9. British Mercantilism over Virginia

Rule in the European governments of the seventeenth century was exercised, not only by the great landowners—through feudalism—but also by groups of merchants and capitalists specially privileged and subsidized by the state, in the system that later came to be known as “mercantilism.” The essence of mercantilism was the granting or selling of monopolistic privilege and subsidy by the state to favored groups of businessmen. Thus, Crown, feudal nobility, and privileged capitalists exercised rule over the exploited remainder of the populace—which included the bulk of merchants and capitalists who sought profit by voluntary service in the marketplace rather than by obtaining privileges from the coercive power of the state.

From the beginning, government meddling—especially by the English government—fastened the mercantile system on the American colonies. As early as 1619, the Crown imposed a duty of one shilling per pound of tobacco imported by the Virginia Company and in 1622 prohibited any tobacco from being grown in England or Ireland. The motivation for the latter act was not to benefit Virginia, but to increase the revenue seized by the Crown: domestic tobacco producers, after all, paid no customs duty. In 1621 the Crown indeed delivered a grave blow to the company and to Virginia by prohibiting the colonists from exporting tobacco (or any other commodity) to any foreign country without first landing in England and paying customs duty there. It was in vain that the company protested that other English subjects and companies were allowed to sell their goods in the best markets, that the edict would cripple the tobacco-cattle trade with Ireland, that many Virginia products were not salable in England.

The sweetener for the company in this network of restriction was the granting, in 1622, to the Virginia Company of the monopoly privilege of importing tobacco into England and Ireland. The supposedly liberal Sir Edwin Sandys had led the intracompany fight to accept the monopoly, and he and his faction were appointed to manage the monopoly, at extravagant salaries.

In the period of the republic, Parliament—as we have seen hardly reluctant to impose mercantile restrictions for the benefit of merchant groups—began the famous series of Navigation Acts. In 1650 it outlawed foreign ships from trading in the colonies without a license, thus striking a blow at efficient Dutch shipping. The following year, it decreed that no goods from Asia, Africa, or America could be imported into England or its colonies except when the owner and most of the crew were English or English-American. It also prohibited imports of foreign goods in entrepot trade—from countries where the product did not originate, prohibited the importation of fish by aliens, and outlawed all participation of foreign ships in the English coastal trade.

These were blows to the efficiency and prosperity of interregional trade, and to the property, actual and potential, of the colonies, all for the special privileges accorded to inefficient shipowners. To enforce these sweeping prohibitions required a bureaucratic apparatus mighty for the time and place, including a network of paid government informers. So strict was the enforcement that not enough English vessels existed to replace the outlawed Dutch shipping, and grave complaints of shortages spread throughout the English colonies in the Americas—including the West Indies. The rebellious Virginia Assembly asserted in 1655 that freedom of trade would be maintained, and demanded that sea captains pay bond not to molest Dutch or other foreign shipping.

England, however, continued to tighten its mercantile restrictions, especially after monarchical rule had been restored. Thus, the Navigation Act of 1660 provided that no goods whatever could be imported into or exported from any English colony except in English-owned ships (of which at least three-fourths of the crew must be English), and compelled certain important enumerated colonial products (including tobacco) to be shipped only to England—thus outlawing colonial export trade in these goods to any other country. All ships leaving the colonies were required to give bond that they would not ship the goods elsewhere. The Navigation Act of 1662 extended these privileges: all future ships not built in English shipyards were now to be excluded from this colonial trade.

The mercantilist structure of the Navigation Acts was completed in 1662 with the exclusion of all European goods (except for a few commodities) from the colonial market except as shipped from English ports and in English-built ships. Colonial governors were charged with the responsibility of enforcement of the navigation laws, but in practice the power was delegated to a naval officer appointed in England.

The navigation laws continued to be tightened still further. The Navigation Act of 1673 moved against the attempt of the planters to maintain some of their tobacco trade by selling to other colonies. The act placed a prohibitive tax of one penny on each pound of tobacco shipped from one colony to another, and appointed customs commissioners to collect the duty. This act crippled the flourishing tobacco trade with New England. More sweeping was the Navigation Act of 1696, which confined all colonial trade to English-built ships, enlarged the powers of the colonial naval officers, and gave the provincial custom officers the right of forcible entry, which they already enjoyed in England. The act led to the establishment of vice admiralty courts in the colonies to enforce the regulations. Operating under Roman law, a vice admiralty court could try and convict without having to submit the cases to colonial juries, which were almost unanimous in their sympathy with any arraigned smugglers.

We have mentioned the drastic fall in the prices of tobacco in the seventeenth century. Much of this drop was due not to the great expansion of the Virginia tobacco crop, but to the Navigation Acts and their smashing of the export market for tobacco in Holland and other countries in Europe. Before the Navigation Acts, the Dutch had paid three pence per pound for Virginia tobacco; after the acts, the tobacco price had fallen to half a penny per pound by 1667. The fall was aggravated by the heavy losses of the English tobacco fleet in the wars with Holland (the Dutch wars of 1664–67 and 1672–73). To offset the crisis, Virginia turned to domestic mercantilism: compulsory cartels to raise tobacco prices. But since such an increase could only be accomplished by coerced restrictions on tobacco acreage, this meant that tobacco markets were not being widened, and prosperity could not be restored to the colony as a whole. In a compulsory tobacco cartel, some tobacco producers could only benefit at the expense of others, and of the rest of the colony’s population. In brief, quotas based on existing production must privilege the inefficient grower and the large grower about to fall behind in the competitive race, and discriminate against the efficient, and the new up-and-coming planters. In the “Plant-Cutting Riots” of 1682, the planters benefiting from the quotas organized bands of vandals to go from plantation to plantation destroying the tobacco crop.

The protection from foreign competition accorded by the Navigation Acts to British shippers not only ruined the Virginians’ tobacco market (and that of neighboring Maryland’s planters as well); it also raised the prices of the gamut of imported goods now confined to British ships. Thus, Virginians suffered doubly from the imperial restrictions.

English enforcement of the Navigation Acts was unfortunately rigorous, especially in the Southern colonies. Three wars of aggression against the Dutch between 1652 and 1675 drove the Dutch—the more efficient of England’s competitors—out of the Chesapeake trade. The very geography of the Chesapeake Bay area made enforcement easy: the English navy needed only to control the narrow entrance of the bay to keep foreign ships from buying or selling to the Virginia or Maryland plantations.

Thus, the English orientation of Virginia trade and finance was compelled by the Navigation Acts, which gravely injured Virginians and retarded Virginia development. Furthermore, the canker of slavery was also due partly to the Navigation Acts. The economic pressure of the acts on the planters led them to look to slavery as a way to cut costs by exploiting forced labor. Moreover, the English government forbade Virginia from restricting the infamous slave trade, the monopoly of which had by the wars against the Dutch been assured to British traders.

John Bland, a London merchant who had traded with the Dutch in Virginia tobacco, presented the excellent case of the Chesapeake planters against the Navigation Acts—but, unfortunately, to no avail.

Added to the devastation caused by the Navigation Acts was the burden of increased taxes. In addition to the crippling penny a pound on all coastal tobacco trade imposed in 1673, the hated poll tax was reimposed, In his first years of rule, Governor Berkeley had abolished the poll tax, which, being levied equally on all, particularly burdened the poorer strata of the population. In 1674, however, when Berkeley reintroduced the poll tax, a number of farmers assembled with their arms in Kent County to prevent collection of the new taxes, by force if necessary. This incipient tax rebellion was dispersed upon Berkeley’s proclamation that tax rebels would be accounted guilty of treason and punished accordingly.

Greatly adding to the grievances of most Virginians was the steady accumulation, ever since his reappointment, of absolute rule in the hands of Governor Berkeley and his clique of allies in the great planter oligarchy. No sooner was he reappointed governor than Berkeley seized control of the House of Burgesses: he filled the seats with his own henchmen and repudiated the Virginia tradition of frequent elections. In fact, he refused to call any election for the House of Burgesses from 1661 on, and only called meetings of the Assembly at his pleasure. Any recalcitrant burgesses were bribed with public offices, all of which were appointed by the governor. Berkeley’s absolute control of the Council—always dominated by the governor—was assured by the fact that the bulk of the councillors were allowed to die without being replaced, were not called together, or were out of reach. Now Berkeley was in full control of both houses of the Assembly. In 1670 Berkeley and the Assembly further tightened oligarchic control by taking the franchise away from nonlandowners. Berkeley also assumed supreme judicial power as president of the General Court of the colony. Oligarchic control by the leading planters over local government was further tightened; the vestries, for example, became self-perpetuating local governing bodies. County courts, made up of the great planters, met in secret to impose the county levy, which more and more placed tax burdens on the poor. Exorbitant fees were paid to sheriffs, clerks, and other local officials out of these taxes, and there was considerable graft involved in the heavy expenditures needed to construct forts westward on the rivers.

Power is always used to acquire wealth, and here was no exception. Berkeley and his allies granted themselves the best lands, most of the public offices, and a monopoly of the lucrative fur trade with the Indians. Another of Berkeley’s tyrannical actions was to have the Assembly reestablish the Anglican church, and also to bring pressure for a governmental college that would include Anglican teaching of the youth.

Whenever anyone in the American colonies in the seventeenth century decided to embark on a policy of tyranny and religious persecution, the first group to bear the brunt was usually the hapless Quakers—of all sects the least devoted to idolatry of church or state. Upon embarking on the dictatorial rule of his second term, Governor Berkeley did not hesitate to revive the old laws against Dissenters, and naturally concentrated on the handful of Quakers. An English Quaker, George Wilson, upon arriving at Jamestown in 1661, was thrust into a dungeon, scourged, and kept in irons until death. While dying, he wrote, in a truly saintly manner: “For all their cruelty I can truly say, Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.” The previous year 1660, the Assembly had passed an act outlawing “an unreasonable and turbulent sort of people commonly called Quakers... [who are] endeavoring... to destroy religion, laws, communities and all bonds of civil society.” Apparently these “bonds of civil society” were to rest, not on voluntary consent, but on the dungeon and the torture rack.

In 1662 Berkeley decreed heavy fines on any Nonconformists who refused to have their children baptized, and threatened to exile any ship masters who brought any Dissenters into the colony. The next year two Quaker women entered Virginia, spreading the message in the colony. The two, Mary Tomkins and Alice Ambrose, were imprisoned and inflicted with thirty-two lashes from a whip of nine cords. After this their property was seized and they were expelled from Virginia.

It stands to reason that a man with this sort of attitude toward religious liberty and search for truth should be vehemently hostile toward education, freedom of inquiry, and individual and collective search for the truth. We are fortunate to have on record, however, a classic statement by Berkeley, revealing the despot’s fury toward learning and free inquiry. When asked in 1671 by the Crown what he had been doing to instruct the people in the Christian religion, Berkeley, in the course of his answer, declared: “I thank God, there are no free schools nor printing and I hope we shall not have these hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them, and libels against the best government. God keep us from both!” Learning and culture apparently were to be reserved to the safe hands of the ruling class, and were not to be permitted the ruled, who might learn enough to want to cast off their chains.

The inherent conflicts within Virginia’s society, as well as between Virginia and England, were further aggravated by an enormous land grant made by Charles II to Lord Hopton and a group of his friends, including Berkeley’s brother, Sir John, in 1649. This was a grant of over five million acres, constituting the partially settled Northern Neck of Virginia between the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers. The Hopton grant was assigned to Lord Culpeper in 1689. Even more startling was the joint proprietary grant of all Virginia in 1673 to two royal favorites, Lords Arlington and Culpeper, for a term of thirty-one years. The latter grant generated fierce opposition in Virginia because, for one thing, the Crown had been collecting the quitrents on Virginia lands in haphazard fashion, whereas Lords Culpeper and Arlington could be expected to make the best out of their feudal grant. The new proprietors were given the power to establish churches and schools, to appoint ministers and teachers. And they were given the power to appoint the sheriffs and other officers to grant lands and to create towns and counties.

Suddenly the Virginians were now confronted with the specter of absolute proprietary feudal rule, as well as the deprivation of all their liberties and their considerable measure of home rule. Indeed, no guarantees for the rights of Virginians were included in the Arlington-Culpeper grant.

The alarmed Assembly met the following year (1674) and protested that the grants would threaten the rights of the people, impose upon them new rents and dues, new grants and levies, and deprive them of the present protection of their rights and properties. The Virginians insisted that they wanted no privileged proprietors, whether individuals or chartered company, standing between them and the Crown and exploiting them still more. At heavy expense the Assembly sent commissioners to London to ask for removal of the grant. The negotiators eventually persuaded Lords Arlington and Culpeper to abandon all claims on the colony except quitrents and escheats (revenue from intestate estates). Pressures by the indignant Virginians had ended the threat of proprietary government over the Virginia colony.

In the course of the negotiations, the commissioners and the two proprietors agreed that Virginia should buy back the vast Northern Neck grant for £400 to each proprietor, and that the quitrents on the remaining lands should continue to be paid to the Crown, thus ending feudal quit-rents in the colony. The proprietary grant of 1673 was to be revoked and no further grants made without consulting the Virginia Council.

A new liberal charter in preparation would have provided that the governor and the members of the Council of Virginia must be residents of the colony and that no taxes could be imposed on Virginia without consent of the House of Burgesses. The charter drawn up by the king’s solicitor-general declared that the taxation provision “contains that which we humbly conceive to be the right of Virginians, as well as all other Englishmen, which is, not to be taxed but by their consent, expressed by their representatives.” Unfortunately this new charter was blocked upon the outbreak of rebellion in Virginia in 1676.

Neither did the losses suffered by Berkeley’s administration in the Dutch War, during 1673, endear the government to the people of Virginia. One of the principal motives of the aggressive English war against the Dutch, beginning in 1672, was to drive the Dutch out of the Virginia trade. The Dutch attacked Virginia and succeeded in sinking eleven Virginia merchantmen laden with tobacco. Neither the war nor the losses were calculated to gain the support of the populace; indeed, many Virginians oppressed by English rule welcomed the Dutch invasion and the prospective shift of sovereignty to the Netherlands.

If we consider then the situation in Virginia in the mid-1670s we can see the accumulation of grievances and the aggravation of conflicts: the sudden feudal proprietary grant of all Virginia to Lords Arlington and Culpeper in 1673; the exclusive landed property franchise in 1670; the reimposition of the poll tax in 1674, and the general increase in taxation; and the establishment of tight rule by the Berkeley clique. To these we might add Berkeley’s persecution of the Dissenters, virtually driving them out of the colony.

Hints of revolt and mutiny against Berkeley began to emerge in the 1670s. On December 12, 1673, fourteen people met at Lawnes Creek Parish Church in Surry County to protest against excessive taxation and to insist that they would thereafter refuse to pay their taxes. Here was one of the first tax rebellions, or organized refusals to pay taxes, in America. On January 3, the very day that Berkeley’s judges issued a writ to haul the fourteen into court for “sedition,” the group met again in a field and one of their leaders, Roger Delke, declared that “we will burn all before one shall suffer.” Berkeley lost no time in hauling the rebels into court where Delke explained that they had met “by reason their taxes were so unjust, and they would not pay it.” Very heavy fines were levied on the protesters, especially on the main leader of the Surry tax protest, Matthew Swan, who continued to insist that the taxes were unjust. Proceedings against Swan lasted longer than against the others, and in April 1674 Swan was brought before the Council and General Court of Virginia for his “dangerous contempt and unlawful project and his wicked persisting in the same.” Berkeley was forced, however, by popular resentment at the treatment accorded the tax rebels, to remit all the fines some months later.

Many of the tax strikers were prominent landowners of the county. Matthew Swan was possibly related to Colonel Thomas Swann, a member of the Council; Delke’s father had been a member of the House of Burgesses. Several other protesters were related to former burgesses, and one was a relative of one of the judges issuing a writ for their arrest. Furthermore, a near uprising was called off in 1674 and two mutinies occurred in the following year. All in all, the stage was set for one of the most important American armed rebellions against English authority in the colonial era: Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676.