STUART IDEALS RESISTED 89 prietor, sought to do in Maryland. Through him the offices were filled with kinsmen, the suffrage was limited to freeholders, and only half of the members-elect were summoned to the assembly. This policy awakened the old spirit of resistance, and in 1676, while Lord Baltimore was absent, a band of sixty, incited by Bacon's example in Virginia, gathered to overthrow the proprietary government. The governor seized and hanged the popular leaders, Davis and Pate, and the rebellion collapsed. Revolution But the spirit of discontent did not disappear. The absence of Baltimore in order to oppose Penn's efforts in England gave opportunity to its growth. Eventually he fell into a dispute with the collectors of the royal revenues in Maryland and in Maryland. the king took the side of his own officers. Most important of all, the struggle was given a religious cast. The accession of James II, a Catholic sovereign, in 1685 accentuated this phase of the controversy. When the royal prince, called the "Old Pretender" by most Protestants, was born, he was proclaimed in Maryland by the proprietary governor with impolitic fervor. The Protestants, through the progress of immigration many times as numerous as the Catholics, were ready for revolt. Then came news that William of Orange had landed in England. No longer restrained, they formed under the lead of John Corde and others an Association for the Defense of the Protestant Religion. They seized St. Mary's, the seat of government, dispersed the Catholic bands who met to resist them, sent a loyal address to William and Mary, and held an assembly in which representation was on a popular basis. The new sovereign of England accepted the revolution in Maryland, which then became a royal province. In 1715 a Protestant succeeded to the Baltimore title and was restored to his full rights in Maryland, which from that time until the revolution was a proprietary colony. Berkeley's For sixteen years after the Restoration political authority in Virginia was the will of Governor William Berkeley. As Charles II prolonged his own supremacy by maintaining the "Cavalier Parliament" for seventeen years, so Berkeley in Virginia Despotism. kept alive for fourteen years the assembly chosen in 1661 in the height of enthusiasm for the Stuarts. By this means, by nominating his own councillors, and by making other appointments judiciously, he concentrated the authority in the hands of a small group of wealthy planters who depended on his own favor. Meanwhile, the price of tobacco had steadily fallen, due partly to the navigation acts and partly to over-production. Virginia had no other money crop, and naturally exploited that to the limit of her capacity. Proposals to limit production had little effect, and there was much suffering. Throughout this period prices of imported merchandise grew higher, the planters fell into debt to the London merchants, and the spirit of hopelessness easily ran into defiance. Berkeley's system of despotism was the most visible of political evils, and they turned against it as the cause of all their distress. Rebellion. The occasion of the outbreak was an Indian war. Within recent years the march of settlement had reached the Potomac valley, which alarmed the Indians in that region. They foresaw the Bacon's end of their hunting grounds, and their murmuring created apprehension in the minds of the settlers. In 1675 the savages killed two planters on the Potomac, and the whites replied by killing the murderers and several other Indians. Reprisals were made by the red men, and soon the frontier was harrowed from end to end. Then the Susquehannocks rose in January, 1676, and killed thirty-six whites. The settlers fled from the border, and called on the governor for protection. He ordered a body of militia to the scene of danger, but recalled it before it had well started. His opponents claimed that he derived profits from the Indian trade, and on that account wished to avoid a war. sumes The assembly met in March, 1676, and proposed to build forts in the Indian country. The people objected that this only meant higher taxes. What they wished was a vigorous campaign to Bacon as- break the power of the Indians effectively. To their Leadership. petitions of this purport Berkeley returned an angry reproof and the people began to raise troops on their own account. They found an excellent leader in Nathaniel Bacon. His fervid speeches had ample foundation in the condition of the colony, and he was shortly at the head of three hundred men, with his face set toward the frontier. To Berkeley this was treason, and he promptly said so in a proclamation. Two hundred and forty of Bacon's men then went home, but he marched on with the rest, and in a bloody action killed one hundred and fifty Indians. Meanwhile, the movement took on the form of open resistance to the existing régime. People were gathering with arms in their hands, Movement becomes Political. and demanding a new assembly chosen by the freemen. In panic Berkeley promised all that was asked, and even pardoned Bacon and restored him to the Council. In the new assembly a number of reforms were adopted which must have been as gall to the power-loving governor. The reformers did not trust the governor, and wished their leader to be commanderin-chief of the militia, probably as a guarantee that the governor would not repudiate his promises. They claimed that the command had been promised, and when it was not given a violent quarrel arose. Bacon was impetuous, and ended by collecting five hundred armed men, with whom he overawed Berkeley and forced him to issue a commission to operate against the Indians. Then the army marched away to the scene of war. As soon as they were gone, the governor repudiated what he had done and called on the people to aid him in suppressing the "rebels." There was BACON'S REBELLION 91 no response to his call, and he fled to Accomac County beyond Chesapeake Bay. The struggle thus became a real attempt at revolution. Bacon had begun as a reformer. If he now yielded, all his work was for naught. Being an aggressive man, he determined to accept Full the challenge and fight it out with the governor. His Rebellion influence over his followers was great enough to carry Fledged. many of them with him, but many others fell away and chose to follow Berkeley, who was able to return to Jamestown with six hundred men. Bacon was soon upon him, besieged the town, and forced the governor to take flight. The struggle was now a social one, the mass of poor and moderately well-to-do people supported the revolt, and the great planters generally were for the old order. While he constructed his lines before the capital, Bacon forced the wives and daughters of many of his enemies to stand before his works to avert the fire of the governor's soldiers. When Jamestown fell he burned it lest it should again offer asylum to his enemies. All this happened during the summer and early autumn of 1676. What else would have come is only to be guessed; for Bacon died October 26 of a fever contracted through exposure, and his cause collapsed. Berkeley came back to Jamestown, harried out the remnant of the rebels who had taken refuge in the swamps, and although the king had promised amnesty to those who submitted, hanged thirteen as a warning to those who defied his authority. To the captured William Drummond, who, before he joined Bacon, had been governor of Albemarle, probably through Berkeley's selection, the governor said in greeting him: "Mr. Drummond, you are welcome. I am more glad to see you than any man in Virginia. Mr. Drummond, you shall be hanged in half an hour." To which the prisoner replied: "As your honor pleases," and he was led away to the scaffold. Death of Bacon. Settlement News of these commotions had ere this reached England, and the king had already dispatched a force of one thousand men under three commissioners to pacify Virginia. Berkeley's high proceedings were well known in England, and the knowledge of Difficulwas reflected in the instructions of the commissioners. ties. Amnesty was offered to all rebels who would submit, and Jeffreys, one of the three, was to succeed Berkeley as governor. They found Berkeley supreme and defiant. His powerful family influence in England made it unwise to arrest him, and there was a period of angry wrangling, at the end of which the irritable old man embarked of his own motion. Arrived at London, he learned that the king would not see him. It was the last straw for a body and mind already tottering under the weight of years, and he died in a few months, July, 1677. He had in his day been a stout-hearted defender of the royal authority, a friend of the Established Church, and a worthy leader of the Ideals. well-born Virginia gentry. His ideals were of great account in a day when democracy was in its cruder stages of development. His often quoted words on education in Virginia express the ideals Berkeley's of his class. "I thank God," he said, "there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have any 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." Rapacity. Bacon's Rebellion shows that Virginia society had gone beyond this ideal, and the royal commissioners recognized the fact. They called for free expressions of grievances with the result that a "charCulpeper's ter" of privileges was granted by the king in which important reforms in local government were included. In 1679 Lord Culpeper arrived as governor. He was in need of money, and proceeded to get it by increasing the fees, requiring "presents" in money from outgoing ship captains, and other similar measures. It was at this time that lawless bands of tobacco planters began to destroy the growing crops to relieve the over-production which produced low prices. In 1684 Culpeper was succeeded as governor by Lord Howard of Effingham, who was in no sense a better ruler than Culpeper. Thus passed the years until the end of the Stuart dynasty, years full of commotion, in which the Virginia spirit of self-government slowly rose against the power of a governor appointed by the king but bent on nothing so much as his own advantage. It took many years of such experience to change the most royal of the colonies into an out-and-out home of revolution; but the process went steadily on. THE COLONIES UNDER THE LATER STUARTS, 1660-1689 New Charles II did not like the Puritan colonies, but he did not wish the trouble of abolishing them. It was easier to give charters to Connecticut and Rhode Island, to wink at the compromise by which Massachusetts seemed to give the suffrage to members of the English Church, and to take what revenue came from the New England trade, than to risk war with the colonists as a result of suppressing the charter. Thus the years passed, for a time in safety for the New Englanders, while their fellow dissenters in England suffered from a high church reaction. When trouble at last came it was through the initiation of his over-zealous officers rather than through the will of the good-natured king. A more serious peril was the attitude of the Indians. The steady extension of the settlements from the seashore inward showed them that their hunting grounds were in danger, King and they came together in common defense under Philip, Philip's War. son of Massasoit, the Wampanoag, long the friend and stay of Plymouth colony. The war began in the summer of 1675 MASSACHUSETTS AND THE STUARTS 93 with the usual outrages on the frontier, in which retaliation and pitiless slaughter played their parts. Knowing the habits of the whites, the Indians fell on them suddenly with bloody results. The Nipmucks, in western Connecticut and Massachusetts, joined in the struggle, and the river towns were ravaged. Then the Narragansetts appeared about to join the belligerents; and the whites, without waiting for open hostilities, fell on them in a fort in what is now Kingston, Rhode Island, and crushed effectually their military power. But the struggle went on more bitterly than ever, the whites fighting for life persistently and steadily. After some months their superior organization began to tell. Canonchet, king of the Narragansetts, was run down and slain in April, 1676. A month later one hundred and twenty warriors were killed in a battle on the Connecticut, and August 12, 1676, Philip himself fell at the hands of Colonel Church, a noted Indian fighter. Through nearly two years' fighting the colonists lost severely in life and property. Their homes were ruined, their crops destroyed, and famine was avoided only by importing grain from Virginia. But the power of the Indians was broken, and thenceforth the settlers might plant in safety in the interior. The most permanent effect of the struggle was the damage inflicted on the beaver trade. Driving back the Indians inevitably limited the area of its operation. In this struggle all the New England colonies suffered indiscriminately, and all united in the measures of defense. chusetts Charter The wounds of war were not healed before Massachusetts realized that serious efforts were to be made to annul the liberal charter under which she enjoyed self-government. The attack would doubtless be of a legal nature, the charge being made that Massathe charter should be forfeited because the colony had, among other things, harbored some of the regicides, Threatened. evaded the king's orders in regard to a broader suffrage, denied the right of appeal to England, shown a spirit of indifference to the royal authorities in regard to the appointment of agents in England, and continually evaded the navigation acts. In 1676 Edward Randolph visited Boston as a "messenger" with a letter from the king to the authorities. He was privately instructed to ascertain in what respect the colony laws were against those of England and to report on religious conditions, the execution of the navigation acts, and the numbers and strength of the colonists. He was a shrewd observer, and was prejudiced against the Puritans. His report was very unfavorable to the colony, but for a time nothing was done. In 1678, however, Randolph was appointed collector of the customs for New England and took up his residence in Boston with the design of breaking up smuggling, which was widespread. His numerous complaints sent to England all proceeded from the conclusion that the only way to enforce the acts of trade was for the king to take the charter colonies into his own hands and appoint officers who |