University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XXIV

CAUSES OF POPULAR DISCONTENT—Continued

The revolt against a heavy tax, because so little was apparently
achieved by it, seemed further justified by the various
acts to build towns and establish forts which passed the
General Assembly. These acts were really suggested by the
English Government. Perhaps, no policy was ever pursued
by any community, whether involuntarily or on its own
motion, which was so hopeless of accomplishment as this
policy. Every economic influence of the time and the locality
was repugnant to its success. The economic system of Virginia
at this period rested broadly upon the fact of the dispersal
of the population. In that age, when artificial manures
had not yet been devised, fertile lands which had never before
been cultivated were required for the production of the highest
grade of tobacco; and these lands could only be acquired by
suing out new patents, or by extending the tobacco fields into
virgin ground belonging to each old plantation. There was
no disposition among the inhabitants to live together in villages
and to go thence daily to their holdings, lying, perhaps,
some distance off. It was the custom for every planter to
reside on his own property. Each community was, as a
rule, chiefly composed of small estates. Such manufactures
as were undertaken were purely domestic, and the artisans
were restricted to the slaves and white indentured servants.

Such being the general condition, it followed naturally that
there was no influence abroad to build up a number of towns
in different parts of the Colony. Jamestown remained in
existence so long simply because it was the capital of the
country and the centre of its judicial and political business.

In 1662, an act of the Assembly required that thirty-two brickhouses
should be erected there at the expense of the counties
—an act that imposed an additional tax of thirty pounds of
tobacco on each tithable—and yet most of these houses were
allowed to sink gradually into ruin long before they could be
completed. The same condition befell the public warehouses
ordered to be constructed elsewhere.

Nor was there any economic influence to make successful
the attempt to establish numerous ports of entry in Virginia,
which was tried on more than one occasion. The Colony was
interspersed with navigable rivers, large and small, and as
most of the plantations fronted on these streams, the merchantmen
could load or unload almost at the doors of the
private storehouses. Should the water be too shallow for the
largest trading vessels to come up to the wharves, there were
always shallops to carry the tobacco on board, or to bring off
the merchandise that was consigned to individual citizens.

Another cause of popular discontent was the act for the
erection of numerous strongholds. The English merchants
preferred the construction of a formidable fortification at
Point Comfort to the building of a fort at Jamestown many
miles above. The channel at the Point was narrow, and it
was thought that, should it be closed by stationary guns, the
most productive plantations in Virginia would be amply
protected. Their opinion prevailed, and the ordnance at
Jamestown was laboriously transported to Point Comfort.
Seventy thousand pounds of tobacco were expended on the
fortification there—only for that fortification to be swept
away by the great hurricane of 1677. The five forts erected
on the James, Nansemond, York, Rappahannock and Potomac
Rivers, at an unreasonable and burdensome expense, were
said, by 1672, to possess no more resistive strength than so
many embankments of mud. The one constructed on the
Nansemond alone was of service in the later wars with the
Dutch.

Berkeley, who, in spite of his infirmities of character, had

been a valuable public servant during the first years of his
administration, assumed more and more a reactionary attitude
under the influences of the Restoration. We have seen how
bravely he led during the Indian and Dutch wars; how active
he was in promoting a cessation of tobacco culture when this
step became desirable; how outspoken even in England in
opposition to the Navigation measure; how encouraging to
domestic manufacture in times of poverty—in short, how
energetic and faithful he was in protecting the varied interests
of the people. But he was now to express sentiments hostile
to education that cast only discredit on his memory. No
words uttered by him have been so often quoted as his comment
on the supposed absence of free schools in Virginia—a statement
without any warrant in fact whatever, as we will show
later on—and his foolish reflection on the influence of learning.
"Learning," he said, "had brought disobedience and heresy
into the world."

Berkeley cannot be condemned all by himself for mere
detestation of the dissenters, for, this attitude on his part
towards them was only in harmony with the intolerant spirit
of that age; but there can be no doubt that he was the real
author of all the harsh and unreasonable measures which were
directed against their freedom of worship in Virginia. One
law provided that every Quaker disembarking at any landing
in the Colony should be clapped in jail and exported in the
ship that brought him in; another sentenced all female Quaker
preachers to the whipping post; and a third (in 1675) suppressed
all Quaker conventicles. The only justification that
could be offered for this policy of oppression was that the
members of the sect refused to take up arms in the Colony's
defense; and that they were in the habit of holding secret
meetings, which seemed to wink at conspiracy.

The hand of tyranny fell almost as heavily on the backs
of the Puritans. Berkeley probably loathed them as acutely
as he did the Quakers; but they do not appear to have found
the same nourishment in his persecutions. A large body emigrated

to Maryland as a land where they were not likely to
be pursued with the same acrimony.

But the arbitrary spirit of the governor was even more
perceptible in his political course after the Restoration. In
retaining the same members of the Assembly during so long a
period without testing popular opinion by the usual number
of elections, he was undoubtedly running contrary to the
wishes of the people at large. Apparently, between 1660 and
1676, there were only two general elections for the House of
Burgesses—probably there was only one, and this in 1661,
at the beginning of this long interval. Had not the insurrection
of 1676 occurred, there is reason to think that the Assembly
would not have been dissolved at all until Berkeley had
permanently withdrawn to England.

Why did he so persistently ignore the custom of the country
in filling only vacant seats in the House? He may have been
honest in thinking that the longer a man remained in office, the
more useful he became by his growth in experience. Could
it be denied too, as he himself asserted, that the abolition of
popular elections put an end to one of the chief occasions of
demagogic agitation? These were self-evident truths that the
people probably did not relish with as much keenness as
Berkeley did.

The members of the Assembly who held power for so
protracted a period had been chosen at the height of the
reactionary influences of the Restoration. Only eight of those
present during the session of 1659-60 were also present during
the session of 1662, and only five of these, after that year,
remained in this body. It was from the start a collection of
men who were in close sympathy with Berkeley; and they
grew more subservient to him the longer he put off the dissolution
of the Assembly. "The sole author of the most
substantial part of the government," said Thomas Ludwell, his
faithful supporter, "whether for laws or for other inferior
institutes, is the governor." A similar Parliament was
sitting in England throughout this interval without any

general election, and it is possible that Berkeley looked upon
this precedent as all the justification that he needed for his
own policy. Vestrymen, commissioners of the county courts,
and sheriffs everywhere, were under his thumb; and as there
was also no longer any general summons for burgesses, he
had no reason to fear any organized popular opposition to
his wishes at the polls. His will was law to the members of
his own council, as their appointment had been made by him,
and they could only expect further honors and profits at his
hand, if they continued obedient. To him alone could all
ambitious men turn for their own advancement in the service
of the State.

The people at large had no influence in their local government,
or in the government at Jamestown. They had no
voice in the local tax levy, and practically none in the central.
"We find ourselves," said the spokesman of Stafford County
in 1677, "very much oppressed through these annual Assemblies.
By triennial sessions and new elections, our burden
might be lessened and good laws furnished." The same
pathetic echo rings through the grievances of the other counties.
Doubtless, taxes were imposed for special purposes that
were proper enough—such, for instance, as the public levy
for the support of the commissioners of 1676 in England, or
for the purchase of the proprietary rights in the Northern
Neck; but there were other levies—such as the increases in
the salaries of the burgesses and subordinate officers—that
must have left an impression of callous extravagance on the
public mind.

Formerly, the list of the burgess' expenses was passed
upon by the court of his county. Now these expenses were
fixed by the Assembly at a definite sum; and this sum could
be always added to by that body whenever a sense of greediness
should overtake it. The levy of Lancaster County in
1673 shows how heavy was the burden of these expenses,
which always included, besides the salary, allowances for one
servant and two horses throughout the session—it amounted

to two hundred and thirty-four pounds of tobacco per diem,
which was equivalent to twenty-five dollars in our modern
values. In 1673, the same county was represented by two
burgesses, and their combined expenses amounted to twelve
thousand pounds of tobacco for the entire session. In Lower
Norfolk, the expenses amounted to ten thousand, seven hundred
pounds of tobacco. It is reasonable to suppose that the
outlay on the same score did not fall below these sums in the
levies of the other counties.

In spite of their restiveness under these deprivations and
impositions, there was not at once among any large section
of the community a disposition to rise up and redress their
wrongs by force. Sensible men were sure that such an
attempt, however justifiable according to our modern convictions,
would not have the support of any portion of the
English people. The Virginians had shown their estimate of
the power of the mother country in 1651 when they submitted
with dignity to the Parliamentary fleet. The passage of the
second Act of Navigation, which destroyed their freedom of
trade and raised the prices of their imported merchandise; the
discouragement of domestic manufactures by the English
Government when it seemed to the colonists to be their only
means of warding off ruin; the refusal of that Government to
coerce Maryland into a cessation of tobacco culture, when
such cessation could alone advance the price of their only
staple crop; the grant of the entire area of Virginia to a
coterie of court favorites without consulting the wishes of
the people, or considering the confusion that would follow—
not one of these events, not all of them combined, opposed as
they were to popular peace separately or as a whole, would
in the end have exercised an explosive influence on the public
mind had not more personal events arisen to give them a
deeper significance. It is true that there was a small mutiny
in 1674, which was suppressed without serious difficulty; and
there was also a lurking fear of an uprising during the Dutch
invasion at an earlier day. But it was the existence of this

feeling of discontent, springing from all those courses which
we have mentioned, that made the great Rebellion led by
Nathaniel Bacon, a possibility; and it was an Indian invasion
that set the match to the highly combustible materials for that
violent outburst in this remote colony oversea.