London:
While this history takes great pain to remind the reader that economic development is the principal policy area relied on to support our history of state (colony) and local colonial political and economic development, it is also necessary we remind the reader that economic development is a policy area, one of many, that are generated by a policy system. No doubt we borrow from systems theories, models and paradigms starting with Kuhn.
But we also have liberally drawn from the literature of policy making, the art and science of how a policy is defined, processed, implemented, and subject to some sort of evaluative feedback loop. That is a backdoor rationale for why we incessantly refer to a “a policy system”; in our case at present an awkward thing I have called the “hybrid English colonial policy system”. And now I prattle on about the “birth” of Virginia’s policy system.
While many histories of colonial seventeenth century North America do touch on aspects of a policy system and policy making, mine rests upon it. The problem I have faced to this point is that, in my opinion, Virginia has not, through the 1630, had the benefit of a functioning Virginia-based policy system which is the across-the-Atlantic counterpart of the sovereign English mother country policy system.
In this hybrid policy system, the motherland policy system is sovereign, and the Virginia policy system does not have the last say in policy making, but it does serve as a self-governance of those issues and levels of decisions which, mostly out of necessity-temporality, have to be made locally if the toilets are going to flush (so to speak). Virginia, as we have seen thus far hadn’t gotten the ok to have such a system, but it created one on its own, and England for its own reasons (none of them particularly good) let their child across the seas more or less handle their affairs. It wasn’t working very well into the 1630’s and in this module series the reader will se it breaks down–at least two or three of the wheels come off.
It is at this point that we encounter a problem with this bi-polar policy system. We have to see how the policy system fixes itself (or not), and in searching for answers we realize the two halves of the potential policy system are not acting in concert with one another–and even worse, those commentators who seek to understand and comment about what is going on retrospectively, do so from their respective sides of the Atlantic.
That it takes an email two or even three months to be received by the other party does not help communication at all or policy making at all. Seventeenth century hybrid colonial policy systems do have their own special problems that need to be overcome. Since Americans are predispose to listen to Americans, a lot of American commentators give short shrift to the English side of policy-making, and dwell pretty exclusively on the American dynamics, or at least those dynamics that fit the paradigm of the commentator or the popular culture of the period in which the commentator writes.
That can be limiting; selectivity of issues outside the paradigm, combined with a short shrift to the English side of the policy making can lead to bad diagnosis and a less than accurate of what happened and what went on and why. That, I believe, has happened with the “thrusting out of Governor Harvey”, and, this pivotal decade of Virginia political development has largely fallen off the table. So to put the thrusting out in its proper context, the first order of business is to understand the English side of policy-making.
England is the sovereign, and the Crown is the chief actor in her side of the policy system. The governor after all is “his” appointed “governor” of the colony, and the Crown decides what he can do or not do. The king can also decide who is to handle the planning and the higher level decision-making for the colony. It is the king, and the English policy system that writes the lyrics, sets the notes to music, and it is the colonials who do the dancing. That it didn’t quite work that way is why the deluge that hit the English policy system in 1635-9 when Harvey was sent back is even more important to understand. Why? Because those subordinate thuggish colonials did and they used it to their advantage. That speaks volumes to Virginia history.
So what is going on in England about 1630-1?
An Overview
In a nutshell we can see there are larger things going on in England than the limited scope of tasks assigned to his Majesty’s governor John Harvey. Harvey was dancing and singing in tune with music and lyrics written in England because he had to, but when he wasn’t–as happened a lot, he was dancing to his own music and lyrics. His problem was that England’s Court politics was also composing several tunes and different lyrics at the same time, and likely inevitably, the governor became associated with the tunes that were sung by his protege’s and intermediaries–which as we shall see were hugely anti-Virginia Company. That the Privy Council, the nominal head of this colonial policy vortex was, if anything, more in tune with the Virginia Company lyrics, it is easier to understand how disruptive the politics associated with the Virginia Company was on Virginia and Harvey’s governance. If the thrusting our narrative we develop in this module series is more or less accurate, one simple conclusion that follows is that whatever one can say about Harvey’s governance, he was out of step and singing the wrong lyrics a good deal of the time. In the end it turns out he was wrong.
The Virginia Company, supposedly dead since 1624, was “both dead and well” in 1630-31. Like the dead Marley, the Company returned as a key player in the English-Virginia policy system, and proceeded to haunt Virginia, and London. As these modules detail, the seeming death of the Company in 1624 did not impede its ability to disrupt goings on in Virginia–a key element supporting our argument that the London end of the hybrid policy system was essential to proper understanding what was happening in Virginia.
The 1631 Dorset Commission–and later the 1634 Laud Commission–were empowered by the King to “manage England’s plantations-colonies” and to determine their future. As we shall see, the king was still of two minds, at least two, maybe more, as to what the permanent government of Virginia was to be. A betting man in 1631 would have bet the king was going to restore the Virginia Company charter, as amended, and return the Company to its old glory days as operator of the colony. And anybody living in Virginia knew they had to take heed, or at least a position on that decision.
But Virginians had their own problems as well–Harvey being one–and the Maryland colony yet another. Virginians had another problem, they lacked the legitimacy of self-governance so there were no formally approved processes and channels by which they could make their concerns known, and defend their own interests as individuals. Virginians did not even have legal right to the land in which their home was built? A word from the king and they were off to the homeless shelter–you know, the wigwam up and down the river.
There were many problems in 1631 Jamestown, but the one that really rocked the boat was the creation of Maryland. From 1631 to 1661 Maryland seriously disrupted Virginia’s politics, and political development as well. With its focus pointed at Maryland, the continued spread of the tobacco monoculture, the be-all of the colony’s economic base, was put on auto-pilot–not be be challenged until Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676.
By that time the tobacco monoculture wasn’t going anywhere but deeper into Virginia’s core fabric. Except that some Virginians, powerful ones, had other ideas on the subject and they had the ears of the Virginia Company. For specifics the reader should review the New Kent-Claiborne Clique-New Men module to recognize the seriousness of the Claiborne Clique and New Kent–and the huge implications that it held for Virginia’s economic base.
The ripping out from Virginia land for a Catholic colony, the king, had shuffled the Virginia deck of cards unilaterally, and as we shall see the Dorsett Commission became the policy arena to which Virginians made their case. Jamestown became even more a backwater, on the margins policy maker than ever before. Without realizing it the king had injected into the Dorsett Commission not only the future regarding the Virginia Company governance, but the brewing battle as to what the Virginia economic base would look like.
Governor Harvey had no input into all this; instead he decided to dance to his own music. I couldn’t guess how many tunes and lyrics were being constructed in 1631 Virginia-England on Virginia. With a half-formed policy system, Virginian’s were at a serious disadvantage in what was a policy stampede that lasted for better part of the decade.
That imposed disruption from London also permeated into the evolution of Virginia planter elite, and fostered its fragmentation into at least two competing sub-elites, the Claiborne Clique and the Mainstream Planter Class (sometimes referred to as the moderates). Up to 1631 the power of the plantation remained unchecked in Virginia, and it, I believe, became more central and the aspirational goal of every tobacco planter. Further intrusion of the Claiborne New Men into the economic base of the monoculture was the reason for the rupture of the two factions in 1632-33. The Laud Commission and the threat of significant revision by the King to the Tobacco Contract in late 1634, along with the settlement of Maryland, set in motion not only resistance to Harvey, who had been seen also as instrumental in the final expulsion of the Virginia Company, whose elimination was necessary for any last hurrah attempt by the Company to restore its governance.
Until 1635 the notes composed and the lyrics written by Charles ( the Virginia Company, the New Men, George Calvert and the choirs in Parliament and the Church of England) could only react by dancing in the local response to these external inputs. In 1635, the local forces, finally got traction with the drama of a gubernatorial coup, and they coped with the backlash for better part of two years, steadfastly pressing their case in London to address Virginia’s (and their personal) needs, and in 1637-8, for the first time, Virginians caught a break, as Court politics opened up sufficiently to make a decision and send them on their way.
The “big picture” of this module then is a quilt woven with these smaller stories embedded. The thrusting out story, then becomes very similar to a Russian Matryoshka “nesting doll”. The Harvey story never was, a simple story of an obnoxious governor who caused an upswell of opposition by the Virginians, nor was it a conspiracy of thuggish Virginia planter elites grasping for Indian land for tobacco plantations. The English side of the hybrid policy system was doing its own thing; a series of pinballs were unleashed simultaneously in what became a multi-pinball-like policy system process. The historical secret is that English colonial policy making was seriously flawed during these years, and Virginia, for various reasons suffered more than Massachusetts from these weaknesses in the London-side of the poorly developed English hybrid colonial policy system.
“Marley Was Dead… of That the Reader Should have No Doubt”.
If Marley was dead, why was he in Scrooge’s bedroom?
It depends on what you mean by dead. The same could be said of the Virginia Company.
If the Virginia Company was kicked out of Virginia in 1624, why is it back in the 1630? Marley brought with him some ghosts. What did the Virginia Company send over to Virginia in the 1630’s? Both Marley’s ghosts and the specter of the Virginia Company created page-turning and durable consequences to the recipients; how/what did the Virginia Company effect the development of Virginia policy system.
Some of the more fundamental questions raised by the dissolution of the Virginia Company remained a subject of debate eighteen years afterward. Through the intervening period proposals to establish a superior council in London were usually joined to plans for a revival of the company with the result that rejection of the latter proposal brought postponement of action on the other. Since anything more than a tentative decision on governmental problems in Virginia seemed inadvisable until the superior authority to be established in England had been determined, the colony was left dependent upon year-to-year decisions regarding the management of its affairs. And in the end, it was decided simply to let stand what had been established by custom and usage.
[99] Wesley Frank Craven, the Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 1607-1689 (Louisiana State University Press, 1970). p. 153
James, more properly the Court which rendered the decision, did not revoke the charter; it suspended it subject to further negotiations, The intent of the time was to rejigger the charter to address the king’s concerns, and, all things being equal, restoring the charger–and Virginia governance-to the Virginia Company. The negotiations did not go well, certainly not quickly–and then in the midst, an ill James I went and died. The Commission that was negotiating the charter, having lost its authorization, desisted and disbanded itself. Charles, in a somewhat disrupted succession, did not assume the throne formally until the following year.
If anything, at that point Charles was more will than his dad to restore the charter–but the Virginia Company Sandys faction was too stubborn. Charles, perhaps impulsively, simply assumed the governance, saying no more proprietary companies for the New World, and then almost immediately approved the Massachusetts Bay Colony charter and went on to approve others–including Calvert’s Maryland. The Virginia Company still active and governing Bermuda did not go away and did not abandon its pretenses to be the the once and future ruler of Virginia. It was consistent in its policy, if Charles was not.
The 1630’s resurrection of the Virginia Company is much underplayed in American history. Most contemporary commentaries simply assert the Company was kicked out in 1624, and then the Crown took over. That is not technically true; as we shall see the charter was “suspended”, not revoked. By 1630-1 the Company was back and Charles was receptive–indeed perhaps hopeful that the Company could take this newfound workload off the king’s shoulders. The thrusting out is superimposed on the politics that surrounded the commissions and company negotiations for a new charter. I believe in the context of that period, the Company politics in London assumed greater visibility and discussion than the events in Virginia did–until 1635 that is. As we shall see the Company tried again in 1642.
The future of Virginia, up in flux, and all the anxiety that meant for Virginians, was very real, and in several ways it motivated Virginians to both take advantage of the flux, or to defend themselves for some of its potentially adverse impacts. This, the reader should assume, took some of the luster and importance away from the new governor. The main battleground was in the meetings and back rooms of the two royal commissions that were entrusted to deal with Virginia’s management and future. The rather robust agenda and expanded job description of Governor Harvey was very out of step with the tunes emanating from London, and given the reality the governor was not especially close to, or known by, the king, led to a rather distant and shallow relationship between the two, brokered chiefly by intermediaries close to the king. During the thirties, the shallowness of royal support for the governor became apparent to at least some Virginians, and that too had its effect on their relationship to the governor.
The Real Culprit is the guy who was responsible: Charles I
The real culprit, the chief instigator common to these disruptions, was correctly pinpointed by a contemporary, the earl of Clarendon, who described the policy-making unleashed by the arrival of Charles I in 1626. The problem was Charles himself and the policy making process he devised to make decisions within his Court–the final stage in the English colonial policy system was the king–and to him Clarendon and myself lay the blame.
His insecurity led him to adopt the suggestions, or yield to the influence, of men who where less capable than himself. He never really discerned the merits or vices of those around him; he tended to confide in those who were merely boasters and adventurers while ignoring those of real, if silent, merit. The [Privy] council about him consisted of professional courtiers, many of whom had been close to his father, while the others were friends or trusted servants. The principal decisions, however were derived from full council to selective small groups or committees; suspicion and jealousy were therefore rife. [Peter Ackroyd, Rebellion: the History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution (Thomas Dunne Books, 2014), p. 108
L. H. Roper also calls attention to his perception of Charles’ policy-making colonial process. To him that policy process resulted from “the overlapping and semi-autonomous institutions of colonial administration [that] stemmed from the character of [its] central administration. … the king remained reliant on a bewildering array of officers … some of which held their places directly from the central government, but others whom gained their places from powerful local patrons, and, so were beholden to the Crown for their positions. Additionally, of course the pursuit of the fruits of office provided a raison d’etre for faction. The lack of clear policy direction from Whitehall, as in the case of Caroline Virginia, gave additional room for autonomous operation to these networks, despite the best efforts of the king’s ministers [99] L. H. Roper, the English Empire in America, 1602-1658, p. 112.
Charles, in my opinion, had little vision about the English empire or colonies. Colonialization was more a broad stroke image, often deeply colored by the actions of other rival nations and monarchs as well as his expectations of being a source for much needed Crown revenues. James I had firmer notions than his son, and so the succession of Charles to the throne in 1625-6 proved to be a setback for Virginia. While the conventional view of contemporary American commentators is the Crown, Charles, took over the governance of Virginia in 1625-6, in many ways he did not. Charles wanted much from his colonies, but he wasn’t willing or able to put in the time and effort to deliver consistent administration and governance.
Another problem that one can take away from our American Virginian commentary of this period is a failure to discern the dramatic shift in Charles’ policy direction that occurred in 1634-5, or so, when Charles shifted away from his earlier preoccupation with Parliament and finding money to finance his activities. That narrative fits nicely with paradigms that are anchored with the road to American revolution and democracy. Our problem in this module, however, is that the shift was launched by the Laud Commission and its head, Archbishop Laud.
From this point on Charles’s first priority was reform of the Anglican Church, rendering it more close to that of the English Catholic Church of yore. Amazingly, Charles’s insensitivity to his own Scotch background betrays his commitment to principles other than religious., Charles was as Scotch as his father, but he defined his Church of England [Anglican] in terms more Catholic than Puritan Protestant. That he rankled Scotch Presbyterians (Covenanters) led him into a war with the Scots as early as 1638-9.
It is the policy storm that was unleashed in that religious policy shift that Virginia owes its 1639 “deal” which birthed its self-governance policy system. It is also ironic, as we shall find out later, that this religious shift exerted profound impact on the evolution of Brenner’s New Men, the men who financed the Virginia colony, fragmenting them, and then shifting the main body over to the Puritan Parliament and eventually to Cromwell. That shift greatly impacted the course of Virginia politics from 1642 on through 1660. Say it another way, the course of Virginia’s political development for the next twenty five years or so after 1635 greatly reflected the issues, religion-ideologies, and events of the English Civil War–and the thrusting out affair was but the first of a long series of civil war-related impacts that bent the Virginia twig.
The birth of the Virginia colonial policy system overlapped this religious shift. Indeed, Charles’s introduction of the “Prayer Book” of the Church of England caused an uproar in Scotch Presbyterian kirks (pulpits). Scots Presbyterians intensely resisted the Prayer Book, and they famously entered into a ‘National Covenant’ on 19 February 1638 to resist this new religious policy (as it happens, that was the day before the Virginia Assembly met [in 1638] to consider the royal proclamations on tobacco [to be considered shortly]) ” [99] L. H. Roper, the English Empire in America, 1602-1658, pp. 116-7. Within months the Scots and English were invading each other with armies. In that period we will see the final policy making within the king’s court that led to the formally announced “Deal” in January 1639. We will later see that course of events play into the “purchase” of the Virginia governorship by William Berkeley.
This lack of clear vision by the sovereign and his chief advisors, inhibited a more reasonable juggling of many priorities that weighed heavily during 1638. As the drift to religious war was foremost in his mind, Harvey and the Virginia question seemed quite secondary. Harvey himself, never personally close to the king, became an unnecessary burden to resolving the Virginia situation so that he could move on to primary concerns.
After all, the various institutions and personages pressing the king for action consumed his precious time. In that policy tempest whatever the formal powers of the sovereign were, Charles was reluctant to use them; such use would commence yet another confrontation three thousand miles away. However, Charles thought of Virginia (“whether imperial or state formation“) these powers) “all to often exceeded its [his] grasp. The distance from Whitehall … compounded the continuing inability of king and ministers to reconcile the conundrum of balancing monarchical authority and prestige with policy issues … and the ongoing manoeuvres of factions [99] L. H. Roper, the English Empire in America, 1602-1658, p. 113. Charles allowed the “Deal” so that he could move on to more pressing affairs. The success of Virginia was caused by the efforts to those who pressed the Deal upon Charles–and this very much included the Mathews’ faction of the Virginia oligarchy–and the weight of the Virginia Company in the Privy Council.
In court politics “hot buttons” are important and everything else feeds into, or works around, the hot buttons. Court policy making is very personal and individual relationships are central. Access, in one way or another, to the king is primary, and the trigger for a policy decision. How this fits into the “rationality” of the process, I have no idea nor expectation. Seventeenth century English court rationality is not ours today, and the process today appears, in a word, “awful”. It certainly begged for consistency, if nothing else. But it was what it was.
What is surprising to me is the Charles I that emerges from this story is not especially mean-spirted or even rigidly dictatorial. He frequently presses a point hard, the tobacco contract again for an example, and then reaches some speed bump, and he moves on to something else without action or resolution. Some historians believe after his December 1635 Privy Council action against the mutineers, he simply forgot about the matter, and delegated it to others for resolution. The “others” as we shall see had their own ideas on the matter, and that led in a direction one would not have thought likely. When they came to a decision, Charles I seems to have simply signed off on it.
I would add to this mix, previous Charles’s willingness to call the Virginia Assembly into session to discuss matters of importance to him, and when they failed to sign on, and offered other ideas, Charles also moved on, ceased his efforts on the matter and moved onto another. If the reader has in her/his mind he forced the issues, more than not, that would have been mistaken. Policy speed bumps often did much more than merely slow him down. Distraction did much to Charles’s policy making, but Virginia and colonization’s relatively low priority should also be included into that mix.
Lost in the bureaucratic and personality jungle that was his court policy system, Charles was consistently unable to follow up on, implement in today’s wordage, the intent of his policy actions, or for that matter develop those policy actions mindful of the realities of that existed in Virginia. If this assessment be correct then the policy process that resulted in the issuance of the future instructions to a new governor in 1628 and in 1638 was dominated by the larger English policy environment which set the hierarchy of policy priorities that overcame Charles’ past reluctance to grant legitimacy and consent to the empowerment of Virginia self-government.
Harvey Sacrificed on the Altar of Court Policy Process
We shall in this module discuss how this deal came to be “made”, and reveal its outlines. The inner workings of this deal, HOW it came to be made, however, are less known and the elements of it are scattered about among many commentators. For the reader to understand the larger context of the atmosphere in the King’s court policy system during 1637 and 1638, the critical years, we ought keep in mind the king is now, almost broke, exhausted in his fight with Parliament for revenues and divine right, losing dominance over the governance of London City, and had, through the actions and dictates of the Laud Commission, commenced what was essentially a religious war against the Puritans and non-Anglican Protestants–the center of which was in Scotland. Scotland, BTW, commenced an invasion of England in 1639 in reaction–and for my two cents that was the first phase in the English Civil War. A decade later Charles was executed.
The 1635-9 court policy process by which Virginia specifically, and early English colonial administration-policy was conducted in this quite significant decision, suggest several comments. The host of agencies, including the remnants of the Dorset Commission and of course the members of the Laud Commission plus the little-known, off to the sidelines, sub-committee of the Privy Council directly responsible for Virginia policy which was likely the main driver of the Deal. The wide ranging and diverse collection of activists, influencers and informants that characterized Charles’s Court policy making in the years leading up to the civil war defies description–and it explains how any one decision could be ignored, altered, or simply lost in the shuffle and never executed. Those who might think the royal word was “let it be said, let it be done” ought to reconsider the belief. The birth of Virginia’s policy system fit well into that flux.
By this time the King and Parliament were adversary, and the latter was not called into session. Parliament, of course, still existed and its members clearly could and did articulate their feelings and respond to issues, but the King-parliamentary nexus was essentially broken–and serious partisan issues, particularly in home of the merchant trader community, the City of London, were complex and trending from bad to worse–to the king’s disadvantage.
Not only was the process relatively open, but it allowed considerable penetration and access by the economic institutions and entities, status circles from class friends and families-the heritage of patronage and nepotism that saturated the era, and reflected the larger politics of the time by allowing access by parliamentary-based actors. As we see by the critical role played by the New Men investor community, we can also see that English colonial policy-making was influenced by those who financed the colonial policy, and sustained the colonial development. Whatever one might say, this was not a closed process; any who could penetrate the oligarchic elite of England could engage in court policy-making.
Certainly, the Fluff Meister’s and the serious who engaged in court politics impacted the decision, I suspect more by closing ranks, and back of the room conversations, not to ignore whisperings in the King’s ear, than any formal participation in meetings and actual proceedings constituted a great part of the Deal. Harvey, especially when he was in Virginia, enjoyed no such luxuries of access–which many well account for why he did not attempt it. London policy-making involvement required timely and wide access to the decision-makers and the various interested whirlpools of interest that surrounded them. Harvey did not enjoy personal access to the negotiations, nor could he hope to.
As a former ship captain, Harvey, although connected to the King through Windebank and a few others, was never personally on the inside. When he left England in late 1636 he was three thousand miles away, totally dependent on his contacts. That he poorly understood the situation he was in at that point is suggested by the incredibly bad governance he inflicted upon Virginia once he returned in early1637.
The irony was Harvey “got what he asked for” from the king: the arrest of his conspirators and their dispatch to London for hearing-trial. How he did it, however, reveals the substance of the man. His ruthless, revenge seeking actions only further polarized Virginians, and almost certainly left the impression on those shipped to England that they had little to lose. The Virginia oligarchs, whatever else they were, were adventurers and risk-takers and their past practice was to act and seize opportunity out of chaos. The manner of Harvey’s implementation of the king’s orders was no doubt his Rubicon and from that point on the dice rolled in London.
Washburn puts it best: “the sending of mutinous Councilors-Capt. John West, Samuel Mathews, John Utie, and William Tucker–[and John Potts to resolve his brother’s imprisonment] as prisoners in England, strangely enough allowed them to accomplish what they had been unable to do in Virginia. So many and so powerful were their friends, so wealthy were they themselves, and so many were the charges they contrived against Harvey now that he was back in the colony and unable to answer them, that the King soon reversed himself, and order Harvey relieved from his post” [99] Wilcomb E. Washburn, Virginia Under Charles I and Cromwell, 1625-1660, p.14
Historians noted that Harvey himself probably played a role in this inaction, in that despite his extended stay in England, Harvey had retained no counsel nor representative to handle his case, and push forward his serious and considerable accusations against the conspirators. Historians have also noted the lack of letters and petitions from Harvey to those of influence and salience on the case, after he had been sent to Virginia. The 1638 enlisting of a lobbyist, George Donne, was too little, too late, and the lobbyist was too sick to repivot the debate and refute the charges.
While all this was going on in Virginia, our four mutineers arrived in London in the early spring of 1637 and, despite the foreboding charges levied against them, and a threat of a dreaded Star Court hearing and trial, they were able to post bail and have free rein to travel–and amazingly access to the royal Court. Wertenbaker simply asserts that Charles, in the sixteen months or so had moved on “and probably forgot about it“. Apparently so did everybody else. It is likely the matter was to be handled by Lord Keeper [of the Seal] and Attorney General, and from these individuals no action was taken, nor any hearing scheduled. The prisoners were set free on bail–and off they went to lobby. While this inaction raises a number of questions, I have no explanation–other than below.
Of the so-called mutineers who spent a shade more than a year and half in England (returning in 1639), John West, fifth son of the Baron De La Warre and younger brother to Lord Delaware the first governor appointed by the Virginia Company in 1609) was of noble heritage; his family was still well connected, and his presence no doubt conveyed continuity and status to those who were now accused. In my opinion, however, it was Samuel Mathews (who BTW was West’s brother in law as well) who likely proved the most aggressive in haunting the walls of Whitehall.
To put Mathews in a 1637 context, however, we need to briefly comment upon Harvey’s second administration. In so doing we will stumble upon an action by Harvey which may well have undone him in the eyes of both the Privy Council and the Queen, excuse me, King. What Mathews did was to play off of the reports of Harvey’s administration, and turn them into fodder for his advocacy behind the deal.
A Gift from Mother England: Brenner’s New Men Replace Virginia Company Merchant Adventurers in the Nick of Time
This “section or topic” is not a tangent but a legitimate, in my mind, element of the Thrusting Out complex. We introduced the New Men in our previous Maryland module, but in this one we connect them to their larger role in English politics and policy-making–a role which was impactful straight through the Cromwell Protectorate. It is a role, whose impacts exerted serious implications to the American colonies, and one that has been left to British historians, and recently to those inclined to the Atlanticism paradigm.
Bluntly put, the thrusting out narrative is jam-packed with New Men and their implications. For example, if the king and placed the return of the Virginia Charter back on the table, it was the New Men who were under the table. As we shall see, the New Men, using Virginia (and other initiatives) were asserting themselves as the recognized replacement for the old guard that founded and foundered the Virginia Company. Merchant Adventurers, privateering aristocrats, were giving way to a younger and more aggressive colonial capitalist-like grouping, our New Men. In the very near future of 1638-9, the New Men were to be caught up in the English Civil War, and over its course, and that of its successor Cromwell, they would assume a prominence in not only colonial policy-making, but English politics as well.
The New Men are an element, however, which is not central in the narrow, American-limited ouster narrative. If anything, American commentators of the period attracted to the Ouster as an early example of American traits and behaviors that would lead to the Revolution and America’s exceptional uniqueness. The New Men, mere bankers, could not hold a candle to American individualism and unwillingness to accept tyranny. While the New Men were willing to travel, indeed live in the colonies and set up their operations there, they were Englishmen and their residence was England where most are buried. Their role, excepting those hard-core historians who are determined to ply their trade with an open mind, just simply is an unneeded note in the Ouster tune.
As Brenner argues, however, they are the generation that really started England’s drive and path that matured into our much hated finance capitalism that inflicted colonialism upon not only the US, but the world. Their impact on the latter was huge. Maurice Thomason or Thompson may likely have been the author of the 1651 First Navigation Acts–and he was still around for their second version in 1661. The Ouster is a part of that path, although it’s chief contribution was that it cemented New Men dominance, if not “control”, over the fledgling Virginia colony and the profitable tobacco trade. As we shall see the New Men were not adverse to crossing over the politics line and setting up the institutions of governance to their advantage–in that sense they cemented the dominance of the First Migration planter oligarchy and carried it through the turbulent Civil War, Protectorate, and even Restoration periods.
Their role in financing the Virginia monoculture will continue in the thirties, but, in the early 1630’s certainly, their financing of the Claiborne Clique represents the greatest threat to this point in the dominance of the monoculture for Virginia’s future. They are the financiers of their Virginia friends, family and allies that stood behind the proposal for a new “Magazine” for the Virginia Company–which was but Plan B behind the New Kent Claiborne initiative. Potentially that meant a sort of North American East Indies Company with continental ambitions, and a focus on trade and settlement that could only reduce the status and the profits of those Virginia planters that exported tobacco.
The threat of the new Magazine and the New Men, of whom Mathews and Utie probably fit into well both fractured and catalyzed the mainstream planter elite, whose muscle and cooperation proved necessary and sufficient to bring off the coup-mutiny-ouster of Harvey. The Deal that was worked out in London, which we will later describe, was primarily to their benefit, and left them dominant over the Virginia economic base. The Second Migration would only inherit that dominance established and stabilized by the First Migration in this critical period.
Through the course of 1634 and 1635 we will see planter fragmentation, behind leaders such as Potts and Menifee. In the next module the mainstream planter class will work the Virginia plantations while the Claiborne Clique and its allies will take on the tasks and goals of the New Men as the latter attempt to hold back the Laud Commission ruling against the Virginia Company, and their favor for the Maryland colony that put an end to the New Kent initiative. The conflict between the two groupings will underscore the domestic politics of Virginia into 1635–and after. The planter elite is at war with itself, and the tobacco monoculture is what is at stake. The twists that will follow will make the TV series Succession look like an amateur production. The establishment of the Virginia tobacco monoculture was not as easy as the textbooks suggest.
the Critical, yet understated role of New Men in saving the Tobacco monoculture
We have described thus far in our past modules, the rise of the tobacco economy and the culture and society its sustained. The installation of the tobacco economy as Virginia’s economic base when combined with Virginia’s climate and geography that created its shredded community fostered and sustained a way of life that is today identified with the South. This is a story about the plantation, as not only the basic unit of the South’s agricultural base.
In 1625, or so, that investment in Virginia’s economic base, the Virginia Company was severed–indeed the merchant adventurer of that Company left “the office”, potentially creating a vacuum that threatened the plantation and the tobacco economy. At one point early on in the late mid-twenties, it was on the verge of collapsing as tobacco prices plummeted, but was saved by Brenner’s New Men-an unintended consequence of England’ inheritance, a byproduct of her drive to capitalism and industrialization]
Despite the fact that the relationship between the two factions seems clear, we may well ask why the Virginians were anxious to achieve the restoration of the Company. [The planters in particular] would hardly profit after all, from the reestablishment of the trade monopoly. The answer … seems to lie in the peculiar value which the Virginians placed upon their estates and other property [indentured servants] to accumulate which they had undergone so many hardships.
The rulers of Virginia in this period were men who held their high position by virtue of their ability to gouge wealth from the hostile environment. The ownership of property represented for them, many of whom came from relatively humble [or middling] backgrounds the attainment of a measure of security-and security was a desperately sought goal on the frontier. Even the most well-to-do among the [Claiborne Clique] were not wealthy. Most of them held estates of three to five hundred acres, much of the land uncultivated. Other Virginians held even smaller plots …
In such a situation the cool calculation of the London businessman seeking profits gave way to the feverish race for the accumulation of the trappings of stability, security and social attainment. The chief among these trappings was land. Its acquisition provided psychological rewards quite apart from any economic benefits [99] J. Mills Thornton III, the Thrusting Out of Harvey, (the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 76, No. 1,Jan 1968)p. 20, quote p.22
What, I believe is most important is that by saving the monoculture, the New Men fostered the continual development of elements of the monoculture–like elite and political cultures, the bipolar workforce, the planter oligarchy, and most of all the plantation itself. It is doubtful the New Men much thought about these offshoots that came with their financing, and their hop-scotch interest in one and then another colony or opportunity prevented them from developing deep roots in any one colony. Keeping up with the economy and politics was time-consuming enough.
But again, the offshoots counted a lot as the thirties moved into the forties and fifties. The stability that came out of the thirties and the thrusting Out was, to me, a real page-turner for the Virginia colony. When Berkeley came to town in 1642, he had something to build on–but more importantly he had something he could latch on to. He would become in his way a Virginian, more than Wyatt or certainly Harvey. He was able to integrate Virginia into the hybrid English colonial system, and help navigate it through the worst of the civil war, Protectorate, and Restoration. It didn’t hurt that through this period, the financing of the New Men continued and delve deeper into the expanding monoculture, in good times and bad.
In the next sections we look a bit deeper into this silent “social infrastructure” that was able to develop from the thirties into the late seventeenth century.
the Monoculture bled into the Development of a budding Virginia Political Culture
In this we can hear echoes of such a psychological bond between land and human ambitions and heart evident two hundred thirty years later: In Gone With the Wind, Scarlet O’Hara hears her father describe their plantation “Tara” as the existential focus of their life and being. As Dad tells her, “land is the only thing in the world worth fighting for … because it is the only thing that lasts“. [999] It is very interesting to contrast that with the Native American conception of land ownership [999].
These founders of the First Generation Virginia plantations are refugees unleashed by the Enclosure Movement, freed from their binding to land on European manors, they imagined their future in terms of its ownership and development of their own. All they needed from others was money that only the New Men had and were willing to lend. They were hard men, but men (and women who wed them) who were capable to giving birth to a policy system in the harshest of climates faced by Britons thus far. Frank though it might be, T. J. Wertenbaker’s summary of this generation is the most apt:
‘This country [Virginia] wants nothing to be peopled with a well-born race to make it one of the best colonies in the world; but want for a governor, we [Virginia] are ruled by a council [Council of State], some of whom have been perhaps transported criminals, who having acquired great estates are now become Your Honor and Rightful Worship, and possess all places of authority’. It is absolutely certain that the Virginia aristocracy was not descended from felons, but this belief that found voice in works of fiction in the seventeenth century must have had some slight foundation in truth. It tends to strengthen the evidence that many men of humble origin did attain places of honor and profit in the colony, and it shows that in England in this period, people were far from imagining that many aristocrats had come to Virginia to settle… Had many men of gentle blood come to Virginia in the first half of the seventeenth century, there would have been no chance for the ‘merchant’ [New Men] class to acquire such prominence. [99] T. J. Wertenbaker, Patrician and Plebian Or the Origin and Development of the Social Classes of the Old Dominion (Firework Press, 2015, first printed 1966), Part One, p. 5-6)
Clifford Dowdey offers yet another accurate insight that calls out a skillset that supports Brenner’s characterization of his New Men of that era:
‘the big ones [the Virginia country gentry] lived and worked with one fundamental difference from the typical English country gentry: they were merchants and traders as well as agriculturalists. Their plantations, based upon the one money crop of tobacco, were all situated on tidal rivers, and their private wharves were shipping centers for their complicated trading operations. They shipped out tobacco and imported, along with their own needs, goods for the small settlers [nearby] who paid in tobacco. They were clothiers, hardware merchants, and sometimes slave dealers’… they combined the new commercialism of their age with traditional agriculture; on the model of the country gentlemen as men of business, on the practicalities of handling the riches of tobacco on a dangerous frontier, they emerged as a new phenomenon in world trade–the merchant planter, “the Virginia planter”.
In adapting to the geography and climate, to conditions and opportunities unique to the frontier , the [Virginia emigrant elite] neither consciously tried to preserve the traditional nor consciously introduced the new: by a day-to-day pragmatism they evolved into a new type of man. [99] Clifford Dowdey, the Virginia Dynasties: the Emergence of ‘King’ Carter and the Golden Age (Little, Brown & Company, 1969), p.15
the entrepreneurial agricultural, individualistic yet focused American
Dowdey’s characterization of this First Generation planter elite permits us to see the challenge that Claiborne’s New Kent-Virginia Company Magazine business model presented to this emerging planter class, as well as to why the establishment of a tobacco monoculture–a way of life as it came to be later described–that became embedded into the idea of Virginia in the colonial period–and long after.
These are the folk that emigrated to Virginia–but not Massachusetts. Virginians came to Virginia for the most part for the opportunity to start a new life through the ownership of land. In Virginia of this period, everything was in some way saturated with the aspirations associated with unrestricted land ownership. The constellation of values that became ingredients for Virginia’s distinctive political culture emanate from the prospect, the aspirations associated with land ownership. Over time these values crystalized into a solid and distinctive political culture, and from there into a way of life.
Intense, hyper individualism, enflamed by the fire of death by disease, and the fear of being overwhelmed by the dark of the forests and swamps inhabited by hostiles who say you as robbers of their land and way of life. Some stayed in Virginia; many returned (even William Tucker, and maybe, in his way, Samuel Mathews). Others led a hybrid existence and traveled to England as needs arose. Virginians, on the whole, were women and men who hardened and fixed to these aspirations they valued. That did not mean they were destined for success. The lack of artisans and a solid non-agricultural middle class, and their amazingly small numbers of emigrants (into the 1640’s) limited any serious effort to break out of the monoculture. By 1630 or so Virginia was at a crossroads.
Virginia’s Social Infrastructure Needed Self-Governance Institutions to Grow and Prosper;
Her sovereign loved the thought of Virginia; more precisely the needed a productive colony but that required much more than thought. Charles always had other priorities and interests. He wanted to rule but not govern her. Governance took time, commitment and consistency, none of which were mainstays of his character or policy-making.
Three thousand miles of ocean and its storms further led him to delegation and away from not direct governance. That was to him the allure of the revitalized Virginia Company. And the ever-looming prospect of a civil war, as much a religious war led him in 1634 to turn colonial administration, “the foreign plantations” over to Archbishop Laud. Laud was not Dorsett, who was not James I, nor Thomas Smythe or Edwin Sandys. Laud, the architect of Charles’s plantation policy and the king’s commitment to Virginia was even more distant than his sovereign’s. With friends such as these who needed enemies. Laud did little of his own, beyond managing the mercantile and inter-colony politics of its fragile North American, West Indies and Caribbean colonial enterprises, and much of that fell to the New Men and their private ambitions. To me that makes our appreciation of the New Men more important an element in our early colonial period.
This is to say that Virginia’s future depended on whether the colony could “make a “go of it”, and by the late 1620’s and early 1630’s that was in question.
The why of continued survival of the colony was two-fold: (1) it had not “broken out” it was thriving, it had a pulse, but by even 1632, Massachusetts who got going in late 1620’s had more people than Virginia–despite the harsher winter, and rocky soils. English emigres went to Ireland and West Indies, and even Bermuda in preference to Virginia. When one dwells on its small population still about a couple of thousand in such a harsh environment the mists of even five hundred years cannot hide how fragile things were in 1632 Virginia;
(2) the second dynamic, the tobacco monoculture, barely scratched into the fields and minuscule and isolated plantations of the shredded river communities was no longer was a gazelle. Its price, in a steady decline with bouts of stabilization, meant that in order to break even, more tobacco had to be planted. That meant more land, more startup costs, and an even more scattered portfolio of fields or surrender of the old fields in favor of new deeper in the hostile hinterland. And in this lies an insight into Virginia’s future.
Whatever peace treaties there would be–or not– the zero-sum drive for land meant sometime a Third Powhatan War would explode–and the threat of a 1622 rerun had to be on the minds of those who tilled these lonely hard isolated fields-swamps. As it usually does, money became the factor that would determine if this fragile colony could sustain itself. In the early 1630’s that was at issue. To move into the Middle Peninsula, to carve out a fur monopoly in the forests of what is now Maryland and northern Virginia required settlers-workforce who had to be paid for, and food, tools and goods to keep them alive and working, seed for corn-tobacco, and access to those who would buy exported tobacco.
By the early 1630’s the tobacco monoculture found a source for funding to replace the Virginia Company, and given that its sovereign, who would not lend his own dime or even pay for its defense, would have died out over the next decades–a failure to thrive. The rise of a new flexible, if greedy and impetuous New Men, were the just-in-time calvary, riding the English pound instead of a white horse, is what sustained, if not created, the initial Virginian policy system.
This financial crisis that never happened is downplayed by historians of the period, but it is central to our story about the Thrusting Out. Virginia’s model of politics and economy that would emerge from its initial policy system–and spread across trans-Appalachian eastern central America–carried with it a flexible financier in the ever-evolving New Men of the British finance industrial capitalism. That relationship, no doubt ended with the battle of Antietam in 1862, but until then it promoted the “Dixie”, of the proverbial Mason-Dixon line.
Harvey had glimpses of all this I suspect. So did the Kent Island Clique who had grand ideas about a new and even larger Virginia. But so did the mainstream planter who was tied to the monoculture and tobacco. It was the money (stupid), that each needed to achieve their aspirations, and that came, in a timely fashion, mostly from Brenner’s New Men, who replaced the Smythe Merchant Adventurers, and, who by the late 1620’s and early 1630’s, were seemingly ready and willing to finance the Kent Island dream, as well as the those of the tobacco-bound mainstream planters.
But all this is a reason why historians saw Virginia of this time in near-anarchy or “shapeless”–it was. Virginia reality rested on its local economies and county polities. Decentralized and shredded, Virginia was as close to an agricultural libertarianism as existed in that time period. I suspect, however, no one knew better than the contemporaries of that day and age, that economic growth required enhanced domestic structural development, and perhaps the carving out of Maryland required a foreign policy and a permanent representative in London. Even a monoculture needs change and the Assembly was to be its vehicle. But for the planters in the Assembly, home base was the individual plantation, and the county that managed its countryside and community.
That in no way implies their model was based around present-day visions of democracy. They were oligarchs, and the structures they desired revolved around their governance. What screwed up their vision was the emergence, and power in London, of the plantation conquistador Claiborne Clique whose business plan to personal profit implied a radical rebalancing of the tobacco monoculture, and as startling, a coup in the Council that meant at minimum pushing non-Clique planters to the margins of power.
For the non-Council planters, they were not likely to be able to protect themselves and their prospects were to be dependent on the Clique and its new Kent Island Magazine. They knew the Kent Islanders well enough to know they would give no quarter. What the average free holder or indentured servant conjectured, I can only hazard a guess, but to the extent their hearts and mind revolved about tobacco, their own ownership of a plantation, and their own shredded community homestead I fail to see what the Clique offered them.
Although their numbers had noticeably increased by the early 1630’s Wertenbaker posits the 1626 census taken of landowners “no less than 25 were for fifty acres or less, 73 for 100, and most of the others for less than 300. The total number of proprietors listed is 224 and the total acreage, 34,472 giving an average for each plantation of 154 acres” [99] Thomas J. Wertenbaker, “the Planters of Colonial Virginia, p. 17. The fog of a five-hundred-year past should not distort the reader’s sensitivity to the small population that was Virginia by 1630, and despite its power in the Council, the relative wealth of the Clique was far from considerable. Oligarchs they may well have been, but wealthy and affluent was only relative to others in Virginia. In Virginia mainstream planters in aggregate could counter the Council Clique.
But in providing such money, in the nick of time, they also kept alive an institution that was the vehicle of both: the plantation. It was the plantation that became the basic core unit of the tobacco economy, but as importantly it was the plantation that housed those who would evolve the political culture than was to define Virginia–and in the course of the next hundred years would produce a world view that hardened into a way of life that would define Virginia, and much of the South through the American Civil War.
But none of this could have evolved if someone, some group, had not entered into this conversion of land from corporate to private as provided the financing that got it its start and allowed it to settle in and develop. That group, as the reader suspects, is Brenner’s New Men, England’s young newcomer colonial investment cohort. The New Men were the only source of capital available in the 1630’s to plantation owners in Virginia–ironically, they did not make their capital available to our desperately poor Harvey. But the New Men did provide the investment needed to operate and grow the Virginia plantation. By the 1660’s their money had sustained the colony, tobacco, the plantation and its owners so well, that its sovereign, Charles, the Second would call the province, his “old Dominion”, thinking of it as a refuge for his father’s supporters.
Understanding the Larger Role Played by Brenner’s New Men in the Ousting
After spending considerable time describing the “usual suspects (Harvey himself, Maryland, the Claiborne economic coup, resurrection of the Virginia Company) as the causes of Harvey’s thrusting out, Thornton reverses field and centers his reader on the underlying dynamic, the submerged ice of the proverbial iceberg, which was the economic instability of Virginia’s land/workforce legitimacy during Charles’s pre-1639 Virginia. Virginia’s economic base, its tobacco monoculture, its developing elite were under serious pressure, albeit more uncertainty, emotion-laden and imagined in hindsight.
It was this pressure from below that unified all Virginians, and given the no doubt fragility of a fledgling finance system promised by the New Men lent an aura of existentialist survival to the politics of the ouster. Lost now to contemporary commentators and readers, it was nevertheless very real then. To me it was this bond of the land/property, made uncertain by the lack of a self-governance legislature, that underlie the need for and the drive to attain the capacity of self-governance out of the ashes of the Ouster and the potential trial of the “mutineers”. The legislature was protection of land, property, a business plan that was transforming itself into a way of life–much like that of pre-Silicon Valley Bank’s Silicon Valley venture capitalists.
Before Harvey ever stepped foot in Virginia as governor, the Claiborne Clique had formed, developed a business plan, and set off to London intent to find financing and political support. The mainstream planters left behind, confronting price decline, if not a tobacco depression, turned to the Assembly to approve reforms, i.e. much detested regulations, of tobacco production and export. Governor West, for reasons that are not completely obvious, shook the plantation conquistador nexus by supposedly ending Virginia’s permanent war against the Powhatan by signing a hugely controversial peace treaty was, after all undone by the Council in the same year. Self governance worked–this time.
Finally, the Harvey administration inserted the governorship into the fight against the monoculture, its land sales/headright and built-in need to replace tired fields with new ones seized from the Powhatan meant royal administrations had pitfalls that could most readily be speed-bumped by a provincial legislature that could protect the planter from the more roguish Council of State.
Appearing exactly in the period which Harvey was first appointed (1628) the Council had become unpredictable, and subject to the persuasions of the Claiborne elite. Before Harvey arrived, Virginia elites were already fragmenting, and each were devising a different path to Virginia’s future. They need a place, an institution, which could defend–and advance–their interests as tobacco planters in a tobacco monoculture.
It was no accident that from 1632 on, the Assembly, which could outvote the Councilors in its membership, would be the vehicle the mainstream planter would defend his plantation and his crop. It was this class who perhaps felt more keenly the anxiety of royal authority, with the governor as its cutting edge, by 1635. It was the Assembly that sent its own delegate to London to argue its case for self-governance and justify the ouster, which the Assembly believed was its decision. Their existential need had been converted into action, risky action, because of the Ouster.
If the trend line of Virginia migration had finally turned upward by 1630, the growth was miniscule–especially when compared to the explosive growth of the Puritans in Massachusetts. Virginia had nearly collapsed and came precious close to Sagadahoc in 1622, and by 1630 with Harvey beginning his new administration Virginia was still on the edge. By shifting our focus to land and the instability underlying the tobacco monoculture, Thornton was forcing us to deal with the 800lb gorilla, Virginia’s need to resolve its internal contradictions, develop more fully its economic base, and to complete its development of political structures.
It was a breakdown in the last, the ouster of Harvey, that finally led to the various forces to commit to an economic base and set up a domestic policy system with capacity sufficient to manage its own problems and find a path to economic growth.
For us who seek at this point to exploit and understand the rise of the Claiborne Clique. the reaction of the Mainstream planters to it, and the attempt by Harvey to set up and behave as a strong royal governor, we need to account for how each proposed to pay for its agenda. Harvey, of all had no deep pockets. Taxes were never an alternative in 1630’s Virginia. The other two factions had identified sources for capital: Brenner’s New Men for the most part.
Thornton, I believe is correct. His central focus that land insecurity was the underlying dynamic that led to the Thrusting Out. Our only quarrel with him (and Andrews) is they limited that insecurity to the political–the refusal of Charles to accept and define the parameters of Virginia’s self-government, a failure that certainly raised the specter of their loss of land and entitlement to a workforce. What he didn’t say was that Brenner’s New Men had arrived at the nick of time to provide the financing needed to sustain the plantation through these years.
the Plantation as the Basic Economic Unit of Virginia’s Economic Base
It was the New Men who in this period supported Claiborne against Maryland and fed into their dreams about a new Virginia Company Magazine contract–the prospect of which that drove a wedge into the unity of the Virginia planter class. The Kent Island venture–and its stormy prospect of pivoting the Virginia economic base away from land and the monoculture– pivoted to trade, finance, logistics–and even better relations with the Native Americans. In that new world, land, owned or not, would become a commodity for a larger finance-trade/export-supply and logistics economy. Kent Island would not have abandoned tobacco, to the contrary, but it would have broken its stranglehold over the economic base–and its oligarchical dominance over the half=developed, closed and unequal policy system that purported to govern it.
There was more, however. The other New Men who offered capital to export and supply the needs of non-Claiborne Clique extended a lifeline to struggling, non-Clique plantation owners. Certainly, smaller in scale than the chief exporters who led Kent Initiative, the general planter community were still able to find financiers that provided financing for the ownership, development, production and expansion of smaller plantations scattered throughout the shredded community that was Virginia. Mainstream Virginia planters had London and ship owner contacts also. In essence, the New Men and the highly individualistic smaller plantation owners found the means to keep their monoculture intact and even grow. What they and the reader have yet to recognize, these New Men gave to all Virginians a path through the Civil War and Cromwell’s Protectorate. But we are getting way ahead of ourselves. So, let’s back up.
There is a “big picture” that provides a measure of clarity to the developing split between the typical tobacco planter of size and the budding colonial merchant adventurers who were replacing the established old school merchant adventurers associated with the Virginia Company. Stuart Bruchey’s valuable perspective calls attention to the key function of acquiring capital for Virginia’s domestic investment; in essence, lacking a currency, and without even the minimal support provided by the traditional London merchant community, where did post Virginia Company get its investment capital?
Bruchey posits that “the private plantations, a method of uniting English capital, the labor of indentured servant or slave, and the resident management of the planter, emerged from these failures” [of merchant adventurers and Virginia Company]. ‘Venture’ and ‘Capital’, previously united in the person of the English absentee investor [Company shareholder or Merchants settling up the Hundreds’ plantations], split off from each other: the venturer now came in person to America to manage his enterprise and drew upon English capital in the form of mercantile credit [99] Stuart Bruchey, the Roots of American Economic Growth: 1607-1861 (Harper Torchbooks,1968), p. 32.
Essentially, Bruchey’s perspective, congruent with Brenner’s, credits these new investors with saving Virginia’s version of the medieval plantation, ensuring its fiscal stability through what would be very turbulent years. In that period the plantation evolved into the basic unit of production, finance, and government in colonial Virginia. Whether they thought about it or not, the New Men updated the manor-plantation so that it could function as the vehicle by which colonialist obtained their capital in the form of loans and credit. We can see the plantation provided the muscle, the economic rationale, and the status personification that underlie the “tilt” in Virginia governance. We can see how the plantation owner, the vortex of that fused dynamic, housed and supported an economic and political elite, that owed its existence and such prosperity as it could hack from the wilderness. It did so finance its debt and credit from London, principally.
Understanding the centrality of the New Men to Virginia in the late twenties and early thirties was their comprehensive provision of credit-finance to the totality of the colony. Summarizing this comprehensiveness, we cite Wesley Frank Craven:
Both Professor Brenner and the late Richard Pares have demonstrated that the merchants trading with the colonies did not limit their activity merely to trade. Engaged in a trade that was basically one of supply and that repeatedly involved extensions of credit, they might find it a natural development of their interest to become promoters of settlement by providing a settler or prospective settler with a needed stake on some form of partnership agreement … The planter received a supply of servants, provisions, equipment, and perhaps land, well beyond what his own means could have provided; the merchant assured himself of the right to market an increased share of the colony’s crop, and gained a measure of protection against what Professor Pares has described as ‘the chief risk in all colonial enterprise’ by making his agent in the colony as a partner. [99] Frank Wesley Craven, White, Red and Black (W. W. Norton & Co, 1971), p. 24
That partnership is the nub underlying the financial relationship that started in this period and continued through to the Revolution. It is the key distinction that separates the New Men from the Merchant Adventurers. The key financial instrument, the bill of exchange, a key financial innovation early for seventeenth century Virginia, was used starting in the 1630’s. “Virginians could purchase bills of exchange. These bills entitled the holder to buy merchandise on credit. The prices of tobacco and the bills of exchange varied inversely. Since the bills amounted to claims upon future merchandise, the colonists could purchase with the present tobacco crop. By altering his [tobacco] portfolio, a colonist could effectively insure his [tobacco] asset. … The best way to maximize the value of the tobacco [thus altering the tobacco portfolio] was to grow the tallest and the highest quality tobacco as possible. This could be done only on virgin land … By the end of 1637, the colonists discovered that the best tobacco lands were along streams” [99] Gary Pecquet, “Crop Controls and Indian Raids in Colonial Virginia” (Foundation for Economic Education, February 1, 1990) https://fee.org/articles/crop-controls-and-indian-raids-in-colonial-virginia/
That debt, limiting as it was in the 1630’s, grew with each passing decade and depression in tobacco prices. By the end of the golden era of Virginia planters, around the 1740’s and 1750’s, it grew to be a serious burden, a chain binding tobacco planting and elite status to British (Scottish) factors that had become unsustainable. In breaking this chain, we will see Virginia planters, switching away from tobacco, commencing trans-Appalachian land development in development corporations, and those who did not (Jefferson for example) degenerating into a sort of permanent fiscal instability verging on bankruptcy. That fiscal instability stood at the bottom of the elite unrest that expressed itself in the drift to independence and revolution of the post 1760’s Virginia. In time, it would lead to the great shift away from tobacco by Virginians in the 1830’s and 1840’s.
Thus, decentralization of Virginia investment capital, issued to plantation owners by foreign creditors, led to creation of a Virginia elite that based its fortunes, fragile though they might be, on debt and tobacco grown on their individual plantations. Those plantations, the bastion of their economic power were harnessed early on–as we can see by the very early 1630’s, to the weak and very fragile political institutions left over the defunct Virginia Company, to the institutions of governance in post-Company Virginia. With the plantation owners came a durable style of politics and governance was launched in Virginia– a style, that I assert, continued through the Byrd political machine of the mid and even late twentieth century.
As the twig was bent in the decades following the transition from the Virginia Company, we see it developing into a more solid branch-trunk through the remainder of the colonial period. It was to the plantation that Berkeley will turn as he settles royalist refugees in the Northern Neck, the Fall Line and Piedmont–and that plantation was as tied to the credit of the British factors as it was to the Tidewater establishment that other royalist refugees took over through marriage or the dying out of the First-Generation planter elite.
That this autonomy becomes observable in the early 1630’s grew out of the flux and transition from the demise of the Virginia Company, and the emergence of a new merchant class that replaces the merchant adventurers of that Company, is only part of the long-term story. Thomason went on and had a large role in the writing and approval of the famous and infamous 1651 Navigation Law, and as we will see, Cloberry and others will play a large, and not always positive or consistent role in the Maryland-Virginia confrontation. But the financing of Virginia’s mainstream planters continued; conducted by hired “factors” that traveled the rivers and eventually the byways of Virginia, accessing and servicing each plantation they could recruit into their financial network. As we shall discover in long-future modules, these factors, mostly Scots by prerevolutionary decades, played an important role in the post 1740-50 evolution of the Virginia planter class. These New Men and their financing proved also to be a mixed blessing to the English-British.
McCusker & Menard observe how that autonomy would frustrate the ends of early English colonial trade policy, creating in Virginia something akin to a 17th century free trade zone:
It should not be at all surprising that colonial interests, intent on controlling their own economy to benefit themselves, sometimes did things that conflicted with metropolitan interests [English colonial trade regulations]. The earliest governmental measures taken by the colonies were in the pre-1650 era, when few, if any, imperial regulations were in force. The colonists most intensive period of activity in this regard, from the late 1630’s to the mid-1640’s, was conditioned by the breakdown of English government during the Civil War. This was accompanied in the colonies by a severe depression from which only they could and did deliver themselves–or so they thought. Thus, the colonists accustomed to managing on their own, largely ignored the Act of 1651 (First Navigation Act], and they paid scant attention to it when it reappeared in 1660 [Second Navigation Act]. By then Massachusetts, Virginia, Barbados and the other colonies could point to mercantilist theory and to several decades of practice, which they believed entitled them to considerable autonomy in their economic affairs [99] John J. McCusker & Russell R. Menard, the Economy of British America. 1707-1789 (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, University of North Carolina Press), 1985-1991), p. 48
Wrap Up
It was these hundreds of plantations that were the mainstay of the economic base, and the potential members of the emerging Virginia planter class. By the nature of the tobacco beast that devoured soil rapidly, and compelled frequent movement into new fields, if not plantations, the volatility of plantation ownership was huge–and it necessarily, if not inevitably, led to a concentration of larger owners over time–with the unfortunate falling into the non-owner class. The nature and character of the plantation, that it in essence substituted for the town and settlement, must be understood. While it grew and evolved through the seventeenth century, becoming more robust, defined, and differentiated in the eighteenth, from the start the plantation possessed characteristics that it carried into the American Revolution and beyond:
The plantation differentiated Virginia agriculture from that of other communities in old England or the Northern and Middle colonies. The plantation made the Chesapeake society unique. Unlike the traditional American farm [homestead], a tobacco estate was virtually a little society in itself. Out of thousands of acres, owned by well-to-do planters, only small areas were actually cleared and under cultivation at one time; most of their lands were still forest. Moreover each large holding was usually divided into several units in order to secure more efficient production: one would contain the ‘mansion house’ where dwelt the owner and his family, others, similarly composed were operated by overseers or leased by white tenant farmers. Each unit, or ‘quarter’ had its gang [workforce]… Rounding out the population of the plantation were a few white indentured servants, who customarily performed the tasks requiring highly skilled artisans [blacksmith] [99] Carl Bridenbaugh, Seat of Empire: the Political Role of Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg (Henry Holt& Co, 1958), p. 4
Ron W. Coan 