Conceived in Liberty (21 page)

Furthermore, the subservient Assembly now met and quickly repealed all of the bold acts of liberal reform of Bacon’s Assembly of June 1676. Under Berkeley’s direction, the Assembly proceeded to hang many more rebels by acts of attainder, and to fine, imprison, banish, and expropriate still more. Some rebels were ordered to pay heavy fines and appear before the Assembly with halters around their necks, kneeling to repent of their guilt and beg for their lives. If freed by the Assembly, they were forced to repeat the same ordeal before the county court. All leading supporters of the rebellion were barred thereafter from holding public office. Even the hapless indentured servants who followed Bacon were sentenced to imprisonment whenever their terms of service should expire. Anyone who had written or spoken anything favoring the rebellion, or even criticizing anyone in authority, received heavy fines, the pillory, flogging, or branding on the forehead. Yet the jails were not filled, being kept clear by banishments and executions.

Some hapless Virginians were caught in the middle in the civil war. Thus Otto Thorpe. Wishing not to sign Bacon’s compulsory loyalty oath, Thorpe
finally did so when his wife was threatened. Later in the rebellion, Thorpe refused to aid Bacon further and had his property confiscated by the rebels as a consequence. Then, when Berkeley returned
to
power, he sent Thorpe to jail for swearing to the Baconian oath and confiscated his property once more.

The commissioners sadly concluded that no peace could come to the colony, either internally or with the Indians, until Berkeley had been completely removed from his post and the general pardon carried out. The only real supporters of Berkeley in his fanatic campaign of vengeance were twenty friends of his among the oligarchy, known as the Green Spring faction. The commissioners reported that the Green Spring group was continually pleading for the punishment of the guilty, who were “little less than the whole country.” The commissioners, indeed, estimated that of all the people in Virginia (who now numbered about 40,000) only 500 had never supported the rebellion. Finally, the Assembly, under pressure of the commissioners, forced the reluctant Berkeley to stop the hangings. As one assemblyman stated, if not for this interference, “the governor would have hanged half the country.” Under pressure of the commissioners, the Assembly of February 1677 also reenacted a few of the most innocuous of the reform laws of the previous year.

Despite the intimidation and terror, a large number of grievances were sent to the Assembly and the commissioners by the people of Virginia. The most common grievance concerned the levying of heavy and unjust taxes by officials, taxes that were used for expenditures over which the people had no control. Typical was a petition from Surry County, which prayed the authorities “to ease us His Majesty’s poor subjects of our great burdens and taxes.” The petition asked:

Whereas
there yearly came a great public levy from James City we never knew for what to the great grief and dissatisfaction of the poor upon whose shoulders the levy chiefly lay,
we most humbly pray
that for the future the collectors of the levy (who instead of satisfaction were wont to give churlish answers) may be obliged to give an account in writing what the levy is for to any who shall desire it.

The Surry county petition also humbly asked for a free election for every Assembly so that they could find redress for their grievances.

Not surprisingly, this humble petition received its typical answer: severe punishment for the petitioners by the Assembly, for the high crime of “speaking or writing disrespectfully of those in authority.” Other grievances mentioned in petitions were favoritism, illegal fees charged by local officials, restriction of the right to vote, monopoly of the Indian trade, and the arbitrary seizing of property by the government.

While the commissioners were hardly zealous in defending the people against Berkeley’s oppression, they at least arranged a peace with the Indians, and the great Indian war was happily ended. Finally, the commissioners
decided to carry the king’s order into effect, and they ousted Berkeley. Leaving for England, Berkeley made his exit in characteristic fashion, kicking and snarling all the way, and bitterly denouncing the ambition, incompetence, and ignorance of the appointed lieutenant governor left in charge. At long last, on May 5, 1677, Berkeley embarked for England, dying soon after his arrival. Perhaps Berkeley’s most appropriate epitaph was the reported comment on the Virginia affair by King Charles II: “That old fool has hanged more men in that naked country than I did here for the murder of my father.”

The shadow of Berkeley still fell over the unhappy colony, however, as Virginia, not knowing of his death, still believed that Berkeley would soon engineer his return. The colony was still in the hands of Berkeley’s henchmen, the Green Spring oligarchs who had been reestablished in their lucrative and powerful offices. Leading members of this faction were Colonel Philip Ludwell, Colonel Thomas Ballard, Colonel Edward Hill, and Major Robert Beverley. It also included Colonel John Washington and Richard Lee. Green Spring’s control was especially strong after the commissioners had returned to England in July. The Green Spring faction ran the council, and engineered corrupt elections to the House of Burgesses. They continued to drag rebels into court to seize their property and they levied another large poll tax on the colony, again laying the heaviest burden on the poorest citizens. Petitions from the counties to redress grievances continued to be punished in the by now traditional manner: severe punishment for statements highly scandalous and injurious to authority.

Finally, in October, news of Berkeley’s death arrived in Virginia, and the king was finally able to get his complete and general pardon published. The Baconian remnants, still hiding in the woods, were able to emerge and resume their normal lives. But if Berkeley was at last truly dead, his system was not; Berkeleyism and the Green Spring faction continued to rule the colony. In fact, the next governor, Thomas Lord Culpeper, was a relative of Lady Berkeley. The revolution had failed, but it continued to live on in the hearts of Americans who cherished the memory of its near victory—a beacon light for future rebellions against tyranny.

*
For the leading expressions of the two points of view, see Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker,
Torchbearer of the Revolution
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1940,) for the orthodox interpretation; and Wilcomb Washburn,
The Governor and the Rebel
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1957), for the revisionist.

*
See below for further discussion of class and caste.

**
Another motive in later rebellion was a desire for a compulsory cartel, in unsound and desperate attempts to force a rise in tobacco prices.

Virginia, as we have seen, was England’s first chartered colony and the first royal colony in America. The remaining type of English colony was the proprietary, and the first proprietary colony was founded in the early seventeenth century, just north of the Virginia border.

A proprietary grant was a far more feudalistic device than the chartered company. For a company, being a joint venture of capitalists, was bent on parceling out land to its shareholders, on earning rapid profits rather than acting as a long-time or permanent feudal landlord. But the gift of a huge tract of land to a single proprietor was a more enticing invitation to feudalism to come to American shores.

The first American proprietary was a grant of land in 1632 by King Charles I to Cecilius Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore. The grant was carved out of Virginia territory and extended from the Potomac River north to the fortieth parallel, including (but rather larger than) the present boundaries of Maryland. The king reserved for himself but one-fifth of the gold and silver that might be mined each year in the province. Otherwise, Lord Baltimore was as free to govern in his vast domain as the king was in England. The king even expressly granted the power to levy any taxes on Maryland, so named in honor of the English queen Henrietta Maria. The charter granted to Lord Baltimore ownership of all the land, minerals, rivers, and fisheries in the area as well as the right to confer titles, incorporate cities and towns, levy taxes, erect churches and feudal manors, and constitute courts. This was a veritable feudal government—a “Palatinate” as existed in Europe, specifically like the Palatinate of Durham in England. One important limitation on Calvert’s absolute rule, as in the case of the king himself, was that he
could levy taxes only with the consent of an Assembly representing the freemen, or landholders, of the province.

The first settlement in Maryland was made in 1634 by two small ships, the
Ark
and the
Dove,
carrying about 220 people and landing at St. Marys, near the mouth of the Potomac. From the first, Roman Catholicism was a uniquely important issue in this colony. For Calvert’s father, George, the first Lord Baltimore and a leader of the monarchial party in England, had turned Catholic after receiving a promise of the grant. From the first, Cecilius wanted to make Maryland a haven from persecution for Catholics in England. But, eager to encourage settlement (for without settlers there would be no profit from his feudal domain), Calvert made no religious test for settling in the colony. As a result, Protestants outnumbered Catholics among the settlers by nearly ten to one from the beginning—with the Protestant faith predominating among the poorer classes and Catholicism among the gentlemen. Both Protestants and Catholics enjoyed full religious liberty and there was no established church in the colony.

Early relations with the Indians were peaceful, with the land acquired from them by voluntary purchase rather than by force. This peaceful coexistence was assured by Calvert’s simple expedient of instructing his men to deal fairly with the Indians. Indeed, the largest wigwam in St. Marys was after purchase consecrated as a church by the two Jesuit priests of the first expedition.
*

The land system, however, in keeping with the vast feudal powers given to Calvert, was established on the most rigidly feudal lines in America. Calvert early advertised that every settler who would finance the transport of five other settlers to the colony would receive a grant as “Lord of the Manor” of 2,000 acres of land—not outright, however, or in fee simple, but as a feudal tenancy with a quitrent of 400 pounds of good wheat per year to the proprietor. The manor lords, most of them Catholic, in turn rented their land to smaller planters in exchange for rent in produce. This restrictive method of allocating land or landownership decidedly hampered the growth of the entire colony during the seventeenth century. Furthermore, Calvert gave vast estates as manors to his friends and relatives.

The first governor of the colony was Calvert’s brother, Leonard, and Calvert appointed a Council to advise his brother. While the Calverts tried to keep representative government to a minimum, an Assembly soon developed, after persistent pressure from below on the proprietors. The proprietor and the Assembly soon quarreled over the extent of their relative powers, the proprietor claiming the sole right to initiate legislation, which the Assembly could then reject. The Assembly, with the power to hold up the enactment of laws, refused to consent to any imposition of a code by Calvert and thus won the fight to initiate legislation.

At first, all the landowners sat in the Assembly, but soon the representative principle was adopted. In 1650, the Assembly turned into the familiar two-house type: the Council sitting as the upper house and the elected members as the lower. The governor and the proprietor, who appointed the governor, had veto power over all legislation and the governor could also dissolve the Assembly at will. However, the Assembly assured its continuing existence by refusing to grant taxes for more than a year at a time. The supreme judicial power, as in Virginia, was vested in the governor and the Council, although eventually this provincial court set up subsidiary county courts for minor cases and judges, appointed and removable by the governor, were appointed as higher courts.

We have already alluded to the conflict between Lord Baltimore and William Claiborne, a Virginian who had established a trading post on Kent Island in Chesapeake Bay. This quarrel was embittered by Claiborne’s virulent anti-Catholicism, which had spurred him to play a leading role in ousting Calvert from Virginia, before the founding of the Maryland colony. With Claiborne refusing to recognize Calvert’s overlordship of Kent Island, Calvert moved to assert his dominion over Claiborne, wielding his land grant as his claim. The conflict was punctuated by a naval battle between the ships of Lord Baltimore and of Claiborne. Finally, the king decided the issue by ruling in Lord Baltimore’s favor.

In the mid-1640s, as the Puritan Revolution arose in England, Lord Baltimore sided with the king, and Leonard Calvert received privileges (or “letters of marque”) from the king to capture vessels belonging to Parliament. On the other hand, the Protestant tobacco trader, Capt. Richard Ingle, a friend of Claiborne’s, received a similar commission from Parliament. The governor ordered Ingle’s arrest for high treason in denouncing the king, whereupon Ingle escaped and in 1645 mounted a successful attack on Maryland. Captain Ingle took the opportunity, “for conscience’” sake, to plunder and pillage “papists and malignants,” seizing property and jailing his enemies. The venerable Father Andrew White, a Jesuit missionary who had arrived on the first ships to land in Maryland, was sent to England in irons to be tried for treason. Happily, the old missionary was acquitted.

In the meanwhile, Claiborne took the opportunity to retrieve Kent Island from Maryland’s seizure. Under Ingle’s attack, Leonard Calvert escaped to Virginia, from where Berkeley helped him to recapture Maryland and Kent Island.

Returning to England, Ingle almost succeeded in revoking Maryland’s charter, but Calvert retained it by taking pains to placate Parliament. Calvert, for example, encouraged a group of Dissenters exiled from Virginia to settle in Maryland, a little further up the Chesapeake Bay from St. Marys, in what is now Annapolis. Furthermore, after Leonard Calvert died in 1648, Lord Baltimore appointed the Protestant William Stone as governor. He required the governor to take an oath not to violate the free exercise of religion by any Christians, specifically including Roman Catholics. Subsequently,
in April 1649, the Maryland Assembly passed the famous Toleration Act, which guaranteed all Christians the free exercise of their religion. However, tolerance and religious liberty went only so far and the death penalty was levied against all non-Christians, including Jews and Unitarians. Neither did toleration extend to freedom of speech, for any use of such religious epithets as “heretic” and “popish priest” was outlawed. Also prohibited on the Sabbath were swearing, drinking, unnecessary work, and disorderly recreation. Actually, the much vaunted Toleration Act was a
retreat
from the religious liberty that had previously prevailed in Catholic-ruled Maryland, and was a compromise with the growing spirit of Puritan intolerance.