CHAPTER IV.
MARYLAND AND VIRGINIA.
BY JUSTIN WINSOR,
The Editor.
MARYLAND began its career as a crown province with conditions similar to those which had regulated its growth under the Proprietary. There was nothing within its limits worthy the name of a town, though there were certain places where the courts met. The people were planters, large and small. They, with their servants, were settled, each with land enough about him, along the extensive tide-water front of the Chesapeake and its estuaries. Each plantation had a wharf or landing of its own, and no commercial centre was necessary to ship or receive merchandise. The Indians were friendly, and no sense of mutual protection, such as prevailed farther north, compelled the settlers to form communities. They raised tobacco,—too much of it,—and saw hardly enough of one another to foster a stable, political union. Local disturbances were accordingly not very promptly suppressed. Because one was independent in his living, he came to have too little sympathy with the independence of the mass.
Life was easy. Land and water yielded abundantly of wild game, while swine and cattle strayed about the woods, with ear-marks and brands to designate their owners. The people, however, had mainly to pound their corn and do without schools, for it needs villages to institute the convenient mill-wheel and build the school-house. The condition of the people had hardly changed from what it was during the seventeenth century. When the eighteenth came in, a political change had already been wrought by the revolution which placed William and Mary on the throne,[595] for in 1692 the Marylanders had welcomed Sir Lionel Copley as the first royal governor. In his train came a new spirit, or rather his coming engendered one, or gave activity to one which had been latent. The assembly soon ordained the Protestant Episcopal church to be the established order of a colony which before had had a Catholic master. In time the exclusiveness relaxed a little, enough in some fashion to exempt from restraint those who were Protestant, but dissenters; but the Romanists soon found to their cost that there was no relief for them. The fear of a Jacobite ascendency in the mother country easily kept the assembly alert to discern the evils supposed to harbinger its advent.
Down to 1715 there was a succession of royal governors, but only one among them made any impress upon the time. This was Francis Nicholson, a man of vigor, who was felt during a long career in America in more than one colony. He was by commission the lieutenant-governor under Copley; but when that governor died, Nicholson was in England. On returning he followed his predecessor’s way in studying the Protestants’ interests. In pursuance of this he made the Puritan settlement at Anne Arundel, later to be known as Annapolis, the capital,[596] and left the old Catholic St. Mary’s thereby to become a name and a ruin.
There grew up presently an unseemly quarrel between Nicholson and Coode, a reprobate ecclesiastic, who had earlier been a conspicuous character in Maryland history.[597] The breach scandalized everybody; and charge and counter-charge touching their respective morals contaminated the atmosphere. Indeed, the indictment of Nicholson by his enemies failed of effect by its excess of foulness. In face of all this the governor had the merit, and even the courage, to found schools. He also acquired with some a certain odor of sanctity, when he sent Bibles to the sick during an epidemic, and appointed readers of them to attend upon a sanitarium which had been established at a mineral spring in St. Mary’s county. There was not a little need of piety somewhere, for the church in Maryland as a rule had little of it. When Nicholson was in turn transferred to Virginia, Nathaniel Blakiston (1699) and John Seymour (1703) succeeded in the government. Under them there is little of moment to note, beyond occasional inroads of the French by land and of the pirates along the Chesapeake. Events, however, were shaping themselves to put an end to the proprietary sway.
Charles, the third Lord Baltimore, died February 20, 1714-15, and his title and rights descended to Benedict, his son, who had already in anticipation renounced Catholicism. In becoming Protestant he had secured from the Crown and its supporters an increased income in place of the allowance that his Catholic father now denied him, out of the revenues of the province, which were still preserved to the family. Benedict had scarce been recognized when he also died (April 5, 1715), and his minor son, Charles, the fifth lord, succeeded. The young baron’s guardian, Lord Guilford, took the government, and finding to his liking John Hart, who was then ruling the province for the king, he recommissioned him as the representative of the Proprietary, who was now one in religious profession with the vast majority of his people. The return of the old master was to appearances a confirmation of the old charter; but an inevitable change was impending.
Meanwhile the laws were revised and codified (1715), and a few years later (1722), by solemn resolution, the lower house of the assembly declared that the people of Maryland were entitled to all the rights and immunities of free Englishmen, and were of necessity inheritors of the common law of England, except so far as the laws of the province limited the application of that fundamental right.[598] This manifesto was the signal of a conflict between the ways that were and those that were to be. The Proprietary and the upper house made a show of dissenting to its views; but the old conditions were doomed. The methods of progress, however, for a while were gentle, and on the whole the rule of succeeding governors, Charles Calvert (1720), Benedict Leonard Calvert (1726), and Samuel Ogle (1731), was quiet.
The press meanwhile was beginning to live, and the Maryland Gazette was first published at Annapolis in 1727. A real town was founded, though it seemed at the start to promise no more than St. Mary’s, Annapolis, or Joppa.[599] This was Baltimore, laid out in 1730, which grew so leisurely that in twenty years it had scarce a hundred people in it. From 1732 to 1734 the Proprietary himself was in the province and governed in his own person.
The almost interminable controversy with the Penns over the northern bounds of Maryland still went on, the latter province getting the worst of it. Even blood was shed when the Pennsylvania Germans, crossing the line which Maryland claimed, refused to pay the Maryland taxes. During this border turmoil, Thomas Cresap, a Maryland partisan, made head against the Pennsylvanians, but was finally caught and carried to Philadelphia. A truce came in the end, when, pending a decision in England, a provisional line was run to separate settlers in actual possession.
Maryland had other troubles beside in a depreciated paper currency, and was not singular in it. She sought in 1733 to find a remedy by making tobacco a legal tender.
In 1751 the rights of the Proprietary again passed, this time to an unworthy voluptuary, destined to be the last Baron Baltimore, Frederick, the sixth in succession, who was not known to his people and did nothing to establish a spirit of loyalty among them. They had now grown to be not far from a hundred and thirty thousand in number, including multitudes of redemptioners, as immigrants who had mortgaged their labor for their ocean passage were called, and many thousands of transported convicts. This population paid the Proprietary in quit-rents and dues not far from seventy-five hundred pounds annually.
FREDERICK, LORD BALTIMORE.
From an engraving in the London Magazine, June, 1768, after an original painting of the sixth baron. He was born Feb. 6, 1731; succeeded to the title on the death of the fifth baron, April 24, 1751. Some accounts make him erroneously the seventh baron.
The beginning of the French war found Horatio Sharpe[600] fresh in office (1753) as the representative of the man to whom the people paid this money. There was need of resources to push the conflict, in which Maryland had common interests with Virginia and Pennsylvania. The delegates were willing to vote grants, provided the revenue of the Proprietary would share in the burden. This the governor refused to consider; but as the war went on, and the western settlements were abandoned before the Indian forays, Sharpe conceded the point, and £40,000 were raised, partly out of a double tax upon Catholics, who were in the main of the upper classes of the people. The question of supplying the army lasted longer than the £40,000, and each renewal of the controversy broadened the gulf between the governor and the lower house. It soon grew to be observed that the delegates planned their manœuvres with a view to overthrowing, under the stress of the times, the government of the Proprietary. Occasionally a fit of generosity would possess the delegates, as when they voted £50 a scalp to some Cherokee rangers, and £1,500 to the Maryland contingent in Forbes’s expedition against Du Quesne. It was never difficult, meantime, for them to lapse into their policy of obstruction. So Maryland did little to assist in the great conflict which drove the French from North America.
When the war was practically closed, in 1760, the long dispute over the boundary with Pennsylvania was brought to an end, substantially, upon the agreement of 1732, by which the Proprietary of that day had been over-reached. This fixed the limits of the present State of Delaware, and marked the parallel which is now known as Mason and Dixon’s line. The most powerful colony south of that line was Virginia, with whom Maryland was also destined to have a protracted boundary dispute, that has extended to our own time, and has been in part relegated to the consideration of the new State, which the exigencies of the civil war caused to be detached from the Old Dominion. What was and is the most westerly of the head fountains of the Potomac (so the charter described the point from which the meridian of Maryland’s western line should run) depended on seeking that spot at the source of the northern or southern fork of the river. The decision gave or lost to Maryland thirty or forty square miles of rich territory. A temporary concession on Maryland’s part, which entailed such a loss, became a precedent which she has found it difficult to dislodge. Again, as the line followed down the Potomac, whether it gave the bed of that river to Virginia or to Maryland, has produced further dispute, complicated by diversities in the maps and by assumptions of rights, but in 1877 arbitration confirmed the bed to Maryland. Changing names and shifting and disappearing soil along the banks of the Chesapeake have also made an uncertainty of direction in the line, as it crosses the bay to the eastern shore. A decision upon this point has in our day gained new interest from the values which attach to the modern oyster-beds.
The history of Virginia was left in an earlier chapter[601] with the suppression of Bacon’s Rebellion. The royal governors who succeeded Berkeley held office under Lord Culpepper, who himself assumed the government in 1679,[602] bringing with him a general amnesty for the actors in the late rebellion.[603] But pardon did not stop tobacco falling in price, nor was his lordship chary of the state, to maintain which involved grinding taxes. Towns would not grow where the people did not wish them, and even when the assembly endeavored to compel such settlements to thrive at fixed landing places, by what was called a Cohabitation Act (1680), they were not to be evoked, and existed only as ghosts in what were called “paper towns.” Tobacco, however, would grow if only planted, and when producers continued to plant it beyond what the mob thought proper to maintain fit prices, the wayward populace cut off the young plants, going about from plantation to plantation.[604] Culpepper kept up another sort of destruction in hanging the leaders of the mob, and in telling the people that a five-shilling piece, if it went for six, would make money plentier. When the people insisted that his salary should be paid in the same ratio, he revoked his somewhat frantic monetary scheme.
When Culpepper ceased to be the Proprietary, in 1684, Virginia became a royal province, and Charles II. sent out Lord Howard of Effingham to continue the despotic rule. The new governor had instructions not to allow a printing-press.[605] He kept the hangman at his trade, for plant-cutting still continued. The assembly managed to despatch Ludwell to England to show how cruelly matters were going, and he got there just after William and Mary were proclaimed. The representations against Effingham sufficed to prevent the continuance of his personal rule, but not to put an end to his commission, and he continued to draw his salary as governor, despite his adherence to James, and after Francis Nicholson had been sent over as his deputy (1690). The new ruler was not unskilled in governing; but he had a temper that impelled him sometimes in wrong ways, and an ambition that made the people distrust him. He could cajole and domineer equally well, but he did not always choose the fit occasion. He was perhaps wiser now than he was when he nearly precipitated New York into a revolution; and he showed himself to the people as if to win their affections. He encouraged manufactures. He moved the capital from Jamestown, and created a small conspicuousness for Williamsburg[606] as he did for Annapolis, in Maryland. He followed up the pirates if they appeared in the bay. He tried to induce the burgesses to vote money to join the other colonies in the French war; but they did not care so much for maintaining frontier posts in order to protect the northern colonies as one might who had hopes to be one day the general governor of the English colonies. They intrigued in such a way that he lost popularity, when he had none too much of it. He seemed generous, if we do not narrowly inspect his motives, when he said he would pay the Virginia share of the war money, if the assembly did not care to, and when he gave half of a gratuity which the assembly had given him, to help found the college of William and Mary. This last act had a look of magnanimity, for James Blair, who had been chiefly instrumental in getting the college charter, and who also in a measure, as the commissary of the Bishop of London, disputed Nicholson’s executive supremacy, had laughed at his Excellency for his truculent ways. The governor had opposed the “Cohabitation” policy as respects towns, and a certain Burwell affair, in which as a lover he was not very complacent in being worsted, had also made him enemies powerful enough to prefer charges in England against him, and he was recalled,—later to be met in New England and Acadia, and as Sir Francis Nicholson to govern in Carolina.
His service in Virginia was interrupted by his career in Maryland, ending in 1698, during which Sir Edmund Andros ruled in the larger colony. This knight’s New England experience had told on him for the better; but it had not wholly weaned him from some of his pettish ways. He brought with him the charter of the College of William and Mary, and had the infelicity to find in Blair, its first president, the adversary who was to throw him. This Scotchman was combative and stubborn enough for his race, and equally its representative in good sense and uprightness. Blair insisted upon his prerogatives as the representative of the bishop, and taking the grounds of quarrel with the governor to England he carried his point, and Nicholson was recalled from Maryland to supply the place of Andros.
The new college graduated its first class in 1700, and at about the same time Claude Philippe de Richebourg and his Huguenots introduced a new strain into the blood of Virginia.
The accession of Queen Anne led to the conferring of the titular governorship in 1704 upon George Hamilton, the Earl of Orkney, who was to hold the office nominally for forty years. For five years the council ruled under Edward Jenings, their president, and when, December 15, 1704, he made his proclamation of the victory of Blenheim, it was a satisfaction to record that Colonel Parke, of Virginia, had been the officer sent by Marlborough to convey the news to the queen.[607]
In 1710 the ablest of the royal governors came upon the scene, Alexander Spotswood, a man now in his early prime, since he was born in 1676. He bore a wound which he had got at this same Blenheim, for he had a decisive, soldierly spirit. It was a new thing to have a governor for whom the people could have any enthusiasm. He came with a peace-offering in the shape of the writ of habeas corpus, a boon the Virginians had been thus far denied. The burgesses reciprocated in devoting £2,000 to build him a palace, as it was called, as perhaps well they might, considering that their annual tobacco crop was now about 20,000,000 pounds.
The happy relations between the governor and his people did not continue long without a rupture. The executive needed money to fortify the frontiers, and the assembly tightened the purse-strings; but they did pass a bill to appoint rangers to scour the country at the river heads.[608] Spotswood did the best he could with scant funds. He managed to prevent the tributary Indians from joining the Tuscaroras in their forays in Carolina,[609] and he induced the burgesses to take some action on the appeals of Governor Pollock.[610] He also gave his energy scope in developing the manufacture of iron and the growing of vineyards, and in the stately march which he made to find out something about the region beyond the Blue Ridge.[611] He was indeed always ready for any work which was required.
ALEXANDER SPOTSWOOD.
After the engraving in the Spotswood Letters, vol. i., with a note on the portraits on p. viii. His arms are on p. vii. Cf. the Century Magazine, xxvii. 447.
If his burgesses revolted, he dissolved them with a sledge-hammer kind of rhetoric.[612] If Blackbeard, the pirate, appeared between the capes, he sent after him men whom he could trust, and they justified his measure of them when they came home with a bloody head on their bowsprit.[613] He had no sooner concluded a conference with the Five Nations, in August and September, 1722,[614] than the opposition to an assumption which he, like the other governors, could not resist, to be the head of the church as well as of the state, made progress enough to secure his removal from office.[615]
During Spotswood’s time, Virginia attained to as much political prominence as the century saw for her prior to the Revolution. The German element, which gathered away from tide-water,[616] began to serve as a balance to the Anglican aristocracy, which made the river banks so powerful. The tobacco fields, while they in one sense made that aristocracy, in another made them, in luckless seasons, slaves of a variable market. This relation, producing financial servitude, enforced upon them at times almost the abjectness of the African slaves whom they employed. Above it all, however, arose a spirit of political freedom in contrast with their monetary subjection. The burgesses gradually acquired more and more power, and the finances of the province which they controlled gave them opportunities which compensated for their personal cringing to the wilful imperialism of the tobacco market. The people lacked, too, the independence which mechanical ingenuity gives a race. A certain shiftlessness even about the great estates, a laziness between crops, the content to import the commonest articles instead of making them,—all indicate this. The amenities of living which come from towns were wanting, with perhaps some of the vices, for an ordinary or a public house generally stood even yet for all that constituted a settlement of neighbors. In 1728 Byrd, of Westover, speaks of Norfolk as having “most the air of a town of any in Virginia.”
Spotswood remained in Virginia, and was a useful man after his fall from office. He was made the deputy postmaster-general of the colonies (1730-39), and he carried into the management of the mails the same energy which had distinguished his earlier service, and brought Philadelphia and Williamsburg within eight or ten days of each other. On his estates, whether on the Rapidan near his Germans at Germanna, or in his house at Yorktown, he kept the courtly state of his time and rank, and showed in his household his tenderest side. His old martial spirit arose when he was made a major-general to conduct an expedition to the West Indies; but he died (1740) just as he was about to embark, bequeathing his books, maps, and mathematical instruments to the College of William and Mary.
Meanwhile, after a short service in the governor’s office by Hugh Drysdale (1722)[617] and Robert Carter, in 1727 William Gooch took the chair, and held it for twenty-two years. It was a time of only chance excitement, and the province prospered in wealth and population. The governor proved conciliatory and became a favorite of the people. He granted toleration to the Presbyterians, who were now increasing on the frontiers, where Mackemie and the Scotch-Irish were beginning to gain influence, and the sturdy pioneers were thinking of the country beyond the mountains.[618] Some of the tide-water spirit was pushing that way, and in 1745 Lord Fairfax settled in the valley, built his Greenway Court, and passed his life in chasing game and giving it to his guests, with other hospitable cheer.[619] Tall and gaunt of person, sharp in his visage and defective in his eyesight, if he had little of personal attraction for strangers, he had the inheritance of some of the best culture of England, and could hand to his guests a volume of the Spectator, open at his own essays. Disappointed in love at an early day, Fairfax added a desire for seclusion to a disposition naturally eccentric. He had come to America for divertisement, and, enamored of the country and its easy life, he had finally determined on settling on his property. The mansion, which he had intended to erect with all the dignity of its manorial surroundings, was never begun; but he built a long one-story building, with sloping roof and low eaves. Here he lived on through the Revolution, a pronounced Tory, but too respected to be disturbed, until the news of Yorktown almost literally struck him dead at ninety-two.
Along the river bottoms of the lowlands, while Major Mayo[620] was laying out Richmond (1733), and while all tradition was scorned in the establishment of the Virginia Gazette (1736),[621] the ruling classes of the great estates felt that they were more rudely jostled than ever before, when Whitefield passed that way, harrying the church,[622] and even splitting the communions of the Presbyterians as he journeyed in other parts.
When Governor Gooch returned to England, in 1749, he left the council in power, who divided (1751) the province into four military districts, and to the command of one of them they assigned a young man of nineteen, George Washington by name. Late in the same year (November 20, 1751) a notable character presented himself in Robert Dinwiddie, and the College of William and Mary welcomed the new executive with a formal address.[623] Dinwiddie had been unpopular as a surveyor of customs, as such officers almost invariably are; and he came to his new power in Virginia at a trying time, just as a great war was opening, and he and the burgesses could not escape conflict on the question of the money needed to make Virginia bear a creditable part in that war. When it was the northern frontiers towards Canada which were threatened, neither Maryland nor Virginia could be made to feel the mortification that their governors felt, if the northern colonies were left to fight alone the battles in which all the English of the continent were interested.
But the struggle was now for the thither slope of the Alleghanies and the great water-shed of the Ohio. In this conflict Virginia presented a frontier to be ravaged, as she soon learned to her cost. The story of that misfortune is told in another chapter,[624] as well as of the outbreak which Dinwiddie forced, when he sent Washington to Le Bœuf. The exigencies of the conflict, however, were not enough to prevent the assembly from watching jealously every move of the governor for asking money from them; and he in turn did little to smooth the way for their peaceable acquiescence, when he exacted unusual fees for his own emolument. The aristocracy were still powerful, and, working upon the fears entertained by the masses that their liberties were in danger, all classes contrived to keep Dinwiddie in a pretty constant turmoil of mind, a strain that, though past sixty, he bore unflinchingly. If, by his presentation of the exigencies, he alarmed them, they would vote, somewhat scantily, the money which he asked for: but they embarrassed him by placing its expenditure in the hands of their own committee. Dinwiddie was often compelled to submit to their exasperating requirements, and was obliged to inform the Lords of Trade that there was no help for it.
It was war indeed, but this chapter is concerned chiefly with civil affairs. Nothing, therefore, can be said here of the disaster of Braddock and its train of events down to the final capture of DuQuesne. Forts were built,[625] and the Indians were pursued[626], and Virginia incurred a debt during it all of £400,000, which she had to bear with the concomitants of heavy taxes and a depreciated paper money. At the end of the war, Norfolk, with its 7,000 inhabitants, was still the only considerable town.
Dinwiddie had ruled as the deputy of Lord Albemarle. When Lord Loudon came over in July, 1756, to assume the military command in the colonies, he became the titular governor of Virginia; but he was never in his province in person, and Dinwiddie ruled for him till January, 1758, when he sailed for England.
[CRITICAL ESSAY ON THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION.]
SINCE the enumeration of the records of Maryland was made in another volume,[627] the Maryland Historical Society, having now in custody the early archives of the province, has begun the printing of them, under the editorship of Mr. William Hand Browne, three volumes of which having been thus far published.[628] The publication committee of that society have also made to the legislative assembly of the State a printed report,[629] dated November 12, 1883, in which they give an account of the efforts made in the past to care for the documents. To this they append a Calendar of State Archives, many of which come within the period covered by the present chapter.[630]
The general histories of Maryland have been characterized in another place.[631] Of one of them, Chalmers’s, some further mention is made in the present volume.[632] Two works of a general character have been published since that enumeration was made. One of these is the Maryland (Boston, 1884) of William Hand Browne, a well-written summary of the history of the palatinate prior to the Revolutionary period.[633] Mr. Browne’s familiarity with the Maryland archives was greatly helpful in this excellent condensation of Maryland’s history. Mr. John A. Doyle has made special use of the colonial documents in the Public Record Office, in the chapters (x. and xi.) which he gives to the province in his English in America, Virginia, Maryland and the Carolinas, London, 1882.
There have been some valuable papers of late embraced in the Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, edited by Professor Herbert B. Adams, which touch Maryland, particularly its institutional history. Such are Edward Ingle’s Parish Institutions of Maryland (Studies, 1st series, no. vi.); John Johnson’s Old Maryland Manors (no. vii.);[634] Herbert B. Adams’s Maryland’s influence upon land cessions to the United States, with minor papers on George Washington’s interest in Western lands, the Potomac Company and a National University (3d series, no. 1);[635] Lewis W. Wilhelm’s Maryland Local Institutions, the Land System, Hundred, County, Town (nos. v., vi., and vii.).
The one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of Baltimore, occurring in 1880, has produced several records. The city commemorated the event, and printed the next year a Memorial Volume, 1730-1880, edited by Edward Spencer;[636] and the Proceedings of the Historical Society, October 12, 1880, constitutes no. 16 of their Publication Fund series. Mr. J. Thomas Scharf, who had published his Chronicles of Baltimore in 1874, elaborated the matter into the more extensive History of Baltimore City and County, in 1881, published at Philadelphia. There is a plan of the city showing its original and present bounds in this last book (p. 62), as well as in the same writer’s History of Maryland (i. 416). In 1752 there was printed a List of families and other persons residing in Baltimore, and this has been thought to be the earliest directory of an American town. In the same year there was a view of Baltimore by John Moales, engraved by Borgum, which is the earliest we have.[637]
The coarse, hearty, and somewhat unappetizing life of the colony, as it appeared to a London factor, who about the beginning of the eighteenth century sought the country in quest of a cargo of tobacco, is set forth amusingly, as well as in a warning spirit, in a rough Hudibrastic poem, The Sot-weed Factor, by Eben Cook, Gent.[638] (London, 1708.)
There are modern studies of the life of the last century in Lodge’s Short History of the English Colonies, in the seventh chapter of Neill’s Terra Mariæ, and in the last chapter of Doyle’s English Colonies; but the most complete is that in the first chapter of the second volume of Scharf’s History of Maryland, whose foot-notes and those of Lodge will guide the investigator through a wide range of authorities.[639]
Illustrations of the religious communions are given in Perry’s History of the American Protestant Episcopal Church (i. 137), in the Historical Collections of the American Colonial Church (vol. iv.), in Anderson’s American Colonial Church, in Hawks’s Ecclesiastical Contributions (section on “Maryland”), and in Theodore C. Gambrall’s Church Life in Colonial Maryland (Baltimore, 1885).[640] The spread of Presbyterianism is traced in C. A. Briggs’s American Presbyterianism, p. 123.
The literature of the controversy over the bounds of Maryland, so far as it relates to the northern lines, has already been indicated in another volume.[641] The dispute was ably followed by McMahon in his History of Maryland (vol. i. pp. 18-59), among the earlier of the general historians, and the whole question has been surveyed by Johnston in his History of Cecil County (ch. xix.). He traces the course of the Cresap war,[642] the progress of the chancery suit of 1735-1750.[643] The diary of one of the commissioners for running the line in accordance with the decision, being the record of John Watson, is preserved in the library of the Pennsylvania Historical Society. Mr. Johnston (p. 307) also describes the line of 1760,[644] and tells the story of the work and methods adopted by Mason and Dixon in 1763, referring to their daily journal, one copy of which is, or was, preserved in the Land Office, the other in the library of the Maryland Historical Society.[645] The scientific aspects of this famous survey are considered in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (1769); and a running sketch of the history of the line, by William Darlington, is reprinted in the Historical Magazine (ii. p. 37). Another, by T. Edwards, is in Harper’s Monthly (vol. liii. p. 549), and one by A. T. McGill in the Princeton Review (vol. xxxvii. p. 88). Dunlap’s “Memoir” (see Vol. III. p. 514) is also contained in Olden Time (vol. i. p. 529).
The most recent and one of the most careful surveys of the history of the dispute between Baltimore and Penn and of the principles involved is in Walter B. Scaife’s “Boundary Dispute between Maryland and Pennsylvania,” in Pennsylvania Magazine of History (October, 1885, p. 241).
Chief among the maps bearing upon the question of the bounds are the following:—
A map of Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and East and West New Jersey, by John Thornton, which is without date, but probably from 1695 to 1700.[646]
A new map of Virginia and Maryland and the improved parts of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, revised by I. Senex, 1719.[647]
A short account of the first settlement of the Provinces of Virginia, Maryland, New York, and Pennsylvania by the English, to which is annexed a map of Maryland, according to the bounds mentioned in the charter and also of the adjacent country, anno 1630, London, 1735. This map is a large folding one called “A map of Virginia, according to Capt. John Smith’s map, published anno 1606; also of the adjacent county, called by the Dutch Niew Nederlant, anno 1630, by John Senex, 1735.”[648]
The map accompanying the agreement of July 4, 1760, between Baltimore and Penn, is reproduced, with the text of that document, in the Pennsylvania Archives, iv. (1853), p.3.
Respecting the bounds in dispute between Maryland and Virginia, the fullest summary of claims and evidence is in the Report and Journal of Proceedings of the joint Commissioners to adjust the boundary line of the States of Maryland and Virginia, Annapolis, 1874. This volume gives statements of the Maryland (p. 63) and Virginia (p. 233) claims, with depositions of witnesses. The volume as deposited in public libraries is accompanied by a coast survey chart, in which the determined bounds are marked, with the attestation of the governor of Maryland.[649]
It may be collated with the Report and accompanying documents of the Virginia Commissioners on the boundary line between Maryland and Virginia, Richmond, 1873, which contains the statements of the Maryland Commissioners as well as those of the Virginia Commissioners, the latter having a voluminous appendix of historical documents, including a large number copied from the British Archives, and depositions taken in 1872. The Final Report of the Virginia Commissioners (Richmond, 1874), includes a memorandum of their journal and their correspondence (1870-72), as well as the journal of the joint commissions of Virginia and Maryland (1872).
WILLIAM BYRD.
After a cut in Harper’s Magazine, April, 1885, p. 712, from the original painting now at Brandon, on James River. Byrd was b. 1674, and d. 1744.
Respecting the bounds of Virginia and North Carolina, commissioners on the part of both colonies were appointed in 1710,[650] but the line was not run in its easterly portion till 1728, by commissioners and surveyors of both governments. Col. William Byrd, one of the commissioners of Virginia, prepared a sort of diary of the progress of the work, which is known as a History of the Dividing Line between Virginia and North Carolina, as run in 1728-29. This and other of Byrd’s writings which have come down to us are in manuscript, in the hand of a copyist, but interlined and corrected by Byrd himself. The volume containing them was printed at Petersburg in 1841 (copyrighted by Edmund Ruffin) with an anonymous editor’s preface, which states that the last owner of it was George E. Harrison, of Brandon, and that the family had probably been prevented from publishing the papers because of the writer’s “great freedom of expression and of censure, often tinctured by his strong church and state principles and prejudices;” for Colonel Byrd was “a true and worthy inheritor of the opinions and feelings of the old cavaliers of Virginia.” These papers were again privately printed at Richmond, in 1866, under the editing of Thomas H. Wynne, in two volumes, entitled History of the Dividing Line and other tracts, from the papers of William Byrd of Westover. Mr. Wynne supplies an historical introduction, and his text is more faithful than that of 1841, since some of the asperities of the manuscript were softened by the earlier editor. Byrd had been particularly severe on the character of the North Carolinians, as he saw it in his intercourse with them,[651] and not the worst of his characterizations touched their “felicity of having nothing to do.” Byrd at the time of his commission was a man of four and fifty, and he lived for some years longer, not dying till 1744. He was a good specimen of the typical Virginian aristocrat, not blind to the faults of his neighbors, and the best sample of such learning and wit as they had,[652] while he was not forgetful of some of the duties to the community which a large estate imposed upon him. Among other efforts to relieve the Virginians from their thraldom to a single staple were his attempts to encourage the raising and manufacture of hemp.[653] One of Byrd’s companions in the boundary expedition of 1728-29 was the Rev. Peter Fontaine, who acted as chaplain to the party, and a draft of the line as then marked is made in connection with some of his letters in Ann Maury’s Memoirs of a Huguenot Family (New York, 1852, 1872, p. 356).[654] In 1749 the line was continued westerly beyond Peter’s Creek, by Joshua Fry and Peter Jefferson, the father of Thomas Jefferson; and was still further continued to the Tennessee River in 1778.[655]
Another question of bounds in Virginia, which it took some time to settle, was the western limits of the northern neck, as the wedge-like tract of territory was called which lay between the Rappahannock and the Potomac. It had been granted by Charles II. to Lord Hopton and others, but when bought by Lord Thomas Culpepper a new royal grant of it was made to him in 1688.[656] It passed as a dower with Culpepper’s daughter Catharine to Thomas, Lord Fairfax, and from him it passed to the sixth lord, Thomas, who petitioned (1733) the king to have commissioners appointed to run the line between the rivers. Of this commission was William Byrd, and an account of their proceedings is given in the second volume of the Byrd Manuscripts (p. 83) as edited by Wynne. A map of the tract was made at this time, which was called The Courses of the Rivers Rappahannock and Potowmack in Virginia, as surveyed according to order in the years 1736-1737. The bounds established by this commission were not confirmed by the king till 1745, and other commissioners were appointed the next year to run the line in question. The original journal of the expedition for this purpose, kept by Maj. Thomas Lewis, is now in the possession of John F. Lewis, lieutenant-governor of Virginia.[657] The plate of the map already referred to was corrected to conform, and this additional title to it was added: A Survey of the Northern Neck of Virginia, being the lands belonging to the Rt. Honourable Thomas Lord Fairfax, Baron Cameron, bounded by and within the Bay of Chesapoyocke, and between the Rivers Rappahannock and Potowmack. Along the line which is dotted to connect the head-spring of the southern branch of the Rappahannock with the head-spring of the Potomac is a legend, noting that it was determined by the king in council, April 11, 1745, that this line should be the westerly limit of the Fairfax domain. A section of the second state of the plate of this map is annexed in fac-simile from a copy in Harvard College library.[658]
An account has been given elsewhere[659] of what has been lost and preserved of the documentary records of Virginia.
The introduction to W. P. Palmer’s Calendar of Virginia State Papers, 1652-1781, summarizes the documents for the period of our present survey which are contained in the body of that book, and they largely concern the management of the Indians on the borders.[660] Among the Sparks MSS. in Harvard College library are various notes and extracts respecting Maryland and Virginia from the English records (1727-1761) in the hand of George Chalmers, as made for his own use in writing his Revolt of the American Colonies.[661]
There were various editions of the laws during the period now under consideration. What is known as the Purvis collection, dedicated to Effingham, was published in London in 1686; and a survey, giving An abridgement of the Laws in force and use in her majesty’s plantations, including Virginia, was printed in London in 1704. The acts after 1662 were published in London in 1728; while the first Virginia imprint on any edition was that of W. Parks, of Williamsburg, in 1733; and John Mercer’s Abridgment, published in Williamsburg four years later (1737), was reprinted in Glasgow in 1759. The acts since 1631 were again printed at Williamsburg in 1752.[662]
The earliest description of the country coming within the present survey is John Clayton’s Account of the several Observables in Virginia (1688), which Force has included in the third volume of his Tracts. A paper on the condition of Virginia in 1688 is the first chapter in W. H. Foote’s Sketches of Virginia (1850). An “Account of the present state and government of Virginia” is in the fifth volume (p. 124) of the Massachusetts Hist. Soc. Collections. The document was presented to that society by Carter B. Harrison, of Virginia. It seems to have been written in England in 1696-98, in the time of Andros’ governorship, and by one who was hostile to him and who had been in the colony.
Professor M. C. Tyler[663] speaks of the commissary, James Blair, as “the creator of the healthiest and most extensive intellectual influence that was felt in the Southern colonies before the Revolution.” This influence was chiefly felt in the fruition of his efforts to found the College of William and Mary.[664] The Present State of Virginia and the College, by Messieurs Hartwell, Blair and Chilton (London, 1727), contains an account, in which Blair, in Tyler’s opinion, had the chief hand. Blair’s relations to the college have had special treatment in Foote’s Sketches of Virginia (ch. ix.); in Bishop Meade’s Old Churches and Families of Virginia (vol. i. art. xii.); and in the Hist. of the American Episcopal Church (vol. i. ch. 7), by Bishop Perry, who gives two long letters from Blair to the governor of Virginia, after the originals preserved at Fulham Palace.
Additional material is garnered by Perry in his Historical Collections of the Amer. Colonial Church, which includes a large mass of Blair’s correspondence.[665]
WILLIAM AND MARY COLLEGE.
After the picture given in Meade’s Old Churches, etc., i. 157. Cf. Perry’s Amer. Episc. Church, i. 123; Gay’s Pop. Hist. U. S., iii. 60.
The original building was burned in 1705. The next building, which by scarcity of funds was long in erecting, was not completed till 1723. The above cut is of this second building. In Scribner’s Monthly, Nov., 1875, are views of the building before and after rebuilding in 1859.
While Francis Makemie was entering the lists in the interest of “cohabitation,” gaining thereby not much respect from the tide-water great-estate owners, and printing in London (1705) his Plain and friendly perswasive to the inhabitants of Virginia and Maryland for promoting towns and cohabitation, setting forth the loss to virtue by the dispersal of sympathizers in religion, Robert Beverley was publishing anonymously in London (1705) his History and Present State of Virginia, in four parts. 1. The History of the First Settlement of Virginia, and the Government thereof, to the present time. 2. The Natural Productions and Conveniences of the Country, suited to Trade and Improvement. 3. The Native Indians, their Religion, Laws, and Customs, in War and Peace. 4. The Present State of the Country, as to the Polity of the Government, and the Improvements of the Land,[666] which, as will be seen in the last section of the title, particularly sets forth the condition of the colony at that time, offering some foundation for Mackemie’s arguments.[667]
About twenty years later we have another exposition of the condition of the colony in Hugh Jones’s Present State of Virginia, giving a particular and strict account of the Indian, English, and negro inhabitants of that colony, published in London in 1724.[668] Jones was rector of Jamestown and a professor in the college at Williamsburg, and his book was a missionary enterprise to incite attention among the benevolent in the mother country to the necessities of the colony. “His book,” says Tyler,[669] is one “of solid facts and solid suggestions, written in a plain, positive style, just sufficiently tinctured with the gentlemanly egotism of a Virginian and a churchman.”
The single staple of Virginia was the cause of constant concern, whether of good or bad fortune, and the case was summed up in 1733, in a tract published at London, Case of the planters of tobacco in Virginia, as represented by themselves, with a vindication.[670] Bringing the history of the colony down to about the date of the period when Jones made his survey, Sir William Keith in 1738 published his History of the British Plantations in America, containing the History of Virginia: with Remarks on the Trade and Commerce of that Colony.[671] Nine years later (1747) Stith published his history, but it pertained only to the early period, and in his preface, dated at Varina, December 10, 1746, he acknowledged his indebtedness to William Byrd.[672]
When Burk published his History of Virginia in 1804,[673] the days of the Revolution had separated him from those that were in reality the formative period of the Virginian character, which had grown out of conditions, then largely a mere record. One would have expected to find the eighteenth century developed in Burk better than it is. The more recent authorities have studied that period more specifically, though Bancroft does not much enlarge upon it.[674] Lodge[675] is chiefly valuable for the conspectus he affords of the manners of the time. Doyle in his English in America (London, 1882) depends on the “Colonial Entry Books” and “Colonial Papers” of the State Paper Office in London. Since Howison’s,[676] the latest history is that by a Virginian novelist, John Esten Cooke, and styled Virginia, a history of the people (Boston, 1883),[677] in which he aims to show, through succeeding generations of Virginians, how the original characteristics of their race have been woven into the texture of the population from the Chesapeake to the Mississippi, as those of New England have controlled the north from the Atlantic to the Lakes. He laments that there has never been a study of the Southern people to the same extent as of the Northern, and says that some of the greatest events in the annals of the whole country need, to understand them, a contemplation of the Virginian traits, losing sight, as he expresses it, of “the fancied dignity of history.” Guided somewhat by this canon, the author has modelled his narrative, dividing the periods into what he calls the Plantation, the Colony, and the Commonwealth,—the second more than covering the years now under consideration. He places first among his authorities for this period The Statutes at Large, being a Collection of all the Laws of Virginia, by William Walter Hening, in thirteen volumes, as the most important authority on social affairs in Virginia. He speaks of its unattractive title failing to suggest the character of the work, and says, with perhaps an excess of zeal, that “as a picture of colonial time, it has no rival in American books.”
The institutional history of Virginia has of late received some particular attention at the hands of Mr. Edward Ingle, who printed in the Mag. of Amer. History (Dec., 1884, p. 532) a paper on “County Government in Virginia,” which he has reprinted with other papers on the Land Tenure, the Hundreds, the English Parish in America, and the Town, in a contribution called Local Institutions of Virginia, which makes parts ii. and iii. of the third series (1885) of the Johns Hopkins University Studies in History and Political Science.[678]
We are fortunate in possessing the official correspondence of the two most notable royal governors of the eighteenth century. The letters of Alexander Spotswood were used by Bancroft, and were then lost sight of till they were recovered in England in 1873.[679] They are now published in two volumes (Richmond, 1882, 1885) as The official letters of Alexander Spotswood, lieutenant-governor of Virginia, 1710-1722; now first printed from the manuscript in the collections of the Virginia Historical Society, with an introduction and notes by R. A. Brock, constituting the initial volumes of a new series of the Collections of the Virginia Historical Society. Spotswood’s official account of his conflict with the burgesses is printed in the Virginia Hist. Register; and we best see him as a man in William Byrd’s “Progress to the Mines,” included in Wynne’s edition of the Byrd Manuscripts. Palmer draws Spotswood’s character in the introduction to his Calendar of Virginia State Papers, p. xxxix.[680]
Of the other collection of letters, The official records of Robert Dinwiddie, lieutenant-governor of Virginia, 1751-1758; now first printed from the manuscript in the collections of the Virginia Historical Society, with an introduction and notes by R. A. Brock, Richmond, Va., 1883-84, being vols iii. and iv. of the new series of the same Collections, a more special account is given in another place.[681]
The valley of Virginia has been more written about locally than the eastern parts. Beside the old history of Kercheval,[682] W. H. Foote has embraced it in the second series of his Sketches of Virginia (Philad., 1855), and it has recently been treated in J. Lewis Peyton’s History of Augusta County, Va. (Staunton, Va., 1882), a region once embracing the territory from the Blue Ridge to the Mississippi.
Norfolk has been made the subject of historical study, as in W. S. Forrest’s Norfolk and Vicinity (1853), but with scant attention to the period back of its rise to commercial importance.
The ecclesiastical element forms a large part of Virginia history in the earlier times. Some general references have been given in another place.[683] At the opening of our present period, there were of the established church in Virginia fifty parishes, with one hundred churches and chapels and thirty ministers,—according to Bray’s Apostolic Charity (London, 1700).[684] The church history has been well studied by Dr. Hawks,[685] Bishop Perry,[686] and Dr. De Costa,[687] in this country, and by Anderson in his History of the Colonial Church (1856),—a book which Doyle calls “laborious and trustworthy on every page.” Bishop Meade has treated the subject locally in his Old Churches and Families of Virginia,[688] as has Dr. Philip Slaughter in his Saint George’s Parish, Saint Mark’s Parish and Bristol Parish,[689] and he has given a summary of the leading churches of colonial Virginia in a section of Bishop Perry’s Amer. Episc. Church (vol. i. p. 614).
The dissenting element was chiefly among the Presbyterians, whose later strongholds were away from the tide-water among the mountains. The Reverend Francis Mackemie[690] had been principal leader among them, and he was the first dissenter who had leave to preach in Virginia. Their story is best told in C. A. Briggs’ American Presbyterianism (p. 109), and in both series of W. H. Foote’s Sketches of Virginia (Phil., 1850, 1855).
The Baptists in Virginia did not attain numerical importance till within the decade preceding the American Revolution, and they had effected scarcely any influence among the opponents of establishment during the period now under consideration.[691] The Huguenots brought good blood, and affected religious life rather individually than as a body.[692]
In depicting the society of Virginia during this period, we must get what glimpses we can from not very promising sources. The spirit which despised literature and schools was in the end dispelled, in part at least, but it was at this time dominant enough to prevent the writing of books; and consequently the light thrown upon social life by literature is wanting almost entirely. The Virginians were apparently not letter-writers and diarists, as the New Englanders were, and while we have a wealth of correspondence in Massachusetts to help us comprehend the habits of living, we find little or nothing in Virginia. We meet, indeed, with some letters of the Byrds[693] and the Fontaines,[694] and the official correspondence of Spotswood and Dinwiddie; but the latter touch only in a casual way upon the habits of living. A few descriptive and political tracts, like Hugh Jones’ Present State,[695] give us small glimpses. Later Virginia writers like Bishop Meade[696] and Dr. Philip Slaughter,[697] have gathered up whatever of tradition has floated down in family gossip; and Foote[698] and Esten Cooke[699] have drawn the picture from what sources they could command, as Irving has in his Life of Washington.[700] The most elaborate survey of the subject, with philosophic impulses, has been made by Eben Greenough Scott in his Development of Constitutional Liberty in the English Colonies of America (New York, 1882),[701] in which he contrasts the manners of the lowland aristocracy with those of the farmers of the valley and with the wilder life of the frontiers.[702] The most elaborate composite of data derived from every source is the chapter on “Virginia in 1765,” in Henry Cabot Lodge’s Short History of the English Colonies, in which he depends very largely on the survival of manners in the days when Burnaby, Anburey, Robin, Smyth, Brissot de Warville, Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, and Weld travelled in the country,—material which has the great disadvantage of being derived from chance observation, with more or less of generalization based on insufficient instances, as Dr. Dwight has pointed out in the case of Weld at least.[703]