The accession of Queen Anne led to the conferring of the titular governorship in 1704 upon George Hamilton, the Earl of Orkney, who was to hold the office nominally for forty years. For five years the council ruled under Edward Jenings, their president, and when, December 15, 1704, he made his proclamation of the victory of Blenheim, it was a satisfaction to record that Colonel Parke, of Virginia, had been the officer sent by Marlborough to convey the news to the queen.[607]
In 1710 the ablest of the royal governors came upon the scene, Alexander Spotswood, a man now in his early prime, since he was born in 1676. He bore a wound which he had got at this same Blenheim, for he had a decisive, soldierly spirit. It was a new thing to have a governor for whom the people could have any enthusiasm. He came with a peace-offering in the shape of the writ of habeas corpus, a boon the Virginians had been thus far denied. The burgesses reciprocated in devoting £2,000 to build him a palace, as it was called, as perhaps well they might, considering that their annual tobacco crop was now about 20,000,000 pounds.
The happy relations between the governor and his people did not continue long without a rupture. The executive needed money to fortify the frontiers, and the assembly tightened the purse-strings; but they did pass a bill to appoint rangers to scour the country at the river heads.[608] Spotswood did the best he could with scant funds. He managed to prevent the tributary Indians from joining the Tuscaroras in their forays in Carolina,[609] and he induced the burgesses to take some action on the appeals of Governor Pollock.[610] He also gave his energy scope in developing the manufacture of iron and the growing of vineyards, and in the stately march which he made to find out something about the region beyond the Blue Ridge.[611] He was indeed always ready for any work which was required.
ALEXANDER SPOTSWOOD.
After the engraving in the Spotswood Letters, vol. i., with a note on the portraits on p. viii. His arms are on p. vii. Cf. the Century Magazine, xxvii. 447.
If his burgesses revolted, he dissolved them with a sledge-hammer kind of rhetoric.[612] If Blackbeard, the pirate, appeared between the capes, he sent after him men whom he could trust, and they justified his measure of them when they came home with a bloody head on their bowsprit.[613] He had no sooner concluded a conference with the Five Nations, in August and September, 1722,[614] than the opposition to an assumption which he, like the other governors, could not resist, to be the head of the church as well as of the state, made progress enough to secure his removal from office.[615]
During Spotswood’s time, Virginia attained to as much political prominence as the century saw for her prior to the Revolution. The German element, which gathered away from tide-water,[616] began to serve as a balance to the Anglican aristocracy, which made the river banks so powerful. The tobacco fields, while they in one sense made that aristocracy, in another made them, in luckless seasons, slaves of a variable market. This relation, producing financial servitude, enforced upon them at times almost the abjectness of the African slaves whom they employed. Above it all, however, arose a spirit of political freedom in contrast with their monetary subjection. The burgesses gradually acquired more and more power, and the finances of the province which they controlled gave them opportunities which compensated for their personal cringing to the wilful imperialism of the tobacco market. The people lacked, too, the independence which mechanical ingenuity gives a race. A certain shiftlessness even about the great estates, a laziness between crops, the content to import the commonest articles instead of making them,—all indicate this. The amenities of living which come from towns were wanting, with perhaps some of the vices, for an ordinary or a public house generally stood even yet for all that constituted a settlement of neighbors. In 1728 Byrd, of Westover, speaks of Norfolk as having “most the air of a town of any in Virginia.”
Spotswood remained in Virginia, and was a useful man after his fall from office. He was made the deputy postmaster-general of the colonies (1730-39), and he carried into the management of the mails the same energy which had distinguished his earlier service, and brought Philadelphia and Williamsburg within eight or ten days of each other. On his estates, whether on the Rapidan near his Germans at Germanna, or in his house at Yorktown, he kept the courtly state of his time and rank, and showed in his household his tenderest side. His old martial spirit arose when he was made a major-general to conduct an expedition to the West Indies; but he died (1740) just as he was about to embark, bequeathing his books, maps, and mathematical instruments to the College of William and Mary.