L.
HUGH DRYSDALE.
Lieutenant-Governor.
L. September 27, 1722, to July 22, 1726.
Hugh Drysdale succeeded Governor Spotswood as
Lieutenant-Governor of Virginia, September 27, 1722.
Although his administration was a brief one, he left his mark
upon the "body of the times." His correspondence with
the Bishop of London on the subject of the colonial clergy,
shows the high standard he had for ministers of the Gospel,
and his position upon the slave trade is equally well defined.
In order to relieve the colonists from a poll-tax, a duty was
laid by the Assembly on the importation of liquors and slaves,
but owing to the opposition of the African Company, the Act
was annulled by the British Board of Trade. Governor
Drysdale announced to the House of Burgesses that "the
interfering interest of the African Company had obtained the
repeal of that law." The planters beheld with dismay the
alarming increase of negroes, but, as was said by one unbiased
by hostility to England, "the British government constantly
checked the attempts of Virginia to put a stop to this infernal
traffic." In June, 1712, Queen Anne, in her speech to Parliament,
boasts of her success in securing to Englishmen a
new market for slaves in Spanish America. George II.
favored the custom, and soon every obstruction to private
enterprise was removed and the ports of Africa laid open to
English competition. The statute declared that "the slave
trade is very advantageous to Great Britain," and so, this
great sin, though forced upon Virginia, became in the lapse
of years its own avenger.
Governor Drysdale died and was gathered to his fathers,
but in the light of the nineteenth century, his opposition to
bringing slaves into Virginia will make his term memorable.
