Give Me Liberty: The Struggle for Self-Government in Virginia

by Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker

The Board of Trade considered the pistole dispute most inopportune. At a time when the French were challenging the right of Great Britain to the vast trans-Allegheny region, it was unfortunate that the Governor should have aroused the bitter resentment of the Assembly. "It is necessary that harmony and mutual confidence be established between the Governors and people in all the colonies," they wrote, "but especially in Virginia, on the frontier of which the French are carrying on their encroachments."[13]

But they could not desert Dinwiddie entirely since the issue involved the royal prerogative. The King rejected the address of the Burgesses, and the Board confirmed the Governor's right to the fee. But they hedged it about with several restrictions. There must be no fee for grants of less than one hundred acres, or for lands granted for importing settlers, or for lands west of the mountains. They reproved Dinwiddie for proposing that the fee be established by act of Assembly, in violation of the King's rights. The making out of surveys for land and neglecting to pass patents was clearly "in the Governor's power to prevent." "We expect you to do your duty ... even though no pecuniary advantage should arise from it." And they recommended that he reinstate Randolph as Attorney General. "This may quiet the minds of the people and stop this unjust clamor."[14]

Dinwiddie was far from happy about this report. The proposal to establish the fee by act of Assembly had come from the Council, not from him, he wrote in reply. As for not taking a fee for patents west of the mountains, he wanted to know which mountains. He had taken no fee for lands beyond the Alleghenies. The suggestion to reinstate the Attorney General was especially displeasing. However, when Randolph arrived at Williamsburg with many letters of recommendation from men of influence in England, denying that he had written the attacks on the Governor in the press, and promising "to conduct himself more regularly in future and with more regard to his Majesty's service," he reinstated him.[15]

One wonders just how many pistoles Dinwiddie pocketed for the use of the seal in the six and a half years of his administration. A few months after he had left Virginia for good there were no less than 1,360 applications for patents waiting to be sealed. Governor Fauquier, Dinwiddie's successor, stated that this was costing the Crown £1,000 a year in quit rents. It would seem to indicate that Dinwiddie, ignoring the positive orders of the Board of Trade, had appeased the people by permitting 1,000,000 acres of occupied land to remain unpatented. Thus the Governor's victory was a hollow one, and the Burgesses, without acquiescing in the decision of the Board, were content to let the matter drop so long as the fee was not collected.

Fauquier, on his part, handled this hot potato with care. "Being extremely desirous to keep peace and harmony in this country," he wrote the Lords of Trade, "and that his Majesty's revenue should not suffer ... I have made a declaration in Council that I would be willing to acquiesce in anything that should be thought reasonable to procure both these advantages. This affair has formerly raised a great flame in this country which is not yet quite subsided, and ... I am endeavoring to quench it entirely that the Assemblies may the easier be prevailed upon to give what is necessary."[16]

In the meanwhile the storm of war had broken over the colonies. A terrible war it was. It lacked the wholesale devastation of the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb, but it was marked by infinite cruelties. Dinwiddie described it vividly. "Think you see the infant torn from the unavailing struggles of the distracted mother, the daughters ravished before the eyes of their wretched parents, and then, with cruelty and insult, butchered and scalped. Suppose the horrid scene completed, and the whole family, man, wife, and children murdered and scalped by these relentless savages, and then torn in pieces."[17]

To Dinwiddie goes the credit of warning the British government that the French were trying to confine the English to the region east of the Alleghenies. In December, 1752, he wrote the Board of Trade that they had built a string of forts from Canada to the mouth of the Mississippi, that they had 5,000 soldiers at New Orleans, and 1,600 elsewhere in America. When he heard that a force of French and Indians had built a fort on the Allegheny River, and were preparing to descend on the Ohio, he sent young George Washington to warn them to leave. This proving ineffectual, he came to the Assembly for funds to finance an expedition to drive them out.

This was the first of a series of appeals for money which gave the Assembly a golden opportunity to weaken the power of the Governor and the royal prerogative. Yet it was an opportunity full of danger. If they clogged their grants with such conditions that Dinwiddie would not accept them, they ran the risk of having the colony overrun by the enemy. At times the Governor was in despair. "The French could have cut off every one of our men and marched down to Hampton without the least danger," he wrote in July, 1754.

When the Assembly met in February, 1754, Dinwiddie told them that Washington had seen a large body of the enemy on the upper Allegheny. Give me men and supplies to oppose them, he pleaded. The safety of Virginia depends on you at this critical juncture.[18] In reply to this appeal they did vote £10,000 but Dinwiddie was far from happy about it because the bill named a committee of the two Houses to supervise its expenditure. "This bill takes from me the undoubted right I have of directing the application of the money," he complained. But since funds could be had on no other terms he gave his assent. "I assure you it was contrary to my inclination, but necessity has no law," he wrote James Abercrombie.[19]

So men were raised and equipped and sent out to the junction of the Allegheny and the Monongahela. Here, under the command of George Washington, they were fortifying themselves when they were attacked by the French and Indians and forced to retire. Again Dinwiddie pleaded for a grant large enough to meet the emergency. When the Assembly responded by voting £20,000, he was delighted until he discovered a rider to pay Peyton Randolph the £2,500 they had promised him for representing them in England in the pistole affair. This was too much for Dinwiddie to swallow, so he vetoed the bill.[20]