Beginnings of the American People

by Carl L. Becker

Less clearly defined than the distinction between the free and the unfree was the distinction, which began to develop toward the middle of the century, and which was doubtless accentuated by the Cavalier migration from England during the Commonwealth period, between the small and the large landowner. The master of a great estate, enjoying a certain leisure and exercising a political and social influence denied to the average freeman, was set above the mass of the planters much as in England the titled nobility was set above the gentry. Of this small but important class, the first William Byrd was a notable example. Uniting in his ancestry the Cavalier and the Roundhead traditions, he inherited, before the age of twenty, 1800 acres of land and a recognized social position in the colony. Before his death he had built up an estate of 26,000 acres, which his son, in the next century, increased to 179,000 acres. He was at once planter, merchant, politician, and social leader. His caravans of from fifty to one hundred pack-horses penetrated regularly for many years to the Cherokee country beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains. The furs which they brought back, together with the products of his plantation, were exported to England and elsewhere in payment for slaves, servants, or other commodities which were periodically landed at his private wharf to be used on his own estate or retailed from his general store to the small planters roundabout. Before he reached the age of thirty, Byrd became, and remained throughout his life, a leader in his own county and in the colony at large—a colonel of militia, a burgess in the assembly, and member of the governor's council.

From the middle of the century Virginia society thus began to take on the character which it retained throughout the colonial period. The colony was primarily a rural and an agricultural community, combining in curious fashion the democratic spirit of the frontier with the aristocratic temper of an older civilization. The unit of social organization was the plantation, which naturally tended to become, and in the case of the larger plantations often became in fact, relatively complete and self-sufficing—a little world in itself. The planter, surrounded by his family and his servants and cut off from intimate or frequent contact with his neighbors, producing, for the most part in abundance, all the necessities and many of the luxuries of life, was master of his entourage and but little dependent upon the outside world. Inevitably the conditions of plantation life developed the aristocratic spirit, the sense of mastery and independence which comes from directing inferiors in an isolated and self-sufficing enterprise.

Influences of environment were strengthened by the traditions which the settlers had inherited. Neither planter nor servant came to America with utopian ideals of society or government. It was discontent not dissent that drove them out. Dissatisfied with their position in the English social system, they were yet well content with the system itself; a system which they were willing enough to establish in the New World in the hope of obtaining in it a more desirable position for themselves. And so it happened that the laborer and the farmer, the small landowner and the master of a great estate, the clergyman and the high official, were disposed to take as a matter of course the position which custom assigned them, and in that position to exercise the authority and render the obedience which was proper to it.

Tradition and environment thus conspired to establish a government in which initiative and leadership fell to the great planters, while the mass of the freemen exercised a restrained and limited supervision. It was a happy accident, rather than any strong popular demand, that gave to Virginia an elected chamber. Sir Edwin Sandys and the Earl of Southampton, who gained control of the Virginia Company in 1618, hoped to put the enterprise on a paying basis by lavish land grants and liberal concessions in respect to religious and political liberty. Governor Yeardley was accordingly sent out in 1619 with instructions to call together "two Burgesses from each Plantation, freely to be elected by the inhabitants thereof." In June of the same year twenty-two burgesses, representing eleven districts, together with the governor and council, assembled in the church at Jamestown and inaugurated representative government in Virginia by passing a body of laws in which the customs of England were adapted to the conditions of a frontier community. After the dissolution of the company in 1624 the appointment of the governor and council vested in the Crown, but the House of Burgesses, elected at first by the freemen, but after the Restoration on the basis of a freehold test, was continued. From the first the assembly, filled by planters, exercised a beneficial influence in giving a practical character to the laws of the province; while on certain occasions, and notably during the period of the Commonwealth, it was the dominant influence in the government of the colony.

But for the most part the assembly was the instrument rather than the source of power. The directing influence was usually in the hands of the great planter who combined the functions of merchant and country gentleman, lawyer and politician and social leader. His knowledge of law and his familiarity with affairs, his social connection and influence, his greater leisure, the traditional authority which hung about his position, all disposed the small planters to accept his initiative and abide by his decisions. It was difficult to defeat his candidate for the burgesses; difficult for the elected burgess not to defer to his opinion. And if the great planters were influential among the burgesses, they were predominant in the council. The home Government expected the governor to manage the affairs of the colony by gathering to his support the most wealthy and influential men in it. Accordingly, the great planters were customarily appointed to the local offices and to the council. Generally speaking, the governor and the great planters established a community of interest on an exchange of favors. The small group of men in the council, related by marriage, ambitious, shrewd, and pushing, already wealthy or bound to become so, supported with reasonable loyalty the royal interests, and found their reward in exploiting, through the political machinery which they controlled, the resources of the colony for their own profit. This compact was the basis of the long régime of Berkeley. But the governor was made aware of the source of his strength when he trespassed upon the preserves of the oligarchy which supported him. His attempt to control the Indian trade drove men like Colonel Byrd over to the side of Bacon, and the authority of the governor collapsed like a pricked balloon.

Of this oligarchy of politician-planters, Colonel Byrd was indeed the most notable. Already wealthy and influential, in 1687 he went to London and secured, through the favor of William Blathwayt, the office of receiver-general of the customs, to which was attached the office of escheator; offices, among the most important in the colony, which he held until his death. It was the duty of the receiver to receive the quit-rents, and to receive them, at the option of the taxpayer, in tobacco in exchange for certificates at the rate of about eight shillings per hundredweight. Tobacco so received was stored in warehouses, and sold at the close of the year by the receiver-general for the benefit of the customs. The tobacco offered for the quit-rents was naturally of inferior quality. Such as it was, the king favored selling it at auction. But the Virginia assembly preferred to have the receiver dispose of it by "private arrangement"; and in fact Colonel Byrd found it convenient to make such "private arrangements" with burgesses or members of the council, who sometimes paid as much as six shillings for tobacco which would bring ten or twelve in the open market.

Members of the legislature who profited by such practices were doubtless willing to stretch a point in favor of the receiver of the customs. In 1679, before he had become receiver, Colonel Byrd was able to obtain from the assembly, on condition of maintaining fifty armed men to repel Indian attacks on the frontier, a grant of ten thousand acres at the Falls extending on both sides of the James River. The grant was disallowed in England, but other grants of great value were obtained with little difficulty. Patents were easily obtained, but they did not become effective until the land was "settled" by clearing and cultivating a minimum tract. For a poor man this was the chief obstacle to acquiring a great estate; but a rich man was often able to avoid it altogether. In 1688, Byrd secured a patent for 3313 acres. He failed to "settle" it and the title lapsed. But the land could not be granted again until the lapse of title was officially declared in the office of the escheator. Colonel Byrd was fortunately escheator as well as receiver, and the lapse of his own title was not declared until 1701, when the same tract was immediately repatented to Nathaniel Harrison, who straightway transferred it to his neighbor and very good friend, the original patentee. In like manner the colonel preëmpted 5644 acres of land, which he held without improvement for ten years when it was transferred to his son.

The aristocracy, of which Colonel Byrd was a shining light, nevertheless held by a somewhat precarious tenure. The crude and primitive conditions of the wilderness, restricting both the occupations and the diversions of life within narrow limits, inevitably ran the thoughts of men in much the same mould. The routine of work and pleasure was much the same on the great plantation as on the small: clearing and planting, spinning and weaving, dancing and horse-racing, neighborly hospitality which was generous and sincere because the opportunity to exercise it was rare, attendance at church or at the county court, at elections, at the annual muster—it was a range of activities too limited to permit of any deep-seated sense of difference between man and man.

And, indeed, the main basis of distinction in this new world was a purely external one—the possession of wealth; and wealth was in no unreal sense the bequest of nature to capacity. Initiative and industry, rather than the dead hand of custom, marked a man for distinction and preferment. It was the land of opportunity where the servant could become the farmer, the farmer a planter, where the planter, acquiring by skill or happy chance a great estate, thereby entered in with the political and social grandees. There were classes but no castes; not birth or title, but individual enterprise determined rank and influence. And in an undeveloped country the possession of a great estate was not a social grievance, but an evidence of success in the perennial contest with nature, the measure of personal prowess and a test of civic virtue. The enrichment of Colonel Byrd, even by ways that were devious, was viewed with complacence by his neighbors so long as it harmed them not. Yet the submission of the small to the great planter was a convenience rather than a necessity. The wilderness, with the Indian as a part of it, developed a crude and a ruthless spirit, but never a cringing or a submissive one. The gentleman and the magistrate were deferred to, but neither was regarded as sacrosanct; and when, in the régime of Berkeley, special privilege in alliance with official corruption seemed to be narrowing the chances of the common man, the insurgent spirit of frontier democracy, denying the validity of distinctions and demanding fair play, found militant expression in Bacon's Rebellion. The episode was an early instance of that struggle between rich and poor, between exploiter and exploited, of that stubborn insistence upon equal opportunity which have so often characterized the more decisive periods of American history.

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