The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910 Part 6

CHAPTER SIXTH

CATHOLIC, PHILOSOPHER, AND REBEL

The first Lord Baltimore, whose family name was Calvert, was a Yorkshireman, born at the town of Kipling in 1580. He entered Parliament in his thirtieth year, and was James's Secretary of State ten years later. He was a man of large, tranquil nature, philosophic, charitable, loving peace; but these qualities were fused by a concrete tendency of thought, which made him a man of action, and determined that action in the direction of practical schemes of benevolence. The contemporary interest in America as a possible arena of enterprise and Mecca of religious and political dissenters, attracted his sympathetic attention; and when, in 1625, being then five-and-forty years of age, he found in the Roman Catholic communion a refuge from the clamor of warring sects, and as an immediate consequence tendered his resignation as secretary to the head of the Church of England, he found himself with leisure to put his designs in execution. He had, upon his conversion, been raised to the rank of Baron Baltimore in the peerage of Ireland; and his change of faith in no degree forfeited him the favor of the king. When therefore he asked for a charter to found a colony in Avalon, in Newfoundland, it was at once granted, and the colony was sent out; but his visits to it in 1627 and 1629 convinced him that the climate was too inclement for his purposes, and he requested that it might be transferred to the northern parts of Virginia, which he had visited on his way to England. This too was permitted; but before the new charter had been sealed Lord Baltimore died. The patent thereupon pa.s.sed to his son Cecil, who was also a Catholic. He devoted his life to carrying out his father's designs. The characters of the two men were, in their larger elements, not dissimilar; and the sequel showed that colonial enterprise could be better achieved by one man of kindly and liberal disposition, and persistent resolve, than by a corporation, some of whose members were sure to thwart the wishes of others. Conditions of wider scope than the settlement of Maryland obstructed and delayed its proprietor's plans; conflicts and changes of government in England, and jealousy and violence on the part of Virginia, had their influence; but this quiet, benign, resolute young man (who was but seven-and-twenty when the grant made him sovereign of a kingdom) never lost his temper or swerved from his aim: overcame, apparently without an effort, the disabilities which might have been expected to hamper the professor of a faith as little consonant with the creed of the two Charleses as of Cromwell; was as well regarded, politically, by cavaliers as by roundheads; and finally established his ownership and control of his heritage, and, after a beneficent rule of over forty years, died in peace and honor with his people and the world. The story of colonial Maryland has a flavor of its own, and throws still further light on the subject of popular self-government--the source and solution of American history.

The idea of the Baltimores, as outlined in their charter, and followed in their practice, was to try the experiment of a democratic monarchy.

They would found a state the people of which should enjoy all the freedom of action and thought that sane and well-disposed persons can desire, within the boundaries of their personal concerns; they should not be meddled with; each man's home should be his castle; they should say what taxes should be collected, and what civil officers should attend to their collective affairs. They should be like pa.s.sengers on a ship, free to sleep or wake, sit or walk, speak or be mute, eat or fast, as they pleased: do anything in fact except scuttle the ship or cut the rigging--or ordain to what port she should steer, or what course the helmsman should lay. Matters of high policy, in other words, should be the care of the proprietor; everything less than that, broadly speaking, should be left to the colonists themselves. The proprietor could not get as close to their personal needs as they could: and they, preoccupied with private interests, could not see so far and wide as he could. If then it were arranged that they should be afforded every facility and encouragement to make their wants known: and if it were guaranteed that he would adopt every means that experience, wisdom and good-will suggested to gratify those wants: what more could mortal man ask? There was nothing abnormal in the idea. The principle is the same as that on which the Creator has placed man in nature: man is perfectly at liberty to do as he pleases; only, he must adapt himself to the law of gravitation, to the resistance of matter, to hot and cold, wet and dry, and to the other impersonal necessities by which the material universe is conditioned. The control of these natural laws, as they are called, could not advantageously be given in charge to man; even had he the brains to manage them, he could not spare the time from his immediate concerns. He is well content, accordingly, to leave them to the Power that put him where he is; and he does not feel his independence infringed upon in so doing. When his little business goes wrong, however, he can pet.i.tion his Creator to help him out: or, what amounts to the same thing, he can find out in what respect he has failed to conform to the laws of nature, and, by returning into harmony with them, insure himself success. What the Creator was to mankind at large, Lord Baltimore proposed to be to his colony; and, following this supreme example, and binding himself to place the welfare of his people before all other considerations, how could he make a mistake?

In arguments about the best ways of managing nations or communities, it has been generally conceded that this scheme of an executive head on one side, and a people freely communicating their wants to him on the other, is sound, provided, first, that he is as solicitous about their welfare as they themselves are; and secondly, that means exist for continuous and unchecked intercommunication between them and him:--it being premised, of course, that the ability of the head is commensurate with his willingness. And leaving basic principles for the moment aside, it is notorious that one-man power is far prompter, weightier, and cleaner-cut than the confused and incomplete compromises of a body of representatives are apt to be.

All this may be conceded. And yet experience shows that the one-man system, even when the man is a Lord Baltimore, is unsatisfactory. Lord Baltimore, indeed, finally achieved a technical success; his people loved and honored him, his wishes were measurably realized, and, so far as he was concerned, Maryland was the victim of fewer mistakes than were the other colonies. But the fact that Lord Baltimore's career closed in peace and credit was due less to what he did and desired, than to the necessity his career was under of sooner or later coming to a close. Had he possessed a hundred times the ability and benevolence that were his, and had been immortal into the bargain, the people would have cast him out; they were willing to tolerate him for a few years, more or less, but as a fixture--No! "Tolerate" is too harsh a word; but another might be too weak. The truth is, men do not care half so much what they get, as how they get it. The wolf in Aesop's fable keenly wanted a share of the bones which made his friend the mastiff so sleek; but the hint that the bones and the collar went together drove him hungry but free back to his desert. It is of no avail to give a man all he asks for; he resents having to ask you for it, and wants to know by what right you have it to give. A man can be grateful for friendship, for a sympathetic look, for a brave word spoken in his behalf against odds--he can be your debtor for such things, and keep his manhood uncompromised. But if you give him food, and ease, or preferment, and condescension therewith, look for no thanks from him; esteem yourself fortunate if he do not hold you his enemy. The gifts of the soul are free; but material benefits are captivity. So the Maryland colonists, recognizing that their proprietor meant well, forgave him his generosity, and his activities in their behalf--but only because they knew that his day would presently be past. Man is infinite as well as finite: infinite in his claims, finite in his power of giving. And for Baltimore to presume to give the people all they claimed, was as much as to say that his fullness could equal their want, or that his rights and capacities were more than theirs. He gave them all that a democracy can possess--except the one thing that const.i.tutes democracy; that is, absolute self-direction. It may well be that their little ship of state, steered by themselves, would have encountered many mishaps from which his sagacious guidance preserved it. But rather rocks with their pilotage than port with his: and beyond forgiving him their magnanimity could not go.

There is little more than this to be derived from study of the Maryland experiment. Let a man manage himself, in big as well as in little things, and he will be happy on raw clams and plain water, with a snow-drift for a pillow--as we saw him happy in Plymouth Bay: but give him roast ortolans and silken raiment, and manage him never so little, and you cannot relieve his discontent. And is it not well that it should be so? Verily it is--if America be not a dream, and immortality a delusion.

Lord Baltimore would perhaps have liked to see all his colonists Catholics; but his experience of religious intolerance had not inflamed him against other creeds than his own, as would have been the case with a Spaniard; it seemed to awaken a desire to set tolerance an example.

Any one might join his community except felons and atheists; and as a matter of fact, his a.s.sortment of colonists soon became as motley as that of Williams in Providence. The landing of the first expedition on an island in the Potomac was attended by the making and erecting by the Jesuit priests of a rude cross, and the celebration of ma.s.s; but there were even then more Protestants than Catholics in the party; and though the leadership was Catholic for many years, it was not on account of the numerical majority of persons of that faith. Episcopalians ejected from New England, Puritans fleeing from the old country, Quakers and Anabaptists who were unwelcome everywhere else, met with hospitality in Maryland. Let them but believe in Jesus Christ, and all else was forgiven them. Nevertheless, Catholicism was the religion of the country. Its inhabitants might be likened to promiscuous guests at an inn whose landlord made no criticisms on their beliefs, further than to inscribe the Papal insignia on the signboard over his door. Thus liberty was discriminated from license, and in the midst of tolerance there was order.

The first settlement was made on a small creek entering the north side of the Potomac. Here an Indian village already existed; but its occupants were on the point of deserting it, and were glad to accept payment from the colonists for the site which they had no further use for. On the other hand, the colonists could avail themselves of the wigwams just as they stood, and had their maize fields ready cleared.

Baltimore, meanwhile, through his agent (and brother) Leonard Calvert, furnished them with all the equipment they needed; and so well was the way smoothed before them, that the colony made progress ten times as rapidly as Virginia had done. They called their new home St. Mary's; and the date of its occupation was 1634. Their first popular a.s.sembly met for legislation in the second month of the ensuing year. In that and subsequent meetings they a.s.serted their right of jurisdiction, their right to enact laws, the freedom of "holy church": his lordship gently giving them their head. In 1642, perhaps to disburden themselves of some of their obligation to him, they voted him a subsidy. Almost the only definite privilege which he seems to have retained was that of pre-emption of lands. At this period (1643) all England was by the ears, and Baltimore's hold upon his colony was relaxed. In Virginia and the other colonies, which had governors of their own, the neglect of the mother country gave them opportunity for progress; but the people of Maryland, no longer feeling the sway of their non-resident proprietor, and having no one else to look after them, became disorderly; which would not have happened, had they been empowered to elect a ruler from among themselves. Baltimore's enemies took advantage of these disturbances to pet.i.tion for his removal from the proprietorship; but he was equal to the occasion; and by confirming his colonists in all just liberties, with freedom of conscience in the foreground, he composed their dissensions, and took away his enemies'

ground of complaint. In 1649, the legislature sat for the first time in two branches, so that one might be a check upon the other. Upon this principle all American legislatures are still formed.

But the reign of Cromwell in England gave occasion for sophistries in Maryland. All other Englishmen, in the colonies or at home, were members of a commonwealth; but Baltimore still claimed the Marylanders'

allegiance. On what grounds?--for since the king from whom he derived his power was done away with, so must be the derivative power.

Baltimore stood between them and republicanism. To give edge to the predicament, the colony was menaced by covetous Virginia on one hand, and by fugitive Charles II., with a governor of his own manufacture, on the other. Calamity seemed at hand.

In 1650, the year after Charles I.'s execution, the Parliament appointed commissioners to bring royalist colonies into line; Maryland was to be reannexed to Virginia; Bennett, then governor of Virginia, and Clairborne, unseated Stone, Baltimore's lieutenant, appointed an executive council, and ordered that burgesses were to be elected by supporters of Cromwell only. The question of reannexation was referred to Parliament. Baltimore protested that Maryland had been less royalist than Virginia; and before the Parliament could decide what to do, it was dissolved, carrying with it the authority of Bennett and Clairborne. Stone now reappeared defiant; but the Virginians attacked him, and he surrendered on compulsion. The Virginian government decreed that no Roman Catholics could hereafter vote or be elected.

Baltimore, taking his stand on his charter, declared these doings mutinous; and Cromwell supported him. Stone once more a.s.serted himself; but in the skirmish with the Virginians that followed, he was defeated, yielded (he seems to have had no granite in his composition), and, with his supporters, was ordered to be shot. His life was spared, however; but Cromwell, again appealed to, refused to act. The ownership of Maryland was therefore still undetermined. It was not until 1667 that Baltimore and Bennett agreed to compromise their dispute. The boundary between the two domains was maintained, but settlers from Virginia were not to be disturbed in their holdings. The second year after Cromwell's death, the representatives of Maryland met and voted themselves an independent a.s.sembly, making Fendall, Baltimore's appointee, subject to their will. Finally, being weary of turmoil, they made it felony to alter what they had done. The colony was then abreast of Virginia in political privileges, and had a population of about ten thousand, in spite of its vicissitudes.

But the quiet, invincible Lord Baltimore was still to be reckoned with.

At the Restoration, he sent his deputy to the colony, which submitted to his authority, and Fendall was convicted of treason for having allowed the a.s.sembly to overrule him. A general amnesty was proclaimed, however, and the kindliness of the government during the remainder of the proprietor's undisputed sway attracted thousands of settlers from all the nations of Europe. Between Baltimore and the people, a give-and-take policy was established, one privilege being set against another, so that their liberties were maintained, and his rights recognized. Though he stood in his own person for all that was opposed to democracy, he presided over a community which was essentially democratic; and he had the breadth of mind to acknowledge that because he owned allegiance to kings and popes, was no reason why others should do so. Suum cuique. Could he but have gone a step further, and denied himself the gratification of retaining his hard-earned proprietorship, he would have been one of the really great men of history.

The ripple of events which we have recorded may seem too insignificant; of still less import is the story of the efforts of Clairborne, from 1634: to 1647, to gain, or retain possession of Kent Island, in the Chesapeake, on which he had "squatted" before Baltimore got his charter. Yet, from another point of view, even slight matters may weigh when they are related to the stirring of the elements which are to crystallize into a nation. Maryland, like a bird half tamed, was ready to fly away when the cage door was left open, and yet was not averse to its easy confinement when the door was shut again. But, unlike the bird, time made it fonder of liberty, instead of leading it to forget it; and when the cage fell apart, it was at home in the free air.

The settlement of the Carolinas, during the twenty years or so from 1660 to 1680, presented features of singular grotesqueness. There was, on one side, a vast wilderness covering the region now occupied by North and South Carolina, and westward to the Pacific. It had been nibbled at, for a hundred years, by Spaniards, French and English, but no permanent hold had been got upon it. Here were thousands upon thousands of square miles in which nature rioted unrestrained, with semi-tropic fervor; the topography of which was unknown, and whose character in any respect was a matter of pure conjecture. This wilderness was on one side; on the other were a worthless king, a handful of courtiers, and a couple of highly gifted doctrinaires, Lord Shaftesbury and John Locke, the philosopher. We can picture Charles II.

lolling in his chair, with a map of the Americas spread out on his knees, while the other gentlemen in big wigs and silk attire, and long rapiers dangling at their sides, are grouped about him. "I'll give you all south of Virginia," says he, indicating the territory with a sweep of his long fingers. "Ashley, you and your friend Locke can draw up a const.i.tution, and stuff it full of your fine ideas; they sound well: we'll see how they work. You shall be kings every man of you; and may you like it no worse than I do! You'll have no France or Holland to thwart you--only bogs and briers and a few naked blacks. Your charter shall pa.s.s the seals to-morrow: and much good may it do you!"

So the theorists and the courtiers set out to subdue the untutored savageness of nature with a paper preamble and diagrams and rules and inhibitions, and orders of n.o.bility and a college of heralds, and inst.i.tutions of slavery and serfdom, and definitions of freeholders and landgraves, caciques and palatines; and specifications of fifths for proprietors, fifths for the n.o.bility, and the rest for the common herd, who were never to be permitted to be anything but the common herd, with no suffrage, no privileges, and no souls. All contingencies were provided against, except the one contingency, not wholly unimportant, that none of the proposals of the Model Const.i.tution could be carried into effect. Strange, that Ashley Cooper--as Lord Shaftesbury was then--one of the most brilliant men in Europe, and John Locke, should get together and draw squares over a sheet of paper, each representing four hundred and eighty thousand acres, with a cacique and landgraves and their appurtenances in each--and that they should fail to perceive that corresponding areas would never be marked out in the pathless forests, and that n.o.blemen could not be found nor created to take up their stand, like chessmen, each in his lonely and inaccessible mora.s.s or mountain or thicket, and exercise the prerogatives of the paper preamble over trees and panthers and birds of the air! How could men of such radiant intelligence as Locke and Shaftesbury unquestionably were, show themselves so radically ignorant of the nature of their fellowmen, and of the elementary principles of colonization? The whole thing reads, to-day, like some stupendous jest; yet it was planned in grave earnest, and persons were found to go across the Atlantic and try to make it work.

Lord Shaftesbury was one of the Hampshire Coopers, and the first earl.

He was a sort of English Voltaire: small and thin, nervous and fractious, with a great cold brain, no affections and no illusions; he had faith in organizations, but none in man; was dest.i.tute of compunctions, careless of conventions and appearances, cynical, penetrating, and frivolous. He was a skeptic in religion, but a devotee of astrology; easily worried in safety, but cool and audacious in danger. He despised if he did not hate the people, and regarded kings as an unavoidable nuisance; the state, he thought, was the aristocracy, whose business it was to keep the people down and hold the king in check. His career--now supporting the royalists, now the roundheads, now neither--seems incoherent and unprincipled; but in truth he was one of the least variable men of his time; he held to his course, and king and parliament did the tacking. He was an incorruptible judge, though he took bribes; and an unerring one, though he disregarded forms of law. He was tried for treason, and acquitted; joined the Monmouth conspiracy, and escaped to Holland, where he died at the age of sixty-two. What he lacked was human sympathies, which are the beginning of wisdom; and this deficiency it was, no doubt, that led him into the otherwise incomprehensible folly of the Carolina scheme.

Locke could plead the excuse of being totally unfamiliar with practical life; he was a philosopher of abstractions, who made an ideal world to fit his theories about it. He could write an essay on the Understanding, but was unversed in Common-sense. His nature was more calm and normal than Shaftesbury's, but in their intellectual conclusions they were not dissimilar. The views about the common people which Sir William Berkeley expressed with stupid brutality, they stated with punctual elegance. They were well mated for the purpose in hand, and they performed it with due deliberation and sobriety. It was not until five years after the grant was made that the const.i.tution was written and sealed. It achieved an instantaneous success in England, much as a brilliant novel might, in our time; and the authors were enthusiastically belauded. The proprietors--Albemarle, Craven, Clarendon, Berkeley, Sir William Berkeley, Sir John Colleton and Sir George Carteret, and Shaftesbury himself--began to look about for their serfs and caciques, and to think of their revenues. Meanwhile the primeval forest across three thousand miles of ocean laughed with its innumerable leaves, and waved its boughs in the breath of the spirit of liberty. The laws of the study went forth to battle with the laws of nature.

Ignorant of these courtly and scholarly proceedings, a small knot of bonafide settlers had built their huts on Albemarle Sound, and had for some years been living there in the homeliest and most uneducated peace and simplicity. Some had come from Virginia, some from New England, and others from the island of Bermuda. They had their little a.s.sembly and their governor Stevens, their humble plantations, their modest trade, their beloved solitudes, and the plainest and least obtrusive laws imaginable. They paddled up and down their placid bayous and rivers in birch-bark canoes; they shot deer and 'possums for food and panthers for safety, they loved their wives and begat their children, they wore shirts and leggins of deerskin like the Indians, and they breathed the pure wholesomeness of the warm southern air. When to these backwoods innocents was borne from afar the marvelous rumors of the silk-stockinged and lace-ruffled glories, originated during an idle morning in the king's dressing-room, which were to transfigure their forest into trim gardens and smug plantations, surrounding royal palaces and sumptuous hunting pavilions, perambulated by uniformed officials, cultivated by meek armies of serfs, looking up from their labors only to doff their caps to lordly palatines and lily-fingered ladies with high heels and low corsages: when they tried to picture to themselves their solemn glades and shadow-haunted streams and inviolate hills, their eyries of eagles and lairs of stag and puma, the savage beauty of their perilous swamps, all the wild magnificence of this pure home of theirs--metamorphosed by royal edict into a magnified Versailles, in which lutes and mandolins should take the place of the wolf's howl and the panther's scream, the keen scent of the pine balsam be replaced by the reek of musk and patchouli, the honest sanct.i.ty of their couches of fern give way to the embroidered corruption of a fine lady's bedchamber, the simple vigor of their pioneer parliament bewitch itself into a glittering senate chamber, where languid chancellors fingered their golden chains and exchanged witty epigrams with big-wigged, snuff-taking cavaliers:--when they attempted to house these strange ideas in their unsophisticated brains, they must have stared at one another with a naive perplexity which slowly broadened their tanned and bearded visages into contagious grins. They looked at their hearty, clear-eyed wives, and watched the gambols of their st.u.r.dy children, and shook their heads, and turned to their work once more.

The first movements of the new dispensation took the form of trying to draw the colonists together into towns, of reviving the Navigation Acts, of levying taxes on their infant commerce, and in general of tying fetters of official red tape on the brawny limbs of a primitive and natural civilization. The colony was accused of being the refuge of outlaws and traitors, rogues and heretics; and Sir William Berkeley, governor of Virginia, one of the proprietors under the Model Const.i.tution, was deputed to make as much mischief in the virgin settlement as he could.

The colonists numbered about four thousand, spread over a large territory; they did not want to desert their palmetto thatched cabins and strenuously-cleared acres; they disliked crowding into towns; they saw no justice in paying to intangible and alien proprietors a penny tax on their tobacco exports to New England--though they paid it nevertheless. They particularly objected to the interference of Governor Berkeley, for they knew him well. And when the free election of their a.s.sembly was attacked, they sent emissaries to England to remonstrate, and meanwhile, John Culpepper leading, and without waiting for the return of their emissaries, they arose and wiped out the things and persons that were objectionable, and then returned serenely to their business. They did not fly into a pa.s.sion, and froth at the mouth, and ma.s.sacre and torture; but quietly and inflexibly, with hardly a keener flash from their fearless eyes, they put things to rights, and thought no more about it.

Such treasonable proceedings, however, fluttered the council chambers in London sorely, and stout John Culpepper, who believed in popular liberty and was not afraid to say so, went to England to justify what had been done. He was arrested and put on trial, though he demanded to be tried, if at all, in the place where the offense was committed. The intent of his adversaries was not to give him justice, but simply to hang him; and why go to the trouble and expense of carrying him to Carolina to do that? He went near to becoming a martyr, did stout John; but, unexpectedly, Shaftesbury, who might believe in despotism, but who fretted to behold injustice, undertook his defense and brought him out clear. The rest of the "rebels" were amnestied the following year, 1681. But one Seth Sothel, who had bought out Lord Clarendon's proprietary rights, was sent out as governor; and after escaping from the Algerine pirates, who captured and kept him for a couple of years, he arrived at Albemarle, commissioned, as Bancroft admirably puts it, to "Transform a log cabin into a baronial castle, a negro slave into a herd of leet-men." Sothel was not long in perceiving that this was beyond his powers, but he could steal: and so he did for a few years, when the colonists, thinking he had enough, unseated him, tried him, and sentenced him to a year's exile and to nevermore be officer of theirs.

These planters of North Carolina were good Americans from the beginning, endowed with a courage and love of liberty which foretold the spirit of Washington's army,--and a religious tolerance which did not prevent them from listening with sympathy and approval to the spiritual harangues of Fox, the Quaker, who sojourned among them with gratifying results. Their prejudice against towns continued, and one must walk far to visit them, with only marks on the forest trees to guide. They were inveterately contented, and having emanc.i.p.ated themselves from the blight of the Model Const.i.tution, rapidly became prosperous. The only effect of Messrs. Locke and Shaftesbury's scheme of an aristocratic Utopia was to make the settlers conscious of their strength and devoted to their freedom. Indeed, the North Carolinians were in great part men who had not only fled from the oppressions of England, but had found even the mild restraints of the other colonies irksome.

The fate of the Model in South Carolina was similar, though the preliminary experiences were different. When Joseph West, agent for the proprietors, and William Sayle, experienced in colonizing, took three shiploads of emigrants to the junction of the Ashley and Cooper rivers, about twenty miles south of lat.i.tude 33, they had a copy of the Model with them. But the first thing they did after getting ash.o.r.e was to vote that its provisions were impracticable, and to revise it to such a degree that, when it was sent over to England for approval, its authors did not recognize their work, and disowned it. But the settlers const.i.tuted their a.s.sembly on the general lines which might now be called American, and put up their huts, in 1672, on the ground where now stands Charleston. The climate was too hot for white labor, and the timely arrival of negro slaves was welcome; in a few years they doubled the number of the whites. The staple crops of the southern plantations needed much more work than those of New England and the north, and this, as well as the preference of the negroes themselves for the warmer climates, determined the distribution of black slavery on the Atlantic coast.

Dutch settlers presently joined the English; a Scotch-Irish colony at Port Royal was set upon by the Spaniards, who, in accordance with the characteristic Spanish policy, ma.s.sacred the inhabitants and burned the houses. But later the revocation by Louis XIV. of the amnesty to Huguenots caused the latter to fly their country and disperse themselves over Europe and America; no higher or finer cla.s.s of men and women ever joined the ranks of exile, and they were everywhere welcomed. Colonies of them settled all along the Atlantic seaboard; and around Charleston many from Languedoc found a congenial home, and became a valuable and distinguished part of the population. America could not have been complete without the leaven of the heroic French Protestants.

Meanwhile the proprietors were gradually submitting, with no good grace, however, to the inevitable. Their Model remained a model--something never to be put to practical use. On paper was it born, and on paper should it remain forever. The proprietors were kings, by grace of Charles II., but they had neither army nor navy, and their subjects declined to be serfs. They declined into the status of land speculators; the governors whom they sent out did nothing but fill their pockets and let the people have the rest. At last, it was enough for the proprietors to suggest anything for the people to negative it, whether it were good or bad. They not only avowed their natural right to do as they pleased, but deemed it due to their self-respect not to do what was pleasing to their tinsel sovereigns in London. And finally, when Colleton, one of the sovereigns in question, tried to declare martial law in the colony, on the plea of danger from Indians or Spanish, the indomitable freemen treated him as their brethren at Albemarle had treated Sothel. The next year saw William and Mary on the English throne; Shaftesbury had died seven years before; and the Great Model subsided without a bubble into the vacuum of historical absurdities.

We left Virginia awaiting the return of the envoys who had gone to ask Charles for justice and protection against the tyranny of Berkeley.

Charles, as we know, first promised the reforms, and then broke his promise, as all Stuarts must. But before the envoys could return with their heavy news, there had been stirring things done and suffered in Virginia.

The character of Berkeley is as detestable as any known in the annals of the American colonies. Many of his acts, and all the closing scenes of his career, seem hardly compatible with moral sanity; in our day, when science is so p.r.o.ne to find the explanation of crime in insanity, he would undoubtedly have been adjudged to the nearest asylum. In his early years, he had been stupid and illiberal, but nothing worse; in his old age, he seemed to seek out opportunities of wickedness and outrage, and at last he gave way to transports which could only be likened to those of a fiend from the Pit, permitted for a season to afflict the earth. He was as base as he was wicked; a thief, and perjured, as well as an insatiable murderer. The only trait that seems to ally him with manhood is itself animal and repulsive. He had wholly abandoned any pretense of self-control; and in some of the outbursts of his frenzy he seems to have become insensible even to the suggestions of physical fear. But this can hardly be accorded the name of courage; rather is it to be attributed to the suffusion of blood to the brain which drives the Malay to run amuck.

Virginia had been nurtured in liberty, and was ill prepared for despotism. On the contrary, she was almost ready to doubt the wisdom or convenience of any government whatever, except such as was spontaneously furnished by the generous and magnanimous instincts of her people. There were no towns, and none of the vice and selfishness which crowded populations engender. Roads, bridges, public works of any sort were unknown; the population seldom met except at races or to witness court proceedings. The great planters lived in comparative comfort, but they were as much in love with freedom as were the common people. This state of things was the outcome of the growth of fifty years; and most of the eight thousand inhabitants of the colony were born on the soil, and loved it as the only home they knew.

The chief injury they had suffered was from the depredations of the Indians, who, on their side, could plead that they had received less than justice at the colonists' hands. Border raids and killings became more and more frequent and alarming; the savages had learned the use of muskets, and were good marksmen. They built a fort on the Maryland border, and for a time resisted siege operations; and when at length some of the chiefs came out to parley, they were seized and shot. The rest of the Indian garrison escaped by night, and slaughtered promiscuously all whom they could surprise along the countryside. A force was raised to check them, and avenge the murders; but before it could come in contact with them, Berkeley sent out a peremptory summons that they should return.

What was the explanation of this extraordinary step? Simply that the Governor had the monopoly of the Indian trade, which was very valuable, and would not permit the Indians who traded with him to be driven away.

In order to supply his already overloaded pockets with money, he was willing to see the red men murder with impunity, and with the brutalities of torture and outrage, the men, women and children of his own race. But the Indians themselves seem admirable in contrast with the inhumanity of this gray-haired, wine-bloated, sordid cavalier of seventy.

The troops on which the safety of the colonists depended reluctantly retired. Immediately the savages renewed their attacks; three hundred settlers were killed. Still Berkeley refused to permit anything to be done; forts might be erected on the borders, but these, besides being of great expense to the people, were wholly useless for their defense, inasmuch as the savages could without difficulty slip by them under cover of the forest. The raids continued, and the plantations were abandoned, till not one in seven remained. The inhabitants were terror-stricken; no man's life was safe. At last permission was asked that the people might raise and equip a force at their own expense, in the exercise of the universal right of self-protection; but even this was violently forbidden by the Governor, who threatened punishment on any who should presume to take arms against them. All traffic with them had also been interdicted; but it was known that Berkeley himself continued his trading with those whose hands were red with the blood of the wives, fathers and children of Virginia.

Finally, in 1676, the report came that an army of Indians were approaching Jamestown. Unless resistance were at once made, there seemed nothing to prevent the extinction of the colony. Berkeley, apparently for no better reason than that he would not recede from a position once taken, adhered to his order that nothing should be done.

There was at that time in Virginia a young Englishman of about thirty, named Nathaniel Bacon. He was descended from good ancestors, and had received a thorough education, including terms in the Inns of Court. He was intellectual, thoughtful, and self-contained, with a clear mind, a generous nature, and the power of winning and controlling men. He had arrived in the colony a little more than a year before, and had been chosen to the council; he was wealthy and aristocratic, yet a known friend of the people. Born in 1642, he was familiar with revolutions, and had formed his own opinions as to the rights of man. He had a plantation on the site of the present city of Richmond; and during the late Indian troubles, had lost his overseer. Coming down on his affairs to Jamestown, he fell into talk with some friends, who suggested crossing the river to see some of the volunteers who had come together for defense. These men were in a mood of excited exasperation at the sinister conduct of the governor, and ready to follow extreme counsels had they had a leader with the boldness and ability to put himself at their head.

The tall, slender figure and grave features of Bacon were well-known.

As he advanced toward the troop of stalwart young fellows, who were sullenly discussing the situation, he was recognized; and something seems to have suggested to them that he was come with a purpose.

Conclusions are sudden at such times, and impulses contagious as fire.

He was the leader whom they sought. "A Bacon--a Bacon!" shouted some one; and instantly the cry was taken up. They thronged around him, welcoming him, cheering him, exclaiming that they would follow him, that with them at his back he should save the country in spite of the governor! They were fiery and emotional, after the manner of the sons of the Old Dominion, and the wrongs of many kinds which had long been rankling in their hearts now demanded to be requited by some action--no matter how daring. Virginians never shrank from danger.

Bacon had been wholly unprepared for this outburst; but he had a strong, calm soul, a ready brain, and the blood of youth. He knew what the colony had endured, and that it had nothing to hope from the present government. He had come to America after making the European tour, intending only a visit; but he had grown attached to Virginia, and now that chance had put this opportunity to help her, he resolved to accept it. He would throw in his lot with these spirited and fearless young patriots--the first men in America who had the right to call the country their own. Standing before them, with his head bared, and in a voice that all could hear, he solemnly pledged himself to lead them against the Indians, and then aid them to recover the liberties which had been wrested from them. "And do you," he added, "pledge yourselves to me!" His words were heard with tumultuous enthusiasm, and a round-robin was signed, binding all to stick to their captain and to one another. That is a doc.u.ment which history would fain have preserved.

With an army of three hundred Virginians, Bacon set forward against the Indians. Meanwhile Berkeley, enraged at this slight on his authority, called some troops together and despatched them to bring back "the rebels." Thus was seen the singular spectacle of a government force marching to apprehend men who were risking their lives freely to repel a danger imminent and common to all.

But Berkeley was going too far. Bacon's act had the sympathy of all except such as were as corrupt as the governor, and the men of the lower counties revolted, and demanded that the long scandal of the continuous a.s.sembly should cease forthwith. Berkeley was intimidated; he had not believed that any spirit was left in the colony; he recalled his men, and consented to the a.s.sembly's dissolution. By the time Bacon and his three hundred got back from their successful campaign, the writs for a new election were out; and he was unanimously chosen burgess from Henrico. The a.s.sembly of which he thus became a member was for the most part in sympathy with him; and though, for the benefit of the record, censure was pa.s.sed upon the irregularity of his campaign, and he was required to apologize for fighting without a commission, yet he was at the same time caressed and praised on all sides, returned to the council, and dubbed the darling of Virginia's hopes. The a.s.sembly then proceeded to undo all the evil and clean out all the rottenness that had disgraced the conduct of their predecessors. Taxes, church tyranny, restriction of the franchise, illegal a.s.sessments, fees, and liquor-dealing were done away with; two magistrates were proved thieves and disfranchised, and trade with Indians was for the present stopped.

Bacon received a commission; but Berkeley refused to sign it; and when Bacon appealed to the country, and returned with five hundred men to demand his rights, the governor was beside himself with fury.

Private letters and other doc.u.ments, made public only long after this date, are the authority for what occurred; but though certain facts are given, explanations are seldom available. Berkeley appears to have been holding court when Bacon and his followers appeared; it is said that he ran out and confronted them, tore his shirt open and declared that sooner should they shoot him than he would sign the commission of that rebel; and the next moment, changing his tactics, he offered to settle the issue between Bacon and himself by a duel. All this does not sound like the acts of a man in his sober senses. It seems probable either that the old reprobate was intoxicated, or that his mind was disordered by pa.s.sion. Bacon, of course, declined to match his youthful vigor against his decrepit enemy, as the latter must have known he would: and told him temperately that the commission he demanded was to enable him to repel the savages who were murdering their fellow colonists unchecked. The governor, after some further parley, again altered his behavior, and now overpowered Bacon with maudlin professions of esteem for his patriotic energy; signed his commission, and sent dispatches to England warmly commending him. A formal amnesty, obliterating all past acts of the popular champion and his supporters which could be construed as irregular, was drawn up and ratified by the governor; and the clouds which so long had lowered over Virginia seemed to have been at last in the deep bosom of the ocean buried. To those whom coincidences interest it will be significant that this victory for the people was won on the 4th of July, 1676.

Operations against the Indians were now vigorously resumed; but Berkeley had not yet completed the catalogue of his iniquities. Bacon's back was scarcely turned, before he violated the amnesty which he had just ratified, and tried to rouse public sentiment against the liberator. In this, however, he signally failed, as also in his attempt to raise a levy to arrest him; and frightened at the revelation of his weakness, he fled in a panic to Accomack, a peninsula on the eastern side of Chesapeake Bay. Word of his proceedings had in the meantime been conveyed to Bacon by Drummond, former governor of North Carolina, and Lawrence. "Shall he who commissioned us to protect the country from the heathen, betray our lives?" said Bacon. "I appeal to the king and parliament!" He established himself in Williamsburg; at Drummond's suggestion Berkeley's flight was taken to mean his withdrawal from the governorship--which, at any rate, had now pa.s.sed its appointed limit--and a summons was sent out to the gentlemen of Virginia to meet for consultation as to the future conduct of the colony. It was at this juncture that the envoys returned from England, with the dark news that Charles had refused all relief.

At the conference, after full discussion, it was voted that the colony take the law into their own hands, and maintain themselves not only against the Indians and Berkeley, but if need were against England herself. "I fear England no more than a broken straw," said Sarah Drummond, snapping a stick in her hands as she spoke: the women of Virginia were as resolved as the men. Pending these contingencies, Bacon with his little army again set out in pursuit of the Indians; hearing which, Berkeley, with a train of mercenaries which he had contrived to collect, crossed from Accomack and landed at Jamestown, where he repeated his refrain of "rebels!" He promised freedom to whatever slaves of the colony would enlist on his side, and fortified the little town. The crews of some English ships in the harbor a.s.sisted him; and in the sequel these tars were the only ones of his rabble that stayed by him. The neighborhood was alarmed, fearing any kind of enormity, and messengers rode through the woods post haste, and swam the rivers, in the sultry September weather, to find and recall their defenders, and summon them to resist a worse foe than the red man.

Before they could reach the young leader, the Indians had been routed, the army disbanded, and Bacon, with a handful of followers, was on his way to his plantation. They were weary with the fatigues of the campaign, but on learning that the prime source of the troubles was intrenched in Jamestown, and that "man, woman and child" were in peril of slavery, they turned their horses' heads southeastward, and galloped to the rescue. They gathered recruits on their way--no one could resist the eloquence of Bacon--and halting at such of the plantations as were owned by royalist sympathizers, they compelled their wives to mount and accompany them as hostages. This indicates to what extremes the violence of Berkeley was expected to go. It was evening when they came in sight of the enemy. But the moon was already aloft, and as the western light faded, her mellow radiance flooded the scene, giving it the semblance of peace. But the impatient Virginians wished to attack at once; and a lesser man than Bacon might have yielded to their urging. Knowing, however, that the country was with him, and feeling that the enemy must sooner or later succ.u.mb, he would not win by a dashing, b.l.o.o.d.y exploit what time was sure to give him. He ordered an intrenchment to be dug, and prepared for a siege. But there was no l.u.s.t for battle in the disorderly and incoherent force which the frantic appeals and reckless promises of the governor had a.s.sembled; they were beaten already, and could not be induced to make a sortie. Desertions began, and all the objurgations, supplications and melodramatic extravaganzas of Berkeley were impotent to stop them; the more shrilly he shrieked, the faster did his sorry aggregation melt away. When it became evident that there would soon be none left save himself and the sailors, he ceased his bl.u.s.tering, and scuttled off toward Gloucester and the Rappahannock.