1691.

Yet the people of Virginia found methods of nourishing the spirit of independence. The permanent revenue was sure to be exhausted on the governor and his favorites; when additional supplies became necessary, the burgesses, as in Jamaica and in other colonies, claimed the right of nominating a treasurer of their own, subject to their orders, without further warrant from the governor. The statutes of Virginia show that the first assembly after the revolution set this example, which was often imitated. The denial of this system by the crown increased the aversion to raising money; so that Virginia refused to contribute its quota to the defence of the colonies against France, and not only disregarded the special orders for assisting Albany, but with unanimity, and even with the assent of the council, justified its disobedience. While other provinces were exhausted by taxation, in eleven years eighty-three pounds of tobacco for each poll was the total sum levied by all the special acts of the assembly of Virginia.

1707 to

1718.

The very existence of the forms of representation led to comparison. Virginia was conscious of its importance to the mother country; and its inhabitants, long aware that their liberties were less than those of New England, were put "upon a nice inquiry into the circumstances of the government." England also provoked a generous rivalry. "The assembly concluded itself entitled to all the rights and privileges of an English parliament;" and the records. of the house of commons were examined in search of precedents favorable to legislative freedom.

The constitution of the church in Virginia cherished colonial freedom; for the act of 1642, which established it, reserved the right of presentation to the parish. The license of the bishop of London and the recommendation of the governor availed, therefore, but little. Sometimes the parish rendered the establishment nugatory by its indolence of action; sometimes the minister, if acceptable to the congregation, was received, but not presented. It was the general custom to hire the minister from year to 1703. year. A legal opinion was obtained from England,

that the minister is an incumbent for life, and cannot be displaced by his parishioners; but the vestry kept themselves the parson's master by preventing his induction, so that he acquired no freehold in his living, and might be removed at pleasure. Nor was the character of the clergy who came over always suited to win affection or respect. The parishes, moreover, were of such length that some of the people lived fifty miles from the parish church; and the assembly would not increase the taxes by changing the bounds, even from fear of impending "paganism, atheism, or sectaries." "Schism threatened "to creep into the church," and to generate "faction in the civil government;" and, when Virginia and the crown came to a first violent collision, the strife related to the rights of "the parsons."

But the greatest safeguard of liberty in Virginia was the individual freedom of mind, which formed, of necessity, the characteristic of independent landholders living apart on their plantations. In the age of commercial monopoly, Virginia had not one market town, not one place of trade. "As to outward appearance, it looked all like a wild desert;" and the mercantile world, founding its judgment on the absence of cities, regarded it as "one of the poorest, miserablest, and worst countries in all America." It did not seek to share actively in the profits of commerce; it had little of the precious metals, and still less of credit; it was satisfied with agriculture. Taxes were paid in tobacco; remittances to Europe were made in tobacco; the revenue of the clergy, and the magistrates, and the colony, was collected in the same currency; the colonial tradesman received his pay in straggling parcels of it; and ships from abroad were obliged to lie whole months in the rivers, before boats, visiting the several plantations on their banks, could pick up a cargo. In the season of a commercial revolution, the commercial element did not enter into the character of the colony. Its inhabitants "daily grew more and more averse to cohabitation." All royalists and churchmen as they were by ancestry, habit, and established law, they reasoned boldly in their seclusion, making their own good pleasure their rule of conduct. "Pernicious notions, fatal to

1703.

1709.

1710.

the royal prerogative, were improving daily;" and, though Virginia protested against the charge of "republicanism," as an unfounded reproach, yet colonial opinion, the offspring of free inquiry which seclusion awakened, the woods sheltered, and the self-will of slaveholders fortified, was more than a counterpoise to the prerogative of the British crown. In former ages, no colony had ever enjoyed a happier freedom. From the days of the insurrection of Bacon, for a period of three quarters of a century, Virginia possessed uninterrupted peace. On its own soil, the strife with the Indians was ended; the French hesitated to invade the western frontier, on which they lowered: if sometimes alarm was spread by privateers upon the coast, a naval foe was not attracted to a region which had neither town nor magazines, where there was nothing to destroy but a field of tobacco, nothing to plunder but the frugal stores of scattered plantations. The soil was stained. by nothing but the sweat of the laborer. In such scenes of tranquil happiness, the political strifes were but the fitful ebullitions of a high spirit, which, in the wantonness of independence, loved to tease the governor; and, again, if the burgesses expressed loyalty, they were loyal only because loyalty was their humor. Hence the reports forwarded to England were often contradictory. "The inclinations of the country," wrote Spotswood in 1710, "are rendered. mysterious by a new and unaccountable humor, which hath obtained in several counties, of excluding the gentlemen from being burgesses, and choosing only persons of mean figure and character." "This government," so he reported in the next year, "is in perfect peace and tranquillity, under a due obedience to the royal authority, and a gentlemanly conformity to the church of England;" and the letter had hardly left the Chesapeake before he found himself thwarted by the impracticable burgesses; and, dissolving the assembly, feared to convene another till opinion should change. But Spotswood, the best in the line of Virginia governors, a royalist, a high churchman, a traveller, bore testimony to the virtues of the people. "I will do justice to this country," he writes to the bishop of London, and his evidence

is without suspicion of bias; "I have observed here less swearing and prophaneness, less drunkenness and debauchery, less uncharitable feuds and animosities, and less knaverys and villanys, than in any part of the world, where my lot has been." The estimate of fifty thousand as the popula tion of the colony on the accession of Queen Anne is far too low.

The English revolution was a "Protestant" revolution: of the Roman Catholic proprietary of Maryland it sequestered the authority, while it protected the fortunes. During the absence of Lord Baltimore from his province, his powers had been delegated to nine deputies, over whom William Joseph presided. The spirit that swayed their counsels sprung from the doctrine of legitimacy which the revolution had prostrated; and they fell with it. Distrusting the people, they provoked opposition by demanding of the assembly, as a qualification of its members, an oath of fidelity to the proprietary. On resistance to the illegal demand, the house was prorogued; and, even after the successful invasion of England became known, the deputies of Lord Baltimore hesitated to proclaim the new sovereigns. The delay gave birth to an armed association for April. asserting the right of King William; and the depu ties were easily driven to a garrison on the south side of

1689.

Patuxent River, about two miles above its mouth. Aug. 1. There they capitulated, obtaining security for them

selves, and yielding their assent to the exclusion of papists from all provincial offices. A convention of the associates, "for the defence of the Protestant religion," assumed the government in the names of William and Mary, and in a congratulatory address denounced the influence of Jesuits, the prevalence of popish idolatry, the connivance by the government at murders of Protestants, and the danger from plots with the French and Indians.

The privy council, after a debate on the address, advised the forfeiture of the charter by a process of law; but King William, heedless of the remonstrances of the proprietary who could be convicted of no crime but his creed, June 1. and impatient of judicial forms, by his own power

1691.

The arbitrary

1692.

1694.

1694 to

1698.

constituted Maryland a royal government. decree was sanctioned by a legal opinion from Lord Holt; and the barons of Baltimore were superseded for a generation. In 1692, Sir Lionel Copley arrived with a royal commission, dissolved the convention, assumed the government, and convened an assembly. Its first act recognised William and Mary; but, as it contained a clause giving validity in the colony to the Great Charter of England, it was not accepted by the crown. The second established the church of England as the religion of the state, to be supported by general taxation. The ancient capital, inconvenient in its site, was, moreover, tenanted chiefly by Catholics and surrounded by proprietary recollections: under Protestant auspices, the city sacred to the Virgin Mary was abandoned, and Annapolis became the seat of government. The establishment of a religion of state, earnestly advanced by the boastful eagerness of Francis Nicholson, who for four years was governor of Maryland, and by the patient, the disinterested, but unhappily too exclusive earnestness of the commissary, Thomas Bray, became the settled policy of the government. In 1696, the inviolable claim of the colony to English rights and liberties was engrafted by the assembly on the act of establishment; and this also was disallowed; for the solicitor-general Trevor "knew not how far the enacting that the great charter of England should be observed in all points would be agreeable to the constitution of the colony or consistent with the royal prerogative." In 1700, the presence and personal virtues of Bray, who saw Christianity only in the English church, obtained by unanimity a law commanding conformity in every "place of public worship." Once more the act was rejected in England from regard to the rights of Protestant dissenters; and when, at last, the Anglican ritual was established by the colonial legislature, and the right of appointment and induction to every parish was secured to the governor, the English acts of toleration were at the same time put in force. Protestant dissent was safe; for the difficulty of obtaining

1700.

1702.