Berkeley into the Interregnum

Overview of the civil war period and institutional road map to 1776 We offer this introduction to the reader to provide them some order and direction through what is a poorly understood period in Virginia–and Colonial America–so the reader can track for his or her own purposes what is salient in the next few modules. It may be passed over if the reader is comfortable, and can certainly, be a refuge if the reader does become a bit bewildered by the frequent turn of events. I do think it will be helpful in assessing key relationships, such as Center and Periphery, and for understanding the systemic stability provided by the little mentioned counties, the Eveready bunny of Virginia political life. After 1642, the Mother Land engaged in its multi-phased civil war will impact, better still disrupt, the course of its own political and economic development, and in doing so will create in the process all sorts of opportunities and threats for its colonial empire and their respective policy systems. In that we have hopefully made the case that each colony, specifically Virginia and Massachusetts, and secondarily Maryland, have developed and follow their own distinctive path to political, social and economic development, the mother country input will be processed differently by each colony–and likely given the salience and potential inherent in this particular disruptive period–bend their fledgling policy twig in a way distinctive to the others. In this module we are most concerned with Virginia’s experience, and until 1652 (the Interregnum) that experience was filtered by William Berkeley, Virginia’s most empowered and inspired governor since its founding. In 1652, Berkeley will be “retired”, fired by Cromwell’s commissioners, and sent off to his early retirement. Virtually simultaneously a new policy system will be created-imposed-negotiated upon Virginia by its political institutions, elites and the Cromwell commissioners. That new policy system, radically different from the first Virginia policy system forged from the Company period and carved out in the 1639 Deal, and honed into a mature “second policy system” by its Assembly and above all Berkeley. That second policy system carried Berkeley through the period discussed in this module. The Cromwell-Assembly 1652 policy system (essentially a third policy system) will govern Virginia into the early 1660’s when, under Berkley’s direction, Virginia will return to its 1643 second policy system. This juggling of policy systems inherently creates dynamics, and when combined with the evolution of Virginia’s counties–which in reality were the bastion of both the second and “third” policy systems–we will see a real bending of the Virginia twig–a bending that in good part led to Berkeley’s ouster in 1676 after Bacon’s Rebellion (which, as one might wonder was itself prompted by the instability and internal change that had accompanied the juggling of the two policy systems). We will attempt to deal with these dynamics, and discuss the events and policy-making of this “third” policy system in the following module. We will restore Berkeley to his second term as governor in that module, and outline his second administration to the point of Bacon’s Rebellion. In so doing we will describe how the second policy system was reinstalled. Still several new policy areas and policy-economic dynamics emerged from these periods. The most notable, I think, was that intercolonial relations and events would become a significant policy input, with significant implications on Virginia. When we deal with Massachusetts we shall see a different narrative but that narrative will also include the rise of intercolonial relations in its policy system. If we want to understand why our present day states are different and similar from each other, the civil war through restoration period offers more than its fair share of twig-bending. In Virginia’s case, the surprising finding is that the policy, economic and social system created by 1639 Deal as modified by Berkeley in 1643 managed through it all quite well and emerged stronger and more durable than ever. We shall see, however, at least one major flaw, more positively a long-term dynamic, will also emerge and that will sustain a permanent tension within that system: a weak governor, a very strong Council of State, and as the years passed by a rising transformative power, the House of Burgesses. Virginia Provincial government, fragmented in varying degrees by the interplay of different governors, would be anchored, however, by the counties which continued their maturation institutionally and became the home base of the Virginia planter oligarchy. I might add by the time of the Drift to Independence and Revolution in the 1770’s, the Burgesses would assume leadership of the provincial policy system, and carry it into the American Republic. The counties continued as the home base of the planter oligarchy. the External Center-Periphery Perspective Up to now, the elites of both ends of the hybrid colonial policy system had been able to work things out with the framework in existence at that time. But now with two masters, an ocean and a religious and civil war that framework was no longer functional. In Roper’s words, “This scenario, in turn, gave rise to ‘ a potential tension between the interests that bound local elites to the crown and the autonomous interests of the [two] states [hybrid policy systems] [99] L. H. Roper, the English Empire in America (Routledge, 2009)  pp. 5-6. Managing and taking advantage of those tensions fell to Governor Berkeley; his first administration to 1651 was dominated by the civil war and its immediate aftermath, the republican Commonwealth, and the commencement of Cromwell’s Protectorate. It is imperative in discussing Berkeley’s first administration that we lodge it within the evolving civil war in the mother country. We can view the English civil war through the Commonwealth as a multi-phased movement from one English policy system to another. England’s colonies therefore in this period had two masters: king and parliament. There is much question, especially in regard to leadership and management of the colonies, whether Parliament was itself divided into two components: Parliament itself, and the Aristocrats/Private Sector Puritan New Men who played a large role indeed in the carrying out, as well as advocacy of policy in regards to the colonies and commercial trade. As the war rolled on, to Berkeley the rise of the Parliament and those associated with that rise became more likely winner and that clearly set the tone for Berkeley’s “foreign policy”. His royal support obviously rendered him an outsider to that nexus, and it is apparent that even through and after the regicide of Charles I, Berkeley was unwilling to bend and shift his loyalties; he acknowledged as his sovereign Charles’s son, Charles II, as the monarch and sovereign of Virginia. The Interregnum, when we talk about it, is dominated by that dynamic. The most confusing, I believe, external impact on Berkeley’s first administration–and an impact that is essential we understand because the Interregnum Parliamentary negotiations will be conducted by its leaders–is the “Maryland Invasion”. As we have seen it began during the Third Powhatan War, and it was very apparent that that invasion was sanctioned by Parliament and the Private Sector/Aristocrats who were entrusted to conduct Parliamentary colonial and trade policy. To say it another way, Berkeley, the royalist supporter and Virginia’s second most powerful political leader, William Claiborne was Parliament’s lead agent in the Maryland invasion. In the course of that war, a new leader, a staunch Virginian Puritan (Bennett), became a major leader in the Maryland invasion. Together they were able to renegotiate a policy system-regime change in Maryland during Berkeley’s first administration. Empowered as Cromwell’s sole negotiating commissions in 1651 through a act of nature, these two Parliamentary leaders would enter into negotiations with Virginia, negotiations that led to Berkeley’s retirement, Virginia’s acceptance and entry into the Commonwealth, and the design of yet a new Virginia policy system: our previously mentioned third policy system. Bennett would become the governor of Virginia and Claiborne its Secretary of State. The implications of all this on Maryland are, of course, substantial, almost existential. During the Cromwell years, it was possible that the Maryland charter could have been annulled and Maryland rejoined to Virginia. It did not happen that way and we will discuss that, but the reader can see that during Berkeley’s first administration we must include the affairs in Maryland as they occurred, and access the shift they caused in Berkeley’s power base in Virginia. The interactions of Berkeley, Mathews, Claiborne and Bennett during these years are critical to our understanding what was going on in Virginia policy-making. In this we can see the intrusion of the Center into Berkeley’s actions.

Virginia Under Berkeley: 1644 Through 1651

So here we are in the middle of William Berkeley’s first administration, 1644, and the task assigned to this module is to complete his first administration that ends in late 1651-early 1652. The immediate challenge for this module is to determine whether or not this is a twig-bending epoch for its policy system and/or economic base.. Isn’t every epoch you ask. To which I respond NO to both questions–with a couple of qualifications. The first qualification is the heritage of the remainder of Berkeley’s first administration–and toss in the next twenty years–is, despite all the sometime dramatic events and twists (think Third Powhatan War, Bacon’s Rebellion, and Maryland war), a is further maturation of the post-1939 policy system, that overlays the geographic spread of the tobacco monoculture, and solidification of the planter-class elite oligarchy, and eventually the installation of a black slave workforce. The second qualification is the one interesting policy initiative of the extended period is Berkeley’s elite-attraction strategy is but a reflection of our first qualification. Berkeley’s importation of royalists is but a conscious program not only to solidify his base of support but also to lay the foundation for the geographic extension of the plantation-based monoculture into the Piedmont, Northern Neck and toward North Carolina and the solidification of the planter oligarchy sustained by a Second Migration. True, the infusion of this new cohort will support and encourage the development of the famous Virginia Tidewater elite political culture, which is an important development but one which will not congeal for the better part of a half century in the future. Accordingly, the module will stress the Third (and final) Powhatan War, Berkeley’s, his “go-native” gubernatorial policy strategy–including his Dutch trade initiative and the Maryland “invasion”. Through it all Berkeley’s steadfast loyalty to the Crown, and the goings on within the bifurcated planter elite, characteristic of the past, will continue. All will culminate in 1651-52 when England/Cromwell sends a fleet over to replace Berkeley with a more favorable regime. We will describe the detail for that. Snuck into the module is an introduction to the Northern Neck grant and early family-dynasty alliances he fostered. We will add an intensive discussion on the development of Virginia’s counties into the mix–at the delight of the reader in the subsequent module. Back to the Third Powhatan War Berkeley resumed his control over the policy system, sending Claiborne and Kemp back to their regular offices. Berkeley took to the field himself directing raids and expeditions, and seemingly made several coherent attempts to decapitate the Indian leadership by trapping them. Opechancanough, however, eluded him and instead Berkeley returned to burning corn crops, and letting the 1645 winter exert its effect on Powhatan resistance. In 1646 he met with the Assembly and  together they organized a strong, trained militia force of about 300 “with the express purpose of capturing him. With these soldiers he harassed Opechancanough’s main force and eventually his forward elements cornered him. Berkeley rushed up with calvary and captured him. With Opechancanough in tow he returned to Jamestown (Billings claims Berkeley’s intention was to ship him to England), but at some point a militiaman bayoneted him in his jail cell. Opechancanough’s successor, Necotowance, sued for peace. Berkeley engaged with him to produce a draft treaty for peace; that draft was then sent to the Assembly when it met in October 1646. Billings asserts there was more to Berkeley’s relying on the Assembly for legislative approval of his negotiated treaty. For him and the Assembly it was win-win; Berkeley set a precedent for the governor to manage Indian affairs, while the Assembly acquired the precedent for its approval. Left out of this equation is the Council of State; while not removed from approval, it was the upper house of the Assembly, it certainly had a policy area in the Council of State. In any event the Assembly’s stature and role was enhanced. Secondly, Craven asserts that the treaty represented a new and comprehensive departure from the “perpetual war” which had followed since the end of the Second Powhatan. Building upon Berkeley’s initial 1644 consolidation of vulnerable population around established and to be established fortified positions, the Assembly in 1645-46 constructed forts Charles, Royal, and Henry at vital river-source positions along the fall line and Tideland interior. As part of the treaty, these forts were entrusted to private individuals for their operation and maintenance.  Required for three year to maintain ten men for each fort this man have been a disguised land transfer of an expensive provincial obligation. The intention was to create a strong of these forts to serve as a defensive wall against any immediate breakdown in the treaty. Craven, with fine insight, notes only Fort Henry had any long-term future, and that was because it was transferred to Abraham Wood who turned it into a trading post and launch site for future expeditions into the Piedmont. If there was a prototype for a second generation “conquistador” it was Wood, a former servant of Mathews, long-associated with direction and management of Mathews’ core and long-standing Indian trading business. What we see in the 1646 treaty amounts to a legislative endorsement of Indian relations as a corollary of the colony’s economic development program. In this, we might see evidence of Mathews determination to minimize reliance on the New Kent-Claiborne initiative and replace it with his own diversified Indian trading-merchant-plantation business plan. We shall return to this shortly, but will end this discussion by suggesting to the reader that Wood’s control of Fort Henry and the acreage provided him by the 1646 treaty legislation gave him the opportunity to create a near monopoly over trading with the Indians in the Piedmont. [99] Wesley Frank Craven, “Indian Policy in Early Virginia” (William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Jan,1944)), pp. 75-6 More notably, of course, were the terms of surrender imposed on Necotowance and the Powhatan resistors. Most fundamentally the Powhatan acknowledged they were tributaries of the colony, an honor for which the governor was paid a yearly gift of twenty beaver skins. In return for transfer of the contested land, they were provided a “reservation” north of the York River. Indian travel in colony land needed special approval and distinctive clothing had to be worn in transit. The Powhatan made English civil and judicial law superior over Powhatan custom or practices. Wherever possible both settlers and Powhatan should be residentially segregated. The governor was endowed with responsibility to oversee and enforce the treaty obligations. Billings concludes his discussion on this topic by correctly stating “The treaty of 1646 formed the core of Anglo-Indian relations for nearly thirty years. However much Berkeley may of wished to honor it, he never succeeded in enforcing it to the letter. Heightened immigration flooded thousands of new settlers in Virginia throughout the 1640’s and beyond. Berkeley could not prevent these immigrants from inundating the reservation, and within a decade of the treaty three new counties were carved from it [99] Warren G. Billings, Sir William Berkeley, pp. 98-9 Among the lesson I glean from the Third Powhatan War starts with the obvious. The war effectively ended Powhatan dominance over the Tidewater regions. From this point on, Indians could no longer lay claim to their last traditional homeland, and excepting the “reservation” could no longer live and travel in these areas without permission. This did not settle the larger question of non-Powhatan tribes that the colony’s future development would trigger, but the Tidewater Powhatan were incorporated into the colony’s governance. A second lesson is the colony’s policy system, from provincial to county sustained itself and its operations remarkably well for a five year old. It functioned in the absence of Berkeley, and its political factions coexisted with each other and stood as no insurmountable barrier to reasonable governance through a very troublesome, disruptive and fear-laden period. They were truly on their own, and, for good and bad reasons they secured victory over their opponent. In so doing they facilitated a new generation of “conquistadors” and, in a small way, created an alternative to the monoculture.

Transfer

Center and Periphery: A Brief Synopsis of the Course of the English Civil War (1648-9) as it Pertains to our History

A central theme in our history is English affairs, the Center, did play a consistent and impactful role in the development of its colonial North American colonies. We ought therefore discuss that early on in this section so we can better understand how it impacted this period, Berkeley’s post-1645 first administration–and how it culminated into his forced retirement in 1651-2. Berkeley was in England from June 1644 until his return in early June 1645. Not only there on Virginia business he met with the King and served him in the West District in the field. By 1646, the “First English Civil War” (1642-1646) was coming to an end. Charles, by the end of April, 1646, had been captured after having been conclusively defeated in the field of battle, and was held by the Parliamentarians who effectively controlled England and the government. In short, William Berkeley in Virginia was very much on his own; indeed his family castle, a royalist stronghold, had been taken by Cromwell’s New Model Army which made its appearance during the last year of this First Civil War. From this point on, until 1648, Parliament was “negotiating with the King on the reconstruction of a monarchy and its relations to parliament and the Church of England. A Second Civil War will commenced in 1648, and it would end with the execution of Charles in (January 30) 1649. A Third Civil War (Anglo-Scottish War) will commence in 1650 and end in 1652. After the execution of his father, his twenty year old son, Charles II, assumed the title, and the position of King of Scotland. English government contested his claim to the throne and Cromwell defeated him in battle (Worcester) in September 1651, whereupon Charles II took refuge in France where he remained until the Restoration. Through all of this William Berkeley maintained his loyalty to the Crown, to both Charles’. Left alone until 1651, Cromwell in that year determined to reassert the authority of Parliament and his governance over the North American colonies and elsewhere. Thus, when its authority had sufficiently stabilized in 1651, the Center once again exercised and reclaimed its role as the sovereign of those colonies. Given the vacuum that obviously characterized this period, Berkeley’s “going native” governance strategy was, either or both, compelled or was a logical public, as well as private, style of rule for him in Virginia. In that the preponderance of the Virginia planter elite remained, like him, loyal to the king (s) and to the Anglican Church, Berkeley was aligned with his fellow residents-citizens.

Who are those men behind the Curtin: Virginia’s Partnership of Periphery and Center,

No wonder Claiborne, commander-in-chief of Virginia’s military during Berkeley’s 1644-1645 absence, was ineffectual in his conduct of the Third Powhatan War. The next question includes what does Berkeley do when he returns in June 1645? But there are other questions as well. Opportunity-vulnerableness is one thing, but the civil war is the take-off period for the New Men merchants, and is Maryland only one of their ever-wilder and ever-widening series of merchant adventurer activities. Another dynamic is the extent to which a Virginia political elite culture is firming up, taking shape, and giving substance to Virginia’s policy-making political structures. Until Cromwell enters the picture this civil war period is more a free-for-all than an exercise of autonomy. Let’s start out with Berkeley. There is some ambiguity as to who had called back Claiborne and his militia in June 1645. Kukla claims it was the Council of State on the day before Berkeley arrived from England. In a tactic reminiscent of his councilor-commander practices in the 1620’s, Claiborne diverted the militia from its intended target [Opechancanough] to pursue his lifelong quest for the repossession of Kent Island. As Claiborne recaptured his island, Richard Ingle overran St Mary’s City [the Maryland capital] and overthrew Lord Baltimore’s authority in Maryland in the name of Parliament and Protestantism. Recognizing the nature of Claiborne’s personal vendetta, Virginia’s Council of State resolved on June 6, 1645 ‘concerning the government on the Isle of Kent’ that Claiborne was ‘not to intermiddle with the government’. The next day marked the ‘sudden arrival of Sir William Berkeley, who vigorously carried the war to the Indians, and who ‘personally led a party of Horse'” [99] Jon Kukla, Order and Chaos p. 291. In either case Berkeley did repudiate Claiborne’s New Kent invasion either by direct action or by enforcement of the Council of State’s dictum., But he did not stand in the way of Ingle, nor Bennett, or Stone. Nor did he disrupt the plans of the Thompson New Men ensconced in the Earl of Warwick’s Commission of Foreign Plantations. He seems not to have exerted influence over the members of the Council of State to undo their invasion-takeover of Maryland? Nor did he enlist the Assembly. Did he take action against Claiborne, or Bennett in regards to Maryland? Not that the records indicate. Can one actually “privateer” a colony; if so, did Berkeley learn to live with it? Based on his non-actions, Berkeley did not seek involvement in Maryland’s affairs. Whether this was quiet calculation that Maryland’s disruption could benefit Virginia, or resignation that the New Men and Puritans had engineered a takeover carrying Calbert’s colony into the Parliamentary orbit and he lacked capacity to reverse that dynamic I do not know. Billings is silent on this. Having said all that, Berkeley did hit out against Bennett, Virginia’s leading Puritan in his religious campaign to be described below. As to Claiborne, it seems clear to me that he wasted no time with him; Claiborne was his Virginian anti-Christ and Berkeley’s implacable and consistent opposition to him makes Claiborne’s 1650-2 actions and decisions even more complex. What is also evident to me is his attempt to “peel off” Samuel Mathews and pivot him in directions with which he agreed and saw value, either personal or for Virginia. But Berkeley’s non-action may also have been a carrot to the Clique, including Mathews who for decades had led fur-trading commerce with tribes in northern Virginia and what was then Maryland. Like his multi-faceted Indian treaty of 1646, Berkeley’s Maryland policy let Claiborne set himself apart from Virginian priorities and current needs, and those that disliked the establishment of the Maryland colony may have seen the Powhatan War and the opening up of the hinterland to Indian trade as attractive, if not necessary. Letting Claiborne define himself as London-oriented, and on a self-absorbed mission. Maybe I am overthinking the impact of Maryland on Virginian attitudes and policy needs, but Mathews, arriving late, took action against the Powhatan and had nothing in particular to do with Claiborne-Thomason’s venture. By stressing the association of the Claiborne councillors with London’s ruthless regicides and meddlesome mercantilists, Berkeley deprived his adversaries of critical support from the many Virginians who never felt personally oppressed by the Stuart kings, the Anglican Church, Dutch traders, or [in Maryland] Calvert ‘tyranny’. Becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy Berkeley’s alienation of [the Claiborne Clique] from local loyalties forced [the Clique] into an ever greater dependence upon interest-group allies in London [and their]supporters who were increasingly tainted with popular perceptions of political authoritarianism and personal avarice as the 1650’s evolved. [In reaction to this] Realizing that the homeland [Virginia, Maryland] allies they enlisted to defeat the Calverts had cost them the approval of their original constituency, the Claiborne councillors eschewed the fanatical coercion that bloodied battlefields in England and Maryland, and reasserted Virginia’s traditional resentment of outside political interference. [99] Fausz. “Merging and Emerging Worlds, p. 86 Berkeley himself was friendly toward these initiatives throughout the post-1645 period, even to the extent of financial participation, and he was, of course, more than sympathetic to Abraham Wood’s (a key Mathew’s ally and protégé)  fort and trading post awarded to him in the 1646 Indian treaty. In any event Berkeley through the period lasting into 1652 substantially stayed out of the Maryland affair. the Curious Mathews Episode: That Berkeley was his own man we do not contest, but is there something going on from at least 1643-46 that suggest London may have had plans for Samuel Mathews, and with asserting control over William Berkeley. If London permitted Thomason and Claiborne to engineer their Maryland adventure, why put up with a nettlesome royal governor next door in Virginia? Kukla and Billings (and I) agree there was a serous attempt between 1642-3 and 1646 to bring Berkeley to bay. Let’s start with the Earl of Warwick. Certainly the wild man of English privateering, war with the Spanish, and colonization of North and South America. The founder and inspirer of Providence Colony had, as mentioned previously, drifted, and then rushed to puritan and parliamentary groups during the pre-civil war and as the civil war evolved. Early on (1641) he was named by Parliament to head the Commission on Foreign Plantations, replacing the Laud Commission,. Laud in 1641 had been impeached, sent to the Tower, convicted and would-be executed. Replacing him was. of all characters, the son of now-dead Thomas Smythe despised enemy, the Rich family titled in 1641 as the Second Earl of Warwick. In today’s parlance he was made “czar” of parliamentary colonial affairs–and head of the Admiralty to boot.. Only one “holdover from the Laud Commission remained on Warwick’s Commission, and Warwick himself “had possession of the governmental rubber stamp of approval of his long-standing personal anti-Spanish foreign policy”. His command of the Navy empowered is colonial policy. When he decided to crack down on Dutch Virginian trade, he could and did seize a lot of Dutch ships enroute to one colony or another. As he watched Claiborne’s Maryland scheme ripen in 1642 and 1643, did he see opportunities in Virginia as well? Well, maybe? Maybe Not. In his new position did Warwick sense the limits of his ambition, and the wildness of Claiborne’s. Roper stresses Warwick’s instincts were less wild and sensitive to the limits of his power. But despite this undisputed mass of authority and power ” the ascendancy of Warwick and his allies to their government brought little practical change to English overseas trade and colonization in terms of what we might call imperial oversight or even in terms of the relationship between the colonies and the metropolis. The patterns of commerce, territorial expansion and imperial administration that had been established prior to 1641 remained essential in place; indeed they intensified [99] L. H. Roper, Advancing Empire: English Interests and Overseas Expansion, 1613-1688 (Cambridge University Press, 2017) pp. 128-9. Warwick’s new Commission was less hell-bent for adventure but more sensitive to the American colonial perspective. Warwick’s Commission was infused with good number of London officials who had been closely associated, indeed some were lobbyists, of the American colonies, especially Massachusetts-New England Puritans and Pilgrims. As Roper asserts “after 1642 the commercial and political connections between colony and the metropolis became increasingly integrated. [99] L. H. Roper, Advancing Empire: English Interests and Overseas Expansion, 1613-1688 (Cambridge University Press, 2017) p. 130 In his new position he made great use of his rolodex of former investors, family, and business partners, and no one benefited more than Maurice Thomson.  Warwick, acting indirectly by 1644, let Thomason and his agents carry out their coup of Calvert’s colony, thrusting out its government and installing their own–but at no point did he strip Calvert of his charter, which without doubt was within his authority. This may be the first sign that as far as the colonies went, Warwick had his limits. In this we find considerable support. Virginia also was impacted by the kind mercies of Thomason and his associates, but while Thomason et al devoured Maryland by 1648, Virginia-relevant Commission policy was almost the opposite. Billings observes “the civil war prevented Warwick’s commission from intruding upon Virginia, though it did not deter the earl from considering what might be done to establish Parliament’s writ there. His first inclination was to let Virginians rule themselves, and he was not necessarily adverse to leaving Berkeley in place, just so long as everyone accepted the commission’s oversight“. Billings further reports he made these intentions public which was sent out early in 1644. By that point Berkeley had put through his 1643 blitzkrieg Assembly restructure and combined with his 1642 anti Virginia Company leadership position was well-positioned within Virginia’s elite; in no way was Berkeley, despite his experience, anywhere near as vulnerable as the Calvert brothers. [99] Warren G Billings, Sir William Berkeley, p. 106. But maybe a gentle stirring of the Virginia waters might yield some positive results could, and apparently did, wander into Warwick’s mind. First reported by Kukla who asserts that Warwick through Mathews had weaved the Claiborne Clique’s way way through Berkeley’s masterful stoke of restructuring Virginia provincial government in his 1643 bicameral remaking of the Virginia Assembly. “Not wanting to be outmaneuvered by a new governor, the merchant-councilors accepted the newly-created House of Burgesses as a legitimate political arena. They induced Thomas Stegg, the Virginia factor of Maurice Thomson to resign from the Council of State, and by whatever means win the election to the new lower house, and secure the speakers’ chair for their faction [Jon Kukla, Order and Chaos p. 292]. At that time Warwick sent private letters to Samuel Mathews, who for some reason was in England [99] Billings, Sir William Berkeley, p. 106 and footnote 61. Mathews, after having returned to the Virginia Council of State in 1638, had stepped down in 1644; he would not return to the Council during affairs discussed in this module; his genealogists refer to this time as “as his quiet period”, adding he was more consumed with his private profit-making affairs, and withdrawing from the public. In any event it would explain why Mathews was absent when Claiborne diverted Virginia militia and invaded New Kent in the autumn of that year, and also suggest why Mathews, the plantation conquistador did not become active in the Third Powhatan until after Berkley’s return in 1645. Mathews seems to have played no know role in the Ingles invasion nor in the negotiations that followed. I might also suggest, Mathew’s wife coming from an aristocratic family that had serves Charles (Hinton), offered him some threads https://www.genealogy.com/ftm/p/a/l/Jerry-M-Palmer/GENE9-0001.html It was during that time Warwick wrote privately to Mathews, making known to him his desire to conduct a moderate program for Virginia and seeking his assistance in that endeavor. He went so far as saying that if Mathews wanted to assume the direction of Virginia government, through the governor’s office, he would have Warwick’s support. In any event in those private letters [99] See Billings, Sir William Berkeley, footnote 61, p. 106 Warwick repeated privately, his message and position publicly expressed, but also hinted that, as Billings puts it, he was ok “if Mathews maneuvered Berkeley from office, and was elected instead, such a change would not be unwelcome“. Kukla picks up on this and asserts that by 1645, that position had sharpened, and that “Mathews had written authorization from the Earl of Warwick … to bring Virginia. if Mathews chose into Parliament’s fold”. Kukla cites different correspondence than Billings (see footnote 53, p. 292), and adds the Third Powhatan war had intervened–and the affair in Maryland had commenced. I might add Parliament’s position in the war was improving as well, and Berkeley’s stay in England, was still fresh. [99] Jon Kukla, Order and Chaos in Early America, p. 292. Both Kukla and Billings concur, however, that Mathews did not follow through on these letters, and apparently stayed in England–leaving Berkeley untouched in Virginia. Mathews, closely associated with New Men Merchants in Harvey’s ouster, and in playing his role in the 1639 Virginia “deal was by 1639 well-known and respected within the Company and Parliamentary camp. His very close personal relationship with Claiborne, and was a key player in the Magazine and fur-trading, not to ignore his long-standing business role in supplying the tobacco export fleet with victuals and supplies on their voyages back to England–Mathews was not a supporter of trade with the Dutch, although archeology of his plantation reveal a number of Dutch goods in his possession. Nevertheless, he declined to follow up on Warwick’s letter. Whatever, Warwick had in mind with his Mathew’s letters, it was always a sideshow in the great cosmic potential policy agenda of that revolutionary period. Mathews was the logical candidate and he declined; Warwick lacked reasonable capacity to move against Berkeley. Why Mathews did so, we can only guess. His family genealogist, Jerry M. Palmer suggest that the period 1644 to 1650 or so was Mathew’s “quiet period” in which having resigned from the Council of State in 1644, he pursued his own interests and profits–apparently involving trips to London. https://www.genealogy.com/ftm/p/a/l/Jerry-M-Palmer/GENE9-0001.html The renowned “governor-slayer”, was not interested in going after Berkeley. He did, however go after the Powhatan. Others observed that by this time a political culture had taken shape in which Virginia politics was fashioned around the principle of least government, and even such places as the Council of State allowed “to each his own” in the pursuit of private profits. If our earlier observations on Berkeley and going native have substance, one senses a collegiality among the larger planter class, sort of like J R Ewing’s Dallas “Cattleman Club” created a common bond among those who aggressively competed for any tobacco they could grow and export. Strongest in the Council of State, this atmosphere of shared ambitions, seems to have carried over into policy-making in which planter owners were the “us” and the others were the “they”. It is possible the Clique’s emergence in the late twenties generated an imposed unity against the Clique by our mainstream planters. That the Clique’s most apparent advantage was its ability to interweave themselves into both New Men and Privy Council circles no doubt set them off from the Mainstream planter. The rise of the Assembly meant an alternative to the Council of State had manifest itself, and the development of leadership within that body created overtones that furthered links to local county leadership, which in return led to “spreading”/quid pro quo or the “if you get the benefit for that then I can get the benefit for this” policy-making atmosphere. In this atmosphere Berkeley, with his going native strategy, was one of them, albeit more than first among equals, but inside rather than an external agent. The free-floating vacuum that was the civil war period was fertile ground for this development. By the middle forties, with Claiborne more on his own than ever, that the Clique was weakening, with Mathews being a likely example. Joint activities and partnerships in economic ventures, as well as social relationships among neighbors in a fairly compact, if isolated, policy system, that formed around counties probably provided some opportunities to work together in policy-making.  The rejuvenation of local militias triggered by the the Third Powhatan provided yet another occasion for the development of social patterns among the competitive elites. The oligarchy, as I see it, was, if anything, more entrenched, and the tilt to counties further enhanced as they led a great deal of the resistance to the Powhatan. Whatever its good points and bad, the First Migration elite fabricated a policy system to support its goals and ambitions, and once again demonstrated their capacity to govern and to define in their own terms political and economic development of the colony. And, for all practical purposes the tobacco plantation-based monoculture, sustained by inertia and a shred pattern of economic activity reinforced by tobacco’s role as the principal currency of the colony continued on is merrie way, civil war, Indian rebellion notwithstanding.

Berkeley’s Aggressive Royal Style of Going Native: As an element of his going native strategy intended to cultivate support and as a precondition for his ED agenda, Berkeley had personally “pacified” the Powhatan with military campaigns in 1645-6, and successfully negotiated and led the approval by the Assembly of a treaty which settled the Indian matter for three decades. The treaty effectively secured “site control” over the coastal Tidewater through to the the Appalachian Fall Lines (todays Richmond, Petersburg, Fredericksburg), thus ending what had been nearly forty years of chronic Indian raids and warfare. To sustain that new “conquest” Berkeley personally constructed a fort at today’s Petersburg, and delegated to new planter elites from England the construction of a system of forts along the Fall Line (William Byrd I, arriving in 1649, built and founded what became Richmond). We will introduce the last in this section. Although extremely controversial today, Berkeley’s site control and removal of Native Americas from these contested coastal Tidewater lands necessarily meant white European hegemony. Without effective site control, lacking to this point, economic growth, English agriculture, plantation or yeoman, could not “take root”.  As we shall see with the Puritans in New England, and the Dutch in New Amsterdam, establishing site control from Native Americans was a de facto precondition for successful economic development–placing ED square in the middle of one of America’s greatest moral complexities. Needless to say, our earlier-described planter willingness to use black slaves as low wage workforce, also meant that economic development could not separate itself from that stain on America’s history. No attempt will be made in this history to defend or justify ED’s involvement in these moral complexities. It is a reality that the two stains were interwoven with economic development in colonial America–and would continue to be so through the entire of American history. As had happened back in 1634, the conquest of new lands from Native Americans generated yet another land grab, a land rush into new Tidewater territories, stretching to the Fall Line. Berkeley’s site control also had the intended effect of creating an opportunity to cross the Fall Line and enter into the Piedmont central plain. Tobacco, a crop that rapidly exhausts the soil’s nutrients, combined with the normal succession of generations/cohorts, combined to compelled plantation elites to continually find virgin land to form new manors/tobacco plantations. The family-clans responded (especially after 1680 by first completing the settlement of the coastal Tidewater, then crossing into Virginia’s interior over the Appalachian Fall Line into the Piedmont plateau. While Berkeley started the initial movement himself, at Petersburg/Fort Henry, it was plantation elites that followed up after his removal. The Piedmont, including Fort Henry, became settled by the more aggressive clan leaders such as William Byrd, and the Randolphs. Berkeley seems to have acquired a good deal of credit-respect for his leadership during the Third Powhatan War and the peace treaty that ended it. My argument was whatever his general popularity among Virginians, the key to a successful administration lie in the factionalized planter oligarchy. Earlier in the previous module I labeled it “going native” by not just supporting the planter class but by joining it. We integrated that governance strategy in our case study on his 1643 Dutch initiative, and in this section we will return to it, and develop another going native nuance, peeling off Samuel Mathews and his entourage from Claiborne by encouraging a diversified economic base by developing a trade with the Native Americans– endorsing, supporting, even participating in it personally. In 1649, this land rush got very complicated as Charles I, on the verge of defeat and capture by the Puritans, made as one of his last acts, a massive land grant to a group of loyal aristocrats and the their families. That land grant, the Northern Neck, embraced over a million acres between the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers, was legally a “baronial estate”, whose administration and legal identity was outside the jurisdiction of the Virginia colony. It was an legal “proprietary” apart from the the authority of the Governor and the General Assembly. The Northern Neck initially included a goodly number of aristocratic families, and its initial governance was a matter of negotiation among the families. When Charles II was restored to power in 1661, he restored that grant, but gave Berkeley personal authority to “manage” its day-to-day affairs on behalf of the aristocrats. Berkeley’s abrupt departure ended that tenuous relationship, and from that point on the Northern Neck became a quasi-independent huge mass of land that extended from the Potomac into today’s West Virginia–almost all of present day Virginia’s northern counties. The Northern Neck will play a significant role in our Virginia story as we go forward in future modules. When Berkeley came back his actions support my assertion that he was on his own and he had better pursue those needs identified by Virginians. He first went to work to confront head on and subdue, and bring an end to the Third Powhatan War. How he formulated the strategy to do so, I do not know, but it clearly was intended to “cut off the head”–capture and or kill Opechancanough. That he adapted his war strategy to support his political standing, by using his 1646 peace treaty to open up the interior to fur trading posts and awarding the latter to individuals critical to his political standing is very evident. The second initiative, more related to the English civil war and the royal agenda, was his “religious war” to support the Anglican Church and repress Puritanism. Finally, his third initiative, to double-down on the Dutch trade–clearly separating himself from the New Men merchant Londoners and the Claiborne Clique–was shared with the Assembly Mainstream planters and his own preferences. The central theme underlying each of these as he conducted them in Virginia was to solidify his own position as governor among the different Virginia factions, and to do so because he believed it the best he could do to support his king during a civil war increasingly looking more and more worrisome by the month. Lost in all of this, however, is that in his strategy, actions and achievements associated with the conduct of the war, the negotiated peace treaty, and the opening up of the hinterland was the aggregated effect of generating exceptional popular and oligarchic support of Virginians, and in so doing contrasting himself from the Claiborne Clique and its monopolistic-London derived vision for the Chesapeake future. Bluntly, while Berkeley served Virginia successfully in these endeavors, Claiborne was in Maryland and New Kent, Mathews in London, and he alone was in Virginia. Fausz, who describes Berkeley’s aggregate policy agenda during his first administration  captures this nicely: Berkeley’s Religious Policy:  Most Virginians, to the extent they were religious, were tied to the Anglican Church. Puritans, were in a clear, if noisy, minority. “The overwhelming sentiment of the colony had long been for strict uniformity in the Church [of England] ‘as neere as may be to the canons in England’ and several statutes had ben passed by the Assembly [in the past] to suppress Quakers and Puritans“. Wertenbaker and Billings suggest it was Puritan aggressiveness in writing to Boston asking that Massachusetts send Puritan ministers to Virginia to preach to their congregations. Three ministers were sent, each with a letter of introduction to the governor. Rather than receiving his support, Berkeley launched an initiative to support the Church of England and to suppress the Puritan congregations. Berkeley’s bill to the Assembly (1647) “requiring all ministers …  to conform to’ the orders and constitutions of the church of England” both in public and private worship, and directing the Governor and council to expel all dissenters from the [colony]. Under these conditions, two ministers left, and one, William Thompson, to remain in his congregation and actively proselytize.[99] T. J. Wertenbaker, Virginia Under the Stuarts, pp. 74-5 His Puritan activism was further intensified when Berkeley’s own chaplain, Thomas Harrison broke with the Church of England, and proclaimed a more Powhatan-friendly relations which justified the 1644 massacre as a “judgement of God upon the colonists for their persecution of Puritans. Harrison was expelled from his parish for not preaching for the Book of Common Prayer. An important effect of this war was to isolate, and grossly irritate, Richard Bennett, a major player in the Maryland invasion, and the leading Puritan of Virginia.  His opposition, based in places like Northampton County along the Chesapeake Bay, likely causes a weakening of its representation in the Assembly after 1647. It also generated a local regionalism that seriously considered breaking away from Virginia. [99] T. J. Wertenbaker, Virginia Under the Stuarts, pp. 82-3] Suffice it to say, a Puritan faction felt and manifested opposition to the governor, and served as a base of support to those who would shortly wish to replace Berkeley. Wertenbaker takes another tact by calling attention to the dispersed number of free former indentured servants who operated small tobacco farms-plantations usually on inferior ground and dependent on the resources of the larger planters in their area. Calling them an emerging “middle class”, which I think best to be a class of small working farmers and laborers, he suggest they possessed some sympathy for the ideas of parliament and opposition to the authoritarian program of the provincial government and counties dominated by larger planters. Wertenbaker observes that Berkeley was in some danger and the Assembly granted him a “guard” in 1648 against “the many disaffections to the government from a schismaticall party, of whose intentions our native country of England had had and yet hath too sad experience” [99] T. J. Wertenbaker, Virginia Under the Stuarts, pp. 75-6 Frankly I do not know what to make of Wertenbaker’s “middle class” and his  suggestion of a “parliamentary party”, certainly composed of Puritan and Puritan-leaning Virginians and those who identified more with the ambitions and potential policy system espoused by Parliament. We certainly cannot ignore the dominance of former Virginia Company elites, Claiborne, Bennett, Mathews and their entourage during the late 1640’s into the Restoration. Reminding the reader we are three decades out from suspension of Virginia Company charter, it is clear the heritage of the Company is more and longer than most might appreciate. But this is its last hurrah. Most historians of this period have preferred to cite the loyalty of the majority of Virginians to the royalist cause–and without doubt the aggressiveness of Berkeley and the Assembly straight through to 1652 supports that position. Having said that, it does not necessarily imply the denial of minority grouping(s) that waited it out and endured majority rule until Parliament and Cromwell thought otherwise in 1651-2. That such groups were more observable in the 1652 negotiations between the Cromwell commissioners and Berkeley-Assembly, through to the Restoration, and the lead-up to Bacon’s Rebellion suggest it is appropriate that we acknowledge as it was slowly growing in the 1640’s and 1650’s that both Virginians and their elite were becoming more complex, diversified, and more representative of the spectrum of ideas and values common in England and the British Isles. We dare not risk becoming so absorbed in Berkeley, and the royalist tide he rode, to what was likely a reality that Virginia in this period was evolving in ways that many critics of the First Migration period downplayed or ignored. Bailyn, to his credit, does see change in this period into which we enter.

Free Trade with the Dutch–Perhaps more controversially Berkeley over two decades tried to break the stranglehold of English merchants, trading factors, and shippers over the transport and sale of Virginia tobacco. Required by English law and regulation to trade exclusively with London, using British shipping, Virginia planters were seemingly locked into a trade that cut their profits dramatically, and made them dependent on England. Berkeley, determined to weaken this artificial monopoly, made several deals with the Dutch, in West Indies and New Amsterdam, that challenged the British mercantile system by attempting a 17th century version of free trade. In 1647 he negotiated “most favored nation status” for Dutch merchants opening up Virginia to Dutch trade and the West Indies and New England to Virginian trade. This could have been a huge innovation, disruption if one prefers, in the tobacco economic mono-culture that Virginia was at that time. During this time, as we shall discuss in a future module, the Crown, and Berkeley passed legislation to develop cities, and particularly a port city through which export and commercial trade could be made. Hotly contested in London and among powerful British merchants, Berkeley pursued his policy successfully until 1649 when Charles was captured, tried, and executed. Berkeley continued his resistance, even threatening to oppose Cromwell militarily (he was after all 3000,nautical miles away), but Cromwell’s 1651 Navigation Act which (a colonial era Jones Act) required that English ships be used in English trade) and the Treaty of Jamestown in 1652 which required Virginia join the English/Puritan mercantile “commonwealth” put an end to Berkeley’s Dutch “free trade” flirtation. . Berkeley, in essence forced out of office, retired to his farm. Domestic Virginia elites simply replaced Berkeley during the interregnum having the unintended effect of both solidifying the political position of Virginia’s plantation oligopoly, and allowing it to continue its royalist inclinations–infused as we shall see below by refugee royalist immigration Berkeley never seems to have lost his enthusiasm for free trade with the Dutch. Upon his return from England, however, he discovered that both Claiborne and Mathews had alerted Parliament and the New Men financiers of Berkeley’s-Assembly action, but the latter were consumed with other matters at that time and did not respond until February 1647 when it called attention to “Adventurers [merchants and lenders] to the several Plantations [colonies] … of America … to discourage the colonists from trucking with the Dutch. That measure provoked the second piece of Berkeley’s legislation” [99] Warren G. Billings, Sir William Berkeley, p. 101 The enactment reached Jamestown just in time for the 1647 Assembly meeting in Jamestown. So in 1647 yet another legislative act was approved by the Assembly specifying that commercial relations with the Dutch was essential to the “colony’s being and subsistence …[and]  condemned attempts by ‘some English merchants on purpose to affright and expel the Dutch and make way for themselves to Monopolize not only our labors and fortunes but even our Persons”. The legislation formally invited the Dutch to trade and promised than anyone in Virginia “who caused them disturbance would suffer punishment and lost of his estates”. [99] Victor Enthoven and Wim Klooster, “the Rise and Fall of the Virginia-Dutch Connection in the Seventeenth Century, in Douglas Bradburn and John Coombs (Eds) Early Modern Virginia: Reconsidering the Old Dominion (University of Virginia Press, 2011, pp. 100-1. Interestingly, Billings adds the Assembly tacked onto the legislation yet another message to the new Parliament that “the act  intruded upon the ‘libertye of the Collony & a right of deare esteeme to free born persons that noe lawe should bee established within the kingdome of England concernine us, without the consent of a grand Assemblye here. Quite possibly, the declaration continued, Parliament had been mislead by the ‘wylie & spetious’ pretences’ of Londoneres and other English traders. If so that was no excuse for the  ‘most honorable houses [of Parliament] to trample upon the rights, immunities & prividedges of our Charter … that were the Conditional reward and [recompense] propounded for our Undertakings [settlement of Virginia] in these rugged paths of Plantation. Kinda cheeky don’t you think? The Indians, god be blessed round about us are subdued; we can only fear the Londoners, who would faine bring us to the same poverty, wherein the Dutch found and relieved us; would take away the liberty of our consciences and tongues and our right of giving and selling our goods to whom we please [99] Victor Enthoven and Wim Klooster, “the Rise and Fall of the Virginia-Dutch Connection in the Seventeenth Century, in Douglas Bradburn and John Coombs (Eds) Early Modern Virginia: Reconsidering the Old Dominion (University of Virginia Press, 2011, p.90

Billings comments that Parliament did not respond and that Berkeley’s commercial policy “went unmet” by anything coming out of Westminster.[99] Warren G. Billings, Sir William Berkeley, p. 102-3. Perhaps, but Billings also a few pages later observes that “some in Parliament anticipated Berkeley’s overthrow. Chief among them was Robert Rich” who, the reader remembers is our Second Earl of Warwick discussed in considerable detail earlier. In November 1643 Parliament appointed Warwick governor-in-chief and Lord High Admiral of all the colonies as well as chairman of its commission entrusted to govern the foreign plantations. Virginia, Berkeley nor the Assembly, seem to have contested the Commission. The Commission in turn pretty much left the colonies alone–a de facto “lets agree to disagree” compromise that neither side had any capacity or incentive to fight. A 1644 public letter from Warwick confirmed the compromise which remained in force through the decade. At that time, however, Warwick met with Samuel Mathews. in London at the time and known to be supportive of Parliament. A subsequent letter suggested the content of their meeting by confirming the compromise but suggesting to Mathews that if Berkeley was overthrown, and replaced by Mathews, Warwick would not be displeased. [99] Warren G. Billings, Sir William Berkeley, p. 105-6. Mathews didn’t take him up on the offer, preferring to remain in England, leaving Berkeley unmolested. For our purposes, this slight of hand, reveals that Parliament-Warwick was well aware of Berkeley, and that within the Claiborne Clique at least there was a undertone of patient watchful waiting until civil war fortunes produced a clear winner-loser. Berkeley, on the other hand got a letter from New York’s Dutch governor-general, Peter Stuyvesant asking to establish a formal trade agreement between the two colonies. Presumably, he sent a gift, an “a finely bred Spanish horse”, presumably captured as a prize from Curacao. Over the next several years “a series of transactions” between the two were made. Looking further out in time , I cite below Berkeley’s 1651 remarks that attacked the imposition of the First Navigation Act and strongly we can support the notion that “free trade with the Dutch” was no opportunistic initiative, but a core Berkeley economic development principle. But that principle was not carved out of stone; it lasted as long as Berkeley was governor-until 1652. The English civil war had a profound effect on Virginia-Dutch commercial relations, both in the short and long run, and both in the scope and in character. During the war navigation between the mother country and the colony was severely hampered. While Parliament got the upper hand in England, Virginia remained firmly royalist until 1652. Dutch merchants … dominated tobacco exportation during the war years. In the long run many different commercial ties were established between the Dutch Republic and Virginia. They involved elite Virginians, London merchants, English and Dutch merchants operating from Amsterdam and Rotterdam, and Dutchmen settling in Virginia. During the 1640’s Virginian planters and republican Dutch entrepreneurs worked closely together. These contacts were so well developed by 1652 that in spite of the Commonwealth’s assumption of control … Dutch ships still sailed to Virginia … By the end of the 1650’s closely integrated networks relied on the Dutch, English and Virginian contacts [99] Victor Enthoven and Wim Klooster, “the Rise and Fall of the Virginia-Dutch Connection in the Seventeenth Century, in Douglas Bradburn and John Coombs (Eds) Early Modern Virginia: Reconsidering the Old Dominion (University of Virginia Press, 2011, pp. 105-6 By the time Berkeley was removed from office in 1652 the innovations of the Dutch in shipping, export, and logistics had been introduced into Virginia. They were there to be copied. The Dutch factors blurred and blended with the New Men over time. At one point in the future, the Dutch will even burn a Virginian annual tobacco fleet in Chesapeake Bay, but tobacco export financing remained in tact. Let’s say this in another way: the tobacco export monoculture’s financial underpinnings was installed by 1652, if not 1660. This was the essential pillar necessary to institutionalize the Virginian tobacco economic base–and the culture and society that grew around it. That financial infrastructure included headrights and indentured servants and by the 1650’s, thanks to the like of Thomason and others, black slaves were appearing on Virginia piers.

The Interregnum (1648,1649,1651, 1652) 

The period between 1648 through 1652 was without doubt the most disruptive to Virginia politics ever to that point, and it was the period in which events in “the Center” were the prime cause of that disruption. Ironically, as we shall see, because Berkeley and the Assembly were united in their rejection of the “new Republic in England”, and loyal to the new young king, Charles II located at first on the continent, the actual disruption in Jamestown was minimal. Like a delayed time bomb, however, the Periphery events, one at a time, exploded onto the Jamestown policy agenda. In this section, therefore, we chronicle the periphery disruptions, and content ourselves with reaction to them from Virginians. Our concluding segment, however, Cromwell’s expedition to Virginia and Maryland, the negotiations of its Commissioners for their surrender, the retirement of Berkeley, and the establishment of the Virginia republic is a book in itself. Remarkably, until recent years only a few of the better historians dealt with it. First, during much of 1648 Charles was captured, held prisoner, then tried, condemned, and executed in early January, 1649. During this time Parliament itself was purged (ending the “Long Parliament); the remaining MPs in aggregate became the Rump Parliament, the House of Lords was terminated (which resulted in the termination of Warwick and his Commission on Foreign Plantations) [99],[“After 1649 many aristocrats and gentlemen who had supported the parliamentary cause, such as Warwick who had commanded they navy, withdrew from public life alarmed at the radical course English society seemed to be taking” L. H. Roper, the English Empire in America (Routledge, 2015), p. 117. Considerable turnover of personnel in London and English governance followed. Warwick’s Commission was replaced (February, 1649) by the “Council of State”, which we will make notation so that it will not be confused with the Virginia Assembly  Council of State. In May 1649, the Rump Parliament issued a declaration declaring the “Commonwealth”, and declaring its jurisdiction over the various colonies and territories of the Stuart “empire” This turnover, principally of royalists resulted in immigration to Virginia and  Barbados. We shall speak of that later. The turnover and the seizure of the English foreign policy establishment, its institutions and agencies, and the entrance of a new, sort of, establishment was a major dynamic in our history. This is the time that Maurice Thompson in particular, and his wing of the Warwick New Men, rose to power. In that it is they who waged the “invasion” and  the restructuring of Maryland colony, one can expect some repercussions in Virginia. In aggregate these changes were the transition into a new policy system (some call it a “regime change”)–replacing the Stuart policy system. There was a new “Center” and necessarily that resulted in changes to the Periphery. Being the seventeenth century there was, of course, both a lag, and a sequence of policies and programs that usually culminated with a master policy initiative, which is usually captured in textbooks and comprehensive histories; the Navigation Act of 1651 is one of these. The “minor” policy initiatives, however, disrupted things in their own way, and invited change and reaction when they were made known to the periphery. The good intentions of the Rump Parliament became manifest when, in January 1650, a bill was brought in and finally passed on August 1 ‘for the advancing and regulating the trade of the Commonwealth, and for the erection of a special special council of trade to look after this business. On September 27 another bill was brought in, and passed by October 3, which is sometimes called [the first] navigation act”, but which had for its immediate object the punishment of four rebellious colonies, Barbados, Bermuda, Antigua and Virginia, by forbidding them to have any manner of commerce by traffic with strangers, prohibiting any foreign ship to trade with them except by special license, and ordering “Generals at sea” to seize all ships that attempted to do so [99] Charles A. Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History, England’s Commercial and Colonial Policy, Vol. 4 (Yale University Press, 1938, 1964),  p.35-6 What is seldom mentioned among these changes was the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648. The consequence of greatest importance to this history is that it resulted in the independence of the Netherlands, which became the first republic–soon to be followed by the second (England). The flip side of that was the Dutch (and English) war against Spain ended as well. Warwick (and Thompson (et al) privateering in the West Indies, Brazil, and Caribbean went out of style. Smuggling didn’t, and from the colonies’ perspective that did not change. The Stuarts had not dealt well with all this as we know, and the English new republic was of a mind in these years to hold a grudge against the Netherlands for their intrusion into the foreign trade of their colonies, tobacco in particular. For the first time, with war’s end and now the Rump Parliament in control, the entire English navy and merchant marine was available for their use. England, arguably, had the largest navy of that period, and that, for the first time meant it had sufficient capacity to involve itself in smuggling and enforcement of England’s new colonial foreign trade policy. While it might seem odd, in this four year transition period, the issue of highest priority in the center was not to ensure the compliance of colonial governments to the new regime, but rather to eliminate the Dutch disruption in North American export trade. It was not until 1652 that the former issue became prime–when Cromwell entered the picture. The reader therefore will see much of Virginia (and Maryland) tobacco trade regulation, and a series of legislative acts that forbade North Americans from trading with the Dutch. These years were not kind in this regard to the Dutch, who suffered a number of setbacks including the near-bankruptcy of its West Indies Corporation–the power behind the New Netherlands colony. BTW, by 1652 England and Holland were at war: the first Anglo-Dutch war. Although this was not known to Andrews in his 1938 work cited above (see Footnote 1, p.41), the authors of these trade bills were uncovered by Robert Brenner (see pp. 187-193 Merchants and Revolution), and constitute a surviving wing of what we call his “New Men” [other such as L. H. Roper (see in particular Advancing Empire) have fleshed this out considerably). Their principal reason for this desire to monopolize the tobacco trade was the dominance of Maurice Thompson in the interregnum foreign policy establishment; Thompson will be the prime author of the famous/infamous 1651 Navigation Act, which is usually considered as the first formal policy, the cornerstone, in English colonial trade. It is worth comment that while we concentrate on Virginia and Berkeley in this section, they were only one of a subset of colonies, and if possible, Barbados and Bermuda were even more hostile to the Parliament than Berkeley. Andrews, however, recognized the prime reason was to throw out the Dutch and establish an English monopoly of trade over its colonies, and most importantly the merchant community of London was the inspiration and driving force behind the legislation and English colonial policy. The influence of the trading companies, which adhered to the old idea of monopoly, was undoubtedly very great with parliament and the [London] Council of State. The Commonwealth was dependent for its financial support upon London [City of] and the companies … and it is not difficult to believe that these corporations brought pressure to bear upon the Rump Parliament to legislate in their behalf as against the outports [Bristol, et al] which favored the ‘lost trades’ (that is the trades controlled by the Dutch, and an open commerce [99] Charles A. Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History, England’s Commercial and Colonial Policy, Vol. 4 (Yale University Press, 1938, 1964),  p. 42; while we have not developed this theme after we introduced and discussed its impact on the Virginia Company, the rivalry between London and the “outports” is both a major factor in the evolution-development of English colonial trade policy, but also a dynamic that impacted greatly very early English (North American) colonization. It is an important factor in the answer to our question as to why current American states are different from each other. As we might expect, Claiborne and Bennett were the chief beneficiaries in this new foreign policy-making system. That is a really big deal in our history. Their dominance will be the last hurrah of the Virginia Company legacy, and the de facto end of the First Migration period. The Virginia 1650’s (1652 to the Restoration) policy system will, like the English, be transformed into a new policy system-regime change, a policy system whose policy-making was dramatically different from the Stuart era–a policy system which will leave behand a bit of a bend in Virginia’s (and Maryland’s) policy making heritage. the Interregnum from the Center’s Perspective (1648,1649,1651, 1652)  The period between 1649 through 1652 was without doubt the most disruptive to Virginia politics ever to that point, and events in “the Center” were the prime cause of that disruption. Ironically, as we shall see, because Berkeley and the Assembly were united in their rejection of the “new Republic in England”, and loyal to the new young king, Charles II, the actual disruption in Jamestown was minimal–until as they say, “it wasn’t”. Through it all Berkeley remained in power to 1652. His support for Charles II was firm and consistent–and aggressively if verbally pursued. He manned his battlements, literally, until the very last. It is worth comment that while we concentrate on Virginia and Berkeley in this section, that Barbados and Bermuda were even more hostile to the Parliament than Berkeley. Accordingly, we include several issuances of the period by Parliament, Berkeley and the Assembly so the reader can make their own judgment on the intensity of this obstinate position. The reader ight also note my sense is this reaction is more than a cranky, obsessive inflexibility to the realities of Parliament’s s victory in England, but also a reaction to the regicide which struck at the heart of one thousand years of English history, and signaled the radicalness of the change in the offing. This in not how the Periphery is supposed to communicate with the Center–and the Center did catch on to that. Wertenbaker reports of Berkeley’s reaction to the regicide. Upon receiving the news, he called the Assembly immediately into session. Its first resolution was to proclaim Charles II as king, a second declared it high treason “to question even by insinuation the ‘undoubted & inherent right of His Majesty … to the Colony of Virginia, and to all other of His Majesties dominions”. Calling Charles I’s executioners lawless tyrants, it further proclaimed that “what person soever, by false reports and malicious rumors shall spread abroad, among the people, anything tending to change of government, … such persons, not only the authors of … but the reporters and divulgers thereof, shall be adjudged guilty [99] T. J. Wertenbaker, Virginia Under the Stuarts, p. 77 When Berkeley and the Assembly later followed this up by rejecting the right of Parliament to exercise sovereignty and to declare themselves a “Commonwealth”, Parliament responded in October 1650 with an act that stated “Since the colony had been settled by the English at great cost to the nation, it should rightly be under the authority of the present government, that “divers persons in Virginia had committed open treason ‘traytorously by force and Subtilty’ usurping the government, and defying the Commonwealth, and in order to repress speedily the rebellious colonists and to inflict upon them a merited punishment, they were to be forbidden all ‘Commerce or Traffique with any people Whatsoever’. The full force of the English navy was to be used in carrying out this act, and all commanders were directed to seize and bring in foreign vessels found trading with the colony”. Virginia was placed under a naval blockade, a blockade which was not as effective to cut off all shipping, did interdict a good many Dutch ships. Berkeley again called the Assembly to convene and before it he launched into an extended rant [99]  See T. J. Wertenbaker, Virginia Under the Stuarts, p. 78] which does not translate well into modern American English. Suffice it to say it ends “by the grace of God we will not so tamely part with our King, and al those blessing we enjoy under him, and if they [Parliament] oppose us, do but follow me, I will either lead you to victory, or lose a life which I cannot more gloriously sacrifice then for my loyalty, and your security”. Thomas Paine of “Give me liberty or give me death” fame was more succinct, but Berkeley’s spirit and core emotion echoes through the ages. The Assembly responded with enactments reiterating their loyalty to the Crown “denounced the [House of] Commons as usurpers and regicides, “We are resolved to Continue our Allegeance to our most Gracious King, yea, as long as his Gracious favor permits us, we will peaceably trade with the Londoners, and all other nations in amity with our Sovereigne. Protect all forraie Merchants with our utmost force in our Capes [Chesapeake Bay and Virginia Rivers]: Allwaies [always] pray for the happy restoration of our King, and … hazard of their souls [that] have opposed him”. Aside from the emotion and intenseness of the response, a byproduct of the regicide, it is evident that in the minds of Berkeley and the Assembly, the third rail of Virginia politics had become free trade, with the Dutch or anybody. The citizens of 1773 Boston could not have equaled the genuineness of the emotion of those who took a stand one hundred and twenty three years earlier–except, of course, they were Virginia’s First Migration thuggish elite demanding continuation of the English monarchy and death to the Republic that overthrew it. The Interregnum, I argue, was the pivot point in Virginia’s colonial history. True, a pivot from Virginia Company colonization to royal, for the lack of a better word, had evolved over what turned out to be an eighteen year process, inherited by William Berkeley in 1642. That period, however, certainly until around the 1630’s mid-decade, left the colony about in the same shape as it was in 1624. The 1650’s, however, if there were a breakout point, was where the scale and volume of change became most pronounced. We ask the reader to be sensitive to a reality that finally, after nearly a half-century, Virginia was more than just surviving,  a place where the narrow-focused, hard-working, ambitious, greedy, grasping settler grabbed land planted tobacco. Like a delayed time bomb, however, the Periphery events, one at a time, exploded onto the Jamestown policy agenda. In this section, therefore, we chronicle the periphery disruptions, and content ourselves with reaction to them from Virginians. Our concluding segment, however, Cromwell’s expedition to Virginia and Maryland, the negotiations of its Commissioners for their surrender, the retirement of Berkeley, and the establishment of the Virginia republic is a book in itself. Remarkably, until recent years only a few of the better historians dealt with it. First, during much of 1648 Charles was captured, held prisoner, then tried, condemned, and executed in early January, 1649. During this time Parliament itself was purged (ending the “Long Parliament); the remaining MPs in aggregate became the Rump Parliament. The House of Lords was terminated (which resulted in the withdrawal of Warwick and the termination of his Commission on Foreign Plantations). Considerable turnover of personnel in London and English governance/aristocracy followed. [99],[“After 1649 many aristocrats and gentlemen who had supported the parliamentary cause, such as Warwick who had commanded they navy, withdrew from public life alarmed at the radical course English society seemed to be taking” L. H. Roper, the English Empire in America (Routledge, 2015), p. 117. Warwick’s Commission was replaced (February, 1649) by the “Council of State”, which we will make notation so that it will not be confused with the Virginia Assembly  Council of State. In May 1649, the Rump Parliament issued a declaration declaring the “Commonwealth”, and asserting its jurisdiction over the various colonies and territories of the former Stuart “empire”. This turnover, principally of royalists resulted in immigration to Virginia and  Barbados. We shall speak of that later. The turnover and the seizure of the English foreign policy establishment, its institutions and agencies, and the entrance of a new, sort of, establishment was a major dynamic in our history. This is the time that Maurice Thompson in particular, and his wing of the Warwick New Men, rose to power. In that it is they who waged the “invasion” and  the restructuring of Maryland colony, one can expect some repercussions in Virginia. In 1652 the noise from the Center came crashing down on them. But, and it was a big “but”, unexpectedly from my way of thinking, the regime-policy system change that resulted, if anything sustained the underlying fundamentals of the colony’s economy, society, and groupings–but not its provincial political institutions. The Assembly, Burgesses more precisely, negotiated its way into becoming the sovereign most powerful political decision-maker of the new policy system. Changes in the electoral franchise were dramatic between 1646 and 1655, but reversed in that year. The political oligarchy survived in tact through to 1662. In aggregate these changes were the transition into a new policy system (some call it a “regime change”)–replacing the Stuart policy system. There was a new “Center” and necessarily that resulted in changes to the Periphery. Being the seventeenth century there was, of course, both a lag, and a sequence of policies and programs that usually culminated with a master policy initiative, which is usually captured in textbooks and comprehensive histories; the Navigation Act of 1651 is one of these. The “minor” policy initiatives, however, disrupted things in their own way, and invited change and reaction when they were made known to the periphery. The good intentions of the Rump Parliament became manifest when, in January 1650, a bill was brought in and finally passed on August 1 ‘for the advancing and regulating the trade of the Commonwealth, and for the erection of a special special council of trade to look after this business. On September 27 another bill was brought in, and passed by October 3, which is sometimes called [the first] navigation act”, but which had for its immediate object the punishment of four rebellious colonies, Barbados, Bermuda, Antigua and Virginia, by forbidding them to have any manner of commerce by traffic with strangers, prohibiting any foreign ship to trade with them except by special license, and ordering “Generals at sea” to seize all ships that attempted to do so [99] Charles A. Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History, England’s Commercial and Colonial Policy, Vol. 4 (Yale University Press, 1938, 1964),  p.35-6 What is seldom mentioned among these changes was the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648. The consequence of greatest importance to this history is that it resulted in the independence of the Netherlands, which became the first republic–soon to be followed by the second (England). The flip side of that was the Dutch (and English) war against Spain ended as well. Warwick (and Thompson (et al) privateering in the West Indies, Brazil, and Caribbean went out of style. Smuggling didn’t, and from the colonies’ perspective that did not change. The Stuarts had not dealt well with all this as we know, and the English new republic was of a mind in these years to hold a grudge against the Netherlands for their intrusion into the foreign trade of their colonies, tobacco in particular. For the first time, with war’s end and now the Rump Parliament in control, the entire English navy and merchant marine was available for their use. England, arguably, had the largest navy of that period, and that, for the first time meant it had sufficient capacity to involve itself in smuggling and enforcement of England’s new colonial foreign trade policy. While it might seem odd, in this four year transition period, the issue of highest priority in the center was not to ensure the compliance of colonial governments to the new regime, but rather to eliminate the Dutch disruption in North American export trade. It was not until 1652 that the former issue became prime–when Cromwell entered the picture. Andrews, however, recognized the prime reason was to throw out the Dutch and establish an English monopoly of trade over its colonies, and most importantly the merchant community of London was the inspiration and driving force behind the legislation and English colonial policy. The reader therefore will see much of Virginia (and Maryland) tobacco trade regulation, and a series of legislative acts that forbade North Americans from trading with the Dutch. These years were not kind in this regard to the Dutch, who suffered a number of setbacks including the near-bankruptcy of its West Indies Corporation–the power behind the New Netherlands colony. BTW, by 1652 England and Holland were at war: the first Anglo-Dutch war. Although this was not known to Andrews in his 1938 work cited above (see Footnote 1, p.41), the authors of these trade bills were uncovered by Robert Brenner (see pp. 187-193 Merchants and Revolution), and constitute a surviving wing of what we call his “New Men” [other such as L. H. Roper (see in particular Advancing Empire) have fleshed this out considerably). Their principal reason for this desire to monopolize the tobacco trade was the dominance of Maurice Thompson in the interregnum foreign policy establishment; Thompson will be the prime author of the famous/infamous 1651 Navigation Act, which is usually considered as the first formal policy, the cornerstone, in English colonial trade. The influence of the trading companies, which adhered to the old idea of monopoly, was undoubtedly very great with parliament and the [London] Council of State. The Commonwealth was dependent for its financial support upon London [City of] and the companies … and it is not difficult to believe that these corporations brought pressure to bear upon the Rump Parliament to legislate in their behalf as against the outports [Bristol, et al] which favored the ‘lost trades’ (that is the trades controlled by the Dutch, and an open commerce [99] Charles A. Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History, England’s Commercial and Colonial Policy, Vol. 4 (Yale University Press, 1938, 1964),  p. 42; while we have not developed this theme after we introduced and discussed its impact on the Virginia Company, the rivalry between London and the “outports” is both a major factor in the evolution-development of English colonial trade policy, but also a dynamic that impacted greatly very early English (North American) colonization. It is an important factor in the answer to our question as to why current American states are different from each other. Thus change in the relations between Center and Periphery affected economics, trade, and the logistics-financing nexus-clusters on which they rested. Workforce immigration became the flip side of the tobacco trade, and the 1651 Navigation Act, unenforceable as it still was, augured, put pressure on past practices and imposed a pattern that we call mercantilism today. After 1651 mercantilism was more than an inconsistent mélange of practices and wishful thinking, it was a two-way street navigated by Center and Periphery as each attempted to maximize their goals. Even today it is still largely thought of as a one-way street from Center to Periphery, but the post 1651 seventeenth century experience was more complex and subtle: [Center-based] officials could not extend their fiscal-military state across the Atlantic until locals eschewed their cross-national, flexible origins, and chose to conform to new imperial standards. The years between 1624 and 1713 were distinguished therefore, both by new expressions of state power, and by the greater realization that mercantilism rested on individual behavior. It would be the willingness of colonists to abandon an earlier cross-national Atlantic [-wide trading] community, and accept membership in the British empire. [99] Christian J. Koot, Empire at the Periphery: British Colonists, Anglo-Dutch Trade, and the Development of the British Atlantic, 1621-1713 (New York University Press, 2011), p.5 What also changed is that Virginia matured in these years, immigration increased, hinterland expansion (and reinvigorated tension with Indians despite their loss in the Third Powhatan), a new generation of elites–a flood of new indentured servants–and a steadily increasing stream of black slaves-fleshed out the colony and allowed it to pass from an exercise in human survival into a more settled, civilized, if grossly unequal, society with a veneer of elite affluence. Even the tobacco monoculture gave way a bit with production of staples, orchards, livestock and fur trading–with yet another small infusion of artisans, professions and merchants. The political structures, especially counties, matured, expanded in scope and function, and with increased population turned into settlements as well as clusters of large plantations with freehold hangers on. These changes infused tensions, ambitions and varying perspectives into governance and that became William Berkeley’s problem in his second administration. Bacon’s 1676 Rebellion is testimony to how well he did in adjusting to the change. While not wishing to go too far into civil war detail, the Interregnum also included the contested passing of the throne to Charles’s son, the twenty year old Charles II. Charles was recognized as King by the Parliament of Scotland in February 1629 and he militarily contested the assertion of sovereignty by the Rump Parliament. Cromwell defeated him severely at the battle of Worcester in September, and Charles was forced into exile in France, the Netherland and Spain over the next nine years. The reaction to the regicide, however, brought about a quick pushback with Scottish highlanders (Charles was, of course, a Scot and the Scottish king), a rather desperate rebellion arose in Ireland, and with moderates ousted from Lords and Parliament a moderate opposition of some means was outside Cromwell’s Presbyterian tent. This was all a bit heady and it infused Charles II and his supporters to take to the field. During that time, Charles II acted as the English king, making decisions, including treaties, forming a rag-tag army and such. One such decision which hall be dealt with in a later module, was. in 1649, in an attempt to raise funds he issued a land grant in Virginia to an assemblage of aristocrats. The grant, known as the Northern Neck (which BTW included the previously mentioned Northumberland) grossed over five million acres-of ill, to non, defined territory. As Charles II lacked the power to enforce the grant until 1661, the grant mattered little in the period discussed by this module. The “Northern Neck”, however, did notably impact eighteenth century Virginia. Essentially Charles II did was whatever he could to retain the possibility of his return to the throne. The reader should keep in mind that he would return to the throne. During the 1650’s while we concentrate on Virginia, he’s out there in the shadows until 1658 when Cromwell died, his son was “tossed out”, and  finally, the intervention a Scottish army and its general overthrew the Rump Parliament, brought back the remnants of the Long Parliament. In 1661 Charles was restored to the throne. In this period, Berkeley remained loyal to Charles II in his retirement period–and that was presumably one of the reasons he was restored to governorship in 1661. Gardening at Green Springs, Berkeley, the reader will discover Berkeley still packed a punch in the new provincial policy system. As we might expect, Claiborne and Bennett were the chief beneficiaries in this new foreign policy-making system. That is a really big deal in our history. Their dominance will be the last hurrah of the Virginia Company legacy, and the de facto end of the First Migration period. The Virginia 1650’s (1652 to the Restoration) policy system will, like the English, be transformed into a new policy system-regime change, a policy system whose policy-making was dramatically different from the Stuart era–a policy system which will leave behand a bit of a bend in Virginia’s (and Maryland’s) policy making heritage. The Interregnum in Depth: The Center Transforms, the Periphery Fights Back, System Change Between 1648 and  1651 Virginia’s narrative is the hardline, almost threatening Berkeley-Assembly support for Charles II, but vituperative commentary on Parliament and its ambitions. Lacking any hints of compromise, it was so aggressive even the Council went along. Virginia’s actions were congruent with her rhetoric as Berkeley and the Assembly accelerated and intensified their pro-Dutch shipping overtures, and opposition to initial trade directives. It is thought the 1651 Navigation Law was a direct response and the Virginia reaction to that literally launched the ships that carried the commissioners and the marines to Virginia-Maryland in 1651. The sentiment and speechifying in favor of Dutch trade in Virginia ran high in this period, but the opposite trend was increasingly evident in England. More subdued in Virginia was a sentiment that resuming the impaired English trade was also important. With such trade impaired, Virginia consumers had to make do with what they could obtain, and some attempted to create domestic equivalents such as livestock and orchards. Another example, that of silk production by Edward Digges, a future Interregnum governor (whose father was a famous parliamentary leader and shareholder of the Virginia Company) imported two Armenian artisans led to the Assembly approving legislation requiring planting of mulberry bushes by planters, and in 1656 provided 4,000 pounds of tobacco to support one of the Armenians. That Berkeley was also behind this experimentation sustained provincial attention into the Restoration period At heart Virginia colonists were very much Englishmen and as emotions in England ran high that the Dutch were eating England’s lunch. “The risk that the rivalry between the two states might lead to war [as it did in 1652] gave new weight to those considerations of self-sufficiency, which since Elizabeth’s day had helped to promote an interest in colonization” [99]  Wesley Frank Craven. “the Southern Colonies” p.248 When the negotiating commissioners arrived in 1652, Cromwell had been conducting negotiations to avert such a conflict for almost three years, and in 1651 seizure of Dutch ships seriously intensified. In the spring of 1652, when the commissioner’s ships arrived in the Chesapeake, that patience was over. In April 1652, the Dutch admiral  Trompe put out to sea with orders to protect Dutch shipping and in May, off Dover, the first encounter followed. War was declared in July. 1652. English colonists in Virginia did not lack for patriotic loyalties, and that had to have been a headwind against Dutch trade. The war itself (almost completely a naval war), fought chiefly in the English Channel and Mediterranean did not touch North America. Trompe was killed in battle in 1653, and overall the heavier English ships had the better of the action.

The Second Administration

People Recruitment That Berkeley used this people recruitment strategy to populate his institutions of governance and secure a stable and somewhat responsive constituency that it served as his political base, perhaps provides us with an early example of Virginia’s “brokerage style” policy-making, a style which was was run from the county which were influenced by its major plantations, and a political culture which emerged to justify, guide and regulate its governing elite. Summary If one wonders why today’s American states are different from each other we need to appreciate that history itself is differentiated by its nature. The fog of a history so long ago obscures much of this change, or reduces it to distorted stereotypes and smush, the collapsing of decades, even centuries into a sentence of description. changed appreciably from 1607 Virginia  to 1732 Georgia (never mind 1776 Delaware), the thirteen colonies took their own sweet time to come together. At the time of the American Constitution in 1789, Georgia had been around for fifty six years, Virginia one hundred and eighty two. In essence he seems to have gone “native” and while still governor became a plantation owner himself becoming “one of them”. Leaving local county government to the planter elite and the House of Burgesses, he opened the door for the local planter oligopoly to cement its dominance, allow it to develop its own distinctive political ideology and culture, and incrementally promote-institutionalize it on its plantations, a way of life that mirrored the pre-Civil War English aristocratic manor. Diversification of the Virginia economic base–Whatever the origins of his beliefs, likely a derivative of his precocious rejection of protectionist mercantilism in favor of comparative advantage and free trade, Berkeley from 1642 on believed, and acted, aggressively to diversify Virginia’s economic base away from tobacco. Upon arrival in the colony, he established his own private plantation, Green Spring House near Williamsburg. At Green Spring House he constantly experimented in the planting of about anything he thought might grow. . Flax, fruits, liquor, rice, potash, and even silk (he imported the worms) achieved sufficient success that he attempted their export, and importantly convinced the General Assembly to pass supportive legislation and subsidy of costs to export for these crops.  His object  attract the interest of the tobacco planters. Eventually, on the advice of his black slaves, he adopted rice and that was very successful. N one of these crops, however, produced wealth competitive with the wealth generated through tobacco, and the taxes levied to support Berkeley’s economic diversification program irked the plantation owners.  and his efforts never dented the near monopoly of tobacco. Berkeley was not the only royal governor that attempted to diversify the economic base. All that tried, however, got no where. It was not until mid-18th century that Virginia planters felt the need to diversify away from tobacco. Berkeley’s economic diversification was not limited to agriculture. Adding yet another dimension, Berkeley engaged in what today would be labeled as cluster-building. Berkeley, in 1644, secured from the House of Burgesses a corporate charter to a group of land speculators who promised to open up the Piedmont frontier and found a settlement in an area with potential lead and ore mines. According to the charter they would then be tasked with opening up the mines for production. The corporation received an abatement from any land sales profits, but was required to pay “the royal fifth” on the profits from the mines. For Virginia this was a pioneering major innovative initiative into economic development and its use of a state corporate charter for this type of goal was a first. Despite its good intentions, the venture did not fare well–especially for the corporate entrepreneurs. They were all killed, to a man, by Indians. The state-chartered corporation, however, that they were awarded proved to be Virginia’s first economic development organization (EDO). From this mine corporation award, state-chartered corporations were off and running (literally from the Indians); they would be the standard structural vehicle for public-private partnerships through to the American Revolution. George Washington’s Potomac Company was a 1784 version. Workforce-Indentured Servant Legislation–Berkeley’s “workforce” initiatives are far and away hugely controversial today, but again he was involved in these initiatives, and they cannot avoid mention simply because they make many uncomfortable, deservedly so. One could legitimately say these workforce initiatives were critical to the structure of that policy system and therefore need be understood. There are two sets of initiatives, the first regarding indentured servants, and the second, alluding to the transition among Virginia planters away from indentured servants to the importation and use of black slaves. Expanded tobacco growing logically meant an increased use of indentured servants. A virtual industry developed around their “recruitment”, travel, and subsequent employment in Virginia. By mid-17th century an estimated 50% of male Virginians were indentured servants [1]. While many servants were recruited by disreputable means, many others willingly signed on, not unaware of the pitfalls. Sadly, their economic plight, desperate by any description, made the risk attendant on being an indentured servant seemingly preferable to their personal status quo. Also as we shall see, many got caught up in what turned out as an enormous “bait and switch” as the terms of indentured servitude were altered considerably during, and after, the Berkeley period. Over the years, the preference for willing and compliant workers by the planters increased, and women, children, and the desperate Irish intensified. The terms of the standard indenture contract were altered to the favor of the “owner”. Planters could sell their contract to others–and did. Provisions in the contract allowed for punishment for “bad behavior”, which besides the more normal bad behavior included dating and marriage. Master’s consent was required. It also included severe penalties, both personal and civil for “running away”. The Virginia government was complicit in all these; in 1696, for example, legislation imposed a fine of 500 pounds of tobacco on any minister who married an indentured servant without master’s permission. As early as 1658, servants were required to spend an additional year under contract if they were responsible for a child born in or out of wedlock. There was also the potential for public flogging for these and other offenses. Children produced by indentured servants upon workable age were subject to the parent’s contract–and they could be sold away (1646). I could go on. Perhaps it was mostly the change in awarding of land after servitude that really spelled the end of indentured servitude in Virginia. Future land ownership was always the key attraction to a prospective indentured servant. The awarding of land at the end of the contract, however, eroded after 1624; by Berkeley’s time it was usually not honored, if indeed it was still part of the contract. Discharged servants got corn, a few coins, a set of clothes, maybe some tools–and sent on their way. As politics and economy changed in England, the attractiveness of indenture declined. During the English Civil War indentured servant importation declined significantly, and the victory of the Puritans meant they discouraged further importation. By the 1680’s, the end of Berkeley’s tenure, English law prosecuted merchants who used indentured servant contracts. By that point, an estimated 4 out of 5 Virginia residents were actual or former indentured servants [2]. Virginia planters were opening up the Piedmont, still not “pacified” and subject to Indian attacks (Peter Jefferson’s first claim to fame was as an Indian-fighter); former indentured servants would not work as sharecroppers on the new Piedmont plantations. Moreover, indentured servants increasingly became “surly”, hard-to-manage, and increasingly non-productive. So a new workforce needs be recruited. Virginia planters turned to using black, at first Caribbean slaves. “After 1670, most Africans entering Virginia would be enslaved under the cover of international law as non-Christian war captives“[3]. In 1662, legislation made children born of slaves, slaves themselves. Fatherhood by planter masters was not punished by Virginia law. When a white woman bore a child of mixed ancestry, she was fined 15 pounds month for the support of that child, or she could herself be bound and sold as an indentured servant. Her child was bound for indenture for a period of thirty years. In 1691, the law required all manumitted (freed) slaves be transported from Virginia. In 1670 there were an estimated 3,000 slaves in Virginia (out of a population of 35,000, or 8.5%). With the Restoration, Charles II authorized royal-chartered corporations (for example, the “Royal Adventurers Into Africa”) and an active English slave trade developed. Others followed. By 1700 Virginia’s slave population ranged somewhere between 6,00 and 12,000–out of an overall 65,000 (10 to 18.5%) [4]. In 1705, all these laws and much more were aggregated and compiled into the legal “Virginia slave code”–which, for all practical purposes serves as the best single date for the legal and formal institutionalization of slavery in Virginia. Berkeley’s Post 1660 Restoration Agenda Until the final defeat, and subsequent execution of Charles I in 1649, Berkeley personally was a royalist in the true sense of the word, loyal to Charles I and his son Charles II. As Cromwell’s Puritans gathered momentum, Berkeley allowed Virginia to declare itself neutral. During the Cromwell period (1650’s) Berkeley was forced out of office, and retired to his Virginia plantation. He did not abandon his royalist inclinations, which were shared among many major Virginia planters. Out of office on his Virginia plantation he pursued his many interests, foremost of which were private economic development projects. During that period, the powerful Virginia planter oligarchy assumed direct control over the colony policy system, electing its own governor, and in general ran the colony’s affairs with an indifferent Cromwell administration lurking in the background. In anticipation of the Restoration of the English monarchy in 1660, Burgesses reappointed Berkeley as governor. Charles II in 1661 formally reappointed Berkeley to the governorship; in that communication Charles II referred to Virginia as his “Old Dominion“. Upon Berkeley’s return to power he navigated a tricky “foreign policy” that substituted Virginia economic development goals instead of Crown and English mercantile objectives–with decidedly mixed results. Berkeley, post-Restoration, ruled rather autocratically, suspending House of Burgesses’ elections. His “Long Assembly”, elected in 1662, served without subsequent election until 1676–when he was “fired”, and literally sent packing. It was Berkeley who, in this controversial and tumultous period, changed the long-standing Virginia freeholder election franchise (1670, 1676) to require property ownership–effectively disenfranchising the great majority of Virginia adult males, and unofficially establishing the plantation oligopoly as Virginia’s ruling elite. Berkeley was nearly overthrown in Bacon’s 1676 Rebellion–but survived the insurrection in large part due to the tolerance of the traditional planter elite to his rule. Bacon died in mid-1776 from dysentery (which nearly killed Berkeley as well), and the timely arrival of a British frigate with marines crushed the Rebellion. Berkeley’s subsequent cruel repression of the movement prompted Charles II to recall him in dishonor in 1677. Still he had “ruled”, officially and unofficially, for thirty-five years. He died in 1677 and was buried in England. Perhaps the key to understanding how Berkeley navigated these treacherous waters, particularly during the Interregnum period when he was out of power, was the deal he seems to have made with Virginia’s emerging planter class, which as we described in the previous module, dominated not only the economic base, but local county government–which in its turn, co-opted the colony-level decision-making bodies, the Royal Council the upper house, and the lower House of Burgesses. In return for the planter deference in the colony’s foreign and economic policy-making, Berkeley turned over the critical policy area of land development to the Royal Council. –Amazingly, Berkeley’s first initiatives upon returning to office in 1660 was to reopen his trade initiatives with the Dutch Governor, Peter Stuyvesant. He negotiated a comprehensive treaty that restored relations and trade, provided a remedy for debt collection in Virginia’s courts, and return of any runaway servants from either colony. In no time at all, a restored Charles II issued his own version of Cromwell’s Navigation Act which excluded the Dutch from the tobacco trade. The net effect was that Virginia planters would pay more to trade and receive a lower price for their product. Berkeley was incensed and (1) immediately traveled to London to argue his free trade position, and (2) wrote his defense of Virginia economic interests vis-à-vis the English mercantile commonwealth: “A Discourse and View of Virginia“. Once again he argued for a diversified Virginian economic base. He also concentrated fire on the adverse effects of the Navigation Act on Virginia, and concentrating on tobacco production and export. In England, however, Berkeley was ill-treated; essentially told to go back to Virginia and mind his own business. The King himself, while sympathetic to a diversified economic base wanted no reduction in taxes and any pressure from disadvantaged England merchants and shippers who also paid his taxes. In early 1663, Charles II promulgated his third Navigation Act which made things even worse–requiring the Virginia tobacco to be sent to English ports, and from there to be sent to their ultimate destination. This was ruinous in its effect on Virginia prices, and in short order Virginia went into a recession induced by tobacco prices. If that were not bad enough, the Dutch, unhappy at being excluded from the tobacco trade, began to pirate the English shippers, and in 1665 war erupted between England and Holland. Caught in a recession and now a war, tensions in Virginia were high, autocratic Berkeley got himself squarely in the midst of a restive western planter and lumpen proletariat insurgency that transformed itself into Bacon’s Rebellion. Relations between Britain and Holland erupted into war. Virginia was successfully raided by a Dutch fleet, destroying some of its annual exports. When peace was restored (New York City finally became English) Berkeley returned to his old habits and established trading ties in NYC with low-cost exporters while on his own version of trade mission. At one point, Berkeley, personally traveled to London to argue his trading position with the British Trade Bureau–he was immediately sent home again and told to mind his own business . Upon returning home, he minded his own business and turned a blind eye to others engaged in such transactions. Over time an alternative, if illegal trade with New York and the West Indies developed. Never really successful in reversing the British control, he nevertheless put himself on the line and endeavored to free Virginia’s economy from English restrictions, regulations and imposed costs. His mixed record regarding free trade, however, left largely in tact a tobacco export nexus that drained profit from the Virginia planters, put it in the hands of intermediaries, and over time these London merchant “factors” (and later Highland Scot merchants who traversed up and down the Tidewater making individual deals with plantation owners) disadvantaged the plantation owner. Throughout the remainder of Virginia’s colonial period the planter class , given an unwillingness to cut back on personal-lifestyle expenditures, while committing his few profits into new slaves-labor force in new fields this export finance system pulverized the pocketbook of the Virginia planter class–leaving them tobacco rich, cash deprived and locked into the tender mercies of the factors. Forever in debt, the Virginia tobacco plantation exporters were early on aware of the costs of a close, but extractive, union with Great Britain. It is no surprise they were first to the line of American merchants and exporters to the potential profitability of a war of independence. The more aggressive planters organized the tobacco assignment trade as agents of London syndicates … They [the Virginia consignment planters] were able to secure credit and obtain manufactured goods and other merchandise from English firms. Acting in the dual role of planters and merchants [i.e. they sold domestically these manufactured goods] , these men parlayed their earnings [potential investment capital] into landholdings situated on the major rivers. They managed the hinterland from their riverside wharves and warehouses, dominating the commerce within a twenty-five mile radius … they purchased tobacco from the smaller planters and sold them English goods. They speculated on land, breaking it into smaller farms, which they either leased or sold to small planters, including  … freed servants [5]. Berkeley Imports a Policy System and Future Political Culture  During and even after the end of the English Civil War, Berkeley developed carried out a determined and sophisticated “people-attraction” economic development strategy. It was very much a personal initiative, for which he drew upon his powers as governor, and his substantial influence among English royalists lords and gentry. Using in particular his authority to administer the colonial headright system and to make land grants (including after 1649 land grants in the proprietary Northern Neck), Berkeley developed a semi-formal campaign to lure worried English royalists to immigrate to the safe haven Virginia offered. “As the rump of the New Model Army mopped up the war for the victorious Puritan legislature, England got hotter still for the scions of the Royalist upper class. Throughout these years, Sir William waved the flag for King and Colony. He actively recruited a Royalist elite for emigration to Virginia. In a time of great insecurity for Royalist landed gentry, Virginia became a beacon of safety, comradeship and opportunity” [6]. Berkeley had his greatest influence on Virginia … More than any other person, he shaped the process of immigration to the colony during a critical period in its history. That process in turn defined Virginia’s culture, and largely determined the main lines of development for generations to come [6a]. Berkeley’s  targeted people-attraction initiative involved personal contact, letter-writing, personal invitation to targeted candidate, a trip to England in which he spoke and made individual appeals. Many were friends, family and among his voluminous contacts, acquaintances, and from time to time a pamphlet. The initiative continued from the middle 1640’s to the early to mid 1660’s. After that royalist migration continued on its own momentum. In addition to refugee recruitment, in earlier years Berkeley also actively promoted a “younger sons immigration” by publishing pamphlets which he mailed directly to the younger sons of English nobles. In an English system centered on primogeniture, such a campaign was attractive and successful. Berkeley, himself a younger son, knew his audience. In that both campaigns Berkeley primarily attracted “men of good families” [Albion’s Seed, p.219] “many persons of condition and good officers of war” (Bound Away, p. 4) English lower noble, or gentry, rather than highly-ranked aristocratic families; one can sense the aspirational backdrop of the attraction campaign. The latter had a more intense attraction to the traditions of nobility, and used it in an equally intense manner to provide legitimacy to their influence and status to their social standings. In any case, they shared an upper class perspective, education, wealth and family connections, Anglican Church membership, and usually attachment to the King. No doubt waged with mixed motivations, Berkeley’s people attraction initiative was quite successful, and continued while Berkeley was retired on his estate-plantation at Green Springs. With the return of Charles II after 1660, Royalist elites also returned to English power and influence, and those family members who in the interim had taken residence in Virginia were able to resume their relationships with their English family resident in England. Conversely, resident English families had plentiful contacts with Virginia royalists so they could use the latter’s assistance in matters of family succession (second sons in a primogeniture-dominant succession), marriage of daughters, and recourse to trade, finance, and political influence). Sons, sometimes daughters, of Virginia plantation owners were sent for their education to England, returning home upon completion. Berkeley had imported 17th century Downtown Abbey to Virginia. What started as a sort of political refugee program, Berkeley’s targeted people-attraction strategy became much more over the decades that followed. Whatever its perceived social status, Virginia royalist elites became an offshoot residence for many great families of the English aristocracy and gentry. As Virginia royalist elites themselves intermarried with domestic ( Jamestown Company era) Virginia elites, bloodlines and family clans–alliances developed. In essence, Berkeley, consciously or not, had also initiated what turned out to be an importation of the English royalist (Cavalier) political culture. This, as shall be argued, is the major element in the development of the Tidewater elite political culture. The uniqueness of Berkeley’s targeted people attraction strategy was it imported an elite, and subsidized their workforce. [The Royalist immigrants] expected to find and accepted the the hierarchical English society they left behind. Privilege, liberty and economic comfort went hand-in-hand with social status … simply accepted as the ordering of fate or God … [as] had evolved organically in England. It was the social legacy of feudal Norman England. In Virginia, however, this rigid class distinction was draconically imposed on the colony by Governor Berkeley and the like-minded landed aristocracy … From the upper ranks of English society, they came: Culpeper and Fairfax, Throckmorton and Digges, Byrd, Spencer and Gage. Starting with a score of aristocratic families and a hundred families of the landed gentry and burghers, the Virginia elite intermarried quickly  and formed an interlocking directorate … from 1660 to the American Revolution [7] Draconian, I am not sure, but autocratically, and for the most part legally, implemented by Berkeley, these royalist emigrants were granted titles to land in large to huge quantities as an incentive to relocate. This incentives Berkeley provided to his imported elite were the cutting edge of his implanting these immigrants as Virginia’s new elite. In effect he gave them a golden key into the patriarchy, and entry points into its policy system. Moreover, the headright system was the incentive that incentive that kept on giving, subsidizing the enlargement of the initial estate once established. The headright system (the royalist landholders could advertise in England  that indentured servants could upon completion of their contract be awarded fifty acres of additional colony-owned land transferred to the plantation owner (and held by him) upon their arrival in Virginia. As discussed previously, the terms of this land transfer to eligible former indentured servants changed fairly radically over the next fifty years, and the practical consequence of the headright system in the post-Berkeley period especially was to augment the land grants to plantation owners. His emerging planter class was drawn to Virginia by a sophisticated marketing campaign, collateral materials, and aggressive subsidies. Most arrived in the decade following 1655. As royalist refugees arrived during the post-Restoration period. Recruited aristocratic families included the former “holder of the keys” to London Tower, and to a son of a Puritan-displaced don at Oxford College (John Washington–guess who is descended from him?). Heinemann asserts this amounted to a “land grab” involving more than a million acres in the period between 1650 and 1665. Royalist recruits in that period, he further suggests, were highly ambitious men on the make … [with] expectations of wealth-producing plantations Their land grab was made possible by the headright system. Taking out fifty acre patents [land grants] on [future import of ] indentures  [servants], they secured almost a million acres from 1650 to 1665, making windfall profits fifty to one hundred times the cost of their investment by renting or selling lands to ex-servants. Many of these newcomers became part of the provincial gentry by marrying wealthy widows. They created large estates by patenting land and building plantations with indentured and enslaved labor and diversifying their commercial activities. [8] These noble and gentry immigrants, once ensconced in America, “continued to intermarry on both sides of the Atlantic, and moved freely back and forth across the ocean. the result was tightly integrated colonial elite which literally became a single cousinage by the beginning of the eighteenth century.  The families, originally based in Northampton, Kent, Bristol and Gloucestershire and Somerset carried over to Virginia. The overlap with the names of Virginia counties during this period is significant [9]. Succinctly summarized by Hackett-Fischer, Berkeley “encouraged the cavaliers to come over in large numbers. When they arrived he promoted them to high office, granted them large estates, and created the ruling oligopoly that ran the colony for many generations” [10]. Hackett-Fischer based his assertion on the demographic and biographical history of Phillip A. Bruce Social Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century (Richmond, 1907). Berkeley. for example, appointed Richard Lee, a chief lieutenant of the former governor, as his second-in-command (Attorney-General). During his tenure under Berkeley Lee personally accumulated about 13,000 Tidewater acres on which he planted tobacco, was a huge importer of indentured servants, and traded slaves and furs. Upon his death in 1664 Richard Lee was reputed to be Virginia’s richest man. After his death several of his parcels were sold, including what became Washington’s Mount Vernon. His grandson, Thomas Lee melded a political dynasty through marriage, land ownership and executive management of Lord Fairfax’s Northern Neck grant. He was the principal founder and first president of the Ohio Land Company (Lawrence Washington, the President’s older half-brother, succeeded him). He held during the course of his career just about every political office, including House of Burgesses and Royal Council. His children included several sons that featured heavily in the Revolution and the Articles of Confederation, the most notable being Richard Henry Lee, signer of the Declaration of Independence, President of the Articles, and Virginia’s first Federalist Senator to the Early Republic–considered as a Founding Father. The descendant, Richard Henry Lee was great-grandfather of Robert E. Lee.

 the Piedmont Settlement

Governor William Berkeley opened up Virginia’s Piedmont, by securing a tentative peace with resident Indian tribes and setting up a series of forts/settlements into which he placed a number of his royalist recruited elites on brand new plantations secured through Berkeley’s land grants. Chief among them proved to be William Byrd I whom we shall discuss as our case study in the settlement of the Piedmont. The multi-state Piedmont runs from Pennsylvania’s northern borders (Philadelphia marks its eastern PA border), along the edges of the Appalachians through Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, ending in northern Alabama. Its eastern borders typically begin at the Fall Line of each state. It is beautiful country, wooded, alternating flat terrain with low-rolling hills and lots of valleys, moderately fertile with versatile soils, back-dropped by the Appalachians–the Blue Ridge in Virginia. With elevations higher than the coastal Tidewater, its climate was considerably healthier, not swampy, and more comfortable temperatures. The Piedmont was Indian country even after Berkeley’s peace treaty,. Berkeley personally set up several, notably Fort Henry forts along his Fall Line–forts that sometimes developed into contemporary recognizable cities such as Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Petersburg. Fort Henry, for example, is today’s Petersburg. Beyond these cities, heading west until we encounter the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains is the Virginia Piedmont plateau. Its first white settlers were freed or run-away indentured servants/households, who simply squatted on what was the coastal Tidewater’s western periphery. Few in number, they forged a meager subsistence, and dodged Indian raids. Crisscrossed by rivers such as the James, Appomattox, Potomac, and Rappahannock that flowed through the Tidewater to the sea, it was natural that in time, given site conquest from the Native Americans, that the great planter families would simply follow the river’s path from their coastline plantations, over the Fall Line and into the Piedmont. In some cases, however, it worked in reverse, as newly planted royalist recruits set up plantations at the Fall Line and expanded in both directions. Berkeley also set up post-Restoration royalists immigrant in western Tidewater/Fall Line areas which he had stabilized during the 1650’s by a series of forts that ran along rivers at the Fall Line. Entrusting the initial 1649 Petersburg fort project to Colonel Abraham Wood, a former indentured servant, Wood established a trading relationship with the Tribes, and conducted a series of expeditions into Virginia’s interior. “The commanders of Berkeley’s forts were favored with land grants so large they were measure not by the acre, but by the mile.” When he arrived in 1669 William Byrd I inherited three square miles from [Fort Henry] … he took command of the fort and agreed to recruit 250 settlers i.e indentured servants]. For his trouble Byrd was given [an additional] eleven square miles. … [Byrd] referred to himself as a ‘forester’ … [and] maintained their manners as a gentleman. They were as much at home in a London salon as in the American wilderness” [11]. From Byrd, of course, will evolve Virginia’s famous 19th and 20th century Byrd dynasty-machine. The Berkeley initiated expansion into the Piedmont, extended Virginia’s territorial footprint to the Fall Line, and made Virginia the largest, most powerful, British colony in America. To provide context for the above assertion, Massachusetts’ estimated population in 1640, just previous to Berkeley’s arrival, was about 14,000, Virginia’s around 7,650. Toward the end of Berkeley’s administration, 1670, Massachusetts held about 30,000 and Virginia 40,000. In 1640, Massachusetts and Virginia constituted in excess of three-quarters of the entire population in British North America. In 1670, the two states, still the largest, constituted slightly in excess of 60 percent. In that year, Tidewater Maryland was 15,000, and Connecticut held 10,000, New York 9,000. Penn’s Pennsylvania, had not yet commenced settlement until later that decade [12]. [Warning: State boundaries do not precisely compare to contemporary boundaries]. It might be noted that I have not discussed Thomas Jefferson. He claimed a Welsh background, others have claimed a lower nobility-gentry ancestry from Suffolk County in eastern England. In either case, his family subsequently emigrated to St Kitts in the Barbados, and a generation later from Barbados to Henrico County Virginia sometime during the 1670’s. Whatever were his fraternal ancestry, his maternal ancestry were the Randolph’s, indisputably royalist [13]. His father was Peter Jefferson, a frontiersmen-plantation owner who shall be mentioned several times in our discussion of colonial Virginia’s economic development policy system. We are not yet done! As the astute reader might wonder–how many such noble/gentry elites flooded into Virginia during this period? Could they have possibly accounted for the dramatic volume of immigrants during these years? No they didn’t. “The great mass of Virginia’s immigrants [during this period] were humble people of lower rank. More than 75 percent came as indentured servants [14]. In 1611 Virginia’s governor Thomas Dale requested he be sent “all offenders of the [jails] condemned to die” –but that was Jamestown First Migration. Hackett-Fischer believes many did not originate from the poorest segments of English society–but rather a step or two above . Probably most were former, i.e. displaced yeoman farmer households. Overwhelmingly male (3 of 4), and teenage, young men, and even children. Still some were criminals, which, of course, was a rather low bar to achieve in English criminal justice [15]. Whatever their original background, the Virginia experience over time reduced most of them to the lumpen proletariat created earlier by the Jamestown Company. Before the end of Governor Berkeley’s administration [tenant farming/sharecropping} was well-established in tidewater Virginia … As late as 1724, the word ‘farming’ in Virginia still meant tenant farming in the English sense–a meaning it had already lost in Massachusetts. … this … system produced a degraded caste of poor whites [as well as] an exploited black [slave] proletariat. There were large numbers of desperately poor farm workers in seventeenth-century Virginia. Some were indentured servants, others were tenants, a few ere free laborers who wandered from job to job. The condition of the working poor in the Chesapeake was as harrowing as it had been in England. [16]  By the time these folk became non-indentured residents of Virginia, the franchise had been restricted to those who owned property, and so likely most never were able to vote. They became an agricultural lumpen-proletariat, and while anecdotal evidence is bountiful no firm statistical description of their post-indenture is available. But one must remember, these are large volumes of people, relative to the population size. Likely they were mobile, especially prone to migration as a young generational cohort. We are going to see these folk in our discussion of trans-Piedmont and Appalachian migrations. We will certainly see them in the first manifestation, the 1676 Bacon’s Rebellion. Edmund S. Morgan concluded: Virginia’s freemen were  ‘an unruly and discontented lot’, and he suggests the problems, actual and anticipated with this growing and dangerous class, were one of the reasons, that Virginian [plantation owners] switched from using unfree European immigrants to using unfree Africans toward the end of the [seventeenth] century [17] . Hackett-Fischer observes that Virginia second migration immigrants were vastly different from those of Massachusetts with Virginia’s being “highly stratified [i.e. dependent on higher classes] more male-dominant, more rural, more agrarian, less highly skilled, and less literate. Many came from the south and west of England; few from East Anglia… These patterns did not develop from chance. Virginia’s great migration was the product of policy and social planning. [Through it] the royalist elite succeeded in shaping the social history of an American region by regulating the process of migration [18]. Through these indentured servants the royalist plantation owners were able to manage their economic system, and most importantly set in place an extremely hierarchical society–from which non elites were effectively disqualified. Make no mistake, Berkeley did not see this class of indentured servants as disenfranchised or even victims of a cruel fate. His classic quote solidifies his personal commitment to the hierarchical and unequal society and economy he fostered. “I thank God we have not free schools nor printing; and I hope we shall not have these for a hundred years. For learning has brought disobedience with heresy and sects into this world; and printing his divulged them and libels against the government. God keep us from both” [19]. The indentured servants were, by and large, not part of this Tidewater political culture. Their political culture, repressed and excluded from the Tidewater elite oligopolistic system, would wait for another day, with the arrival of allies in the western counties of Virginia. In time, many will be identified with what we call the Scots-Irish. Footnotes [1] Ronald L. Heine, et al., Old Dominion, New Commonwealth, p. 49 [2] Ronald L. Heine, et al., Old Dominion, New Commonwealth, p.51 [3]Ronald L. Heine, et al., Old Dominion, New Commonwealth, p.52 [4] Ronald L. Heine, et al., Old Dominion, New Commonwealth, p. 54 [5] Ronald L. Heine, et al., Old Dominion, New Commonwealth, p. 47 [6] D. Huntley, “the Cavalier Flight to Virginia” (British Heritage, Jul 13, 2016) https://britishheritage.com/the-cavalier-flight-to-virginia [6a] David Hackett-Fischer and James C. Kelly, Bound Away, p. 35 [7] D. Huntley, “the Cavalier Flight to Virginia” (British Heritage, Jul 13, 2016) https://britishheritage.com/the-cavalier-flight-to-virginia [8] Ronald L. Heine, et al., Old Dominion, New Commonwealth, p. 47 [9] David Hackett-Fischer, Albion’s Seed, pp. 217-22, p. 238 [10] David Hackett-Fischer, Albion’s Seed, p. 212 [11] David Hackett-Fischer and James C. Kelly, Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement (University of Virginia Press, 2000), pp. 81-2 [12] https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/colonialbostonpops.pdf. [13] https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/jeffersons-ancestry [14] David Hackett-Fischer, Albion’s Seed, p. 227, and Wesley Frank Craven, White, Red and Black: the Seventeenth Century Virginian (Charlottesville, 1971, p. 5 [15]  David Hackett-Fischer, Albion’s Seed, p. 228) [16] David Hackett-Fischer, Albion’s Seed, pp. 379-80 [17] Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: the Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (Virginia, 1975) [18] David Hackett-Fischer, Albion’s Seed, pp 231-2 [19] D. Huntley, “the Cavalier Flight to Virginia” (British Heritage, Jul 13, 2016) https://britishheritage.com/the-cavalier-flight-to-virginia