15. The Virginia Land System

The Southern colonies generally had a much less eventful history in the first half of the eighteenth century than their more northerly sisters. These colonies expanded but retained roughly the same social and political structure: a large plantation economy, growing mainly tobacco, and staffed with forced labor—with Negro slaves increasing more and more in relation to indentured servants. The headright system of land grants, among other political institutions, had subsidized the importation of indentured servants, and the availability of forced labor in turn permitted large plantations, otherwise uneconomic, to develop and prosper. In each colony the Anglican church was established, but not very popularly, and religious liberty was permitted to all Protestants. An appointed royal or proprietary governor with his allied Council presided over the colony and was confronted with an elected Assembly, which, though elected reasonably democratically, generally represented the planter oligarchy. Slaves and servants, of course, could never vote. The Assembly jealously guarded its power over appropriation and tax bills, and would not relinquish it to the executive.

Maryland and Virginia were particularly stable in this period, especially the former colony. Virginia received a deep imprint from the lengthy administration of Governor Alexander Spotswood (1710–22). A thoroughgoing reactionary, Spotswood was, in the words of Herbert Osgood, “a high Tory and defender of the prerogative in matters of Church and State, and an aggressive imperialist in his relations with the Indians, the French and the neighboring colonies.”* He was a close friend of the influential British Tory William Blathwayt. Spotswood was always ready to arm, and fight against, the Indians or the French, and he urged English seizure of the Great Lakes and trans-Allegheny region.

In contrast to the Northern colonies, a permanent fund for governors’ salaries existed in both Maryland and Virginia, and this weakened the extent of Assembly control over the governor. But the Assembly could still threaten to cut off other appropriations for the executive branch, and this proved an effective weapon. During Queen Anne’s War, the Assembly balked at Spotswood’s demand for military appropriations against a rumored (but never materialized) attack by the French. Four years later it again balked at appropriations to fight Indians in South Carolina.

Governor Spotswood arrived in Virginia with instructions to reform the land system. The original fairly viable headright policy of granting fifty acres to each settler had been prevented through granting free settlers an additional fifty acres for each indentured servant. To this were added the purchases of headrights, Virginia having decided in 1702 to allow unlimited purchases of headrights at the price of five shillings for fifty acres. Fraudulent surveys and grants also helped result in a policy of large land grants to speculators instead of to settlers.

Spotswood at first tried to reform the system of land monopoly. The legal requirement that land be cleared and “planted” before grant of title, had been construed so loosely that a land speculator could appropriate ten thousand acres by clearing just one acre and building a tiny hut upon the acre of land. Spotswood managed to drive through a stricter land law in 1710 and 1713, providing also for forfeiture for nonpayment of quitrent—Spotswood was interested not only in genuine reform but also in enforcement of the perennially contentious quitrent burden. The Council, however, was largely composed of great landlords; they bitterly resisted the new laws, and as judges of the General Court, declared the forfeiture applicable only to future rather than past land grants—and even this restricted provision was not enforced by Virginia officials.

Alexander Spotswood finally decided that it would be more profitable to join the “grantees” than to try to defeat them. Spotswood not only had his own land laws weakened in 1720; he also inaugurated an era of large land grants on easy terms, especially in the tempting areas of unsettled Piedmont land, west of the Virginia fall line. Spotswood himself was not slow to take advantage of his own change of heart—especially when he heard of his pending removal—and by the end of his term he had managed to grant himself over 85,000 acres in Spotsylvania County. As an extra bonus, Spotswood granted himself a special quitrent exemption for a seven-year period. He also took care to be granted land containing iron mines, the first iron produced in Virginia. He even imported a settlement of Germans to found Germanna and to work the mines, but the subsidized venture turned out to be a failure. The first imported Germans were Swiss, who soon moved to new land of their own, at which point Spotswood made certain to import Palatine Germans to be indentured servants, who could not leave their work so readily.

The policy of land engrossment was continued and expanded by Spotswood’s successors, among whom was William Gooch, who governed Virginia from 1726 to 1749. In 1730, Gooch made the lot of the land monopolist still easier by deferring quitrents and permitting a settlement of one family for every thousand acres. These terms were specified in a grant of 30,000 acres to John van Meter. Between 1730 and 1736—just six years—eight grants were made by the Virginia government totaling 500,000 acres of unsettled land. The largest grant was 130,000 acres to William Beverly. Some of these grants passed through the Piedmont and into the Shenandoah Valley. These grants began in 1728 with gifts of 26,000 acres to Larkin Chew and his associates; the Van Meters soon received 40,000 acres.

The actual settlers, however, were not necessarily worse off in securing this land here than elsewhere. In no colony was a libertarian homestead principle in full operation, and many settlers found it cheaper to purchase small farms from these speculators than to battle for patents from the Virginia bureaucracy or to buy land in Pennsylvania.

In the march westward, Virginia came into conflict with competing land monopolists, the owners of the huge Northern Neck. Lord Culpeper had been proprietor of Northern Neck as well as coproprietor of Virginia itself in the late seventeenth century. But when he sold back his proprietary right in Virginia to the Crown in 1684, he could not negotiate a sale for Northern Neck, for which he then obtained a perpetual charter from King James II in 1688. By the turn of the eighteenth century, the Northern Neck grant had passed by inheritance into the hands of Lord Fairfax. Fairfax, by loose construction of the charter, contended that Northern Neck should extend to all the land between the headwaters of the Potomac and Rappahannock (including Rapidan) rivers. Finally, in 1745, the case was decided in favor of Lord Fairfax over the protests of the governor and the House of Burgesses. By this appalling decision, Lord Fairfax was granted the ownership of the enormous total of six million acres of northern Virginia, including a large piece of the Shenandoah Valley.*

In the meanwhile, leading tidewater planters had for decades received land grants from Virginia in this expanding region. Particularly active was William Beverly, nephew of William Byrd II, and the Beverly family had secured over sixty thousand acres and, in fact, a large part of Augusta County. In contrast, Robert (“King”) Carter, an agent of Lord Fairfax and senior member of the Council, had acquired an enormous amount of land—under Fairfax’s overlordship—for himself, his relatives, and friends. When Fairfax’s claim was upheld, he validated all Virginia grants in his region, with himself, of course, as the overlord receiving quitrents. The quitrents, however, were poorly enforced, Fairfax having come up against the almost universal colonial resistance to paying this feudal levy. Being poorly enforced, the Fairfax proprietary did not arouse the resentment that might have been expected.

*Herbert L. Osgood, The American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century (Worcester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1958), 2: 216.

*The decision awarded to Fairfax the present Virginia counties of Culpeper, Fauquier, Rappahannock, Madison, Prince William, Stafford, Fairfax, Loudoun, Arlington, Warren, Page, Shenandoah, Clarke, Frederick, King George, Westmoreland, Richmond, Northumberland, and Lancaster; and the West Virginia counties of Jefferson, Berkeley, Morgan, Hampshire, and Hardy.