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CHAPTER XVIII.

VIRGINIA AND MARYLAND.

JEALOUSY OF JAMES I. OF THE VIRGINIA COMPANY.

EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON ELECTED TREASURER. - PROGRESS OF THE COLONY. - MASSACRE OF 1622. - DISSENSIONS IN THE LONDON COUNCIL. - CHARTER OF THE COMPANY TAKEN AWAY. RAPID SUCCESSION OF GOVERNORS OF THE COLONY. LORD BALTIMORE, AND HIS VISIT TO VIRGINIA. CHARTER OF MARYLAND. -CECIL CALVERT'S COLONY. - ITS LANDING IN MARYLAND. THE FIRST TOWN. - ST. MARY'S BLUFF.PURCHASE FROM THE INDIANS. THE FIRST CATHOLIC CHAPEL. FRIENDLY RE

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LATIONS WITH THE INDIANS.

James I. and

Company.

WHEN the regular meeting for the election of officers of the Virginia Company was held in 1620, a message was received from the king naming four persons, one of whom he wished to be chosen its treasurer for the ensuing year. It was a despotic act, not easy to enforce, on the one hand; hard to obey, and difficult to evade on the other. Its own charter, not the royal wish, was the law for the Company. But James sincerely believed that the Council of the Virginia the Virginia adventurers was a nursery of sedition, and, in a measure, he was unquestionably right. Among the many persons who were busy with schemes for peopling the new country, the larger number were moved, some by selfish motives, others by broad commercial and patriotic purposes. But besides these, the thinking men of the time, those who valued religious and civil freedom; who contended and meant to contend against tyranny at home, so long as the struggle was of any avail; who looked to the future of England with apprehension, and were sustained by the hope that a new England might arise across the sea-all these by a common impulse engaged in some scheme of American colonization. The conviction of the king was neither a prejudice nor a mistake, but an instinct. However much it might please him to be busy about the government of a colony, he watched with jealous eyes any body of men accustomed to congregate together, lest treason against the royal prerogative should be hatched among them. The Council of the Virginia Company attended to its own affairs; but there were men at that board whose influence, in Parliament and out of it, James dreaded, not without reason. The nominations he now made were only the beginning of more serious aggressions.

1621.]

CONDITION OF THE COLONY.

477

ton elected

The Company was happy to effect a compromise. The king consented not to insist upon the election of one of his own candidates; the Company so far gratified his wish as to quietly drop the man whom he held to be the most obnoxious. "Choose the devil if you will," said James, "but not Sir Edwin Sandys." The treasurer The Earl of elected was the Earl of Southampton a choice hardly Southamp more acceptable to James than that of Sandys himself, but treasurer. quite as advantageous to the interests of the Company. For the policy which for the two previous years had been so successfully pursued, Southampton continued; nor was the active management of the affairs of the colony by Sandys lost to it; he still remained a member of the Council, and frequently acted as treasurer— always virtually the governor by Southampton's appointment.

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So vigorous was that management that the number of colonists sent to Virginia during the years 1619, 1620, and 1621, was three thousand five hundred and seventy, more than half of the whole number sent by the Council to the colony since Newport landed the first company at Jamestown in 1607. During the same period fifty patents were granted to individuals for private plantations, and these transported at their own charges and for their own use many servants and cattle in addition to those sent on the company's account. It was not the fault of the London Council that the establishment of a more prosperous community did not follow their large expenditure of labor, of care, and of money. Had there been nothing in the character of the emigrants, a large proportion of whom were persons v hose expulsion from an old country was much more desirable than their acquisition in a new, to stand in the way of the progress and prosperity of the colony, there was reason enough in the want of any diversity of industry and the enforced labor of bound servants in one direction, to check any healthy and vigorous growth. All the energies of the people continued to be devoted to the cultivation of the one great staple, tobacco, and neither the constant and earnest remonstrance of the Council in London, nor the evidence of their own short-sightedness in the constant threat of scarcity of food, and often of famine, could induce the colonists to adopt a wiser system. The colony was fourteen years old when the governor wrote to the Council in London - "as to barley, oats and the best peas there is either none, or a very small quantity of any of them in the country."

So long as the colony was in the hands of the Council their efforts to check this evil were never pretermitted, but were never com- Cultivation pletely successful. The law to regulate the planting of to- of tobacco. bacco was made more stringent, but seems to have continued, for the

1 Neill's History of the Virginia Company, note p. 185.

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most part, a dead letter, if even there were any attempt to enforce it. Provision was made for the introduction of other industries, but their growth, if they had any at all, was feeble. The soil of Virginia, it was thought, was peculiarly suited to the vine; cuttings, accordingly, were procured from time to time in large quantities from France, and sent over with French vine-dressers, to attend to their cultivation. Wine, it was hoped, might be manufactured in large quantities; it was certainly begun, for in the minutes of the proceedings of the Council in London, a single pipe is spoken of as having been sent over, but which, unfortunately, soured on the passage. Mulberry tries encour trees and silk-worms were introduced, and everything done to encourage their growth. The Council were sanguine, and one of their letters enjoined the colonial government to tolerate no costly apparel except such silks as should be of their own manufacture. This early application of the principle of protection to home industries the colonial officers rather resented as an insult to the rags of the ordinary colonial wear. The silk making was no more flourishing than the manufacture of wine. Glass-works also were established, with skilled workmen from Italy. Iron-works were started. Ship-building and salt-making were encouraged. Dutch workmen were sent out to put up saw-mills; there was not even a grist-mill in the colony till 1622.

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The first mill.

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But neither the exhortations of the Council, the diligence of the colonial authorities, nor the amount of capital employed, could bring the culture of any of these products into successful competition with the growing of tobacco, where the promise of speedy wealth, especially with those who had the means to buy the cheap labor of men bound to service for a term of years, was so much greater. Whatever the prosperity which the cultivation of this single staple brought to the colony in after times, or brought rather to a single class, it is evident. that its earlier struggles were greatly prolonged by this concentration of its energies in a single direction.

The massa

Sir George Yeardley, who, with Sandys, had given to the colony, in 1619, a fresh start and a new chance of success, retired from cre of 1622. the governorship in 1622, and was succeeded by Sir Francis Wyat. The Earl of Southampton was reëlected treasurer from year to year till the Company lost its charter. With such officers the colony would have continued slowly to improve, notwithstanding all drawbacks and mistakes, but for a sudden calamity which, in the spring of 1622, well-nigh ruined it.

For several years there had been almost unbroken peace with the Indians. So little fear was there of any interruption of this tranquillity that the English had heedlessly scattered themselves about the

1622.]

MASSACRE OF 1622.

479

country upon isolated farms, or in small settlements, as interest or inclination led them, neglecting all precautions of armed security, permitting the natives to come and go familiarly among them without question and without thought of danger. It proved a fatal confidence in a people who reckon dissimulation as among the virtues, and the infliction of vengeance as the noblest use of courage.

Since the death of Powhatan, his younger brother, Opechancanough, had become the most powerful chief in Virginia. His hatred of the English had never slept, though carefully hidden under the guise of friendship and submission. It was enough to keep alive his anger and his desire for vengeance that these stranger people still remained in a country to which he considered his race had an exclusive right. But he had other provocations in the memory of past wrongs, which the English had forgotten, or which they believed to be condoned for in treaties, in the interchange of many acts of good fellowship, and the long maintenance of kindly and familiar relations. His proposal and attempt to massacre the whole colony was, indeed, preceded by the recent killing of a chief by two boys whose master he had murdered; but as this brave was well known not to be a favorite of Opechancanough, though popular with the tribe, his death was the pretext rather than the cause of the fearful vengeance which fell upon the whites on the 22d of March, 1622.

Its sudden

ness and atrocities.

There was no intimation and no suspicion of the intentions of the savages. Not one of the thousands who dispersed themselves about the country to visit the unsuspecting English with sudden death, was moved by any grateful remembrance of favors or of friendship to warn any of the intended victims of the swift calamity which was about to overtake them. On the appointed morning, everywhere, in places wide apart, the savages, sometimes idly loitering, seemingly in friendly mood, into the houses of the whites, sometimes creeping stealthily unseen and unheard into fields where men were busily at work, fell upon them with a suddenness and a vigor that gave no time for defence, or prayer, or warning. They spared neither age nor sex, but slaughtered indiscriminately men and women, parents and children, in a riot of atrocity and cruelty to which the North American Indian never so completely abandons himself, and never so fully delights in, as when his victim is utterly defenceless and entirely at his mercy. It was not enough merely to take life, sometimes even at the table where bread had just been given them to eat. With a horrid pleasure they mutilated and disfigured the bodies they had already put beyond help or harm, wreaking their unspent rage upon the dead as a wild beast cries over and tears the creature he has just killed and seeks to find life in it that he may kill again.

When this cruel work was finished, the savages turned to the possessions of those they had murdered. Horses, cattle, and swine were destroyed; houses and barns set on fire. Hatred and the love of vengeance made them prodigal of things which at any other time would have been most precious possessions. They left nothing pertaining to the whites that was capable of destruction.

The attack was chiefly upon those who were at a distance from Jamestown; but there, fortunately, the people were put upon their guard. The night before the massacre a converted Indian was told by his brother of the proposed extermination of the English, and was urged to do his part toward it by the murder of his master. It was the single instance so far as there is any distinct record in which the tie of blood was forgotten, and the obli

The colonists warned.

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gation of kindly relations from benefits received remembered. The Indian revealed to his master what was to happen on this morning. The planter, whose place was opposite Jamestown, hurried across the river before daylight, and gave warning to the authorities of the town. The people were put under arms; word was sent to all the plantations within timely reach; and the larger part of the colonists were thereby saved, for the Indians made no attack where they found they were to encounter an armed resistance. Where they did strike, however, the blow was effectual. The number killed, probably within an hour, was about three hundred and fifty.

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