310

LEGISLATION OF A ROYALIST LEGISLATURE.

for a few years longer that appeals were permitted from the general court to the assembly. The place of sheriff in each county was conferred on one of the justices for that county, and so devolved to every commissioner in

course.

But the county courts, thus independent of the people, possessed and exercised the arbitrary power of levying county taxes, which in their amount usually exceeded the public levy. This system proceeded so far, that the commissioners, of themselves, levied taxes to meet their own expenses. In like manner, the self-perpetuating vestries made out their lists of tithables, and assessed taxes without regard to the consent of the parish. These private levies were unequal and oppressive; were seldom-it is said, never brought to audit; and were, in some cases at least, managed by men who combined to defraud the public.

For the organization of the courts, ancient usage could be pleaded. A series of innovations gradually effected a revolution in the system of representation. The law which limited the duration of legislative service to two years, was silently but "utterly abrogated and repealed; and the legislators assumed to themselves, by their own act, an indefinite continuance of power. The parliament of England, chosen on the restoration, was not dissolved for eighteen years. The legislature of Virginia retained its authority for almost as long a period, and yielded it only to an insurrection.

far greater

The rate of wages of the burgesses than is tolerated in these days of opulence was fixed by the same assembly, and for its own members, who had usurped, as it were, a perpetuity of office. The taxes for this purpose were paid with great reluctance, and, as they amounted to about two hundred and fifty pounds of tobacco for the daily emoluments of each member, were for a new country an intolerable grievance.

The freedom of elections was further impaired by 'frequent false returns" made by the sheriffs. Against

1669.]

CHARLES II. GIVES AWAY VIRGINIA.

311

these the people had no sufficient redress; for the sheriffs were responsible neither to them nor to officers of their appointment.

The system of universal suffrage could not permanently find favor with an assembly which had given to itself an indefinite existence. The restrictions adopted by the monarchical government of England, were cited as a fit precedent for English colonies; and, in 1670, it was enacted that "none but freeholders and housekeepers shall hereafter have a voice in the election of any burgesses."

Thus was a majority of the people of Virginia disfranchised by the act of their own representatives. An assembly continuing for an indefinite period at the pleasure of the governor, and decreeing to its members extravagant and burdensome emoluments; a royal governor, whose salary was established by a permanent system of taxation; a constituency restricted and diminished; religious liberty taken away almost as soon as it had been won; arbitrary taxation in the counties by irresponsible magistrates; a hostility to popular education, and to the press; these were the changes which, in about ten years, were effected in a province that had begun to enjoy a virtual independence.

The English parliament had crippled the industry of the planters of Virginia; the colonial assembly had diminished the franchises and impaired the powers of its people; Charles II. was equally careless of the rights and property of its tens of thousands of inhabitants. In 1649, just after the execution of Charles I., during the extreme anxiety and despair of the royalists, a patent for the Northern Neck, that is, for the country between the Rappahannock and the Potomac, had been granted to a company of Cavaliers, as a refuge for their partisans. In May, 1669, this patent was surrendered, that a new one might be issued to Lord Culpepper, who had succeeded in acquiring the shares of all the associates. The grant was extremely oppressive, for it included plantations which had long been cultivated. But

312 VIRGINIA REMONSTRATES AGAINST THE GIFT.

the prodigality of the king was not exhausted. To Lord Culpepper, and to Henry, earl of Arlington, the lavish sovereign of England, in February, 1673, gave away "all the dominion of land and water, called Virginia,' for the full term of thirty-one years.

Thus the royalist party in Virginia drew on itself indignation by its suppression of colonial liberties, and equally lost favor from the wanton ingratitude and reckless prodigality of the English king. Virginia was at once distracted by domestic contests, and stung to rebel by the royal invasion of civil rights and property.

The assembly of Virginia, composed, in part at least, of opulent landholders, were excited to alarm by dangers which were menaced by the thoughtless grants of a profligate prince; and, in 1674, Francis Morryson, Thomas Ludwell, and Robert Smith, were appointed agents to sail for England, and enter on the difficult duty of recovering for the king that supremacy which he had so foolishly dallied away. "We are unwilling,”. said the assembly, "and conceive we ought not, to submit to those to whom his majesty, upon misinformation, hath granted the dominion over us.' At the same time they asked for the immunities of a corporation.

The messengers of Virginia more than fulfilled their instructions. They asserted the natural liberties of the colonists; claimed, with earnest zeal, an exemption for them from arbitrary taxation; and insisted on their indefeasible right to the enjoyment of legislative powers, as the birthright of the children of Englishmen. But fidelity, justice, and favor, were not enough to secure the object. A secret influence was irrevocably exerted against the grant of a charter. The agents were detained a twelvemonth without making any progress, when the news reached England of events which involved the Ancient Dominion in gloomy disasters.

For, at the time when the envoys were appointed, Virginia was rocking with the excitements that grew out of its domestic griefs. The rapid and effectual abridgment of its popular liberties, joined to the uncertain

CHARACTER AND CONDITION OF THE VIRGINIANS. 313

tenure of property that followed the announcement of the royal grants, would have roused any nation; how much more a people like the Virginians! The generation now in existence were chiefly the fruit of the soil; they were children of the woods, nurtured in the freedom of the wilderness, and dwelling in lonely cottages, scattered along the streams. No newspapers entered their houses; no printing-press furnished them a book. They had no recreations but such as Nature provides in her wilds, no education but such as parents in the desert could give their offspring. The paths were bridleways rather than roads; and the highway surveyors aimed at nothing more than to keep them clear of logs and fallen trees. I doubt if there existed what we should call a bridge in the whole Dominion. Visits were made in boats, or on horseback through the forests; and the Virginian, travelling with his pouch of tobacco for currency, swam the rivers, where there was neither ferry nor ford. Almost every planter was his own mechanic. The houses, for the most part of but one story, and made of wood, often of logs, the windows closed by convenient shutters for want of glass, were sprinkled at great distances on both sides of the Chesapeake, from the Potomac to the line of Carolina. There was hardly such a sight as a cluster of three dwellings. Jamestown was but a place of a state-house, one church, and eighteen houses. Till recently, the legislature had assembled in an ale-house. Virginia had neither towns nor lawyers. A few of the wealthier planters lived in braver state at their large plantations, and, surrounded by indented servants and slaves, produced a form of society that has sometimes been likened to the manners of the patriarchs, and sometimes to the baronial pride of feudalism. The inventory of Sir William Berkeley gave him seventy horses, as well as large flocks of sheep. "Almost every man lived within sight of a lovely river.” The parish was of such extent, spreading over a tract which a day's jour

314 DAWN OF IDEAS OF POLITICAL FREEDOM. [1674.

ney could not cross, that the people met together but once on the Lord's day, and sometimes not at all; the church, rudely built in some central solitude, was seldom visited by the more remote families, and was liable to become inaccessible by the broken limbs from foresttrees, or the wanton growth of underwood and thickets.

Here was a new form of human nature. A love of freedom inclining to anarchy pervaded the country. In Europe, people gathered in towns; here they lived by themselves. In the Old World, even the peasantry crowded together into compact villages. The farmers of Virginia lived asunder, and in their mild climate were scattered very widely, rarely meeting in numbers, except at the horse-race or the county court.

It was among such a people, which had never been disciplined to resistance by the heresies of sects, or the new opinions of "factious" parties, — which, till the restoration, had found the wilderness a safe protection against tyranny, and had enjoyed "a fifty years' experience of a government easy to the people," that the pressure of increasing grievances began to excite open discontent. Men gathered together in the gloom of the forests to talk of their hardships. The common people, half conscious of their wrongs, half conscious of the rightful remedy, were ripe for insurrection. To effect it, nothing was wanting but an excuse for appearing in

arms.

In 1674, the Seneca Indians, a tribe of the Five Nations, had driven the Susquehannahs from their abode at the head of the Chesapeake to the vicinity of the Piscataways on the Potomac; and Maryland had become involved in a war with the Susquehannahs and their confederates. In the next year, murders were committed on the soil of Virginia, and were avenged by the militia on the borders. As the conflict continued, in 1676, the Indians subject to Virginia began to assert independence. The horrors of insecurity visit every log-house on the frontier; the plantations are laid waste;