Pioneers of the Old South: a chronicle of English colonial beginnings Part 2

The Elizabeth from London reached Virginia in May, 1613. It brought to the colony news of Bermuda, and incidentally of that new notion brewing in the mind of some of the Company. When the Elizabeth, after a month in Virginia, turned homeward, she carried a vigorous letter from Dale, the High Marshal, to Sir Thomas Smith, Treasurer of the Company.

"Let me tell you all at home [writes Dale] this one thing, and I pray remember it; if you give over this country and loose it, you, with your wisdoms, will leap such a gudgeon as our state hath not done the like since they lost the Kingdom of France; be not gulled with the clamorous report of base people; believe Caleb and Joshua; if the glory of G.o.d have no power with them and the conversion of these poor infidels, yet let the rich mammons' desire egge them on to inhabit these countries. I protest to you, by the faith of an honest man, the more I range the country the more I admire it. I have seen the best countries in Europe; I protest to you, before the Living G.o.d, put them all together, this country will be equivalent unto them if it be inhabited with good people."

If ever Mother England seriously thought of moving Virginia into Bermuda, the idea was now given over. Spain, suspending the sword until Virginia "will fall of itselfe," saw that sword rust away.

Five years in all Dale ruled Virginia. Then, personal and family matters calling, he sailed away home to England, to return no more. Soon his star "having s.h.i.+ned in the Westerne, was set in the Easterne India." At the helm in Virginia he left George Yeardley, an honest, able man. But in England, what was known as the "court party" in the Company managed to have chosen instead for De La Warr's deputy governor, Captain Samuel Argall. It proved an unfortunate choice. Argall, a capable and daring buccaneer, fastened on Virginia as on a Spanish galleon. For a year he ruled in his own interest, plundering and terrorizing. At last the outcry against him grew so loud that it had to be listened to across the Atlantic. Lord De La Warr was sent out in person to deal with matters but died on the way; and Captain Yeardley, now knighted and appointed Governor, was instructed to proceed against the incorrigible Argall. But Argall had already departed to face his accusers in England.

CHAPTER VII. YOUNG VIRGINIA

The choice of Sir Edwyn Sandys as Treasurer of the Virginia Company in 1619 marks a turning-point in the history of both Company and colony. At a moment when James I was aiming at absolute monarchy and was menacing Parliament, Sandys and his party-the Liberals of the day-turned the sessions of the Company into a parliament where momentous questions of state and colonial policy were freely debated. The liberal spirit of Sandys cast a beam of light, too, across the Atlantic. When Governor Yeardley stepped ash.o.r.e at Jamestown in mid-April, he brought with him, as the first fruits of the new regime, no less a boon than the grant of a representative a.s.sembly.

There were to be in Virginia, subject to the Company, subject in its turn to the Crown, two "Supreme Councils," one of which was to consist of the Governor and his councilors chosen by the Company in England. The other was to be elected by the colonists, two representatives or burgesses from each distinct settlement. Council and House of Burgesses were to const.i.tute the upper and lower houses of the General a.s.sembly. The whole had power to legislate upon Virginian affairs within the bounds of the colony, but the Governor in Virginia and the Company in England must approve its acts.

A mighty hope in small was here! Hedged about with provisions, curtailed and limited, here nevertheless was an acorn out of which, by natural growth and some mutation, was to come popular government wide and deep. The planting of this small seed of freedom here, in 1619, upon the banks of the James in Virginia, is an event of prime importance.

On the 30th of July, 1619, there was convened in the log church in Jamestown the first true Parliament or Legislative a.s.sembly in America. Twenty-two burgesses sat, hat on head, in the body of the church, with the Governor and the Council in the best seats. Master John Pory, the speaker, faced the a.s.sembly; clerk and sergeant-at-arms were at hand; Master Buck, the Jamestown minister, made the solemn opening prayer. The political divisions of this Virginia were Cities, Plantations, and Hundreds, the English population numbering now at least a thousand souls. Boroughs sending burgesses were James City, Charles City, the City of Henricus, Kecoughtan, Smith's Hundred, Flowerdieu Hundred, Martin's Hundred, Martin Brandon, Ward's Plantation, Lawne's Plantation, and Argall's Gift. This first a.s.sembly attended to Indian questions, agriculture, and religion.

Most notable is this year 1619, a year wrought of gold and iron. John Rolfe, back in Virginia, though without his Indian princess, who now lies in English earth, jots down and makes no comment upon what he has written: "About the last of August came in a Dutch man of warre that sold us twenty Negars."

No European state of that day, few individuals, disapproved of the African slave trade. That dark continent made a general hunting-ground. England, Spain, France, the Netherlands, captured, bought, and sold slaves. Englishmen in Virginia bought without qualm, as Englishmen in England bought without qualm. The cargo of the Dutch s.h.i.+p was a commonplace. The only novelty was that it was the first s.h.i.+pload of Africans brought to English-America. Here, by the same waters, were the beginnings of popular government and the young upas-tree of slavery. A contradiction in terms was set to resolve itself, a riddle for unborn generations of Americans.

Presently there happened another importation. Virginia, under the new management, had strongly revived. s.h.i.+ps bringing colonists were coming in; hamlets were building; fields were being planted; up and down were to be found churches; a college at Henricus was projected so that Indian children might be taught and converted from "heathennesse." Yet was the population almost wholly a doublet-and-breeches-wearing population. The children for whom the school was building were Indian children. The men sailing to Virginia dreamed of a few years there and gathered wealth, and then return to England.

Apparently it was the new Treasurer, Sir Edwyn Sandys, who first grasped the essential principle of successful colonization: Virginia must be HOME to those we send! Wife and children made home. Sandys gathered ninety women, poor maidens and widows, "young, handsome, and chaste," who were willing to emigrate and in Virginia become wives of settlers. They sailed; their pa.s.sage money was paid by the men of their choice; they married-and home life began in Virginia. In due course of time appeared fair-haired children, blue or gray of eye, with all England behind them, yet native-born, Virginians from the cradle.

Colonists in number sailed now from England. Most ranks of society and most professions were represented. Many brought education, means, independent position. Other honest men, chiefly young men with little in the purse, came over under indentures, bound for a specified term of years to settlers of larger means. These indentured men are numerous; and when they have worked out their indebtedness they will take up land of their own.

An old suggestion of Dale's now for the first time bore fruit. Over the protest of the "country party" in the Company, there began to be sent each year out of the King's gaols a number, though not at any time a large number, of men under conviction for various crimes. This practice continued, or at intervals was resumed, for years, but its consequences were not so dire, perhaps, as we might imagine. The penal laws were execrably brutal, and in the drag-net of the law might be found many merely unfortunate, many perhaps finer than the law.

Virginia thus was founded and established. An English people moved through her forests, crossed in boats her s.h.i.+ning waters, trod the lanes of hamlets builded of wood but after English fas.h.i.+ons. Climate, surrounding nature, differed from old England, and these and circ.u.mstance would work for variation. But the stock was Middles.e.x, Surrey, Devon, and all the other s.h.i.+res of England. Scotchmen came also, Welshmen, and, perhaps as early as this, a few Irish. And there were De La Warr's handful of Poles and Germans, and several French vinedressers.

Political and economic life was taking form. That huge, luxurious, thick-leafed, yellow-flowered crop, alike comforting and extravagant, that tobacco that was in much to mould manners and customs and ways of looking at things, was beginning to grow abundantly. In 1620, forty thousand pounds of tobacco went from Virginia to England; two years later went sixty thousand pounds. The best sold at two s.h.i.+llings the pound, the inferior for eighteen pence. The Virginians dropped all thought of sa.s.safras and clapboard. Tobacco only had any flavor of Golconda.

At this time the rich soil, composed of layer on layer of the decay of forests that had lived from old time, was incredibly fertile. As fast as trees could be felled and dragged away, in went the tobacco. Fields must have laborers, nor did these need to be especially intelligent. Bring in indentured men to work. Presently dream that s.h.i.+ps, English as well as Dutch, might oftener load in Africa and sell in Virginia, to furnish the dark fields with dark workers! In Dale's time had begun the making over of land in fee simple; in Yeardley's time every "ancient" colonist-that is every man who had come to Virginia before 1616-was given a goodly number of acres subject to a quit-rent. Men of means and influence obtained great holdings; owners.h.i.+p, rental, sale, and purchase of the land began in Virginia much as in older times it had begun in England. Only here, in America, where it seemed that the land could never be exhausted, individual holdings were often of great acreage. Thus arose the Virginia Planter.

In Yeardley's time John Berkeley established at Falling Creek the first iron works ever set up in English-America. There were by this time in Virginia, gla.s.s works, a windmill, iron works. To till the soil remained the chief industry, but the tobacco culture grew until it overshadowed the maize and wheat, the pease and beans. There were cattle and swine, not a few horses, poultry, pigeons, and peac.o.c.ks.

In 1621 Yeardley, desiring to be relieved, was succeeded by Sir Francis Wyatt. In October the new Governor came from England in the George, and with him a goodly company. Among others is found George Sandys, brother of Sir Edwyn. This gentleman and scholar, beneath Virginia skies and with Virginia trees and blossoms about him, translated the "Metamorphoses" of Ovid and the First Book of the "Aeneid", both of which were published in London in 1626. He stands as the first purely literary man of the English New World. But vigorous enough literature, though the writers thereof regarded it as information only, had, from the first years, emanated from Virginia. Smith's "True Relation", George Percy's "Discourse", Strachey's "True Repertory of the Wracke and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates", and his "Historie of Travaile into Virginia Brittannia", Hamor's "True Discourse", Whitaker's "Good News"-other letters and reports-had already flowered, all with something of the strength and fragrance of Elizabethan and early Jacobean work.

For some years there had seemed peace with the Indians. Doubtless members of the one race may have marauded, and members of the other showed themselves highhanded, impatient, and unjust, but the majority on each side appeared to have settled into a kind of amity. Indians came singly or in parties from their villages to the white men's settlements, where they traded corn and venison and what not for the magic things the white man owned. A number had obtained the white man's firearms, unwisely sold or given. The red seemed reconciled to the white's presence in the land; the Indian village and the Indian tribal economy rested beside the English settlement, church, and laws. Doubtless a fragment of the population of England and a fragment of the English in Virginia saw in a pearly dream the red man baptized, clothed, become Christian and English. At the least, it seemed that friendliness and peace might continue.

In the spring of 1622 a concerted Indian attack and ma.s.sacre fell like a bolt from the blue. Up and down the James and upon the Chesapeake, everywhere on the same day, Indians, bursting from the dark forest that was so close behind every cl.u.s.ter of log houses, attacked the colonists. Three hundred and forty-seven English men, women, and children were slain. But Jamestown and the plantations in its neighborhood were warned in time. The English rallied, gathered force, turned upon and beat back to the forest the Indian, who was now and for a long time to come their open foe.

There followed upon this horror not a day or a month but years of organized retaliation and systematic harrying. In the end the great majority of the Indians either fell or were pushed back toward the upper Pamunkey, the Rappahannock, the Potomac, and westward upon the great shelf or terrace of the earth that climbed to the fabled mountains. And with this westward move there pa.s.sed away that old vision of wholesale Christianizing.

CHAPTER VIII. ROYAL GOVERNMENT

In November, 1620, there sailed into a quiet harbor on the coast of what is now Ma.s.sachusetts a s.h.i.+p named the Mayflower, having on board one hundred and two English Non-conformists, men and women and with them a few children. These latest colonists held a patent from the Virginia Company and have left in writing a statement of their object: "We... having undertaken, for the glory of G.o.d and advancement of the Christian faith, and honor of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia-". The mental reservation is, of course, "where perchance we may serve G.o.d as we will!" In England there obtained in some quarters a suspicion that "they meant to make a free, popular State there." Free-Popular-Public Good! These are words that began, in the second quarter of the seventeenth century, to s.h.i.+ne and ring. King and people had reached the verge of a great struggle. The Virginia Company was divided, as were other groups, into factions. The court party and the country party found themselves distinctly opposed. The great, crowded meetings of the Company Sessions rang with their divisions upon policies small and large. Words and phrases, comprehensive, sonorous, heavy with the future, rose and rolled beneath the roof of their great hall. There were heard amid warm discussion: Kingdom and Colony-Spain-Netherlands-France-Church and State-Papists and Schismatics-Duties, t.i.thes, Excise Pet.i.tions of Grievances-Representation-Right of a.s.sembly. Several years earlier the King had cried, "Choose the Devil, but not Sir Edwyn Sandys!" Now he declared the Company "just a seminary to a seditious parliament!" All London resounded with the clash of parties and opinions.* "Last week the Earl of Warwick and the Lord Cavendish fell so foul at a Virginia... court that the lie pa.s.sed and repa.s.sed.... The factions... are grown so violent that Guelfs and Ghibellines were not more animated one against another!"

* In his work on "Joint-stock Companion", vol.II, pp. 266 ff., W. R. Scott traces the history of these acute dissensions in the Virginia Company and draws conclusions distinctly unfavorable to the management of Sandys and his party.-Editor.

Believing that the Company's sessions foreshadowed a "seditious parliament," James Stuart set himself with obstinacy and some cunning to the Company's undoing. The court party gave the King aid, and circ.u.mstances favored the attempt. Captain Nathaniel Butler, who had once been Governor of the Somers Islands and had now returned to England by way of Virginia, published in London "The Unmasked Face of Our Colony in Virginia", containing a savage attack upon every item of Virginian administration.

The King's Privy Council summoned the Company, or rather the "country" party, to answer these and other allegations. Southampton, Sandys, and Ferrar answered with strength and cogency. But the tide was running against them. James appointed commissioners to search out what was wrong with Virginia. Certain men were s.h.i.+pped to Virginia to get evidence there, as well as support from the Virginia a.s.sembly. In this attempt they signally failed. Then to England came a Virginia member of the Virginia Council, with long letters to King and Privy Council: the Sandys-Southampton administration had done more than well for Virginia. The letters were letters of appeal. The colony hoped that "the Governors sent over might not have absolute authority, but might be restrained to the consent of the Council.... But above all they made it their most humble request that they might still retain the liberty of their General a.s.semblies; than which nothing could more conduce to the publick Satisfaction and publick Liberty."

In London another paper, drawn by Cavendish, was given to King and Privy Council. It answered many accusations, and among others the statement that "the Government of the companies as it then stood was democratical and tumultuous, and ought therefore to be altered, and reduced into the Hands of a few." It is of interest to hear these men speak, in the year 1623, in an England that was close to absolute monarchy, to a King who with all his house stood out for personal rule. "However, they owned that, according to his Majesty's Inst.i.tution, their Government had some Show of a democratical Form; which was nevertheless, in that Case, the most just and profitable, and most conducive to the Ends and Effects aimed at thereby.... Lastly, they observed that the opposite Faction cried out loudly against Democracy, and yet called for Oligarchy; which would, as they conceived, make the Government neither of better Form, nor more monarchical."

But the dissolution of the Virginia Company was at hand. In October, 1623, the Privy Council stated that the King had "taken into his princely Consideration the distressed State of the Colony of Virginia, occasioned, as it seemed, by the Ill Government of the Company." The remedy for the ill-management lay in the reduction of the Government into fewer hands. His Majesty had resolved therefore upon the withdrawal of the Company's charter and the subst.i.tution, "with due regard for continuing and preserving the Interest of all Adventurers and private persons whatsoever," of a new order of things. The new order proved, on examination, to be the old order of rule by the Crown. Would the Company surrender the old charter and accept a new one so modeled?

The Company, through the country party, strove to gain time. They met with a succession of arbitrary measures and were finally forced to a decision. They would not surrender their charter. Then a writ of quo warranto was issued; trial before the King's Bench followed; and judgment was rendered against the Company in the spring term of 1624. Thus with clangor fell the famous Virginia Company.

That was one year. The March of the next year James Stuart, King of England, died. That young Henry who was Prince of Wales when the Susan Constant, the Goodspeed, and the Discovery sailed past a cape and named it for him Cape Henry, also had died. His younger brother Charles, for whom was named that other and opposite cape, now ascended the throne as King Charles the First of England.

In Virginia no more General a.s.semblies are held for four years. King Charles embarks upon "personal rule." Sir Francis Wyatt, a good Governor, is retained by commission and a Council is appointed by the King. No longer are affairs to be conducted after a fas.h.i.+on "democratical and tumultuous." Orders are transmitted from England; the Governor, a.s.sisted by the Council, will take into cognizance purely local needs; and when he sees some occasion he will issue a proclamation.

Wyatt, recalled finally to England; George Yeardley again, who died in a year's time; Francis West, that brother of Lord De La Warr and an ancient planter-these in quick succession sit in the Governor's chair. Following them John Pott, doctor of medicine, has his short term. Then the King sends out Sir John Harvey, avaricious and arbitrary, "so haughty and furious to the Council and the best gentlemen of the country," says Beverley, "that his tyranny grew at last insupportable."

The Company previously, and now the King, had urged upon the Virginians a diversified industry and agriculture. But Englishmen in Virginia had the familiar emigrant idea of making their fortunes. They had left England; they had taken their lives in their hands; they had suffered fevers, Indian attacks, homesickness, deprivation. They had come to Virginia to get rich. Now clapboards and sa.s.safras, pitch, tar, and pine trees for masts, were making no fortune for Virginia s.h.i.+ppers. How could they, these few folk far off in America, compete in products of the forest with northern Europe? As to mines of gold and silver, that first rich vision had proved a disheartening mirage. "They have great hopes that the mountains are very rich, from the discovery of a silver mine made nineteen years ago, at a place about four days' journey from the falls of James river; but they have not the means of transporting the ore." So, dissatisfied with some means of livelihood and disappointed in others, the Virginians turned to tobacco.

Every year each planter grew more tobacco; every year more s.h.i.+ps were laden. In 1628 more than five hundred thousand pounds were sent to England, for to England it must go, and not elsewhere. There it must struggle with the best Spanish, for a long time valued above the best Virginian. Finally, however, James and after him Charles, agreed to exclude the Spanish. Virginia and the Somers Islands alone might import tobacco into England. But offsetting this, customs went up ruinously; a great lump sum must go annually to the King; the leaf must enter only at the port of London; so forth and so on. Finally Charles put forth his proposal to monopolize the industry, giving Virginia tobacco the English market but limiting its production to the amount which the Government could sell advantageously. Such a policy required cooperation from the colonists. The King therefore ordered the Governor to grant a Virginia a.s.sembly, which in turn should dutifully enter into partners.h.i.+p with him-upon his terms. So the Virginia a.s.sembly thus came back into history. It made a "Humble Answere" in which, for all its humility, the King's proposal was declined. The idea of the royal monopoly faded out, and Virginia continued on its own way.

The General a.s.sembly, having once met, seems of its own motion to have continued meeting. The next year we find it in session at Jamestown, and resolving "that we should go three severall marches upon the Indians, at three severall times of the yeare," and also "that there be an especiall care taken by all commanders and others that the people doe repaire to their churches on the Saboth day, and to see that the penalty of one pound of tobacco for every time of absence, and 50 pounds for every month's absence... be levyed, and the delinquents to pay the same." About this time we read: "Dr. John Pott, late Governor, indicted, arraigned, and found guilty of stealing cattle, 13 jurors, 3 whereof councellors. This day wholly spent in pleading; next day, in unnecessary disputation."

These were moving times in the little colony whose population may by now have been five thousand. Harvey, the Governor, was rapacious; the King at home, autocratic. Meanwhile, signs of change and of unrest were not wanting in Europe. England was hastening toward revolution; in Germany the Thirty Years' War was in mid-career; France and Italy were racked by strife; over the world the peoples groaned under the strain of oppression. In science, too, there was promise of revolution. Harvey-not that Governor Harvey of Virginia, but a greater in England was writing upon the circulation of the blood. Galileo brooded over ideas of the movement of the earth; Kepler, over celestial harmonies and solar rule. Descartes was laying the foundation of a new philosophy.

In the meantime, far across the Atlantic, bands of Virginians went out against the Indians-who might, or might not, G.o.d knows! have put in a claim to be considered among the oppressed peoples. In Virginia the fat, black, tobacco-fields, steaming under a sun like the sun of Spain, called for and got more labor and still more labor. Every little sailing s.h.i.+p brought white workmen-called servants-consigned, indentured, apprenticed to many-acred planters. These, in return for their pa.s.sage money, must serve Laban for a term of years, but then would receive Rachel, or at least Leah, in the shape of freedom and a small holding and provision with which to begin again their individual life. If they were ambitious and energetic they might presently be able, in turn, to import labor for their own acres. As yet, in Virginia, there were few African slaves-not more perhaps than a couple of hundred. But whenever s.h.i.+ps brought them they were readily purchased.

In Virginia, as everywhere in time of change, there arose anomalies. Side by side persisted a romantic devotion to the King and a determination to have popular a.s.semblies; a great sense of the rights of the white individual together with African slavery; a practical, easy-going, debonair naturalism side by side with an Established Church penalizing alike Papist, Puritan, and atheist. Even so early as this, the social tone was set that was to hold for many and many a year. The suave climate was somehow to foster alike a sense of caste and good neighborliness-cla.s.s distinctions and republican ideas.

The "towns" were of the fewest and rudest-little more than small palisaded hamlets, built of frame or log, poised near the water of the river James. The genius of the land was for the plantation rather than the town. The fair and large brick or frame planter's house of a later time had not yet risen, but the system was well inaugurated that set a main or "big" house upon some fair site, with cabins cl.u.s.tered near it, and all surrounded, save on the river front, with far-flung acres, some planted with grain and the rest with tobacco. Up and down the river these estates were strung together by the rudest roads, mere tracks through field and wood. The cart was as yet the sole wheeled vehicle. But the Virginia planter-a horseman in England-brought over horses, bred horses, and early placed horsemans.h.i.+p in the catalogue of the necessary colonial virtues. At this point, however, in a land of great and lesser rivers, with a network of creeks, the boat provided the chief means of communication. Behind all, enveloping all, still spread the illimitable forest, the haunt of Indians and innumerable game.

Virginians were already preparing for an expansion to the north. There was a man in Virginia named William Claiborne. This individual-able, determined, self-reliant, energetic-had come in as a young man, with the t.i.tle of surveyor-general for the Company, in the s.h.i.+p that brought Sir Francis Wyatt, just before the ma.s.sacre of 1622. He had prospered and was now Secretary of the Province. He held lands, and was endowed with a bold, adventurous temper and a genius for business. In a few years he had established widespread trading relations with the Indians. He and the men whom he employed penetrated to the upper sh.o.r.es of Chesapeake, into the forest bordering Potomac and Susquehanna: Knives and hatchets, beads, trinkets, and colored cloth were changed for rich furs and various articles that the Indians could furnish. The skins thus gathered Claiborne s.h.i.+pped to London merchants, and was like to grow wealthy from what his trading brought.

Looking upon the future and contemplating barter on a princely scale, he set to work and obtained exhaustive licenses from the immediate Virginian authorities, and at last from the King himself. Under these grants, Claiborne began to provide settlements for his numerous traders. Far up the Chesapeake, a hundred miles or so from Point Comfort, he found an island that he liked, and named it Kent Island. Here for his men he built cabins with gardens around them, a mill and a church. He was far from the river James and the ma.s.s of his fellows, but he esteemed himself to be in Virginia and upon his own land. What came of Claiborne's enterprise the sequel has to show.

CHAPTER IX. MARYLAND

There now enters upon the scene in Virginia a man of middle age, not without experience in planting colonies, by name George Calvert, first Lord Baltimore. Of Flemish ancestry, born in Yorks.h.i.+re, scholar at Oxford, traveler, clerk of the Privy Council, a Secretary of State under James, member of the House of Commons, member of the Virginia Company, he knew many of the ramifications of life. A man of worth and weight, he was placed by temperament and education upon the side of the court party and the Crown in the growing contest over rights. About the year 1625, under what influence is not known, he had openly professed the Roman Catholic faith-and that took courage in the seventeenth century, in England!

Some years before, Calvert had obtained from the Crown a grant of a part of Newfoundland, had named it Avalon, and had built great hopes upon its settlement. But the northern winter had worked against him. He knew, for he had resided there himself with his family in that harsh clime. "From the middle of October to the middle of May there is a sad fare of winter on all this land." He is writing to King Charles, and he goes on to say "I have had strong temptations to leave all proceedings in plantations... but my inclination carrying me naturally to these kind of works... I am determined to commit this place to fishermen that are able to encounter storms and hard weather, and to remove myself with some forty persons to your Majesty's dominion of Virginia where, if your Majesty will please to grant me a precinct of land... I shall endeavour to the utmost of my power, to deserve it."

With his immediate following he thereupon does sail far southward. In October, 1629, he comes in between the capes, past Point Comfort and so up to Jamestown-to the embarra.s.sment of that capital, as will soon be evident.

Here in Church of England Virginia was a "popish recusant!" Here was an old "court party" man, one of James's commissioners, a person of rank and prestige, known, for all his recusancy, to be in favor with the present King. Here was the Proprietary of Avalon, guessed to be dissatisfied with his chilly holding, on the scent perhaps of balmier, easier things!

The a.s.sembly was in session when Lord Baltimore came to Jamestown. All arrivers in Virginia must take the oath of supremacy. The a.s.sembly proposed this to the visitor who, as Roman Catholic, could not take it, and said as much, but offered his own declaration of friendliness to the powers that were. This was declined. Debate followed, ending with a request from the a.s.sembly that the visitor depart from Virginia. Some harshness of speech ensued, but hospitality and the amenities fairly saved the situation. One Thomas Tindall was pilloried for "giving my lord Baltimore the lie and threatening to knock him down." Baltimore thereupon set sail, but not, perhaps, until he had gained that knowledge of conditions which he desired.

In England he found the King willing to make him a large grant, with no less powers than had clothed him in Avalon. Territory should be taken from the old Virginia; it must be of unsettled land-Indians of course not counting. Baltimore first thought of the stretch south of the river James between Virginia and Spanish Florida-a fair land of woods and streams, of good harbors, and summer weather. But suddenly William Claiborne was found to be in London, sent there by the Virginians, with representations in his pocket. Virginia was already settled and had the intention herself of expanding to the south.

Baltimore, the King, and the Privy Council weighed the matter. Westward, the blue mountains closed the prospect. Was the South Sea just beyond their sunset slopes, or was it much farther away, over unknown lands, than the first adventurers had guessed? Either way, too rugged hards.h.i.+p marked the west! East rolled the ocean. North, then? It were well to step in before those Hollanders about the mouth of the Hudson should cast nets to the south. Baltimore accordingly asked for a grant north of the Potomac.

He received a huge territory, stretching over what is now Maryland, Delaware, and a part of Pennsylvania. The Potomac, from source to mouth, with a line across Chesapeake and the Eastern Sh.o.r.e to the ocean formed his southern frontier; his northern was the fortieth parallel, from the ocean across country to the due point above the springs of the Potomac. Over this great expanse he became "true and absolute lord and proprietary," holding fealty to England, but otherwise at liberty to rule in his own domain with every power of feudal duke or prince. The King had his allegiance, likewise a fifth part of gold or silver found within his lands. All persons going to dwell in his palatinate were to have "rights and liberties of Englishmen." But, this aside, he was lord paramount. The new country received the name Terra Mariae-Maryland-for Henrietta Maria, then Queen of England.

Here was a new land and a Lord Proprietor with kingly powers. Virginians seated on the James promptly pet.i.tioned King Charles not to do them wrong by so dividing their portion of the earth. But King and Privy Council answered only that Virginia and Maryland must "a.s.sist each other on all occasions as becometh fellow-subjects." William Claiborne, indeed, continued with a determined voice to cry out that lands given to Baltimore were not, as had been claimed, unsettled, seeing that he himself had under patent a town on Kent Island and another at the mouth of the Susquehanna.

Baltimore was a reflective man, a dreamer in the good sense of the term, and religiously minded. At the height of seeming good fortune he could write: "All things, my lord, in this world pa.s.s away.... They are but lent us till G.o.d please to call for them back again, that we may not esteem anything our own, or set our hearts upon anything but Him alone, who only remains forever." Like his King, Baltimore could carry far his prerogative and privilege, maintaining the while not a few degrees of inner freedom. Like all men, here he was bound, and here he was free.

Baltimore's desire was for "enlarging his Majesty's Empire," and at the same time to provide in Maryland a refuge for his fellow Catholics. These were now in England so disabled and limited that their status might fairly be called that of a persecuted people. The mounting Puritanism promised no improvement. The King himself had no fierce antagonism to the old religion, but it was beginning to be seen that Charles and Charles's realm were two different things. A haven should be provided before the storm blackened further. Baltimore thus saw put into his hands a high and holy opportunity, and made no doubt that it was G.o.d-given. His charter, indeed, seemed to contemplate an established church, for it gave to Baltimore the patronage of all churches and chapels which were to be "consecrated according to the ecclesiastical laws of our kingdom of England"; nevertheless, no interpretation of the charter was to be made prejudicial to "G.o.d's holy and true Christian religion." What was Christian and what was prejudicial was, fortunately for him, left undefined. No obstacles were placed before a Catholic emigration.

Baltimore had this idea and perhaps a still wider one: a land-Mary's land-where all Christians might foregather, brothers and sisters in one home! Religious tolerance-practical separation of Church and State-that was a broad idea for his age, a generous idea for a Roman Catholic of a time not so far removed from the mediaeval. True, wherever he went and whatever might be his own thought and feeling, he would still have for overlord a Protestant sovereign, and the words of his charter forbade him to make laws repugnant to the laws of England. But Maryland was distant, and wise management might do much. Catholics, Anglicans, Puritans, Dissidents, and Nonconformists of almost any physiognomy, might come and be at home, unpunished for variations in belief.

Only the personal friends.h.i.+p of England's King and the tact and suave sagacity of the Proprietary himself could have procured the signing of this charter, since it was known-as it was to all who cared to busy themselves with the matter-that here was a Catholic meaning to take other Catholics, together with other scarcely less abominable sectaries, out of the reach of Recusancy Acts and religious pains and penalties, to set them free in England-in-America; and, raising there a state on the novel basis of free religion, perhaps to convert the heathen to all manner of errors, and embark on mischiefs far too large for definition. Taking things as they were in the world, remembering acts of the Catholic Church in the not distant past, the ill-disposed might find some color for the agitation which presently did arise. Baltimore was known to be in correspondence with English Jesuits, and it soon appeared that Jesuit priests were to accompany the first colonists. At that time the Society of Jesus loomed large both politically and educationally. Many may have thought that there threatened a Rome in America. But, however that may have been, there was small chance for any successful opposition to the charter, since Parliament had been dissolved by the King, not to be summoned again for eleven years. The Privy Council was subservient, and, as the Sovereign was his friend, Baltimore saw the signing of the charter a.s.sured and began to gather together his first colonists. Then, somewhat suddenly, in April, 1632, he sickened, and died at the age of fifty-three.

His son, Cecil Calvert, second Lord Baltimore, took up his father's work. This young man, likewise able and sagacious, and at every step in his father's confidence, could and did proceed even in detail according to what had been planned. All his father's rights had descended to him; in Maryland he was Proprietary with as ample power as ever a Count Palatine had enjoyed. He took up the advantage and the burden.

The father's idea had been to go with his colonists to Maryland, and this it seems that the son also meant to do. But now, in London, there deepened a clamor against such Catholic enterprise. Once he were away, lips would be at the King's ear. And with England so restless, in a turmoil of new thought, it might even arise that King and Privy Council would find trouble in acting after their will, good though that might be. The second Baltimore therefore remained in England to safeguard his charter and his interests.

The family of Baltimore was an able one. Cecil Calvert had two brothers, Leonard and George, and these would go to Maryland in his place. Leonard he made Governor and Lieutenant-general, and appointed him councilor. s.h.i.+ps were made ready-the Ark of three hundred tons and the Dove of fifty. The colonists went aboard at Gravesend, where these s.h.i.+ps rode at anchor. Of the company a great number were Protestants, willing to take land, if their condition were bettered so, with Catholics. Difficulties of many kinds kept them all long at the mouth of the Thames, but at last, late in November, 1633, the Ark and the Dove set sail. Touching at the Isle of Wight, they took aboard two Jesuit priests, Father White and Father Altham, and a number of other colonists. Baltimore reported that the expedition consisted of "two of my brothers with very near twenty other gentlemen of very good fas.h.i.+on, and three hundred labouring men well provided in all things."

These s.h.i.+ps, with the first Marylanders, went by the old West Indies sea route. We find them resting at Barbados; then they swung to the north and, in February, 1634, came to Point Comfort in Virginia. Here they took supplies, being treated by Sir John Harvey (who had received a letter from the King) with "courtesy and humanity." Without long tarrying, for they were sick now for land of their own, they sailed on up the great bay, the Chesapeake.

Soon they reached the mouth of the Potomac-a river much greater than any of them, save s.h.i.+pmasters and mariners, had ever seen-and into this turned the Ark and the Dove. After a few leagues of sailing up the wide stream, they came upon an islet covered with trees, leafless, for spring had hardly broken. The s.h.i.+ps dropped anchor; the boats were lowered; the people went ash.o.r.e. Here the Calverts claimed Maryland "for our Savior and for our Sovereign Lord the King of England," and here they heard Ma.s.s. St. Clement's they called the island.

But it was too small for a home. The Ark was left at anchor, while Leonard Calvert went exploring with the Dove. Up the Potomac some distance he went, but at the last he wisely determined to choose for their first town a site nearer the sea. The Dove turned and came back to the Ark, and both sailed on down the stream from St. Clement's Isle. Before long they came to the mouth of a tributary stream flowing in from the north. The Dove, going forth again, entered this river, which presently the party named the River St. George. Soon they came to a high bank with trees tinged with the foliage of advancing spring. Here upon this bank the English found an Indian village and a small Algonquin group, in the course of extinction by their formidable Iroquois neighbors, the giant Susquehannocks. The white men landed, bearing a store of hatchets, gewgaws, and colored cloth. The first Lord Baltimore, having had opportunity enough for observing savages, had probably handed on to his sagacious sons his conclusions as to ways of dealing with the natives of the forest. And the undeniable logic of events was at last teaching the English how to colonize. Englishmen on Roanoke Island, Englishmen on the banks of the James, Englishmen in that first New England colony, had borne the weight of early inexperience and all the catalogue of woes that follow ignorance. All these early colonists alike had been quickly entangled in strife with the people whom they found in the land.

First they fell on their knees, And then on the Aborigines.

But by now much water had pa.s.sed the mill. The thinking kind, the wiser sort, might perceive more things than one, and among these the fact that savages had a sense of justice and would even fight against injustice, real or fancied.

The Calverts, through their interpreter, conferred with the inhabitants of this Indian village. Would they sell lands where the white men might peaceably settle, under their given word to deal in friendly wise with the red men? Many hatchets and axes and much cloth would be given in return.

To a sylvan people store of hatchets and axes had a value beyond many fields of the boundless earth. The Dove appeared before them, too, at the psychological moment. They had just discussed removing, bag and baggage, from the proximity of the Iroquois. In the end, these Indians sold to the English their village huts, their cleared and planted fields, and miles of surrounding forest. Moreover they stayed long enough in friends.h.i.+p with the newcomers to teach them many things of value. Then they departed, leaving with the English a clear t.i.tle to as much land as they could handle, at least for some time to come. Later, with other Indians, as with these, the Calverts pursued a conciliatory policy. They were aided by the fact that the Susquehannocks to the north, who might have given trouble, were involved in war with yet more northerly tribes, and could pay scant attention to the incoming white men. But even so, the Calverts proved, as William Penn proved later, that men may live at peace with men, honestly and honorably, even though hue of skin and plane of development differ.

Now the Ark joins the Dove in the River St. George. The pieces of ordnance are fired; the colonists disembark; and on the 27th of March, 1634, the Indian village, now English, becomes St. Mary's.

On the whole how advantageously are they placed! There is peace with the Indians. Huts, lodges, are already built, fields already cleared or planted. The site is high and healthful. They have at first few dissensions among themselves. Nor are they entirely alone or isolated in the New World. There is a New England to the north of them and a Virginia to the south. From the one they get in the autumn salted fish, from the other store of swine and cattle. Famine and pestilence are far from them. They build a "fort" and perhaps a stockade, but there are none of the stealthy deaths given by arrow and tomahawk in the north, nor are there any of the Spanish alarms that terrified the south. From the first they have with them women and children. They know that their settlement is "home." Soon other s.h.i.+ps and colonists follow the Ark and the Dove to St. Mary's, and the history of this middle colony is well begun.

In Virginia, meantime, there was jealousy enough of the new colony, taking as it did territory held to be Virginian and renaming it, not for the old, independent, Protestant, virgin queen, but for a French, Catholic, queen consort-even settling it with believers in the Ma.s.s and bringing in Jesuits! It was, says a Jamestown settler, "accounted a crime almost as heinous as treason to favour, nay to speak well of that colony." Beside the Virginian folk as a whole, one man, in particular, William Claiborne, nursed an individual grievance. He had it from Governor Calvert that he might dwell on in Kent Island, trading from there, but only under license from the Lord Proprietor and as an inhabitant of Maryland, not of Virginia. Claiborne, with the a.s.sembly at Jamestown secretly on his side, resisted this interference with his rights, and, as he continued to trade with a high hand, he soon fell under suspicion of stirring up the Indians against the Marylanders.

At the time, this quarrel rang loud through Maryland and Virginia, and even echoed across the Atlantic. Leonard Calvert had a trading-boat of Claiborne's seized in the Patuxent River. Thereupon Claiborne's men, with the shallop c.o.c.katrice, in retaliation attacked Maryland pinnaces and lost both their lives and their boat. For several years Maryland and Kent Island continued intermittently to make petty war on each other. At last, in 1638, Calvert took the island by main force and hanged for piracy a captain of Claiborne's. The Maryland a.s.sembly brought the trader under a Bill of Attainder; and a little later, in England, the Lords Commissioners of Foreign Plantations formally awarded Kent Island to the Lord Proprietor. Thus defeated, Claiborne, nursing his wrath, moved down the bay to Virginia.

CHAPTER X. CHURCH AND KINGDOM

Virginia, all this time, with Maryland a thorn in her side, was wrestling with an autocratic governor, John Harvey. This avaricious tyrant sowed the wind until in 1635 he was like to reap the whirlwind. Though he was the King's Governor and in good odor in England, where rested the overpower to which Virginia must bow, yet in this year Virginia blew upon her courage until it was glowing and laid rude hands upon him. We read: "An a.s.sembly to be called to receive complaints against Sr. John Harvey, on the pet.i.tion of many inhabitants, to meet 7th of May." But, before that month was come, the Council, seizing opportunity, acted for the whole. Immediately below the entry above quoted appears: "On the 28th of April, 1635, Sr. John Harvey thrust out of his government, and Capt. John West acts as Governor till the King's pleasure known."*

* Hening's "Statutes" vol. I p. 223.

So Virginia began her course as rebel against political evils! It is of interest to note that Nicholas Martian, one of the men found active against the Governor, was an ancestor of George Was.h.i.+ngton.

Harvey, thrust out, took first s.h.i.+p for England, and there also sailed commissioners from the Virginia a.s.sembly with a declaration of wrongs for the King's ear. But when they came to England, they found that the King's ear was for the Governor whom he had given to the Virginians and whom they, with audacious disobedience, had deposed. Back should go Sir John Harvey, still governing Virginia; back without audience the so-called commissioners, happy to escape a merited hanging! Again to Jamestown sailed Harvey. In silence Virginia received him, and while he remained Governor no a.s.sembly sat.

But having a.s.serted his authority, the King in a few years' time was willing to recall his unwelcome representative. So in 1639 Governor Harvey vanishes from the scene, and in comes the well-liked Sir Francis Wyatt as Governor for the second time. For two years he remains, and is then superseded by Sir William Berkeley, a notable figure in Virginia for many years to come. The population was now perhaps ten thousand, both English born and Virginians born of English parents. A few hundred negroes moved in the tobacco fields. More would be brought in and yet more. And now above a million pounds of tobacco were going annually to England.

The century was predominantly one of inner and outer religious conflict. What went on at home in England reechoed in Virginia. The new Governor was a dyed-in-the-wool Cavalier, utterly stubborn for King and Church. The a.s.semblies likewise leaned that way, as presumably did the ma.s.s of the people. It was ordered in 1631: "That there bee a uniformitie throughout this colony both in substance and circ.u.mstance to the cannons and const.i.tutions of the church of England as neere as may bee, and that every person yeald readie obedience unto them uppon penaltie of the paynes and forfeitures in that case appoynted." And, indeed, the pains and forfeitures threatened were savage enough.

Official Virginia, loyal to the Established Church, was jealous and fearful of Papistry and looked askance at Puritanism. It frowned upon these and upon agnosticisms, atheisms, pantheisms, religious doubts, and alterations in judgment-upon anything, in short, that seemed to push a finger against Church and Kingdom. Yet in this Virginia, governed by Sir William Berkeley, a gentleman more cavalier than the Cavaliers, more royalist than the King, more churchly than the Church, there lived not a few Puritans and Dissidents, going on as best they might with Established Church and fiery King's men. Certain parishes were predominantly Puritan; certain ministers were known to have leanings away from surplices and genuflections and to hold that Archbishop Laud was some kin to the Pope. In 1642, to reenforce these ministers, came three more from New England, actively averse to conformity. But Governor and Council and the majority of the Burgesses will have none of that. The a.s.sembly of 1643 takes sharp action.

For the preservation of the puritie of doctrine and unitie of the church, IT IS ENACTED that all ministers whatsoever which shall reside in the collony are to be conformable to the orders and const.i.tutions of the church of England, and the laws therein established, and not otherwise to be admitted to teach or preach publickly or privately. And that the Gov. and Counsel do take care that all nonconformists upon notice of them shall be compelled to depart the collony with all conveniencie. And so in consequence out of Virginia, to New England where Independents were welcome, or to Maryland where any Christian might dwell, went these tainted ministers. But there stayed behind Puritan and nonconforming minds in the bodies of many paris.h.i.+oners. They must hold their tongues, indeed, and outwardly conform-but they watched lynx-eyed for their opportunity and a more favorable fortune.