Give Me Liberty The Struggle for Self-Government in Virginia

Excerpt

CHAPTER I

THE CORNERSTONE OF LIBERTY

Three little vessels—the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery—left England in December, 1606, under the command of Captain Christopher Newport, to found a colony on the distant shores of Virginia. Two decades earlier Sir Walter Raleigh had sent out a group of settlers to what is now North Carolina, and they had disappeared mysteriously. What had happened to them? men asked. Had they been killed by the Indians? Had they fallen victims to disease? Had they starved? Those who shared in this new venture must have wondered if a like fate awaited them in this strange new land.

But their spirits rose when they entered Chesapeake Bay. Landing parties were delighted with the "fair meddowes ... full of flowers of divers kinds and colors," the "goodly tall trees," and the streams of fresh water. It was a smiling country which seemed to bid them welcome. But when they entered the mouth of a broad river, which they called the James in honor of their King, and made their way up into the country, new doubts must have assailed them. They knew that savages lived in the dense forests which lined both banks; might not strange wild beasts live there also? Might there not be fatal diseases unknown in Europe?

Possibly they wondered what type of government Englishmen would live under here. In the charter granted the Virginia Company of London in 1606 it was promised that they should "enjoy all the liberties, franchises, and immunities" of Englishmen, "as if they had been abiding" in England. Even without this promise they would have taken it for granted that they were not surrendering the freedom derived from their ancestors. This was the view taken six decades later by Francis Moryson and Thomas Ludwell, agents for the colony. If the King planted a colony of Englishmen, they and their heirs ought by law to enjoy the "same liberties and privileges as Englishmen in England." After all, the colony would be but "an extension or dilation of the realm of England."

The men who came to Virginia had, in the mother country, participated in the government through representatives of their own choosing, so they insisted upon this right in their new home. They claimed, also, the habeas corpus, jury trial, and freedom from taxation save by their own consent. In England not even the King could take a man's money legally until it had been granted by the House of Commons. Upon this recognized principle English liberty was chiefly based; upon its acceptance in America depended the future of liberty there.

Yet when the first band of settlers stepped ashore at Jamestown, liberty in England still hung in the balance. At the conclusion of the Wars of the Roses the King was almost absolute. The people were desperately tired of anarchy; they were tired also of the oppressions of the barons. So long as the King put an end to both they had no desire to limit his power. The Commons ate out of his hand. Henry VIII might tear the Church from the Roman see, Mary might restore it, Edward might once more break with Rome—in each case the people submitted. Those who dared resist faced the headsman's block or the pyre.

But in time the memory of the Wars of the Roses grew dim. And the growth of the artisan class, the development of trade, the birth of a great literature, the work of the universities, the expansion of world horizons fired the imagination and awakened men to their own potentialities. Self-government is a tender plant which withers in the soil of poverty and ignorance, and it was the advance of prosperity and enlightenment under the Tudors which made possible the flowering of liberty under the Stuarts.

James I had been on the throne only three years when the little town which bore his name was founded. James has been called the wisest fool in Christendom; but he was neither wise nor a fool. His conception of the King's office was logical and simple. It was his function to rule; the duty of the people was to obey. If they did not, like bad children they should be scolded and perhaps punished, since it was not only illegal but wicked to question the King's authority. "As to dispute what God may do is blasphemy, so it is sedition in subjects to dispute what a King may do," he said. Parliament he considered a nuisance. "I am surprised that my ancestors should have permitted such an institution to come into existence," he said. "I am a stranger and found it here when I arrived, so that I am obliged to put up with what I cannot get rid of."

The House of Commons were not inclined to accept the King's theory of the relations between himself and Parliament. When James told them that they had no privileges save by royal grace, they replied that he had been misinformed. When in answer to James' demand that they refrain from meddling in foreign affairs, they entered on their journal a protestation of their right of free speech, he was so enraged that he sent for the book and with his own hands tore out the page.

The Commons considered it a precious privilege to be "governed by certain rules of law ......