The higher judiciary were appointed by the governor; and appeals to the king in council were provided for, in cases where the sum in dispute amounted to £300.

Religious freedom for all Protestant sects was promised.

The franchise was placed upon a property basis. All men owning land of forty shillings annual value, or possessing forty pounds in personal property, became voters.

The last two provisions in great measure overthrew the old theocracy; the first four to all practical intents made Massachusetts a royal province. At the same time, Maine, Plymouth, and Nova Scotia were included in the Massachusetts jurisdiction.

FOR FURTHER READING on New England from 1660 to 1690, excellent material will be found in Andrews' Colonial Self-government (41–73, 252–272) and in Channing, II (65–79, 156-185).

III. VIRGINIA, 1660-1690 1

154. During the Commonwealth, many of the dispossessed royalist gentry turned their faces toward the New World, as the Puritans had done in their hour of gloom a generation earlier. At the Restoration, the royalists who were still in England expected to get back the lands they had lost. But the great majority were disappointed of this hope, and so the movement to America received new impetus. Practically all this emigration went to Virginia. Between 1650 and 1670, the population of that colony rose from 15,000 to 40,000; and more than half of this increase came from immigration.

155. This migration ranks in importance side by side with the earlier ten-year Puritan movement. It made Virginia the land of the Cavaliers. In this period, there appeared in America the ancestors of the Virginia Harrisons, Lees, Masons, Madisons, Marshalls, Monroes, Nelsons, Nicholases, Pages, Peytons, Pendletons, Randolphs, Wythes, Washingtons.

lings to four. Then, in a few weeks, 909 new freemen were admitted — more than in the preceding sixteen years.

1 Reread §§ 25-49 before taking up this Division.

§ 156]

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These country gentry fitted easily into the rural society of Virginia. There they became an attractive and lovable set of leaders. They were somewhat less active intellectually than the Puritan leaders, less stimulated by the friction of town life and by religious controversy, and less inclined to mark out new ways in state or church. But they were robust, dauntless, chivalrous, devout, and deeply imbued with the best tradition of the best part of England (rural England) in England's most heroic century. The earlier migration to Virginia had given that colony a noble history; but it was this Cavalier immigration of the fifties and sixties which a century later flowered into Virginia's splendid galaxy of Revolutionary patriots, and, a little later still, justified to the Old Dominion her proud title, "Mother of Presidents."

The party epithets, Cavalier and Roundhead, should not blind us to the close likeness between the gentry elements in Massachusetts and Virginia. The "Cavalier " emigrants were not graceless, riotous hangers-on of the court, slavishly subservient to despotism, as they are sometimes pictured. They were God-fearing, high-minded gentlemen, who had loved liberty only a degree less than they had feared anarchy, men of the same social stamp and habits of thought as the Winthrops, Dudleys, and Humphreys of the Bay Colony, and the Hampdens, Pyms, and Eliots in England, with whom they had stood shoulder to shoulder for a generation of constitutional struggle before the Civil War, and from whom they separated at last with mutual grief when the great war came.

156. The first effect of the Cavaliers on politics in Virginia was bad. In 1660 a new Assembly was elected, and the wild enthusiasm for the Restoration filled it with Cavalier hotheads. Since 1628, a new Assembly had been chosen at least once in two years; but, by an arbitrary stretch of power, Governor Berkeley (§ 49) kept this unfit Cavalier Assembly alive, without a new election for sixteen years much as his royal master in England did with his unfit Cavalier Parliament. Moreover, Berkeley, in this second term, was an old man, tortured by ill-health, arrogant, peevish, vindictive, an easy tool for a ring of greedy favorites. His long administration, from

1660 to 1677, was a period of misgovernment and political reaction.

157. With the Restoration, governor and Council ceased to be elective (§ 48). Berkeley received a commission from King Charles; and this, he felt, freed him from the restrictions the Assembly had placed upon him (§ 49). According to the royal instructions, he resumed the absolute veto and the power to dissolve and call Assemblies at his will.

These changes put the government back where it was before the Commonwealth. But this was not all. A law of 1670 took the right to vote from all but landowners ("freeholders").

The franchise in Virginia had been exceedingly liberal. All free White males had had votes, including former servants when their terms had expired. In 1655, indeed, a law was passed restricting the right to "householders," but it was repealed the next year on the ground that it was "hard and unagreeable to reason that any shall pay equal taxes and not have a voice in elections." (Source Book, No. 35; cf. also No. 105 for the law of 1670.)

158. So far we have considered changes only in the "central government." In local government, the loss was even more serious. The county raised local taxes and expended them, and it passed "by-laws" of considerable importance.1 Until

1 In 1632 the county became the unit for the choice of representatives to the General Assembly. On the other local unit, the parish, see American History and Government, § 103.

§ 160]

POLITICAL REACTION

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the Restoration these things were done in the county court, a meeting of all free White males; but now most of these powers were transferred from the open court to a Board of eight "Justices" in each county, appointed by the governor from the more important landowners. Other men could still come to the county courts as spectators, but their political power was limited to casting a vote now and then in the election of a new Assembly.

Along with this political reaction went many other serious faults. Taxes were exorbitant, and were expended wastefully. There was much unjust "class legislation," such as the exemption of Councilors and their families from taxation. The sheriffs (appointed by the governor on the advice of the county justices) and other law officers charged oppressive fees for simple and necessary services. The governor granted to his favorites vexatious trade monopolies, which robbed the people. 159. The 40,000 inhabitants of 1670 included 2000 Negro slaves and 6000 White bond servants.1 There were also several thousand ex-servants who had not acquired land and who remained as laborers on the plantations of their former masters. The rest of the population consisted of a few hundred large planters and a large body of small planters.

Discontent was chronic in the servant class; and now the small planters also were restive. They were practically unrepresented, and they felt rightly that they were overtaxed and discriminated against. The navigation laws intensified their grievances. The lack of vessels enough to transport tobacco to the English market did not much hurt the large planters, whose crops would be taken care of first; but, for a time, the small planter often found his entire crop left on his hands, or (if he shipped at all) his small profits were eaten up by the increased freights.

160. These conditions led to the first "rebellion" in America. The occasion was an Indian outbreak which Berkeley's inefficient government let go without check. Finally the savages

1 Cf. Source Book, No. 104 (Berkeley's Report of 1671).

ravaged an outlying plantation of Nathaniel Bacon, an energetic young planter. Bacon raised troops and punished the Indians terribly in two campaigns; but Berkeley declared the young captain and his followers rebels, because they had secured no commission for military action.

There followed an obscure quarrel over a commission extorted from the governor; and this quarrel merged into a civil

RUIN OF THE JAMESTOWN CHURCH. From a photograph. Jamestown was burned during Bacon's Rebellion, and was never rebuilt. This ruined tower is all that remains.

war. From a valiant Indian fighter, Bacon was suddenly transformed into a popular champion and a democratic hero. Finding arms in their hands, he and his party tried to use them for social and political reform. "Bacon's Rebellion" became a rising against "special privilege." The fundamental cause was not discontent at the inefficiency of the government against the Indians, but social discontent.

Berkeley was deserted. During much of the struggle, he could hardly muster a corporal's guard. The aristocracy, however, did not join Bacon. They were too much opposed to rebellion, and too jealous toward the democratic features of the movement;