USA > Virginia > Old Virginia and her neighbours > Part 13
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When Argall arrived in Virginia, he found that a new industry, at which sundry experiments had been made under Dale, was acquiring large dimen- sions and fast becoming established. Of all the gifts that America has vouchsafed to the Old World, the most widely acceptable has been that which a Greek punster might have called " the Bacchic gift," το βακχικόν δώρημα, tobacco. No other visi- ble and tangible product of Columbus's discovery has been so universally diffused among all kinds and conditions of men, even to the remot- Tobacco. est nooks and corners of the habitable earth. Its serene and placid charm has everywhere proved irresistible, although from the outset its use has been frowned upon with an acerbity such as no other affair of hygiene has ever called forth. The first recorded mention of tobacco is in Column- bus's diary for November 20, 1492. The use of it was soon introduced into the Spanish peninsula, and about 1560 the French ambassador at Lisbon, Jean Nicot, sent some of the fragrant herb into France, where it was named in honour of him Nicotiana. It seems to have been first brought to England by Lane's returning colonists in 1586, and early in the seventeenth century it was becoming fashionable to smoke, in spite of the bull of Pope Urban VIII. and King James's "Counterblast to Tobacco." Every one will remember how that
BEGINNINGS OF A COMMONWEALTII. 175
royal author characterized smoking as "a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bot- tomless." On Twelfth Night, 1614, a dramatic entertainment, got up by the gentlemen of Gray's. Inn and ealled the Mask of Flowers, was The Mask of Flowers. performed before the king and queen at
Whitehall. In it the old elassic Silenus appears, jovial and corpulent, holding his goatskin wine- bag, and with him a novel companion, an Ameri- ean chieftain named Kawasha, dressed in an em- broidered mantle cut like tobacco leaves, with a red cap trimmed with gold on his head, rings in his ears, a chain of glass beads around his neck, and a bow and arrows in his hand. These two strange worthies discuss the merits of wine and tobacco : --
Silenus. Kawasha comes in majesty ; Was never such a god as he. He's come from a far country To make our nose a chimney.
Kawasha. The wine takes the contrary way To get into the hood ; But good tobacco makes no stay, But seizeth where it should. More incense hath burned at Great Kawash a's foot Than to Silen and Bacchus both, And take in Jove to boot.
Silenus. The worthies they were nine, 't is true, And lately Arthur's knights I knew, But now are come up worthies new, The roaring boys, Kawasha's crew.
176 OLD VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBOURS.
Kuwasha. Silenus tops 1 the barrel, but Tobacco tops the brain And makes the vapours fine and soote,2 That man revives again. Nothing but fumigation Doth charm away ill sprites. Kawasha and his nation Found out these holy rites. 3
In Virginia the first settlers found the Indians cultivating tobacco in small gardens. The first Englishman to make experiments with it is said. to have been John Rolfe in 1612. Under Yeard- ley's first administration, in 1616, the cultivation of tobacco became fairly established, and from that time forth it was a recognized staple of the colony. The effects of this were very notable. As the great purchasing power of a tobacco crop
Effects of tobacco cul- came to be generally known, the people ture. of Virginia devoted themselves more and more to its cultivation, until nearly all other crops and most other forms of industry were neglected. Thus the type of society, as we shall hereafter see, was largely determined by the cultivation of to- bacco. Moreover a clear and positive inducement was now offered for emigration such as had not existed before since the first dreams of gold and silver were dispelled. After the first disappoint-
1 There is a play upon words here. The first "top " is appar- ently equivalent to "drink up," as in the following : "Its no hainous offence (beleeve me) for a young man . . . to toppe of a canne roundly." Terence in English. 1614. The second " top" seems equivalent to "put the finishing touch on." - "Silenus quaffs the barrel, but Tobacco perfects the brain."
2 Sweet.
3 Nichols, Progresses of King James, ii. 739.
.
BEGINNINGS OF A COMMONWEALTH. 177
ments it became difficult to persuade men of hard sense to go to Virginia, and we have seen what a wretched set of people were drawn together by the Company's communistic schemes. But those who came to acquire wealth by raising tobacco were of a better sort, men of business-like ideas who knew what they wanted and how to devote themselves to the task of getting it. With the establishment of tobacco culture there began a steady improve- ment in the characters and fortunes of the colo- nists, and the demand for their staple in Europe soon became so great as forever to end the possi- bility of perishing from want. Henceforth what- ever a Virginian needed he could buy with tobacco.
We have now to see how Virginia, which was fast becoming able to support itself, became also a self-governing community. The administrations of Lord Delaware, of Dale, of Yeardley, and of Argall, were all despotisms, whether mild or harsh. To trace the evolution of free govern- ment, we must take our start in the year 1612, when the London Company obtained its The London
third charter. The immediate occasion Company's third char- ter, 1612.
for taking out this charter was the de-
sire of the Company to include among its posses- sions the Bermuda Islands, and they were now added to Virginia. At the same time it was felt that the government of the Company needed some further emendation in order to give the members more direct and continuous control over its pro- ceedlings. It was thus provided that there should be weekly meetings, at which not less than five members of the council and fifteen of the Company
178 OLD VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBOURS.
must be present. Besides this there were to be held four general courts or quarter sessions in the course of each year, for electing the treasurer and council and passing laws for the government of the colony. At these quarter sessions charges could be brought against delinquent servants of the Com- pany, which was clothed with full judicial powers of hearing and deciding such cases and inflicting punishments. A good many subscribers had been. alarmed by evil tidings from Virginia so that they would refuse or more often would simply neglect to pay in the amount of their subscriptions. To
remedy these evils the Company was empowered to expel delinquent members or to bring suits in law and equity against them to recover damages or compel performance. Furthermore, it was allowed to. replenish its treasury by setting up lotteries, a practice in which few people at that time saw any- thing objectionable. Such a lottery was held at a house in St. Paul's Churchyard, in July, 1612, of which the continuator of Stow's Chronicle tells us : "This lottery was so plainly carried Lotteries. and honestly performed that it gave full satisfaction to all persons. Thomas Sharplisse, a tailor of London, had the chief prize, viz., 4,000 crowns in fair plate, which was sent to his house in very stately manner. During the whole time of the drawing of this lottery, there were always present divers worshipful knights and esquires, accompanied with sundry grave discreet citizens."
In September the Spanish ambassador, Zuñiga, wrote home that " there was a lottery on foot to raise 20,000 ducats [equivalent to about $40,000].
BEGINNINGS OF A COMMONWEALTH. 179
In this all the livery companies adventured. The grocers ventured £62 15s., and won a silver [dish] and cover valued at £13 10s." 1
This remodelling of the Company's charter was an event of political importance. Formerly the meetings of the Company had been few and far between, and its affairs had been practically con- trolled by the council, and in many cases by its chief executive officer, the treasurer, Sir Thomas Smith. Now the weekly meetings of the Com- pany, and its courts of quarter sessions, armed with such legislative and judicial powers, put a new face upon things. It made the Company a democratic self-governing body, and when we re- call the membership of the Company we The Con- can see what this meant. There were fifty-six of the craft-guilds or liveried pany be- comes an important force in companies of the city of London, whose . politics, lord mayor was also a prominent member, and the political spirit of London was aggressively liberal and opposed to high prerogative. There were also more than a hundred London merchants and more than two hundred persons belonging to the nobility and gentry, including some of the foremost peers and knights in the party hostile to the Stuart king's pretensions. The meetings of the Company were. full of discussions which could not .help taking a political turn, since some of the most burning political questions of the day - as, for example, the great dispute over monopolies and other disputes - were commercial in charac- ter. Men's eyes were soon opened to the ex-
1 Neill's Virginia Company, p. 66.
180 OLD VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBOURS.
istence of a great deliberative body outside of Parliament and expressing itself with much free- dom on exciting topics. The social position and weighty character of the members drew general attention to their proceedings, especially as many of them were also members of either the House of Lords or the House of Commons. We can easily believe the statement that the discussions of the Company were followed with even deeper interest than the debates in Parliament. It took a few years for this aspect of the situation to be- come fully developed, but opposition to the new Opposition charter was soon manifested, even by
to the char- sundry members of the Company itself.
ter : Mid- dleton's
Some of them agreed with Sergeant
speech. Montague that to confer such vast and vague. powers upon a mercantile corporation was unconstitutional. In a debate in Parliament in 1614 a member of the Company named Middleton attacked the charter on the ground that trade with Virginia and agriculture there needed more strict regulation than it was getting. "The shopkeep- ers of London," he said, " sent over all kinds of goods, for which they received tobacco instead of coin, infinitely to the prejudice of the Common- wealth. Many of the divines now smell of to- bacco, and poor men spend 4d. of their day's wages at night in smoke. [He] wished that this patent may be damned, and an act of Parliament passed for the government of the colony by a company." 1
So much effect was produced by speeches of this sort that the council of the Company as a counter-
1 Neill's Virginia Company, p. 67.
BEGINNINGS OF A COMMONWEALTH. 181
stroke presented a petition for aid, and had it defended before the House of Commons by the eminent lawyer, Richard Martin, one of the most brilliant speakers of the day. Martin gave a fine historical description of English colonizing enter- prise since Raleigh's first attempts, then he dwelt upon the immediate and pressing needs of Vir- ginia, especially the need for securing an ample reinforcement of honest workmen with their wives and children, and he urged the propriety of a lib- eral parliamentary grant in aid of the Company and its operations. Then at Mr. Martin forgets himself,
the close of an able and effective speech
his eloquence carried him away, and he so far for- got himself as to remind the House that it had been but a thriftless penury which had led King Henry VII. to turn the cold shoulder upon Co- lumbus, and to predict for them similar chagrin if they should neglect the interests of Virginia. This affair, as he truly said, was of far greater impor- tance than many of the trifles on which the House was in the habit of wasting its time. Poor Martin should have stopped a minute sooner. His last remark was heard with indignation. One member asked if he supposed the House was a school and he the schoolmaster ; another moved that he should be committed for contempt ; finally it was decided that he should make a public apology. So tie next day, after a mild and courteous rebuke from the Speaker, Mr. Martin apologized as and has to
follows, according to the brief memoran- apologize.
dum entered upon the journal of the House of Commons for that day : " All men liable to err,
182 OLD VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBOURS.
and he particularly so, but he was not in love with error, and as willing as any man to be divorced therefrom. Admits that he digressed from the subject ; that he was like a ship that cutteth the cable and putteth to sea, for he cut his memory and trusted to his invention. Was glad to be an example to others, and submitted to the censure not with a dejected countenance, for there is com- fort in acknowledging an error." 1
While such incidents, trifling in themselves, tended to create prejudice against the Company on the part of many members of Par-
Factions
within the liament, factions were soon developed
Company.
within the Company itself. There was, first, the division between the court party, or sup- porters of the king, and the country party, opposed to his overweening pretensions. The difference between court and country parties was analogous to the difference between Tories and Whigs that began in the reign of Charles II. A second di- vision, crossing the first one, was that between the defenders and opponents of the monopolies. A third division grew out of a personal quarrel between the treasurer, Sir Thomas Smith, and a prominent shareholder, Lord Rich, afterwards Earl of Warwick. This man's title remains to- day in the name of Warwick County near the mouth of James River. At first he and Sir Thomas Smith were on very friendly terms. Sam- uel Argall was closely connected by marriage with Smith's family, and it was Lord Rich and his friends who in 1617 secured Argall's appointment
1 Neill's Virginia Company, p. 71.
BEGINNINGS OF A COMMONWEALTH. 183
as deputy-governor of Virginia. The appointment turned out to be far from creditable. Argall's rule was as stern as Dale's, but it was not pub- lic-spirited. From the upright and spotless Dale severity could be endured ; with the self-seeking and unscrupulous Argall it was quite otherwise. He was so loudly accused of peculation and ex- tortion that after one year the Company sent out Lord Delaware to take personal charge of the colony once more. That nobleman sailed in the spring of 1618, with 200 emigrants. They went by way of the Azores, and while touching at the island of St. Michael, Lord Delaware Death of and thirty of his companions suddenly Lord Dela- ware, 1618.
fell sick and died in such manner as to
raise a strong suspicion that their Spanish hosts had poisoned them. Among the governor's pri- vate papers was one that instructed him to arrest Argall and send him to England for trial. When the ship arrived in Virginia this document fell into Argall's hands. Its first effect was to make him behave worse than ever, until renewed com- plaints of him reached England at the moment of a great change in the governorship of the Company.
The chief executive officer of the Company was the treasurer. Since 1609 Sir Thomas Smith had held that office, and it had naturally enough become fashionable to charge all the ills of the colony to his mismanagement. Quarrel be- tween Lord Rich and Sir Thomas Smith. There may have been some ground for this. Sir Thomas was a merchant of great public spirit and talent for business, but he was apt to keep too many irons in the fire, and!
184 OLD VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBOURS.
the East India Company, of which he was gov- ernor, absorbed his attention much more than the affairs of Virginia. The country party, led by such men as the Earl of Southampton, Sir Edwin Sandys, and Nicholas Ferrar, were opposed to Smith and twitted him with the misconduct of Argall. At this moment broke out the quarrel between Smith and Lord Rich. One of the mer- chant's sons aged only eighteen fell madly in love with the nobleman's young sister, Lady Isabella Rich, and his passion was reciprocated. There was fierce opposition to their marriage on the part of the old merchant; and this led to an elopement and a private wedding, at which the Earls of Southampton and Pembroke and the Countess of Bedford assisted.1 These leaders of the country party thus mortally offended Sir Thomas Smith, while between him and the young lady's brother, Lord Rich, there was a furious explosion. Lord Rich, who in the midst of these seenes became Earl of Warwick, by which title posterity remem- bers him, was a prominent leader of the court party, but this family quarrel led him to a tempo-
Election of rary alliance with the opposition, with Sir Edwin the result that in the annual election for Sandys. the treasurership of the Company, in April, 1619, Sir Thomas Smith was defeated, and Sir Edwin Sandys chosen in his place. This vic- tory of the king's opponents called forth much excitement in England; for the remaining five years of its existence the Company was controlled by Sandys and his friends, and its affairs were 1 Brown's Genesis, il. 1014.
BEGINNINGS OF A COMMONWEALTH. 185
"administered with a degree of energy, unselfish- ness, and statesmanlike wisdom, perhaps unparal- leled in the history of corporations." 1
This victory in the spring election consummated the ascendency of Sandys and his party, but that ascendency had been already shown in the appointment of George Yeardley to Sir George Yeardley ap- pointed gov- ernor of Virginia. succeed Lord Delaware as governor of Virginia. The king can hardly have rel-
ished this appointment, but as Yeardley was of rather humble birth, being the son of a poor mer- chant tailor, he gave him a certain sanction by making him a knight. High official position seemed in those days more than now to need some such social decoration. Yeardley was ordered to send Argall home; but that independent person- age being privately notified, it is said by the Earl of Warwick, loaded his ship and sailed for. Eng- land before the governor's arrival. He was evi- dently a man who could carry things with a bold face. His defence of himself satisfied the court party but not the country party; the evidence against him seems to have reached the point of moral conviction, but not of legal certainty ; he was put in command of a warship for the Medi- terranean service, and presently the king, perhaps to relieve his own qualms for knighting Yeardley, slapped him on the back and made him Sir Sam- uel Argall ..
On many occasions the development of popu- lar liberty in England has gone hand in hand with its development in America. The growing
1 Doyle's Virginia, p. 157.
186 OLD VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBOURS.
strength of the popular antagonism to Stuart methods of government was first conspicuously marked by the ascendency of Sir Edwin Sandys and his party in Parliament and in the manage- ment of affairs in Virginia. Its first fruit was
The first the introduction of parliamentary institu-
American legislature, tions into America. Despotic govern- 1619. ment in Virginia had been thoroughly discredited by the conduct of Argall. More than 1,000 persons were now living in the colony, and the year 1619 saw the number doubled.1 The people called for self-government, and Sandys be- lieved that only through self-government could a colony really prosper. Governor Ycardley was accordingly instructed to issue writs for the elec- tion of a General Assembly in Virginia, and on the 30th of July, 1619, the first legislative body of Englishmen in America was called together in the wooden church at Jamestown. Eleven local con- stituencies were represented under the various des- ignations of city, plantation, and hundred; and each constituency sent two representatives, called burgesses, so that the assembly was called from 1619 until 1776 the House of Burgesses. The eleven boroughs were James City, Charles City, the City of Henricus, Martin Brandon, Martin's Hun- dred, Lawne's Plantation, Ward's Plantation, Ar- gall's Gift, Flowerdieu Hundred, Smith's Hundred, and Kecoughtan. The last two names were soon changed. Smith's Hundred, at first named after the treasurer, took for its sponsor one of the opposite party and became Southampton Hun-
1 Neill's Virginia Company, pp. 179, 181.
BEGINNINGS OF A COMMONWEALTH. 187
dred. The name of this friend of Shakespeare, . somewhat.curtailed, was also given to Kecoughtan, which became Hampton, and so remains to this day. These eleven names indicate the extent of the colony up the James River about to seventy miles from its mouth as the crow flies, and later- ally five or six miles inland from either bank, with a population rather less sparse than that of Idaho at the present day. Such was the first American self-governing state at its beginning, - a small beginning, but what a change from the summer day that witnessed Lord Delaware's arrival nine years before !
Concerning this House of Burgesses I shall have something to say hereafter. Let it suffice for the present to observe that along with the governor and deputy-governor there was an appointed upper house called the council ; and that the governor, with the assistant council, and the House of Bur- gesses, altogether constituted a General Assembly essentially similar to the Gen- Nature of the General Assembly. eral Court of Massachusetts, to their common prototype, the old English county court, and to their numerous posterity, the bicameral leg- islatures of nearly all the world in modern times. The functions of this General Assembly were both legislative and to some extent judicial. It was endowed with full powers of legislation for the colony. Its acts did not acquire validity until ap- proved by the General Court of the London Com- pany, but on the other hand no enactment which the Company might make for the colony was to be valid until approved by its General Assem-
.
188 OLD VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBOURS.
bly. These provisions were confirmed by a char- ter issued in 1621.
This gift of free government to England's first colony was the work of the London Company - or, as it was now in London much more often called, the Virginia Company -- under the noble management of Sir Edwin Sandys and his friends. That great corporation was soon to perish, but its boon to Virginia and to American liberty was to be abiding. The story of the Company's down- fall, in its broad outlines, can be briefly told, but first I may mention a few incidents that occurred before the crisis. One was the first introduction
The first ne- of negro slaves into Virginia, which, by
gro slaves, a rather curious freak of dates, came in 1619. 1619, just after the sitting of the first free legislature, and thus furnished posterity with a theme for moralizing. " About the last of An- gust," says Secretary Rolfe, " [there] came in a Dutch man of warre that sold us twenty negars. A census taken five years later, however, shows only twenty-two negroes in the colony. The in- crease in their numbers was for some time very slow, and the establishment of slave labour will best be treated in a future chapter.
The same year, 1619, which witnessed the intro- duction of slaves and a House of Burgesses, saw also the arrival of a shipload of young women - spinsters carefully selected and matron-
A cargo of ized - sent out by the Company in quest maidens, 1619.
of husbands. In Virginia, as in most new colonies, women were greatly in the minority, and the wise Sir Edwin Sandys understood that
BEGINNINGS OF A COMMONWEALTH. 189
without homes and family ties a civilized commu- nity must quickly retrograde into barbarism. On arriving in Virginia these girls found plenty of snitors and were entirely free to exercise their own choice. No accepted suitor, however, could claim his bride until he should pay the Company 120 pounds of tobacco to defray the expense of her voy- age. This practice of sending wives continued for some time, and as homes with pleasant society grew up in Virginia, life began to be made attractive there and the immigration rapidly increased. By 1622 the population of Virginia was at least 4,000, the tobacco fields were flourishing and lucrative, durable houses had been built and made comfort- able with furniture brought from England, and the old squalor was everywhere giving way to thrift. The area of colonization was pushed up the James River as far as the site of Richmond .-
This long narrow colony was dangerously ex- posed to attack from the Indian tribes along the York and Pamunkey rivers and their confederates to the west and north. But an Indian attack was something that people had ceased to expect. For eight years the Indians had been to all appear- ance friendly, and it was not uncommon to see them moving freely about the vil- The great Indian mas- sacre, 1022. lages and plantations. There had been a change of leadership among them. Wahun- sunakok, the old Powhatan whom Smith called "Father," was dead ; his brother Opekankano was now The Powhatan. It is a traditional belief that Opekankano had always favoured hostile measures toward the white men, and that for some years he
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