Conceived in Liberty (17 page)

The protection from foreign competition accorded by the Navigation Acts to British shippers not only ruined the Virginians’ tobacco market (and that of neighboring Maryland’s planters as well); it also raised the prices of the gamut of imported goods now confined to British ships. Thus, Virginians suffered doubly from the imperial restrictions.

English enforcement of the Navigation Acts was unfortunately rigorous, especially in the Southern colonies. Three wars of aggression against the Dutch between 1652 and 1675 drove the Dutch—the more efficient of England’s competitors—out of the Chesapeake trade. The very geography of the Chesapeake Bay area made enforcement easy: the English navy
needed only to control the narrow entrance of the bay to keep foreign ships from buying or selling to the Virginia or Maryland plantations.

Thus, the English orientation of Virginia trade and finance was compelled by the Navigation Acts, which gravely injured Virginians and retarded Virginia development. Furthermore, the canker of slavery was also due partly to the Navigation Acts. The economic pressure of the acts on the planters led them to look to slavery as a way to cut costs by exploiting forced labor. Moreover, the English government forbade Virginia from restricting the infamous slave trade, the monopoly of which had by the wars against the Dutch been assured to British traders.

John Bland, a London merchant who had traded with the Dutch in Virginia tobacco, presented the excellent case of the Chesapeake planters against the Navigation Acts—but, unfortunately, to no avail.

Added to the devastation caused by the Navigation Acts was the burden of increased taxes. In addition to the crippling penny a pound on all coastal tobacco trade imposed in 1673, the hated poll tax was reimposed, In his first years of rule, Governor Berkeley had abolished the poll tax, which, being levied equally on all, particularly burdened the poorer strata of the population. In 1674, however, when Berkeley reintroduced the poll tax, a number of farmers assembled with their arms in Kent County to prevent collection of the new taxes, by force if necessary. This incipient tax rebellion was dispersed upon Berkeley’s proclamation that tax rebels would be accounted guilty of treason and punished accordingly.

Greatly adding to the grievances of most Virginians was the steady accumulation, ever since his reappointment, of absolute rule in the hands of Governor Berkeley and his clique of allies in the great planter oligarchy. No sooner was he reappointed governor than Berkeley seized control of the House of Burgesses: he filled the seats with his own henchmen and repudiated the Virginia tradition of frequent elections. In fact, he refused to call any election for the House of Burgesses from 1661 on, and only called meetings of the Assembly at his pleasure. Any recalcitrant burgesses were bribed with public offices, all of which were appointed by the governor. Berkeley’s absolute control of the Council—always dominated by the governor—was assured by the fact that the bulk of the councillors were allowed to die without being replaced, were not called together, or were out of reach. Now Berkeley was in full control of both houses of the Assembly. In 1670 Berkeley and the Assembly further tightened oligarchic control by taking the franchise away from nonlandowners. Berkeley also assumed supreme judicial power as president of the General Court of the colony. Oligarchic control by the leading planters over local government was further tightened; the vestries, for example, became self-perpetuating local governing bodies. County courts, made up of the great planters, met in secret to impose the county levy, which more and more placed tax burdens on the poor. Exorbitant fees were paid to sheriffs, clerks, and other local officials out of these taxes, and there was considerable graft
involved in the heavy expenditures needed to construct forts westward on the rivers.

Power is always used to acquire wealth, and here was no exception. Berkeley and his allies granted themselves the best lands, most of the public offices, and a monopoly of the lucrative fur trade with the Indians. Another of Berkeley’s tyrannical actions was to have the Assembly reestablish the Anglican church, and also to bring pressure for a governmental college that would include Anglican teaching of the youth.

Whenever anyone in the American colonies in the seventeenth century decided to embark on a policy of tyranny and religious persecution, the first group to bear the brunt was usually the hapless Quakers—of all sects the least devoted to idolatry of church or state. Upon embarking on the dictatorial rule of his second term, Governor Berkeley did not hesitate to revive the old laws against Dissenters, and naturally concentrated on the handful of Quakers. An English Quaker, George Wilson, upon arriving at Jamestown in 1661, was thrust into a dungeon, scourged, and kept in irons until death. While dying, he wrote, in a truly saintly manner: “For all their cruelty I can truly say, Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.” The previous year 1660, the Assembly had passed an act outlawing “an unreasonable and turbulent sort of people commonly called Quakers... [who are] endeavoring... to destroy religion, laws, communities and all bonds of civil society.” Apparently these “bonds of civil society” were to rest, not on voluntary consent, but on the dungeon and the torture rack.

In 1662 Berkeley decreed heavy fines on any Nonconformists who refused to have their children baptized, and threatened to exile any ship masters who brought any Dissenters into the colony. The next year two Quaker women entered Virginia, spreading the message in the colony. The two, Mary Tomkins and Alice Ambrose, were imprisoned and inflicted with thirty-two lashes from a whip of nine cords. After this their property was seized and they were expelled from Virginia.

It stands to reason that a man with this sort of attitude toward religious liberty and search for truth should be vehemently hostile toward education, freedom of inquiry, and individual and collective search for the truth. We are fortunate to have on record, however, a classic statement by Berkeley, revealing the despot’s fury toward learning and free inquiry. When asked in 1671 by the Crown what he had been doing to instruct the people in the Christian religion, Berkeley, in the course of his answer, declared: “I thank God,
there are no free schools
nor
printing
and I hope we shall not have these hundred years; for
learning
has brought disobedience, and heresy and sects into the world, and
printing
has divulged them, and libels against the best government. God keep us from both!” Learning and culture apparently were to be reserved to the safe hands of the ruling class, and were not to be permitted the ruled, who might learn enough to want to cast off their chains.

The inherent conflicts within Virginia’s society, as well as between Virginia and England, were further aggravated by an enormous land grant made by Charles II to Lord Hopton and a group of his friends, including Berkeley’s brother, Sir John, in 1649. This was a grant of over five million acres, constituting the partially settled Northern Neck of Virginia between the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers. The Hopton grant was assigned to Lord Culpeper in 1689. Even more startling was the joint proprietary grant of
all
Virginia in 1673 to two royal favorites, Lords Arlington and Culpeper, for a term of thirty-one years. The latter grant generated fierce opposition in Virginia because, for one thing, the Crown had been collecting the quitrents on Virginia lands in haphazard fashion, whereas Lords Culpeper and Arlington could be expected to make the best out of their feudal grant. The new proprietors were given the power to establish churches and schools, to appoint ministers and teachers. And they were given the power to appoint the sheriffs and other officers to grant lands and to create towns and counties.

Suddenly the Virginians were now confronted with the specter of absolute proprietary feudal rule, as well as the deprivation of all their liberties and their considerable measure of home rule. Indeed, no guarantees for the rights of Virginians were included in the Arlington-Culpeper grant.

The alarmed Assembly met the following year (1674) and protested that the grants would threaten the rights of the people, impose upon them new rents and dues, new grants and levies, and deprive them of the present protection of their rights and properties. The Virginians insisted that they wanted no privileged proprietors, whether individuals or chartered company, standing between them and the Crown and exploiting them still more. At heavy expense the Assembly sent commissioners to London to ask for removal of the grant. The negotiators eventually persuaded Lords Arlington and Culpeper to abandon all claims on the colony except quitrents and escheats (revenue from intestate estates). Pressures by the indignant Virginians had ended the threat of proprietary government over the Virginia colony.

In the course of the negotiations, the commissioners and the two proprietors agreed that Virginia should buy back the vast Northern Neck grant for £400 to each proprietor, and that the quitrents on the remaining lands should continue to be paid to the Crown, thus ending feudal quit-rents in the colony. The proprietary grant of 1673 was to be revoked and no further grants made without consulting the Virginia Council.

A new liberal charter in preparation would have provided that the governor and the members of the Council of Virginia must be residents of the colony and that no taxes could be imposed on Virginia without consent of the House of Burgesses. The charter drawn up by the king’s solicitor-general declared that the taxation provision “contains that which we
humbly conceive to be the right of Virginians, as well as all other Englishmen, which is,
not to be taxed but by their consent, expressed by their representatives.
” Unfortunately this new charter was blocked upon the outbreak of rebellion in Virginia in 1676.

Neither did the losses suffered by Berkeley’s administration in the Dutch War, during 1673, endear the government to the people of Virginia. One of the principal motives of the aggressive English war against the Dutch, beginning in 1672, was to drive the Dutch out of the Virginia trade. The Dutch attacked Virginia and succeeded in sinking eleven Virginia merchantmen laden with tobacco. Neither the war nor the losses were calculated to gain the support of the populace; indeed, many Virginians oppressed by English rule welcomed the Dutch invasion and the prospective shift of sovereignty to the Netherlands.

If we consider then the situation in Virginia in the mid-1670s we can see the accumulation of grievances and the aggravation of conflicts: the sudden feudal proprietary grant of all Virginia to Lords Arlington and Culpeper in 1673; the exclusive landed property franchise in 1670; the reimposition of the poll tax in 1674, and the general increase in taxation; and the establishment of tight rule by the Berkeley clique. To these we might add Berkeley’s persecution of the Dissenters, virtually driving them out of the colony.

Hints of revolt and mutiny against Berkeley began to emerge in the 1670s. On December 12, 1673, fourteen people met at Lawnes Creek Parish Church in Surry County to protest against excessive taxation and to insist that they would thereafter refuse to pay their taxes. Here was one of the first tax rebellions, or organized refusals to pay taxes, in America. On January 3, the very day that Berkeley’s judges issued a writ to haul the fourteen into court for “sedition,” the group met again in a field and one of their leaders, Roger Delke, declared that “we will burn all before one shall suffer.” Berkeley lost no time in hauling the rebels into court where Delke explained that they had met “by reason their taxes were so unjust, and they would not pay it.” Very heavy fines were levied on the protesters, especially on the main leader of the Surry tax protest, Matthew Swan, who continued to insist that the taxes were unjust. Proceedings against Swan lasted longer than against the others, and in April 1674 Swan was brought before the Council and General Court of Virginia for his “dangerous contempt and unlawful project and his wicked persisting in the same.” Berkeley was forced, however, by popular resentment at the treatment accorded the tax rebels, to remit all the fines some months later.

Many of the tax strikers were prominent landowners of the county. Matthew Swan was possibly related to Colonel Thomas Swann, a member of the Council; Delke’s father had been a member of the House of Burgesses. Several other protesters were related to former burgesses,
and one was a relative of one of the judges issuing a writ for their arrest. Furthermore, a near uprising was called off in 1674 and two mutinies occurred in the following year. All in all, the stage was set for one of the most important American armed rebellions against English authority in the colonial era: Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676.

The spark that set off the great rebellion of 1676 came from the tinderbox of Indian relations. To explain them we must first go back to chart the history of Indian-white relations in seventeenth-century Virginia.

First, we may ask, how did the colonists go about the task urged upon them by King James, of bringing “the infidels and savages living in those parts [the native American Indians] to human civility”? Generally we may say that the native American Indians regarded the newcomers with a mixture of brotherly kindness and eagerness to make contact with the world outside; this, however, was countered by hostility based on the well-founded fear that the colonists were out to seize their lands. The whites generally regarded the Indians as possessors of land ripe for expropriation. This attitude of the whites was partially justified, as Indian land was typically owned not by the individual, but by the collective tribal unit, and furthermore was inalienable under tribal law. This was particularly true of the land itself as contrasted to its annual use. Furthermore, tribal law often decreed land ownership over large tracts of even unused acreage. Still, however, this land inequity provided no excuse for the physical dispersion of individual Indians from their homes and from land actually used, let alone the plundering of their crops and the slaughtering of the Indian people.