1660-82]

Virginia and the Restoration

9

Parliament; and those who remained loyal to the King were allowed a year in which to arrange their affairs before leaving the colony.

As the overthrow of monarchy had been accepted in Virginia peacefully, so was the Restoration. It was not long, however, before the colony began to smart under the reckless prodigality of Charles II. During his exile he had rewarded some of his followers by a huge grant of territory in Virginia, including much that was already regularly occupied and cultivated. After the Restoration the representatives of the colonists obtained the revocation of that grant. But it was cancelled only to be replaced by one of wider extent and more dangerous import. In 1672 the whole soil of the colony was granted to Lord Arlington and Lord Culpeper with extensive proprietary rights, including powers to exact quit-rents, nominate sheriffs and land-surveyors, and appoint clergy. An agency was sent to England to oppose this monstrous invasion; and the protest was received with favour. A charter was drafted which, if carried through, would have been a document of the greatest constitutional importance, since it contained a clause providing that the colonists could not be taxed without the consent of their own legislature.

All this was brought to naught by an ill-timed outburst of popular fury in the colony. Various causes were at work creating discontent. A poll-tax had to be imposed to meet the expense of the agency. An Act was passed limiting the right of voting to landholders and householders and thereby disfranchising many electors. But the chief grievance of the settlers was the supineness of Berkeley in checking and punishing outrages by the natives. At last an enterprising young settler, Nathaniel Bacon, took up arms on his own responsibility. For this Berkeley treated Bacon as a rebel. What followed is somewhat obscure. For a time there seemed to be a reconciliation, and Bacon was restored to his rank as a councillor. Then again they quarrelled. Bacon obtained armed possession of Jamestown. Finally Berkeley prevailed. Bacon died suddenly, with suspicions not unnatural, but probably unfounded, of poison; and his supporters were punished with a fury and vindictiveness which excited the displeasure of the Crown and brought about Berkeley's dismissal.

The choice of the next two governors illustrates a danger which was coming over colonial administration. Hitherto a colonial governorship had been but little of a prize. The governors had all belonged to the class of wealthy planters and had made their home in the colony. Now the official emoluments and patronage had increased to such an extent as to offer a temptation to a needy fortune-hunter. Lord Culpeper, who became governor in 1682, and Lord Howard of Effingham, who followed him, were representatives of a type of whom the student of colonial history sees a good deal too much. Culpeper was already tainted in reputation in the eyes of the colonists as one of the recipients of that

10

Virginia after the Revolution

[1682-1758

monstrous grant which has been described above. But, fortunately for the colony, neither he nor Howard was a man of concentrated or far-reaching purpose. By jobbery, and by devising new imposts for the benefit of himself and his creatures, Howard inflicted financial injury on individuals. The liberty of the colony as a whole did not suffer at his hands. There was indeed one exception. Howard claimed and secured for the governor and council what had hitherto been vested in the whole Assembly, the right of appointing the secretary to that body. This however was fully compensated by an advantage which the popular representatives had lately secured. At first the burgesses and the councillors sat as one chamber-an arrangement undoubtedly to the advantage of the council, the more permanent and united body. But about 1680 the burgesses acquired the right of sitting as a separate

chamber.

The Revolution of 1688 was received with a tranquillity which shows how the political life of the colony had drawn apart from that of the mother-country. Nevertheless the triumph of Whig principles made itself felt in Virginia. The right of self-taxation was recognised in the instructions given to the governor. He was to "recommend” certain taxes to the Assembly. The representatives were to be "persuaded" to pass an Act giving the governor and council certain provisional powers of raising a duty in case of emergency.

With Howard began a system vicious in theory yet not without its practical advantages, whereby the nominal governor was an absentee, and his duties were discharged by a lieutenant-governor. That the office of

governor should be bestowed on a wealthy and aristocratic non-resident was beyond doubt an abuse. A tribute was exacted from the colonists for a payment which, if made at all, ought to have been made from the English civil-list. But one must at least admit that honest and competent men were entrusted with what was virtually the supreme office in the colony. Such were Francis Nicholson, lieutenant-governor (save for a short interval) from 1690 to 1704, Alexander Spotswood (1710 to 1722), and Robert Dinwiddie (1751 to 1758). Nicholson and Dinwiddie were both at times violent and unconciliatory, and the former was far from decorous in his private life. None of them sympathised with the aspirations of the settlers after political freedom, or showed much enlightenment in their views as to the future of the colony. But they were all hard-working and public-spirited men, and cleanhanded in money matters, according to the standard of their time.

THE NEW ENGLAND COLONIES

In the meantime Englishmen were forming other communities along the Atlantic sea-board. Of these by far the most important, both in their original aspect and their ultimate results, were the group known as

Puritanism and New England

11

New England. It is the fashion to speak of "cavalier" Virginia and "republican" New England; to regard the one as representing the aristocratic, the other the plebeian, element in English life. That is but a faint approximation to the truth. More correct would it be to say that both mainly represented the English middle class, the class of the yeoman and the trader, neither being exclusively drawn from one or the other; but that natural conditions developed in Virginia a landed aristocracy, in New England a type of community which might either be called a wide and modified oligarchy or a restricted and severely conditioned democracy. In Virginia power insensibly found its way into the hands of the landholders; the great bulk of the population, the servants and bondsmen, whether white or black, stood outside the body politic. In the various New England colonies political rights were fenced in by religious qualifications more or less severe; but there was nothing which could be called a class permanently excluded from power. Citizenship was within the reach of all.

In Virginia there was no sort of corporate union below that of the State. A New England colony was made up of a number of smaller organisms, each with an intensely strong sense of corporate life. In both colonies a community far removed from the nominal centre of government, conscious of needs and aspirations which its rulers wholly ignored or misunderstood, drifted into half-conscious republicanism. But though the political creeds of the New Englander and the Virginian may have been in theory much the same, they were held in very different fashions. The Virginian might be aroused by an act of tyranny into passionate self-assertion, but he was incapable of that patient watchfulness, that continuous and systematic building-up of barriers against any possible encroachment which formed so large a part of the political history of New England.

In the fullest sense the New England colonies were the offspring and embodiment of Puritanism. The desire for a certain form of wor-. ship prompted their formation, and certain theological beliefs and moral principles were the underlying forces which determined their growth. Moreover it was Congregationalism, far more than any other influence, which determined the political form that the New England colonies were to take, and the spirit which directed and animated that form. The Swiss religious reformers regarded the individual Church, however small and externally unimportant, as being potentially an independent corporation. "Höngg and Küssnacht," said Zwingli, "is a truer Church than all the bishops and popes together." In the Old World such a view could not rise beyond the expression of a pious aspiration; in America it became in a sense a practical truth. The antecedents of the New Englander and his conditions of life predisposed him to republicanism; and this republicanism easily became a reality when it found an appropriate machinery created ready to its hand.

12

New England and the Independents

[1593

It will be remembered that the original Virginian Company had two branches one the London Company whose fortunes we have traced, the other the so-called Plymouth Company. In 1607 the latter made an attempt to form a colony. The first expedition, commanded by George Popham and Ralegh Gilbert, landed at the mouth of the river Kennebec, in what is now Maine, but owing to climate and mismanagement almost immediately failed. The Company continued to exist, but without any of that energy and activity which marked the Virginian branch. Vessels were sent out to fish, to trade, and to explore, but nothing further was done toward the establishment of a colony. The members of the Company seem to have regarded themselves simply as landholders with territorial rights and no specific obligations. In 1620 the Company was reorganised with a new patent, and was henceforth known as the New England Company. But the change does not appear to have brought with it wider schemes or any increase of energy.

Colonisation on commercial principles and mainly, though not wholly, for motives of profit had, so far, failed in one instance and had won but incomplete success in another. Now a new force was to be brought into the field. In 1593 a congregation of Independents in

London fled to Amsterdam in order to avoid the restrictions and penalties imposed by the English government on their worship. The results of the Hampton Court Conference made matters look even more gloomy for Nonconformists; and two other congregations fled to the Low Countries, one in 1606 from Scrooby, the other somewhat earlier from Gainsborough. It is with the former of these two that we have to deal. Their wanderings, their arrival in America, their early hardships, and their later prosperity have been told by one of their chief members, William Bradford, with almost unsurpassable force, dignity, and candour.

The refugees did not find the Low Countries altogether an acceptable home, mainly owing to a coarseness and dissoluteness of life, not to be wondered at in a country which had so long been the battle-ground of Western Europe. After some five or six years the leaders of the party began to think of a home beyond the Atlantic, where the members of the little flock might preserve their nationality as Englishmen and their separate individuality as a Church. After some deliberation as to the site for the colony it was decided to enter into negotiations with the Virginia Company. To this end two representatives were sent to England. In anticipation of possible opposition from the Crown, they were armed with a document in which their attitude to the civil power was set forth under seven heads. The document was an admission of the supremacy of the State in religious matters. We can hardly doubt that the concessions made in this document went beyond what a Puritan congregation would have been prepared to make if they had intended to remain in England. At the same time it may be taken as indicative of what we shall find abundantly proved, namely, the conciliatory and

-1627]

The Pilgrim Fathers

13

acquiescent character of the Puritanism of Plymouth as distinguished from the militant and aggressive type of Puritanism which animated the later settlement of Massachusetts. "Pilgrim Fathers " is a wholly appropriate term as describing the Plymouth settlers: we miss a significant distinction if we apply it to their successors.

The poverty of the refugees was a difficulty which had to be surmounted. To this end the delegates entered into negotiations with certain London traders, who were, in modern language, to "finance" the colony and to receive in return all profits accruing after provision had been made for the subsistence of the settlers. This was to last for seven years then the partnership was to be dissolved and the stock sold. The choice of a site for the settlement caused no little difficulty. Some of the London partners wished to settle under the Plymouth Company, not that of Virginia. Some of the intended colonists proposed Guiana. Then a project was started for settling on the territory of the Dutch West India Company. This last design was disapproved by the States General; and the agreement with the Virginia Company was ratified. Finally, as we shall see, the site of the colony was determined not of deliberate choice but by chance.

In August, 1620, after various mishaps and delays, the emigrants, one hundred in number, sailed from Plymouth in that historic vessel called the Mayflower. A stormy voyage brought them to a point far north of the Virginia Company's territory. The ship-master was ordered to sail south-west, but he disobeyed orders, and, as the pilgrims thought, of deliberate treachery, landed them in Cape Cod Harbour.

Owing to the various delays in sailing and the length of the voyage the emigrants had to face the winter unprepared. Their sufferings were great, and deaths were not a few. In similar circumstances Popham's settlers had despaired and fled; but the Plymouth pilgrims were strong in religious faith, and in the sense of a divine mission. Happily too, whereas Popham's colony had to face a winter of exceptional severity, the first winter passed by the Pilgrim Fathers was peculiarly mild. Fortunately for the colonists, their relations with the natives were from the outset friendly. Edward Winslow, one of the leading men in the colony, had some knowledge of medicine, and saved the neighbouring Indian chief when his life was despaired of; and the Indians in their gratitude befriended the settlers and instructed them in the cultivation of maize. The alliance with the London merchants proved unsatisfactory. They looked exclusively or mainly to their own pecuniary gain, not to the permanent welfare of the community. Thus the colonists were glad to make an arrangement whereby, in 1627, the interests of the London partners were transferred to six of the chief settlers. The bargain bore hard on the settlers for the time being, but they were more than compensated by the increase of independence.

At the outset the system of industry was purely communal. The