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Governor Harvey arrives

John Harvey was one of the most important 17th Century Virginia governors, but he was a volatile ship’s captain trying to navigate the tricky politics of colonial Virginia.  And Virginia had unique politics even for an English colony.  The king, the merchants, the former Virginia Company, the Virginia elite, and the average Virginian all had different interests and ideas.  There was a substantial vein of Puritanism in the colony, but it never attained the level of institutional cohesion that it did in New England.  It was a colony which intensely valued its democratic ideals, but which would almost unanimously support the king in the looming Civil War.

Harvey needed to solidify the colony’s economic foundation, but the planters suspected any attempt to lessen tobacco production, the merchants resented any attempt to lessen their control over the colony, and the king didn’t see why the colony couldn’t make a dramatic shift toward other industries.

 

Transcript

When John Harvey arrived in Virginia, he seemed genuinely optimistic about what he’d find there.  He knew the colony pretty well, had transported people there, owned land there, and in fact had brought the first peaches to the colony.  He knew Samuel Mathews and other leading citizens from his time on King James’s commission, and he was on good terms with them.  The colony had problems, but he’d seen what it was capable of, and with the king’s backing, and the colonists’ cooperation, he could solidify Virginia’s wellbeing for decades to come.  But, life’s never that simple.  Before he’d even left for England, the seeds of discord were planted, and within a year his outlook would be completely different.

Introduction

But, before we get into that, it’s time to introduce our ill-fated governor.  He was an old sea captain who’d done a little bit of everything.  He’d helped organized England’s coastal defense at the outbreak of the Thirty Years War, and he’d also helped patrol the English Channel at that time.  He’d acted as a privateer in the Caribbean for a while, and he’d helped with the colonization of Virginia.  Harvey was, by most accounts, both a thoroughly decent person, and someone with an atrocious temper.  Back in the days of King James’s commission, a spat between Harvey and his hired crew had ended in them threatening mutiny, and him threatening to slit their throats.  While in Virginia, he’d gotten in a fight with a man named William Mutch, and punched Mutch during the altercation.

Now, a volatile temper and the outlook of a ship’s captain actually fit together to a certain extent.  As a ship’s captain, Harvey was used to total, one-person authority, with serious penalties for disobedience or breaking the rules.  A gruff manner was, to a certain extent, part of the job of being a sea captain, even in people like George Somers, who were naturally mild and accommodating.  Do what I say, because I said so, now, or suffer the consequences.

But, what works on a ship, doesn’t often work in politics, especially at a time in history when England was particularly sensitive to issues of one-person governance and when arbitrary rule, meaning authoritarianism, was a political buzzword.  Harvey wasn’t in charge in Virginia.  In fact, he was in a weaker position than the colony’s other leaders.  He didn’t have as much money, he wasn’t an established political leader, and he was viewed with inherent suspicion, because he was the king’s personal representative at a time when there was some suspicion about the king, himself.

Pretty much everything had to go through a vote, either of the Council or of the unicameral General Assembly.  Furthermore, he was tasked with running the colony’s day-to-day affairs and diplomacy, while people like Mathews spent the vast majority of time on their own private affairs.  He had veto power, but that was pretty much it.  He was there to play the game of politics on the king’s behalf.  Harvey had a reasonable range of skills, but that wasn’t one of them, and what’s more, that wasn’t what he expected his job to be.

As soon as he could, Harvey called a meeting of the General Assembly.  Since he’d left Virginia, the colony’s economic situation had deteriorated.  The price of tobacco had dropped to less than 1p per pound, compared to the 38p per pound it had sold for less than a decade before.  Plus, the merchants had started making the colonists pay the cost of shipping themselves, which came out to about 12 pounds per small shipment.  And, they could get away with this, because the Virginia colonists were wholly reliant on trade with the English merchants for any income at all.  English merchants formed a small, tight-knit community who acted as a unified group in their transactions with the colonists, so the colonists couldn’t benefit from any sort of competition.  The merchants could sell tobacco at a high price in England, while spending virtually nothing for it in Virginia.

The price of tobacco was unlivably low, but colonists still had to buy basic necessities like tools from England, tools which they used among other things to work the land.  For these purchases, they again depended on the same merchants, who could charge high prices for even basic commodities.  One colonist complained at the merchants had stored large quantities of servants’ shoes, but he sold them at a price the colonists couldn’t afford.

A couple years later, Harvey quantified the price of shoes in a letter to England, saying the merchants demanded 50-60 pounds weight of tobacco per pair of shoes.  And, I think dissecting this is a good way to illustrate the price situation in the colony.  That was a time when colonists were demanding 6p per pound of tobacco, so one pair of shoes cost the colonists one and a half pounds.  It’s hard to find how much they sold tobacco for in England, and they did fluctuate wildly, but a low-average I found was about 4 shillings per pound of tobacco, and at that rate, that same tobacco would be sold for 12 pounds in England.

It was a situation which had been getting increasingly dire over the last couple of years, and there wasn’t anything the colonists could really do to oppose it.  To adjust, they simply grew even more tobacco than previously, prioritizing it over corn, and depending on whatever corn they could get from trade with the Indians.  They couldn’t get enough from trade to sustain themselves, so they were starting to suffer from a lack of food.  Harvey was definitely on the side of economic diversification, in fact he didn’t really like tobacco any more than James or Charles did, but even for tobacco’s most emphatic supporters, there was no denying that that was an unacceptable situation.

At the Assembly, it seemed that Harvey and the others were on the same page.  There were clear cut problems to deal with.  The Assembly agreed that it was important to reduce the amount of tobacco planted, and to increase the amount of corn.  Harvey arranged to send ships around the Chesapeake and southward to Cape Fear to trade for corn, and the Assembly agreed to build a fort at Point Comfort large enough to mount 12-16 cannons.  They put Mathews in charge of this project, he was still someone who both Harvey and the Assembly trusted.  They also agreed to pursue other industries, specifically potash, rapeseed, and the salvage of nitrates from chamber pots.  None of this was codified, exactly, but the Assembly all seemed to be on the same page about the colony’s needs, and how best to address them.

And, they started expanding the frontier, building at Chiskiak, near modern Yorktown.

Shortly after the Assembly, Harvey did the first of many unpopular things he’d do as governor, when he brought Dr. Pott, the acting governor he’d replaced, to trial.

This was something the king had actually requested.  While governor, Pott had refused William Capps permission to return to England, knowing Capps was the king’s agent.  The king had ordered him to return to England to report on the colony’s situation, and the progress that he had made encouraging other industries, but when he’d asked Pott for permission to obey those orders, Pott and the Council had refused.  Then, when Capps escaped and returned to England anyway, they launched an investigation into the people who had helped him.

Sadly, like so many early American stories, this one is woefully underdocumented, and that’s pretty much all we know about it, so your guess as to why the council acted this way is as good as mine, but when Capps got to England, he told his side of the story to the Privy Council, and the king sent orders to Harvey to investigate whether or not the colony had followed the orders he’d sent with Capps, and to punish anyone involved in the “oppressions” Capps complained about, and, if a councilmember had been involved, to punish him particularly aggressively.

So, when Harvey got to Virginia and started investigating, he found out that Potts had been involved.  As he investigated the Capps incident, he heard multiple other severe complaints about Pott’s behavior, both as a doctor and as a political leader.  One man said he’d pardoned a willful murder, and another man said his charge of murder had been unjust.  They felt he played judicial favorites.  People said he’d marked other men’s cattle for his own, and killed every hog which had wandered onto his own land for his own personal gain, with no attempt to return it to its rightful owner.  So, Harvey arraigned Pott on three felony charges: pardoning willful murder, branding other mens’ cattle for his own, and stealing cattle and hogs.  He confined him to his plantation while awaiting trial, but Pott disregarded his orders and went to Charles City.  So, Harvey put him in jail, but ultimately yielded to public pressure and allowed him to return home under bond.  Pott refused to return home if a bond was involved, so he remained in jail until his trial.  And at the trial, a jury of 13 men found him guilty.  As punishment, Harvey ordered Pott’s estate be confiscated, and Pott be imprisoned.  But, he delayed the sentence, and wrote to England asking that the king pardon the former doctor because he was the only physician in Virginia who was acquainted with the common, local diseases.  He removed him from the council, though.  Harvey also returned the estate of a man Pott had convicted of murder.

Harvey’s behavior seems pretty reasonable, but there was a strong backlash in Virginia at the time, for a number of reasons, not least of which was that Pott was jolly and popular with wide swaths of the population, compared to Harvey who was volatile and regarded with skepticism.  Pott had also been the person who had testified about Harvey’s violent argument with Mutch a few years before, so people suspected Harvey was getting revenge, and they also felt that Harvey was trying to demonstrate the weight of his authority.  Nothing dramatic happened, but the event did start to push a wedge between Harvey and quite a few other colonists.

As for the progress on commodities, along with the news about Pott, Harvey wrote a letter to the Privy Council suggesting they ask Francis West, William Claiborne and William Tucker for information.  West, Claiborne and Tucker were already in England, trying to prevent Lord Baltimore from getting a patent for a colony within Virginia’s borders, and Claiborne was establishing his trading patent with Clobbery and Company.

So, suddenly, within just a couple of months, the seeds of a lot of conflict had been planted, and things weren’t getting better.  By October, Harvey wrote a letter to the king, giving him some updates, and urging him for the first, but by no means the last, time to pay him his salary.  Harvey explained that so far, he had paid all expenses himself, and he was starting to go into debt to pay those expenses, even though he was serving the king and colony.  He needed money now, please and thank you.

To this point, Harvey had had a good relationship with Mathews, even writing to the king encouraging him to give Mathews special privileges, but that wouldn’t last either.  In fall, Harvey sent an exploratory expedition up the James River Valley to find a silver mine rumored to have been found by one of the Germans way back during Gates’s administration, and he put Mathews in charge.  Mathews got a late start, and the enterprise completely failed.  At least one of Harvey’s friends blamed Mathews for the failure, the first hints of a rift.

Harvey’s temper wasn’t doing him any favors either.  After one council meeting, Harvey took offense at Richard Stephens’ insolent language, and knocked out several of his teeth with a cudgel.  When questioned, he readily acknowledged that he’d done it, but emphasized that the altercation hadn’t occurred during a council meeting.

In January 1631, the Privy Council ordered Harvey to limit tobacco planting and encourage cultivation of other crops, food, potash and iron ore.  The previous Assembly hadn’t passed any tangible measures to achieve these aims, just stated their resolve to work toward them.  Harvey replied to the king that he hated tobacco, and wished it could be completely expelled from Virginia, but said the Colony was dealing with a Catch 22 on the issue.  Harvey didn’t have the power to make the colonists pursue other commodities.  Only an order from the king and council could push the colonists to seriously pursue industries like potash and iron ore, but if the king did that before other commodities were developed, serious restrictions on tobacco would destroy the colony.  Harvey also voiced his criticisms of the merchants, who had formed a monopoly against the colonists.

And in the spirit of those criticisms, Harvey started to encourage trade with other colonies in New England, Nova Scotia, the West Indies, and with the Dutch at New Netherland.  Nathaniel Basse was the first person authorized to go trade with other colonies, and Harvey specifically instructed Basse to encourage people from other colonies to come to Virginia, specifically encouraging New Englanders to come to the Delaware Bay, saying Virginia would help them.

This idea actually wasn’t well received, though.  The English merchants didn’t want competition, and the merchants had a disproportionate amount of policy influence because they were the ones who informed people in England about what was going on.  The king also didn’t want valuable commodities going to the Dutch rather than him.  Perhaps more surprisingly, though, Mathews and his allies opposed this.  They had a good relationship with the English merchants, and that had given them lucrative, central positions in the export of tobacco from Virginia to England.  In fact, their merchant relationship was so strong that they were some of the few people in Virginia who really wouldn’t have minded seeing the Virginia Company reconstituted in some manner.  The only people who supported Harvey’s opening of trade were the people with no real political influence, who rightly thought they might get higher tobacco prices from the Dutch.  With the policy implemented, though, William Claiborne rushed to take advantage of it, procuring a license to trade with colonies all along the North American coastline.

And, by April, the relationship between Harvey and his Council had completely fallen apart.  Harvey wrote to the king asking, again, for his salary, and asking for the king to strengthen his authority within the colony.  And in stark contrast to his earlier statements, he said Mathews was the worst of his enemies.  He said the council opposed him and disputed his authority at every turn, and all he could do was cast a simple vote in favor of the policies he supported.  He had absolutely no power.  They cared about their own wellbeing, rather than the general good, or doing what was right.  They hindered his attempts to administer equal justice, and he was powerless to oppose them on anything.  In fact, he said, pretty much all he did was entertain people who came to Jamestown, at his own expense, so he should be called the “host” of Virginia, not the governor.

Evidently, the councilors also wrote letters to the Privy Council, complaining that Harvey insisted that his commission should give him full authority to govern in the king’s name, that he was a source of arbitrary rule.  The Privy Council warned both parties to stop their bickering and govern the people in peace.

And, the merchants were also voicing their disapproval of Harvey’s leadership, specifically, criticizing Harvey’s proposed tobacco policies, and pushing hard for the King to prevent the colonists from trading directly with foreign nations.

In response, the king created a commission to see what English policies would best encourage Virginia’s success.  They were to figure out what commodities were being produced, what should be, and how best to advance the colony and attract settlers.  The commission was a good blend of people, but a disproportionate number had been members of the Sandys-Southampton Virginia Company faction.  George Sandys, Nicholas Ferrar, John Wolstenholme, Francis Wyatt, John Coke and others.

This became the biggest attempt yet to push for a reconstitution of the Virginia Company, and they wanted that company to span the area granted under the original charter, meaning, they wanted the Dutch and Swedes out of the region, and for Baltimore’s grant application to be refused.  And, they wanted Virginia and Company officials to be paid out of the king’s customs duties.

This request was rejected, for a multitude of reasons, but mostly boiling down to the fact that Virginia was doing better under royal control, that the king actually profited from the colony under royal control, and that at this point it was just as unnecessary as having a company take over governance of Ireland.  They also noted, however, that Virginia Company leaders had engaged in some pretty extreme political agitation, and that was in a less volatile political situation than King Charles was facing.

The decision was a no-brainer, though when the idea was rejected, George Sandys asked to be put at the head of the Privy Council’s commission to govern Virginia and other plantations.  This was after months of bickering over the charter, and over Maryland, though, and the king didn’t want conflict to continue, so he rejected the request and put future Archbishop Laud in charge.  Still, disputes about Maryland and the Virginia Company continued in the background of all Virginia history for the next few years.

And, back in the colony, Harvey and the Council ended the year by signing an agreement to work in harmony and mend their discontent.  It was very much in the Mathews faction’s interest to minimize bickering within Virginia while their London allies worked to prevent Lord Baltimore from getting a charter for Maryland.  And, with a truce, Harvey may actually be able to implement some of his ideas, and the orders he received from London.  Harvey accepted their interpretation of his commission, though he kept asking the king to give him tangible power, and his salary, both unsuccessfully.