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. I bet the reader can’t wait to get started. I know I can’t.
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 and Maryland war), is further maturation of the post-1939 policy system, geographic spread of the tobacco monoculture, and solidification of the planter-class elite oligarchy, not new innovations by any means.
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 mysterious year-long sojourn back to England, his “go-native” gubernatorial policy strategy–including his Dutch trade initiative and Maryland–his steadfast loyalty to the Crown, and the goings on within the bifurcated planter elite. All will culminate in 1651-52 when England/Cromwell sends a fleet over to replace Berkeley with a more favorable regime.
Snuck into that 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 but also a crucial explanation for Virginia’s policy system tilt toward decentralization and provincial broker policy-making style.
the Third Powhatan War
Berkeley inherited an impossible relationship with the Powhatan. Since the Second Powhatan War the various local tribes regrouped, and the settlers kept on coming, seizing more land each year and intruding ever deeper on the cherished home grounds of the Powhatan. Billings reports the Powhatans “clung to as much of their traditional territory as they could without provoking the colonists unduly. At the same time the Indians eagerly sought trade goods from the English. The conundrum was how to take the best the aliens had to offer, keep the strangers at a distance, and retain cultural identity. This was not an easy riddle to crack, given the rapidity with which Virginia expanded after 1632. [99] Warren G. Billings, Sir William Berkeley, p. 49
From the Virginians perspective, the tie in with the expansion of the tobacco monoculture was fundamental to their personal business plan and to their desire to express their individualist drives by establishing a homestead-plantation which was compelling. Indians were simply steam-rolled, and any earlier Virginia Company-royal hopes of coexistence and missionary conversion died during the Second War. In Richter’s view “In Virginia the emphasis on individual mastery of labor [obtained through a headright from a land patent] inspired a particularly frantic sort of land grabbling. Whoever first ‘took up’ a plot of choice riverfront ground with an abandoned Powhatan village and cornfields, hired a surveyor to mark its bounds and paid the appropriate registration fees … for the headrights won the prize”.
The expansion into the Middle Peninsular during Harvey’s administration, the construction of the Palisade Wall on the [Williamsburg] fall line, and the simultaneous settlement by such as Potts, West and others established yet another frontier. Settlement on the Eastern Shore, as reported earlier led to yet more land seizures as did the settlers-plantation owners drift to the Carolina borders. While the Second War seemingly ended sometime in the mid-thirties, the tension between Powhatan and English always had the potential to start another.
For Richter the “root of the [Third Powhatan War] was the relentless colonial pressure on Native land holdings from Virginia planters and the roaming herds of semi-domesticated animals, that by trampling the remaining Indian cornfields had become as much a part of the English juggernaut as tobacco. [99] Daniel K. Richter, Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts(the Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2011, pp. 208-9 Piled onto this expansion of Europeans into the Tidelands and northern/southern coastal tidewater land was the influx of more and more settlers after 1635. In 1625, the Virginia census recorded about 750 settlers to about 7600 in the early 1640’s [99] L. H. Roper, Advancing Empire, p. 50. Part of that exodus was the drift toward civil war, and religious-economic tensions that grew during this period.
What really changed after 1622 Second Powhatan War was the mentality of the English. Up to that time, the Virginia Company, certainly its leadership in England, reflected in the hopes of its sovereign James (and later Charles as well) was a sort of missionary and beneficial trading relationship between English and England that would allow for not simple survival but prosperity and the diversification of the economic base. The First Powhatan ended any hopes of that and in return left in the minds of the surviving and incoming English a set of behavior and attitudinal patterns that translated into that “Indians should be avoided as much as possible, used when necessary, and exterminated when they got in the way. Natives were just one more obstacle to English possession of Virginia, and many a colonist looked to that hoped-for-day when the barbarians, like weeds of a field, might be cut down forever. Inspired thus, settlers remained wary, arrogant, and general hostile to anything Indian [99] Warren G. Billings, Sir William Berkeley, p. 50
An interesting sidelight to this narrative is the development of an alternate set of relationships in the Potomac and Maryland tidewater regions. Instead of tobacco, fur and European goods/metals were traded between non Powhatan tribes that settled near-by and English-Virginian traders. The natural enemies of these tribes were the Powhatan, and in their mind the English traders were allies in that struggle. The reader will rightly suspect that I have snuck in the Claiborne Clique, Claiborne and Mathews in particular. “After the founding of Maryland in 1634, Virginians competed with their colonial rivals to the north for control of the Indian trade, and some of the first men [Europeans] to settle along the Northern Neck of Virginia, did so in order to trade with the Susquehannock [99] Colin G. Calloway, the Indian World of George Washington(Oxford University Press, 2018, p. 24
During this period of expansion a significant turn was toward settlement in these areas, small-scale to be sure, but in alignment with a trading focus, settlements were as much trading posts as they were permanent cities. That this trade would in a few decades open up Maryland to a port city, Baltimore, suggests an alternate development to the monoculture was not an impossibly. It also lends a bit of credence that Indian-settler relationships did not have to be the zero-sum relationship such as found in the European Virginia tidewater heartland.
Still, in my view, there was no mistaking the Third Powhattan War was near to inevitable—and had been for at least two decades. The Powhatan traditional home, the Tidelands of Virginia, and what will be North Carolina, was at stake. Sources allege the timing for the attack was some combination of the Powhatan perception of the English civil war and its effects on the colony, and the arrival to the new governor who was in their eyes a newcomer and vulnerable.
Opechancanough had learned of the civil war wracking England and determined that’ now was his time or never, to roote out all the English: For those that they could not surprise and kill under the feigned masque of Friendship and feasting, and the rest would be by wants; and having no supplyes from their own Countrey which could not helpe them, be Suddenly Consumed and famished’ [99] A Perfect Description of Virginia (London, 1649), p. 12; [99] Daniel K. Richter, Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts, p. 209
Amazing as it was, the leader of the third war was Opechancanough, the leader of the second, and a major leader, capturer of John Smith in the first. Estimated to be around 100 years of age, his describers acknowledge he was immobile without the assistance of others, and his eyelids were so weak he required others to hold them up so he could see. Yet, as Wertenbaker states, his mind was clear and his memory of his near-victory in the first year of the Second Powhatan War served as his battle plan for the third. Like in March 1622 he set the say for the first surprise attack on an English holiday (Holy Thursday, 18 April 1644). Hitting with the same surprise and ferocity the result mirrored the first day of 1622, “the Massacre”:
The slaughter was even greater than in 1622, and no less than 500 Christians are said to have been destroyed. But this calamity fell almost entirely upon the frontier counties at the heads of the great rivers, and upon the plantations on the south side of the James. The [Powhatan] could not penetrate to the older and more populous counties of the lower peninsula. For this reason, the disaster, horrible as it was, did not overwhelm the entire colony and threaten its destruction as had the massacre of 1622″ [99] Thomas J. Wertenbaker, Virginia Under the Stuarts, 1607-1688, p. 73
Wertenbaker outlines Berkeley’s response, crediting him with driving the Indians back. Unfortunately, he did not mention that by June of 1644, Berkeley was heading back to England, where he would remain into June of 1645. Richter is more helpful. Admitting that “documentation on the Powhatan campaign against the Virginians is sparse”, but he some commentators report the Indians continued to “alarm” the settlers “day and night”, killing their cattle and corn fields at night [p. 209]. This corresponds to Opechancanough’s game plan in which after the surprise attack he would continue a sustained attack against the Virginians, avoiding a pitched battle, and hitting their food and livestock.
Berkeley had ordered that vulnerable areas be abandoned and the local population sent to protected forts and settlements. The militia were organized at the Palisade, and eighty militia were sent to its relief. Throughout Virginia the militia were woken from their long sleep and formed into an organized force at the county and settlement level [99] William L. Shea, Virginia at War: 1644-46 (Military Affairs, Vol 41, No. 3 (1977), p. 142. Wertenbaker refers also to “Palizaded houses”, that converted a homestead into a mall fort for several families (this was used a hundred-thirty years later in the New York Mohawk River area during the Revolutionary War). He also confirmed that when the English sent retaliatory expeditions the Indians were no where to be found, retreating into the woods.
This meant, of course, the English were able to return the favor and burn Indian crops, livestock and settlements. By June 1644, it was probably clear to Berkeley that a fast quelling of the insurrection was unlikely and that Virginia needed help from England to continue a sustained resistance. As a sidenote, that sustenance was rendered extraordinarily difficult as in 1642, Charles lost control of the English Navy after having been placed under the command of the Earl of Warwick by Parliament. Aware of this development or not, Berkeley called into session on June 1, the Assembly “to map out a battle plan”. A consensus quickly took shape and the Assembly approved a resolution setting the new Indian relations policy for the colony:
wee will forever abandon all formes of peace and familiarity with the whole Nation, and will do the utmost of our power to pursue and roote out those which have anyway had their hands in the shedding of our blood and Massacring of our people”. [They further stated] the tactics that had proved effective in the [Second Powhatan War] … the systematic destruction of the fleet-footed Indians, vulnerable corn crop–were to be followed as farre as our abilities and Ammunition shall enable us [99] William L. Shea, Virginia at War: 1644-46 (Military Affairs, Vol 41, No. 3 (1977), p. 142. Shea suggests that much of this quote came from Berkeley himself.
Berkeley was then authorized to return to England “and implore his Majesty’s gracious assistance for our Releife”. Empowered with letters of credit (to help pay for supplies) and to pay Berkeley’s transit, Berkeley left on 22 June.
At this point, a pause to consider Berkeley’s mission to England. Scattered commends and suggestive wording by several historians suggest they shared my initial reaction to this action. For all sorts of reasons this trip seems counter-intuitive. The political risks of leaving Virginia to the other groups outside his faction, the perils of the trip itself, and the ebb and flow of the king’s fortunes in the civil war, plus the landing of his ship in London, controlled by Parliament, on what was a very fragile mission suggest Berkeley was taking on quite a risky affair. That he took a year to get back, and, at one point, joined on the field of action the Crown’s resistance to Parliament, is in no way contemplated as part of his Virginia mission, can leave one to wonder what Berkeley had in his mind.
Smartly Berkeley had split his Virginia powers between his lieutenant governor, Richard Kemp, and, the Captain General in charge of militia and the military campaign to, OMG, William Claiborne. This was wise in a political sense; Kemp and Claiborne were bitter enemies, rivals, and not likely to join forces against him. Likely Berkeley felt he enjoyed the Assembly’s support, and to the extent it mattered general support in the settler population. But the risk he assumed that in the military campaign was incalculable. What saved him in the end when he did return to Virginia, was that Claiborne was at best ineffectual and has stood accused of using the militia to further his own anti-Maryland ambitions than fighting the Powhatan.
Why was Claiborne Ineffectual in fighting the Powhatan? Inserting the Invasion of Maryland by London New Men and Virginian Associates.
Why was Claiborne ineffectual in waging the Third Powhatan becomes apparent when we see what he was up to during Berkeley’s absence. Berkeley left for England in June 1644, and in the early autumn Claiborne, incredibly invaded Kent Island and repossessed old haunts, New Kent, which for the past six years or so was considered as part of Maryland colony. He was no doubt making a determination as to whether he could breathe life into his old business plan. In the autumn of 1644, Claiborne launched this attack on New Kent with a force of Virginia militia, diverted from the Pamunkey (Indian) campaign. Claiborne reconquered his old trading base and settlement–holding it under his control into 1645. [99] J Frederick Fausz, “Merging and Emerging Worlds, pp. 79-80. In the midst of the Third Powhatan, Claiborne was repossessing New Kent with borrowed Virginia militia.
Fausz, almost commonsensically, sees Calvert saw an opportunity “to link his personal goals in Chesapeake affairs to the larger Anglo-American struggle over political and religious ideology. Exploiting an expanded circle of interethnic allies and associates, Claiborne became the friend of every Maryland enemy making their cause, his cause, and their triumphs, his triumphs. Although Claiborne did not coordinate every move of a united conspiracy, he was linked with, and benefited from all the crises that befell the Calverts between 1642 and 1658.[99] J Frederick Fausz, “Merging and Emerging Worlds, pp. 76.
This focus, determination, obsession on Maryland had a certain appeal to most Virginians, who as Harvey had discovered, were robustly opposed to having a “papist” colony carved out of their loins’. It is not at all likely this firm commitment against Maryland as a colony carried top priority when the Third Powhatan War commenced. That was their top priority, but it proved of little concern to Claiborne who continued in his policy obsession. Working with Thomson, Ingle, Bennet and Stone he was a glue that kept this disparate coalition together as the coup evolved into 1648 agreement with Calvert. Handed a Protestant coup over the royalist Calvert, Warwick was not unhappy, and when Cromwell arrived in the 1651 colonial scene, neither was he.
From 1642 on Maryland was vulnerable. Lord Calvert was resident in England/Ireland, and his brother was governor. Maryland and Calvert were, as all colonies were, considerably disrupted by the start of a civil war, and to make matters worse his colony was financially hard-pressed, near bankrupt, deeply enmeshed in the Irish-civil war campaigns, and Maryland itself was engaged in its own war with resident tribes who were enemies of the Powhatan–and allies of the Claiborne Clique. To further add to Calvert’s woes, Maryland was populated by only a handful of setters. By 1646 the “beleaguered Maryland colony contained fewer English residents than it had at its founding a dozen years before. Lord Calvert’s Maryland was about to enter its “Valley Forge” period of state history.
Almost simultaneously in autumn 1644, a certain Captain Richard Ingle “invaded Maryland with armed adventurers from Virginia and letters of marque from Parliament seeking to destroy the Calvert’s’ alleged ‘tyrannical power against the Protestants”. [99] J Frederick Fausz, “Merging and Emerging Worlds, p. 78; See also Brenner, p. 167. Not surprisingly Ingle rapidly overran what opposition he encountered, and seized Maryland’s capital. Maryland’s governor, the brother of Lord Calvert, i.e. Governor Calvert, fled to, of all places, Jamestown–where else could he go?
Who was this Richard Ingle? On its face Ingle was the captain of a ship named “Reformation” (a neutral name no doubt). Hailing from Kent, England Ingle was a Chesapeake trade factor in the employ of a certain Maurice Thomson. Fausz asserts Ingle’s real mission was a “plundering time” that Thomason-Ingle exacted from Maryland residents for his personal revenge and mistreatment by Calvert’s council of state, and a larger aspiration of “London Puritan merchants to ruin the Stuart-tainted Lord Baltimore“[99] See Fausz, p.79, footnote 44 for a detailed, more than you ever want know, explanation of Thomason’s anger. Brenner casts a larger shadow on the Maryland invasion. He acknowledges that “sections of the colonial merchant leadership almost certainly had known beforehand of these attacks on Maryland”
Brenner further adds that “Sections of the Virginian merchant-planter-councilor leadership [our Claiborne Clique] quickly saw an opportunity [at the departure of Berkeley and the chaos opened up by the civil war] to regain control. Richard Ingle, a merchant and sea captain who had been trading with Maryland in partnership with the London colonial merchants Thomas Allen and Anthony Pennyston seized St Mary’s in 1644. Almost simultaneously, William Claiborne captured Kent Island. Both men claimed to represent Parliament against the royalist and papist proprietary government, and Calvert’s patent was immediately brought into question before the Earl of Warwick’s parliamentary commission on plantations.[99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 167-8
Put this “invasion” in other words, private elements of the Center and the Periphery had joined hands to overthrown the colony of Maryland, in advance of any official authority from the Parliament or the Commission of Foreign Plantations, nor with any authority from the Virginian government, while the Virginia governor was in England taking the field to fight in the King’s cause. If the royal government under Kemp was holding steady in Jamestown, the colony’s foreign policy seems to have been to launch an attack on Maryland to protect Virginia from the Powhatan. To the reader, I can only add this is what happens in a civil war; Virginia did have its distinctive after effects of the English civil war, and the Maryland invasion was one of them. The politics that resulted from this invasion would wrack both colonies through to 1661–if not longer.
This invasion story, however, is not yet complete. His brother, the governor, resident in Jamestown recruited a completely unexpected ally in the form of Virginia’s leading Puritan plantation conquistador Richard Bennett, an ally of Claiborne, a fellow member of the Virginia Council of State and close friend-business associate of Maurice Thompson. [99] J Frederick Fausz, “Merging and Emerging Worlds, pp. 79-8 Fausz asserts Bennett’s militia forces “constituted the largest, most cohesive military force available to hire in the Chesapeake. Apparently this force was available, and was hired by Governor Calvert to retake his Maryland colony from Ingle in 1646. Ingle still remained at St Mary’s, awaiting payment negotiated in the course of events during 1644-46. They were then joined by Governor Calvert and his Bennett mercenaries and all then engaged in negotiations.
To help them along, in March 1647 “eighteen London merchants ‘trading to Virginia and other plantations’ petitioned Parliament to demand the abrogation of the Baltimore proprietorship [Calvert’s charter] … Once again Maurice Thomason was prominent among the signers, who included such old associates of Thomason as William Pennoyer, Oliver Cloberry (brother of our old friend William), George Fletcher, Thomas Deacon and Richard Chandler (a onetime apprentice of [Maryland’s soon to be governor] Thomas Stone, as well as Ingle’s partner [remember him] Anthony Pennyston. The future of the Calvert proprietorship was not to be decided for many years, but once again, the American merchant-planter leadership had set in motion a political attack on a colonial institutional order that had proved incompatible with their interests in continuing commercial expansion.” [99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 167-8
Fortunately for Governor Calvert, he died in 1647, and that created a convenient opening in the governor’s office. Lord Calvert was forced to appoint a new governor, William Stone from Virginia, yet another Virginian plantation owner, sheriff, member of the House of Burgesses, and surprise–a close associate of William Claiborne and business associate of Maurice Thompson. Stone had been Ingle’s attorney and business agent on the Virginian Eastern Shore whose main product was trading beaver pelts. The deal that was cut authorized and provided headrights to Stone to settle 500 British and Irish settlers in Maryland between 1648-50.
What we have just described is a complicated and calculated coup d’état by Thomson and Claiborne that forced Lord Calvert to turn over his Maryland government to their associates from Virginia. In the chaos of the First English Civil War, with authorization from Parliament, prominent elements of Virginia’s government had used Virginia militia under their authority to invade Maryland and then reach a political agreement with Lord Calvert to install as a new governor yet another Virginia planter and Council member. What was the motivation for this one might ask? Was it an element of the larger Puritan-Parliament civil war? Was it a Puritan takeover of a supposedly Catholic colony?
Answered by a pro-Calvert supporter at that time, the motivation was neither: “it was not religion, it was not punctilios [political principles] they stood upon, it was that sweete, that rich, that large Country they aimed at”. In short they wanted riches and profit. [99] J. Frederick Fausz, “Merging and Emerging Worlds: Anglo-Indian Interest Groups and the Development of the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake”, included in Lois Green Carr, Philip D. Morgan, and Jean B. Russo (Eds), Colonial Chesapeake Society (Institute of Early American History and Culture-University of North Carolina Press, 1988), p. 81
This “deal” saved Calvert’s charter, ensured the continuity of the Maryland colony, and allows us today to count Maryland as one of our fifty states. What this deal implicitly accomplished was to settle Calvert’s so-called “Catholic” province with Protestant Puritans in Parliament–and installed Puritan supported New Men merchants-plantation owners from Virginia as the governance of his Maryland colony.
By appointing Protestant relative of prominent London critics to offices in Maryland and encouraging Puritan immigration to make the province less exclusively a haven for ‘Papists and Enemyes’ of Parliament, Cecil Calvert saved his province from eminent destruction in the late 1640’s … [But] Either out of total ignorance or extreme courage Lord Baltimore admitted dangerous political enemies into Maryland’s inner circle, and in effect placed a dagger in Claiborne’s hands … By 1650 Claiborne’s ever-enlarging interest group connections dominated strategic positions of power on both sides of the Atlantic, giving him all the leverage he needed to take revenge on Lord Baltimore and to redirect the course of Chesapeake history. [99] J. Frederick Fausz, “Merging and Emerging Worlds, pp. 80-1.
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.
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.
So let’s discuss Berkeley. Why did he take a year to come back to Virginia–no doubt aware at some point about the Maryland invasion? What did his experience in England do to affect his policy and politics when he returned to Virginia?
As Billing’s recounts upon his return Berkeley found his allies tossed all over the place, and his favorite home, the court, in a mobile exile. Colonial policy was never the king’s highest priority, and in the context of the civil war the extent it came into play was on its impact on matters made important by the civil war. The best opportunities lie in the several “fields” or geographic areas in which campaigns and battles were waging. Berkeley’s past experience in that situation was not likely to lead him to drop his governorship and pursue the former. More than anything perhaps was a likely realization that he was left to his own resources, if he was to return to Virginia.
Billings in his Virginia biography acknowledges that the governor “memories aside, something else surely tugged at him: the realization that having … [such a military] command would mean abandoning the colony for a long while and maybe for good”. He concludes, however, “that was not a prospect he relished because of his deepening attachments for Virginia. And so he took his leave of the king, bought what arms he could, and went home as quickly as he could find a westbound vessel [99] Warren G. Billings, Sir William Berkeley, p. 98
Well, OK. I have nothing better to offer and his ultimate action speaks louder than my doubts. The Queen with whom he was reasonably close was in refuge in France, his supporters, proteges and family, were either dead, scattered to the four winds, or in the field or the inner councils of Charles. Things were not going well for Charles, and it was certainly evident the king could not send any last-minute calvary–or ammunition and supplies–to Virginia. His was a lost cause. Lacking any documentation, I conclude, as Billings, that as soon as Berkeley’s questions were answered, Berkeley took the next available ship to Virginia, and after a year interlude he was back on the scene.
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.
Berkeley was balancing his own popularity-support with his instructions from Charles I. The English civil war in American history tends to pit parliament against a divine right king, but while accurate the civil war in England was as much political as religious. Berkeley had a small Puritan minority, but Virginia was a bastion of the Church of England, and it appears to have been a bit indifferent as to the configuration of the Anglican church, stressing more its traditional linkage to the crown.
Billings offers an insight into this indifference, an insight that explains why Berkeley’s religious agenda was so controversial: “Virginian Anglicans showed little taste for punishing their nonconformist neighbors, especially because they were themselves rather lax in their own faithfulness to the royal view of church discipline. Few colonists actually wished for a replication of English strife that set Anglican against Puritan. Especially not Berkeley. A devout son of the Church who brooked little dissent from its teachings, he rejected the theological rigidities of Archbishop William Laud and the king” [99] Warren M. Billings, a Little Parliament: the Virginia General Assembly in the Seventeenth Century (the Library of Virginia, 2004), p.29.
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 suggests 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. I suspect it is a reaction to an enactment of the October 1646 Assembly franchise redefinition. Washburn calls that legislation “the strictest and most democratic voting law ever made in Virginia. Not only were all freemen (as well as covenanted [i.e. indentured] servants) allowed to vote, but they were fined 100 pounds of tobacco for failing to do so [99] Wilcomb E. Washburn, Virginia Under Charles I and Cromwell, 1625-1660, p. 21.
This law continued in effect until 1655 when it was amended to prohibit freemen from voting unless they were householders (thereby eliminating indentured servants]. I keep this legislation in the back of my mind because one can discern an aggressive tone to the resolutions and enactments that characterized the legislatures that followed–especially during the Interregnum. The assertion of Assembly sovereignty that carried the day in the 1652 negotiations with Claiborne and Bennett may well have followed from this “temporary’ composition of the Assembly caused by this legislation. If so the voice of the indentured did not reflect the elite view, and their demand to eliminate the Council of State can well be understood.
Nevertheless. 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 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.
People Recruitment
That Berkeley used what economic developers call a “people recruitment strategy” to populate his colony and supplement a constituency supportive and congruent with him and his sympathies. Upon their arrival he wasted little time in awarding them land patents and headrights, and sending them off to hinterland territories. One was up into northern Potomac and it overlapped unintentionally with Charles’s 1649 Northern Neck land grant. Interestingly, Berkeley’s own brother , Sir John Berkeley, was one of the grantees. [99] Craven, the Southern Colonies, p. 246.
Berkeley had followed his people attraction effort during the period of the civil war, but it certainly intensified with the regicide and as Craven suggests that “For a time [Berkeley’s] position in the colony, backed by the Assembly’s strong condemnation of the regicide, appears to have held out some real promise of a Royalist refuge on the Chesapeake that would have brought to the aid of the Virginia colony men of substantial quality and ability [99] Craven, pp. 246-7. To the extent this appealed to potential refuges, Virginia lost out to the West Indies , but mostly to the Continent, which were the first choices. One must also question the ability and usefulness of such men, aristocratic and gentlemen as they were, to serve economic development-governance purposes in the Virginia hinterland–it was almost equivalent to Jamestown 1607 Deja vu.
To be blunt, these were individuals that would have been properly termed “cavaliers” and in the 1640’s and 1650’s they had little interest in Virginia. Craven summarized this thought by observing “Virginia could boast of gentlemen who in every way met the test of a Cavalier, but though their influence on social standards was possibly greater than their numbers, there were only a few of them. … Virginia’s now timeworn Cavalier tradition has little basis in historical fact”. [99] Craven, p. 247
Craven instead hazards his view that “the relatively heavy migration into Virginia and Maryland during the 1650’s was related to the politics of the period, chiefly through the consequent disturbance of the English economy, quoting a 1656 letter calling attention to the “unsettled condition of England: ‘I wish I could heare in what condicon you live in, for I fear if these times hold long amongst us, we must all faine [deign] to come to Virginia’ [99] Craven, p. 47, footnote 43′. He then cements this position with a realistic assessment of Virginia’s periphery position vis a vis the power of a Center, disturbed and ruffled as it was; it contains hints of what Berkeley had to be sensitive of in 1652:
… the promise of effective aid from the Royalists had disappeared with the collapse of their political fortunes in England. The most urgent of the colony’s economic needs was a re-establishment of normal relations with the mother country. … Virginia had in 1650 a population of approximately 15,000 souls, as against a half million in 1776; it needed capital, the continuance of a readily assimilated flow of immigration and the assurance of an established market for the purchase of supplies suited to it requirements and tastes. Whatever temptation the Dutch trade may have offered, the inducement was certainly insufficient to warrant such a severance of economic and social ties with the homeland. [[99] Craven, the Southern Colonies, pp. 247-8
The repercussions impacted the southern Potomac areas, that administratively came to be known as Northumberland. Refusing to pay taxes in the Third Powhatan, the newly franchised Assembly of 1647 (November) “ordered that persons inhabiting Northumberland and ‘other remote and straying plantations on the south side of the Patomeck River, Wicokomoko, Rappahannock, and Fleets Bay’ be displanted and removed. They justified this action on the basis of frequent instructions form the King to Berkeley and the Council directing that the planters not be allowed to scatter themselves too widely, and also because they considered such settlement ‘pernicious’ and ‘destructive’ to the peace and safety of the colony” [99]. Wilcomb E. Washburn, Virginia Under Charles and Cromwell, p.21 Given one year to implement the legislation, the Assembly in October 1648 reversed this action. Washburn attributes this rather dramatic reversal to a backlash from the inhabitants, a backlash so severe the Assembly authorized Northumberland to elect two representatives to the Burgesses as a county. In the same year the Assembly also authorized settlement on the north side of the York and Rappahannock Rivers one year from that date in order to allow surveying and patenting.
No doubt the pressure of the inhabitants, would-be-inhabitants, and speculators, in addition to the difficulty of enforcing the decision, caused the repeal of [both previous] acts. The restraining hand of the Governor was never again to be felt as had been in the period following the 1646 peace. The explosive growth of settlement in Virginia had proved impossible to control [99]. Wilcomb E. Washburn, Virginia Under Charles and Cromwell, p.22
Land speculation, however, was not confined to the Potomac, but also spilled over into today’s North Carolina coastland, Albemarle.
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.
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.
When 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 lack of success, however, left behind a tobacco export nexus that drained profit from the Virginia planters, and put it in the hands of intermediaries, and London merchant “factors”. In time they would be supplemented by a Highland Scot merchants who traversed up and down the Tidewater making individual deals with plantation owners–usually to the added disadvantage of the plantation owner. Given an unwillingness to cut back on personal expenditures, this export finance system pulverized the pocketbook of the Virginia planter class–leaving them tobacco rich and cash deprived. 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
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Ron W. Coan 