Another effort was the organization in England in 1723 by the Rev. Thomas Bray of a company called "Dr. Bray's Associates." Dr. Thomas Bray was the bishop's commissary to the province of Maryland. The purpose of Dr. Bray's Associates was to establish in the colonies schools for the education and Christian instruction of Negro children, and it did a useful work. It did a notable work in the City of New York, and it conducted schools in other places; one of them at Williamsburg, in Virginia.
There was another and most unusual development in Virginia. Under the urge of the Bishop of London's pastoral letter there came a great increase in the number of baptisms of adult Negroes; so sudden an increase as to cause concern to Commissary Blair and to Governor Gooch. In some way a report had spread among the Negroes that ex-Governor Alexander Spotswood, upon his return from a voyage to England, had brought with him an order from the King directing that all baptized Negro slaves be set free. The story, improbable as it was to English ears, was believed implicitly by the Negroes and it brought many of them to their parish clergy seeking for baptism. Time passed and there was no movement to set the baptized Negroes free. They became indignant, for they believed the colonial authorities had ignored the King's order. A plot for a Negro uprising was formed; but the plot was discovered and the ringleaders were punished.
Another incident occurred two years later. A woman slave who had been baptized was convicted of manslaughter in the Gloucester County Court which sentenced her to death. She thereupon plead the benefit of clergy. Her plea brought a new problem to the courts of Virginia for until that time no woman and no slave in the colony had ever been permitted to plead benefit of clergy. The County Court considered the plea and the vote was a tie between granting the plea and enforcement of the sentence. The County Court referred the matter to the General Court of the colony; and there again the vote resulted in a tie. The General Court therefore referred the case to the Attorney General of England. Meanwhile, the General Court ordered that the woman's plea be granted, and, in order not to set a precedent in an unsettled question, directed that she be sold out of the colony. At a subsequent meeting of the General Assembly the matter was settled so far as Virginia was concerned by enactment of a law that all persons convicted of a first offense of felony, whether male or female, bond or free, might plead benefit of clergy.
Slavery existed in the American colonies from Massachusetts and Connecticut to Virginia and the Carolinas at the end of the seventeenth century. It was alien to English ideals of human freedom. Yet out of it all one tremendously important fact has come to pass. The Negro came to America from almost every Negro tribe and dialect in central and southern Africa; he came without any connection except his connection with other slaves when more than one were sold to the same master. He came into a highly developed civilization with great organized power of leadership and government; and through the generations of slavery the Negro in America wrought for himself a national and racial consciousness within the sphere of American life. The American Negro today is the most highly educated and the most advanced Negro in the world. As such he has the opportunity to make his own contribution to the culture and the civilization of the world. This their centuries of slavery and repression have brought them.
CHAPTER SIX
Fighting Adverse Conditions
The political conditions in England throughout the middle of the seventeenth century bore heavily upon Virginia in religious as well as in civil matters. The period of civil war which began in 1642 lasted until the King was captured by the parliamentary forces, and Archbishop Laud, the hated persecutor of dissenters, was beheaded. After an imprisonment of four years the king was beheaded and Oliver Cromwell reigned as Protector of the Commonwealth. The civil war had lined up the dissenting bodies in England, and the Presbyterian Church in Scotland, against the King and the Church of England.
On the American scene the Puritan colonies in New England were in hearty sympathy with the dissenters in England. In Virginia the government and the great body of the people were in equal sympathy with King Charles and the Established Church. It is true there were in Virginia the goodly number of several hundred Puritan settlers. In the Church also there was some Puritan sympathy among a small group of the clergy. One of these, indeed, the Rev. Thomas Harrison, who became minister of Elizabeth River Parish (Norfolk) in 1640, was presented for trial in the county court in April 1645 "For not reading the Book of Common Prayer, and not administering the sacrament of baptism according to the canons and order prescribed, and for not catechizing on Sunday in the afternoon, according to the Act of Assembly." He was banished to Massachusetts in 1648, where he remained for two years and married. Afterward he returned to England and was given official position in the Commonwealth under Cromwell.
In the heated atmosphere of the times the Puritan group in Virginia took occasion to apply to the Puritan church government in Massachusetts to send three ordained Puritan "missionaries" to their fellow religionists in Virginia, but upon the arrival of the missionaries their ship was met by government officials; the three missionaries sent back to Massachusetts; and the master of the ship was fined for bringing them to the colony. No one in official position in Virginia could escape the conviction that the sending of Puritan ministers to Virginia at such a time, whether upon request of the Nansemond River group or upon suggestion from Boston, was for any purpose other than to foment and organize Puritan opposition to the King. For that reason Puritanism in Virginia came under suspicion, and the Governor, Sir William Berkeley, with the full support of the government and public opinion, treated all Puritans as enemies. He made their situation so intolerable that the entire group accepted an invitation from the proprietor of the Province of Maryland and migrated to that colony. There, given land on the Severn River, they gained control of the provincial government within a few years. The forcing of the group out of Virginia was a political act of defense and was not religious persecution.