Conceived in Liberty (16 page)

While attached to the Crown, many Virginians protested immediately when in 1648 the governor and the Council claimed authority to conscript (impress) soldiers without the concurrence of the House of Burgesses, and when they proceeded to conscript a ten-man bodyguard for the governor. The Assembly gave as one excuse for agreeing to this conscription the existence of a “schismatical party” (the Puritans and Dissenters) disaffected from the government.

In 1649, when Parliament had executed Charles I, Virginia stood stubbornly by the Old Order and proclaimed its continued allegiance to the House of Stuart. Indeed, the Virginia Assembly denounced the King’s execution
bitterly, defied the proclaimed authority of Parliament, and proceeded to uphold this view savagely by decreeing it a crime carrying the death penalty for anyone even to defend the execution. In fact, anyone making so bold as to question the right of succession of Charles II, or to propose any change in the existing government of Virginia, was to be charged with high treason. Even speaking any evil of the king was to be punished at the arbitrary discretion of governor and Council. Virginia also offered refuge to prominent emigrés—the Cavaliers, for example, faithful supporters of the Crown. The Cavaliers, largely of wealthy merchant and landed families, took their accustomed place among the leading planting families in Virginia, including the prominent Lees, Carters, Randolphs, and Masons, and, indeed, the bulk of the men who remained as the dominant planters of Virginia.
*

In retaliation, Parliament in 1650 passed the embryo of the first Navigation Act, which forbade Virginia from trading with foreign countries or with any foreign ships lacking a special license—thus hitting at England’s efficient Dutch competitors. It is instructive that this first important measure of restrictive mercantilism was specifically proclaimed to be a punishment to a rebellious colony. Parliament concluded by denouncing the Virginians as rebels and traitors.

When news of Parliament’s punitive action reached Virginia in early 1651, the reaction of the Virginia rulers was both perceptive and heroically defiant. Comparing the situation in Virginia with that in England, Governor Berkeley told the Assembly: “Consider yourselves how happy you are, and have been, how the gates of wealth and honor are shut on no man, and that there is not an arbitrary hand, that dares to touch the substance either poor or rich.” What can be hoped from submission to parliamentary dictates? Now, Berkeley went on, the Virginians enjoyed freedom from oppression, peace, and the opportunity to gain wealth, and “the security to enjoy this wealth when gotten.... We can only fear the Londoners, who would fain to 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.” The governor and the members of the Assembly then unanimously adopted a “Vindication” for their actions. The Vindication perceptively concluded that Parliament was punishing the trade of Virginia in order to appease the “avarice of a few interested persons [the big London merchants], who endeavor to rob us of all we sweat and labor for.”

In 1652 Parliament sent a fleet with four commissioners to Virginia to bring the recalcitrant colony to heel. Fortunately, the commissioners were moderates and the instructions liberal. Furthermore, the Virginians, after
raising an army of over a thousand men, wisely decided that discretion was the better part of warfare, and submitted to the commissioners’ force. In return, the rule of the parliamentary commissioners turned out to be liberating rather than vindictively repressive. Not only was the royalist Berkeley deposed and Commissioner Richard Bennett substituted as governor with the agreement of the Burgesses, but executive and judicial powers were shorn from the governor and the governing power placed in the House of Burgesses, the colony’s elected house and miniature Parliament. The supreme legislative, executive, and judicial power was now vested in the House of Burgesses, where at least the Virginians themselves could exercise
some
check on state power. Virginia was declared “free from all taxes, customs and impositions,” and it was affirmed that none could be levied without consent of the Assembly, and that no garrisons could be maintained there without the same consent. Virginian trade was no longer to be singled out for discriminatory treatment. Berkeley himself was permitted to retire undisturbed to his Virginia estate.

Again, as in other matters, liberalism went only so far, and all inhabitants who refused to swear an oath of allegiance to Parliament were ordered exiled from the colony. On the other hand, the majority of the people of any parish was permitted to keep using the Anglican Book of Common Prayer.

Partially in fidelity to its revolutionary principles, partially from preoccupation with pressing affairs at home, Parliament left Virginia pretty much alone during the decade of the republic. In one sense, too much alone—for Bennett and the new secretary of the colony, William Claiborne, the veteran anti-Marylander, determined to take up the cause of the Virginia irredenta and forcibly bring Maryland back under the Virginia motherland. However, the new lord protector, Oliver Cromwell, soon scotched these efforts and in a few years Virginia and Lord Baltimore finally settled peacefully the Virginia-Maryland boundary.

The leading home-rule problem within Virginia, in those years, was the grievance of Northampton County on the Eastern Shore. Northampton protested in May 1652 against paying poll taxes of forty pounds of tobacco when it had not been represented in the Virginia Assembly for five years; in short, a cry against taxation without representation.

There were some difficulties between Governor Samuel Mathews, Jr. and the Burgesses during the late 1650s over unauthorized actions of the governor as well as his attempt to dissolve the Assembly in a dispute, but the disagreements were amicably resolved and the Burgesses left in unchallenged control.

With the collapse of the republican Protectorate in 1659, and the virtually coincidental death of Governor Samuel Mathews, the Virginia House of Burgesses proclaimed its “supreme power” until England should reassert a legitimate authority. The Burgesses then voluntarily elected
the royalist Berkeley governor once more. Achieving total, if temporary, independence from Britain, however, did not improve the civil-libertarian attitude of the Assembly. For it decreed that anyone who should “say or act anything in derogation of the present government” would be punished as an enemy of the peace. The election of Berkeley in March 1660 preceded the restoration of the monarchy in England by two months, and the new king, Charles II, quickly extended the official commission to Berkeley. Granting the extreme royalism motivating Virginia’s action and its purely temporary character, the fact remains that Virginia had the boldness to battle England, and even to declare a short-lived independence from the motherland. Surely, whatever the motives, here was an unwitting training ground in revolution, a testing of Virginia’s willingness to stand on its own feet and defy the mighty imperial country to which all the colonists had sworn allegiance.

*
See Richard L. Morton,
Colonial Virginia
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960), 1:166–68. For a rather different account of this immigration, cf. Bernard Bailyn, “Politics and Social Structure in Virginia,” in
Seventeenth-Century America,
ed. James M. Smith (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), pp. 98–100.

Rule in the European governments of the seventeenth century was exercised, not only by the great landowners—through feudalism—but also by groups of merchants and capitalists specially privileged and subsidized by the state, in the system that later came to be known as “mercantilism.” The essence of mercantilism was the granting or selling of monopolistic privilege and subsidy by the state to favored groups of businessmen. Thus, Crown, feudal nobility, and privileged capitalists exercised rule over the exploited remainder of the populace—which included the bulk of merchants and capitalists who sought profit by voluntary service in the marketplace rather than by obtaining privileges from the coercive power of the state.

From the beginning, government meddling—especially by the English government—fastened the mercantile system on the American colonies. As early as 1619, the Crown imposed a duty of one shilling per pound of tobacco imported by the Virginia Company and in 1622 prohibited any tobacco from being grown in England or Ireland. The motivation for the latter act was not to benefit Virginia, but to increase the revenue seized by the Crown: domestic tobacco producers, after all, paid no customs duty. In 1621 the Crown indeed delivered a grave blow to the company and to Virginia by prohibiting the colonists from exporting tobacco (or any other commodity) to any foreign country without first landing in England and paying customs duty there. It was in vain that the company protested that other English subjects and companies were allowed to sell their goods in the best markets, that the edict would cripple the tobacco-cattle trade with Ireland, that many Virginia products were not salable in England.

The sweetener for the company in this network of restriction was the granting, in 1622, to the Virginia Company of the monopoly privilege of importing tobacco into England and Ireland. The supposedly liberal Sir Edwin Sandys had led the intracompany fight to accept the monopoly, and he and his faction were appointed to manage the monopoly, at extravagant salaries.

In the period of the republic, Parliament—as we have seen hardly reluctant to impose mercantile restrictions for the benefit of merchant groups—began the famous series of Navigation Acts. In 1650 it outlawed foreign ships from trading in the colonies without a license, thus striking a blow at efficient Dutch shipping. The following year, it decreed that no goods from Asia, Africa, or America could be imported into England or its colonies except when the owner and most of the crew were English or English-American. It also prohibited imports of foreign goods in
entrepot
trade—from countries where the product did not originate, prohibited the importation of fish by aliens, and outlawed all participation of foreign ships in the English coastal trade.

These were blows to the efficiency and prosperity of interregional trade, and to the property, actual and potential, of the colonies, all for the special privileges accorded to inefficient shipowners. To enforce these sweeping prohibitions required a bureaucratic apparatus mighty for the time and place, including a network of paid government informers. So strict was the enforcement that not enough English vessels existed to replace the outlawed Dutch shipping, and grave complaints of shortages spread throughout the English colonies in the Americas—including the West Indies. The rebellious Virginia Assembly asserted in 1655 that freedom of trade would be maintained, and demanded that sea captains pay bond not to molest Dutch or other foreign shipping.

England, however, continued to tighten its mercantile restrictions, especially after monarchical rule had been restored. Thus, the Navigation Act of 1660 provided that no goods whatever could be imported into or exported from any English colony except in English-owned ships (of which at least three-fourths of the crew must be English), and compelled certain important enumerated colonial products (including tobacco) to be shipped only to England—thus outlawing colonial export trade in these goods to any other country. All ships leaving the colonies were required to give bond that they would not ship the goods elsewhere. The Navigation Act of 1662 extended these privileges: all future ships not built in English shipyards were now to be excluded from this colonial trade.

The mercantilist structure of the Navigation Acts was completed in 1662 with the exclusion of all European goods (except for a few commodities) from the colonial market except as shipped from English ports and in English-built ships. Colonial governors were charged with the responsibility of enforcement of the navigation laws, but in practice the power was delegated to a naval officer appointed in England.

The navigation laws continued to be tightened still further. The Navigation Act of 1673 moved against the attempt of the planters to maintain some of their tobacco trade by selling to other colonies. The act placed a prohibitive tax of one penny on each pound of tobacco shipped from one colony to another, and appointed customs commissioners to collect the duty. This act crippled the flourishing tobacco trade with New England. More sweeping was the Navigation Act of 1696, which confined
all
colonial trade to English-built ships, enlarged the powers of the colonial naval officers, and gave the provincial custom officers the right of forcible entry, which they already enjoyed in England. The act led to the establishment of vice admiralty courts in the colonies to enforce the regulations. Operating under Roman law, a vice admiralty court could try and convict without having to submit the cases to colonial juries, which were almost unanimous in their sympathy with any arraigned smugglers.

We have mentioned the drastic fall in the prices of tobacco in the seventeenth century. Much of this drop was due not to the great expansion of the Virginia tobacco crop, but to the Navigation Acts and their smashing of the export market for tobacco in Holland and other countries in Europe. Before the Navigation Acts, the Dutch had paid three pence per pound for Virginia tobacco; after the acts, the tobacco price had fallen to half a penny per pound by 1667. The fall was aggravated by the heavy losses of the English tobacco fleet in the wars with Holland (the Dutch wars of 1664–67 and 1672–73). To offset the crisis, Virginia turned to domestic mercantilism: compulsory cartels to raise tobacco prices. But since such an increase could only be accomplished by coerced restrictions on tobacco acreage, this meant that tobacco markets were not being widened, and prosperity could not be restored to the colony as a whole. In a compulsory tobacco cartel, some tobacco producers could only benefit at the expense of others, and of the rest of the colony’s population. In brief, quotas based on existing production must privilege the inefficient grower and the large grower about to fall behind in the competitive race, and discriminate against the efficient, and the new up-and-coming planters. In the “Plant-Cutting Riots” of 1682, the planters benefiting from the quotas organized bands of vandals to go from plantation to plantation destroying the tobacco crop.