The Revolution in Virginia

Preface

The present work is chiefly based on the original sources of information in the archives department of the Virginia State Library. This great collection has been used before, of course, and some of the papers are in print, but I think that no one but myself has ever examined it exhaustively with a view to such a book as The Revolution in Virginia. I have given references to the manuscript collection as it is now classified in those specific cases where references may be of use; in the case of generahzations I have followed the inferences which I have drawn from my study of the mass of material.

I am under obligations to Mr. William G. Stanard, of the Virginia Historical Society; Dr. W. E. Dodd, of the University of Chicago; Dr. D. R. Anderson, of Richmond College; and Dr. Douglas S. Freeman, for reading the manuscript and making useful suggestions. My debt to Mr. James D. Wise, who spent much time in aiding me to make revisions, is so great that I am at a loss to devise a fitting acknowledgment.

H. J. ECKENRODE.

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Contents

I. Beginning of the Revolution .... 1 II. The Radicals 32

III. The Struggle for Norfolk . . . .58

IV. The County Committees 96

Chapter I

The American Revolution was a movement with two distinct aspects. On one side it was marked by the union of hitherto independent communities and the beginning of common institutions and of a common life. The other phase witnessed the progress of the revolt within the colonies themselves and the creation of their individual governments. The method of historians in treating of the Revolution generally has been to take the most striking incidents in the history of the colonies in the years immediately preceding 1776 and join them to an account of the workings of the Continental Congress and the campaigns of the Continental army. The internal growth of the newmade States is almost entirely ignored, probably because in some instances it is not well known. But in this stage of American history, when the national life was so feeble, the progress of events in Massachusetts and Virginia was more important than the deliberations of Congress. No adequate account has been given of the spiritual change which came over Massachusetts and Virginia in the Revolutionary epoch and which had such great influence on the development of the nation. Because the early history of the individual States has not been well worked out, there are certain hiatuses in our histories, such, for instance, as the lack of an account of the origin of the Democratic Party. Historians give us the impression that it sprang full-grown from the head of Jefferson, that he was its creator. But the Democratic Party had come into existence in an undefined way before the great political genius of Jefferson laid hold of it and moulded it to his purposes. Jefferson was a Virginian and the Democratic Party as a political movement with real purposes was hkewise a Virginia product; the story of its rise is one of the most interesting chapters of Revolutionary history.

In a brief analysis, the Revolution was the result of the "clash between imperial expansion and colonial development — two forms of progressivism — just as the Puritan Revolution was the outcome of the conflict of expanding monarchy with the growing idea of popular rights, mainly expressed through religion. In Virginia the colonial constitution had become well defined before the middle of the eighteenth century. Based on the fine old principle of the Englishman's inherent right of self-government, it had acquired certain fixed positions without much reference to strict logic. It was really the result of a long contest; the history of Virginia, hke that of the other colonies, is little more than a series of disputes with the royal governors, who served the colony greatly in some ways and in other ways were out of touch with colonial fife and needs. Parliament exerted a variable control over the colonies, from time to time passing taxation-without-representation statutes, but generally leaving the provincials suflBciently alone to cause itself to be looked on admiringly as the palladium of liberty. As a matter of fact, the causes of the Revolution were practical far more than theoretical. The colonies endured Parliamentary supervision so long as this was not too vigorous; customs laws were of small account while smuggling went unchecked. Only when the British government attempted to enforce its customs acts and ventured to impose other and burdensome taxes, hke the Stamp Act, did the taxation-without-representation protest appear; then the provincials, with all of Englishmen's gravity in asserting a paradox, denied the Parliamentary right of taxation. 1 If we think they may have been deficient in argument while right in principle, it should be remembered that the king's lawyers produced good precedents in the ship-money case in 1637. In a political struggle both sides always prove themselves right by any number of constitutional citations, but, nevertheless, the victory of one side carries with it far more right and happiness than the triumph of the other.

Opposition to the British government did not begin with the Stamp Act in 1765. Before this time the colony had on many occasions successfully resisted the royal authority; indeed a legislature noted for its independence had existed in Virginia since 1619. In 1635 this assembly forcibly sent the royal governor Harvey back to England because it resented his efforts to enlarge his powers. Virginia tardily and reluctantly acquiesced in the rule of Commonwealth and Protectorate, and, on the other hand, broke out in 1676 in open rebellion against its Cavalier governor, who sought to play the tyrant. Ten years later, in 1686, the House of Burgesses refused to allow the governor and council to lay a tax, and it did not favor the establishment of a post-oflSce in America by act of Parliament.

The high spirit of the Virginia assembly quickened in the eighteenth century with the colony's rapid growth in wealth, population, and culture. The governors of that period found themselves continually at odds with the House of Burgesses in attempting to secure votes of money; Dinwiddle even had difficulty in obtaining supplies for the French-and-Indian War. This dual government by royal governor and local assembly resulted in the attachment of certain constitutional powers to either party, with a neutral zone between, while outside of both loomed the vague, ill-defined claims of Parliament. The governor was selected by the king and represented him. Along with the ordinary executive routine, he appointed most of the colonial officials ; called out the militia against the Indians and made treaties with them ; suggested legislation and approved or vetoed bills, but with a final reservation to the Privy Council; sat as chief judge in the general court; and, finally, inducted clergymen of the established church into parishes — though he had not the power of appointing them. The governor's council, which acted in the threefold capacity of consulting executive body, the highest court and the upper chamber of the legislature, was appointed for Hfe by the British Privy Council on the governor's nomination, and was generally under his influence. The House of Burgesses, the representative branch of the assembly, consisted of two members for each county and single members for boroughs. It initiated money bills in the manner of the House of Commons and was the most important and powerful branch of the colonial government, successfully asserting its rights and privileges on many occasions in opposition to the governor and council.

With the increase of the number of counties in the eighteenth century and the rise of a large class of landed proprietors whose main public ambition took the form of representing fellow countrymen in Wilhamsburg, the House of Burgesses grew greatly in power and prestige. Virginia in its earlier period had been a more or less democratic community and it always contained a sturdy smallfarmer class, tenacious of its self-respect. Lyon G. Tyler has pointed out that, while in New England the poor man was addressed as "goodman," in Virginia he insisted on his right to "mister."

But the eighteenth century saw the rise of a strong aristocracy, based on the possession of the comparatively valuable lands of the tidewater section tilled by white indented servants and negro slaves. Ownership of great tracts of cleared lands and abundance of cheap labor enabled the planters, in spite of the wasteful agricultural system then in vogue, to raise large enough crops of tobacco to leave a considerable surplus above expenses. The settlers had gone from England to Virginia for the same reason that settlers go everywhere — to make a living. After the first hard age of settlement, when men struggled to subdue nature and lived and died toiling relentlessly, there succeeded a period of relaxation, enjoyment, and growing refinement, wherein the descendants of successful land-patentees and tobacco-growers gave themselves an English education, found pleasure in society and sport, and took to politics as a means of gaining influence and distinction. And since the Virginia colonists, unlike those of New England, were fully in accord with the feelings of the majority of Enghshmen, they were without dissenter ideas in religion or politics. It was natural, therefore, that they should take as their ideal of imitation the Enghsh country gentleman, whose thoughts and habits, considering the necessary differences between England and Virginia, they reproduced with remarkable jSdehty. This planter class, generally fairly well informed for the times and enjoying considerable leisure, possessed great power among a poor and ignorant population: they took over almost as a right the local offices, and the ambition of the ablest or most pushing led them to the House of Burgesses.

The majority of planters did not, of course, profit by their opportunities. Many of them, in the fervor of their liking for English country life, merely wasted their means and leisure in sport and dissipation. Horse-racing for large stakes flourished in Virginia between 1730 and 1775, and at the beginning of the Revolution a considerable number of large landholders had ruined themselves by gambling and high Hving. Many estates were on the market. But the colonial system, with all its great drawbacks, offered a wonderful chance of development to ambitious and willing men. Politics was a respectable career, and not a business as it is so often nowadays; it invited the best men. The planter had a sufficient and tolerably secure income derived from his crops; he could give much time to reading and public affairs without private injury, because he usually had an overseer to superintend the labor of his slaves; and gradually there developed a race of politicians remarkable for their combination of theoretical training with practical experience — men well read in English law and history, and, later, open to the great liberal tendencies of the middle eighteenth century. The^ liberal movement, which influenced America as well as western Europe, had the effect in Virginia of disturbing that deep-rooted idolatry of English institutions which had given birth to the Virginia aristocracy. A typical product of eighteenth-century liberalism in Virginia was George Mason, the broad-minded and capable thinker who wrote the constitution of 1776.

The House of Burgesses was largely made up of planters, who were Enghshmen in feeling, but who nevertheless asserted the dignity and independence of the body in which they sat in opposition to attempts or imagined attempts of the British authorities to stretch their jurisdiction. They were reinforced about the middle of the century by another self-willed element actually hostile to the imperial government, the representatives from the new middle and western counties. This piedmont and mountain section was much more democratic in feeling and much less cultured and wealthy than the east, even for the standard of those days. The western or " upland " members for many years were too few and inexperienced to do more than vote with the controlling majority led by skilled politicians, but they were never quite in harmony with the tidewater and eventually asserted themselves successfully against it.

Several serious clashes with the royal government in the decade preceding the Stamp Act illustrated the growing independence and self-consciousness of the House of

Burgesses. When Governor Dinwiddle in 1753 attempted on his own initiative to levy a fee of a pistole for signing land patents, the Burgesses protested in the memorable and prophetic words of Richard Bland: "The rights of the subject are so secured by law, that they cannot be deprived of the least part of their property but by their own consent." The governor in reply claimed that he was acting according to the king's instructions and strictly within the king's rights over vacant lands, but the House refused to accept his explanation: it declared that those who paid the pistole fee would be regarded as betrayers of the people, and thereby established a precedent for securing uniformity through holding offenders up to public obloquy later used with great effect in suppressing Toryism. The British Privy Council, when appealed to as tlie final authority in the fee dispute, allowed the Burgesses to have their way. Before the passage of the Stamp Act the British government at times incUned to be almost too conciliatory towards the colonies.

It is probable that the House of Burgesses was mistaken in the pistole contention, for the title to vacant lands was unquestionably vested in the king, and the governor as the royal representative was hardly outside his rights in levying a fee. Still, it had not been demanded before, and the Virginians felt that advantage was being taken of a technical right to introduce a new and insidious custom and a possible precedent for future taxes.

This controversy was the prelude to a much more important dispute hinging on the king's power of interference with colonial legislation. The colonial constitution, as has been noted, recognized three powers in the state — king,

Parliament, and local assembly. The king's power was mainly, though not entirely, delegated to the governor, who received instructions from home outlining his policy; these instructions were regarded as law. ParUamentary authority was by general colonial consent limited to the regulation of commerce. Needless to say, the extensive right of regulating commerce when interpreted in the loose construction fashion might seem to sanction almost any stretch of governmental jurisdiction, but as a matter of fact Parhament was not inclined to be unduly vexatious before 1760. Most colonial ills flowed from other sources.

The assembly, which was the strictly local branch of government, exercised wider powers than modern lawmaking bodies — executive and judicial as well as legislative. At first the small upper house, representing a few aUied families, held a dominating position, but as the colony grew in age and population the House of Burgesses more and more tended to become the important chamber. The council was Tory in feeling, while the Burgesses cherished the Whig tradition of Enghsh liberty, and its independent-minded leaders were bound to come into conflict with the British government as soon as the latter should attempt to stretch its prerogatives.

The first important controversy between colony and home government, however, did not result from Parliamentary taxation, but from the royal authority as exer cised in colonial legislation. The Church of England establishment in Virginia, the miniature state chiu-ch of the colony, furnished the occasion, and the conflict decided the long-debated question whether the control of the establishment lay finally with the assembly or the British officials. In 1758 the assembly passed an act which particularly affected the ministers of the established church and aroused their ire. This so-called "Twopenny Act" compounded debts and the salaries of ofhcials, which were payable in tobacco by legal regulation, in money at the rate of twopence a pound. The measure was possibly necessary on account of the low price of tobacco and the weight of taxation due to the French-and-Indian \Yar, then in progress, but the assembly had passed a similar law in 1755 and seemed about to establish a rule of scaling down salaries w^hen tobacco was high without providing any compensation when it fell below the normal, as it frequently did. The state-supported clergy, who naturally objected to this heads-I-win-tails-you-lose system, appealed to England and succeeded in enlisting the services of the Bishop of London, the colonial diocesan. The bishop took up the cudgels in a letter denouncing the Virginia government.

The final stage in the passage of a colonial law was the king's assent, but the assembly hastened to put the Twopenny Act into effect upon securing the governor's approval, without waiting to hear from England, although the act altered a statute which the king had approved. In other words, the Virginia assembly dared to legislate on its own authority and in practical disregard of the king. The Bishop of London hinted that such action was in the nature of treason; it was at least not strictlj'^ constitutional. In answer to the bishop's letter two high-spirited Virginians, Landon Carter and Richard Bland, sprang to the defense of the assembly and there followed a merry war of pamphlets, in which John Camm, president of William and

Mary College, supported the side of the clergy. In this dispute the theory of tlie colonial constitution was first clearly defined by the chief writer i)articipating, Richard Bland. 1

/Richard Bland, of Prince George, deserves a word of mention, since he more than any other man was the author of the Revolution in Virginia, i He was born in 1710 and died in 1776, spanning the whole preliminary period of the Revolution in his mature manhood. His education was of peculiar value for these critical decades from 1755 to 1775; after a preliminary course in William and Mary he studied history and law at the University of Edinburgh, and was probably the best constitutional lawyer in the colonies. He saw with great clearness and astuteness on just what grounds the legal resistance to the British policy might be effectively placed and most of the remonstrances emanating from the House of Burgesses were his work. In personality Bland was of that type of Virginian which is best illustrated by the figure of George Mason, that type considered characteristically Virginian, — half practical farmer, half classical scholar and lawyer ; genial, wellmannered, personally somewhat untidy and careless of clothes.

^Bland defended the assembly's action in setting aside a law approved by the king on the plea that action was sometimes necessary before the king's will could be learned. *'Salus populi, suprema lex," he impudently quoted. In brief, the colony had to consider its own best interests, even at the expense of constitutional forms. But the royal council, to which Virginia's action was not especially

* H. J. Eckenrode's Separation of Church and State in Virginia, 24 et seq.

palatable, "disallowed," that is, vetoed the Twopenny Act, and left the clergy the remedy of suing in the courts for the difference between their money commutations and their salaries in tobacco according to the prices current in 1758. Several ministers took advantage of this decision to bring suit and some judgments were obtained. One of the cases came up in Hanover Court in 1763, with the parish minister, Maury, the plaintiff. Patrick Henry, then an obscure young lawyer, represented the defendants, who were the vestry. In the speech delivered on this occasion, Henry boldly asserted Bland's doctrine, put forward three years earlier, that the assembly had the right to pass necessary legislation wdthout interference from England. He even went so far as to declare, in terms that simply thrilled his audience, that the king in vetoing a reasonable and beneficial measure had forfeited the right to his subjects' obedience. This speech, which is generally regarded as the beginning of the Revolutionary movement in Virginia, actually marks the end of an agitation lasting for five years. Henry played Luther to Bland's Erasmus, carrying to their conclusion the principles which the constitutional lawyer had outlined in his pamphlet of 1760.

As it happened, the seed fell on prepared ground. The once solidly Episcopalian Hanover County was now full of dissenters, and Presbyterians largely manned the jury, which brought in a nominal verdict of one penny damages. It proved the ruin of the clerical cause. Virginia rang with Henry's name and the great body of people, who had hitherto viewed the matter with indifference, now took sides against the preachers. This outburst of enthusiasm led in later times to an obscuring of the actual issues involved, and Henry was presented somewhat in the light of a tribune combating class privilege. In truth, however, the Twopenny Act had been devised by the ruling clique in the House of Burgesses, which would have been inconveniently taxed if the ministers had been paid according to the letter of the law. The dissenters did play a part, but it was subordinate. Henry's real importance in the case consisted in the coujp by which he turned a quarrel of the House of Burgesses and the courts into a general political issue. It was Henry's great work, as the "Parsons' Cause" first showed, to enlist the body of Virginia people in the Revolutionary movement, which, without him, would have taken a different direction.

The clergy were defeated in the Virginia courts by the popular clamor raised by Henry; the British Privy Council also ruled against them on some technicality when appeals were carried to that body. Though the dispute had thus ended in the complete discomfiture of the clergy, the war of pamphlets continued for several years longer; John Camm, the clerical leader, exchanged fire again and again with Bland and Carter. Camm believed that the control of the Virginia estabhshment belonged properly to the king, not to the assembly; and this unpopular theory, along with the clergy's unsuccessful appeal from the Virginia courts to the Privy Council, tended to alienate many persons from the state church and foster the growth of dissent in eastern Virginia. Presbyterians and Baptists now appeared in numbers in even the most conservative counties.

Bland, in his later pamphlets in the Twopenny case, and in his "Inquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies,"

published in 1766, advanced beyond his first position, until he came to assert that all men born under an English government are subject only to laws made with their own consent.^ In his Stamp Act pamphlet of 1766 he ingeniously outlined the distinction between the external government of England and the internal government of the assembly and between external and internal taxation, basing the colonial right to internal self-taxation on the common law, which follows the Englishman around the world, as well as on specific grants in royal charters. He defined, probably more clearly than any other colonial writer, the difference between the external authority of Parliament to pass acts for the regulation of commerce and the internal power of the assembly to levy any tax it might see fit, which distinction has survived in the American Constitution of 1787. This difference between "external" and "internal" government, rather ridiculous to Charles Townshend and not altogether convincing to-day, was an ingenious effort of the colonial mind to offer some real objection in law to the encroachments of the British ministry. From the Pistole Fee to 1776 Bland was busy in occupying defensive positions against England, and these were none the less effective that they sometimes happened to be novel. j

Opinion in Virginia over the "Parsons' Cause" had been practically unanimous except for the parsons, who natuifally viewed the constitution in another light. But in 1765, with the crisis brought on by the Stamp Act, party differences began to appear for the first time. On this occasion the middle and western sections rose to a place of influence never afterwards lost. The country beyond the Blue Ridge ^ Colonel Dismounted, 21a.

was being rapidly settled by non-English races — Germans and Scotch-Irish — who had little of the Virginian reverence for Anglican institutions. The Presbyterian and democratic Scotch-Irish were reinforced by the piedmont country between the tidewater and the mountains, which had also been affected by dissent and democracy. Counties were being formed, and all that the new section needed was a vigorous and self-assertive leader. At length he appeared.

(Before Patrick Henry's debut in the assembly in 1765, Virginia was ruled by a coterie of eastern members — an astute, far-seeing, and experienced group of politicians, of whom the chief was John Robinson, speaker of the House of Burgesses and treasurer of the colony. Robinson belonged to the type which controls a conservative community; he was well connected, rich, polished, genial, and possessed of fair mental powers. He ruled inter 'pares by virtue of his popularity and a certain force of character. This group led by Robinson had governed with considerable efficiency and usually managed to overreach the governor and get their way with the home administration. But in 1764 they had been appalled by the declaratory act preceding the Stamp Act, which laid down the doctrine of the Parliamentary right of taxing the colonies. The House of Burgesses registered a dignified though emphatic protest, but Parliament, in disregard of colonial objections, passed the Stamp Act in the following year, 1765. Patrick Henry took his seat in the House as a member for Louisa at the May session of 1765, when the news of the act was fresh .1

Robinson and his group had long held undisturbed pessession of the House of Burgesses, but Henry, instead of containing himself in the presence of the silk-stockinged and self-important gentlemen from the tidewater, as might have been expected of a newcomer ignorant of the legislative "ropes," signalized his entry by assuming the championship of popular measures. A good opportunity stood at hand, but one which only a man of nerve would take. The ruling clique in Virginia, like all ruling cliques, could not entirely refrain from abusing a long lease of power. John Robinson partly owed his commanding place to an accommodatiag disposition, for it had been his habit to lend the public funds to friends on their personal security. As he was a man of large wealth for the times, the colony apparently did not run much risk of loss by this procedure, while a number of free-living, money-spending politicians and planters profited by the use of the treasury as a bank until Robinson became involved for a great amount.

The situation finally became so serious that the speaker and his friends devised a plan of securing specie from England and lending it to planters on land security; this would have enabled Robinson to transfer to the treasury the securities he held for the public money loaned. Henry boldly fell athwart the scheme,^ and, according to Jefferson, defeated it, though the journal shows that the bill actually passed the House of Burgesses and was lost in the council. In the debate on the loan-office Henry gained a valuable ally in Richard Henry Lee, another ambitious politician of radical predilections, who succeeded in bringing about an investigation of the treasury. This cut-anddried performance resulted in Robinson's vindication for 1 William Wirt's Life of Patrick Henry, 53.

the time being, but on his death in 1766 a defalcation of more than one hundred thousand pounds came to hght. Nevertheless, the parties implicated looked out for themselves so cleverly that they were not called to account, and Robinson, being dead, could not protect himself, A large part of his estate was sold for the benefit of the colony, which was not entirely reimbursed. The names of the borrowers never came to light, but the scandal had some effect on popular opinion and assisted in paving the way for the rise of a novus homo.

(The loan-office was quickly crowded into the background by weightier measures, for at this same session of 1765 Patrick Henry took the lead in opposition to the Stamp Act. He precipitated a sensational crisis by suddenly introducing in the House a set of resolutions which openly and indignantly denied the right of Parliament to tax the colonies. It was the best-judged move of his whole wonderful career, and, in effect, the beginning of the American Revolution. At this time the colonies had taken no stand on the taxation question and their future action was uncertain, yet, if the right of taxation was not to be conceded, definite and emphatic protest was imperative. With all deference for modern American writers who make out such a good case for the British government, it should be observed that the Stamp Act, no matter on what excellent legal grounds it might stand, was a genuine measure of oppression. It was a subtle tax, affecting almost every relation of life. If it had been tamely submitted to, any governmental tyranny might have been expected. The plea of levying a tax on America for colonial defense should not blind us to the obvious intention of the British government also to milk the fat American cow for its own benefit.

The boldness of the resolutions and the violence of Henry's speech alarmed the circle of eastern planters, who were as much opposed to the Stamp Act as the orator, but who preferred to carry on their opposition in the time-honored method of respectful petition. At a later date and in a period of glorification of the Revolution, it was claimed that Henry won a victory over the "court" or British faction in the House of Burgesses. As a matter of fact, no English party existed in Virginia at this time or afterwards. The nearest approach to such a party was the coimcLl, which was closely allied to the governor, but the council's influence had been steadily declining for some years and had practically disappeared by the Revolution. Certainly no English party had a place in the House of Burgesses, if by that term is meant a group willing to subordinate the colony to the will of the British government. The leaders acting against Henry to defeat his resolutions were Speaker Robinson, Edmund Pendleton, Peyton Randolph, Robert Carter Nicholas, Richard Bland, and George Wythe, all of whom with the exception of Robinson became active revolutionists a decade later. The speaker, it is true, stood near the governor, Fauquier, and was, so to speak, in touch with the home government, but it is almost certain that he would have sided with his associates if he had been living in 1775, since he had taken the lead in protests and in the first committee of correspondence. Assertion of colonial rights was nothing new to the House of Burgesses; it had always been a singularly independent body. It had thwarted Governor Dinwiddle consistently, it had asserted itself in the "Parsons' Cause" and in the Pistole Fee, and in 1764 it had memorialized against the declaratory act preceding the Stamp Act. Landon Carter, George Wythe, Richard Bland, Peyton Randolph, and others of the so-called "court" party formed the committee to draw the protest. No view could be more mistaken than that Henry originated the spirit of resistance to British claims in the Virginia House of Burgesses; that spirit had always existed.,