Virginia Under Charles I And Cromwell, 1625-1660

by Wilcomb E. Washburn

Under the terms of the settlement the Grand Assembly was to continue to function, and the Assembly and commissioners agreed that Richard Bennett, one of the commissioners, should act as Governor for a year. It was expected that orders would shortly arrive from England establishing new patterns of government. Such instructions were especially necessary to determine the role and authority of the Governor and Council, formerly appointed by the King. The new rulers in England were made aware of the need for a new policy for the colonies, but they never found time to make the necessary decisions. At intervals the colonists were informed that Cromwell had not forgotten them and that His Highness would soon let them know his pleasure. But instructions never came except spasmodically and inadequately. The merchants who stood to gain from the Navigation Act of 1651, which generally excluded foreign ships from the colonies and attempted to restrain colonial trade with foreign countries, complained at the failure of the colonists to obey the act and demanded that orders be sent to enforce it, but no adequate provisions were ever made.

Thus the colony was left to its own devices during the period. Virginia traders paid little attention to Parliamentary restrictions on their commerce. They insisted that the provision of the Articles of Surrender allowing them free trade with all nations according to the laws of the Commonwealth did not prevent them from trading with foreigners. They argued that since the first article of the surrender agreement guaranteed them the rights of freeborn Englishmen, an act discriminating against them in matters of trade because they happened to live in the colonies was illegal. Dutch ships called often, though perhaps not so frequently as some have believed, and individual Virginians traded as they pleased with the Dutch and English colonies in America.

Expansion in Virginia, 1650-1656

The existence of a weak executive, dependent on the people for his authority, inevitably brought about a dispersal of power and authority from the center to the outer edges of settlement. The explosive force of expansion was no longer limited by the strong hand of a royal Governor, and each increment of population in the colony and power in the hands of the local authorities added fuel to the combustion.

One of Virginia's frontiers at this time was the Eastern Shore. It was a frontier community because the law of the colonial government in Jamestown rarely extended to it. The local commissioners of the county court, later called "justices," provided what justice existed on the Eastern Shore. But since these commissioners were sometimes the worst offenders against the policies of the Governor, Council, and Burgesses, justice was often sacrificed to interest, especially when Indians were involved. The leaders on the Eastern Shore, like Edmund Scarborough, were among the richest men and greatest landowners of the colony. They conducted the county's business as if it were their own, which indeed it was to a great extent. Their oppression of the Eastern Shore Indians makes a sorry history, despite the efforts of Governor Berkeley to restrain them. In April 1650, for example, Berkeley was forced to write to the commissioners of Northampton asking them not to allow any land to be taken from the Laughing King Indians. Berkeley pointed out that during the massacre of 1644 these Indians had remained faithful to the English. How could Virginia expect them to do the same again, asked Berkeley, "unless we correspond with them in acts of charity and amity, especially unless we abstain from acts of rapine and violence, which they say we begin to do, by taking away their land from them, by pretence of the sale of a patent."

Honest attempts were made both before and after the retirement of Sir William Berkeley in 1652 to restrain the frontier barons in their savage attacks on unsuspecting Indian towns. But often the law was too weak and the guilty too strong. Neither the Indians in front of them nor the government behind them had the power to curb their desires except in a limited fashion. This was one of the benefits—to the frontiersmen—of living under English law. The government could not effectively restrain the Englishman nor protect the Indian. As a result the reckless expansion went on into the lands of other tribes. As each new Indian tribe was reached the same dismal pattern of subjugation or extirpation was repeated, despite the efforts of the Governor and Council to see that the rights of the Indians were preserved.

Every extension of settlement strengthened local rule. In May 1652 the people of Northampton County, which comprised the whole of the Eastern Shore of Virginia, protested to the Assembly against a tax levied on them, asserting that since they had not sent representatives to the Assembly since 1647, except for one Burgess in 1651, they did not think the Assembly could tax them. They asked that they be allowed to have a separate government and the right to try all causes in their own courts. Although Northampton was not allowed to dissociate itself entirely from the rest of Virginia, acts of 1654 and 1656 allowed the county to constitute laws and customs for itself on matters dealing with Indians and manufactures.

Virginia's most important frontier region in the 1650's was the area along the Potomac River, although settlement went on simultaneously westward up the James, York, and Rappahannock, southward into Carolina, and northward up the Eastern Shore to Maryland. Sometimes individuals obtained grants to explore, settle, and monopolize the trade of these regions. But usually the expansion was catch as catch can. Since land travel was still more difficult than water travel, expansion up the Potomac, the last great unsettled tidewater river, was fastest. Individuals who already had plantations in the older areas of settlement around Jamestown sailed their barques up the Potomac and, without bothering to go ashore, took the bounds of likely pieces of land. The best spots were often the corn fields of the Indians and sometimes the very towns where they lived. The fact that the Indians occupied the land counted for little in the thoughts of the settlers and speculators who flocked to the area. Following their surveys, the explorers rushed back to James City and put in claims for the waterfront acreages, presenting one "headright"—proof that someone had been imported into the colony by their agency—for every fifty acres. The Patent Books of the colony frequently show signs of fraud in the presentation of headrights. Occasionally more land was granted than the claimant was entitled to on the basis of the headrights he presented. But the headright system, even imperfectly administered, remained during the Parliamentary period as one of the elements of restraint on the unbounded desires of the planters. Land acquisition was thus tied in a fixed ratio to population increase. There was, as a result, some assurance that land acquired would be populated and farmed. It was not until late in the seventeenth century that anyone could buy land for money alone, a practice which enabled some individuals in the eighteenth century to obtain holdings exceeding 100,000 acres. In the middle of the seventeenth century 10,000 acres was a practical "top" limit.

At the beginning of the Commonwealth period in Virginia a number of new counties were set up. The Assembly of April 1652 listed two new ones: Gloucester, north of the York, and Lancaster, north of the Rappahannock. The Assembly of November 1652 listed Surry, south of the James, for the first time. Settlers had moved into these areas earlier when they were parts of other counties, and in two cases the county organization may have been set up prior to April 1652. The Assembly of July 1653, in addition to authorizing exploration and settlement on the Roanoke and Chowan rivers in present-day North Carolina, and exploration into the Appalachian Mountains, ordered that a county to be called Westmoreland should be set up west of Northumberland County on the Potomac, with boundaries from Machodoc River to the falls of the Potomac above the town of the Anacostan Indians. It was thus intended not only to include in the new county all the lands of the Doeg Indians, but also those of the Anacostans. The Assembly of November 1654 authorized the establishment of New Kent County along both sides of the upper York River and far up the Pamunkey and Mattaponi rivers.

The Assembly of November 1654 also authorized the three new northern counties of Lancaster, Northumberland, and Westmoreland to march against the Rappahannock Indians to punish various "injuries and insolencies offered" by them. One hundred men were to be raised in Lancaster, forty in Northumberland, and thirty in Westmoreland. The commissioners of these counties were authorized to raise the troops, and one of their number was appointed commander-in-chief of the expedition. He was to march to the Rappahannock Indian town and demand and receive "such satisfaction as he shall thinke fitt for the severall injuries done unto the said inhabitants not using any acts of hostility but defensive in case of assault." The charge of the war was to be borne by the three counties concerned. This expedition was like many others that both preceded and followed it. In each case, enormous authority and responsibility were given to local officials who were themselves frequently the leading oppressors of the Indians. Such expeditions not infrequently took on the character of private wars between the big landowners of the frontier and the Indian towns in the vicinity. The Governor, Council, and Burgesses frequently heard the complaints of the local settlers, but rarely the complaints of the Indians. The authorization to the local community to administer justice to the Indians often proved a cover for their expulsion or extirpation.