Conceived in Liberty (15 page)

**
Cf. Winthrop D. Jordan, “Modern Tensions and the Origins of American Slavery,”
Journal of Southern History
(February 1962), pp. 17-30.

*
Ibid.
Jordan cites many evidences of Negro slavery—including court sentences, records of Negroes, executions of wills, comparative sale prices of Negro and white servants—dating from 1640, before which time the number of Negroes in Virginia was negligible.

**
“Spurious” in colonial legislation meant not simply illegitimate, but specifically the children of interracial unions.

Religion played an extremely significant role in the life of the man of the seventeenth century—a century of great religious wars, schisms, and revolutions ensuing from the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. England suffered not only under feudalism, but under its corollary, the established state church. Indeed, one of the causes of the Reformation, expecially in England, was the desire of the rising absolutism of the Crown to bring the church in Great Britain under its domination.
*
The Church of England, appointed and controlled by the Crown, fulfilled this ambition.

The original founders naturally believed that Virginia would be as rigorously Anglican as the old country itself. King James I—that scholarly enthusiast for his own divine right—enjoined the Virginia colonists in the first charter of 1606 to propagate the true religion: “We, greatly commending... the desires for the furtherance of so noble a work, which may hereafter tend to the glory of his Divine Majesty, in propagating of Christian religion to such people, as yet live in darkness and miserable ignorance of the true knowledge and worship of God and man in time bring the infidels and savages, living in those parts, to human civility, and to a settled and quiet government....”

Much of the motivation, at least as officially proclaimed, for the founding of the colony was the desire to establish a Protestant bulwark against Catholic Spain. Many leading Anglican ministers, including John Donne, dean of St. Paul’s, propagandized for the Virginia Company’s settlement
on these grounds. One of the preachers in the earliest settlement, the Reverend Alexander Whitaker, wrote a tract,
Good News from Virginia,
which was published by the Virginia Company in 1613 and which proclaimed that to doubt the future of the Virginia colony was to doubt the promises of God.

From the first settlement at Jamestown, the Anglican religion was the established church of the colony. The Virginia General Assembly periodically enacted laws to compel conformity, but the lure of profits led the landowners—eager for new settlers and servants—to relax
de facto
religious pressures on the immigrants, and such laws as compulsory church attendance were rarely enforced.

The new conditions faced in America—the great distance from home, the new lands, the freer social structure—caused Virginia’s Anglican church to develop very differently from the mother church. From the beginning, control by the bishop of London was loose, and each church came to be controlled by its own vestry—elected by vote of its parishioners, but in practice by the leading planters of the parish—rather than by the central government of the Church of England. Whereas the governor of Virginia had the right to induct ministers for life, the vestries called ministers for a year or a term of years, and rarely offered ministers for induction. Thus Virginia developed a decentralized—almost a congregational—government in its dominant Anglican church.

Although the church was decentralized, Virginia was nonetheless theocratic. The affairs of the smallest political unit, the parish, were governed by the church vestry, which had the power to levy local taxes. While theoretically elected by the parishioners, the vestrymen actually filled their own vacancies and so became a self-perpetuating oligarchy.

Informality and decentralization were also fostered by the thin, extensive settlement of the land; hence the scattering of churches over the Virginia countryside. Time and again the high-church hierarchy in England deplored the disorder, the neglect of ritual, the informality of prevailing low-church Virginia practice. One of Virginia’s leading planters, Robert Carter, expressed a typical sentiment when in 1720 he wrote:

I am of the Church of England way.... But the high-flown, up-top notions and great stress that is laid on ceremonies, any further than decency and conformity, are what I cannot come into reason of. Practical godliness is the substance—these are but the shell.

Liberalism in religion, however, proceeded but part way, and the hand of theocracy was often evident. Virginia, alarmed at Roman Catholicism in the neighboring colony of Maryland, passed an act “Concerning Popish Recusants.” The act levied the very heavy fine of twenty pounds per month for any failure to attend Anglican services. It also imposed life imprisonment and the confiscation of property on anyone who refused to take the Oath of Allegiance of 1605. This loyalty oath had been decreed by King
James I in 1605 as a method of cracking down on Catholics, following the abortive Gunpowder Plot. From the granting of the first charter, King James had imposed a loyalty oath of allegiance and supremacy on all Virginia colonists; refusal was supposed to incur the death penalty. Indeed, the laxity of the London Company in enforcing the loyalty oath, caused by its desire to encourage settlement, was one of King James’ major charges against the company that led
to
its dissolution.

As a further persecution of the few Roman Catholics—they were virtually nonexistent in the colony—the mass and the sacraments were prohibited, tutoring one’s children in the Catholic religion was outlawed, and life imprisonment and confiscation of property were decreed for anyone sending their children to English-speaking Catholic schools in France or Spain. This extreme legislation remained in force until 1662, the Restoration period, when the act was quietly allowed to lapse. In 1643 a law was passed forbidding Catholics from holding office and outlawing all priests in the colony. After the Restoration, apart from the imposing of oaths of loyalty to the state church for public officials, the theocratic rule relaxed somewhat, although the heavy fine for nonattendance at Anglican services continued. Again, a partially mitigating factor was that these harsh laws were not always rigorously enforced. Thus, the leading—and virtually the only—Catholic family in the colony, headed by planter George Brent, a relative of the Maryland Carrolls, was allowed to move to Virginia about 1650 and to remain there relatively undisturbed. In Brent’s case, laxity was encouraged by the thinness of the population in Virginia, the virtual nonexistence of Catholics in the colony, and the prominence and pronounced royalist sympathies of this tobacco planter.

*
As always, a corollary to power was loot, and one of the attractions of the Reformation to England was the opportunity it afforded Henry VIII to confiscate the property of the monasteries and to distribute and sell the seized assets to favorites of the Crown.

From their earliest days, Virginians engaged in conflicts with their government. The first open rebellion while Virginia was under royal rule occurred in 1635. This arose from a territorial dispute with the new neighboring colony of Maryland (see below). William Claiborne, a leader of the Virginia colony and secretary of its Council, had obtained a royal license to establish a fur-trading post on Kent Island, between Maryland and Virginia, which he had purchased from the Indians. The Virginia House of Burgesses—which included a representative from Kent Island—backed Claiborne in his refusal to recognize the overlordship of the Maryland feudal proprietor, Lord Baltimore. Egged on by a competing Virginia fur trader’s accusation that Claiborne was inciting the Indians to attack the Marylanders, Lord Baltimore ordered the seizure of Claiborne and the confiscation of his property. Maryland’s ships attacked and seized a vessel of Claiborne’s, and not only killed several Kent Islanders in the process, but also hanged one as a “pirate” after the battle. Governor John Harvey of Virginia angered the Virginians by taking the side of Lord Baltimore, removing Claiborne from his office as secretary, and jailing an official who sided with Claiborne. Harvey here showed his ability to judge the winning side, as the Crown also ruled against Claiborne in 1638. This and other tyrannical actions by Governor Harvey brought about an open revolt by the Council led by Samuel Mathews, a former indentured servant, at the head of several hundred armed men.

Aside from high-handed personal actions, Harvey was accused of making unauthorized expenditures, levying export taxes on tobacco and fees on each immigrant, and requisitioning ammunition from ships entering the
colony. However, among the rash of legitimate complaints against Harvey was the charge that he had made a dangerous peace with the Indians without the Council’s consent. It must be remembered that the settlers not only protested against despotic actions of the government, but were also hell-bent for grabbing as much land as possible from the Indians; accordingly, peace with the natives was the last thing that the settlers desired.

Thus the Council was driven to meeting and it “thrust out” Harvey from the colony in 1635. Harvey was shipped back to England and Captain John West appointed in his place until the king’s wishes could be known. As soon as he arrived in England, Harvey again showed his character by having arrested the two negotiators whom the Council had sent to England to plead its case. One of them, Francis Pott, was still languishing in prison a year later, and under harsh conditions.

Harvey was reappointed by the Crown and returned to Virginia in 1637, thirsting for vengeance against the rebellious colonists. First, Harvey, backed by Lord Baltimore, had his chief enemies arrested for treason and hauled to England to appear before the Court of Star Chamber. Those arrested included Captain John West, Samuel Mathews, and George Menefie, as well as William Claiborne. True to his personal vow that he would not leave Captain Mathews with assets “worth a cow’s tail,” Harvey confiscated his enemies’ property in Virginia. The Crown, however, forced Harvey to disgorge the seized property. Harvey also concluded that humor was dangerous to the state, and he consequently arrested the Reverend Anthony Panton, rector for some of the leading rebels. Panton’s crime was apparently calling the man who Harvey had appointed secretary of the colony instead of Claiborne, a “jackanapes.” The “trial” of Panton was conducted by none other than Richard Kemp himself—the new secretary in question—who acted as both prosecutor and judge. Sentence was meted out by Kemp with appropriate severity: the seizure of Panton’s possessions, his expulsion from his parish, and exile from Virginia—with the penalty of death should he return to the colony. Harvey also moved to impose a tithing tax on the corn of Panton’s parishioners, presumably a special punishment for their lack of wisdom in having Panton as their rector.

This monstrous procedure was too much for even the rather callous sensibilities of the day. The Crown suspended the sentence and finally removed Harvey in 1639. The decision against Panton was reversed and his property and parish restored. The imprisoned Council leaders were released and restored to their positions. The “mutiny” of the Virginia leaders against Governor Harvey’s despotic rule had finally succeeded. It was Harvey’s successor, Governor Francis Wyatt, who was instructed to convene periodic meetings of the Virginia Assembly, thereby making Virginia’s representative body a permanent one.

One lasting consequence of Claiborne’s colony was the settlement in 1645 of the Northern Neck of Virginia (the peninsula between the Rappahannock and the Potomac rivers) by refugees from Kent Island.

The most prominent figure in the government of Virginia in the seventeenth century was the governor Sir William Berkeley, whose term of office began in 1642 and continued, with interruption, until 1677. In contrast to the later years of his term, Berkeley’s first years found him a liberal reformer. The entire poll tax, both the tax paid to the governor and the general tax, was repealed; peace was made with the Indians; taxes on estates were lowered; impoverished debtors in prison were given relief; and such relics of Virginia Company oppression as condemnations were abolished. In addition, a law was reenacted to prevent the governor and the Council from levying any taxes or appropriating any new money except by authority of the Assembly. Berkeley also ended some of the land abuses in Virginia by removing arbitrary James River Valley particular-plantation grants that had never been settled, and allowing settlers to enter these lands and gain title to them.

Soon after Berkeley took office, the Virginia colony found itself confronted with a revolution in Great Britain. Staunchly royalist in that era, Virginia stood firm for the Crown. Virginia’s devotion to the royal cause was shaped by its own particular experience. For one thing, Charles I’s rule in Virginia had been relatively moderate, far different indeed from the tyranny he was imposing on England. Virginians had been permitted to enjoy more freedom and local rule than Englishmen had ever enjoyed before. The oppressive Navigation Acts had not yet been imposed. The king had removed the hated John Harvey. Governor Berkeley’s reforms had been welcomed. Moreover, Anglican-Puritan relations were not nearly as exacerbated as in the home country. As we have seen, Virginia’s own Anglicanism was decidedly low church; the Pilgrim fathers had been invited to Virginia in 1620 and an influential moderate Puritan group settled, during the 1640s, in southside Virginia. (This is not to say that religious liberty prevailed: Puritans were sporadically persecuted and dissenting ministers driven from the colony.) Finally, to the Virginians, the rule of the old Virginia Company had been far worse than royal rule: petitioning against any reimposition of the company, the Assembly exclaimed that the colonists, if under the scepter of the company, would be subject to arbitrary rule, their property rights would be taken from them, and their freedom of trade—“the blood and life of a commonwealth”— would be sacrificed to the monopoly of the company.