The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 Catholic, Philosopher, and Rebel byHawthorne, Julian
The first Lord Baltimore, whose family name was Calvert, was a
Yorkshireman, born at the town of Kipling in 1580. He entered Parliament
in his thirtieth year, and was James's Secretary of State ten years later.
He was a man of large, tranquil nature, philosophic, charitable, loving
peace; but these qualities were fused by a concrete tendency of thought,
which made him a man of action, and determined that action in the
direction of practical schemes of benevolence. The contemporary interest
in America as a possible arena of enterprise and Mecca of religious and
political dissenters, attracted his sympathetic attention; and when, in
1625, being then five-and-forty years of age, he found in the Roman
Catholic communion a refuge from the clamor of warring sects, and as an
immediate consequence tendered his resignation as secretary to the head of
the Church of England, he found himself with leisure to put his designs in
execution. He had, upon his conversion, been raised to the rank of Baron
Baltimore in the peerage of Ireland; and his change of faith in no degree
forfeited him the favor of the king. When therefore he asked for a charter
to found a colony in Avalon, in Newfoundland, it was at once granted, and
the colony was sent out; but his visits to it in 1627 and 1629 convinced
him that the climate was too inclement for his purposes, and he requested
that it might be transferred to the northern parts of Virginia, which he
had visited on his way to England. This too was permitted; but before the
new charter had been sealed Lord Baltimore died. The patent thereupon
passed to his son Cecil, who was also a Catholic. He devoted his life to
carrying out his father's designs. The characters of the two men were, in
their larger elements, not dissimilar; and the sequel showed that colonial
enterprise could be better achieved by one man of kindly and liberal
disposition, and persistent resolve, than by a corporation, some of whose
members were sure to thwart the wishes of others. Conditions of wider
scope than the settlement of Maryland obstructed and delayed its
proprietor's plans; conflicts and changes of government in England, and
jealousy and violence on the part of Virginia, had their influence; but
this quiet, benign, resolute young man (who was but seven-and-twenty when
the grant made him sovereign of a kingdom) never lost his temper or
swerved from his aim: overcame, apparently without an effort, the
disabilities which might have been expected to hamper the professor of a
faith as little consonant with the creed of the two Charleses as of
Cromwell; was as well regarded, politically, by cavaliers as by
roundheads; and finally established his ownership and control of his
heritage, and, after a beneficent rule of over forty years, died in peace
and honor with his people and the world. The story of colonial Maryland
has a flavor of its own, and throws still further light on the subject of
popular self-government--the source and solution of American history.
The idea of the Baltimores, as outlined in their charter, and followed in
their practice, was to try the experiment of a democratic monarchy. They
would found a state the people of which should enjoy all the freedom of
action and thought that sane and well-disposed persons can desire, within
the boundaries of their personal concerns; they should not be meddled
with; each man's home should be his castle; they should say what taxes
should be collected, and what civil officers should attend to their
collective affairs. They should be like passengers on a ship, free to
sleep or wake, sit or walk, speak or be mute, eat or fast, as they
pleased: do anything in fact except scuttle the ship or cut the rigging
--or ordain to what port she should steer, or what course the helmsman
should lay. Matters of high policy, in other words, should be the care of
the proprietor; everything less than that, broadly speaking, should be
left to the colonists themselves. The proprietor could not get as close to
their personal needs as they could: and they, preoccupied with private
interests, could not see so far and wide as he could. If then it were
arranged that they should be afforded every facility and encouragement to
make their wants known: and if it were guaranteed that he would adopt
every means that experience, wisdom and good-will suggested to gratify
those wants: what more could mortal man ask? There was nothing abnormal in
the idea. The principle is the same as that on which the Creator has
placed man in nature: man is perfectly at liberty to do as he pleases;
only, he must adapt himself to the law of gravitation, to the resistance
of matter, to hot and cold, wet and dry, and to the other impersonal
necessities by which the material universe is conditioned. The control of
these natural laws, as they are called, could not advantageously be given
in charge to man; even had he the brains to manage them, he could not
spare the time from his immediate concerns. He is well content,
accordingly, to leave them to the Power that put him where he is; and he
does not feel his independence infringed upon in so doing. When his little
business goes wrong, however, he can petition his Creator to help him out:
or, what amounts to the same thing, he can find out in what respect he has
failed to conform to the laws of nature, and, by returning into harmony
with them, insure himself success. What the Creator was to mankind at
large, Lord Baltimore proposed to be to his colony; and, following this
supreme example, and binding himself to place the welfare of his people
before all other considerations, how could he make a mistake?
In arguments about the best ways of managing nations or communities, it
has been generally conceded that this scheme of an executive head on one
side, and a people freely communicating their wants to him on the other,
is sound, provided, first, that he is as solicitous about their welfare as
they themselves are; and secondly, that means exist for continuous and
unchecked intercommunication between them and him:--it being premised, of
course, that the ability of the head is commensurate with his willingness.
And leaving basic principles for the moment aside, it is notorious that
one-man power is far prompter, weightier, and cleaner-cut than the
confused and incomplete compromises of a body of representatives are apt
to be.
All this may be conceded. And yet experience shows that the one-man
system, even when the man is a Lord Baltimore, is unsatisfactory. Lord
Baltimore, indeed, finally achieved a technical success; his people loved
and honored him, his wishes were measurably realized, and, so far as he
was concerned, Maryland was the victim of fewer mistakes than were the
other colonies. But the fact that Lord Baltimore's career closed in peace
and credit was due less to what he did and desired, than to the necessity
his career was under of sooner or later coming to a close. Had he
possessed a hundred times the ability and benevolence that were his, and
had been immortal into the bargain, the people would have cast him out;
they were willing to tolerate him for a few years, more or less, but as a
fixture--No! "Tolerate" is too harsh a word; but another might be too
weak. The truth is, men do not care half so much what they get, as how
they get it. The wolf in Aesop's fable keenly wanted a share of the bones
which made his friend the mastiff so sleek; but the hint that the bones
and the collar went together drove him hungry but free back to his desert.
It is of no avail to give a man all he asks for; he resents having to ask
you for it, and wants to know by what right you have it to give. A man can
be grateful for friendship, for a sympathetic look, for a brave word
spoken in his behalf against odds--he can be your debtor for such things,
and keep his manhood uncompromised. But if you give him food, and ease, or
preferment, and condescension therewith, look for no thanks from him;
esteem yourself fortunate if he do not hold you his enemy. The gifts of
the soul are free; but material benefits are captivity. So the Maryland
colonists, recognizing that their proprietor meant well, forgave him his
generosity, and his activities in their behalf--but only because they knew
that his day would presently be past. Man is infinite as well as finite:
infinite in his claims, finite in his power of giving. And for Baltimore
to presume to give the people all they claimed, was as much as to say that
his fullness could equal their want, or that his rights and capacities
were more than theirs. He gave them all that a democracy can possess
--except the one thing that constitutes democracy; that is, absolute
self-direction. It may well be that their little ship of state, steered by
themselves, would have encountered many mishaps from which his sagacious
guidance preserved it. But rather rocks with their pilotage than port with
his: and beyond forgiving him their magnanimity could not go.
There is little more than this to be derived from study of the Maryland
experiment. Let a man manage himself, in big as well as in little things,
and he will be happy on raw clams and plain water, with a snow-drift for a
pillow--as we saw him happy in Plymouth Bay: but give him roast ortolans
and silken raiment, and manage him never so little, and you cannot relieve
his discontent. And is it not well that it should be so? Verily it is--if
America be not a dream, and immortality a delusion.
Lord Baltimore would perhaps have liked to see all his colonists
Catholics; but his experience of religious intolerance had not inflamed
him against other creeds than his own, as would have been the case with a
Spaniard; it seemed to awaken a desire to set tolerance an example. Any
one might join his community except felons and atheists; and as a matter
of fact, his assortment of colonists soon became as motley as that of
Williams in Providence. The landing of the first expedition on an island
in the Potomac was attended by the making and erecting by the Jesuit
priests of a rude cross, and the celebration of mass; but there were even
then more Protestants than Catholics in the party; and though the
leadership was Catholic for many years, it was not on account of the
numerical majority of persons of that faith. Episcopalians ejected from
New England, Puritans fleeing from the old country, Quakers and
Anabaptists who were unwelcome everywhere else, met with hospitality in
Maryland. Let them but believe in Jesus Christ, and all else was forgiven
them. Nevertheless, Catholicism was the religion of the country. Its
inhabitants might be likened to promiscuous guests at an inn whose
landlord made no criticisms on their beliefs, further than to inscribe the
Papal insignia on the signboard over his door. Thus liberty was
discriminated from license, and in the midst of tolerance there was order.
The first settlement was made on a small creek entering the north side of
the Potomac. Here an Indian village already existed; but its occupants
were on the point of deserting it, and were glad to accept payment from
the colonists for the site which they had no further use for. On the other
hand, the colonists could avail themselves of the wigwams just as they
stood, and had their maize fields ready cleared. Baltimore, meanwhile,
through his agent (and brother) Leonard Calvert, furnished them with all
the equipment they needed; and so well was the way smoothed before them,
that the colony made progress ten times as rapidly as Virginia had done.
They called their new home St. Mary's; and the date of its occupation was
1634. Their first popular assembly met for legislation in the second month
of the ensuing year. In that and subsequent meetings they asserted their
right of jurisdiction, their right to enact laws, the freedom of "holy
church": his lordship gently giving them their head. In 1642, perhaps to
disburden themselves of some of their obligation to him, they voted him a
subsidy. Almost the only definite privilege which he seems to have
retained was that of pre-emption of lands. At this period (1643) all
England was by the ears, and Baltimore's hold upon his colony was relaxed.
In Virginia and the other colonies, which had governors of their own, the
neglect of the mother country gave them opportunity for progress; but the
people of Maryland, no longer feeling the sway of their non-resident
proprietor, and having no one else to look after them, became disorderly;
which would not have happened, had they been empowered to elect a ruler
from among themselves. Baltimore's enemies took advantage of these
disturbances to petition for his removal from the proprietorship; but he
was equal to the occasion; and by confirming his colonists in all just
liberties, with freedom of conscience in the foreground, he composed their
dissensions, and took away his enemies' ground of complaint. In 1649, the
legislature sat for the first time in two branches, so that one might be a
check upon the other. Upon this principle all American legislatures are
still formed.
But the reign of Cromwell in England gave occasion for sophistries in
Maryland. All other Englishmen, in the colonies or at home, were members
of a commonwealth; but Baltimore still claimed the Marylanders'
allegiance. On what grounds?--for since the king from whom he derived his
power was done away with, so must be the derivative power. Baltimore stood
between them and republicanism. To give edge to the predicament, the
colony was menaced by covetous Virginia on one hand, and by fugitive
Charles II., with a governor of his own manufacture, on the other.
Calamity seemed at hand.
In 1650, the year after Charles I.'s execution, the Parliament appointed
commissioners to bring royalist colonies into line; Maryland was to be
reannexed to Virginia; Bennett, then governor of Virginia, and Clairborne,
unseated Stone, Baltimore's lieutenant, appointed an executive council,
and ordered that burgesses were to be elected by supporters of Cromwell
only. The question of reannexation was referred to Parliament. Baltimore
protested that Maryland had been less royalist than Virginia; and before
the Parliament could decide what to do, it was dissolved, carrying with it
the authority of Bennett and Clairborne. Stone now reappeared defiant; but
the Virginians attacked him, and he surrendered on compulsion. The
Virginian government decreed that no Roman Catholics could hereafter vote
or be elected.
Baltimore, taking his stand on his charter, declared these doings
mutinous; and Cromwell supported him. Stone once more asserted himself;
but in the skirmish with the Virginians that followed, he was defeated,
yielded (he seems to have had no granite in his composition), and, with
his supporters, was ordered to be shot. His life was spared, however; but
Cromwell, again appealed to, refused to act. The ownership of Maryland was
therefore still undetermined. It was not until 1667 that Baltimore and
Bennett agreed to compromise their dispute. The boundary between the two
domains was maintained, but settlers from Virginia were not to be
disturbed in their holdings. The second year after Cromwell's death, the
representatives of Maryland met and voted themselves an independent
assembly, making Fendall, Baltimore's appointee, subject to their will.
Finally, being weary of turmoil, they made it felony to alter what they
had done. The colony was then abreast of Virginia in political privileges,
and had a population of about ten thousand, in spite of its vicissitudes.
But the quiet, invincible Lord Baltimore was still to be reckoned with.
At the Restoration, he sent his deputy to the colony, which submitted to
his authority, and Fendall was convicted of treason for having allowed the
assembly to overrule him. A general amnesty was proclaimed, however, and
the kindliness of the government during the remainder of the proprietor's
undisputed sway attracted thousands of settlers from all the nations of
Europe. Between Baltimore and the people, a give-and-take policy was
established, one privilege being set against another, so that their
liberties were maintained, and his rights recognized. Though he stood in
his own person for all that was opposed to democracy, he presided over a
community which was essentially democratic; and he had the breadth of mind
to acknowledge that because he owned allegiance to kings and popes, was no
reason why others should do so. Suum cuique. Could he but have gone a step
further, and denied himself the gratification of retaining his hard-earned
proprietorship, he would have been one of the really great men of history.
The ripple of events which we have recorded may seem too insignificant;
of still less import is the story of the efforts of Clairborne, from 1634:
to 1647, to gain, or retain possession of Kent Island, in the Chesapeake,
on which he had "squatted" before Baltimore got his charter. Yet, from
another point of view, even slight matters may weigh when they are related
to the stirring of the elements which are to crystallize into a nation.
Maryland, like a bird half tamed, was ready to fly away when the cage door
was left open, and yet was not averse to its easy confinement when the
door was shut again. But, unlike the bird, time made it fonder of liberty,
instead of leading it to forget it; and when the cage fell apart, it was
at home in the free air.
The settlement of the Carolinas, during the twenty years or so from 1660
to 1680, presented features of singular grotesqueness. There was, on one
side, a vast wilderness covering the region now occupied by North and
South Carolina, and westward to the Pacific. It had been nibbled at, for a
hundred years, by Spaniards, French and English, but no permanent hold had
been got upon it. Here were thousands upon thousands of square miles in
which nature rioted unrestrained, with semi-tropic fervor; the topography
of which was unknown, and whose character in any respect was a matter of
pure conjecture. This wilderness was on one side; on the other were a
worthless king, a handful of courtiers, and a couple of highly gifted
doctrinaires, Lord Shaftesbury and John Locke, the philosopher. We can
picture Charles II. lolling in his chair, with a map of the Americas
spread out on his knees, while the other gentlemen in big wigs and silk
attire, and long rapiers dangling at their sides, are grouped about him.
"I'll give you all south of Virginia," says he, indicating the territory
with a sweep of his long fingers. "Ashley, you and your friend Locke can
draw up a constitution, and stuff it full of your fine ideas; they sound
well: we'll see how they work. You shall be kings every man of you; and
may you like it no worse than I do! You'll have no France or Holland to
thwart you--only bogs and briers and a few naked blacks. Your charter
shall pass the seals to-morrow: and much good may it do you!"
So the theorists and the courtiers set out to subdue the untutored
savageness of nature with a paper preamble and diagrams and rules and
inhibitions, and orders of nobility and a college of heralds, and
institutions of slavery and serfdom, and definitions of freeholders and
landgraves, caciques and palatines; and specifications of fifths for
proprietors, fifths for the nobility, and the rest for the common herd,
who were never to be permitted to be anything but the common herd, with no
suffrage, no privileges, and no souls. All contingencies were provided
against, except the one contingency, not wholly unimportant, that none of
the proposals of the Model Constitution could be carried into effect.
Strange, that Ashley Cooper--as Lord Shaftesbury was then--one of the most
brilliant men in Europe, and John Locke, should get together and draw
squares over a sheet of paper, each representing four hundred and eighty
thousand acres, with a cacique and landgraves and their appurtenances in
each--and that they should fail to perceive that corresponding areas would
never be marked out in the pathless forests, and that noblemen could not
be found nor created to take up their stand, like chessmen, each in his
lonely and inaccessible morass or mountain or thicket, and exercise the
prerogatives of the paper preamble over trees and panthers and birds of
the air! How could men of such radiant intelligence as Locke and
Shaftesbury unquestionably were, show themselves so radically ignorant of
the nature of their fellowmen, and of the elementary principles of
colonization? The whole thing reads, to-day, like some stupendous jest;
yet it was planned in grave earnest, and persons were found to go across
the Atlantic and try to make it work.
Lord Shaftesbury was one of the Hampshire Coopers, and the first earl. He
was a sort of English Voltaire: small and thin, nervous and fractious,
with a great cold brain, no affections and no illusions; he had faith in
organizations, but none in man; was destitute of compunctions, careless of
conventions and appearances, cynical, penetrating, and frivolous. He was a
skeptic in religion, but a devotee of astrology; easily worried in safety,
but cool and audacious in danger. He despised if he did not hate the
people, and regarded kings as an unavoidable nuisance; the state, he
thought, was the aristocracy, whose business it was to keep the people
down and hold the king in check. His career--now supporting the royalists,
now the roundheads, now neither--seems incoherent and unprincipled; but in
truth he was one of the least variable men of his time; he held to his
course, and king and parliament did the tacking. He was an incorruptible
judge, though he took bribes; and an unerring one, though he disregarded
forms of law. He was tried for treason, and acquitted; joined the Monmouth
conspiracy, and escaped to Holland, where he died at the age of sixty-two.
What he lacked was human sympathies, which are the beginning of wisdom;
and this deficiency it was, no doubt, that led him into the otherwise
incomprehensible folly of the Carolina scheme.
Locke could plead the excuse of being totally unfamiliar with practical
life; he was a philosopher of abstractions, who made an ideal world to fit
his theories about it. He could write an essay on the Understanding, but
was unversed in Common-sense. His nature was more calm and normal than
Shaftesbury's, but in their intellectual conclusions they were not
dissimilar. The views about the common people which Sir William Berkeley
expressed with stupid brutality, they stated with punctual elegance. They
were well mated for the purpose in hand, and they performed it with due
deliberation and sobriety. It was not until five years after the grant was
made that the constitution was written and sealed. It achieved an
instantaneous success in England, much as a brilliant novel might, in our
time; and the authors were enthusiastically belauded. The proprietors
--Albemarle, Craven, Clarendon, Berkeley, Sir William Berkeley, Sir John
Colleton and Sir George Carteret, and Shaftesbury himself--began to look
about for their serfs and caciques, and to think of their revenues.
Meanwhile the primeval forest across three thousand miles of ocean laughed
with its innumerable leaves, and waved its boughs in the breath of the
spirit of liberty. The laws of the study went forth to battle with the
laws of nature.
Ignorant of these courtly and scholarly proceedings, a small knot of
bonafide settlers had built their huts on Albemarle Sound, and had for
some years been living there in the homeliest and most uneducated peace
and simplicity. Some had come from Virginia, some from New England, and
others from the island of Bermuda. They had their little assembly and
their governor Stevens, their humble plantations, their modest trade,
their beloved solitudes, and the plainest and least obtrusive laws
imaginable. They paddled up and down their placid bayous and rivers in
birch-bark canoes; they shot deer and 'possums for food and panthers for
safety, they loved their wives and begat their children, they wore shirts
and leggins of deerskin like the Indians, and they breathed the pure
wholesomeness of the warm southern air. When to these backwoods innocents
was borne from afar the marvelous rumors of the silk-stockinged and
lace-ruffled glories, originated during an idle morning in the king's
dressing-room, which were to transfigure their forest into trim gardens
and smug plantations, surrounding royal palaces and sumptuous hunting
pavilions, perambulated by uniformed officials, cultivated by meek armies
of serfs, looking up from their labors only to doff their caps to lordly
palatines and lily-fingered ladies with high heels and low corsages: when
they tried to picture to themselves their solemn glades and shadow-haunted
streams and inviolate hills, their eyries of eagles and lairs of stag and
puma, the savage beauty of their perilous swamps, all the wild
magnificence of this pure home of theirs--metamorphosed by royal edict
into a magnified Versailles, in which lutes and mandolins should take the
place of the wolf's howl and the panther's scream, the keen scent of the
pine balsam be replaced by the reek of musk and patchouli, the honest
sanctity of their couches of fern give way to the embroidered corruption
of a fine lady's bedchamber, the simple vigor of their pioneer parliament
bewitch itself into a glittering senate chamber, where languid chancellors
fingered their golden chains and exchanged witty epigrams with big-wigged,
snuff-taking cavaliers:--when they attempted to house these strange ideas
in their unsophisticated brains, they must have stared at one another with
a naive perplexity which slowly broadened their tanned and bearded visages
into contagious grins. They looked at their hearty, clear-eyed wives, and
watched the gambols of their sturdy children, and shook their heads, and
turned to their work once more.
The first movements of the new dispensation took the form of trying to
draw the colonists together into towns, of reviving the Navigation Acts,
of levying taxes on their infant commerce, and in general of tying fetters
of official red tape on the brawny limbs of a primitive and natural
civilization. The colony was accused of being the refuge of outlaws and
traitors, rogues and heretics; and Sir William Berkeley, governor of
Virginia, one of the proprietors under the Model Constitution, was deputed
to make as much mischief in the virgin settlement as he could.
The colonists numbered about four thousand, spread over a large
territory; they did not want to desert their palmetto thatched cabins and
strenuously-cleared acres; they disliked crowding into towns; they saw no
justice in paying to intangible and alien proprietors a penny tax on their
tobacco exports to New England--though they paid it nevertheless. They
particularly objected to the interference of Governor Berkeley, for they
knew him well. And when the free election of their assembly was attacked,
they sent emissaries to England to remonstrate, and meanwhile, John
Culpepper leading, and without waiting for the return of their emissaries,
they arose and wiped out the things and persons that were objectionable,
and then returned serenely to their business. They did not fly into a
passion, and froth at the mouth, and massacre and torture; but quietly and
inflexibly, with hardly a keener flash from their fearless eyes, they put
things to rights, and thought no more about it.
Such treasonable proceedings, however, fluttered the council chambers in
London sorely, and stout John Culpepper, who believed in popular liberty
and was not afraid to say so, went to England to justify what had been
done. He was arrested and put on trial, though he demanded to be tried, if
at all, in the place where the offense was committed. The intent of his
adversaries was not to give him justice, but simply to hang him; and why
go to the trouble and expense of carrying him to Carolina to do that? He
went near to becoming a martyr, did stout John; but, unexpectedly,
Shaftesbury, who might believe in despotism, but who fretted to behold
injustice, undertook his defense and brought him out clear. The rest of
the "rebels" were amnestied the following year, 1681. But one Seth Sothel,
who had bought out Lord Clarendon's proprietary rights, was sent out as
governor; and after escaping from the Algerine pirates, who captured and
kept him for a couple of years, he arrived at Albemarle, commissioned, as
Bancroft admirably puts it, to "Transform a log cabin into a baronial
castle, a negro slave into a herd of leet-men." Sothel was not long in
perceiving that this was beyond his powers, but he could steal: and so he
did for a few years, when the colonists, thinking he had enough, unseated
him, tried him, and sentenced him to a year's exile and to nevermore be
officer of theirs.
These planters of North Carolina were good Americans from the beginning,
endowed with a courage and love of liberty which foretold the spirit of
Washington's army,--and a religious tolerance which did not prevent them
from listening with sympathy and approval to the spiritual harangues of
Fox, the Quaker, who sojourned among them with gratifying results. Their
prejudice against towns continued, and one must walk far to visit them,
with only marks on the forest trees to guide. They were inveterately
contented, and having emancipated themselves from the blight of the Model
Constitution, rapidly became prosperous. The only effect of Messrs. Locke
and Shaftesbury's scheme of an aristocratic Utopia was to make the
settlers conscious of their strength and devoted to their freedom. Indeed,
the North Carolinians were in great part men who had not only fled from
the oppressions of England, but had found even the mild restraints of the
other colonies irksome.
The fate of the Model in South Carolina was similar, though the
preliminary experiences were different. When Joseph West, agent for the
proprietors, and William Sayle, experienced in colonizing, took three
shiploads of emigrants to the junction of the Ashley and Cooper rivers,
about twenty miles south of latitude 33°, they had a copy of the Model
with them. But the first thing they did after getting ashore was to vote
that its provisions were impracticable, and to revise it to such a degree
that, when it was sent over to England for approval, its authors did not
recognize their work, and disowned it. But the settlers constituted their
assembly on the general lines which might now be called American, and put
up their huts, in 1672, on the ground where now stands Charleston. The
climate was too hot for white labor, and the timely arrival of negro
slaves was welcome; in a few years they doubled the number of the whites.
The staple crops of the southern plantations needed much more work than
those of New England and the north, and this, as well as the preference of
the negroes themselves for the warmer climates, determined the
distribution of black slavery on the Atlantic coast.
Dutch settlers presently joined the English; a Scotch-Irish colony at
Port Royal was set upon by the Spaniards, who, in accordance with the
characteristic Spanish policy, massacred the inhabitants and burned the
houses. But later the revocation by Louis XIV. of the amnesty to Huguenots
caused the latter to fly their country and disperse themselves over Europe
and America; no higher or finer class of men and women ever joined the
ranks of exile, and they were everywhere welcomed. Colonies of them
settled all along the Atlantic seaboard; and around Charleston many from
Languedoc found a congenial home, and became a valuable and distinguished
part of the population. America could not have been complete without the
leaven of the heroic French Protestants.
Meanwhile the proprietors were gradually submitting, with no good grace,
however, to the inevitable. Their Model remained a model--something never
to be put to practical use. On paper was it born, and on paper should it
remain forever. The proprietors were kings, by grace of Charles II., but
they had neither army nor navy, and their subjects declined to be serfs.
They declined into the status of land speculators; the governors whom they
sent out did nothing but fill their pockets and let the people have the
rest. At last, it was enough for the proprietors to suggest anything for
the people to negative it, whether it were good or bad. They not only
avowed their natural right to do as they pleased, but deemed it due to
their self-respect not to do what was pleasing to their tinsel sovereigns
in London. And finally, when Colleton, one of the sovereigns in question,
tried to declare martial law in the colony, on the plea of danger from
Indians or Spanish, the indomitable freemen treated him as their brethren
at Albemarle had treated Sothel. The next year saw William and Mary on the
English throne; Shaftesbury had died seven years before; and the Great
Model subsided without a bubble into the vacuum of historical absurdities.
We left Virginia awaiting the return of the envoys who had gone to ask
Charles for justice and protection against the tyranny of Berkeley.
Charles, as we know, first promised the reforms, and then broke his
promise, as all Stuarts must. But before the envoys could return with
their heavy news, there had been stirring things done and suffered in
Virginia.
The character of Berkeley is as detestable as any known in the annals of
the American colonies. Many of his acts, and all the closing scenes of his
career, seem hardly compatible with moral sanity; in our day, when science
is so prone to find the explanation of crime in insanity, he would
undoubtedly have been adjudged to the nearest asylum. In his early years,
he had been stupid and illiberal, but nothing worse; in his old age, he
seemed to seek out opportunities of wickedness and outrage, and at last he
gave way to transports which could only be likened to those of a fiend
from the Pit, permitted for a season to afflict the earth. He was as base
as he was wicked; a thief, and perjured, as well as an insatiable
murderer. The only trait that seems to ally him with manhood is itself
animal and repulsive. He had wholly abandoned any pretense of
self-control; and in some of the outbursts of his frenzy he seems to have
become insensible even to the suggestions of physical fear. But this can
hardly be accorded the name of courage; rather is it to be attributed to
the suffusion of blood to the brain which drives the Malay to run amuck.
Virginia had been nurtured in liberty, and was ill prepared for
despotism. On the contrary, she was almost ready to doubt the wisdom or
convenience of any government whatever, except such as was spontaneously
furnished by the generous and magnanimous instincts of her people. There
were no towns, and none of the vice and selfishness which crowded
populations engender. Roads, bridges, public works of any sort were
unknown; the population seldom met except at races or to witness court
proceedings. The great planters lived in comparative comfort, but they
were as much in love with freedom as were the common people. This state of
things was the outcome of the growth of fifty years; and most of the eight
thousand inhabitants of the colony were born on the soil, and loved it as
the only home they knew.
The chief injury they had suffered was from the depredations of the
Indians, who, on their side, could plead that they had received less than
justice at the colonists' hands. Border raids and killings became more and
more frequent and alarming; the savages had learned the use of muskets,
and were good marksmen. They built a fort on the Maryland border, and for
a time resisted siege operations; and when at length some of the chiefs
came out to parley, they were seized and shot. The rest of the Indian
garrison escaped by night, and slaughtered promiscuously all whom they
could surprise along the countryside. A force was raised to check them,
and avenge the murders; but before it could come in contact with them,
Berkeley sent out a peremptory summons that they should return.
What was the explanation of this extraordinary step? Simply that the
Governor had the monopoly of the Indian trade, which was very valuable,
and would not permit the Indians who traded with him to be driven away. In
order to supply his already overloaded pockets with money, he was willing
to see the red men murder with impunity, and with the brutalities of
torture and outrage, the men, women and children of his own race. But the
Indians themselves seem admirable in contrast with the inhumanity of this
gray-haired, wine-bloated, sordid cavalier of seventy.
The troops on which the safety of the colonists depended reluctantly
retired. Immediately the savages renewed their attacks; three hundred
settlers were killed. Still Berkeley refused to permit anything to be
done; forts might be erected on the borders, but these, besides being of
great expense to the people, were wholly useless for their defense,
inasmuch as the savages could without difficulty slip by them under cover
of the forest. The raids continued, and the plantations were abandoned,
till not one in seven remained. The inhabitants were terror-stricken; no
man's life was safe. At last permission was asked that the people might
raise and equip a force at their own expense, in the exercise of the
universal right of self-protection; but even this was violently forbidden
by the Governor, who threatened punishment on any who should presume to
take arms against them. All traffic with them had also been interdicted;
but it was known that Berkeley himself continued his trading with those
whose hands were red with the blood of the wives, fathers and children of
Virginia.
Finally, in 1676, the report came that an army of Indians were
approaching Jamestown. Unless resistance were at once made, there seemed
nothing to prevent the extinction of the colony. Berkeley, apparently for
no better reason than that he would not recede from a position once taken,
adhered to his order that nothing should be done.
There was at that time in Virginia a young Englishman of about thirty,
named Nathaniel Bacon. He was descended from good ancestors, and had
received a thorough education, including terms in the Inns of Court. He
was intellectual, thoughtful, and self-contained, with a clear mind, a
generous nature, and the power of winning and controlling men. He had
arrived in the colony a little more than a year before, and had been
chosen to the council; he was wealthy and aristocratic, yet a known friend
of the people. Born in 1642, he was familiar with revolutions, and had
formed his own opinions as to the rights of man. He had a plantation on
the site of the present city of Richmond; and during the late Indian
troubles, had lost his overseer. Coming down on his affairs to Jamestown,
he fell into talk with some friends, who suggested crossing the river to
see some of the volunteers who had come together for defense. These men
were in a mood of excited exasperation at the sinister conduct of the
governor, and ready to follow extreme counsels had they had a leader with
the boldness and ability to put himself at their head.
The tall, slender figure and grave features of Bacon were well-known. As
he advanced toward the troop of stalwart young fellows, who were sullenly
discussing the situation, he was recognized; and something seems to have
suggested to them that he was come with a purpose. Conclusions are sudden
at such times, and impulses contagious as fire. He was the leader whom
they sought. "A Bacon--a Bacon!" shouted some one; and instantly the cry
was taken up. They thronged around him, welcoming him, cheering him,
exclaiming that they would follow him, that with them at his back he
should save the country in spite of the governor! They were fiery and
emotional, after the manner of the sons of the Old Dominion, and the
wrongs of many kinds which had long been rankling in their hearts now
demanded to be requited by some action--no matter how daring. Virginians
never shrank from danger.
Bacon had been wholly unprepared for this outburst; but he had a strong,
calm soul, a ready brain, and the blood of youth. He knew what the colony
had endured, and that it had nothing to hope from the present government.
He had come to America after making the European tour, intending only a
visit; but he had grown attached to Virginia, and now that chance had put
this opportunity to help her, he resolved to accept it. He would throw in
his lot with these spirited and fearless young patriots--the first men in
America who had the right to call the country their own. Standing before
them, with his head bared, and in a voice that all could hear, he solemnly
pledged himself to lead them against the Indians, and then aid them to
recover the liberties which had been wrested from them. "And do you," he
added, "pledge yourselves to me!" His words were heard with tumultuous
enthusiasm, and a round-robin was signed, binding all to stick to their
captain and to one another. That is a document which history would fain
have preserved.
With an army of three hundred Virginians, Bacon set forward against the
Indians. Meanwhile Berkeley, enraged at this slight on his authority,
called some troops together and despatched them to bring back "the
rebels." Thus was seen the singular spectacle of a government force
marching to apprehend men who were risking their lives freely to repel a
danger imminent and common to all.
But Berkeley was going too far. Bacon's act had the sympathy of all
except such as were as corrupt as the governor, and the men of the lower
counties revolted, and demanded that the long scandal of the continuous
assembly should cease forthwith. Berkeley was intimidated; he had not
believed that any spirit was left in the colony; he recalled his men, and
consented to the assembly's dissolution. By the time Bacon and his three
hundred got back from their successful campaign, the writs for a new
election were out; and he was unanimously chosen burgess from Henrico. The
assembly of which he thus became a member was for the most part in
sympathy with him; and though, for the benefit of the record, censure was
passed upon the irregularity of his campaign, and he was required to
apologize for fighting without a commission, yet he was at the same time
caressed and praised on all sides, returned to the council, and dubbed the
darling of Virginia's hopes. The assembly then proceeded to undo all the
evil and clean out all the rottenness that had disgraced the conduct of
their predecessors. Taxes, church tyranny, restriction of the franchise,
illegal assessments, fees, and liquor-dealing were done away with; two
magistrates were proved thieves and disfranchised, and trade with Indians
was for the present stopped. Bacon received a commission; but Berkeley
refused to sign it; and when Bacon appealed to the country, and returned
with five hundred men to demand his rights, the governor was beside
himself with fury.
Private letters and other documents, made public only long after this
date, are the authority for what occurred; but though certain facts are
given, explanations are seldom available. Berkeley appears to have been
holding court when Bacon and his followers appeared; it is said that he
ran out and confronted them, tore his shirt open and declared that sooner
should they shoot him than he would sign the commission of that rebel; and
the next moment, changing his tactics, he offered to settle the issue
between Bacon and himself by a duel. All this does not sound like the acts
of a man in his sober senses. It seems probable either that the old
reprobate was intoxicated, or that his mind was disordered by passion.
Bacon, of course, declined to match his youthful vigor against his
decrepit enemy, as the latter must have known he would: and told him
temperately that the commission he demanded was to enable him to repel the
savages who were murdering their fellow colonists unchecked. The governor,
after some further parley, again altered his behavior, and now overpowered
Bacon with maudlin professions of esteem for his patriotic energy; signed
his commission, and sent dispatches to England warmly commending him. A
formal amnesty, obliterating all past acts of the popular champion and his
supporters which could be construed as irregular, was drawn up and
ratified by the governor; and the clouds which so long had lowered over
Virginia seemed to have been at last in the deep bosom of the ocean
buried. To those whom coincidences interest it will be significant that
this victory for the people was won on the 4th of July, 1676.
Operations against the Indians were now vigorously resumed; but Berkeley
had not yet completed the catalogue of his iniquities. Bacon's back was
scarcely turned, before he violated the amnesty which he had just
ratified, and tried to rouse public sentiment against the liberator. In
this, however, he signally failed, as also in his attempt to raise a levy
to arrest him; and frightened at the revelation of his weakness, he fled
in a panic to Accomack, a peninsula on the eastern side of Chesapeake Bay.
Word of his proceedings had in the meantime been conveyed to Bacon by
Drummond, former governor of North Carolina, and Lawrence. "Shall he who
commissioned us to protect the country from the heathen, betray our
lives?" said Bacon. "I appeal to the king and parliament!" He established
himself in Williamsburg; at Drummond's suggestion Berkeley's flight was
taken to mean his withdrawal from the governorship--which, at any rate,
had now passed its appointed limit--and a summons was sent out to the
gentlemen of Virginia to meet for consultation as to the future conduct of
the colony. It was at this juncture that the envoys returned from England,
with the dark news that Charles had refused all relief.
At the conference, after full discussion, it was voted that the colony
take the law into their own hands, and maintain themselves not only
against the Indians and Berkeley, but if need were against England
herself. "I fear England no more than a broken straw," said Sarah
Drummond, snapping a stick in her hands as she spoke: the women of
Virginia were as resolved as the men. Pending these contingencies, Bacon
with his little army again set out in pursuit of the Indians; hearing
which, Berkeley, with a train of mercenaries which he had contrived to
collect, crossed from Accomack and landed at Jamestown, where he repeated
his refrain of "rebels!" He promised freedom to whatever slaves of the
colony would enlist on his side, and fortified the little town. The crews
of some English ships in the harbor assisted him; and in the sequel these
tars were the only ones of his rabble that stayed by him. The neighborhood
was alarmed, fearing any kind of enormity, and messengers rode through the
woods post haste, and swam the rivers, in the sultry September weather, to
find and recall their defenders, and summon them to resist a worse foe
than the red man. Before they could reach the young leader, the Indians
had been routed, the army disbanded, and Bacon, with a handful of
followers, was on his way to his plantation. They were weary with the
fatigues of the campaign, but on learning that the prime source of the
troubles was intrenched in Jamestown, and that "man, woman and child" were
in peril of slavery, they turned their horses' heads southeastward, and
galloped to the rescue. They gathered recruits on their way--no one could
resist the eloquence of Bacon--and halting at such of the plantations as
were owned by royalist sympathizers, they compelled their wives to mount
and accompany them as hostages. This indicates to what extremes the
violence of Berkeley was expected to go. It was evening when they came in
sight of the enemy. But the moon was already aloft, and as the western
light faded, her mellow radiance flooded the scene, giving it the
semblance of peace. But the impatient Virginians wished to attack at once;
and a lesser man than Bacon might have yielded to their urging. Knowing,
however, that the country was with him, and feeling that the enemy must
sooner or later succumb, he would not win by a dashing, bloody exploit
what time was sure to give him. He ordered an intrenchment to be dug, and
prepared for a siege. But there was no lust for battle in the disorderly
and incoherent force which the frantic appeals and reckless promises of
the governor had assembled; they were beaten already, and could not be
induced to make a sortie. Desertions began, and all the objurgations,
supplications and melodramatic extravaganzas of Berkeley were impotent to
stop them; the more shrilly he shrieked, the faster did his sorry
aggregation melt away. When it became evident that there would soon be
none left save himself and the sailors, he ceased his blustering, and
scuttled off toward Gloucester and the Rappahannock.
Bacon, Drummond, Lawrence and their men occupied the abandoned town, in
which some of them owned houses, and burned it to the ground. The act was
deliberate; the town records were first removed; and the men who had most
to lose by the conflagration were the first to set the torch.
Jamestown at that time contained hardly twenty buildings all told; but it
was the first settlement of the Dominion, and sentiment would fain have
preserved it. A mossy ruin, draped in vines, is all that remains of it
now. The ascertainable causes of its destruction seem inadequate; yet the
circumstances show that it could not have been done in mere wantonness.
Civilized warfare permits the destruction of the enemy's property; but the
enemy had retreated, and the expectation was that he would never return.
That Bacon had reasons, his previous record justifies us in believing; but
what they were is matter of conjecture. As it is, the burning of Jamestown
is the only passage in his brief and gallant career which can be construed
as a blemish upon it. Unfortunately, it was, also, all but the final one.
He pursued Berkeley, and the army of the latter, instead of fighting,
marched over to him with a unanimity which left the governor almost
without a companion in his chagrin. The whole of Virginia was now in
Bacon's hand; he had no foes; he was called Deliverer; he had never met
reverse; he was a man of intellect, judgment and honor, and he was in the
prime of his youth; in such a country, beloved, and supported by such a
people, what might he not have hoped to achieve? Men like him are rare; in
a country just emerging into political consciousness, he was doubly
precious. There was no one to take his place; the return of Berkeley meant
all that was imaginable of evil; and yet Bacon was to die, and Berkeley
was to return.
In the trenches before Jamestown, Bacon had contracted the seeds of a
fever which now, in the hour of his triumph, overcame him. After a short
struggle he succumbed; and his men, fearing, apparently, that the ghoulish
revenge of the old governor might subject his remains to insult, sunk his
body in the river; and none know where lie the bones of the first American
patriot who died in arms against oppression. His worth is proved by the
confusion and disorganization which ensued upon his death. Cheeseman,
Hansford, Wilford and Drummond could not make head against disaster. On
the governor's side, Robert Beverly developed the qualities of a leader,
and a series of small engagements left the patriots at his mercy. Berkeley
was re-established in his place; and then began the season of his revenge.
His victims were the gentlemen of Virginia; the flower of the province.
He had no mercy; his sole thought was to add insult to the bitterness of
death. He would not spare their lives; he would not shoot them; they must
perish on the gallows, not as soldiers, but as rebels. When a young wife
pleaded for her gallant husband, declaring that it was she who persuaded
him to join the patriotic movement, Berkeley denied her prayer with coarse
brutality. When Drummond was brought before him, he assured him of his
pleasure in their meeting: "You shall be hanged in half an hour." One can
see that mean, flushed countenance, ravaged by time and intemperance, with
bloodshot eyes, gloating over the despair of his foes, and searching for
means to torture their minds while destroying their bodies. Trial by jury
was not quick or sure enough for Berkeley; he condemned them by
court-martial and the noose was round their necks at once. Their families
were stripped of their property and sent adrift to subsist on charity. In
his bloodthirstiness, he never forgot his pecuniary advantage, and his
thievish fingers grasped all the valuables that his murderous instincts
brought within his power. But the spectacle is too revolting for
contemplation.
"He would have hanged half the country if we had let him alone," was the
remark of a member of the assembly. It was voted that the execution should
cease; more than two-score men had already been strangled for defending
their homes and resisting oppression. Even Charles in London was annoyed
when he heard of the wasteful malignity of "the old fool," and sent word
of his disapproval and displeasure. A successor was sent over to supersede
him; but he at first refused to go at the king's command, though he had
ever used the king's name as the warrant for his crimes. He had sold
powder and shot to the Indians to kill his own people with; he had
appropriated the substance of widows and orphans whom he had made such; he
had punished by public whipping all who were reported to have spoken
against him; he forbade the printing-press; but all had been done "for the
King". And now he resisted the authority of the king himself. But Charles,
for once, was determined, and Berkeley, under the disgrace of severe
reprimand, was forced to go. The joy bells clashed out the people's
delight as the ship which carried him dropped down the harbor, and the
firing of guns was like an anticipation of our celebration of Independence
Day. He stood on the poop, in the beauty of the morning, shaking out
curses from his trembling hands, in helpless hatred of the fair land and
gallant people that he had done his utmost to make miserable. In England,
the king would have none of him, and he met with nothing but rebuffs and
condemnation on all sides. The power which he had misused was forever
gone; he was old, and shattered in constitution; he was disgraced,
flouted, friendless and alone. He died soon after his arrival, of
mortification; he had lived only to do evil, and to withhold him from it
was to take his life away.
It is not the function of the historian to condemn. Berkeley was by birth
and training an aristocrat and a cavalier, and he was a creature of his
age and station. He had been taught to believe that the patrician is of
another flesh and blood than the plebeian; that authority can be enforced
only by tyranny; that the only right is that of birth, and of the
strongest. He was early placed in a position where every personal
indulgence was made easy to him, where there was none to call in question
his authority, and where there was temptation to assert authority by
oppression, and by arrogating absolute license to act as the whim
prompted, and to lay hands on whatever he coveted. Add to these conditions
a nature congenitally without generous instincts, a narrow brain, and a
sensual temperament, and we have gone far to account for the phenomenon
which Berkeley finally, in his approaching senility, presented. He was the
type of the worst traits that caused England ultimately to forfeit
America; the concentration of whatever is opposite to popular liberties.
His deeds must be execrated; but we cannot put him beyond the pale of
human nature, or deny that under different circumstances he would have
been a better man. We may admit, too, that, in the wisdom of Providence,
he was placed where, by doing so much mischief, he was involuntarily the
cause of more good than he could ever willingly have accomplished. He
taught the people how to hate despotism, and how to struggle against it.
He wrought a mutual understanding and sympathy between the upper and lower
orders; he led them to define to their own minds what things are
indispensable to the existence of true democracy. These are some of the
uses which he, and such as he, in their own despite subserved. He and the
young Bacon were mortal foes; but he, by opposing Bacon, and murdering his
friends, aided the cause for which they laid down their lives.
After his departure there ensued a period of ten years or more, during
which the pressure upon Virginia seemed rather to grow heavier than to
lighten. The acts of Bacon's assembly were repealed; all the former abuses
were restored; the public purse was shamelessly robbed; the suffrage was
restricted; the church was restored to power. In 1677 the Dominion became
the property of one Culpepper, who had the title of governor for life; and
the restraints, such as they were, of its existence as a royal colony were
removed. But Culpepper's course was so corrupt as to necessitate his
removal, and in 1684 the king resumed his sway. James II. reached the
English throne the following year, and his persecutions of his enemies in
England gave good citizens to America. But the Virginians, who could be
wronged and oppressed, but never crushed, protested against the arbitrary
use of the king's prerogative; they were punished for their temerity, but
rose more determined from the struggle. No man could be sent to Virginia
who was strong enough to destroy its resolve for liberty.
And now the English Revolution was at hand; and we are to inquire what
influence the new dispensation was to have on the awakening national
spirit of the American colonies.
