinction between Massachusetts and Virginia was the former rested, and further developed, a proto-urban middle class occupation configuration, while the latter sucked it up into tobacco and the plantation. Both Massachusetts and Virginia had plenty of entrepreneurs, but they pushed them onto separate paths. If accurate, then the First Migration era was indeed the period in which Virginia’s tobacco monoculture was fully embraced and became embedded in its political and economic systems.
The revitalization of the Virginia Company, and the possibility the Kent Island initiative would control its Magazine, rendered Virginia’s planter class a muddle of conflicted positions and interests. Undoubtedly, that they could not, but needed badly to, express their positions and articulate their interests, left them both frustrated, each plantation owner atomized. No newspapers existed in Virginia but at that time, their communication was limited to by petition to the members of Dorsett, the Privy Council or perhaps the king. So how disthe Mainstream Planter get into the action more effectively–by using the Assembly when it could. And Harvey sympathetic on this issue for he too, and his bosses in London were in agreement
The Dorset Commission inevitably became the lightning rod and generator of Virginia political action and concern. The Commission was tasked with the responsibility for determination of the colony’s future, kicking Virginians–and Harvey–into the margins. It was clear from its beginning the Dorset Commission was loaded up with pro-Virginia Company shareholders, past Company officials, and those, like its “customs farmer” chair John Wolstenholme who saw an opportunity to regain control over the Virginia colony and in particular the “monopoly over its trade”. Within a matter of a few months, the Dorset Commission announced its recommendation to reissue a revamped charter to the Virginia Company.
Also ,of great concern was the membership in Dorsett Commission of Lord Chichester (and several associated with him), governor of the Irish Ulster Plantation. Chichester, governor-general of Ireland, was engaged in an aggressive land seizure program, which was in process of being carried out. That program centered on the systematic takeover of Irish held lands in Ulster, evicting all Irish owners regardless of their social status, and replacing them with Scot and English “undertaker” landowners who would resettle the land with English-Scot servants. The fate of the Irish farmer was most horrendous; over a decade they were simply deprived of the exercise of their rights as Englishmen as they tried legally to resist the dispossession.
The large land owners that replaced Irish peers were mostly merchants and adventurers. As Thornton observes “it was only natural… that the appointment of the [Dorset] commissioners aroused considerable apprehension among the Virginians“. Thornton goes further; he suggests it is the primary cause of Harvey’s ouster. Simply put Virginian landowners feared they would suffer the same fate as had befallen the Irish landlords and freeholders [99] J Mills Thornton III, “the Thrusting out of Governor Harvey: a Seventeenth Century Rebellion”, the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 76, No. 1 (January, 1968), p. 14.
Previous to this those Virginian fears existed, but this new “fear” mobilized them and from this point on the possibility the Virginia Company revitalized meant not a return to the past, but a new transformative shift of Virginia’s economic base and a new elite and workforce. There was logically an additional role that the Assembly could and must play as a defender of the status quo, and, of course, the existing planter elite, indenture contracts which promised land on their expiration, and the planter oligarchy. We are reminded here of my earlier quote regarding Tara.
With this dire future, the resurrection of the Virginia Company, an action which seemed likely at that time, was still the preferred direction, but minus the deal with the company magazine and any new land disposition. Whatever Virginians thought of the Company and the Company officials, the return of the Virginia Company offered the security of the Company recognizing the legitimacy and legal rights of its past actions and decisions in Virginia. It was no great love for the Company period, or loyalty to it, that prompted their willingness to be governed by the Company again. Oddly enough perhaps, to the Mainstream Planter, the Company without the Magazine controlled by Claiborne, was a source of stability, whose past behavior proved little threat to the plantation and the tobacco monoculture.
It was that news, received by Mathews in December 1631 that prompted him and the Clique on the Council of State to carve out an agreement with Harvey ending the policy bickering within the Council of State that disrupted governance badly, which, if continued, might reflect itself on the actions of the Dorset Commission as it prepared the Virginia Company charter for implementation. It was at this point, that concerns of the planter community regarding the Claiborne Clique’s northern venture became more serious, imminent, and threatening. They had to react before they became real, and embedded in a contract with the new Virginia Company.
Brenner captures the bare knuckles conflict between his “merchant-councilor interest’ (what we call the Claiborne Clique) and the “general planters”. Brenner argues that English “New Men’ financiers like Cloberry and Thomason, forged an alliance with members of “Virginia’s council clique [those with membership on the Council of State]:
Working together, councilors and (New Men) merchants penetrated all aspects of the Virginia economy. The specific trajectory of Virginia’s early economic evolution, is indeed incomprehensible without reference of a special merchant-councilor interest distinct from, and in important ways directly opposed to, the interests of the generality of planters. During the pre-Civil War era, the merchant-councilor combine engaged in wholesale share out of the colony’s major resources–furs, lands, and commercial monopolies. At the same time its members pursued pro-merchant commercial policies that were directly harmful to, and opposed by, most of the colony’s planters–above all the establishment of a new Virginia Company and the abolition of free trade with Virginia” [99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 117.
If that trade relationship materialized planters saw themselves transformed from economic agents with some measure of autonomy into a crushing dependence on the magazine and the Claiborne joint stock board of directions that set their policy. The fur trading initiative and the import “supplies” function threatened their standard of living, and given the strength of the Clique on the Council of State only heightened their fear of political suppression.
And so the stage was set, as early as 1631-2, for the Claiborne Clique to encounter a solid opposition from the Mainstream planter groups. In this sense, then, with New Men on both sides of the conflict, the Virginia planters embraced what leverage its members could, using institutions, the Assembly and the Council, each could dominate, to battle their conflicting ambitions and hopes. So in 1632-35 we see the fledgling, fragile, but flexible Greate Charter institutions acting as expressions of particular groupings of the planter class–and in so doing– take yet another step on their path to becoming a functioning legislature. That they did so with the most tenuous of relations with the greater population of Virginia, reflecting rather different wings of an oligarchy, they had not yet tackled the important and pivotal question-issue of representativeness. We shall see that a generation in the future.
The conquistadors attracted to Claiborne, like Claiborne, were well-connected and educated, with kinship linkages to the political actors and the resources needed to play politics in London. The great bulk of Virginia planters, as we shall see did not enjoy these advantages to the same degree–and did not enjoy the luxury to pack off to London. Any Virginian planter who wanted to export his tobacco himself had to enter those troubled waters to address their fear. So great was the perceived threat of Claiborne’s potential trade monopoly we see an alliance forming around Harvey’s tobacco and agricultural proposals introduced at March 1632 session of the Assembly.
Harvey, we should remember had earlier in 1631, sent to the Dorset Commission comments expressing his opposition to Claiborne’s Council of State-approved northern fur trade monopoly. His position on Claiborne receiving a Magazine-like monopoly in trade was similar and likely to have been expressed to many. Moreover, Harvey was consistent in his position. In mid-1633 he again reiterated his opposition, sarcastically attacking Tucker’s proposed provisioning “magazine” (personalizing the attack by identifying Tucker by name)) that set, what Harvey regarded as, absurdly low prices for the monopoly’s purchase of tobacco from Virginians. allowing its sale in England at markedly higher prices. His accusations came close to cries of extortion and certainly exploitation, never mind excessive greed. By that point politics in London had stalemated the Company’s revival; the King was personally trying, unsuccessfully, to negotiate a compromise.
Harvey was “on the record” and likely that made it easier for planters to work with him on a comprehensive set of initiatives to both protect tobacco and to encourage its limitation by expanded corn production and limited plantings. The latter had already been passed by the Assembly in 1628. While the planters no doubt wanted an open market (free trade) on tobacco pricing, their trading at the best price they could get, the King always wanted a set price, a fairly low one.
It was fear of the Claiborne initiative and its potential contract and takeover of the Company Magazine that made Mainstream planters anxious, and prompted their mobilization in early 1632. Back of their uneasy minds was the memory of tyranny, corruptions, miserable quality and scarcity of goods imported, and the horrendously low prices for tobacco purchased from Virginians and then exported at greater profit by the Virginia Company magazine. This was, I suggest, not an irrational fear from the likes of Tucker and Claiborne and probably the New Men behind them.
The economic reality of Virginia’s 1630’s plantation owner was that he was atomized, i.e. almost totally on his own. This may have suited the temperament of the plantation owner, the system and culture was extremely individualized and every owner was out for himself and his family, many of whom seem to have shared his values. Economically, however, such individualism imposed its own reality that investment capital was not just a prerequisite for growth, but a requirement, for example seeds for the future year. Under the Company, the Magazine whatever its evils, and there were many, filled the void. But by 1630 if one wants evidence of what a Hobbesian world was, a war of all against all, Virginia could have been the poster child. However, haughty, the Mainstream planter class was fiscally vulnerable.
the 1632 General Assembly Battles the Governor’s Council
After the late 1631 peace treaty was signed with Mathews and the New Men (see above), Harvey called the General Assembly into session (1632). At that session, Harvey negotiated a significant expansion of shire government sufficient to accommodate Tidewater expansion to that date (we shall develop that in a future module).
He also signed Virginia’s first highway bill, legislation assigning building and maintenance of highways to the local parish-government. Future highway bills (1657, 1663) reassigned that responsibility to the county courts; for a generation however, this critical infrastructure, made especially critical by the shredded community, was left to the discretion and fiscal support of a religious institution (it does appear the parish was delegated power to call a labor levy). This may well be as convincing a proof of my “local tilt” as could be offered. The Assembly declined a role other than authorization for the then key infrastructure, highway building and river dredging. These fundamental tasks were thus delegated to the local level whose perspective was limited to its local needs, and not provincial. The consequence was that a comprehensive Virginia road system was not a priority in Virginia dates at least to 1632 [99] See Changju Lee, & John S. Miller “Lessons Learned from the Rise and Fall of Toll Roads in the United States and Virginia” (Virginia Center for Transportation, Innovation and Research, 2014)
Reflecting the king’s desire to diversify Virginia’s economy beyond tobacco, Harvey secured Assembly approval of his tobacco legislation that, in a time of collapsed prices and serious drought, attempted to limit production, and to regulate its local price and export terms. Harvey also pursued several economic strategies in 1632, including an attempt to diversify Virginia agriculture away from tobacco to cash crops, an attempt to develop iron ore/potash mining, workforce reforms limiting tobacco production to 2,000 plants per worker in lines with the legislation enacted previous to his arrival.
The rapid growth of tobacco production put a high premium on land … As a result [domestic planters] demand[ed] that the size of the colony be increased, and to seek special land grants [headright] … Naturally enough, the merchant-council clique [Claiborne, Tucker, Thomason group] was especially active on this score. However, by the mid-1630’s they had run up against the implacable opposition of Governor … Harvey, who was pursuing a land policy diametrically opposed to their own … because he wanted to avoid costly military mobilizations and to minimize catastrophic military conflicts … [he] sought, above all, to maintain peace with the Indians. But unless the Indians were destroyed, the planters could not expand the colony at the desired pace. Harvey had also been stingy about granting land to the planters [in his five years he old signed off on nine headright and land sales contracts]. Finally as the King’s servant, Harvey had fully backed Charles I’s grant [of Maryland] to Cecilius Calvert … a direct affront to Virginian planter expansionist ambitions. [99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 140-1
Also in order to ensure better quality tobacco (as a solution to the decline in Virginia tobacco price), Harvey had tobacco low quality tobacco burned, rather than export it; burning, unpopular as it was, was possible only because the authorized regulation required its inspection previous to export. Diversification and tobacco regulation were primarily provincial level initiatives promoted by the governor as a solution to low tobacco prices, which in the end proved largely ineffectual with inconsistent enforcement and autonomous plantation owners able to bypass through export from their own piers.
Harvey in this period systematically reviewed Virginia legislation with a mind to update it, make it consistent and reflective of the royal position. In accordance with his royal instructions he secured funds for the Palisades Project and construction of a second fort, entrusted to Samuel Mathews for implementation. Mathews was unable to successfully build the structure, and Harvey associates blamed Mathews. Mathews, who at the onset of the project may have been more accepting of Harvey, probably crossed over his Rubicon and joined Harvey’s Claiborne Clique’s outright opposition to Harvey [99] http://americanhistorypodcast.net/category/series-7-virginia-under-charles-i/. In essence the reader is seeing mobilization of political support, ostensibly against Harvey, but in Mathew’s case pushing him from his broker role in the 1631 peace treaty, to the Clique.
The 1632 session was, in my opinion, Harvey’s finest moment, in an administration reeking with disruption and animosity. When Harvey left office, no matter how discredited, the office of the governor was, it was more defined, and anchored within the Greate Charter framework. That the King did not know how to use it more effectively was not Harvey’s fault.
Despite these successes, it would appear any consensus between Harvey and the Council had pretty much evaporated by early-mid 1633. While the looming Maryland issue festered in the background, the effects of the Dorsett Commission Report put Harvey on his back foot. The events in London promised Virginian transformative consequences, with the 1632 likely return of the Virginia Company, and the threat of Claiborne opportunism in using Dorsett as his launch pad for his New Kent venture. Harvey tried to voice his opinions on key topics, and jockey around for support for his agenda and initiatives, but again London was where all eyes were turned. What happened early in 1632, in my opinion, was dramatic, probably unexpected, but page-turning.
the Assembly Fires the Next Shot
Harvey and the planters came to an agreement of six pence per pound, which contrasted with the preferred English (and Claiborne) price of one pence. The deal also included legislation requiring each planter plant at least two acres of corn per head, which product could be sold to the highest bidder. The penalty for noncompliance was forfeiture of the entire tobacco crop of that year. That Harvey had little capacity to reach into the hinterlands to enforce that is suggestive the planters were willing to some degree comply on their own terms [99] Wilcomb E. Washburn, Virginia Under Charles I and Cromwell, 1625-1660, pp. 7-8.
In addition, both planters and Harvey unified around the most visible and threatening aspect of the Claiborne plan, its use of English ships as vehicles for it export. This was exactly what the King and Privy Council wanted, not to ignore the powerful customs-farming cluster that had an undue say on the Dorsett Commission. A Claiborne monopoly prevented any non-Clique Virginia planters from “seeking our best market” [by using Dutch ships] if they were to utilize the magazine of the new Claiborne Company.
Dutch ships were plentiful enough in Virginia. The attraction was the Dutch, relying on their logistical mastery over the English at that time, could offer as much as eighteen pence. Against such competition English shipping was doomed to be the ship of last resort for Virginia exporters. Washburn reports that Virginia planters had already built several barges to ship their tobacco to the Dutch New York plantations on the Hudson River [99] Wilcomb E. Washburn, Virginia Under Charles I and Cromwell, 1625-1660, p. 8
With these initiatives under their belt, the March1632 Assembly moved on to what I regard as perhaps the most radical of all actions: sending the Assembly position on the Claiborne plan combined with a revamped Virginia Company directly to the Dorsett Commission.
So on March 6, 1632, the Assembly approved a petition to the Dorset Commission, in which they outlined the planter position on the matter.
Brenner summarizes that position expressed in the petition:
Their program was straightforward: to use the Virginia Assembly to put limits on tobacco production and [therefore] keep up tobacco prices; so far as possible to compel planters to produce their own supplies [thus limiting the need for provisions], especially food within the colony; and to overcome their dependence on the merchants [Claiborne Clique] by destroying privileged trading syndicates, and especially by opening up the colony to free trade, in particular with the Dutch [by using Dutch ships in contravention to English colonial policy]. In attempting to implement these measures the planters had no doubt that their main obstacle was that small group of merchant-planter-councilors [on the Council of State, i.e. the Claiborne Clique] that in these years was attempting to secure a stranglehold on the tobacco economy [99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 130
In the petition the Assembly further explained that their rising debt levels was tied to the export of tobacco, and that absent restrictions on production by the Assembly, the logic was for individual planters to increase volume thereby further lowering the price and raising their debt levels. They pointedly attacked those who sought to make them “a slave to other men’s purses“, and specifically targeted, by name, Captain William Tucker (who was, of course, the brother in law of Thomason and partner of Cloberry).
If this were not enough, amazingly on the very same day, March 6, 1632, the Council [of State] issued its petition to the Dorsett Commission and took the oppositional step of making it clear to the Dorset Commission that it supported restricting the trade in Virginia tobacco to the English market and shipping–with the exclusion of the Dutch. On the very same day the Assembly petitioned for free trade, the Council of State, having been outvoted in the Assembly, sent its opposing petition to London.
The battle between the Council and the Assembly had commenced. [99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 130-1
the Claiborne Clique Strikes Back
Predictably, the Claiborne Clique dominated the Council of State. That body in the following months reacted several months later, using its direct access to the Dorset Commission. From that body Claiborne-New Men dominated joint stock corporation/syndicate was approved by the Dorsett as a over fur trading and the sole right to market (export) the entire colony’s tobacco crop for three years. The corporation’s governance consisted of members of the Clique, including as principals Tucker, Thomson and ally, the large merchant planter partner, Thomas Stone.
Pulling off what could be described as coup over the Virginia economy, the Clique/Council further fleshed out their program to achieve the desired powers in the reconstituted Virginia Company. They petitioned the Dorset Commission to approve a company in London (the Virginia Company) that would enjoy a monopoly of North American trade with, and to, England–from which would be excluded all non-English ships, merchants, and factors (anti Dutch).
With powers such as these that joint stock corporation could effectively set the price from sellers for such tobacco and other goods. If the planters wanted free trade with Dutch and use of Dutch ships as a means to add competition into the pricing of tobacco, the Clique had countered with their own monopoly and powers to set prices for the Virginia Company. What’s more they had secured the permission of the Dorsett Commission to do so. This was no longer an idle dream floating in the policy winds.
During this path-breaking period, the Clique held a strong hold over the Council of State. Claiborne, now back in Virginia and actively founding his New Kent settlement and stocking it with settlers and fur traders, while he remained as the colony’s Secretary of State. The Clique-Council following up on its economic coup, secured the required signature of an apparently unwilling Governor Harvey on the monopoly authorized earlier by Dorsett, making it a legal commission and legislation. This perhaps forced signature-approval, however, triggered subsequent pushback from Harvey.
In his letter to the Privy Council forwarding the act, Harvey urged them to reject the act, insinuating the Clique had compelled him, by virtue of their existing stranglehold of tobacco export, to sign the Council act. In that letter Harvey asserted the act created “an official monopoly … to use their powerful market position to extract exorbitant profits from the planters” [99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 131 In short, during the spring and summer of 1632 the Council, the governor and the Assembly played as hard-balled politics as had been seen in Virginia since its founding. It was this point that the New Kent-Company Magazine initiative had achieved its “high water”, i.e. the maximum extent of its success momentum.
the Stasis in London Had Effects in Virginia, mid 1632-mid-34
It became clear as the fall of 1632 turned into winter and spring of 1633 major league pushback against the Dorsett-approved Virginia Company charter and revamped Magazine was under attack from a number of directions, including a serious and sustained petition drive from the mainstream Virginia planters. To add substance and specificity to their earlier position, the Assembly (1633) approved setting of a minimum price for tobacco, and they asked the Dorset Commission to approve it. If the Commission did this, Virginia planters would be in position to restrict tobacco production and move to diversity their crop into staples and food for provisioning. [99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 130-1 In short, the planters, using the Burgesses and Assembly, had coalesced and had matured sufficiently to realize–and act–to regulate themselves.
What was also happening in this period was that Charles could not secure the consensus of the Virginia Company board, and that of several of its key members, on the degree of input the king wanted on the Company, and maybe more significant the acceptance by the Company of the king’s Maryland land grant to Calvert. Over the spring and summer it became clear to Charles that his vision of a more balanced (from his perspective) Company charter was not in the cards.
As he no doubt (gradually) pivoted away from the Dorsett Commission and its decision in the aftermath, a sort of policy limbo in London emerged in which the Dorsett Commission incrementally lost its influence and command of Virginia’s future, and in that vacuum the opponents of the Virginia Company, revamped or otherwise, had taken up the attack and pressing the king hard to back away from both.
Mainstream Virginia planters were in the anti-revamped Company camp, and they pushed back by drawing closer to Harvey, digging in their heels, at minimum, distancing themselves from the Claiborne Clique. With the Maryland grant “floating in the wind”–until first settlement in February 1634–the gulf between Mainstream Planters and the Clique-New Kent remained in place.
From mid-1633 to mid-year 1634 momentum was with the anti-Company, anti Clique factions. The break-through by the mainstream planters was their alliance with Harvey in the 1634 March General Assembly, and the April 28 1634 formal commencement of the “Laud” Commission on Foreign Plantations. A subsequent approval of the Maryland Calvert Charter by the Laud Commission confirmed the pivot away from the Virginia Company had been completed The Company and Claiborne Clique back-pedaled. They quickly developed plans and counter-attacked, engaging in a major last hurrah to reverse that trend. The Harvey Ouster got caught up in the backwash.
Harvey Plays his Game, But Not Well: Harvey’s Steps Boldly into a Policy System that did not Exist
From my perspective, Harvey, owner of an allegedly obnoxious and arrogant personality, had one special distinction that separated him from Virginia’s resident governing elite—he was an outsider to it. Equally outrageous was that he believed before he arrived, and what he saw when he arrived, was a colony in which the elite planters sucked the lifeblood out of the Company and the colony. It may be he saw Virginia as a “punchbowl” from which the elite drank heartily. Given the variety of metaphors and similes regarding punchbowls, we will content ourselves with using William McChesney Martin’s Federal Reserve comment: Harvey was determined to “take away that punchbowl”. The reaction of the Virginia elite to that is predictable. That reaction will provide the background music for the remainder of this module.
An outsider, Harvey had to preside on a very regular basis over Council elites whose past actions and experiences included extensive London interactions, and who over time had formed into factions, certainly rivalries, pursuing their personal agendas. Among this group we can see a key distinction was the extent to which the Council member had forged London access, because with that access they could achieve more than those that that had to content themselves with their lower level power bases.
Roper describes the path of access to the court used by Claiborne and Mathews, with the former latching on to Edwin Sandys, the Earl of Southampton, and then to Earl of Dorset, a fellow Kent landowner. It is likely that avenue was utilized following Claiborne’s return to London in 1629-30. Roper rightly points out how the Virginia actors in Charles’s hybrid policy policy system entered into the politics and policy-making in England and the Court. That the path meant choosing a faction or individual with which they are allied meant they could play in Charles’s faction ridden, personalistic, opportunistic policy-making morass I call a hybrid policy system.
The norms, seemingly accepted by oligarchical Council of State, blurred governor and council powers, and with fiscal resources of their own, crafted their own agenda. Given their highly individualistic personalities, the extremely competitive ambitions toward land and indentured servant expansion and growth, and widely dispersed locations of Council members (in the shredded community), they were inclined to support each other in their plans, putting aside the various rivalries and factions, to give way to their opponents, fully expecting that the latter would give way to them.
The willingness to do so was probably based on their shared unity and commitment to the tobacco monoculture, the plantation as the home base of the planter class, and the need to be wary of outsiders that may impinge on their ambitions and impede their ability to export tobacco to England–the life blood of their economic position. Within that consensus even the sovereign was an outsider, as the 1628-9 tobacco contract episode would prove, and Harvey surely fell into that category as well.
Avoiding frontal attacks and showing the proper deference, the Council was more than able–it was willing–to press its interests previous to Harvey. For a body that lacked official legitimacy and definition, the Council and even the Assembly, when needed, could figure out what it wanted, and within limits take it to London or approve it in the Governor’s Council. With Harvey on board in Jamestown, they could hold Harvey responsible for transmitting their position to the king–in effect transforming the king’s agent into their agent. No wonder Harvey was cranky. That the previous Acting Governor, Potts, was as scandalous as they came in Virginia, Harvey on day one in the job, enjoyed no honeymoon from that crowd in the Council of State.
A Spark From the Governor’s Council Triggers a Pulse in the Assembly
So from 1632 on the nexus of issues that fractured Virginia’s government encountered the problems of governance through a half-formed, deeply partisan, and badly designed Governor-Council decision-making framework. That encounter shared the background dynamic that neither the governor nor the Council agreed on the role and authority of either the governor or the Council–and London was keeping its distance.
Logically in the Council oppositional factions emerged–and that opposition spread into the Mainstream planter proto-class. George Menifee is credited with being a leader of the “moderates” as some historians have called them. I think them more anti-Claiborne than moderate, but, in that they shared a common position with the Governor regarding the Claiborne initiatives, planters held off attacking him, particularly when he took issue with those matters associated with Claiborne New Kent and the powers of a proposed revitalized Virginia Company.
In this sense these independents on the Council were viewed as moderates in their support of Harvey, and their support continued through to 1634 when the Laud Commission replaced Dorset. The rise of these moderates erupted in 1632 as we shall shortly see.
Why Won’t They Pay this Guy?
The seizure of Putt’s estate by Harvey raised two issues, the first, the vulnerability of Virginia land ownership in the wake of the demise of the Virginia Company, which we have discussed elsewhere, and the unwillingness of either the Virginia Company or the King to pay a salary to its Virginia resident CEO. To a certain extent trivial from a big picture perspective, that mysterious practice did play a noticeable role in the weakening of the Virginia governorship.
From the start in 1607 and further confirmed by the Greate Charter practices, the governor did not accrue a salary, nor were his expenses picked up by the Company. From Dale’s Gift on (1613) the Company paid “in kind” with abundant resources that did not tap into its scare cash; grants of company owned land–and servants, were “leased” to the governor (and other offices) in lieu of salary/expenses. The governor was expected to derive from these lands proceeds which were his sustenance, and his path to wealth. Although Virginia had asserted its right to tax and levy fees in 1624, that power had as the 1630’s not been formally legitimized by the King nor his Privy Council. Fees, as they are today, are on safer ground, but taxes were believed to be a major reason why the King had not legitimized the Assembly as a legitimate institution of Virginia government. Craven offers a assessment of this practice:
When through the years after 1624, the colonists took up almost the full burden of the public charge [i.e. Virginia’s expenses], they relied chiefly for relief on other forms of compensation for public service than financial. Witness the effort, both conscious and unconscious, to make the badge of office a mark of honor and standing in the community …[Also] after 1624 it is doubtful that members of the council received any compensation other than the opportunity afforded them as men selected from the more substantial planters to protect a common interest. And if some of them used the advantage of their position to extend in one way or another their stake in the community, it should be remembered that a land grant was the oldest form of reward in Virginia, and that it was natural to use land, the colony’s major asset to subsidize services” [One can easily recognize the award by the Council of various “monopolies” is simply yet a creative and innovative use of land]
At face value this had some merit, and it squared quite well with the customs of the day. That it blurred the public with the private was less a concern in 1630 where a certain ethics had evolved that seemingly created “red lines” of personal behavior that exposed deficiencies of honor and character, and laid oneself open to public charges. Everybody did it–even the King–but as times were changing the practice had a certain “medieval” attached to it. That the medieval evolved through the seventeenth century suggests to the reader that future colonies, future states, were founded and developed in accordance with the changing ethos, politics, historical experience and morals-popular culture of the English. Virginia was the first, and its heritage, more than Pennsylvania for example, shared more with Henry VIII than with William and Mary as did Pennsylvania.
The practice had enormous consequences because the company officials in the 1610’s used it to grow Rolfe’s tobacco, and from their innovation the tobacco gazelle was set in motion. The refinement of the use of indenture for workforce as wrought in Sandys’ Greate Charter initiatives supplement land grants with workforce to utilize the land. The combination of the two in the hands of the company elite probably more than any single factor created the oligarchy that governed Virginia by 1630. In addition, the blurring of public and private, diverted the attention of public officials to their private holdings, but also limited the capacity and use of government as those in charge of government were just as unwilling as the next taxpayer to pay taxes or fees.
Obviously that is no small matter, but we can further observe that its continuation, by default of James and Charles in allowing the practice to continue after the Company’s charter was suspended permitted that oligarchical elite to continue in power and as Virginia grew in wealth and size, so did that elite. By the 1630’s the reader would be off base to think the distinction between private and public in Virginia well developed–in fact the contrary held–and that was one value Harvey shared with the resident Virginia elite, and his seizure of Pott’s estate carried more than tinges of being partially motivated as a means for Harvey to pay his bills and garner his own estate.
In 1634, not a small matter, Harvey was able to finally secure approval for a salary for the governor, rather than empowering the governor to live off the proceeds of whatever property was under control by his office [99] Phillip Alexander Bruce, Institutional History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, Vol 2. pp. 340-45. Combined with his expansion and update of the local shire governance, one must view this as positive in the enhancement of Virginia’s capacity to govern itself and the initiatives were congruent to the dominant settlement nexus of the colony.
Harvey was not without cause for his actions. He had not been paid, and he needed to replenish his coffers to support himself as well as pay expenses, such as “hosting meetings and guests” that were incumbent in his office. By his time, any pay would have to be borne by the public, and that meant taxes or fees levied on the citizen and taxpayer. There were several “third rails” in the politics of the day, and taxes-fees were one of them. The aversion to public costs heavily affected the policy initiatives of the day, and the propensity of the actors to rely on them.
Harvey’s approach to the tobacco monoculture
By 1630, the Virginia second generation tobacco elite, with their army of indentured servants/plantation workforce, were obsessed with carrying out personal expansion plans and were not in the slightest interested in hearing Harvey’s threatening pontifications. Settlement expansion, Indian relations, tobacco production, securing headright incentives were wrapped together in a mental and policy nexus that with the Dorset Commission in 1631 reactivated old fears in the security of one’s land holding and workforce. Harvey’s tone and actions only made things worse. He did not get off to a rousing start. Thornton rightly puts this fear as the single underlying cause of Virginia’s innate anxiety about Harvey–at least through 1634.
In the past Harvey made loose comments on the Company’s use of land patents and headrights as evidence of its corruption, and Harvey had consistently advocated return of Company-derived benefits (headrights and land grants as salaries) to the Company–as an attack on the Sandys administration. As one might expect former Company officials, and those hangers on that benefited from Company administration (the plantation conquistadors) took notice and never forgot. Harvey was one step short of being their worst fear. [99] Bernard Bailyn, “Politics and the Social Structure in Virginia” in James Morton Smith (Ed), 17th Century America: Essays in Colonial History, p. 96.
Not one to keep his feelings private, once in Virginia, Harvey reconfirmed much of his past views. His Virginia reluctance to approve them for ordinary and necessary sales activated these has generated land patent and headright fears from Virginians. Piled on top of this was Harvey’s negative attitude toward land patents and headright incentives. From the start he approved fewer and fewer land sales and headright incentives (which legally the governor had to approve) despite rising demand for new land to increase production. Harvey had, by comments back in the 1624 report disparaged risky penetration into the hinterland for its potential to stir up Indian reaction and consequently generate a call for British redcoats to protect the colony.
This anxiety was not ameliorated by Harvey’s agenda in his first year in office.
Harvey pursued several economic strategies, including an attempt to diversify Virginia agriculture away from tobacco to cash crops, an attempt to develop iron ore/potash mining, workforce indenture reforms, and limiting tobacco production to 2,000 plants per worker in lines with the legislation enacted previous to his arrival. But Harvey in March 1630 proposed a radical new initiative intended to ensure better quality tobacco (as a solution to the decline in Virginia tobacco price). Harvey had tobacco burned rather than export it–and that was possible because he required its inspection previous to export.
Harvey’s initiative was a reasonable response to the realities of market demand, but the abruptness and demeanor– he derided their obsession with growing tobacco at the expense of corn and staples and labeled such action as their “greedie desires to make store of Tobackoe” thus ignoring the wishes of the king by not diversifying their economy [99] Wilcomb E. Washburn, Virginia Under Charles I and Cromwell, 1625-1660, p. 6 The response to the initiative after it was approved by the Assembly was at best uneven, and it did not provide any increase in tobacco prices in the years after. None of this was especially to the liking of local plantation elites, and particularly to the smaller tobacco planter who did not have the luxury of cutting production.
Harvey continued to use the Assembly to launch his assault on tobacco and to introduce his economic development strategy. Of course, when frustrated he would use the equivalent of an executive order in defiance of both Assembly and Council. While it is hard to distinguish between a proper use of such authority, and orders which are arbitrary, if not oppositional and tending to favoritism and personal advantage, hindsight during the Ouster and subsequent trials of the conspirators, as legitimization for a coup, suggest Harvey did cross the line–and likely frequently. That these orders affected key players in England, the merchants and ship owners, suggest they were not well received there, becoming fodder in a campaign to terminate Harvey.
During the 1630’s Virginia’s governor and assembly attempted to support tobacco prices by various subtle measures (1) crop control laws; (2) increased use as currency (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 into staples, 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 so few paid it any attention [99] Gary M. Pecquet, British Mercantilism and Crop Controls in the Tobacco Colonies: a Study of Rent-Seeing Costs (the Cato Journal, 2003-Researchgate). That all these regulations met with mixed reactions from planters and exporters
I suspect that Harvey’s agenda set the tone for the policy differences between the Virginia planters, the Claiborne Clique, and the horde of military commander plantation conquistadors starting with the March 1630 Assembly. As we shall shortly see, Harvey was capable of positive and supporting initiatives to planters in particular. Andrews, for instance notes that in his communications with the King, Harvey constantly and consistently called attention to the King’s not having rendered a final determination on the nature of Virginia governance, and pleading in return that he enjoy the King’s support in his actions until such would occur [99] Charles M. Andrews, the Colonial Period of American History: the Settlements, Volume I (pp. 203-4).
I would add he opposed the Claiborne Clique (which Mainstream planters opposed), and he specifically supported tobacco export using Dutch ships, not the expensive and hard to get English. Harvey, also from time to time could see value in the Assembly, as it probably allowed him an opportunity to bypass the closed-door oppositional decision-making by the Council of State. In the end Harvey was not able to forge an effective alliance of Mainstream planters with him or his agenda., Harvey, I think, suffered the fate of Herbert Hoover in that his policies were reasonable and logical, but his manner, and the suspicions regarding his motives and ultimate vision for Virginia, could never sustain the support of his constituency–I also suspect strongly that was partially because it was apparent he did not value it.
Harvey’s Relations with the Powhatan
Likely also is that Harvey’s subsequent actions of sending ships to trade for corn with the Indians, hit plantation conquistador business plan using military expeditions against the Powhatan as a means of grabbing Indian maize which they sold to settlers, hard. Whatever its outcome, and however fair or unfair, moral or unmoral, Harvey’s tolerance of Indian-owned land resulted in periodic incidents involving Native America. Settler fear of the Indians (they were vastly outnumbered and vulnerable in open fields), and the sheer hatred that followed the 1622 Massacre made peace treaties a road block to settling on Indian land–all of which combined to make positive Indian relations a third rail of 1630 Virginia politics.
Harvey, on his own authority, negotiated and signed an agreement in spite of this opposition.
Harvey’s position on Indian conflict, and uneasy with expansion of the colony through takeover of Indian lands, Harvey reflected London’s position on tribal relations. Never inclined to fight the tribes, it was expensive, disruptive, and really got in the way of fostering imports of furs, minerals, and, of course, tobacco–plus the Anglican Church tilted to missionary work and humane treatment, The Settlement & Indian Nexus, however. was so central to the past regime that Harvey’s position quickly manifested itself–and triggered the opposition of the conquistadors, if not the planter and resident population.
Harvey seemed totally at odds with the zero-sum land settlement-tobacco monoculture-Indian-fighting Virginia strategy nexus held as a paradigm by Virginia’s domestic elites. It also ran counter to corn raiding, the key to renter-servant exclusive planting of tobacco and a a source of profit to the conquistadors, and to the formidable commanders that exercised considerable sway in local governments and counties. For better or worse, the bitter memories of the 1622 Massacre and the periodic incidents that were chronic lent an extremely emotional tone to the issue, which in no way helped Harvey’s standing.
What’s more Indian relations was an issue over which Harvey as governor had little effective control. Indian relations were the jurisdiction of the local commanders, the militia under their control, and the Hundreds local elite. What followed was an undeclared war, characterized by a succession of local incidents, and if anything a continuation of corn raids and unfair corn and trade exchanges. Considered by the Virginia English as little more than savages, undeserving of trust or peaceful relations, Ironically, the reluctance of the average settler to participate in a militia expedition–in preference to staying in an isolated, exposed tobacco field to plant-harvest tobacco–meant the plantation conquistadors lacked manpower to mount a full attack, and encouraged shorter, smaller corn raids that only created more incidents–and deepened Powhatan antipathy.
Of considerable irony the Palisades Project, the King’s primary instruction to Harvey, could not have been regarded as anything but the largest single land grab of Indian lands to that point in Virginia history. It was a nest of land sales, headrights and an access to which was limited to the few plantation owners and settlers who could use them. Applying the King’s instructions, Harvey had introduced the proposal for the Palisades Project, and began its implementation.
In stark contrast to his intended restriction of land patents and headrights, Harvey granted 600 acres each to Captain John West and Captain John Utie–plus a fifty acre headright for servants for the next year, and twenty-five for the next. [99] Wilcomb E. Washburn, Virginia Under Charles I and Cromwell, 1625-1660, p. 6. In Harvey’s favor, he had ordered and allowed the construction of a four mile long palisade between the James and the York Rivers as a protection against the tribes. Still the inconsistencies had to imply hypocrisy at minimum. This was a major-league issue for the tobacco-driven homesteaders, and Harvey’s intransigence on the issue, motivated to a great degree by his fear of generating and Indian war, placed a serious barrier to any genuine mainstream planter alliance with Harvey, and instead created a bond with the Clique.
Let’s Segue Way into the Thrusting Out
The reader might note that decisions on the matter in 1633 had shifted from Dorsett to the Privy Council. Perhaps not surprisingly in March 1634, the King replaced the Dorset Commission with a new Commission, headed by Archbishop Laud. The Virginia Company charter was never issued. In mid-1633, following a strong lobbying effort from ten Virginia planters (several members of the Assembly), the Privy Council revoked the legislation approved by the Council of State establishing the Tucker et all monopoly. In response in August, William Tucker doubled-down by petitioning the Privy Council “asking that the Virginia Company be resurrected and demanding that the government take action [i.e. enforce] to exclude the Dutch from Virginia commerce”. Referring the matter to a committee, and meeting with personally Tucker, Stone and other Clique members, the Privy Council, however, did exclude the Dutch from trade with Virginia. However, no decision was made on the charter for the Virginia Company, and the matter was again deferred.
As we move into 1634, the reality the Company and its Magazine was on the defensive and no longer likely to be approved, the fear of the Clique resided a bit, and members of the Clique, especially the always politically attune Mathews possibly became less hard-core and more open to interests of the Mainstream. For reasons, of which I am unclear, William Tucker had either gone to England, or was less involved in Virginia affairs. That left Mathews as Claiborne’s closest supporter; but by late 1634, he was a supporter who maintained contacts with the Mainstream Planter factions. It may be. ironically, that at a time the Virginia Company thought its best path to a renewed charter lay in Virginia’s support (the Clique), that the Virginian Clique was hard-pressed itself.
Still in early 1634, with the Assembly in session, it was the Assembly that scored the advantage. If Harvey had satisfied his good government agenda, the Assembly had developed a robust and specific program agenda, defended its interests within county government, and if anything had solidified its hold on its administration given the informal shared dimension congruent with gubernatorial appointment; and the Assembly once again demonstrated its autonomy and independence from the Council.
If any issue permeated into mentalities of Virginia elite and non elite, it was land ownership, or, for the indentured, the prospect of land ownership. Land was the lynchpin of the economic success in the tobacco monoculture, and the basis for participation in the colony’s governing institutions. By this point, the tobacco monoculture and its expansion was ingrained into the fabric of the elite for sure, and became the de facto prime filter for Assembly political action.
After 1625 the colony spread into the hinterland. The push into Powhatan traditional lands meant new plantations, large and homestead, and Indian conflict situations grew accordingly–as did the latent fear of those who settled in this vulnerable districts. Previous to Harvey. the Council and Governor approved, and signed, the land sale patents and awarded headrights for new servant-workforce. Harvey’s approval was necessary, and by 1632-3 he was severely restricting his signing of patents for such land sales. This fundamental dynamic was further threatened by the King’s refusal to legitimize past land sales approved by the company), or the new ones issued since the king assumed administrative direction of the colony. If there was sound government policy behind Harvey’s agenda, his none to subtle condescending tone, if not insulting tone, undermined his position.
The Clique already dominated Virginia’s tobacco export by virtue of their scale of production or their ability to develop and utilize tobacco export infrastructure to reinforce their position and bring to heel many smaller uses who could not export effectively individually without their assistance. Without doubt the key power in this was their ability to favorably access the headright powers to secure indentured labor. Harvey’s restraint on issuing new land and headright approvals for royal owned lands, however, seemingly to the advantage of the non-Clique planters, actually reinforced the status quo dominance of the Clique, and sharpened the competition for sale of existing land titles that were beyond the control of Harvey. If the Clique could not longer expand, neither could the mainstream planters catch up with them–and the Clique had other bypasses to utilize for financing.
His willingness to work with the Assembly-Burgesses, the 1634 empowerment, restructure, and “englishization” of Virginia’s county system stands out; that reform laid a sound foundation for Virginia’s chief unit of local government. While some commentators attribute the county reform to the Laud Commission, the timing doesn’t work out. The Laud Commission was named in April 28, and the Assembly took action in early March.
The proposed amendment to the tobacco contract did Harvey no good, and his management, perhaps attempting to “thread the needle” was a major mistake that may well have cost him his job. In many of his positions the King was not sensitive to and often opposed to the Virginian agenda. Lacking firm proof, I also sense Harvey’s use of “executive orders” was increasing through 1634. If he was not actually bypassing the Council, and even the Assembly, the perception surely existed at that time; Implementing them made Harvey decidedly out of step with resident Virginia elites.
Turbulence and internal factions within the King’s court likely increased Harvey’s isolation and may have predisposed Harvey to behave more aggressively and arbitrarily. Sensitive to the mechanizations of the Virginia Company and the Clique, he did little, however,, aside from Claiborne’s termination, to solidify his relations with the mainstream planters. By early 1635, with the royal appointment of a new secretary from England, Harvey seemed even more an outsider than ever. [99].https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/harvey-sir-john-ca-1581-or-1582-by-1650/
Following royal instructions did not shield Harvey from negative reaction and the king seemed insensitive to the affect of his plans and initiatives on Harvey. In 1634, without doubt, Harvey’s assistance to the Maryland colony, in 1634 seriously undermined his standing with Virginians, and mainstream planter elites. Harvey’s termination of Claiborne at a point where Harvey’s assistance to the Maryland colony was controversial in itself, but the suppression of Claiborne, still very powerful and well-respected, had its logic, but whatever the logic the timing was also very bad.
Harvey became the lightning rod for that generalized anxiety, the flashpoint in prompting resistance, and the basic underlying reason why few in Virginia felt comfortable with a strong governorship that with a letter from the King would oust them from their homes. The carve up of Virginia to the benefit of Maryland signaled to many a lack of commitment to his colony, and his insensitivity to the reaction against the latter’s Catholicism added yet another emotion-laden issue into the mix; that anti-Catholicism ran high in England, even within the court policy system, rendering the pro-Spanish/Catholic dispositions of his boss and mentor more evident and under attack, if not vulnerable to termination, may have confirmed to many that Harvey’s loyalties were to the former.
By 1635 Harvey was skating on thin ice. More to the point in my argument, the aggregation of all these stresses, dysfunctions, insoluble tensions, counter pressures and crossflow politics at a time when things were not going especially well in Virginia, overloaded the fragile half-developed Virginia policy system, and the inability to efficiently and effectively advocate if not address problems from and by the London policy system only sharpened the perceived need to get the king to commit to self-governance and to formally acknowledge the method by which he was to govern the colony. This level of politics and fractured policy making had reached its limits. The system was broken and it needed to be fixed.
Ron W. Coan 