borne equally by all males over sixteen: the right of suffrage was limited to freeholders, except during a part of the time of the Commonwealth, and a few years afterwards; slaves were regarded as real estate for the purpose of being annexed to the land, and of transmitting an undivided inheritance to the heir: and lastly, in 1705, a law was passed to take away from the courts the power of defeating entails, as had been the practice in the colony, and was still permitted in England.

The high wages of the members of assembly may be regarded as a further evidence of the same aristocratic injustice. Their compensation, during the reign of Charles the First, was 150 pounds of tobacco a day, besides the expense of horses and a servant, amounting to about 100 pounds more. After allowing both for the lower money price of tobacco at that period, and the greater value of the precious metals, this daily compensation must be deemed equal to eight or ten dollars at the present time: and as it was paid by the several counties to their respective members, we cannot wonder that it was one of the grounds of popular complaint in the insurrection in 1676, under Nathaniel Bacon.* In 1677, this complaint seemed to the commissioners sent from England so well founded, that, on their recommendation, the wages of the members were greatly re

duced.

*Although the immediate cause of the people's taking up arms in that civil commotion, was to defend themselves against the Indians, who were then ravaging the frontier, and who found impunity in the tardy and indecisive measures of an aged Governor, yet after they had taken the means of redress into their own hands, and returned from their expedition against the Indians, other causes of popular discontent in the laws themselves were the subject of loud complaint, and became the reason or afforded a pretext for Bacon to keep his force embodied, and finally to assume the attitude of open war. One of the grievances complained of was, that all the revenue was raised by a poll tax, by which the wealthy landholder contributed nothing, except so far as he was an owner of slaves. This injustice was the more felt on account of the recent increase of taxes for the purpose of purchasing up the improvident grant made by Charles the Second to two court favourites. They also complained of the high wages of the members of assembly, and the high fees to other public officers; all indicating that the power of the government was exercised for the benefit of a few at the expense of the many.

Persons thus clothed with power and authority, and accustomed to its exercise, were not likely to prove the most submissive of subjects; and though there was probably always a court and a country party in Virginia as well as in England, yet, by far the larger part of the aristocracy of the colony sided with the whigs in all the disputes with the crown, or its colonial representative, the Governor. Indeed, the spirit of resistance to illegal or oppressive exertions of the royal prerogative, seems never to have been long dormant, from the year 1624, when Virginia ceased to be a proprietary government, until the period of separation.

The annals of the colony, meagre as they unfortunately are, afford abundant evidence of this firm and independent spirit. Thus, in 1631, the Council and the House of Burgesses united in the bold step of sending the Governor, Sir Matthew Harvey, a prisoner to England, to be tried for the tyrannical acts of his administration. In 1657, when the colony, which had espoused the royal cause, capitulated to the force sent out by Cromwell, his Commissioners expressly stipulated with the House of Burgesses, that the people of Virginia "should have and enjoy such freedom and privileges as belong to the freeborn people of England; that trade should also be as free in Virginia as in England; and that no tax, custom or imposition should be laid in Virginia, nor forts nor castles erected therein without the consent of the Grand Assembly.”

In 1673, Charles the Second having granted the whole province of Virginia to the lords Culpepper and Arlington for thirty-one years, with the power to grant waste lands, receive quit rents, form new counties, erect courts, and exercise similar acts of sovereignty, the colonists took alarm, and employed agents in England to apply to the crown, first for leave to purchase up this grant, and then for a new charter, which would secure the colony not only from the repetition of similar grants, but from other invasions of their rights. The application to the King's privy council by the colony's agents, set forth ten provisions, which they asked that their new charter should contain; one of which was, "that no tax or imposition should be laid on

the people of Virginia but by the Grand Assembly." After the negotiation of more than a year, the king, in conformity with the recommendation of his council, consented to all the requests, and directed a charter to be prepared accordingly. But either before the charter was executed, or, as some say, after execution, but before delivery, the news of Bacon's rebellion caused it to be stopped, and another substituted, in which, to the great disappointment of the colonists, the most important provisions, including the one respecting taxation, was omitted.

In 1677, the House of Burgesses made a spirited opposition to an invasion of their privileges by the agents of the crown. The Commissioners who had been sent out from England to investigate the circumstances of Bacon's rebellion, and who had been invested with a general power of sending for persons and papers, had demanded the journals of the House. This demand the Burgesses peremptorily refused; and their Clerk being afterwards compelled by the Commissioners to surrender them, the House, at its next session, after reciting this "act of illegal violence," declared their belief that "his majesty would not grant" this power to the Commissioner, for they "find not the same to have been practised by any of the kings of England;" they did, therefore, "take the same to be a violation of their privileges." They asked, moreover, for satisfactory assurances that "no such violation of their privileges should be offered for the future."

This declaration of the Assembly, Charles, in his instructions to lord Culpepper, the Governor of Virginia, stigmatizes as "seditious," and requires him to have erased from their proceedings.

From this time, until the revolution of 1688, the Governor of Virginia and the Assembly seem to have been in a state of continual collision. The popular and the government parties were more distinctly marked, and in a higher state of irritation against each other than at any previous period, occasioned partly by the mutual injuries inflicted during Bacon's insurrection, and yet more by the vindictive course of the Governor and the Royalists which succeeded it, and partly from the more

liberal notions of popular rights and constitutional law, which the progress of knowledge, and the discussions provoked by the arbitrary measures of the House of Stuart had produced in every part of the British dominions.

In the year 1685 these bickerings rose to their greatest height. The Governor of Virginia, lord Howard, had, by proclamation, declared, that since an act of Assembly of 1682, which repealed another act of 1680, had not received the royal assent, the act supposed to be repealed was still in force. The House of Burgesses conceiving that the power now asserted, might, by suspending the exercise of the royal negative on the colonial laws, be used to revive laws that had been long disused, and which every one supposed to have been repealed, made such a spirited remonstrance against this and other offensive acts of the government that the Governor prorogued the Assembly.

The reigning monarch, James the Second, in a letter to lord Howard, passes a harsh censure on these "irregular and tumultuous" proceedings of the House, the members of which, for thus presuming to question the negative voice entrusted to the Governor, he does not hesitate to charge with "disaffected and unquiet dispositions," and with purposely protracting their time on account of their wages, and he therefore directs the Governor to dissolve the Assembly. As the high wages of the members had long been a subject of complaint, the Governor condescended to touch this popular string, by directing the king's letter "to be publicly read in every County court, that the inhabitants and Burgesses may be made sensible how displeasing such obstinate proceedings were to his Majesty."

This disagreement continued until 1689, when, on the accession of William and Mary, the liberal principles of the revolution prevailed, and produced a more conciliatory course towards the colonies. From this time until 1764, when the stamp act was proposed, there was no collision between either the crown or its representative and the Assembly, of sufficient importance to attract the notice of historians, except the illegal fee for patents claimed by Governor Dinwiddie in 1754. This the As

sembly voted "illegal and oppressive." They even sent an agent to England expressly to procure its repeal.

While the rapid growth of Virginia, and the other English provinces of America presented to England strong temptations to draw a revenue from them, and so to restrict their industry as to prevent their future rivalship with the mother country in commerce or manufactures, the same career of prosperity was continually presenting to the colonies greater power of resistance, and greater inducements to use it. With such inherent motives to discord and repulsion, it was morally impossible that they could permanently continue members of the same government; and, sooner or later, the separation was inevitable. But that great event was undoubtedly hastened by the wavering and ill digested policy of the ministers of George the Third, who pursued a course by which they attained the benefits neither of firmness nor moderation; and in which, from the time the project of levying a tax in America was formed, every measure taken by the administration was regarded by the colonists, if oppressive, as a proof of their danger, and if conciliatory, as an admission of their strength.

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