The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910 Page 15

  They mourned his death, and opened their arms to all royalist refugees from the power of Cromwell. When Cromwell sent over a man-of-war, however, they accepted the situation. Virginia had by that time grown to so considerable an importance that they could adopt a somewhat conservative attitude toward the affairs even of the mother country.

  The ten years following Charles's accession were a period of peace and growth in the colony; of great increase in population and in production, and of a steady ripening of political liberties. But the conditions under which this development went on were different from those which existed in New England and in New York. The Puritans were actuated by religious ideals, the Dutch by commercial projects chiefly; but the Virginia planters were neither religious enthusiasts nor tradesmen. Their tendency was not to huddle together in towns and close communities, but to spread out over the broad and fertile miles of their new country, and live each in a little principality of his own, with his slaves and dependants around him. They modeled their lives upon those of the landed gentry in England; and when their crops were gathered, they did not go down to the wharfs and haggle over their disposal, but handed them over to agents, who took all trouble off their hands, and after deducting commissions and charges made over to them the net profits. This left the planters leisure to apply themselves to liberal pursuits; they maintained a dignified and generous hospitality, and studied the art of government. A race of gallant gentlemen grew up, well educated, and consciously superior to the rest of the population, who had very limited educational facilities, and but little of that spirit of equality and independence which characterized the northern colonies. Towns and cities came slowly; the plantation system was more natural and agreeable under the circumstances. Orthodoxy in religion was the rule; and though at first there was a tendency to eschew narrowness and bigotry, yet gradually the church became hostile to dissenters, and Puritans and Quakers were as unwelcome in Virginia as were the latter in Massachusetts, or Episcopalians anywhere in New England. All this seems incompatible with democracy; and probably it might in time have grown into a liberal monarchical system. The slaves were not regarded as having any rights, political or personal; their masters exercised over them the power of life and death, as well as all lesser powers. The bulk of the white population was not oppressed, and was able to get a living, for Virginia was "the best poor man's country in the world"; there was little or none of the discontent that embarrassed the New Amsterdam patroons; the charter gave them representation, and their manhood was not undermined. Had Virginia been an island, or otherwise isolated, and free from any external interference, we can imagine that the planters might at last have found it expedient to choose a king from among their number, who would have found a nobility and a proletariat ready made. But Virginia was not isolated. She was loyal to the Stuarts, because they did not bring to bear upon her the severities which they inflicted upon their English subjects; but when she became a royal colony, and had to put up with corrupt and despotic favorites of the monarch, who could do what they pleased, and were responsible to nobody but the monarch who had made them governor, loyalty began to cool. Moreover, men whose ability and advanced opinions made them distasteful to the English kings, fled to the colonies, and to Virginia among the rest, and sowed the seeds of revolt. Calamity makes strange bedfellows: the planters liked outside oppression as little as did the common people, and could not but make common cause with them.

  The distance between the two was diminished. Social equality there could hardly be; but political and theoretic equality could be acknowledged.

  The English monarchy made the American republic; spurred its indolence, and united its parts. Man left to himself is lax and indifferent; from first to last it is the pressure of wrong that molds him into the form of right. George I. gave the victory to the Americans in the Revolution as much as Washington did. And before George's time, the colonies had been keyed up to the struggle by years of injustice and outrage. And this injustice and outrage seemed the more intolerable because they had been preceded by a period of comparative liberality. It needs powerful pressure to transform English gentlemen with loyalist traditions, and sympathies into a democracy; but it can be done, and the English kings were the men to do it.

  Until the period of unequivocal tyranny arrived, the chief shadow upon the colony was cast by its relations with the Indians. Powhatan, the father of Pocahontas, and chief over tribes whose domains extended over thousands of square miles, kept friendship with the whites till his death in 1618. His brother, Opechankano, professed to inherit the friendship along with the chieftainship; but the relations between the red men and the colonists had never been too cordial, and the latter, measuring their muskets and breastplates against the stone arrows and deerskin shirts of the savages, fell into the error of despising them. The Indians, for their part, stood in some awe of firearms, which they had never held in their own hands, and the penalty for selling which to them had been made capital years before. But they had their own methods of dealing with foes; and since neither side had ever formally come to blows, they had received no object lesson to warn them to keep hands off. Opechankano was intelligent and far-seeing; he perceived that the whites were increasing in numbers, and that if they were not checked betimes, they would finally overrun the country. But he did not see so far as his brother, who had known that the final domination of the English could not be prevented, and had therefore adopted the policy of conciliating them as the best. Opechankano, therefore, quietly planned the extermination of the settlers; the familiar terms on which the white and red men stood played into his hands. Indians were in the habit of visiting the white settlements, and mingling with the people. Orders for concerted action were secretly circulated among the savages, who were to hold themselves ready for the signal.

  It might after all never have been given, but for an unlooked for incident. A noisy and troublesome Indian, who imagined that bullets could not kill him, fell into a quarrel with a settler, and slew him; and was himself shot while attempting to escape from arrest. "Sooner shall the heavens fall," devoutly exclaimed Opechankano, when informed of this mishap, "than I will break the peace of Powhatan." But the waiting tribes knew that the time had come.

  On the morning of March 22, 1622, the settlers arose as usual to the labors of the day; some of them took their hoes and spades and went out into the fields; others busied themselves about their houses. Numbers of Indians were about, but this excited no remark or suspicion; they were not formidable; a dog could frighten them; a child could hold them in check.

  Indians strolled into the cabins, and sat at the breakfast-tables. No one gave them a second thought. No one looked over his shoulder when an Indian passed behind him.

  But, miles up the country from Jamestown lived a settler who kept an Indian boy, whom he instructed, and who made himself useful about the place; and of all the Indians in Virginia that day he was the only one whose heart relented. His brother had lain with him the night before, and had given him the word: he was to kill the settler and his family the next morning. The boy seemed to assent, and the other went on his way. The boy lay till dawn, his savage mind divided between fear of the great chief and compassion for the white man who had been kind to him and taught him. In the early morning he arose and stood beside his benefactor's bed. The man slept: one blow, and he would be dead. But the boy did not strike; he wakened him and told him of the horror that was about to befall.

  Pace--such was the settler's name--did not wait for confirmation of the tale; indeed, as he ran to the paddock to get his packhorse, he could see the smoke of burning cabins rising in the still air, and could hear, far off, the yells of the savages as they plied their work.

  He sprang on the horse's back, with his musket across the withers, and set off at a gallop toward Jamestown. Most of the colonists lived in that neighborhood; if he could get there in time many lives might be saved. As he rode, he directed his course to the cabins, on the right hand and on the left, that lay in hi
s way, and gave the alarm. Many of the savages, who had not yet begun their work, at once took to flight; they would not face white men when on their guard. In other places, the warning came too late. The missionary, who had devoted his life to teaching the heathen that men should love one another, was inhumanly butchered. Pace arrived in season to avert the danger from the bulk of the little population; but, of the four thousand scattered over the country-side, three hundred and forty-seven died that morning, with the circumstances of hideous atrocity which were the invariable accompaniments of Indian massacre. The colonists were appalled; and for a time it seemed as if the purpose of Opechankano would be realized. Two thousand settlers came in from the outlying districts, panic-stricken, and after living for a while crowded together in unwholesome quarters in the vicinity of Jamestown, took ship and returned to England. Hardly one in ten of the plantations was not deserted. The bolder spirits, who remained, organized a war of extermination, in which they were supported and re-enforced by the company, who sent over men and weapons as soon as the news was known in England. But the campaign resolved itself into long and harassing attacks, ambuscades and reprisals, extending over many years. There could be no pitched battles with Indians; they gave way, but only to circumvent and surprise. The whites were resolved to make no peace, and to give no quarter to man, woman or child. The formerly peaceful settlement became inured to blood and cruelty. But the red men could not be wholly driven away. Just twenty years after the first massacre the same implacable chief, now a decrepit old man, planned a second one; some hundreds were murdered; but the colonists were readier and stronger now, and they gathered themselves up at once, and inflicted a crushing vengeance. The ancient chief was finally taken, and either died of wounds received in fight, or was slain by a soldier after capture. After 1646, the borders of Virginia were safe. There is no redeeming feature in this Indian warfare, which fitfully survives, in remote parts of our country, even now. It aided, perhaps, to train the race of pioneers and frontiersmen who later became one of the most remarkable features of our early population.

  Contact with the savage races inoculated us, perhaps, with a touch of their stoicism and grimness. But in our conflicts with them there was nothing noble or inspiring; and there could be no object in view on either side but extermination. Our Indian fighters became as savage and merciless as the creatures they pursued. The Indian must be fought by the same tactics he adopts--cunning, stealth, surprise, and then unrelenting slaughter, with the sequel of the scalping knife. They compel us to descend to their level in war, and we have utterly failed to raise them to our own in peace. Some of them have possessed certain harshly masculine traits which we can admire; some of them have showed broad and virile intelligence, the qualities of a general, a diplomatist, or even of a statesman. There have been, and are, so-called tame Indians; but such were not worth taming. As a whole, the red tribes have resisted all attempts to lift them to the civilized level and keep them there. Roger Williams, and the "apostle," John Eliot, were their friends, and won their regard; but neither Williams' influence nor Eliot's Bible left any lasting trace upon them. The Indian is irreclaimable; disappointment is the very mildest result that awaits the effort to reclaim him. He is wild to the marrow; no bird or beast is so wild as he. He is a human embodiment of the untrodden woods, the undiscovered rivers, the austere mountains, the pathless prairies--of all those parts and aspects of nature which are never brought within the smooth sway of civilization, because, as soon as civilization appears, they are, so far as their essential quality is concerned, gone.

  To hear the yelp of the coyote, you must lie alone in the sage brush near the pool in the hollow of the low hills by moonlight; it will never reach your ears through the bars of the menagerie cage. To know the mountain, you must confront the avalanche and the precipice uncompanioned, and stand at last on the breathless and awful peak, which lifts itself and you into a voiceless solitude remote from man and yet no nearer to God; but if you journey with guides and jolly fellowship to some Mountain House, never so airily perched, you would as well visit a panorama. To comprehend the ocean, you must meet it in its own inviolable domain, where it tosses heavenward its careless nakedness, and laughs with death; from the deck of a steamboat you will never find it, though you sail as far as the Flying Dutchman. But the solitude which nature reveals, and which alone reveals her, does but prepare you for the inaproachableness that shines out at you from the Indian's eyes. Seas are shallow and continents but a span compared with the breadths and depths which separate him from you. The sphinx will yield her mystery, but he will not unveil his; you may touch the poles of the planet, but you can never lay your hand on him. The same God that made you, made him also in His image; but if you try to bridge the gulf between you, you will learn something of God's infinitude.

  Sir George Yeardley and Sir Francis Wyatt both held the office of governor twice, and with good repute; in 1630, Sir John Harvey succeeded the former. He was the champion of monopolists; he would divide the land among a few, and keep the rest in subjection. He fought with the legislature from the first; he could not wring their rights from them, but he distressed and irritated the colony, levying arbitrary fines, and browbeating all and sundry with the brutality of an ungoverned temper. His chief patron was Lord Baltimore, a Roman Catholic, and therefore disfavored by the Protestant colony, who would not suffer him to plant in their domain. He bought a patent authorizing him to establish a colony in the northern part of Virginia, which was afterward called Maryland, being cut off from the older colony; and this diminution of their territory much displeased the Virginians. But Harvey supported him throughout; and permitted mass to be said in Virginia. He likewise prevented the settlers from carrying on the border warfare with the Indians, lest it should disturb his perquisites from the fur trade. Violent scenes took place in the hall of assembly, and hard words were given and exchanged; the planters were men of hot passions, and the conduct of the governor became intolerable to them. Matters came to a head during the last week in April of 1635. An unauthorized gathering in York complained of an unjust tax and of other malfeasances; whereupon Harvey cried mutiny, and had the leaders arrested. But the boot was on the other leg. Several members of council, with a company of musketeers at their back, came to his house; Matthews, with whom the governor had lately had a fierce quarrel, and the other planters, tramped into the broad hall of the dwelling, with swords in their hands and threatening looks, and confronted him. John Utie brought down his hand with staggering force on his shoulder, exclaiming, "I arrest you for treason!" "How, for treason?" queried the frightened governor.

  "You have betrayed our forts to our enemies of Maryland," replied several stern voices. Harvey glanced from one to another; in the background were the musketeers; plainly this was no time for trifling. He offered to do whatever they demanded. They required the release of prisoners, which was immediately done, and bade him prepare to answer before the assembly. They would listen to no arguments and no excuses; he was told by Matthews, with a menacing look, that the people would have none of him. "You intend no less than the subversion of Maryland," protested Harvey; but he promised to return to England, and John West, who had already acted as ad-interim governor while Harvey was on his way to Virginia, was at once elected in his place.

  This incident showed of what stuff the Virginians were made. It was an early breaking-out of the American spirit, which would never brook tyranny. In offering violence to the king's governor they imperiled their own lives; but their blood was up, and they heeded no danger. When Harvey presented himself before Charles at the privy council, his majesty remarked that he must be sent back at all hazards, because the sending him to England had been an assumption on the colonists' part of regal power; and, tobacco or no tobacco, the line must be drawn there. If the charges against him were sustained, he might stay but a day; if not, his term should be extended beyond the original commission. A new commission was given him, and back he went; but this shuttlecock experience seems to
have quelled his spirit, and we hear no more of quarrels with the Virginia council. Wyatt relieved him in 1639; and in 1642 came Sir William Berkeley. This man, who was born about the beginning of the century, was twice governor; his present term, lasting ten years, was followed by a nine years' interval; reappointed again in 1660, he was in power when the rebellion broke out which was led by Nathaniel Bacon. Little is known of him outside of his American record; in his first term, under Charles I., he acted simply as the creature of that monarch, and aroused no special animosities on his own account: during the reign of Cromwell, he disappeared; but when Charles II. ascended the throne, Berkeley, though then an old man, was thought to be fitted by his previous experience for the Virginia post, and was returned thither. But years seemed to have soured his disposition, and lessened his prudence, and, as we shall see, his bloodthirsty conduct after Bacon's death was the occasion of his recall in disgrace; and he died, like Andros more than half a century later, with the curse of a people on his grave.

  But his first appearance was auspicious; he brought instructions designed to increase the reign of law and order in the colony, without infringing upon its existing liberties. Allegiance to God and the king were enjoined, additional courts were provided for, traffic with the Indians was regulated, annual assemblies, with a negative voice upon their acts by the governor, were commanded. The only discordant note in the instructions referred to the conditions of maritime trade, afterward known in history as the Navigation Acts. The colony desired free trade, which, as it had no manufactures, was obviously to its benefit. But it was as obviously to the interest of the king that he alone should enjoy the right of controlling all imports into the colony, and absorbing all its exports; and his rulings were framed to secure that end. But for the present the Acts were not carried into effect; and, on the other hand, the prospect was held out that there should be no taxation except what was voted by the people themselves; and their contention that they, who knew the conditions and needs of their colonial existence, were better able to regulate it than those at home, was allowed. By way of evincing their recognition of this courtesy, the assembly passed among other laws, one against toleration of any other than the episcopalian form of worship; and when Charles was beheaded, in 1649, it voted to retain Berkeley in office. But when in the next year, the fugitive son of the dead king undertook to issue a commission confirming him in his place, Parliament intervened. Virginia was brought to her bearings; and the Navigation Acts were brought up again. Cromwell, no less than Charles, appreciated the advantages of a monopoly.