organised Quaker emigration from England, for the purchasers intended to form a colony of refuge for their co-religionists. After the peace of 1674 the Crown granted new letters patent for both New York and New Jersey to the Duke of York alone, in disregard of the Quaker purchase. Andros, who went out to govern the two provinces for the duke, declined to recognise the Quaker rights, but his master was more complaisant and allowed the settlement to proceed. This kindness was partly due to statesmanship, which demanded that the colony should be peopled, and partly to a queer friendship that existed between the Catholic duke and the Quaker William Penn, who had taken over Byllyng's share of the business. Penn, the acknowledged leader of his sect, could command a fair amount of capital, and in 1681-2 he simplified the Jersey problem by buying up the Carteret rights in addition to those of Berkeley. The duke instructed Dongan, his representative at New York, to honour the arrangement, and the separate existence of New Jersey was assured. The colony was not, however, a personal proprietorship of William Penn, but that of a syndicate of which he was the leader. The Quakers were not the most numerous section of the population, and their principles rendered them disinclined for political strife. The government of New Jersey thus fell chiefly to the non-Quakers and, except for its religious toleration, resembled the New England type. Penn was not content with the New Jersey experiment; he hankered after a colony in which he could put his own pronounced views to a trial unhindered by prior occupation of the field. The Quakers, in spite of the friendship of the Duke of York, experienced bitter persecution in the England of Charles II. Their unworldly stubbornness in petty matters-wearing a distinctive costume, refusing to doff their hats in courts of justice, "theeing" and "thouing" their judges, and interrupting the services of the established Church-aroused more hatred than did their fundamental principles, and both they and their persecutors came to the conclusion that the continued residence in England of their more intransigent members was impossible. Virtuous as they were, authority regarded them as bad citizens, and there was consequently no objection to their emigration; the State, classing them for its purposes with paupers, felons and rebels, felt relieved at their departure and was disposed to facilitate their going.1 This circumstance explains how Penn was enabled to enter the ranks of the favoured courtiers in obtaining a proprietary grant of a large new area of North America, to which he undertook to draw off his unpopular followers. The Crown had owed several thousand pounds to Penn's father, who had died in 1670, and ten years later it still owed the money to his son. The latter offered to accept an American grant in payment, and in March 1681 received letters patent for a vaguely defined tract 1 Beer, 1, 29-30. PENNSYLVANIA 255 whose borders were ultimately drawn as those of the present State of Pennsylvania. At the time of granting, however, the province was much larger, and it was soon afterwards made to include the settlements on the south side of the Delaware estuary which had hitherto belonged to New York. The duke freely made over this territory to Penn, but since it was already occupied, its development took a different course from that of Pennsylvania proper, and in 1702 it was separated to form the colony and subsequent State of Delaware. Penn had suggested "Sylvania" as the title of his province, and it was Charles II who attached the prefix, somewhat against the will of the grantee.1 New York had become a cosmopolitan colony by the accidents of its history; Pennsylvania was made cosmopolitan by the policy of its founder. The Quakers were strong in Wales and Ireland as well as in England, and contingents from all three countries were among the pioneers. In addition to this Penn wrote a prospectus which was published on the continent in Dutch, French and German, and by this means attracted a number of foreign recruits, chiefly Germans and Swiss, from religious bodies like the Mennonites, whose principles resembled those of the Quakers. From the outset there was complete religious toleration, and all Christians were allowed full political rights; the only restriction was that the sects must abstain from interference with each other's practices. The grant of representative government was a condition embodied in the patent and was acted upon as soon as the pioneers had settled down. Penn drew up an elaborate and unworkable constitution known as the "Frame of Government", but he did not attempt to put it into operation; its council of seventy-two and Assembly of two hundred members were obviously impossible, and it should be read as an academic statement of principle. There was, however, some trace of its influence in the early political arrangement whereby the council (of eighteen members) could alone initiate legislation, and the Assembly (of thirty-six) could alone vote upon it. This peculiarity soon disappeared, and the constitution became one of the normal type, giving scope, it may be added, for the usual dissensions between proprietor and subjects. Penn himself spent the years 1682-4 in the colony. To him may be attributed two lasting achievements, the establishment of friendly relations between the colonists and the Indians, whose lands were punctually although not too generously paid for, and the laying-out of the capital city of Philadelphia on the estuary of the Delaware. Philadelphia was an example of deliberate planning and not of haphazard growth, and its position guaranteed its future importance, for it stood in the only corner of the province which impinged upon navigable water. Pennsylvania was a spiritual as well as a material experiment. In the former character it succeeded as well as any 1 See Jones, F. R., Colonisation of the Middle States and Maryland, pp. 263–81. practical man could expect, for it produced a clean-living and tolerant community; but to Penn it was a disappointment, for he expected something more, and with the inevitable squabbles between factions and authorities it fell far short of the example of peace and charity of which he had dreamed. On the material side there was unqualified success. The planting of the pioneers went without a hitch, there was no Indian war and no "starving-time" as in the earlier foundations, and in ten years Philadelphia was exporting surplus foodstuffs to the West Indies. If the saints were no more than passably saintly, they were yet excellent men of business. The history of Virginia under the Restoration is full of important incidents, but it will be possible to touch only upon those matters which are typical of the position of a Plantation colony in its second generation. By 1660 the formative period was over, and the chief task of Virginia, as of Barbados, was to adapt itself to the general polity of the Empire. Sir William Berkeley, appointed governor by Charles I and displaced by the Commonwealth, resumed office when Charles II mounted the throne. At that date he had lived nearly twenty years in Virginia, understood its interests, and was welcomed as a governor the colony could trust. He identified himself with the planters' protest against the enumeration of tobacco in the Navigation Act of 1660, but failed to secure its repeal. The restriction caused much discontent, and all commercial misfortunes were attributed to it. In reality, as had been apparent more than twenty years before, the depression in the tobacco trade was primarily due to overproduction. The colony's output glutted the English market and had to face Spanish and Portuguese competition on the continent of Europe. The only way to improve the price of Virginian tobacco was to limit the output. To that end the Home Government urged the colonists to turn their attention to flax, hemp and pitch, products which would have rendered the Empire more nearly self-sufficing. But all efforts in these directions failed, either because the commodities were unsuited to the country or because the servile organisation of labour could not be adapted to them. Narrow and self-centred, the colony developed political characteristics that were typical of the period. An Assembly composed of Berkeley's supporters was elected in 1660 and sat undissolved for sixteen years. During that time many new immigrants arrived and the views of the electorate greatly changed. Nevertheless the ruling clique clung to office, managed public business for their own benefit, and gradually drew apart as an oligarchy treating the newcomers as inferiors. Berkeley, whose character deteriorated with age, abetted this schism in the corporate life. The climax came with a rebellion headed by one Nathaniel Bacon, an immigrant, in 1676. It cost many lives, entailed the recall of Berkeley, and ultimately cleared the political atmosphere. The melancholy sequence of corruption, VIRGINIA AND MARYLAND 257 incompetence and explosion arose largely from the appointment of a planter governor, such as the people of other colonies were fond of demanding; for an outsider of detached views would hardly have allowed things to go so far. While it is true that the local leaders in Virginia, as in other colonies of the period, were by no means examples of civic virtue, it is fair to add that the actions of the Home Government were not such as to improve the tone of political life. Charles II, in pursuance of the policy of making powerful subjects responsible for colonial development, granted to courtiers the right to dispose of unoccupied lands in the colony. If the purpose was to ensure the speedy population of waste areas there was something to be said for it, although even then the existing colonists were entitled to some voice in the matter. But the grant to Lords Arlington and Culpeper in 1673 went further and accorded to the patentees the greater part of the patronage of the colony. With good reason the Virginians protested, and negotiations were on foot for the incorporation of the inhabitants as joint owners of the land rights when the rebellion of 1676 put an end to the matter.1 Berkeley's successors, Culpeper (1679–84) and Lord Howard of Effingham (1684-9), were accused of extortion and were guilty of the bad practice of allowing colonial offices to be held in England and performed on the spot by deputy. These abuses, imperial and local, were typical of the age, and were rampant in the colonies of France, Spain and Portugal as well as of England. Maryland had on the whole a less troubled record under the Restoration. In the process of imperial development it played its part as the only proprietary colony of the early foundations still retaining that status. The Lords Baltimore continued the cautious and sensible policy which had brought them through the vicissitudes of the Interregnum, and the secret of Maryland's tranquillity is to be found in the personal residence of the ruling family in the colony. Charles Calvert, son of the second proprietor, governed Maryland from 1661 to 1675, and when in the latter year he succeeded to the proprietorship, he continued to live among his subjects until State business called him to England in 1684. During this period the principal topic of controversy was the evasion and enforcement of the laws of trade; Maryland tobacco found its chief markets in Holland and Germany, and the enumeration clause that forced it to travel to its destination by way of England was keenly resented. In general it may be said that the chartered and proprietary colonists experienced less interference with their local autonomy than did those directly under the Crown, and that they took advantage of the looser control to infringe the Navigation Acts much more extensively. The individualist tendencies observable in most of the colonies during this period were nowhere more strongly marked than in New CHBEI 1 Channing, Hist. of U.S. 11, 63-4. 17 England. It was natural that this should be so, for a social and political environment of a unique character was established there, the contacts with the mother country were slight-there was very little trade and virtually no emigration-and, above all, the New England merchants aspired to the position of exploiters rather than subordinate members of the Empire. The Plantation trade was their opportunity of wealth, for they had no rich products of their own, and they were determined to carry Plantation goods to continental Europe and manufactures from it, whatever the Navigation Acts might say. It followed from this that, autonomous as they desired to be, they had no thought of secession from the Empire. Apart from the question of defence, they would have been economically lost had they passed outside the imperial system. The time had not yet come, as Scotland was to find, when a minor State could independently enjoy a share of oceanic trade. Of the five Puritan colonies, Massachusetts was the only one which in 1660 had any royal authority for its constitutional system; in its case the charter granted to the Massachusetts Bay Company in 1629 was still valid. Rhode Island had obtained during the Civil War a parliamentary charter that was now worthless. Plymouth, Connecticut and New Haven had never had any formal authority for their establishment. Clarendon's policy, as already explained, was to favour agricultural Connecticut as against Massachusetts, whose mercantile activity was a threat to the imperial system then in course of consolidation. Connecticut therefore received a royal charter in 1662 which recognised its constitution and allowed it to absorb New Haven. Rhode Island received a similar grant in 1663, and Plymouth could have had one on certain conditions which it preferred to refuse. Plymouth thus continued a precarious separate existence, liable at any moment to be cut short; but as an imperial unit the colony was now unimportant, for its expansion was blocked by the position of its neighbours, it had no good port, and it had already attained the limits of development possible in its existing area. Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island formed a group known as the charter colonies. Each elected its own governor as well as its Assembly and other State officials, the terms of office were short, and the administration was therefore well under the control of the elecHad the franchise been liberal, democracy would have existed. But Massachusetts, and to some extent Connecticut, still contrived to make church membership the qualification for the right to vote, and the result was an oligarchy. Orders from England, it is true, required the abandonment of the religious test, but they were disregarded. Just as the Dutch War of 1664-7 was breaking out, Clarendon sent commissioners to Massachusetts to enquire into its political practices and enforce obedience; but the war diverted their attention, and before its close Clarendon's rule was coming to an end. |