Sir William Berkeley was elected governor by the General Assembly of Virginia two months before the Restoration, and, acknowledging himself as “the servant of the assembly,” he accepted the appointment from their hands. But Virginia, speaking from the heart of her faithful loyalist settlers, even then acknowledged a secret hope of a restored monarchy. The Restoration took place, and Virginia, like England, set no bounds to the expression of her joy. An address was sent to the king, “praying his pardon for their having yielded to a power they were unable to resist.” Forty-four thousand pounds of tobacco were given to the two deputies who conveyed the address. Charles transmitted a royal commission to “his faithful adherent,” Berkeley; and Berkeley, assuming authority under it, issued writs for the election of a new assembly, no longer as governor elected by the people, but as commissioner under the king. The loyal enthusiasm and aristocratic tendencies of the people elected for this new assembly only landholders and cavaliers. The democratic power of Virginia was at an end. Momentous changes had already begun, not alone in her constitution, but in the social condition of her people. Of this social condition a few words must be allowed us.
There has always been in the character of the southern states “an instinctive aversion to too much government.” This showed itself early in Virginia by the isolated manner in which the country was colonised. Unlike the New England colonists, the spirit of whose life was organisation and government; who, naturally forming themselves into communities, established towns with corporate authorities; who regarded religions instruction as the first concern, and secular instruction as the second; who, while yet small as a people, branched out into colonies, and impelled by the spirit of commercial activity, traded to all parts of the world; unlike these determined, energetic, and expansive settlers, the people of Virginia showed from the first an aversion to congregate in towns, or to engage in commerce. They lived on their plantations, scattered over the colony, like the estates of the nobility in an old country, and were themselves influenced by the spirit of feudal institutions.
At the time of the Restoration, sixty years after the first settlement, Virginia comprehended an extent of country about half the size of England, with a population of about 40,000, including negro slaves and indented servants. It was divided into fifty parishes; the plantations lay dispersed among the banks of rivers and creeks, those on the James River extending about 100 miles into the interior. Each parish extended many miles in length along the river’s side, but in breadth ran back only a mile. This was the average breadth. Many parishes were destitute of churches, or any means of religious instruction; in fact, not more than ten parishes were supplied with ministers, and of these some were by no means of exemplary character. Religious worship was held but once a day, and such families—and these were by far the greater number—as lived at a distance from the church, did not trouble themselves to attend at all. Religion, as evidenced by outward forms of worship, was by no means a vital object with the Virginian planters of those days. The general want of schools, likewise owing to the scattered state of the population, “was most of all bewailed by parents in Virginia. The want of schools was more deplored than the want of churches. The children of Virginia, naturally of beautiful and comely persons, and of more ingenuous spirits than those of England,” grew up almost devoid of instruction.
“The theocratic form of government in New England,” says Hildreth, “tended to diminish the influence of wealth by introducing a different basis of distinction, and still more so that activity of mind, the consequence of strong religious excitement. Hence, in New England, a constant tendency towards social equality. In Virginia and Maryland, on the other hand, the management of provincial and local affairs fell more and more under the control of a few wealthy men, possessed of large tracts of land, which they cultivated by the labour partly of slaves, but principally of indented white servants.
“Indented servants existed, indeed, in all the American colonies; but the cultivation of tobacco created a special demand for them in Virginia and Maryland. A regular trade was early established in the transport of persons who, for the sake of a passage to America, suffered themselves to be sold by the master of the vessel to serve for a term of years after their arrival. Nor was this embarkation always voluntary; sometimes they were entrapped by infamous arts, sometimes even kidnapped, and sometimes they were persons sentenced to transportation for political and other offences. Felons so transported were known under the appellation of ‘jail-birds.’ Cromwell in this way disposed of his English, Scotch, and Irish prisoners of war, both in Virginia and New England. On the expiration of their term of servitude, of four, five, or seven years, these servants acquired all the rights of freemen, and in Virginia were entitled to the fifty acres of land to which all immigrants had a claim.”
The plantations lay along the rivers, and trading vessels ascending them, landed their goods and took the tobacco, the great staple production of the country, on board at their very doors. There was no home-manufacture of any kind in Virginia; all manufactured goods were imported from England. Virginia herself neither exported nor imported. She possessed not above two vessels of her own; and, though ship-building and navigation might have been carried on advantageously from her position, she had neither the talent nor the turn of mind necessary for such engagements.
As a picture of Virginian life at this period, we will indulge ourselves with a graphic extract from Bancroft, to whom we are already so largely obliged. “The generation now in existence was 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 newspaper entered their houses, no printing-press furnished them with books. They had no recreation but such as nature provides in her wilds; no education but such as parents in the desert could give to their offspring. The paths were bridleways rather than roads, and it is questionable if there was 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 river where there was neither ford nor ferry. Almost every planter was his own mechanic. The houses, for the most part, but of one story, and made of wood, often of logs, the windows closed by convenient shutters for want of glass, were sprinkled on both sides of the Chesapeake, from the Potomac to the borders 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, occupied by about a dozen families. Till very lately the legislature assembled in the hall of an ale-house. Virginia had neither towns nor lawyers. A few of the wealthier planters, however, lived in braver state at their large plantations, and surrounded by indented servants and slaves, produced a new form of society that has sometimes been likened to the manners of the patriarchs, and sometimes to the baronial pride of feudalism.”
Such was the population of Virginia. Hospitable and luxurious in the simplicity of their free, unconventional life; loving liberty, not so much as a sublime principle of human elevation and enlightenment, but as the very element of their joyous existence; cherishing a sentiment of loyalty and attachment to the old mother-country, with such traditional reverence as they would regard the head of an ancestral line; enthusiastic and impulsive, quick to revenge and keen in their sense of wrong. We shall see the effect produced on a people of this generous and mercurial character, by the oppressions of a monarch whom they had welcomed back to his throne with all the enthusiasm of their traditional loyalty.
The first evidence of the Restoration perceived in Virginia was the rigorous enforcement of the Navigation Act, by which all foreign vessels were excluded from the English colonies. At the expense of 200,000 pounds of tobacco, Sir William Berkeley was sent over by the colony to remonstrate on their behalf; but Sir William employed his time in London, not on the business of the colony, but in securing to himself a share in the Great Carolina Charter, in which, as we have said, he became one of the eight proprietaries.
So far from anything being done to lessen the pressure of the Navigation Act on the Anglo-American colonies, the following parliament increased its stringency, and the colonists were prohibited from shipping their produce, known under the term “enumerated articles,” to any other market than that of England; and from importing any European commodities otherwise than through the English merchant. This law, which pressed heavily on New England, was fatal to Virginia, whose sole staple was tobacco, and who depended on the New England trader, whose commercial dealings were already of a European character, and who contrived for a long time to set the law at defiance. It was different with Virginia,—she had no ships of her own; custom-houses sealed her ports; her market was restricted, and the prices of all foreign goods, coming to her through the English merchant, were increased.