impartial injustice to reduce all the colonies to a direct dependence on the crown. The proprietary, hastening to England, vainly pleaded his irreproachable administration. His remonstrance was disregarded, his chartered rights despised; and a writ of quo warranto was ordered against his patent. But, before the legal forms could be complied with, the people of England had sat in judgment on their king.

The revolution of 1688 brought no immediate benefit to Lord Baltimore. William Joseph, the president, to whom he had intrusted the administration, convened an assembly in November, 1688, and thus addressed them: "The power by which we are assembled here is undoubtedly derived from God to the king, and from the king to his excellency, the lord proprietary, and from his said lordship to us. The power, therefore, whereof I speak, being, as said, firstly, in God and from God; secondly, in the king and from the king; thirdly, in his lordship; fourthly, in us-the end and duty of and for which this assembly is now called and met is that from these four heads; to wit, from God, the king, our lord, and selves." Having thus established the divine right of the proprietary, he endeavored to confirm it by exacting a special oath of fidelity. The assembly resisted, and was prorogued. The laws threatened the severest punishment, even imprisonment, exile, and death itself on practices against the proprietary government; but the spirit of popular liberty, inflamed by Protestant bigotry, the clamor of a pretended Popish plot, and a delay in proclaiming the new sovereigns, broke through all restraint; an organized insurrection was conducted by John Coode, a worthless man, of old an associate of Fendall; and, in August, 1689, "The Association in arms for the defence of the Protestant religion" usurped the government.

VOL. I.-30

CHAPTER X.

HOW THE STUARTS REWARDED THE LOYALTY OF VIRGINIA.

FROM 1652 to 1660, "THE PEOPLE OF VIRGINIA" had gov erned themselves. In England, triennial parliaments had been established by law; the Virginians, imitating the "act of 1640 for preventing inconveniences happening by the long intermission of parliament," provided for a biennial election of their legislators. In its forms and in its legislation, Virginia was a representative democracy; it insisted on universality of suffrage; it would not tolerate "mercenary" ministers of the law; it left each parish to take care of itself; every officer was, directly or indirectly, chosen by the people.

This result grew naturally out of the character of the early settlers, who were, most of them, adventurers, bringing to the New World no wealth but enterprise, no privileges but those of Englishmen. A new and undefined increase of freedom was gained by the universal prevalence of the spirit of personal independence. An instinctive aversion to too much government was a trait of southern character, expressed in the solitary manner of settling the country, in the indisposition of the inhabitants to collect in towns, or to associate for the creation of organizations for local self-rule. As a consequence, there was little commercial industry or accumulation of commercial wealth. The exchanges were made almost entirelyand it continued so for more than a century-by factors of British merchants. The influence of wealth, under the form of stocks and dealings in money, was always inconsiderable, and men were so widely dispersed that far the smallest number were within easy reach of the direct influence of the estab lished church or of civil authority. In Virginia, except in

matters that related to foreign commerce, a man's own will went far toward being his law.

Yet the seeds of privilege existed, and there was already a disposition to obtain for it the sanction of colonial legislation. Virginia was a continuation of English society. Its history is the development of the principle of English liberty under other conditions than in England. The first colonists were not fugitives from persecution; they came, rather, under the auspices of the nobility, the church, and the mercantile interests of England; they brought with them an attachment to monarchy, a reverence for the Anglican church, a love for England and English institutions. Their faith had never been shaken by the inroads of skepticism; no new ideas of natural rights had as yet inclined them to "faction." The Anglican church was, without repugnance, sanctioned as the religion of the State. The development of the plebeian sects, to which there was already a tendency, had not come, and unity of worship, with few exceptions, continued to the end of the century. The principle of the English law which granted real estate to the eldest born was respected, though the rule was modified in many counties by the custom of gavelkind. From the beginning, for every person, whom a planter should at his own charge transport into Virginia, he could claim fifty acres of land. Thus a body of large proprietors grew up from the infancy of the settlement.

The power of the favored class was increased by the want of the means of popular education. The great mass of the rising generation could receive little literary culture; its higher degrees were confined to the few. Many of the royalists who came over after the death of Charles I. brought the breeding of the English gentry of that day, and the direction of affairs fell into their hands. But others had reached the shores of Virginia as servants, doomed to a temporary bondage. Some of them, even, were convicts; but the charges of which they were convicted were chiefly political. The number transported to Virginia for crime was never considerable.

Servants were emancipated when the years of their indenture were ended, and the laws were designed to secure and to hasten their enfranchisement. In 1663, a few bond

men, soldiers of Cromwell and probably Roundheads, impatient of servitude and excited by the nature of life in the wilderness, indulged once more in vague aspirations for a purer church and a happier condition; but their conspiracy did not extend beyond a scheme to anticipate the period of their freedom, and was easily suppressed. The facility of escape compelled humane treatment of white servants, who formed one fifth of the adult population.

In 1671, the number of blacks in a population of forty thousand was estimated at two thousand; not above two or three ships of negroes arrived in seven years. The statute of the previous year, which declares who are slaves, followed an idea long prevalent through Christendom: "All servants, not being Christians, imported into this country by shipping, shall be slaves." In 1682, it was added: "Conversion to the Christian faith doth not make free." The early Anglo-Saxon rule, interpreting every doubtful question in favor of liberty, declared the children of freemen to be free. Doubts arose if the offspring of an Englishman by a negro woman should be bond or free, and, by the law of 1662, the rule of the Roman law prevailed over the Anglo-Saxon. The offspring followed the condition of its mother. In 1664, Maryland, by "the major vote" of its lower house, decided that "the issue of such marriages should serve thirty years." The female slave was not subject to taxation; in 1668, the emancipated negress was "a tithable." "The death of a slave from extremity of correction was not accounted felony, since it cannot be presumed," such is the language of the statute of 1669, "that prepensed malice, which alone makes murther felony, should induce any man to destroy his own estate." Finally, in 1672, it was made lawful for "persons pursuing fugitive colored slaves to wound, or even to kill them." The master was absolute lord over the slave, and the slave's posterity were his bondmen. As property in Virginia consisted mainly of land and laborers, the increase of negro slaves was grateful to the large landed proprietors.

The aristocracy, which was thus confirmed in its influence by the extent of its domains, by its superior intelligence, and by the character of a large part of the laboring class, aspired

to the government of the country; from among them the council was selected; many of them were returned as members of the legislature; and they held commissions in the militia. The absence of local municipal governments led to an anomalous extension of the power of the magistrates. The justices of the peace for each county fixed the amount of county taxes, assessed and collected them, and superintended their disbursement; so that military, judicial, legislative, and executive powers were in their hands.

At the restoration, two elements were contending for the mastery in the political life of Virginia: on the one hand, there was in the Old Dominion a people; on the other, a forming aristocracy. The present decision of the contest would depend on the side to which the sovereign of the country would incline. During the few years of the interruption of monarchy in England, that sovereign had been the people of Virginia; and their legislation had begun to loosen the cords of religious bigotry, to confirm equality of franchises, to foster colonial industry by freedom of traffic with the world. The restoration of monarchy took from them the power which was not to be recovered for more than a century, and gave to the superior class an ally in the royal government and its officers.

The emigrant royalists had hitherto not acted as a political party. If one assembly had, what Massachusetts never did, submitted to Richard Cromwell; if another had elected Berkeley as governor, the power of the people still controlled legislative action. But, on the tidings of the restoration of Charles II., Virginia shared the joy of England. In the mother country, the spirit of popular liberty, contending with ancient institutions which it could not overthrow, had been productive of much calamity, and had overwhelmed the tenets of popular enfranchisement in disgust and abhorrence: in Virginia, where no such ancient abuses existed, the same spirit had been productive only of benefits. Yet to the colony England seemed a home; and loyalty to the king pervaded the plantations along the Chesapeake. With the people it was a generous enthusiasm; to many of the leading men it opened a career for ambition; and, with general consent, Sir William Berkeley, assuming such powers as his royal commission bestowed,