The Grandees of Government: The Origins and Persistence of Undemocratic Politics in Virginia

Prologue

22 PROLOGUE The cartouche from the 1755 edition of the map of Virginia that Joshua Fry and Peter Jefferson prepared in 1751 (courtesy of the Library of Virginia) depicts Virginia as its most influential residents and people in Great Britain thought of it. Dressed in the latest English fashions and wearing three-cornered hats, three white gentlemen planters smoke, drink, and do business with a merchant wearing a smock and cloth cap. Three African Americans, minimally dressed and presumably enslaved, prepare casks of tobacco for loading aboard a ship for transportation and sale in England. A fourth African American serves a glass of wine to one of the gentlemen. Excluding any depiction of agricultural or domestic life in the colony, this cartouche focuses on the central importance of tobacco cultivation and the men who were most important in that enterprise , the planters and slaves. The political economy of tobacco production and slavery shaped the political institutions and practices of colonial Virginia. En route to the new colony of Maryland in the summer of 1634, Thomas Yong stopped in Virginia to repair his storm-damaged ship. Before resuming his voyage he inquired about affairs in Maryland and learned that the government there was engaged in a dispute with William Claiborne, a member of the governor’s Council of State in Virginia. Claiborne claimed ownership of Kent Island, in Chesapeake Bay, where he had established a profitable fur-trading post. Under the terms of the charter that King Charles I issued to Lord Baltimore that created the colony of Maryland, Kent Island was in Maryland and subject to its government and no longer in Virginia as defined in the charters that King James I had issued to the Virginia Company. Yong learned that Claiborne and other influential merchant-planters on the Virginia Council were obstructing the efforts of the governor, Sir John Harvey, to settle the dispute peacefully, which would be to Claiborne’s disadvantage. Writing to his patrons back in England, Yong complained that Claiborne and the others had “exasperated & incensed all the English Collony of Virginia ” to such an extent “as here it is accounted a crime almost as heynous as treason to favour nay allmost to speak well” of Maryland at all. Yong continued , “I have observed myself a palpable kind of strangeness & distance between those of the best sort in the Country who have formerly been very familiar & loving one to another & onely because the one hath bene suspected but to have bene a wellwisher to the Plantation of Maryland.” The captain wrote that the governor had been “a great reformer in the abuses in the Government especially in the point of Justice, wch at his first entrance was full of corruption & partiality the richest & most powerfull opposing & swallowing upp the poorer,” but that “he is somtimes overborn by the strength & power of some factious & turbulent spiritts of his Council. For here in this place all things are carried by the most voyces of the Council, & they are for the most part united in a kind of faction against the Governor , in so much as they make their publick consultations give strength and authority to their faction.” Consequently , Yong wrote, “it is hard for the Governor to determine or order any thing here contrary to their dictations, for they come all hither pre-occupated & resolved to follow & concur wth the votes of their leaders.” The council members “dislike any propositions of his,” Yong concluded, “how beneficiall soever to the Country, so choosing rather to deprive themselves of the good that might arise to themselves thereby than that he should be the Author of such a benefitt to the country.”1 4 the grandees of government Harvey was a former ship captain who was accustomed to issuing orders bluntly and without consultation and having them carried out promptly and without question. Both his behavior and his policies alienated the ambitious men like Claiborne whom he found in office when he arrived in 1630. In May 1635, the year following Yong’s brief stop in Virginia, those bold and powerful members of the council arrested Harvey, expelled him from the colony, and installed one of their own as governor. The king immediately sent Harvey back to Virginia to show the Virginians who had the exclusive right to dismiss royal governors. Harvey’s second administration accomplished little more than that, though, because the king’s demonstration of authority did not break or even...