Conceived in Liberty (28 page)

Blair combined political, ministerial, and educational activities, assuming a seat in the Council in 1694. He soon broke with Andros, who was apparently not theocratic enough for the young minister. Blair agitated for increased support for the established church, and King William and Queen Mary responded by asking the Assembly to pay the clergy in money or in tobacco valued at current prices. The House of Burgesses replied tartly that the ministers were well enough paid; whereupon, in mid-1696, the Anglican clergymen of the colony petitioned the Assembly for greater salaries and subsidies. The legislature yielded to the pressure, and increased subsidies for the ministers.

Blair’s pressure finally resulted in Andros’ removal in the spring of 1698, and his replacement as governor by Francis Nicholson, now returning to Virginia as full-fledged governor, rather than as Culpeper’s deputy.

Nicholson effected a few badly needed reforms: on royal instructions, he had the great powers of the Council over the colony reduced; no longer could councillors be customs collectors, naval officers, and auditors all in one—thus reducing the practice of councillors’ sitting in judgment on their own actions.

Nicholson also tried to institute land reforms. During the 1680s and 1690s, land engrossing through large arbitrary land grants had grown apace. Governor Andros, in particular, had granted large tracts to individuals, by selling to individual engrossers “rights” to land. The old headright system of granting fifty acres of land for each person settled in or brought to Virginia was hardly ideal; but selling rights to fifty-acre plots at one to five shillings per “right,” completely cut the natural link between land settlement and ownership, and added to the monopolizing of unused land by speculators.

Typical of land abuses in Virginia was the case of a large planter, William Byrd II. The law required a land grantee to establish at least one settler to every 100 acres of his grant within ten years of the date of issue. Now this was hardly a satisfactory safeguard against land abuses, since the grantee rather than the settlers themselves was considered the property owner. The settlers either were forced into a quasi-feudal subservience to the privileged grantee, or else had to buy the land at prices far higher than the zero price that would have obtained without the engrossment by the government and its pet grantees. Of course, the settlers still had to spend money immigrating, clearing the land, etc., but at least no arbitrary cost would have been imposed on top of these expenses. Yet, despite these grave weaknesses, the law at least tried to establish
some
connection between landownership and settlement, and grantees like Byrd proceeded to evade even this vague limitation.

Thus, in 1688 William Byrd obtained a grant from the government of over 3,000 acres. He failed to get the land settled within the ten years, but being head of the Virginia land office he managed to delay forfeiting the land until 1701. At that point, Byrd got the same tract regranted to his close friend Nathaniel Harrison, who soon had the land regranted to Byrd for another ten years’ chance. An additional tract of 6,000 acres was secured by Byrd. Failing to settle it in time, he had it transferred to his son.

Nicholson tried to reform these practices, but accomplished little. In his first administration he tried to revoke some land grants, but the Council refused to cooperate; in his second term he prohibited the practice of gaining more headright land by bringing in more Negro slaves. On the other hand, far less helpful were Nicholson’s attempts to enforce quitrent payments to the Crown.

During the Nicholson administration, Virginia changed its capital from Jamestown nearby to the newly created city of Williamsburg in the spring
of 1700. A more lasting achievement was Nicholson’s proclamation in 1703 of the English Act of Toleration in Virginia. Liberty of conscience for all religions was guaranteed, except for non-Protestants. This action guaranteed religious freedom to the new and growing dissenting Protestant sects in Virginia, especially Presbyterians, whose form of worship was quite close to the low Anglicanism of the colony.

The irascible Nicholson soon fell to quarreling with the Blair faction, by now intermarried with the powerful Ludwells. The Blair-Ludwell clique immediately began to plot for Nicholson’s recall. Six councillors, led by Blair, submitted such a petition to Queen Anne in 1703, accusing Nicholson of personal bullying and despotic behavior. But the governor took his case openly to the Assembly and the public in the spring of 1705, and the majority of the House of Burgesses, as well as the great majority of the Anglican clergymen of the colony, came to Nicholson’s defense. The bulk of the clergy petitioned England, denouncing Blair’s attack on the governor and hailing Nicholson’s administration. One of Blair’s friends published a bitter attack on the convocation of clergymen, the first stanza of which pointedly declared:

Bless us! What dismal times are these! What stars are in conjunction! When priests turn sycophants to please, And hare-brained passion to appease; Dare prostitute their unction.

Finally, in the summer of 1705 Blair succeeded and Nicholson was removed as governor. He was replaced by a new system. Appointed as governor-in-chief of Virginia was the Earl of Orkney, who remained in England for forty years, drawing a good salary for his post while taking no interest whatever in colonial affairs. As lieutenant governor, in actual charge of Virginia, the Crown appointed Major Edward Nott.

During the short-lived Nott administration, the new governor tried once again to push through a bill forcing Virginia to build ports and to restrict all trade to them. The Port Bill was instigated by English merchants, who would have found it cheaper and more convenient to concentrate their shipments at a few ports rather than having to trade at each planter’s wharf. The Crown, however, disallowed the bill and thus finally ended the menace of compulsory ports in Virginia. The Crown also became alarmed that Virginians were shifting from tobacco to cotton or wool raising and manufacturing. In the imperial mercantilist framework, the colonies were not supposed to compete with imperial manufactures; they were supposed only to supply raw material and then purchase the finished product from the mother country. The Board of Trade ordered Nott to discourage any cotton planting in Virginia.

The big dispute of the Nott administration was over the established church. The oligarchic Council, led by Blair, was anxious to put the Anglican Church on a more secure footing by raising ministers’ salaries and securing greater tenure in office. Nothing was done, since the relatively liberal
House of Burgesses had opposite objectives. One objective was to reduce the church oligarchy by periodically dissolving the ruling bodies of the church, that is, the vestries, which had become self-perpetuating bodies of church elders. Both parties deadlocked, and neither set of changes could pass, an impasse aggravated by the Anglican clergy’s denunciation of the highhanded tactics of the “Scot hireling,” Blair. The deadlock meant that the overwhelming majority of Anglican ministers in Virginia—those not officially inducted into office—held office only on the sufferance of the particular board of vestrymen.

Nott died a year after his induction and the next four years were politically uneventful, as the president of the Council served as acting governor of the colony.

While Virginia, in the decades after Bacon’s Rebellion, increasingly settled down to a rather placid oligarchic rule, one element in Virginia society persisted in being the reverse of placid about its condition. From Bacon’s Rebellion to 1710, the colony seethed with incipient and actual revolts by the Negro slaves. Being an oppressed minority of the populace, the slaves, in revolt by themselves and lacking mass white support, could not hope to succeed, and yet they continued to try to break through to freedom.

In the early 1680s, the Virginia legislature was troubled enough to pass the Act for Preventing Negroes Insurrections. Frequent meetings of Negro slaves were denounced as “dangerous,” as conspiratorial activity abounding “under pretext of feast, and burials.” Yet, despite such precautions, slave revolts broke out in Virginia in 1687, 1691, 1694, 1709, and 1710, as well as in other years.

The 1687 uprising was centered in Virginia’s Northern Neck. The plan of uprising was uncovered, and the leaders executed. The Council, as a consequence, prohibited public slave funerals, which the rebels had used as their meeting ground. But this did not prevent the uprising of 1691, in which the slave Mingoe, having escaped his master in Middlesex County, gathered a guerrilla band and attacked plantations, especially in Rappahannock County.

By 1694 Governor Andros condemned the lack of enforcement of antislave rebellion legislation, thus permitting Negroes to “run together in certain parts of the colony, causing assemblages so dangerous as to threaten the peace of the whole community.”

As Negro slaves increased in number after the turn of the century, threats of slave rebellion grew correspondingly. Early in 1709 a plot for rebellion by both Negro and Indian slaves in Surry, James City, and Isle of Wight counties was uncovered. The court inquiry found that the “late dangerous conspiracy [was] formed and carried on by great numbers of... Negroes and Indian slaves for making their escape by force from the service of their masters, and for the destroying and cutting off such... as should oppose their design.” The revolt conspiracy was led by four slaves: Scipio, Peter, Salvadore, and Tom Shaw.

The following year, a slave revolt planned for Easter in Surry and James City counties was betrayed by the slave Will, whose freedom was purchased by the Virginia legislature as a “reward of his fidelity and for encouragement of such services.” It was ironic that the informer should be rewarded with the very goal that the rebels were desperately trying to achieve: freedom. The two main rebel leaders were duly executed, said Lieutenant Governor Jennings, “to strike such terror in the other Negroes as will keep them from forming such designs in the future....”

Religion was one of the principal traits distinguishing the Northern from the Southern colonies. In the South the state-established Church of England tended to be dominant, but the Northern colonies were largely settled by members of churches dissenting from the established church. These Dissenters came to America largely because they desired to create communities in which they could practice their beliefs undisturbed.

The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century had taken two broadly different paths. In the rising absolute monarchies of Europe, the state gained control over the church within the nation (whether Protestant or Catholic) and found it more consonant with its own power-structure to maintain the episcopal system. On the other hand, independent and decentralized cities and provinces, such as Switzerland and the Netherlands, were the home of far more thoroughgoing reform in religious doctrine and structure. In these (Calvinist) countries, bishops were eliminated and ministers appointed directly by the state.

In England, the church, created as a state church by the Crown, not only maintained episcopacy but was far closer than the Lutherans to Roman Catholic doctrine and practice. Protestantizing reforms were soon introduced into the church, but the Catholic church during the reign of Queen Mary drove the more radical of the reformers to Holland and other Continental centers of advanced Protestant theology and practice. When the Church of England was reestablished under Elizabeth in 1559, the returning reformers found the Anglican church even less reformed than before they had gone into exile. They now concentrated on seeking a purification of religious ceremonies within the Anglican church and were thus called
Puritans. The Puritans came to hold important church and university positions and to exercise a strong influence in the government and in Parliament, but the government soon summarily removed them from their posts. Persecution polarized the Puritans, who began to advocate the purification of the church organization (which had blocked the purification of rites) by eliminating the role of the bishops. Some of the reformers (the Separatists, or Congregationalists) doubted the possibility of reforming the state church from within, and illegally withdrew from attendance at church to organize separate reformed churches, vesting autonomous control in each congregation.

The bulk of the Puritans, however, were influenced by the Calvinist or Presbyterian form of church organization dominant in the Netherlands and parts of Switzerland, where their leaders had lived in exile. In the Presbyterian system, first established at Geneva, each church or congregation was, to be sure, ruled by elders—the preaching elder, or minister, and the ruling elder, or leading layman. But to prevent diversity of doctrine, the congregation selected the minister and elder only with the advice and consent of a synod or consistory of the ministers and elders of the churches of the district. While the role of the leading laymen in the church was high, state officials in Geneva were restricted to church members, and this limited the selection of magistrates to laymen who were under the influence of the ministers. Thus, in contrast to Anglicanism, control of the church was partially replaced by church control of the state. This Presbyterian method of church organization, negating the roles of king and bishops, tended to appeal to the ministers and to the local community oligarchs—nobles, gentry, merchants—whose powers over the people would thus be increased at the expense of their political opposition, the king and his officials. In France, England, Scotland, and the Netherlands a large portion of local political leaders became Calvinist and Presbyterian.

Since the English government strongly punished suspected Calvinists, the Presbyterian organization was not directly introduced into England, and the Puritans, aided by their intellectual center at Cambridge University, spread their beliefs from within the Anglican church, by which they influenced the important groups and industrial populations of London, East Anglia, and the West Country.