Spotswood was one of the ablest Governors sent to America to represent the British Crown. He did much to open the West to Virginia, encouraged settlement in the Piedmont, and erected forts in the passes of the Blue Ridge. He wiped out a nest of pirates under the notorious Blackbeard and strung several of them up at Williamsburg. A man of artistic interests, he was responsible for the beautiful Palace gardens, with their wealth of boxwood, walks, walls, lake, ornate gates, flower beds; and designed charming Bruton Parish Church.
In 1716 he led a party of gentlemen, accompanied by rangers, servants, and Indians, on an exploring expedition to the West. As they rode through the wilderness of the Piedmont, they shot deer and bears, camped in the open, roasted venison on wooden forks. On reaching the Blue Ridge they toiled to the summit, and there, looking out over the Valley of Virginia, drank the health of King George I and the royal family. After descending into the Valley and crossing the Shenandoah River, they turned their horses' heads homeward. Back in Williamsburg, the Governor presented each of his companions with a golden horseshoe, inscribed with sic juvat transcendere montes.
Although Spotswood was accused of being haughty and implacable, he lacked the fiery temper of Nicholson or the revengeful fury of Sir William Berkeley. In his conflicts with the Council his astute mind and his knowledge of English and Virginia constitutional law made it easy for him to refute their arguments. Though he defended the powers of the Crown, he was honestly concerned for the welfare of the colony. But he hated democracy, and he had no patience with what he termed the follies of the ignorant multitude. Despite his assaults on the Virginia aristocracy, his ambition was to become one of them, and he used his office to build up one of the greatest estates in the colony.
The instructions given Spotswood by the Lords of Trade were on the whole wise and liberal. The people of Virginia were to have the full benefit of the habeas corpus; fees and salaries must be moderate; no one must be deprived of life, member, or property without due process of law; martial law was forbidden; the people were to be supplied with arms. Yet several clauses were loaded with trouble for the Lieutenant Governor—one for appointing courts to try criminals; another for preventing frauds in the accounts of governmental receipts and payments; another for collecting arrears of quit rents; one to prevent the holding of large tracts of unoccupied land.
When this last instruction was read to the Council, they must have shifted uneasily in their seats, for most of them held land which they did not cultivate. Fourteen years earlier Edward Randolph had reported this to the Lords of Trade. The reason the colony was so thinly settled, he thought, was that poor men would not go there "because members of the Council and others who made an interest in the government, have from time to time procured grants of very large tracts of land." Thus newcomers and indentured workers on becoming free were forced to be tenants or go to the utmost bounds of the colony. The remedy, he suggested, was to force payment of arrears of quit rents and prohibit for the future grants of more than 500 acres.[1]
Both Nott and Hunter had been instructed to cancel patents for land of any who neglected to cultivate even a small part of their holdings. So now Spotswood, in the face of bitter opposition, restricted all grants to 400 acres unless the patentee showed that he was able to meet this requirement. In 1710 he tried to satisfy the Lords of Trade by pushing through a law stating what should be considered satisfactory seating, and in 1713 another making the regulations still more specific.[2]
The chief effect of these acts was to arouse the resentment of the Council. They assented to them in their capacity as the Upper House of the Assembly because they dared not flaunt openly the commands of the British government. But they found means to make them inoperative. The rumor was spread throughout the colony that the attorney general in England had ruled that no lands patented prior to the passage of these acts was liable to forfeiture. To ease men's fears, several large landholders purposely refused to pay quit rents. Even John Grymes, the deputy auditor into whose hands the quit rents were paid, himself remained in arrears "to show no danger in that law."[3] Spotswood admitted that the law was a failure when he wrote in 1718: "No man in Virginia has yet had land granted away for non-payment of quit rents."
When Spotswood came to Virginia there were many complaints of hard times. The war in Europe had proved disastrous to the tobacco trade, the flow of hogsheads to the continent of Europe had been reduced to a trickle, tobacco piled up in the British warehouses, the merchants left a part of each crop on the planters' hands, and the price dropped lower and lower. Many of the poorer farmers were in rags, and some began to raise sheep and to spin and weave. The salaried class, especially the clergy, were in dire straits also, since they were paid in tobacco, often of the lowest grade.
The fertile brain of Spotswood now thought out a scheme intended to raise the price of tobacco, give the colony a convenient and stable currency, make the collecting of quit rents easier, and prevent frauds in shipping out tobacco. So he got one of his friends in the Assembly to introduce a bill to require inspection of all tobacco at government warehouses, and the issuing of tobacco notes which were to be legal tender. This plan had much to recommend it, and a similar one was put into successful operation later during the administration of Governor Gooch.
Despite violent opposition in certain quarters, the tobacco bill passed both Houses of Assembly and was signed by the Governor. So now there were sounds of hammering and sawing as warehouses arose on the great rivers. Soon the tobacco vessels were tying up at the adjacent wharves, and the planters were rolling their hogsheads for the inspection. After the agent had examined the leaf, he either rejected it as "trash" and unfit for exportation, or stamped on the hogshead the weight and variety of the tobacco, and gave the owner his certificate.