CONTEST FOR POPULAR POWER IN SOUTH CAROLINA. 187 XIII. When Colleton endeavored to collect quit-rents, not CHAP. only on cultivated fields, but on wild lands also, direct insubordination ensued; and the assembly, 1687. imprisoning the secretary of the province, and seizing the records, defied the governor and his patrons, and entered on a career of absolute opposition. Colleton resolved on one last desperate effort, and, 1689. pretending danger from Indians or Spaniards, called out the militia, and declared martial law. But who were to execute martial law? The militia were the people, and there were no other troops. Colleton was in a more hopeless condition than ever; for the assembly believed itself more than ever bound to protect the country against a military despotism. It was evident, the people were resolved on establishing a government agreeable to themselves. The English revolution of 1688 was therefore imitated on the banks of the Ashley and Cooper. Soon after William 1690. and Mary were proclaimed, a meeting of the representatives of South Carolina disfranchised Colleton, and banished him from the province. CHAPTER XIV. THE COLONIES ON THE CHESAPEAKE BAY. XIV. to CHAP. For more than eight years, "THE PEOPLE OF VIRGINIA" had governed themselves; and their govern1652 ment had been conducted with wise moderation. 1660. Tranquillity and a rapid increase of population promised the extension of its borders; and colonial life was sweetened by the enjoyment of equal franchises. No trace of established privilege appeared in its code or its government; in its forms and in its legislation, Virginia was a representative democracy; so jealous of a landed aristocracy, that it insisted on universality of suffrage; so hostile to the influence of commercial wealth, that it would not tolerate the "mercenary ministers of the law; so considerate for religious freedom, that each parish was left to take care of itself. Every officer was, directly or indirectly, chosen by the people. The power of the people naturally grew out of the character of the early settlers, who were, most of them, adventurers, bringing to the New World no wealth but enterprise; no rank but that of manhood; no privileges but those of Englishmen. The principle of the English law which grants real estate to the eldest born, was respected; but generations of Virginians had hardly as yet succeeded each other; the rule had produced no effect upon society, and, from the THE PEOPLE OF VIRGINIA. 189 XIV. beginning, had been modified in many counties by the CHAP. custom of gavelkind.' Virginia could not imitate those great legislative reforms of the Long Parliament, because her happier soil was free from the burdens of forest laws and military tenures, courts of wards, and starchambers. The tendency towards a multiplication of religious sects began already to be perceptible, under the freedom of a popular government. In its care for a regular succession of representative assemblies, Virginia exceeded the jealous friends of republican liberty in England; there triennial parliaments had been established by law; the Virginians, imitating the terms of the bill, claimed the privilege of a biennial election of their legislators. 2 In addition to the strength derived from the natural character of the emigrants, from the absence of feudal institutions, from the entire absence of the excessive refinements of legal erudition, and from the constitution, legislation, and elective franchises of the colonists, a new and undefined increase was gained by the universal prevalence of the spirit of personal independence. An instinctive aversion to too much government was always a trait of southern character, expressed in the solitary manner of settling the country, in the absence of municipal governments, in the indisposition of the scattered inhabitants to engage in commerce, to collect in towns, or to associate in townships under corporate powers. As a consequence, there was little commercial industry; and, on the soil of Virginia, there were no vast accumulations of commercial wealth. The exchanges were made almost entirely 1 Jones's State of Virginia, p. 61. 2 Hening, i. 517. The bill is modelled after the "act for preventing inconveniences happening by the long intermission of parliament," 190 ARISTOCRACY IN VIRGINIA. CHAP. and it continued so for more than a century—by facXIV. tors of foreign merchants. Thus the influence of wealth, under the modern form of stocks and accumulations of money, was always inconsiderable; and men were so widely scattered-like hermits among the heathen-that far the smallest number were within reach of the direct influence of the established church or of government. In Virginia, except in matters that related to foreign commerce, a man's own will went far towards being his law. Yet the germs of an aristocracy existed; and there was already a tendency towards obtaining for it the sanction of colonial legislation. Unlike Massachusetts, Virginia was a continuation of English society. The first colonists were not fugitives from persecution; they came, rather, under the auspices of the nobility, the church, and the mercantile interests of England; they brought with them an attachment to monarchy; a deep reverence for the Anglican church; a love for England and English institutions. Their minds had never been disciplined into an antipathy to feudalism ; their creed had never been shaken by the progress of skepticism; no new ideas of natural rights had as yet inclined them to "faction." The Anglican church was, therefore, without repugnance, sanctioned as the religion of the state; and a religion established by law always favors aristocracy; for it seeks support, not in conviction only, but in vested rights. The rise of the plebeian sects, which swarmed in England, was, for the present at least, prevented, and unity of worship, with few exceptions, continued for about a century from the settlement of Jamestown. The aristocracy of Virginia was, from its origin, exclusively a landed aristocracy; its germ lay in the manner in which rights to the soil had ARISTOCRACY IN VIRGINIA. 191 XIV. been obtained. For every person whom a planter CHAP. should, at his own charge, transport into Virginia, he could claim fifty acres of land; and thus a body of large proprietors had existed from the infancy of the settlement.1 These vast possessions, often an inheritance for the eldest born, awakened the feelings of family pride. The power of the rising aristocracy was still further increased by the deplorable want of the means of education in Virginia. The great mass of the rising generation could receive little literary culture; the higher degrees of cultivated intelligence in the colony were confined to a small number of favored emigrants. Many of the royalists who came over after the death of Charles I., brought to the colony the culture and education that belonged to the English gentry of that day; and the direction of affairs necessarily fell into their hands. The instinct of liberty may create popular institutions; they cannot be preserved in their integrity except by the conscious intelligence of the people. But the distinctions in society were rendered more marked by the character of the plebeian population of Virginia. Many of them had reached the shores of Virginia as servants; doomed, according to the severe laws of that age, to a temporary servitude. Some of them, even, were convicts; but it must be remembered, the crimes of which they were convicted were chiefly political. The number transported to Virginia for social crimes was never considerable; scarcely enough to sustain the sentiment of pride in its scorn of the laboring population; certainly not enough to affect its character. Yet the division of society into two classes was strongly marked, in a degree une 1 Virginia's Cure, by R. G. 1662, p. 8. |