English law, purchase of the grantees their rights to the country. The agents fulfilled their instructions, and asserted the natural liberties of the colonists.

We arrive at the moment when almost for the last time the old spirit of English liberty, such as had been cherished by Sir Edwin Sandys and Southampton and Ferrar, flashed up once more in the government of the Stuarts. Among the heads of the charter which the agents of Virginia were commanded by their instructions to entreat of the king, it was proposed "that there should be no tax or imposition laid on the people of Virginia but by their own consent, expressed by their representatives in assembly as formerly provided by many acts." "This," wrote Lord Coventry, or one who expressed his opinion, "this I judge absolutely necessary for their well-being, and what in effect Magna Charta gives; and besides, as they conceive, will secure them from being subject to a double jurisdiction, viz., the lawes of an English parliament where they have noe representatives." The subject was referred by an order in council to Sir William Jones and Francis Winnington, the attorney and solicitor general; and, in their report of the twelfth of October, 1675, they adopted the clause in its fullest extent, with no restriction except the provision "that the concession bee noe bar to any imposition that may bee laid by act of parliament here," that is, in England, "on the commodities which come from that country.' At the court at Whitehall, on the nineteenth of November, this report was submitted to the king in council, who declared himself inclined to favor his subjects in Virginia and give them all due encouragement; he therefore directed letters patent to be prepared confirming all things in the report. The charter was prepared as decreed, and, on the nineteenth of April, 1676, it was ordered by the king in council "that the lord chancellor doe cause the said grant to pass under the great seale of England accordingly." It might have seemed that a great era was opening upon England through the solemn concession to the oldest of her colonies of all the rights of independent legislation. In the progress of their suit, the

1675.

agents of Virginia were grateful for the support of Coventry, whom they extolled as one of the worthiest of men. They owned the aid of Jones and Winnington; and they had the voices "of many great friends," won by a sense of humanity, or submitting to be bribed by poor Virginia. But a stronger influence was secretly and permanently imbodied in favor of the despotic administration of the colonies, and the consequent chances of great emoluments to courtiers. On the thirty-first of May, the king in council reversed his former decree, and ordered that "the lord high chancellor of England doe forbeare putting the great seale to the patent concerning Virginia, notwithstanding the late order of the nineteenth April last past." The irrevocable decision against the grant of a charter was made before the news reached England of events which involved the Ancient Dominion in gloom.

CHAPTER XX.

THE GREAT REBELLION IN VIRGINIA.

Ar the time when the envoys were appointed, Virginia was rocking with the excitements that grew out of 1674. its domestic griefs. The rapid and effectual abridg

ment of its popular liberties, joined to the uncertain tenure of property that followed the announcement of the royal grants, would have roused any nation; how much more a people like the Virginians! The generation now in existence were chiefly the children of the soil, nurtured in the freedom of the wilderness, and dwelling in lonely cottages scattered along the streams. Of able-bodied freemen, the number was estimated at not far from eight thousand. No newspapers entered their houses; no printing-press furnished them a book. They had no recreations but such as nature provides in her wilds; no education but such as parents in the desert could give their offspring. The paths were bridleways rather than roads; and the highway surveyors aimed at nothing more than to keep them clear of logs and fallen trees. There was not an engineer in the country. I doubt if there existed what we should call a bridge in the whole dominion. Visits were made in boats or on horseback; and the Virginian, travelling with his pouch of tobacco for currency, swam the rivers, where there was neither ferry nor ford. Almost every planter was his own mechanic. The houses, for the most part of but one story, and made of wood, often of logs, the windows closed by shutters for want of glass, were sprinkled at great distances on both sides of the Chesapeake. There was hardly such a sight as a cluster of three dwellings. Jamestown was but a place of a state house, one church, and eighteen houses, occupied by about a dozen families. Till very recently, the legislature had assembled in the hall of

an alehouse. Virginia had neither towns nor lawyers. As to shipping, there never were more than two vessels, and these not above twenty tons' burden. A few of the wealthier planters lived in braver state at their large plantations, and, surrounded by indented servants and slaves, produced a form of society that has sometimes been likened to the manners of the patriarchs, and sometimes to the baronial pride of feudalism. The inventory of Sir William Berkeley gave him seventy horses, as well as large flocks of sheep. "Almost every man lived within sight of a lovely river." The parish was of such extent, spreading over a tract which a day's journey could not cross, that the people met together but once on the Lord's Day, and sometimes not at all; the church, rudely built in some central solitude, was seldom visited by the more remote families, and was liable to become inaccessible by the broken limbs from forest trees or the wanton growth of underwood and thickets.

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Here was a new form of human nature. A love of freedom inclining to anarchy pervaded the country; loyalty was a feebler passion than the love of liberty. Existence "without government" seemed to promise to "the general "it is a genuine Virginia sentiment - a greater degree of happiness" than the tyranny "of the European governments." Men feared injustice more than they feared disorder. In the Old World, the peasantry crowded. together into compact villages; the farmers of Vir- 1674. ginia lived asunder, and in their mild climate were scattered very widely, rarely meeting in numbers except at the horse-race or the county court.

It was among such a people, which had never been disciplined to resistance by the heresies of sects or the new opinions of "factious " parties, which, till the restoration, had found the wilderness a safe protection against tyranny, and had enjoyed "a fifty years' experience of a government easy to the people," that the pressure of increasing grievances excited open discontent. Men gathered together in the gloom of the forests to talk of their hardships. Half conscious of their wrongs, half conscious of the rightful remedy, they were ripe for insurrection. A collision be

tween prerogative and public opinion, between that part of the wealth of the country which was allied with royalism and the great mass of the numbers and wealth of the country, between the old monarchical system and the American popular system, was at hand. Opinions were coming into life; and the plastic effort of modern political being was blindly but effectually at work.

1674.

In 1674, on the first spontaneous movement, the men of wealth and established consideration kept aloof. It was easily suppressed by the calm advice "of some discreet persons," in whom the discontented had confidence. Yet it was not without effect; the county commissioners were ordered to levy no more taxes for their own emoluments. But, as the great abuses continued unreformed, the murmurs were not quieted. The common people were rendered desperate by taxes, which, being levied for polls, deprived labor of nearly all its earnings. To produce an insurrection, nothing was wanting but an excuse for appearing in arms.

The causes which had driven the Indians of New England to despair acted with equal force on the natives of Virginia.

The Seneca Indians, a tribe of the Five Nations, had driven the Susquehannahs from their abode at the head of the Chesapeake to the vicinity of Piscataway on the Poto

mac; and Maryland had terminated a war with them 1675. and their confederates. In July, 1675, a party of

them, crossing from the Maryland to the Virginia shore, pillaged a plantation whose owner they charged with having defrauded them in trade. They were pursued, overtaken, stripped of their spoils, and beaten or killed. To be revenged on the planter, Indian warriors killed two of his servants and his son. A party of thirty Virginians under Brent and Mason followed them across the river, and killed a chief and ten of his men, while the rest fled for their lives. The governor of Maryland complained to Sir William Berkeley of the violation of his jurisdiction. Meantime, the Indians, having obtained a wonderful skill in the use of fire-arms, built a fort within the border of Maryland,