The Revolution in Virginia

THE American Revolution was a movement with two distinct aspects. On one side it was marked by the union of hitherto independent communities and the beginning of common institutions and of a common life. The other phase witnessed the progress of the revolt within the colonies themselves and the creation of their individual governments. The method of historians in treating of the Revolution generally has been to take the most striking incidents in the history of the colonies in the years immediately preceding 1776 and join them to an account of the workings of the Continental Congress and the campaigns of the Continental army. The internal growth of the newmade States is almost entirely ignored, probably because in some instances it is not well known. But in this stage of American history, when the national life was so feeble, the progress of events in Massachusetts and Virginia was more important than the deliberations of Congress. No adequate account has been given of the spiritual change which came over Massachusetts and Virginia in the Revolutionary epoch and which had such great influence on the development of the nation. Because the early history of the individual States has not been well worked out, there are certain hiatuses in our histories, such, for instance, as the lack of an account of the origin of the Democratic Party. Historians give us the impression that it sprang full-grown from the head of Jefferson, that he was its creator. But the Democratic Party had come into existence in an undefined way before the great political genius of Jefferson laid hold of it and moulded it to his purposes. Jefferson was a Virginian and the Democratic Party as a political movement with real purposes was likewise a Virginia product; the story of its rise is one of the most interesting chapters of Revolutionary history.

In a brief analysis, the Revolution was the result of the clash between imperial expansion and colonial development-two forms of progressivism-just as the Puritan Revolution was the outcome of the conflict of expanding monarchy with the growing idea of popular rights, mainly expressed through religion. In Virginia the colonial constitution had become well defined before the middle of the eighteenth century. Based on the fine old principle of the Englishman's inherent right of self-government, it had acquired certain fixed positions without much reference to strict logic. It was really the result of a long contest; the history of Virginia, like that of the other colonies, is little more than a series of disputes with the royal governors, who served the colony greatly in some ways and in other ways were out of touch with colonial life and needs. Parliament exerted a variable control over the colonies, from time to time passing taxation-without-representation statutes, but generally leaving the provincials sufficiently alone to cause itself to be looked on admiringly as the palladium of liberty. As a matter of fact, the causes of the Revolution were practical far more than theoretical. The colonies endured Parliamentary supervision so long as this was not too vigorous; customs laws were of small account while smuggling went unchecked. Only when the British government attempted to enforce its customs acts and ventured to impose other and burdensome taxes, like the Stamp Act, did the taxation-without-representation protest appear; then the provincials, with all of Englishmen's gravity in asserting a paradox, denied the Parliamentary right of taxation. If we think they may have been deficient in argument while right in principle, it should be remembered that the king's lawyers produced good precedents in the ship-money case in 1637. In a political struggle both sides always prove themselves right by any number of constitutional citations, but, nevertheless, the victory of one side carries with it far more right and happiness than the triumph of the other.

Opposition to the British government did not begin with the Stamp Act in 1765. Before this time the colony had on many occasions successfully resisted the royal authority; indeed a legislature noted for its independence had existed in Virginia since 1619. In 1635 this assembly forcibly sent the royal governor Harvey back to England because it resented his efforts to enlarge his powers. Virginia tardily and reluctantly acquiesced in the rule of Commonwealth and Protectorate, and, on the other hand, broke out in 1676 in open rebellion against its Cavalier governor, who sought to play the tyrant. Ten years later, in 1686, the House of Burgesses refused to allow the governor and council to lay a tag, and it did not favor the establishment of a post-office in America by act of Parliament.

The high spirit of the Virginia assembly quickened in the eighteenth century with the colony's rapid growth in wealth, population, and culture. The governors of that period found themselves continually at odds with the House of Burgesses in attempting to secure votes of money; Dinwiddie even had difficulty in obtaining supplies for the French-and-Indian War. This dual government by royal governor and local assembly resulted in the attachment of certain constitutional powers to either party, with a neutral zone between, while outside of both loomed the vague, ill-defined claims of Parliament. The governor was selected by the king and represented him. Along with the ordinary executive routine, he appointed most of the colonial officials; called out the militia against the Indians and made treaties with them; suggested legislation and approved or vetoed bills, but with a final reservation to the Privy Council; sat as chief judge in the general court; and, finally, inducted clergymen of the established church into parishes - though he had not the power of appointing them. The governor's council, which acted in the threefold capacity of consulting executive body, the highest court and the upper chamber of the legislature, was appointed for life by the British Privy Council on the governor's nomination, and was generally under his influence. The House of Burgesses, the representative branch of the assembly, consisted of two members for each county and single members for boroughs. It initiated money bills in the manner of the House of Commons and was the most important and powerful branch of the colonial government, successfully asserting its rights and privileges on many occasions in opposition to the governor and council.

With the increase of the number of counties in the eighteenth century and the rise of a large class of landed proprietors whose main public ambition took the form of representing fellow countrymen in Williamsburg, the House of Burgesses grew greatly in power and prestige. Virginia in its earlier period had been a more or less democratic community and it always contained a sturdy smallfarmer class, tenacious of its self-respect. Lyon G. Tyler has pointed out that, while in New England the poor man was addressed as "goodman," in Virginia he insisted on his right to "mister."

But the eighteenth century saw the rise of a strong aristocracy, based on the possession of the comparatively valuable lands of the tidewater section tilled by white indented servants and negro slaves. Ownership of great tracts of cleared lands and abundance of cheap labor enabled the planters, in spite of the wasteful agricultural system then in vogue, to raise large enough crops of tobacco to leave a considerable surplus above expenses. The settlers had gone from England to Virginia for the same reason that settlers go everywhere - to make a living. After the first hard age of settlement, when men struggled to subdue nature and lived and died toiling relentlessly, there succeeded a period of relaxation, enjoyment, and growing refinement, wherein the descendants of successful land-patentees and tobacco-growers gave themselves an English education, found pleasure in society and sport, and took to politics as a means of gaining influence and distinction. And since the Virginia colonists, unlike those of New England, were fully in accord with the feelings of the majority of Englishmen, they were without dissenter ideas in religion or politics. It was natural, therefore, that they should take as their ideal of imitation the English country gentleman, whose thoughts and habits, considering the necessary differences between England and Virginia, they reproduced with remarkable fidelity. This planter class, generally fairly well informed for the times and enjoying considerable leisure, possessed great power among a poor and ignorant population: they took over almost as a right the local offices, and the ambition of the ablest or most pushing led them to the House of Burgesses.

The majority of planters did not, of course, profit by their opportunities. Many of them, in the fervor of their liking for English country life, merely wasted their means and leisure in sport and dissipation. Horse-racing for large stakes flourished in Virginia between 1730 and 17'75, and at the beginning of the Revolution a considerable number of large landholders had ruined themselves by gambling and high living. Many estates were on the market. But the colonial system, with all its great drawbacks, offered a wonderful chance of development to ambitious and willing men. Politics was a respectable career, and not a business as it is so often nowadays; it invited the best men. The planter had a sufficient and tolerably secure income derived from his crops; he could give much time to reading and public affairs without private injury, because he usually had an overseer to superintend the labor of his slaves; and gradually there developed a race of politicians remarkable for their combination of theoretical training with practical experience - men well read in English law and history, and, later, open to the great liberal tendencies of the middle eighteenth century. The liberal movement, which influenced America as well as western Europe, had the effect in Virginia of disturbing that deep-rooted idolatry of English institutions which had given birth to the Virginia aristocracy. A typical product of eighteenth-century liberalism in Virginia was George Mason, the broad-minded and capable thinker who wrote the constitution of 1776.

The House of Burgesses was largely made up of planters, who were Englishmen in feeling, but who nevertheless asserted the dignity and independence of the body in which they sat in opposition to attempts or imagined attempts of the British authorities to stretch their jurisdiction. They were reinforced about the middle of the century by another self-willed element actually hostile to the imperial government, the representatives from the new middle and western counties. This piedmont and mountain section was much more democratic in feeling and much less cultured and wealthy than the east, even for the standard of those days. The western or " upland " members for many years were too few and inexperienced to do more than vote with the controlling majority led by skilled politicians, but they were never quite in harmony with the tidewater and eventually asserted themselves successfully against it.

Several serious clashes with the royal government in the decade preceding the Stamp Act illustrated the growing independence and self-consciousness of the House of Burgesses. When Governor Dinwiddie in 1753 attempted on his own initiative to levy a fee of a pistole for signing land patents, the Burgesses protested in the memorable and prophetic words of Richard Bland: "The rights of the subject are so secured by law, that they cannot be deprived of the least part of their property but by their own consent." The governor in reply claimed that he was acting according to the king's instructions and strictly within the king's rights over vacant lands, but the House refused to accept his explanation: it declared that those who paid the pistole fee would be regarded as betrayers of the people, and thereby established a precedent for securing uniformity through holding offenders up to public obloquy later used with great effect in suppressing Toryism. The British Privy Council, when appealed to as the final authority in the fee dispute, allowed the Burgesses to have their way. Before the passage of the Stamp Act the British government at times inclined to be almost too conciliatory towards the colonies.

It is probable that the House of Burgesses was mistaken in the pistole contention, for the title to vacant lands was unquestionably vested in the king, and the governor as the royal representative was hardly outside his rights in levying a fee. Still, it had not been demanded before, and the Virginians felt that advantage was being taken of a technical right to introduce a new and insidious custom and a possible precedent for future taxes.

This controversy was the prelude to a much more important dispute hinging on the king's power of interference with colonial legislation. The colonial constitution, as has been noted, recognized three powers in the state - king, Parliament, and local assembly. The king's power was mainly, though not entirely, delegated to the governor, who received instructions from home outlining his policy; these instructions were regarded as law. Parliamentary authority was by general colonial consent limited to the regulation of commerce. Needless to say, the extensive right of regulating commerce when interpreted in the loose construction fashion might seem to sanction almost any stretch of governmental jurisdiction, but as a matter of fact Parliament was not inclined to be unduly vexatious before 1760. Most colonial ills flowed from other sources.

The assembly, which was the strictly local branch of government, exercised wider powers than modern lawmaking bodies - executive and judicial as well as legislative. At first the small upper house, representing a few allied families, held a dominating position, but as the colony grew in age and population the House of Burgesses more and more tended to become the important chamber. The council was Tory in feeling, while the Burgesses cherished the Whig tradition of English liberty, and its independent-minded leaders were bound to come into conflict with the British government as soon as the latter should attempt to stretch its prerogatives.

The first important controversy between colony and home government, however, did not result from Parliamentary taxation, but from the royal authority as exercised in colonial legislation. The Church of England establishment in Virginia, the miniature state church of the colony, furnished the occasion, and the conflict decided the long-debated question whether the control of the establishment lay finally with the assembly or the British officials. In 1758 the assembly passed an act which particularly affected the ministers of the established church and aroused their ire. This socalled "Twopenny Act" compounded debts and the salaries of officials, which were payable in tobacco by legal regulation, in money at the rate of twopence a pound. The measure was possibly necessary on account of the low price of tobacco and the weight of taxation due to the French-and-Indian War, then in progress, but the assembly had passed a similar law in 1755 and seemed about to establish a rule of scaling down salaries when tobacco was high without providing any compensation when it fell below the normal, as it frequently did. The state-supported clergy, who naturally objected to this heads-I-win-tails-you-lose system, appealed to England and succeeded in enlisting the services of the Bishop of London, the colonial diocesan. The bishop took up the cudgels in a letter denouncing the Virginia government.

The final stage in the passage of a colonial law was the king's assent, but the assembly hastened to put the Twopenny Act into effect upon securing the governor's approval, without waiting to hear from England, although the act altered a statute which the king had approved. In other words, the Virginia assembly dared to legislate on its own authority and in practical disregard of the king. The Bishop of London hinted that such action was in the nature of treason; it was at least not strictly constitutional. In answer to the bishop's letter two high-spirited Virginians, Landon Carter and Richard Bland, sprang to the defense of the assembly and there followed a merry war of pamphlets, in which John Camm, president of William and Mary College, supported the side of the clergy. In this dispute the theory of the colonial constitution was first clearly defined by the chief writer participating, Richard Bland.^[1]

Richard Bland, of Prince George, deserves a word of mention, since he more than any other man was the author of the Revolution in Virginia. He was born in 1710 and died in 1776, spanning the whole preliminary period of the Revolution in his mature manhood. His education was of peculiar value for these critical decades from 1755 to 1775; after a preliminary course in William and Mary he studied history and law at the University of Edinburgh, and was probably the best constitutional lawyer in the colonies. He saw with great clearness and astuteness on just what grounds the legal resistance to the British policy might be effectively placed and most of the remonstrances emanating from the House of Burgesses were his work. In personality Bland was of that type of Virginian which is best illustrated by the figure of George Mason, that type considered characteristically Virginian, - half practical farmer, half classical scholar and lawyer; genial, wellmannered, personally somewhat untidy and careless of clothes.

Bland defended the assembly's action in setting aside a law approved by the king on the plea that action was sometimes necessary before the king's will could be learned. "Sales populi, suprema lex," he impudently quoted. In brief, the colony had to consider its own best interests, even at the expense of constitutional forms. But the royal council, to which Virginia's action was not especially palatable, "disallowed," that is, vetoed the Twopenny Act, and left the clergy the remedy of suing in the courts for the difference between their money commutations and their salaries in tobacco according to the prices current in 1758. Several ministers took advantage of this decision to bring suit and some judgments were obtained. One of the cases came up in Hanover Court in 1763, with the parish minister, Maury, the plaintiff. Patrick Henry, then an obscure young lawyer, represented the defendants, who were the vestry. In the speech delivered on this occasion, Henry boldly asserted Bland's doctrine, put forward three years earlier, that the assembly had the right to pass necessary legislation without interference from England. He even went so far as to declare, in terms that simply thrilled his audience, that the king in vetoing a reasonable and beneficial measure had forfeited the right to his subjects' obedience. This speech, which is generally regarded as the beginning of the Revolutionary movement in Virginia, actually marks the end of an agitation lasting for five years. Henry played Luther to Bland's Erasmus, carrying to their conclusion the principles which the constitutional lawyer had outlined in his pamphlet of 1760.

As it happened, the seed fell on prepared ground. The once solidly Episcopalian Hanover County was now full of dissenters, and Presbyterians largely manned the jury, which brought in a nominal verdict of one penny damages. It proved the ruin of the clerical cause. Virginia rang with Henry's name and the great body of people, who had hitherto viewed the matter with indifference, now took sides against the preachers. This outburst of enthusiasm led in later times to an obscuring of the actual issues involved, and Henry was presented somewhat in the light of a tribune combating class privilege. In truth, however, the Twopenny Act had been devised by the ruling clique in the House of Burgesses, which would have been inconveniently taxed if the ministers had been paid according to the letter of the law. The dissenters did play a part, but it was subordinate. Henry's real importance in the case consisted in the coup by which he turned a quarrel of the House of Burgesses and the courts into a general political issue. It was Henry's great work, as the "Parsons' Cause" first showed, to enlist the body of Virginia people in the Revolutionary movement, which, without him, would have taken a different direction.

The clergy were defeated in the Virginia courts by the popular clamor raised by Henry; the British Privy Council also ruled against them on some technicality when appeals were carried to that body. Though the dispute had thus ended in the complete discomfiture of the clergy, the war of pamphlets continued for several years longer; John Camm, the clerical leader, exchanged fire again and again with Bland and Carter. Camm believed that the control of the Virginia establishment belonged properly to the king, not to the assembly; and this unpopular theory, along with the clergy's unsuccessful appeal from the Virginia courts to the Privy Council, tended to alienate many persons from the state church and foster the growth of dissent in eastern Virginia. Presbyterians and Baptists now appeared in numbers in even the most conservative counties.

Bland, in his later pamphlets in the Twopenny case, and in his "Inquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies," published in 1766, advanced beyond his first position, until he came to assert that all men born under an English government are subject only to laws made with their own consent.^[2] In his Stamp Act pamphlet of 1766 he ingeniously outlined the distinction between the external government of England and the internal government of the assembly and between external and internal taxation, basing the colonial right to internal self-taxation on the common law, which follows the Englishman around the world, as well as on specific grants in royal charters. He defined, probably more clearly than any other colonial writer, the difference between the external authority of Parliament to pass acts for the regulation of commerce and the internal power of the assembly to levy any tax it might see fit, which distinction has survived in the American Constitution of 1787. This difference between "external" and "internal"government, rather ridiculous to Charles Townshend and not altogether convincing today, was an ingenious effort of the colonial mind to offer some real objection in law to the encroachments of the British ministry. From the Pistole Fee to 1776 Bland was busy in occupying defensive positions against England, and these were none the less effective that they sometimes happened to be novel.

Opinion in Virginia over the "Parsons' Cause" had been practically unanimous except for the parsons, who naturally viewed the constitution in another light. But in 1765, with the crisis brought on by the Stamp Act, party differences began to appear for the first time. On this occasion the middle and western sections rose to a place of influence never afterwards lost. The country beyond the Blue Ridge was being rapidly settled by non-English races - Germans and ScotchIrish - who had little of the Virginian reverence for Anglican institutions. The Presbyterian and democratic Scotch-Irish were reinforced by the piedmont country between the tidewater and the mountains, which had also been affected by dissent and democracy. Counties were being formed, and all that the new section needed was a vigorous and self-assertive leader. At length he appeared.

Before Patrick Henry's debut in the assembly in 1765, Virginia was ruled by a coterie of eastern members - an astute, far-seeing, and experienced group of politicians, of whom the chief was John Robinson, speaker of the House of Burgesses and treasurer of the colony. Robinson belonged to the type which controls a conservative community; he was well connected, rich, polished, genial, and possessed of fair mental powers. He ruled inter pares by virtue of his popularity and a certain force of character. This group led by Robinson had governed with considerable efficiency and usually managed to overreach the governor and get their way with the home administration. But in 1764 they had been appalled by the declaratory act preceding the Stamp Act, which laid down the doctrine of the Parliamentary right of taxing the colonies. The House of Burgesses registered a dignified though emphatic protest, but Parliament, in disregard of colonial objections, passed the Stamp Act in the following year, 1765. Patrick Henry took his seat in the House as a member for Louisa at the May session of 1765, when the news of the act was fresh.

Robinson and his group had long held undisturbed possession of the House of Burgesses, but Henry, instead of containing himself in the presence of the silk-stockinged and self-important gentlemen from the tidewater, as might have been expected of a newcomer ignorant of the legislative "ropes," signalized his entry by assuming the championship of popular measures. A good opportunity stood at hand, but one which only a man of nerve would take. The ruling clique in Virginia, like all ruling cliques, could not entirely refrain from abusing a long lease of power. John Robinson partly owed his commanding place to an accommodating disposition, for it had been his habit to lend the public funds to friends on their personal security. As he was a man of large wealth for the times, the colony apparently did not run much risk of loss by this procedure, while a number of free-living, money-spending politicians and planters profited by the use of the treasury as a bank until Robinson became involved for a great amount.

The situation finally became so serious that the speaker and his friends devised a plan of securing specie from England and lending it to planters on land security; this would have enabled Robinson to transfer to the treasury the securities he held for the public money loaned. Henry boldly fell athwart the scheme,^[3] and, according to Jefferson, defeated it, though the journal shows that the bill actually passed the House of Burgesses and was lost in the council. In the debate on the loan-office Henry gained a valuable ally in Richard Henry Lee, another ambitious politician of radical predilections, who succeeded in bringing about an investigation of the treasury. This cutand-dried performance resulted in Robinson's vindication for the time being, but on his death in 1766 a defalcation of more than one hundred thousand pounds came to light. Nevertheless, the parties implicated looked out for themselves so cleverly that they were not called to account, and Robinson, being dead, could not protect himself. A large part of his estate was sold for the benefit of the colony, which was not entirely reimbursed. The names of the borrowers never came to light, but the scandal had some effect on popular opinion and assisted in paving the way for the rise of a novus homo.

The loan-office was quickly crowded into the background by weightier measures, for at this same session of 1765 Patrick Henry took the lead in opposition to the Stamp Act. He precipitated a sensational crisis by suddenly introducing in the House a set of resolutions which openly and indignantly denied the right of Parliament to tax the colonies. It was the best-judged move of his whole wonderful career, and, in effect, the beginning of the American Revolution. At this time the colonies had taken no stand on the taxation question and their future action was uncertain, yet, if the right of taxation was not to be conceded, definite and emphatic protest was imperative. With all deference for modern American writers who make out such a good case for the British government, it should be observed that the Stamp Act, no matter on what excellent legal grounds it might stand, was a genuine measure of oppression. It was a subtle tax, affecting almost every relation of life. If it had been tamely submitted to, any governmental tyranny might have been expected. The plea of levying a tax on America for colonial defense should not blind us to the obvious intention of the British government also to milk the fat American cow for its own benefit.

The boldness of the resolutions and the violence of Henry's speech alarmed the circle of eastern planters, who were as much opposed to the Stamp Act as the orator, but who preferred to carry on their opposition in the timehonored method of respectful petition. At a later date and in a period of glorification of the Revolution, it was claimed that Henry won a victory over the "court" or British faction in the House of Burgesses. As a matter of fact, no English party existed in Virginia at this time or afterwards. The nearest approach to such a party was the council, which was closely allied to the governor, but the council's influence had been steadily declining for some years and had practically disappeared by the Revolution. Certainly no English party had a place in the House of Burgesses, if by that term is meant a group willing to subordinate the colony to the will of the British government. The leaders acting against Henry to defeat his resolutions were Speaker Robinson, Edmund Pendleton, Peyton Randolph, Robert Carter Nicholas, Richard Bland, and George Wythe, all of whom with the exception of Robinson became active revolutionists a decade later. The speaker, it is true, stood near the governor, Fauquier, and was, so to speak, in touch with the home government, but it is almost certain that he would have sided with his associates if he had been living in 1775, since he had taken the lead in protests and in the first committee of correspondence. Assertion of colonial rights was nothing new to, the House of Burgesses; it had always been a singularly independent body. It had thwarted Governor Dinwiddie consistently, it had asserted itself in the "Parsons' Cause" and in the Pistole Fee, and in 1764 it had memorialized against the declaratory act preceding the Stamp Act. Landon Carter, George Wythe, Richard Bland, Peyton Randolph, and others of the so-called "court" party formed the committee to draw the protest. No view could be more mistaken than that Henry originated the spirit of resistance to British claims in the Virginia House of Burgesses; that spirit had always existed.

But if he did not initiate the opposition, he did show the wisdom of immediate and emphatic action. With his unrivaled faculty for seizing the psychological moment, Henry rightly judged that the time had passed for respectful representations to the "best of kings" and that the hour of rough and vigorous action had arrived. The speech he made in defense of his resolutions was startling and seditious in the extreme. After a stormy debate of two days, May 29-30, 1765, the resolutions, somewhat amended, passed the House. Jefferson, loitering in the lobby watching the scene instead of attending his classes at William and Mary, describes the fat and excited Peyton Randolph as rushing past him swearing that he would have given five hundred guineas for a single vote to help defeat Henry. Yet this man, who so passionately resented the orator's bold stand on the Stamp Act, afterwards became the speaker of the Revolutionary House of Burgesses and of conventions, and the first president of the Continental Congress. Robert Carter Nicholas, who a year later succeeded Robinson as treasurer, was an important Revolutionary leader, as was Edmund Pendleton, chairman of the Committee of Safety and president of the constitution-making convention of 1776. George Wythe, another of Randolph's associates, played a prominent part in the creation of the State government and is credited by Jefferson as being the only man in Virginia sharing his own extreme views of the colonial constitution. Richard Bland had been the most effective literary representative of colonial rights.

Jefferson admits that there was no difference in principle on the Stamp Act resolutions between the opposing parties in the House of Burgesses, but merely a difference on the question of their expediency. "They were opposed," he says, "by Randolph, Pendleton, Nicholas, Wythe, and all the old members whose influence in the House had till then been unbroken."^[4] The resistance of the tidewater planters was due to two things - to the leadership of a member outside of the old circle and, in greater part, to Henry's irreverent allusions to the king. The Virginian of that day, however much he might object to the policy of the British ministry, entertained a profound respect for the person of the sovereign; and the sentence which is almost all of the great speech that has come down to us "C.Tsar had his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell, and George the Third" -was drowned in the cries of "Treason" rising from a deeply shocked assembly. That rebellious speech startled a wider audience than the chamber which heard it; it ran through the colonies and gave rise to the agitation ending in Parliament's repeal of the offending statute.

The Virginia leaders had intended a constitutional protest against the Stamp Act; they did not wish to commit the colony to a resistance that the British government might construe as treason. The event showed that the orator was right, not they, and that a bold face intimidated the ministry where mildness and the spirit of conciliation would only have confirmed it in its course. So perhaps it is not to be wondered at that writers of succeeding generations, imbued with the prevailing democratic ideas and viewing the events of 1765 retrospectively, should have translated the conservative ring of planters and lawyers, which was thoroughly patriotic in temper if cautious in action, into a party advocating submission to England, and Henry, the agitator and incendiary, into an innovator forcing a declaration of colonial rights through a hostile House. We are further informed that the public so fully indorsed Henry and condemned his opponents that at the ensuing election for the assembly of 1766 many delegates who voted against the resolutions failed of reelection.^[5] A number of changes did take place in the personnel of the succeeding House of Burgesses, but the rejected conservatives must have been very minor victims, since in no case was a conservative leader defeated. More than this, Peyton Randolph, the leading conservative, was elected speaker in place of John Robinson - a strange victory indeed for the patriots to have won over the "court" party. An explanation of Virginia politics in the decade preceding the Revolution on the theory of a "court" or British party leads to a dilemma. We are led to conclude that Patrick Henry, by the sheer force of genius, prevailed on the planters to stand up for rights to which they had been indifferent before, or that he forced them because of his popularity to advocate principles they did not believe in. They were enlightened by the rather unlearned Henry on the subject of constitutional law, or were driven by fear of the populace into that basest of opportunism, insincere revolution. The whole history of the House of Burgesses - proud, independent, and tenacious of its privileges - speaks against such a theory.

In fact, it was not Henry who influenced the conservative leaders so much as it was the conservative leaders who furnished him with thunder. The orator began his career by putting into practice in his Hanover speech the arguments Richard Bland had introduced to the small reading public in the pamphlet of 1760. Henry's eloquence metamorphosed the reasoning of the constitutional lawyer into clear common speech. Again, in 1765, he endued with all the fire of his passion the protests which the House of Burgesses had made in 1764 in rather tame phraseology. In neither case was there a difference of principle; in both, all the difference in the world in power and effect.

The great crisis of 1765 did not, therefore, witness the beginning of the resistance to the British policy; that resistance had begun long before and was properly the result of the colony's rapid development into a strong and populous state. None the less, Henry's appearance on the stage was a momentous event in American history, for it marked the spread of the spirit of revolt from the assembly to the body of the people, and the rise of the Democratic Party. Henry was the inspirer and first leader of that party, which under Jefferson grew beyond the boundaries of Virginia and finally triumphed in the nation at large. Before 1765 tendencies existed in Virginia, but no parties - hardly even factions. Legislative action lay in the hands of a group of large planters, and such opposition as existed did little more than express the discontent of westerners and the protests of dissenter preachers against the order of society. After 1765 there were two more or less clearly defined parties - the conservatives headed by the old leaders, and the democrats, or more properly, the progressives, led by Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee. Party names did not exist, but there was true party action, and the opponents, though agreeing mainly in their constitutional views, differed widely as to ways and means. Accordingly as one faction or the other predominated, the Revolution in Virginia went forward rapidly or moved cautiously and in the hope of reconciliation with England.

Patrick Henry, who overthrew the old order and brought in the new, is the most striking figure in Virginia history. In a measure he was aided by circumstances, but the chief factor in the coup d'etat was his own overmastering personality. The hour and the man coincided. Henry con trolled a majority in the House of Burgesses, where inarticulate opposition to the "ring" had been powerless, and he became a rallying figure for all the elements of dissent and revolution. The council, which recruited its membership from a circle of families in the Williamsburg neighborhood, had drawn away in recent years from the House of Burgesses and the planter class in general. The "conciliar" families more and more tended to form a separate circle elevated above the other planters. Their sympathies were English, and they would have become active Tories if the great body of planters, who viewed them with jealousy and distrust, had not been in the saddle. As it was, they became lukewarm patriots and participated in the Revolution in order to save themselves.

We look back on this period with the knowledge of what happened. But the effect of Henry's stand against Parliament was not so striking as immediately to determine the public attitude on the issue. The courts practically negatived the Stamp Act by making various excuses for doing business without stamps and threatened to shut up shop altogether. Northampton Court even went so far as to declare the Stamp Act unconstitutional, the first instance in American history of such a declaration. The fate of the act depended, however, not upon court decisions, but upon popular opinion, and in the interim between the adjournment of the assembly and the date set for the new law to go into effect - November 1, 1765 quite a few Virginians applied for office under the tax commission in the impression that it would soon begin its work. No less a patriot than Richard Henry Lee had sought an appointment. This was an unfortunate step and one his friends were put to pains to explain, although Lee was really not so much to blame as might appear at first sight. The Burgesses had exhausted their resources of protest without impressing the British government, and the general belief in the summer of 1765 seems to have been that submission was inevitable. Benjamin Franklin thought so and made no effort to dissuade a kinsman who came to ask his advice about seeking a tax office. The crisis was indeed grave. If the colonists believed that acceptance of the Stamp Act was preferable to the risks of resistance, a loyalist party would have arisen in Virginia, as well as in other colonies, having the same interests as the British government. Signs are not wanting that many men in Virginia were willing to ally themselves with the royal government and prosper in its shadow. While the House of Burgesses had resisted every effort of the governor to increase his authority and had even asserted itself against the royal prerogative, these contests were only skirmishes compared to a clash with Parliament over the fundamental right of taxation.

This fall of 1765, when the question of the Stamp Act was decided, was the critical moment in the American Revolution; all that followed was the direct result of the stand then taken. And it soon became clear that Patrick Henry had done a greater work than inspire a party in a legislative chamber; he had fired the people of all the colonies into passionate resistance to the British government. When the commissioner convoying the first consignment of stamps, a Virginian named Mercer, arrived in Williamsburg, the populace rose and demanded that he resign his office. This was on October 30, 1765, just before the Stamp Act became operative, and the scene was the most memorable the little Virginia capital had ever witnessed.^[6] An excited crowd gathered before the coffee-house, which opened on the wide thoroughfare named, with such charming grandiloquence, "the Duke of Gloucester Street." The governor, accompanied by the speaker and other officials, went thither to greet the newly arrived stamp commissioner and found him on the point of being mobbed. A crowd composed of the best citizens of Williamsburg and planters of the neighborhood loudly threatened to "rush in," and the speaker interposed his ample person before the governor to ward off possible missiles from the representative of the majesty of England. Mercer was in actual danger for a time, but he promised to give a prompt answer to the demand for his resignation and Fauquier's coolness quieted the rioters, who finally allowed the stamp commissioner to go off under his guardianship. Next day the prudent Mercer resigned.

This outburst was no demonstration of the lower classes, but of the well-to-do and intelligent planters, who now definitely took sides against England. Owing to a similarity of feeling among the planters of eastern and southern Virginia, they acted unitedly, and because of their local power and influence they carried all classes with them into the Revolution. Henry had aroused the people generally; he had particularly stirred the younger and liberally inclined country gentlemen, and they were not afraid to use violence to gain their way.

The Williamsburg disturbance was followed by the organized and effective resistance of experienced politicians. Richard Henry Lee, who was astute enough to know that he had made a mistake almost as soon as he made it and quickly withdrew his application for a tax position, went to the extreme of opposition when he saw which way the wind blew. His excellent talents as a conspirator showed to advantage, when early in the next year, in February, 1766, he organized in his own county of Westmoreland the first "association,"^[7] that form of boycott destined to give the British government endless trouble and to serve as the immediate forerunner of war in 1774. This "association" bound the subscribers to import no goods froth England until the Stamp Act had been repealed, and while it did not immediately prove useful because hardly needed under the circumstances, it remained a valuable precedent for future service.

Repeal quickly followed from the emphatic protests of the colonies. The Stamp Act could not have been enforced without troops and the British ministry had no wish to resort to extremities. This show of weakness was fatal to the authority of the government. The colonies had learned that Parliament could be intimidated into giving way and never forgot the lesson: they went on to resist all further assertions of the English right of taxing the colonies, no matter on what ground. A now definitely developed patriot party in Virginia had learned, too, that uniform action might be secured by exerting pressure on the individual counties, and for this reason there never was a Tory party in Virginia. The west was solidly patriotic because it was raw, democratic, and dissenter; the east was as solidly patriotic because the planter class, convinced that its welfare lay in opposition to England, overawed the considerable but widely scattered loyalist element, which was helpless in the face of a well-organized majority in every community.

The bonfires and bell-ringings over the repeal of the Stamp Act might have been spared. The English administration, though it had abandoned the attempt to enforce a truly burdensome, income-producing tax, was not prepared to renounce the principle of taxation. It substituted the Townshend Acts of 1767, which were based on the theory admitted by the colonists themselves of the Parliamentary right to regulate commerce; duties were laid on tea, glass, paper, and lead shipped into America. The struggle immediately recommenced, and the House of Burgesses, in April, 1768, adopted a complaint written by Richard Bland that the Townshend duties amounted to an exercise of "internal" control and so were unconstitutional, which was an extension of the doctrine of "internal" power to cover the whole field of taxation and a distinct advance over the former position of the provincials. But the Americans of those days were too English to be much disturbed by inconsistencies; with marvelous facility they contrived to raise constitutional objections to every new assertion of authority on the part of the ministry. Indeed, the colonists were so thoroughly aroused by the real menace of the Stamp Act that they were determined to submit to no new taxes of any kind. It is not for us to blame them. Liberty cannot be made strictly dependent on a series of constitutional precedents; law seldom measures the real issues at stake in history. However defective the fathers may have been in logic, -- and that they were sometimes defective we must admit, --nevertheless, they stood for the principle of selfgovernment against the worldold system of arbitrary rule.

In the following year, in May, 1769, the House of Burgesses again protested against the British policy, with the result that Lord Botetourt, the governor, immediately dissolved it. The members nominally obeyed; in reality they merely adjourned to a private house, where they elected Speaker Randolph chairman and performed the first act of real rebellion. Borrowing Richard Henry Lee's scheme of three years earlier, they adopted a non-importation agreement which specifically boycotted slaves, wines, and British manufactures. George Mason, who was not then a member of the assembly, drew this paper and George Washington presented it.^[8] Peyton Randolph, who had led the fight against Patrick Henry over the Stamp Act resolutions, acted as ringleader in this conspiracy against the home government. It is true that the nonimportation agreement adopted then did not have any marked immediate effect, but the boycott method of resistance was carried a point further in Tune, 1770, when an "association" was formed between the Burgesses and the leading merchants of Virginia. At this stage of the taxation controversy, the economic interests of the colony, commercial as well as agricultural, stood in united opposition to the British policy. This association bound subscribers not to import from Great Britain, after September 1, 1770, spirits, foodstuffs, certain manufactures, oils and paints, or to receive into keeping any of the prohibited imports after June 25, 1770. Goods imported in conformity with the association might be sold, but prices were not to be advanced because of restrictions laid on trade. In order to carry it into effect committees of five should be chosen in each county, with authority to publish the names of violators of the agreement and to examine the books of offending merchants. The first name signed to the as sociation was that of Peyton Randolph; the next, that of Andrew Sprowle, of Norfolk, chairman of the trade and leading merchant of the colony. Then followed Robert Carter Nicholas, Richard Bland, Edmund Pendleton, Archibald Cary, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson, Jr., and many others. At the same time the Virginia traders formed an organization at Williamsburg to further the association. A committee of 125 business men from all parts of the colony was appointed for the purpose of deliberating on the political situation.^[9]

While planters and traders thus joined hands in support of colonial liberties, one order of men remained somewhat in sympathy with the British government. The clergy had been disheartened by the Privy Council's abandonment of their cause in the Twopenny case. They had yielded to their fate without resignation, because they felt they were in the right, but their evident helplessness did not tend to encourage them to engage in other disputes with the assembly. Nevertheless, a few irreconcilable spirits, led by John Camm, president of William and Mary College, had the courage to defy public sentiment in an other issue. Virginia was still mainly Anglican in religion, though dissent was rapidly growing at the expense of the establishment, but the Anglicans quite as much as dissenters opposed the foundation of a colonial episcopate, that scheme of the northern Anglican clergy. Opposition to an episcopate on the part of Virginia Episcopalians was political, of course, not ecclesiastical; they feared that an official like a bishop might lend a dangerous support to the ministerial plan to control the colonies. Under Camm's influence, James Horrocks, the commissary in Virginia, called a convention of ministers to debate the episcopate, but only a handful responded and their interest was obviously lukewarm. Camm's desire to strengthen the movement for a bishop therefore came to naught. He had, however, displayed his own Tory and High Church principles and his action subjected the Episcopal ministers in Virginia to the suspicions of a part of the populace, when, as a matter of fact, many of them were patriots and a few were Revolutionary leaders. This abortive attempt to draw the clergy into an ill-timed movement strikingly illustrated the unanimity of public opinion in the colony at that time; Anglicans joined hands with dissenters in opposing a political scheme masquerading under the name of religion.

THE convention which met in July, 1775, found itself faced by the necessity of raising troops and preparing for war. By this time many companies of minute-men existed in Virginia, but the militia expected to serve only in emergencies. To meet the need of a permanent force, the convention passed an ordinance for raising two regiments of regulars and a number of companies of riflemen far border defense. There was no money in the Virginia treasury, however, and regular taxation was in abeyance during the Revolutionary crisis. An untrained assembly might have hesitated in finding ways and means, but this convention of experienced legislators went on to assert its sovereignty by laying a special levy. Carriages, tithables, land, ordinary licenses, marriage licenses, and legal writs were taxed to provide the money for arming, equipping, and paying the troops and paying the delegates in the Continental Congress. As some time must elapse before such taxes would come in, while money was immediately needed, the convention voted an issue of £ 350,000 of treasury notes. These were secured in the first place by the special taxes and finally by the whole property of the colony solemnly pledged by the convention.

The keynote of Revolutionary finance was thus struck at the beginning. The first paper money commanded a good exchange value for some time, but subsequent issues caused rapid depreciation until the nadir was reached in 1782, when Virginia paper was worth about one to one thousand in specie. The English government, probably with wisdom, had opposed colonial paper money, and this issue of 1775 is one of the evidences of open revolution.

The convention met the need for an executive when, on August 17, 1775, it elected a Committee of Safety, endowed with considerable powers. The break with the colonial regime was now complete, for the royal governor, regarded up to this time as head of the state, gave way to another and frankly revolutionary executive. The convention itself was only the House of Burgesses acting in an unprecedented capacity, but the administrative junta called into being had no association with the past. It was born of a necessity completely beyond the scope of constitutional limitations.

The Committee of Safety, in its political complexion, represented the conservative wing of the patriot party as against the progressives led by Henry and Jefferson. As has been stated before, the use of party appellatives in describing the factions existing in Virginia before the rise of definite political organizations is not entirely accurate, but genuine divergencies require the employment of names. In the convention of July, 1775, conservatives and progressives were in strong conflict, - the one side pressing for sweeping measures and open war, the other endeavoring to stave off the inevitable struggle to the last moment. The revolutionary party, which was about equal in strength to its opponents, put forward Patrick Henry for colonel of the First Virginia Regiment, and, as such, ranking officer of the Virginia forces. Although Hugh Mercer, afterwards killed at Princeton, led him on the first ballot, Henry's friends managed to elect him; but his antagonists, foiled in their effort to prevent his election, consistently hampered his action through the administrative power of the Committee of Safety.

This body without exception was composed of men of substance and position. Six members came from the tidewater counties, three from the south side, one from the piedmont, and one from the west. A glance thus shows that the preponderant eastern element secured the success of its policies by electing a majority of the committee from its own ranks. Seven of the eleven members, Pendleton, Bland, John Page, Paul Carrington, Dudley Digges, Carter Braxton, and John Tabb, may be classed as conservatives, leaving as progressive representatives George Mason, Thomas Ludwell Lee, William Cabell, and James Mercer. Mason, probably the foremost member in point of ability, seldom attended meetings and the direction of affairs fell into the hands of Edmund Pendleton, the conservative leader. Bland, who might have disputed the primacy with him, was old and in declining health. Pendleton, as both president of the convention and chairman of the Committee of Safety, occupied a unique position. With Jefferson, Henry, and Richard Henry Lee out of Virginia politics for the time being, he was the most influential man in the government. Because of his ascendancy, the Williamsburg administration held off from war long after hostilities had begun elsewhere; they still hoped against hope for a reconciliation with England. Such an event would have been welcome to Pendleton provided it could be had on terms honorable to America. As this could not be, he bravely played his part in the Revolution. Pendleton is a figure in many ways resembling Disraeli. Like Disraeli he had to make his way from obscure beginnings; like Disraeli he became the ardent defender of the ruling class which accepted him. He was of fine presence and polished manners, an able lawyer, an honorable and capable public man. He believed in government by gentlemen and had no sympathy for the great democratic movement which Henry had first led and which Jefferson was later to guide to a mighty destiny. He spent much of his career in resisting attacks on the crumbling social order of the colonial age and died at the threshold of the nineteenth century just as he was about to deliver a final blow in behalf of that most conservative of institutions, the Anglican Church.

The convention entrusted the Committee of Safety with the powers needed by a vigorous executive in time of war. It was given control of troops in the field and the militia and had authority to secure arms and ammunition wherever they could be found. It might enter into negotiations with other colonies for military support and was to carry on a correspondence with the various county committees. This last-named duty developed into a general supervision of these committees. The convention imposed on loyalists the penalties of imprisonment and seizure of estates at the discretion of the Committee of Safety. Service in the militia was required of all able-bodied men of military age except Britons born, who might remain neutral.

Owing to the influence of Edmund Pendleton, the Committee of Safety used its powers with extreme caution in the summer of 1775. To him Dunmore was still the lawful governor, to be respected as such. Besides taking no steps against Dunmore, the committee largely left the loyalists alone in September, October, and November, 1775. It found abundant employment in organizing, equipping, and feeding the troops raised by the convention and in getting into the field a part of the militia.

Unquestionably the Williamsburg junta displayed energy and intelligence, but it also allowed time for Dunmore to get reinforcements and recruits and begin to harass the Chesapeake shores. The committee was forced at length by Dunmore's depredations on property and arrests of patriots to make a demonstration; and, on October 24, 1775, decided to send troops to Norfolk. Dunmore meantime worked energetically to raise a force. He had ample leisure to do this, for so slowly did the colonial troops move that they reached the vicinity of Norfolk only about December 1, 1775; and if the governor had not taken the initiative by attacking the militia at Kempsville and proclaiming freedom to slaves, it is probable that hostilities might have been postponed for a considerably longer period. In fact the Committee of Safety, zealous as it was in purely administrative work, preferred to leave large questions of policy to the convention; it probably felt that it possessed anomalous powers which should not be asserted too vigorously.

When the convention met, on December 1, 1775, a whole host of complaints and appeals awaited it; a widespread feeling existed that the convention was the sole authority able to deal with the novel and confusing circumstances attending the overthrow of the old regime and the beginning of war. Thus the Accomac Committee on November 30 reported that the county delegates could not attend the convention for fear of being taken by English ships cruising in Chesapeake Bay and complained of the exposed situation of the Eastern Shore and the general disinclination of the people for militia service: it asked for a detachment of regulars to take the place of militia for guard duty.^[1] The Elizabeth City patriots stated, on December 2, that some of the people of that county had boarded a schooner and brought supplies ashore from her, and that another vessel, laden with provisions, might have been taken if they had had "powder and orders." They accordingly requested directions from the convention or Committee of Safety as to future action in regard to seizing British ships.^[2] Warwick complained that it could raise only one hundred militia, a force too small to protect the county from the enemy, who had already begun to ravage it: the committee asked for an additional force of 125 men.^[3] War had evidently begun and war measures were necessary, among others the adoption of a definite policy towards the Tories. County committees had mercilessly suppressed these unfortunates by such means as isolated communities are able to employ, but the work of repression could no longer be left to local bodies. Still, the Committee of Safety had refrained, save in a few aggravated cases, from using the license granted to it of imprisoning loyalists and taking possession of their estates. Under these circumstances action by the convention was necessary and unavoidable. Citations of names go to prove that in spite of the extreme disadvantages they were under there were a good many loyalists in Virginia, including men of position and influence: if they had been shown toleration their numbers would have increased with every reverse of the American arms until a genuine party might have come into existence.

The chief men of Tory inclinations in Virginia were John Randolph, attorney-general of the colony and father of Edmund Randolph, Secretary of State in Washington's Cabinet, who resigned his office and went to England; William Byrd, of Westover, perhaps the first gentleman of Virginia, colonel of a regiment in the French-and-Indian War and member of the council, who was approached in regard to accepting a command in the Revolutionary army, but refused to entertain the offer and remained quietly at his fine estate of "Westover" until his death in 17'77; Ralph Wormeley, member of the council and of one of the most prominent colonial families; Richard Corbin, receivergeneral of Virginia, and his sons, Francis and Thomas; Reverend John Agnew, of Suffolk, who became chaplain of the Queen's Rangers and finally settled in New Brunswick; Reverend Jonathan Boucher, rector of Hanover and later of St. Mary's Parish; Bryan Fairfax, of Alexandria, who attended and withdrew from the Fairfax meeting of July 18, 1774, where a county committee was appointed and strong resolutions were adopted; Lord Thomas Fairfax, the friend of Washington and one of the very few noblemen residing in America, the owner of a vast estate in western Virginia on which he continued to live undisturbed all through the Revolution; Reverend John Camm, president of William and Mary College and commissary, who committed no overt act and went unmolested; Andrew Sprowle, of Norfolk, the leading merchant in Virginia, who died in exile in 1776; Archibald Ritchie, of Middlesex, father of the noted editor; Philip Rootes, of "Rosewall"; Jacob Ellegood, held as a prisoner and repeatedly asked for in exchange by the British; Matthew Phripp, of Norfolk, merchant; John Tayloe Corbin, a large landowner's son; and John Grymes, another prominent planter. Many men of less importance shared their opinions and usually suffered a harder fate.

Not only were the loyalists a menace by reason of their numbers and prominence, but Dunmore, through his depredations and finally by his proclamation of martial law, forced the provincial government to proceed vigorously against them as his adherents. After considering Dunmore's proclamation, the convention, on December 13, 1775, issued a counter-declaration framed in the style of Jeffersonian rhetoric. Dunmore's tyranny is arraigned and Virginians are exhorted to show zeal in resisting it. The people of Norfolk receive warning not to be led by the governor into opposing the colony, although the convention admits the practical difficulty of refusing his demands. But neutrality is the least that can be accepted. "If any of our people, in violation of their faith plighted to this colony, and the duty they owe to society, shall be found in arms, or continue to give assistance to our enemies, we shall think ourselves justified, by the necessity we are under, of executing upon them the law of retaliation."^[4] On the next day the convention directed Woodford to send to Williamsburg Tories taken in arms against the colony, and, pending orders from the convention or Committee of Safety, to detain other persons appearing unfriendly. The Journal of the Convention of December, 1775, 64. convention further proclaimed the death penalty for slaves engaged in conspiracy or rebellion, and other punishments for slaves seduced into joining Dunmore by his invitation, but offered pardon to those who had already taken arms and were willing to surrender themselves.^[5] It also entered on the task of considering the cases of individual loyalists. There was actual treason as well as disaffection. Depositions made concerning John Dew, a shipmaster, recently arrested in the Rappahannock River, showed that he had attempted to corrupt a patriot force at Fredericksburg by picturing the superior comforts enjoyed by troops in the British service. "The Ding," he said, "found his soldiers four new shirts & a good suit of cloaths, paid for their washing, & 3/6 shillings per week day, free Quarters & advised them to goe to the Governor."^[6]

On December 16, 1775, the convention reappointed the Committee of Safety, with two changes, Joseph Jones and Thomas Walker replacing George Mason and Carter Braxton. Though the vote for him fell off greatly, Edmund Pendleton remained the head of the committee. At the same time the convention heard Dr. Archibald Campbell, of Norfolk, who complained that he had been charged with aiding Dunmore against the colony, but had done nothing except under compulsion. The convention referred his petition to a special committee and ordered him back to his room in Williamsburg under guard. A few days later Woodford sent to the convention three other suspected loyalists, Matthew Phripp, Edward Hack Moseley, and the latter's son: they were ordered into confinement waiting examination. The Caroline Committee reported that it had seized the effects of another Norfolk Tory, Thomas Hepburn, then in arms against the colony. Yet, in spite of the widespread disaffection in the Norfolk district and the number of Tories sent to Williamsburg for trial, the convention acted with commendable moderation. While county committees crushed British sympathizers without mercy, the convention, like the Committee of Safety, proceeded cautiously in inflicting severe punishments. As has been stated, the greater number of irreconcilable royalists left Virginia before the end of 1775, but a part of this non-native mercantile class was willing neither to submit quietly to the Revolution nor to go into exile; they were hostile to the patriot party and openly in sympathy with Dunmore. Some of these men had gone further at Norfolk in the king's behalf than could be easily explained' on the ground. of constraint; and the convention, in view of this fact, withdrew the consent granted by the July Convention for British-born residents to remain neutral. It charged them with violating the Continental Association, giving intelligence to the enemy and furnishing him with provisions, propagating falsehoods injurious to the patriot cause, inciting slaves to rebellion and leading them in arms against the colony. No citizens were any longer to be exempt from the burdens and dangers of defending the country. Able-bodied men declining so necessary a duty were to be permitted (at the pleasure of the Committee of Safety) to leave:^[7] those who had taken arms against the American cause, or otherwise compromised themselves, were denied this privilege. The colony thus laid down the principle that all citizens must range themselves frankly on its side or depart; there was no longer room in Virginia for neutrals. A few individuals of influence, like William Byrd, continued to live unmolested while remaining quiet, but the measure resulted in the expulsion of most of the British merchants and clerks who still lingered.

A special committee investigated the loyalists sent to Williamsburg by Woodford. Archibald Campbell, according to the report, had been opposed to violence in resisting England because he thought that "a strict adherence to the commercial opposition would produce a redress of grievances." His chief offense was in taking Dunmore's oath: he had sent his family to Bermuda, whither he intended to follow shortly. John Willoughby, former county lieutenant of Norfolk and chairman of the local committee, had also been forced to take Dunmore's oath, and had ordered out the Norfolk militia in Dunmore's interest. As for Cary Mitchell,^[8] Woodford had been notified to send on the evidence, but had failed to do so. The committee found that "Archibald Campbell does not appear to have been inimical to the rights and liberties of America," that John Willoughby had acted under compulsion, and that Cary Mitchell did not appear to be unfriendly. The three men were then discharged on parole not to give assistance or intelligence to the enemy.^[9] The two Moseleys had likewise taken the British oath, but had not aided Dunmore actively, and were discharged. Matthew Phripp was reported to have played an important part in the patriot councils at Norfolk before Dunmore's occupation of that place, at which time he also had been compelled to subscribe to the .oath. "Falling into the power of Lord Dunmore," the report stated, "he had only the alternative of submitting, or exposing his life and fortune to his lordship's resentment; in his extremity he yielded, and took the oath; but as the said Matthew Phripp soon after manifested his willingness to support the common cause, we think, upon the whole, he ought to be restored to the confidence of his countrymen."^[10]

The convention, in dealing with these first cases of loyalists, showed mildness, for the war had not as yet progressed far enough to produce much bitterness and, furthermore, the Norfolk patriots had been put in a difficult position by Dunmore. This moderation was so marked that at the beginning of 1776 several Tories who had gone on board the fleet in Norfolk Harbor with their families ventured to ask Woodford and Howe for permission to return home. The commanders replied that they would receive and protect the women and children and hold the men as prisoners. Their action was approved.^[11]

At the first of the year the line had not yet been strictly drawn between enemies and friends and the colony was not exactly in a state of war. Practically speaking, war existed, but not legally. Commerce still continued under the restrictions of the Continental Association, which was an embargo and not a war measure; and the convention was somewhat at a loss as to the proper procedure in the case of the vessels that county committees and militia were now seizing in Chesapeake Bay. Open war had put an end to any usefulness the Association might have had as a protest, or means of gaining concessions, but it remained in force because the Revolution was a civil war and not an international conflict begun under proper forms - commerce had not been placed on a war footing. Necessity, however, was righting this artificiality, as is shown in the case of a shipmaster, Stephen Pierce, held for carrying salt from Antigua to Maryland in violation of the Association. He was allowed to proceed on his way because Maryland probably needed the salt.^[12]

Captured ships and cargoes were another war feature the convention was forced to deal with. Several vessels had been seized in Hampton Roads on the charge of violating the Association, or being the property of enemies of America. The committee recommended the forfeiture of the sloop Agatha freighted with a quantity of rum,-not because the rum had been improperly imported, but on account of the hostile conduct of the owners. Again, the sloop Swallow, bringing in salt, had not violated the Association, but the attitude of Hector McAllister,^[13] the owner, towards the colony required investigation. The brig Corlet, engaged in importing contrary to the Association, should be sold at auction. The convention laid this report on the table and ordered that the cargo of the Agatha, except the rum, be delivered to the owners.

Captain Richard Barron, in April, 1776, seized two vessels at Fredericksburg and one at Port Royal under the resolutions of Congress making all British property on the water liable to capture. Two of the ships belonged to British firms having agents on the Rappahannock; half of the third was claimed by an agent as his personal property and so not subject to confiscation. This awkward question of divided ownership - which meant that the government could only claim a part of a property - repeatedly came up in connection with estates belonging to business firms composed both of citizens and alien enemies. Seizures under Congressional recommendation, which were limited at first to effects captured at sea, later included every form of property.

Before adjournment the convention's attitude towards loyalists changed greatly. When it met the body had no very definite mode of punishment in mind; when it adjourned it had passed severely repressive measures. This transformation resulted largely from the obnoxious activity of the loyalists around Norfolk during their brief season of ascendancy. Norfolk and Princess Anne patriots, in their bitterness, requested that the British sympathizers of the neighborhood be moved to a distant part of the colony to prevent further mischief. They declared that the Tories had raided their plantations, robbed them of plate, money, and other valuables, stripped their wives and daughters almost to nakedness, burned their houses, and ended by dragging some of them into captivity. These various alleged misdoings led to the passage of an ordinance "for establishing a mode of punishment for the enemies to America in this colony."^[14] All white men who had been in arms against the colony and who should refuse to surrender themselves within two months, or who might thereafter aid the enemy, were to be imprisoned at the discretion of the Committee of Safety, which should also seize their estates and apply the revenues to the use of the colony. The committee, now wielding the power of imprisoning and pardoning Tories, became an extra-judicial court. This ordinance, however, did not prove sufficiently definite; it left the treatment of loyalists still a matter rather of policy than of law. The May, 1776, Convention accordingly increased the penalties for disaffection to forfeiture of estates and imprisonment, although such part of the property of imprisoned loyalists as was judged proper should be applied to the support of their families.^[15] Commissioners appointed by the county courts were to administer the forfeited estates for the benefit of the public. To settle the question of allegiance, the convention adopted a test oath. The arms and ammunition of all persons refusing it were to be taken for the state.^[16] A good many nonjurors in various parts of the colony were disarmed under this provision, yet not without compensation, at least ordinarily. Thus Philip Rootes was allowed six pounds for a rifle seized at his house.^3[17]

Many Norfolk cases came before the convention in the last days of the session. Alexander Gordon, who had borne arms against the colony and had been active in Dunmore's behalf; Joshua Whitehurst, who had attempted to raise recruits for him; Dr. Thomas Hall, ensign in Dunmore's army; a dozen Tories who had fought at Great Bridge; the commander of one of Dunmore's tenders; nine others who had been pressed into military service by the British were held as prisoners. Five men who had "in some measure aided Lord Dunmore," but had not taken arms or shown especial zeal, were released on parole to do nothing unfriendly in the future.^[18] Forty negroes, most of them captured at Great Bridge, were condemned to sale in the West Indies or restored to owners.^[19]

The convention also examined the man who - inexplicably enough - seems to have been the most dreaded Tory produced by Virginia in the Revolution. John Goodrich, a Nansemond planter and shipowner, had rendered the colony conspicuous service in the early stages of the struggle by bringing in from the West Indies a quantity of that sorely-needed article, powder. This performance drew down Dunmore's resentment and he was arrested and put on a sort of parole, being required to visit the governor's ship once every ten days. Apparently Goodrich was a subject of intimidation - an art in which Dunmore excelled. At all events, after a little while he began to act definitely on the British side. In command of an armed sloop he captured a ship in Ocracoke Inlet, North Carolina, and is said to have taken another in Chesapeake Bay. His career as a privateer was cut short when his sloop was boarded in Ocracoke Inlet by North Carolina patriots, who sent him a prisoner to Williamsburg. The government there signified its belief that he was a dangerous character by putting him in close confinement. After a careful examination the convention found him guilty of bearing arms against the colony and aiding the enemy; he was ordered to be sent to the interior and his estate was seized and administered by commissioners. Other charges against loyalists came to the convention from zealous county committees. The Dinwiddie Committee, informing the convention that Thomas Irving, a deputy postmaster in that county, was also agent for Neil Jameson, a Tory, asked for advice in regard to removing him. "The committee would not chuse to be officious in acting without authority from the Convention-but are clearly of opinion it is highly improper and may be of great prejudice to suffer the said Irving to continue post-master - which may give him an opportunity of opening letters - of conveying intelligence of the most dangerous nature to the welfare of this colony, . . . yet we are anxious not to exceed the line of our duty and therefore beg, Sir. you would be pleased to point it out to us."^[20] This letter is a fair sample of the spirit of obedience and desire for guidance inspiring the local committees in their dealings with the convention. Recommendations and orders from the latter body usually received prompt obedience, even when contrary to the wishes of committees. Thus, Wilson Curle, chairman of the Elizabeth City Committee, reported to Pendleton that that body had delivered a ship it had seized to the owner according to the orders of the convention. The Northampton Committee, which had sent several loyalist prisoners to Williamsburg, was highly gratified because the convention approved its conduct towards "those deluded people."^[21] In general the relations of the convention and Committee of Safety with the county committees were strikingly harmonious.

In the interval between the March and May Conventions of 1776, the Committee of Safety once more became the central power in the colony. Now that the die was cast, and open war was being waged in Virginia, and the convention itself had decided the treatment of loyalists, the junta acted more vigorously and definitely than in its earlier career. The committee's former wide discretionary powers were outlined in positive ordinances. Besides, the conservatives in the early months of 1776 had begun to lose hope of a reconciliation with England and anticipated an independent government.

Norfolk continued to be the chief internal problem of the Revolutionary administration. The destruction of this center of disaffection in January, 1776, somewhat simplified the question, but the country people of the region had been considerably tainted by Tory associations and Dunmore still found sympathizers and intelligence-givers ready to serve him. All this section lay open to raids by the British naval force, which continued to depredate with increasing severity. So constant were these raids and of such benefit to the raiders that the Committee of Safety as early as March, 1776, pondered the question of advising the people of the lower country to remove into the interior and leave their lands uncultivated, in order to cut off supplies from the British. This policy naturally failed to meet the approval of the population affected by the proposal, which urged, with obvious reason, that the removal of more than five thousand people in spring weather over bad roads would involve much suffering.^[22]

The committee hesitated to go so far as to enforce a general depopulation of the country, but, nevertheless, on April 10, 1776, ordered all persons in Norfolk and Princess Anne Counties, who had joined Dunmore and taken his oath, to move into the interior at least thirty miles from the enemy. To insure the enforcement of this order, the slaves of the evicted loyalists were to be carried inland and returned to their owners only when these had settled themselves as directed. A thousand pounds was voted for the relief of poor people unable to bear the expense of moving. The committee had been induced to take this action by an exaggerated letter from General Charles Lee,^[23] then commanding at Norfolk, as well as by the general belief that Norfolk Tories were engaged in supplying Dunmore with provisions and information.^[24] The Princess Anne Committee, in its perturbation over this sweeping order of banishment, declared to the Committee of Safety that, while the Norfolk people were much given to communicating with the enemy, the Princess Anne population was free from that iniquity. "As to the inimical dispositions of many of the Inhabitants of this County," the committee pathetically continued, "we beg leave to assure you that we, who have lived and been bred up with them, and have heard their Sentiments on this unhappy Dispute, and have been Witnesses of their conduct, think there are as few in this County as in any part of the Colony, and are as willing to join in any Measure for the advancement of the American cause; but such is our unhappy Fate that from the Manoeuvres of Lord Dunmore in this County when it was almost in a defenceless state, that we have been thought in general Inimical and has been a great means of our being grossly misrepresented."^[25] The committee asked that nothing more be done than to put the live stock out of Dunmore's way.^[26] The government agreed to allow friends and neutrals to remain on their estates on this condition: the inimical were to be forced to remove with their families and effects. The Norfolk people had also protested against the removal order; and since Dunmore had now left that vicinity the convention rescinded the resolution except in so far as it applied to the inimical.

As above stated, the Committee of Safety succeeded to the convention's function of court of appeals from the counties. Appellants felt that this tribunal would treat them with less prejudice than local committees, and, in fact, the committee acted with great lenity in these appeals. The cases of Joshua Whitehurst and Walter Hatton, of Accomac, have been mentioned. In the case of Archibald Ritchie,^[27] accused by the Essex Committee of violating the Association by importing, the committee recommended the prosecutors to pass over the offense with a warning. The imported goods were not condemned, because brought in before the passage of the confiscatory ordinance. The convention, however, in the spring meeting condemned goods seized before the passage of the ordinance, and left it to the option of local committees to confiscate goods or go on publishing offenders as before.

The committee was as anxious to avoid usurping the power of the local organizations as the latter were to refer cases to it for decision. When Thomas Mann Randolph and Thomas Underwood demanded to know whether the Goochland Committee had authority to investigate charges against Randolph, mentioned in a summons to Underwood, the committee ruled that it had no power to interfere with the Goochland authorities in an examination, but expressed a wish that they would not act on mere slanders and would confine themselves to actual Toryism.^[28] It frequently sent offenders back to the local courts for trial rather than seem to stretch its authority. The committee, about the first of March, 1776, adopted the policy of confining loyalists on parole within certain limits. They were perhaps led to take this action by appeals like that of Jacob Ellegood, the noted Tory, who had been thrown into jail and petitioned to be allowed to return to his plantation and live there quietly. The committee refused his request, but ordered his removal to Page Warehouse, Hanover, to remain on parole not to go out of the town limits or hold any correspondence on political subjects.^[29] Ellegood's conduct proved so obnoxious to the patriotic people of Hanovertown that the committee, on June 1, 1776, transferred him to Winchester.^[30] Later, after a tedious detention, he was exchanged as a prisoner of war. Mary Ellegood, his wife, appealed to the convention for relief in June, 1776, complaining that she and her three children had been deprived of the necessities of life since the seizure of her husband's estate. The committee, indeed, used loyalist property for the public service before the policy of actual confiscation began. Slaves of loyalists were frequently put to work for the government, as in the case of six of them confined in the public jail, who were used around the prison. The horses of George Logan, who had joined Dunmore, were sold and his slaves hired out for the benefit of the treasury.^[31]

Ralph Wormeley, Jr., one of the few men of high standing in the planter class openly identified with the British cause, came before the Committee of Safety, on April 22, 1776.^[32] The occasion of his summons was an indiscreet letter written to John Grymes, which happened to fall into the hands of the patriots and was forwarded to Williamsburg. The committee decided that nothing in Wormeley's conduct, or even in the letter, came within the scope of the ordinance establishing penalties for disaffection, but that the letter clearly proved an inimical disposition and a readiness to join the enemy on occasion. Wormeley was accordingly ordered to be discharged on giving bond for £ 10,000, not to correspond with the British or aid them, or to leave the colony without the consent of the government. The unfortunate correspondent had graphically described the difficulties under which Tories labored in tidewater Virginia in 1776, pressed as they were on one side by Dunmore and on the other by the Williamsburg government, sympathizing with the British but unable to aid them. Wormeley protested in utter irritation against Dunmore's demand for an unequivocal stand on his side, when such a course could only bring ruin to the impotent loyalist without benefiting the governor. But the ruin of his friends meant nothing to Dunmore, who was catching at every straw in the vain hope of securing some elements of strength.

Wormeley's complaint was as follows:

When you and John Nelson returned from Norfolk, you informed me that Lord Dunmore, wished or expected or thought it my duty, that I should immediately in person repair to his Lordship; that some such ostensible mark of my attachment to government, and Loyalty to my King was looked for from me, and that notwithstanding my inequivocal steady and invariable conduct, if I still continue at home, I may be exposed to the indiscriminating ravages of war, without any Chance of reparation. Whether this opinion is founded on the last proclamation of the King's on the late advice of the minister or from his Lordship's conjecture I do not know: as to the proclamation and the late advices from the Minister, I have an easy answer.

1st. I have never seen the proclamation; never heard it read or repeated, it cannot then be expected of me to pay respect to any instrument of that sort, whose contents I can have no cognizance of: before they are submitted to my senses. 2nd. as to the advice of the Minister which may lead his Lordship to conclude it to be the duty of every man, now, when the friends of government are in such a state of impotency, or rather are under such compleat dominion, to repair to his Lordship without probability of advancing any practical scheme of utility, of concerting any effectual plan of operations, and without any regard to circumstances, I say Sir, such advices are repugnant to the words and meaning of the King. In the true Knowledge of our present situation, his Majesty thus expresses himself, "and although many of those unhappy people may still retain their loyalty and may be too wise not to see the fatal consequences of this usurpation and wish to resist, yet the torrent of violence has been strong enough to compel their acquiescence till a sufficient force shall appear to support them." A few observations in the above quoted passage will prove the repugnancy, "unhappy people" in what? being overpowered 'by these usurpers, so overpowered that they cannot even hope they can only wish to resist it: this being the case, what are these unhappy people to do? What does his Majesty expect? not their fruitless vain endeavors which prejudice every cause: he knows that the torrent of violence is strong enough to retain them in their compulsive acquiescence "till a sufficient force shall appear to support them." He expects then they will wait the event; they will have, they have a right to protection. Every effort and endeavor now on their part would only issue in ruin to themselves and ruin to their cause. No man bears the accursed Tyranny with more impatient mortification than I do, and if there was a corner on the face of the earth, that I could support myself in and enjoy that freedom that I am now violently deprived of, I would for the gratification of my happiness fly to it. I have too much feeling not to be exquisitely sensible of my slavish condition .... But after all what beneficial consequences could my personal attendance operate in favor of that cause, whose success I have at heart? My example is not efficacious enough to influence others to follow it. What exertions of mine could now avail? and are not ineffectual exertions Capitally erroneous in policy? would not, or might not the departure of a person of my insignificance quicken the jealousy of the present rulers, give fresh vigor to prosecutions, and make them lash our few party friends, not with the rod of iron, which we have experienced, severe enough for the most criminal atrocity, but with a red hot one, fresh from the infernal forge of Tyranny.

If tho' the Governor should think my presence necessary and that I can in any degree be assistant to his Lordship, government or my country, will give me an official Summons, and afford me proper facilities to reach him, I will at the hazard of that precarious negative quiet that is now indulged to me, I will to the prejudice of my health, which you know is at present interrupted by a most inveterate disorder . . . at the risk of my life, of everything, obey it.^[33]

Wormeley did not give the required bond and remained in custody. It is probable that his political separation from almost the entire planter class oppressed him with a sense of isolation and finally weakened his fervent devotion to the royal side. At any rate, on May 11, 1776, he addressed the convention and, expressing regret for his unfortunate letter, declared his attachment for the American cause. The only point in which he differed from public opinion, he asserted, was in the means to be adopted for obtaining relief from Parliamentary taxation. He had never opposed public measures or violated the Association and the ordinances of the convention. The committee that examined his case reported that the letter showed an unfriendly and dangerous spirit and recommended his confinement to his father's estate in Frederick and Berkeley under bond of £16910,000 not to leave without permission. Wormeley then gave bond and entered upon exile.^[34]

As the year 1776 advanced, Virginia began to settle down into a more regular status: the Revolution, in its primary and immediate character, was over. An unfailing sign of this, county committees began to be superseded as tribunals by courts of inquiry appointed from members of committees or militia officers and juries were summoned as in ordinary courts of law. The large, unwieldy committees gave place to these small commissions. The courts of inquiry were later succeeded, upon the establishment of a permanent government, by the old-style county-court system. The courts of inquiry conducted themselves much as the committees had done and retained the same connection with the Committee of Safety, sending offenders on to Williamsburg as before. The Gloucester commissioners' court, on April 4, 1776, tried John Wilkie on the charge of communicating with the enemy. The jury brought in a verdict of "guilty of giving intelligence to our Enemies and going on board the man of war intentionally," and sent Wilkie to the Committee of Safety.^[35] The committee ordered an inventory to be taken of his estate and appointed Sir John Peyton commissioner to sell it.^[36] The Norfolk court of inquiry, on April 30, 1776, examined Thomas Talbott charged with being inimical. As three witnesses testified in his behalf, he was discharged. But at the same session the court ironed John Scott, convicted of supplying the enemy with provisions, and sent William Creamer to Williamsburg for the same offense. Another court of inquiry consisting of four officers, held in May, 1776, considered cases of furnishing supplies to the enemy, desertion, and drunkenness;^[37] and also tried the loyalist John Willoughby, ordered to remove inland from the coast but disobedient. The chief evidence against Willoughby was a statement he had made that the proceedings of the patriot party would force the people to become Tories or form a third party. As Willoughby pleaded drunkenness for an excuse he was treated leniently, intoxication being regarded by the Fathers as a palliating circumstance in almost every crime from failure to attend church to treason. The case of George Oldener was more serious. Oldener, among other things, had aided one of the witnesses against him under the impression that he was a deserter from the American army and had called a prisoner held by Dunmore a "damned rebel." He was judged to be unfriendly to the patriot cause, but as he had committed no overt act to bring him within the ordinance prescribing imprisonment for "enemies of America" he was sent into exile in the interior.

Appeals came to the Committee of Safety from the new courts of inquiry just as from the former committees. The Committee of Safety, on June 8, 1776, tried a case appealed from Middlesex, that of Charles Neilson, who was ordered to remain within the limits of Fauquier County and to be kept in custody until he gave a bond of £ 100 not to leave the county.^[38] He was released from confinement on giving bond and went away to Fauquier, while five commissioners took possession of his Middlesex estate and his other property in Gloucester.^[39]

The Committee of Safety, on June 21, 1776, sat on John Goodrich, Jr., son of the noted Goodrich, who had created such a stir in the colony. John Goodrich, the younger, with his brother Bartlett, in assisting his father to bring in the powder, had imported forbidden goods and falsified the invoices, changing the nationality of articles from Scotch and Irish to Dutch, - a not infrequent transformation in those days of the Continental Association. They had ingeniously pleaded in defense that they were forced to take other British goods in order to get the powder, but the convention confiscated the goods and branded the importers as inimical. John Goodrich, Jr., further found himself in the custody of William Harwood, bound not to correspond with Dunmore or go more than three miles from Harwood's place without permission. When no witnesses appeared against him at the date set for his regular trial before the Committee of Safety, he was discharged on giving bond of £ 2000 for good behavior, which William Harwood furnished. Goodrich refused, however, to take the oath prescribed for suspects and suffered disarming proof positive of a hostile spirit. Both he and Bartlett Goodrich received rather lenient treatment, which the authorities no doubt often regretted later. For the Goodrich sons became a thorn in the side of Virginia before the war ended. Managing to get away to New York, they fitted out privateers and waged warfare on Virginia commerce with energy and luck; they dashed in through the Capes and cut out ships time and again. Of all the British privateers swarming in these waters they were the most noted.

The Revolutionary Convention met for the last session on May 6, 1776. Edmund Pendleton, chairman of the Committee of Safety and president of the December, 1775, Convention, was again elected president. Pendleton, on assuming the gavel, made a brief speech in which he called the attention of the convention to the necessities of the situation: he reminded the delegates that the courts had been closed for two years and that many criminals were waiting trial, and that the ordinance "prescribing a mode of punishment for the enemies of America" required amendment.

The speech was the keynote of a sterner policy towards loyalists. Two days later Pendleton laid before the convention a letter from John Tayloe Corbin to the Tory, Charles Neilson, "containing sentiments inimical to America," together with the proceedings of the King and Queen Committee upon the same.^[40] Corbin was committed to custody and his letter referred to a committee, which reported that it showed "a disposition unfriendly and dangerous to the rights of his country" and recommended his confinement on parole. Corbin had quite a tale of hardship to tell in his behalf. He stated that he had written the letter in October, 1775, to Neilson, who was about to go to Norfolk with a passport from the Middlesex Committee, but that he had not violated the colonial regulations in any way. In spite of this, the commander of the local minute-men had arrested him, taken him from his family, and, after keeping him a prisoner for four days, finally brought him before the county committee, which had discharged him as not coming within its jurisdiction. Anxious for a vindication, he had come to Williamsburg with the suspected letter, when, on his arrival, he had been again arrested under a military warrant and confined in the common guardhouse. No open act was charged against Corbin, but nevertheless the convention demanded a bond of £16910,000 and paroled him to stay in Caroline County. His case, like Wormeley's, attracted great attention, as he was one of the wealthiest and most prominent men in the colony and one of the few rash enough to protest, even in a private letter, against the Revolution.

In spite of such occasional severity, the convention conducted its investigations with strict justice and dismissed a number of suspects.^[41] The public temper, however, was gradually hardening under the stress of war. Not only was disaffection becoming a more serious offense as the gap between the colonies and England widened, but property rights were less carefully guarded. The convention directed the Caroline and Spotsylvania Committees to determine the ownership of four vessels seized as British property by the colonial naval commander in the Rappahannock. Significantly enough, the convention placed the burden of proving ownership on the claimants. It was not now for the colony to prove that suspected ships were British property, but for the owners to prove that they were not. The convention continued the policy of the Committee of Safety in sending prisoners for trial to the commissioners' courts in the counties where the offenses had been committed, except in appeals or cases of exceptional difficulty. Joshua Hopkins, held on the charge of carrying provisions to Dunmore, was sent to Princess Anne for trial.^[42] It had required some trouble to secure proof against this cunning fellow, but he was caught at last coming from Dunmore's ship by a party that had lain in wait for him two days. Likewise, Thomas Mitchell, arrested on suspicion of being inimical, was sent to the York court. A very sad appeal came to the convention from eighteen ruined merchants and clerks who wished to leave the country. They had been given permission to leave on finding themselves unable to go on doing business, and actually boarded a vessel, but it had been seized for the use of the colony. As they had canceled their contracts and sold their effects before leaving, they were now homeless and destitute.^[43] The convention granted them permission to go away - a permission seldom withheld from British-born merchants seeking to leave Virginia. It was a solution of the difficulty much more palatable to the government than confinement. Finally, Britons who were so lacking in tact as to wish to remain in an impossible position were forcibly expelled; yet such measures were never adopted during the administration of the Committee of Safety, which always treated these unfortunates with consideration.

When the May, 1776, Convention adjourned, after providing a constitution, the Revolution proper was at an end. It was carried through in Virginia with far less effort than in most of the other colonies. Little blood was shed even in battle; no Tories had been put to death, legally or by mobs, and few had been tarred and feathered. At the same time the Revolution in Virginia, as elsewhere, had only been accomplished at the price of great loss and suffering, and hundreds of exiles had fled forth from the once easy-going and hospitable province into an unfamiliar world.

By far the greater number of loyalists went quietly abroad and little record is left of them. Those remaining behind fared hard. In May, 1776, at the time of the meeting of the convention, a dozen Tories lay in the public jail in Williamsburg, together with several prisoners of war and a number of negroes belonging to the former. These wretches, confined in the unspeakable eighteenth-century jail and obliged for the most part to provide their own food, suffered terribly. Under the impulse of distress one or another of the prisoners from time to time would plead for trial, sometimes in vain. Robert Shedden, in a letter to John Page, declared that he had done nothing hostile to America and asked for an opportunity to clear himself. John Carmont stated that he had been arrested four months before for boarding a vessel in Norfolk Harbor and sent to Williamsburg without a hearing before the local committee. Three months later he had been brought before the Committee of Safety and ordered back to Norfolk for trial; but, nevertheless, had continued in prison in Williamsburg without a change of linen, money, or other necessaries. What the condition of the prisoner in the public jail at Williamsburg was may be seen by the report of a committee appointed by the convention to investigate. This jail, it should be borne in mind, was no worse than other prisons of that period in which men starved, died of infectious diseases, or froze to death for lack of fire and clothing; in fact, it was far better than the prisons provided by the British for the American soldiers in New York.

The said jail [the committee reported], being badly planned and situated for the purpose of admitting a free air, all the prisoners are more or less distressed on that account; this inconvenience is greatly increased, as well by a large number of persons being under confinement in the same small apartment as the heat of the weather; altho' most of the rooms seem to have been properly attended to, and kept in tolerable decency, an offensive smell, which they think would be injurious to the most robust health, prevails in them all, but which they think might be in a great measure removed by burning tar in and frequently purifying the rooms with vinegar. The rooms in which the negroes are confined abound with filth, a circumstance, as they are informed, owing to the want of necessary hands to assist in providing for so large and unusual a number of prisoners; several windows may, with safety, be cut in the walls of the jail; ventilators, if properly fixed, would be of infinite service: Some complaints were made by the prisoners against the unwholesomeness of their diet, which, upon inquiry, were found to be groundless. John Goodrich, the elder, is at present, and hath been for three days past, indisposed with a slight fever, proceeding, as they imagine, from a restlessness and peevishness under his chain; two gentlemen of the faculty have advised his removal to some other place, lest that disorder, which at present is but slight, might in a short time, for want of fresh air, terminate in a putrid fever.^[44]

It is pleasing to note that the convention ordered the ameliorations recommended to be immediately carried into effect and directed the removal of John Goodrich, minus his chain but under a strong guard, to some place where he might recover his health.

As the spirit of this report goes to show, the Revolution in Virginia was accomplished without any unnecessary cruelty and, so far as possible, under forms approaching those of law. Local committees suppressed the disaffected, but in a struggle which was, in effect, a civil war, selfpreservation demanded the sacrifice. Many hard things were done, many men suffered imprisonment, and many more were ruined, but suffering and loss are the inevitable accompaniments of revolution. County committees, indeed, sometimes showed a small intolerance, an inquisitorial, and perhaps tyrannical, spirit,! but small men will not work with enthusiasm otherwise. The central authority, the convention and the Committee of Safety, with the succeeding council, were always broad-minded and inclined towards tolerance. Mob violence, as has been noted, was rare.

Nothing is more characteristic of the elevated ideals of the convention than its release, on June 12, 1776, of two criminals in the public jail on the ground that no legitimate court existed to try them.^[45] Whereas [it declared], Samuel Flanagan and Manasses McGahey have been severally committed to the public jail in the city of Williamsburg, charged with capital offenses, for which they ought, in the regular course, to have been brought to trial, at a court of Oyer and terminer and jail delivery, on the Second Tuesday in this month, which could not be held by reason of the present convulsions, and for want of a commission from the late executive power; and whereas no method is yet adopted for the trial of criminals, and it might be thought inconsistent with the liberty we are endeavoring to secure, in the most permanent manner, to keep men charged with criminal offenses in long confinement without bringing them to their trials, the Committee thinks it best to grant a pardon to the said criminals respectively, hoping that this lenity, together with the imprisonment they have undergone, will produce a sincere contrition and reformation of their manners, and that they may hereafter prove useful members to society.

So it will be seen that the Revolution had begun to show its humanitarian side, that side of social progress and development destined to be of great importance, and of far-reaching influence on the present age.

THE later military movements in Virginia have been so frequently described and in such detail that a further prolonged study would be superfluous; yet a general account of the operations of the war cannot well be excluded from any broad narrative of the Revolution. After Dunmore's expulsion the offensive operations of the Virginia government ended. Its military activities were confined to furnishing supplies and troops for the Continental army, and it made little effort to provide for home defense. Militia organization actually became less efficient as the war progressed. There was need, too, for a mobile and trained militia. Virginia was not invaded for several years, but the Chesapeake was terribly raided by privateers through the entire contest and the Indians were always threatening and occasionally dangerous.

The Indian menace seemed great for a moment in 1776, when both the Creeks and Cherokees were carrying on hostilities against the borders of the Southern colonies. The arrival of a British force at this moment would have made the red men's assistance valuable; the British did not come and the Americans were able to put down the Indians. South Carolina roughly suppressed the Creeks, and the three Southern colonies then turned in concert against the Cherokees who were raiding Virginia as far as the Blue Ridge. Virginia sent out an expedition under Colonel Isaac Christian which traversed the wilderness far into the present State of Tennessee and endured extraordinary hardships. It met with no resistance, however, as the Cherokees were awed by the size of the force, and, after witnessing the destruction of some of their towns, sued for peace. Christian's raid made such an impression on these savages that they remained comparatively quiet for the rest of the war.

The English, absorbed in their efforts to conquer the North, had allowed their allies to be subdued without assistance. And so long as the towns of Philadelphia and New York and the line of the Hudson remained the British objective, little heed was paid to the South. It was only after Burgoyne had surrendered at Saratoga and Howe had evacuated Philadelphia that the new commander-in-chief, Sir Henry Clinton, began to meditate an attack on the prosperous and undefended South. Sooner or later a Southern war would lead to an invasion of Virginia, the chief Southern State and the natural base of supplies for armies operating in the Carolinas. The British harassed the Commonwealth with several severe raids before making it the scene of regular campaigns. Command of the sea gave them the option of selecting any point along the coast for attack, and no country could be more inviting to water expeditions than Virginia, with its deeply indented shore and its numerous broad rivers. In the realization of these facts, Clinton sent an expedition from New York in May, 1779, under Admiral Sir George Collier.^[1] The fleet anchored in Hampton Roads on May 9, and Collier, with Matthews, who commanded the troops on board, lost little time in attacking Portsmouth, where the patriots were encamped.

The rulers at Williamsburg had made a hasty attempt to meet the raid by calling out militia and holding two thousand recruits about to be sent to the Continental army. When Collier abandoned Portsmouth, they were sufficiently reassured to forward the recruits to South Carolina along with two troops of horse. The assembly passed a totally ineffective act for raising forty-five hundred volunteers by way of salving its conscience and gave the question little further thought. It did go so far, however, as to ask for a detachment of the French fleet to guard the unprotected Chesapeake waters. If this request had been granted, the State would have escaped losses from privateers and organized raids like Collier's which finally came to endanger the American cause. But the French fleet was kept at Newport, where it accomplished nothing, while Virginia was left open to assaults by forces of any size.

In October, 1780, a British expedition of three thousand men commanded by General Leslie landed at Portsmouth. Leslie was not primarily engaged in raiding, but in establishing communication with Cornwallis in the Carolinas, and his ravages were not widespread. After a stay of about a month at Portsmouth and Suffolk, he sailed for South Carolina to reinforce Cornwallis. Militia in considerable numbers had gathered to oppose him, but according to the customary hand-to-mouth method of the Virginia government it dispersed on the disappearance of the immediate danger. Collier's and Leslie's unopposed occupation of Virginia ports prepared the way for a much more serious enterprise; the State's evident helplessness encouraged the British to push raids into the interior. Clinton chose Benedict Arnold to command the next expedition, which entered the Virginia Capes on December 30, 1780.

Instead of stopping at Portsmouth as the British commanders had done previously, Arnold boldly stood up the James with his force of sixteen hundred men. There was no army to oppose him; the patriots had thrown up earthworks at points along the river, and the cannon at one of these, Hood's, fired on the flotilla, but this feeble resistance ended when Arnold landed troops. The traitor reached Richmond on January 5, 1781. When he had destroyed the military stores and the public buildings at the new Virginia capital, he fell back down the James. One detachment of the expedition, in attempting to ascend the Appomattox to Petersburg, was so vigorously opposed by General Smallwood with a body of militia that it gave up the enterprise. Simcoe's cavalry surprised and dispersed a handful of militia at Charles City Court-House. Arnold was ambushed at Hood's on his way down the river by George Rogers Clark, the Western hero, and suffered a slight loss. All in all, however, this small British expedition met with no opposition worthy of the name.

Arnold established himself at Portsmouth on January 20, 1781. He had come for no flying visit, but for systematic raiding; a reinforcement of two thousand men made him formidable. By this time the Virginia government had managed to bring four thousand militia into the field, pant of the force on the Rappahannock under Weedon, past under Thomas Nelson, Jr., at Williamsburg, and part under Baron Steuben at Cabin Point on the James.^[2] There was some prospect of assistance, too, since the presence of Arnold had called the attention of Washington and the French to the Virginia campaign. Desire to capture the traitor, as well as the necessity of preventing the destruction of the State's resources, led to a resolution to send a French fleet to the Chesapeake as a part of a joint military and naval movement. Lafayette was ordered to the head of the Bay with a detachment of the Continental army to be employed in the attempt. The plan of cooperation failed, owing largely to the blundering of the French. A squadron commanded by De Tilly entered Hampton Roads, but because of its small size the commander feared that he would be bottled up by the British fleet. Without attempting any maneuvers, he sailed back to the French base of operations, Newport, Rhode Island.^[3] All the same, the opportunity to capture Arnold was too tempting to be lost. The French admiral Destouches brought a second and larger fleet to Virginia with eleven hundred troops on board, commanded by Baron Viomenil, Rochambeau's second in command. Destouches's tardy movements frustrated the plan. The British admiral Arbuthnot reached the Capes ahead of the French and an action between the two fleets resulted in the latter's return to Newport for a second time.

This failure was attended with serious consequences. The militia had assembled in sufficient numbers to be of some service in a joint attack on Portsmouth with the French and Lafayette's Continentals. Colonel Parker was at Suffolk with the Nansemond militia and Lawson at Smithfield with nine hundred infantry and a troop of horse. Muhlenberg occupied Cabin Point with eight hundred infantry and Armand's cavalry legion. On the north side of the James, Nelson had gathered one thousand men. Muhlenberg, who commanded all these forces, aimed to prevent Arnold from escaping south to join Cornwallis by acting in concert with the North Carolina militia, and he might have succeeded if the French had held command of the sea. As it was, the English were reinforced after Destouches's debacle, and the American plan of campaign completely broke down. Instead of taking the offensive against the English, the patriots were not even able to offer a successful defense to a new invasion projected from Portsmouth. The British fleet had brought further troops and another commander, Major-General Phillips. Phillips was a rare specimen of that insolent, overbearing military type which had done so much to prejudice the colonies In the middle of April, 1781, Phillips went up the James River with the best part of his command. The James, which divides Virginia into unequal halves, was the main commercial highway and strategic line of the State. The chief towns were on it or near it, and the largest tobacco warehouses; to hold it was to control the greater part of eastern Virginia. Naturally, then, it was the center of operations for the campaign of 1781, both for Phillips's raid and the more serious movements of Cornwallis later in the year. Phillips turned aside to occupy Williamsburg and then proceeded up the Appomattox. Muhlenberg, with his militia, made some opposition to the British, who entered Petersburg on April 25, 1781, only after a lively brush.^[4] The invaders created havoc, burning warehouses at Petersburg and Warwick and the military supply depot at Chesterfield Court-House.

The main British objective was Richmond, where a quantity of stores again had been collected. Baron Steuben was now commanding in Virginia instead of Muhlenberg; he had only a handful of regulars and a small force of militia, but he made such resistance as was possible and succeeded in delaying the enemy's advance. Time was of importance, for Lafayette was rapidly drawing near with his Continentals. Though he had been ordered to Virginia originally for the attack on Portsmouth, which proved abortive, he arrived in season to be of great service in the defensive campaign now really beginning. The British reached Manchester on the south bank of the James opposite Richmond on April 29, just as Lafayette entered the latter place from the north.^[5] Phillips had the larger and better force, amounting to twenty-three hundred men, but the crossing of the river under fire was a somewhat hazardous operation and the English general allowed discretion to cool his ardor. He retired down the James to Westover after a raid of exceptional severity, in which Virginia suffered material injury. Lafayette followed along the north bank of the river, too weak to attack, but strong enough to oppose any attempt to cross. His presence was of importance, for it made impossible any wide dispersal of the British force for plundering.

Phillips, who was ailing, returned to Petersburg and died on May 13; Arnold succeeded him in command. The generalissimo in the South, Lord Cornwallis, was advancing from North Carolina to join Arnold and inaugurate a campaign in Virginia. Lafayette, though he longed to prevent the junction, could do nothing with his few troops. He wrote to hasten the movements of Anthony Wayne, detached with a further force of Continentals to aid him, and passed over the James towards Petersburg. The rival artillery carried on a cannonade across the Appomattox, but the Frenchman was in such a dangerous position with the broad James in his rear that he speedily returned to Richmond. He still hoped to be able to attack Arnold before the arrival of Cornwallis; he did not know that the latter had reached Petersburg before Wayne had set out from York, Pennsylvania, on the march southward. The situation of the patriots was now very threatening. Nathanael Greene, the American commander in the Carolinas, had refused to follow Cornwallis into Virginia and had taken the fateful step of marching South; the Old Dominion was left to such defense as might be devised. Cornwallis commanded a considerable and wellappointed army, especially strong in cavalry, while the only American force in the State of any consequence was Lafayette's small detachment of Continentals augmented by militia. The English general began his movements by advancing to the James, which he crossed at Westover. He reached Bottom's Bridge on the Chickahominy on May 28;^[6] Lafayette left Richmond on May 27, with the British near at hand.^[7] He was in no little danger; the enemy by an energetic use of their cavalry might have held him until the main force could come up. The marquis, appreciating his position, began a rapid retreat northward to join Wayne who was now known to be somewhere near at hand. Cornwallis wheeled in pursuit and paralleled the American line of march for several days, endeavoring to intervene between Lafayette and Wayne and bring the former to battle. On May 28, Lafayette crossed the South Anna and on May 30 crossed the North Anna and was safe. On June 10, Wayne met him on the Rapidan, with one thousand Continentals of the Pennsylvania line.

Cornwallis had given up the pursuit on June 1 and turned his attention elsewhere. He sent Tarleton on a cavalry raid to Charlottesville, whither the Virginia assembly had fled, and Simcoe to Point of Fork on the upper James, where the Virginians had assembled large military stores. Tarleton drove the assembly over the mountains to Staunton, but had no other success; Simcoe succeeded in frightening off Steuben, who guarded Point of Fork, and burned the stores. This was a serious loss for the bankrupt Virginia government. Meanwhile the American army, which had been increased by W Wayne to about four thousand men, was now strong enough to play with the offensive. Lafayette was no longer in danger from a cavalry attack and might even offer battle, provided he had exceptional advantages. At least, he could prevent further British raids of any consequence; Cornwallis must keep his troops well in hand in the face of a formidable foe quite able to cut off, detachments. Cornwallis fell back to the James River west of Richmond as Lafayette in turn advanced; on the latter's approach he turned eastward and passed through Richmond to Williamsburg. Lafayette followed,^[8] at first cautiously, but gradually with more boldness. Steuben joined him on June 19 with a militia array, raising his army to five thousand men, of whom two thousand were Continentals. It was too heterogeneous and badly equipped an army, however, to be lightly risked in battle, though as a check and impediment on Cornwallis's movements it was invaluable. The conquest of Virginia was impossible as long as it existed.

Lafayette's vigorous pursuit brought on several severe skirmishes with the British rear-guard. On one occasion Muhlenberg in the American van was set upon by Tarleton, but Lafayette threw his supports briskly forward and the dragoons retired. Anthony Wayne, who commanded the patriot advance, continued to press the British closely, fighting a skirmish at Spencer's Ordinary on June 26. On June 28, Cornwallis reached Williamsburg, where orders from Clinton met him. He was directed to send back part of his army to New York for Clinton's reinforcement and to take up a defensive position with the remainder. He thereupon moved south with the intention of going to Portsmouth; by sending his baggage across the James in advance of his troops he beguiled the Americans into believing that his army had already passed over. Intent on cutting off the rear-guard, Wayne pressed forward across a long causeway through the swamps which line the river near Jamestown. Cornwallis remained perdu until Wayne entered the trap and then confronted him with the whole British army drawn up for battle. For a moment W ayne's danger was very great. His force doubtless would have been overwhelmed, if Lafayette, on reaching the scene of action, had not promptly brought up supports, which were fortunately near at hand. Two battalions of Pennsylvanians created a diversion by charging the British center, thus giving Wayne the chance to withdraw. The affair at Green Spring was a sharply contested engagement, from which the Americans were exceedingly fortunate to escape without heavy loss. Tarleton later accused Cornwallis of sluggishness in not following up his advantage the next morning, and it does seem that the English general let pass an opportunity to dispose of Lafayette and bring his Virginia venture to a successful pause.

As it was, the campaign had been a failure in a strategic sense, though Virginia's economic resources had suffered greatly. Cornwallis established himself at Portsmouth, while Tarleton went off on a brief plundering excursion through southern Virginia more productive of outrages on the inhabitants than of injury to the American cause. Lafayette, with an army still intact and growing, took up a position at Malvern Hill, later famous for the battle fought there in 1862. Virginia could not be called conquered as long as a considerable American force still held the field; the State was weakened by a summer of marching and burning, but its resources were yet large. After a month of constant maneuvering Cornwallis had failed to bring on a battle and now held only the country at the mouth of the James. Indeed, the campaign, with the subsequent surrender, has drawn much hostile criticism on Cornwallis. That he was not a great strategist is true, but he was a competent tactician, and he gave the Americans more trouble than any British general. He organized a disciplined and mobile army with which he marched vast distances and fought a number of engagements, nearly always with success. His invasion of Virginia was inevitable if the British wished to secure their conquests in the South; the patriots in the Carolinas could always count on aid from Virginia, which was sometimes of prime value, as in the King's Mountain expedition. The occupation of Virginia would mean the subjection of North and South Carolina, as well as the possession of an excellent base for an attack on Maryland and Delaware. There were many possibilities involved, and the chief blame for the British downfall should rest with Clinton, who sought to control New York and the South simultaneously with a force entirely too small once the French appeared in the field. The policy of sending out expeditions from New York to attack distant points was feasible only as long as the British held undisputed control of the sea. Loss of sea command would mean the exposure of some outlying detachment to a FrenchAmerican concentration of overpowering size, and this was what occurred. Cornwallis happened to command the smallest and most vulnerable detachment and the blow fell on him.

The moment was an anxious one for the French and American commanders; the play was theirs, but the selection of the proper move was not so easy to determine. Washington had long cherished the idea of an attack on New York, but he now reluctantly abandoned this design. New York was difficult to approach from the sea and was heavily fortified and well garrisoned. He therefore turned towards Cornwallis, who held an exposed position on Chesapeake Bay far from the British bases at New York and Charleston. But a movement against Cornwallis would necessitate the cooperation of the main 'French fleet, then lying off Haiti, with the French-American army on the Hudson, and furthermore the quiescence of Cornwallis himself, who could fall back on Wilmington unless cut off by a land force.

De Grasse, the French admiral in the West Indies, agreed to cooperate and sailed from Haiti to the Chesapeake with twentyeight ships of the line and a large body of troops. In the mean time Cornwallis had moved from Portsmouth to Yorktown on the YorkJames Peninsula, which he considered more accessible to the sea. Lafayette remained at Malvern Hill until Cornwallis's movement to Yorktown caused him to break up camp and advance to the Pamunkey River. De Grasse sailed through the Capes on August 30. By this time Washington was on his way to Virginia, but still distant, and Lafayette was close at hand, but not actually present. It would seem, then, that Cornwallis erred in not attacking the French troops when De Grasse landed them at Jamestown, for his force was much superior. He did consider an attack after the French had joined Lafayette at Williamsburg, but found the venture too risky.

His fate was quickly sealed by the French naval superiority. On September 5, the British admiral Graves reached the Capes with a fleet not much smaller than the French. De Grasse at once put out to sea to meet him, and an indecisive engagement followed, resulting in the crippling of several English vessels. During the action a small French fleet from Newport slipped into Hampton Roads, and when the French and English ships returned to the Chesapeake, Graves found the balance of odds against him; he therefore returned to New York, leaving Cornwallis unrelieved.

But the latter had excellent chances of escape so long as he was blockaded on the land side by no more considerable a force than Lafayette's. His end drew near when Washington arrived at Williamsburg, on September 14, and the allied army landed from the transports which had brought them from the Elk River at the head of Chesapeake Bay. On September 28, Washington moved to the vicinity of Yorktown and the trap had definitely closed on Cornwallis. The Englishman had counted on British sea power until it became too late to escape from the peninsula. The movement against Cornwallis was one of the most brilliant strategical combinations of the eighteenth century. Any one of a number of accidents might have frustrated the plan. If the English fleet had held the sea against De Grasse, Cornwallis would have received succor; if Cornwallis had scented the danger and retreated south, the campaign would have ended fruitlessly. As it was, the cooperation between fleet and army was excellently timed in spite of the immense distances to be covered and the many possible interruptions, such as a sally by Clinton from New York.

With the allied army in position before Yorktown, the surrender was a question of time. There was intrenching to be done and siege cannon to be mounted and redoubts to be taken at the point of the bayonet, but these things were parts of the inevitable military performance preceding a surrender in those days. Cornwallis finally threw up the sponge on October 19, 1781. The war thus closed in reality on Virginia soil. The campaign had proved a critical one, and the French fleet and army were the decisive factors. Owing to the numerical inferiority of the British in the various fields of the war, the loss of this small army, which would not have been greatly felt under ordinary circumstances, secured the independence of America. The Whig Party, now in power in England, would no longer support a struggle which it had always opposed and which it looked on as a hopeless effort to bring back an irreconcilable part of the empire.

THE treaty of peace removed the external danger of conquest, but it was the signal for the renewal of the political contest which had been going on in Virginia ever since 1765 and which had reached a climax in 1776. The pressure of war and the necessity of suppressing Toryism had prevented violent party divisions after that year, though in 1779 the conservatives took advantage of Jefferson's removal from the assembly to attempt a partial restoration of the established church, and in 1781 they obtained control of the governor's office when Jefferson's failure as a war executive became evident.

The restoration of peace removed the restraint which the need of harmonious action in a time of crisis had placed upon the two wings of the patriot party. At last conservatives and democrats might fight for the mastery without fear of outside complications. They might now decide whether the social revolution that had begun in 1776 should go further, or whether the Old Dominion should revert to the conditions of the colonial period. If Jefferson had retained his popularity and the active leadership of the democratic party, it is not likely that the conservatives would have felt themselves strong enough to attempt reactionary legislation, but Jefferson was living abroad in eclipse and the conservative party, in his absence, was stronger than its rival. Several circumstances combined to brighten the outlook for the conservatives in 1784, when the contest began. Although a number of western counties had been created during the war, the conservatives still held control of the tier of small tidewater counties, and as counties were equally represented in the House of Delegates, the eastern section had as many members as the populous central and western districts. Then again, the conservatives counted on their side the most influential leaders. Some of them were of the planter type, like John Tyler and Benjamin Harrison, while others were brilliant young lawyers such as Henry Tazewell and John Marshall, the future Chief Justice. Towering above these stood Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee, who were now opposing the Revolutionary development as warmly as they had advocated the Revolution itself in 1775. Henry and Lee fought each other for the leadership of the assembly from 1782 to 1784 and then joined hands in an effort at a conservative restoration. They were rivals, but they had much in common besides their hatred of Jefferson.

As it chanced, religion was the issue on which the struggle turned. The Anglican Church had been well-nigh ruined by the loss of tithes and the upheaval of the war, but the planters were still mainly Anglican in belief and they had come to appreciate the value of the church as a social bulwark. Formerly dissenting communions like the Presbyterians and Baptists had also rather lost than gained by the war, while freethinking abounded. Indeed, democracy more and more tended to be associated with unbelief and hostility to organized worship. Jefferson himself shared this rather superficial skepticism, which flourished like a green bay tree in Virginia in the last decades of the eighteenth century and then withered suddenly and completely early in the nineteenth. In making their stand on the religious question, the conservatives were combating at a vital point the leveling principle now beginning deeply to influence the illiterate masses throughout the State.

At that time probably none of the American States had absolutely severed political and religious connection; certainly New England had some distance to go before reaching religious liberty. Many serious-minded men felt that Virginia had ventured far enough in the direction of liberalism and that faith itself was endangered. Consequently, strong support arose for the movement to reestablish state patronage of religion when the end of the war once more allowed men to turn their minds towards internal matters. There was no question of the restoration of the Anglican communion as the single state church, for the Presbyterians and Baptists were too numerous to make such a thing possible. But it was practicable to lay a tax on property for the general support of religion and to apportion the proceeds among the various churches; and it was in this form that Henry presented the question to the assembly when it met in Richmond for the May, 1784, session.

The spring debate was preliminary. At the fall meeting of the assembly a resolution approving an "assessment," or tax for religious support, passed the House of Delegates, and a bill levying such a tax was introduced and fiercely debated.^[1] On this occasion Patrick Henry was opposed by James Madison and George Nicholas, who had taken the leadership of the democratic party. Both of them clearly realized the danger to individualism involved in such a paternal measure as the religious assessment; they fought it with determination and energy. Nevertheless, Henry had a small majority in both houses, and the bill would have passed if the orator had not accepted another election to the governorship at the critical moment, November, 1784. We do not know the real reason for Henry's abdication of his leadership at the very threshold of decisive success. It is highly probable that his opponents wished to get rid of him by electing him governor, but he was too astute to be misled by an obvious ruse. Henry probably acquiesced in his election because he saw that any form of religious restraint would soon prove highly unpopular with the democratic majority in the State, and by becoming governor he was able to free himself from a dubious policy. At all events, with Henry out of the way, Madison succeeded in postponing final action on the assessment to the next meeting of the assembly.

Both sides now appealed to the people, and Madison wrote his noblest paper in advocacy of complete separation of church and state. His supporters worked feverishly through the central and southern counties in the summer of 1785 and to such effect that when the assembly met in the fall religious taxation was buried beneath a pyramid of adverse petitions.^[2] Madison took advantage of the opportunity to bring forward Jefferson's Bill for Religious Freedom, which had been shelved since 1779. It passed without difficulty. Virginia thus became one of the first states in the world completely to divorce religion from politics. This victory of liberalism was quickly followed by a wave of democratic enthusiasm. The effort to halt the Revolution had failed; it was destined to go forward to its logical conclusion. In the same year, 1785, the first movement for the abolition of slavery arose in Virginia. It proved abortive, of course, but it is a proof of the progress of radicalism. In the following years democratic social and political ideas continued to grow, although there was still a strong conservative element in the tidewater.

The struggle over the adoption by Virginia in 1788 of the United States Constitution is not without its puzzling features. The westerners, the great upholders of individualism, generally opposed it, while the tidewater planters, who imagined they saw a hope for themselves in the centralizing tendencies of the Constitution, favored it. By such an apparent inversion of position as often occurs in politics, Patrick Henry led the anti-Federalists in the interests of States' Rights and democracy, and Madison became the successful leader of the Federalists. Henry made the most brilliant fight of his career on this occasion, but ratification was carried by a small majority and was distinctly a victory of the planter reactionaries.

The success of the Federalists was not followed by a conservative ascendency in Virginia as in Massachusetts. The principles of democracy were too passionately held by the great majority of men in all sections of the State to allow a return to the rule of the planter oligarchy. As soon as it became evident that the new Union was no rights-of-man government, but a highly conservative political and social structure, discontent broke out among the Virginia democrats. Thus, when Jefferson retired from Washington's Cabinet he found the material existing for a party opposed to Federalist ideas, and he spent the next few years in its organization. In this manner the Democratic-Republican Party came into being.

The democratic impulse was immensely quickened by the French Revolution. Virginia, which had experienced a real contest between the forces of conservatism and liberalism, welcomed with enthusiasm the stimulating Gallican propaganda. Indeed, the Old Dominion was transformed thereby. It became the fashion in the North in a later age to sneer at the inconsistency of the Revolutionary generation in preserving the institution of slavery, though subscribing to the Declaration of Independence dogma that all men are created free and equal. This inconsistency is more apparent than real. That the statement was meant to apply in a political rather than a social sense, we all, of course, now understand; but it also had a very practical social application. The Revolution changed the attitude of the mass of Virginia people towards the negro race and the transformation lasted until the end of slavery. In the colonial era slaves were looked on as little better than brute beasts and were frequently treated with great cruelty. The law was absolutely callous, and a great number of poor blacks suffered execution for trifling thefts such as afterwards came to be good-naturedly looked on as a mere African weakness, or froze to death in jail awaiting trial; others were outlawed and killed on sight like wild animals. The records are full of these cases. But in this treatment of the blacks the Virginia people were in no sense more cruel than the rest of the world; it was the world, we must remember, in which men were hanged, drawn and quartered, broken on the wheel and decapitated for comparatively trivial offenses, with an iron disregard for human suffering the present age cannot understand - the antediluvian world before the egalitarian deluge.

The Revolution changed all this. After 1785 a strong and persistent abolitionist sentiment existed in Virginia, and would probably have predominated but for the almost insuperable practical obstacles to emancipation. Popular feeling forced the government to permit private emancipation, which proceeded on such a scale that the institution of slavery was seriously threatened. The assembly intervened in 1816 to save it by requiring freedmen to leave the State within a year of manumission, and the practice of freeing slaves at the death of masters lessened.^[3]

Gradually the democratic wave, which began in 1776 and reached high-water mark about 1795, spent its force. It had wrought great changes, but it was not destined to achieve a permanent triumph. Democracy in Europe had received a deathblow by the overthrow of Napoleon in 1815 and America felt the effect of the reaction. In Virginia other reasons contributed to the checking of liberalism. The development of the South and West drew from the Old Dominion its best young manhood and brought on a disastrous economic competition; Virginia lost rank as the greatest of American States and rapidly sank to a secondary position. It was no longer a land of energetic and forward-looking men, but of memories, a place of social amenities and soft dreaming. Under the influence of Sir Walter Scott's novels glorifying the feudal age, the new generation constructed in imagination a colonial past of splendor which had had small counterpart in reality. The old English and aristocratic spirit revived and existed alongside the democratic theories of government which Jefferson had introduced. Jefferson's name was revered while his influence dwindled.' Much, indeed, of the humanitarian teaching of the Revolution continued to permeate society and slavery was softened by this influence to the end, but the fact remains that in Virginia the swing-back from democracy was steadily increasing in momentum from the fall of Napoleon to the Civil War.

1 W. E. Dodd's Statesmen of the Old South, 70.

THE END