Part 8 (2/2)
George Sandys was appointed agent of the colony in England, and pet.i.tions reached England probably in the autumn of 1640. The breach between the king and Parliament was then complete, and Charles had thrown himself entirely into the arms of the court party. Sandys, despairing of success from the king, appealed to Parliament in the name of the ”Adventurers and Planters in Virginia,” and ”the Virginia patent was taken out again under the broad seal of England.”[18] To what extent the new charter established the boundaries of Virginia does not appear, and the subsequent turn of affairs in Virginia made the action of Parliament at this time a nullity.
To offset these proceedings, the king commissioned[19] Sir William Berkeley, a vehement royalist, as successor to the popular Wyatt, and he arrived in Virginia in January, 1642, where he at once called an a.s.sembly to undo the work of Sandys. A pet.i.tion to the king protesting against the restoration of the company was adopted, but although it was signed by the council and burgesses, as well as by Berkeley, the preamble alludes to strong differences of opinion.[20] The change of position was doubtless brought about by the issue made in England between loyalty and rebellion; and, while desirous of a recharter, the majority of the people of Virginia did not care to desert the king.
The pet.i.tion was presented July 5, 1642, to Charles at his headquarters at York, who returned a gracious reply that ”he had not the least intention to consent to the introduction of any company.”[21]
While loyal to the king, the people of Virginia had never been wedded to the views of the high-church party in England. Among the ministers the surplice was not usual, and there was a Puritan severity about the laws in regard to the Sabbath and attendance at church. As the strife in England became more p.r.o.nounced, the people in Nansemond and lower Norfolk counties, on the south of the James, showed decided leanings towards Parliament and to the congregational form of wors.h.i.+p.
Soon they began to think of separating from the church of England altogether, and they sent for ministers to New England in 1642. In response, the elders there despatched three of their number, who, arriving in Virginia, set zealously to work to organize the congregations on the Nansemond and Elizabeth rivers. According to their own account, these ministers met with much success till they were suddenly stopped in the work by Berkeley, who persuaded the a.s.sembly, in March, 1643, to pa.s.s severe laws against Nonconformists; and under this authority drove them out of the land in 1644.[22]
In the same year occurred an Indian attack which these preachers and John Winthrop, the governor of Ma.s.sachusetts, thought to be a special visitation of Providence. After the ma.s.sacre in 1622 the war with the Indians had continued in a desultory way for over twelve years. Year after year squads of soldiers were sent in various directions against the different tribes, and by 1634 the Indians were so punished that the whites thought it safe to make peace. Now, after a repose of ten years, the fierce instincts of the savages for blood were once more excited.
April 18, 1644, was Good Friday, and Governor Berkeley ordered it to be kept as a special fast day to pray for King Charles; instead, it became a day of bloodshed and mourning.[23] The chief instigator of the ma.s.sacre of 1622 was still alive, old Opechancanough, who, by the death of his brother Opitchapam, was now head chief of the Powhatan Confederacy. Thinking the civil war in England a favorable occasion to repeat the b.l.o.o.d.y deeds of twenty-two years before, on the day before Good Friday he attacked the settlers, and continued the a.s.sault for two days, killing over three hundred whites. The onslaught fell severest on the south side of James River and on the heads of the other rivers, but chiefly on the York River, where Opechancanough had his residence.[24]
The ma.s.sacre of 1622 shook the colony to its foundation, and it is surprising to see how little that of 1644 affected the current of life in Virginia. Berkeley seemed to think so little of the attack that after making William Claiborne general of an expedition against the Pamunkey tribe he left the colony in June, 1645.[25] He was gone a whole year, and on his return found that Claiborne had driven the Indians far away from the settlements. In 1646 he received information which enabled him to close the war with dramatic effect. At the head of a body of cavalry he surprised old Opechancanough in an encampment between the falls of the Appomattox and the James, and brought him, aged and blind, to Jamestown, where, about three weeks later, one of his guards shot him to death.[26] A peace was made not long after with Necotowance, his successor, by which the Indians agreed to retire entirely from the peninsula between the York and James rivers.[27]
One of the most remarkable results of the ma.s.sacre was the change it produced in Rev. Thomas Harrison, Berkeley's chaplain at Jamestown, who had used his influence with the governor to expel the Nonconformist ministers of New England. He came to the belief of John Winthrop that the ma.s.sacre was a Providential visitation and turned Puritan himself. After a quarrel with Berkeley he left Jamestown and took charge of the churches on the Elizabeth and Nansemond rivers with their Puritan congregations. Berkeley would probably have set the law-officers upon him at once, but among his councillors was Richard Bennett, himself of Harrison's congregation, and his influence held the governor back for a time.
Three years pa.s.sed, and at length Harrison and his elder, William Durand, were peremptorily directed to leave the colony. Harrison went first to New England and then to old England, while William Durand emigrated to Maryland, where, aided by Bennett, he made terms with Governor William Stone for the emigration of his flock; and in the year 1649 more than one thousand persons left Virginia and settled on the Severn and Patuxent rivers. The settlement was called Providence, and was destined to play a remarkable part in the history of Maryland.[28]
When the civil war in England was fairly on, emigration to Virginia was much improved in material, and for many years was very large. The new-comers came to make homes, not merely to make tobacco, and they no longer consisted of servants, but of the merchants and yeomanry of England. ”If these troublous times hold long amongst us,” wrote William Hallam, a salter of Burnham, in Ess.e.x County, England, ”we must all faine come to Virginia.”[29]
Hitherto the uncertainty resulting from the overthrow of the charter made it difficult to secure a good cla.s.s of ministers. Those who came had been ”such as wore black coats and could babble in a pulpet, and roare in a tavern, exact from their paris.h.i.+oners, and rather by their dissolutenesse destroy than feed their flocks.” Now these ”wolves in sheep's clothing” were by the a.s.sembly forced to depart the country and a better cla.s.s of clergymen arrived.[30] In 1649 there were twenty churches and twenty ministers who taught the doctrines of the church of England and ”lived all in peace and love”;[31] and at the head of them was a roan of exemplary piety, Rev. Philip Mallory, son of Dr.
Thomas Mallory, Dean of Chester.[32]
The condition of things about 1648 is thus summed up by Hammond, a contemporary writer: ”Then began the gospel to flourish; civil, honorable, and men of great estates flocked in; famous buildings went forward; orchards innumerable were planted and preserved; tradesmen set to work and, encouraged, staple commodities, as silk, flax, potashes attempted on.... So that this country, which had a mean beginning, many back friends, two ruinous and b.l.o.o.d.y ma.s.sacres, hath by G.o.d's grace outgrown all, and is become a place of pleasure and plenty.”
Later, after the beheading of King Charles in 1649, there was a large influx of cavaliers, who, while they raised the quality of society, much increased the sympathy felt in Virginia for the royal cause.
Under their influence Sir William Berkeley denounced the murder of King Charles I., and the General a.s.sembly adopted an act making it treason to defend the late proceedings or to doubt the right of his son, Charles II., to succeed to the crown.[33] Parliament was not long in accepting the challenge which Berkeley tendered. In October, 1650, they adopted an ordinance prohibiting trade with the rebellious colonies of Virginia, Barbadoes, Antigua, and Bermuda Islands, and authorizing the Council of State to take measures to reduce them to terms.[34]
In October, 1651, was pa.s.sed the first of the navigation acts, which limited the colonial trade to England, and banished from Virginia the Dutch vessels, which carried abroad most of the exports. About the same time, having taken measures against Barbadoes, the Council of State ordered a squadron to be prepared against Virginia. It was placed under the command of Captain Robert Dennis; and Thomas Stegge, Richard Bennett, and William Claiborne, members of Berkeley's council, were joined with him in a commission[35] to ”use their best endeavors to reduce all the plantations within the Bay of Chesopiack.” Bennett and Claiborne were in Virginia at the time, and probably did not know of their appointment till the s.h.i.+ps arrived in Virginia.
The fleet left England in October, 1651, carrying six hundred men, but on the way Captain Dennis and Captain Stegge were lost in a storm and the command devolved on Captain Edmund Curtis.[36] In December they reached the West Indies, where they a.s.sisted Sir George Ayscue in the reduction of Barbadoes. In January, 1652, they reached Virginia, where Curtis showed Claiborne and Bennett his duplicate instructions.
Berkeley, full of fight, called out the militia, twelve hundred strong, and engaged the a.s.sistance of a few Dutch s.h.i.+ps then trading in James River contrary to the recent navigation act.
The commissioners acted with prudence and good sense. They did not proceed at once to Jamestown, but first issued a proclamation intended to disabuse the people of any idea that they came to make war.[37] The result was that in March, 1652, when they appeared before the little capital, the council and burgesses overruled Berkeley, and entered into an agreement with Curtis, Claiborne, and Bennett, which proves the absence of hard feelings on both sides. The Virginians recognized the authority of the commonwealth of England, and promised to pa.s.s no statute contrary to the laws of Parliament. On the other hand, the commissioners acknowledged the submission of Virginia, ”as a voluntary act not forced nor constrained by a conquest upon the countrey”; and conceded her right ”to be free from all taxes, customs, and impositions whatever, not enforced by the General a.s.sembly.” In particular it was stipulated that ”Virginia should have and enjoy the antient bounds and lymitts granted by the charters of the former kings.”
The articles were signed March 12, 1652, and the commissioners soon after sailed to St. Mary's and received the surrender of Maryland.
They returned in time to be present at a new meeting of the a.s.sembly held at Jamestown in April, at which it was unanimously voted that until the further pleasure of Parliament was known Richard Bennett should be governor and William Claiborne secretary of state. To the burgesses, as the representatives of the people, was handed over the supreme power of thereafter electing all officers of the colony.[38]
Then Virginia, the last of the British dominions to abandon the king, entered upon eight years of almost complete self-government, under the protection of the commonwealth of England.
In 1652 the settlements in Virginia were embraced in thirteen counties, of which Northampton, on the Accomack Peninsula, extended to the southern boundary of Maryland. On the James River were nine counties: Henrico, Charles City, James City, Surry, Warwick, Warascoyack, or Isle of Wight, Elizabeth City, Nansemond, and Lower Norfolk. On York River were York County on the south side and Gloucester on the north side.[39] On the Rappahannock was Lancaster County, extending on both sides of the river from Pianketank to Dividing Creek in the Northern Neck; and on the Potomac was the county of Northumberland, first settled about 1638 at Chicacoan and Appomattox on the Potomac, by refugees from Maryland.[40]
Towards the south the plantations, following the watercourses, had spread to the heads of the creeks and rivers, tributaries of the James, and some persons more adventurous than the rest had even made explorations in North Carolina.[41] Westward the extension was, of course, greatest along the line of the James, reaching as far as the Falls where Richmond now stands. The population was probably about twenty thousand, of whom as many as five thousand were white servants and five hundred were negroes.
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