OF those who profited from the labor of Virginia’s tobacco growers after 1660, the king stood foremost. Royal interest in the wealth that came from tobacco long antedated Berkeley’s efforts to renovate Virginia’s economy. Already in 1619 James I, even as he denounced the evils of tobacco, had tried to gain for the crown some of the profits of supplying Englishmen with it.1 Charles I had also tried, also unsuccessfully, to talk Virginians into giving him or his favorites the exclusive right to market their product.2 But the royal government had another way to collect the lion’s share of the profits from tobacco: by requiring the colonists to ship their crop to the mother country, where an import duty could be collected on it.
The first edict requiring shipment to England was issued in 1621,3 but could not be effectively enforced; and while the English were preoccupied with their Civil Wars, the Dutch had taken the opportunity to enter the trade. During the years when the Virginians were establishing their society, it was mainly the Dutch who carried off their tobacco. When Cromwell first began to gather in the strings of empire in the 1650s, London merchants stood behind him in the attempt to wrest from the Dutch their control of trade everywhere. And when Charles II took the throne in 1660, the same merchants had joined him in moves to make as much as possible out of the rising tobacco crop. In that year the king’s ministers secured the passage of the navigation act mentioned in the preceding chapter that cut off Virginia’s trade with the Dutch. The act required tobacco produced in any English colony to be shipped only to England or to another English colony. It had to be shipped in an English or English colonial ship, manned by a crew that was at least three-quarters English or English colonial.4 When it entered England, it would pay a duty of twopence a pound, a tax roughly equal to the price the producer then got for it and more than he would get during the next two decades.
Although 1½ pence of the twopenny duty was returned if a merchant reshipped his tobacco to a foreign market, the revenue from tobacco was spectacular. In 1675, when roughly a third of the tobacco was reexported, the annual proceeds from tobacco duties were estimated at £100,000.5 In 1685 the customs levy on what stayed in England was raised to fivepence.6 Reexportation rose steadily and reached 63 percent of imports in the last years of the century.7 Even so, the king must have received roughly £1,894,000 from the Virginia and Maryland tobacco crop during the six years from 1697 to 1702.8 By 1708 one observer estimated the annual revenue at £400,000.9
The drop in the price of tobacco after mortality declined and production increased was no catastrophe for the king. The customs duty was levied not on value but on weight. If the planter got only a halfpenny a pound—tobacco dropped that low in 166610 ___the king still got twopence a pound. The larger the crop, whatever its price, the greater the royal revenue. No other colonial product carried such a burden of imperial taxation: in the 1670s it could be calculated that every man who worked in the tobacco fields earned £7.10.00 annually for the royal treasury, which was more than he earned for himself or for a master.11 No other colonial product yielded so much revenue.12 The value and weight of sugar brought to England from the West Indies was greater than that of Virginia and Maryland tobacco, but the duties collected on it were smaller. More than once in the course of the century Virginia’s governors reminded the king that Virginia produced a larger share of the royal revenue than any other colony.13
Although the king, or the government he represented, became the principal tobacco profiteer as soon as the Navigation Acts were passed, tobacco seems to have invited exploitation by men of every rank in the seventeenth century; and the development of Virginia society after 1660 must be viewed with an eye to the toll that everyone who came near tobacco tried to collect from it.
Every year, after the danger from the summer fevers was past and the great harvest was beginning to come in from the fields to be cured, the tobacco ships would converge on Virginia, beat their way through the passage between Cape Charles and Cape Henry, and spread out into the watery landscape, up the great rivers and into the bays, Lynnhaven, Mockjack, Chesapeake, to familiar wharves. The first loaded and back to England would enjoy an advantage in the European market. But many, for safety’s sake, sailed together. In a small way it was like the gathering of the Spanish treasure fleet at Nombre de Dios or San Juan de Ulúa. Tobacco was scarcely gold or silver, but the quantities carried out through Virginia’s capes every year were enough to attract some of the same kind of attention that Englishmen had given to the treasure of New Spain a century earlier. As the volume of shipping rose, pirates of all nations became a serious problem. Sometimes they lurked off the capes to catch the tobacco ships homeward bound. Often they came inside and ranged along the shores, pilfering and plundering. Occasionally they were caught and executed,14 but they kept coming. In 1700 an English man-of-war, with Virginia’s Governor Nicholson aboard, captured one in Lynnhaven Bay after a battle that lasted from five in the morning till three in the afternoon, the two ships within pistol shot of each other and blasting away with everything they had.15
The naval patrols were not always so assiduous. Some of the men entrusted with fending off pirates and interlopers were distinguishable from the pirates only by the flag they flew. Roger Jones, an old navy captain, assigned in 1683 to command an armed sloop and twelve men, managed to make do with eight men while collecting pay for the full twelve and thus began his Virginia career with a tidy bonus. The small number of men he retained would scarcely have been effective against pirate ships, which sometimes mustered crews of over a hundred, but they served as a bargaining force. Jones, it was claimed, laid the foundation of a great estate by “adviseing Tradeing with and Sheltering Severall Pyrates and unlawfull Traders … but more perticulerly by tradeing with and assisting one Davis and other Pyrates to whome as is credibly repoarted he struck the Kings Collours But they Soone understood he was of their owne Tribe or a well wisher to them, and therefore dismissed Captain Jones againe with a Considerable quantity of French wines and other valuable goods.”16
Jones was succeeded by Captain Thomas Allen and Captain John Crofts of the royal navy, with two naval ketches, Deptford and Quaker. Allen and Crofts seem to have been anything but Quakers. Allen had a mistress aboard and Crofts a wife, or at least a woman he called his wife (Governor Howard was not persuaded that she was). Crofts was often in his cups, but when sober he knew how to take advantage of the opportunities that lay before him. He and Allen apparently made a practice of shaking down the masters of tobacco ships already cleared by the local customs officers. Though they went about it crudely, they took in according to a Rappahannock planter, about £500 yearly apiece and might easily have raised the sum to £1,000 apiece if the one had not been a sot and the other a fool.17 There were enough technicalities in the customs regulations to offer a pretext for holding a ship for a time. A master with a cargo aboard was always eager to get it to market as soon as possible, and made the more eager by the fact that it was difficult to scrape together provisions for the voyage. Once your ship was ready to go, it was worth paying a substantial bribe to be out and away, especially if you were intercepted by Captain Crofts.
Crofts was a violent man and good at intimidating those he stopped. When in drink, he and his alleged wife regularly threw everything in sight at each other—she even tossed coals from the fire about the cabin, terrifying the men in the powder room. The crew sometimes had to take to the shrouds to get clear of the captain, as he thrashed about with drawn sword, threatening to split them all. When Crofts stopped William Gennes, headed for Plymouth in the Daniel and Elizabeth with full clearance papers, Gennes asked why. In reply Crofts “belched out a thousand Oaths, that [he] was come there to gaine an Estate, and he would gett one before he left the Country.”18
Taking the hint, Gennes gathered up what plate and gold and silver rings he could find aboard and presented them as a contribution toward the captain’s goal. It was not enough for Crofts. His response, according to Gennes, was to swear “Damne him againe, he would nott be Contented with such toys.”19 He demanded fifty guineas. But this was too much for Gennes, and Crofts finally settled for £25 sterling plus the plate and some clothes. Unfortunately for Crofts, the owner of the vessel, William Martin of Plymouth, was not a man to take this sort of thing lying down. Hence the case ultimately came before the Privy Council, to whom the secretary of the colony attested that “Tho many merchants have suffered by Captain Crofts in this Nature, none have taken soe good resolutions to make knowne their sufferings as this Mr. Martin hath done.”20
A more talented crook than Captain Crofts was Captain James Moody of H.M.S. Southampton. Though he had a nasty habit of horsewhipping Virginians who displeased him, Captain Moody avoided the crude form of shakedown favored by Crofts. Instead, when stationed in Virginia waters in the 1690s, he turned his sailors into lumberjacks and went into the lumber business. He had the men fell cedar and black walnut timber, much prized in England but expensive to transport there. After his men had sawed it into planks and billets, Moody delivered these, marked with his name, to the tobacco ships riding in the James and York rivers. Those captains who refused to carry the lumber or demanded that Moody pay freight charges found their sailors impressed for service aboard the Southampton and their ships thereby stranded. Moody managed to get into the tobacco business also, but not by having his sailors grow tobacco for him. Though unable to pay for provisions for his crew, he seems to have had no trouble buying tobacco on credit for himself, and this too he got shipped freight free by the same tactics.21
Officers of the royal navy were not the only government officials to fatten on the tobacco trade. Virginians serving in the colony government got into the act too. In order to reduce direct taxes, the House of Burgesses in 1658 tried a duty of two shillings per hogshead exported from Virginia. They repealed the act the next year but reimposed it in 1662 and in 1680 made it perpetual.22 The governor usually named members of his council to collect the duty: two for the James River, two for the Potomac, and one each for the Rappahannock, the York, and the Eastern Shore. After 1673, when Parliament levied a penny a pound duty on tobacco shipped to another English colony instead of to England, the collectors were usually entrusted with gathering this too and with enforcing the other Navigation Acts. As compensation they were entitled to fees for entering and clearing ships and to a 10 percent commission on the duties they collected.23
But a collector’s salary (a commission was always known as a salary in seventeenth-century Virginia) was not as important as the opportunities the office presented. Nicholas Spencer, collector for the lower precinct of the Potomac, admitted as much in asking his brother to secure him a royal confirmation of the office in perpetuity (in case the next governor should give or sell it to another): “the proffit of sallery is not soe much as the many advantages it gives mee otherwayes.”24 Precisely what Spencer meant by “otherwayes” he did not say. Perhaps the collectors could get free freight for their own tobacco in return for overlooking certain duties; possibly they commanded a more direct form of bribery as eighteenth-century customs officials did. At any rate, when the zealous Edward Randolph came to inspect Virginia’s collectors in 1692, he found them a venal lot, who regarded their offices simply as perquisites “intended to enrich the members of the council.”25 As councillors they were able to block all efforts at reform, for they constituted the colony’s supreme court. In 1698 Benjamin Harrison (who was about to gain a seat on the council himself) observed how they stood by each other.
and if any one of themselves does happen to Speake a little freely of the Miscarriages of his Brethren, tho’ perhaps there may be truth enough in it, Yet upon Second thoughts they, takeing it to be their Common Interest to agree among themselves, do generally let such things sleep without moving any further. Thus about two years since Coll. Parke [collector for the lower James] of his own knowledge accused Coll. Hill [collector for the upper James] (in the presence of Severall People) of Frauds and abuses in Collecting the penny a pound on Tobacco imposed by the 25 Car. 2. c. 7; but ’tis probable the Consideration how fatall a prosecution of that nature might in Consequence prove to himself amongst the Rest, caused him to desist from makeing any legall information.
Harrison was ready to cite other names and figures to demonstrate his conclusion that “There is not perhaps in all the Kings Dominions any place where the methods of Managing both the trade and Revenues are so exactly calculated to defraud the Publick, and abuse the subject.”26
As might be expected from the hints of bribery, the collectors seldom felt obliged to seize a ship for violating the Navigation Acts. When they did, the circumstances were likely to be unusual, as in the case of the ship Phoenix. The Phoenix belonged to William Fisher, a merchant in Terceira (Azores), whose factor in La Rochelle shipped him £12,000 sterling worth of goods aboard her in 1675. The master, Leonard Haynes, ran away with the ship, tried unsuccessfully to peddle the goods in Newfoundland, and then headed for Virginia, where he perhaps knew of kindred spirits. He brought her into Cherry Stone Creek on the Eastern Shore and conspired with John Bellamy, a substantial planter there, to unload the ship as though consigned to Bellamy. But the Phoenix was a foreign ship, forbidden to trade in an English colony, and Colonel John Stringer, the collector for the Eastern Shore, made it known that he would not overlook so blatant a violation. Bellamy and Haynes therefore contrived to beach the ship, as though she were wrecked, and on the pretext of this distress were able legally to remove the cargo. That Colonel Stringer connived at this move seems apparent from the fact that the cargo quickly disappeared into the hands of “Colonel Stringer, Coll. Kendall, Coll. Waters, Major Spencer, Capt. Foxcroft, Coll. Thomas Ballard and several others.” These were all commissioners of Northampton County with the exception of Ballard, who was from James City County, a member of the governor’s council and collector for James River.27
When Governor Berkeley heard of this fraud, he ordered the ship and goods seized, to be retained for the owner, whom he promptly informed of his action. Fisher gratefully sent off an agent to bring them back to Terceira, but before the agent arrived, Colonel Stringer had a better idea. As collector for the Eastern Shore, he now seized the ship and goods as forfeited for violation of the Navigation Acts. His fellow councillors and collectors constituted the court to try the case, and with no one to contest it they obliged by condemning the ship and cargo. The governor was now entitled to one-third of the proceeds, Colonel Stringer to another third, and the king to the remainder. When Fisher’s agent arrived and demanded the goods, he found them in the hands of Virginia’s great men. They had punished Bellamy for attempting to smuggle, but they met all of Fisher’s claims for the goods by citing their own condemnation of the vessel. Fisher could not collect a penny, and fifteen years later he was still trying in vain to secure a special royal order for Governor Berkeley’s share, which another Virginia magnate, Philip Ludwell, had obtained in a characteristic Virginia manner. Ludwell had married Berkeley’s widow.28
Virginia’s officials did not often get windfalls like the Phoenix, but from the way they gathered about the spoils it is obvious that the talents so evident in the boom times of the 1620s had not disappeared. The 1660s and 1670s were far from being a boom time. The expansion of population and the corresponding expansion of tobacco production combined with the restrictions of the Navigation Acts to keep tobacco prices in a twenty-year trough.29 The market recovered in the 1680s and 1690s but only sporadically. Only those who dealt with tobacco in large volumes could count on making profits from growing or selling it.
In this situation the control and use of government became more than ever the key to successful exploitation of Virginia’s growing population. It was the force of government that enabled the royal treasury to collect a legal toll and officers like Captain Crofts an illegal toll on the tobacco trade. And it was the force of government that enabled the most successful Virginians to supplement the income from their own tobacco with dues and fees and perquisites that placed a heavy burden on the lesser men who hoed the weeds and stripped the stalks.
As the profits of tobacco growing fell in the 1660s and 1670s, the profits of government office in Virginia rose. The most lucrative office, of course, was the governor’s. When Berkeley was returned to the chair—with the restoration of the monarchy in 1660—the House of Burgesses voted him a gift of a bushel of corn from every tithable in the colony, an amount that would have been worth more than £1,000.30 In later years too they often voted special gifts of money in addition to his annual salary of £1,000 and in addition to various perquisites that grew over the years. They gave him 200,000 pounds of tobacco (roughly £1,000) to pay for his fruitless trip to England in 1661.31 Beginning apparently in 1663, he was given the proceeds of a special ten-shilling duty on every hogshead of tobacco shipped to other English colonies. Later this was set at a fixed £200 per year, so that his annual salary was £1,200.32 In 1661 Berkeley forbade anyone to kill unmarked cattle in the wild “hee laying claime to them as dew to him as beinge Governor.”33 He also claimed an annual tribute in beaver from the subject Indian tribes,34 plus 200 pounds of tobacco for every marriage license issued in Virginia, plus 350 pounds annually from every tavern that retailed drinks, plus 5 shillings from every person leaving the colony.35 After 1680 governors of Virginia also got 40 shillings from every non-English person naturalized; and, without apparent authorization, they collected 20 shillings from incoming ships under a hundred tons and 30 shillings from ships over that weight.36
Most of these perquisites became permanently attached to the office, and the men who succeeded Berkeley kept reaching for more. Lord Culpeper, who was appointed governor in 1678, got the regular salary jacked up to £2,000, plus £150 for house rent.37 At that rate he was able to spend all but nine months of his seven-year governorship in England simply by hiring a lesser man to preside over the colony as lieutenant governor at the rate of £1,000 a year. Culpeper was one more of that long line of men who came to Virginia with only a brief sojourning and a quick profit in mind. And so was Lord Howard of Effingham, whom the king appointed to replace Culpeper in 1684.
Lord Howard may not really have been a grasping man, but he was hard up and regarded the office as a heaven-sent boon to repair his ailing fortunes. During his first year in Virginia, while his wife remained in England, he bombarded her with love letters (in which he also adjured her to “keepe your children from taking Gods name in vayne,” and to keep young Charles “from being amongst the servants”).38 To allay the pain of their parting, he presented her with calculations of the future profits of his office. His first expectation was that the various perquisites would bring the total annual income to £2,500, and that he might be able to put aside £1,500 a year in spite of the lavish hospitality expected of him. But within two months of his arrival in 1684, he had already collected £300 in perquisites and predicted that he would be able to live on these alone and have the whole salary clear profit. One way in which he managed to increase the perquisites was by charging a fee of 200 pounds of tobacco for affixing the colony seal to every document issuing from the secretary’s office, the chief of these being patents for land. In this way alone, a local planter estimated, he got 80,000 to 100,000 pounds of tobacco annually.39 Virginians objected to the innovation, and the king eventually stopped it. Nevertheless, Governor Howard was able to shore up his estate more rapidly than he had expected. Within six months of his arrival he had sent back bills of exchange totaling £1,220 and was planning to send £1,000 more by the next ship. He could honestly rejoice in writing to his “dearest dearest dearest Life and Joy” that God had put him “in such an honorable and proffitable imployment.”40
Next to the governor in rank and emoluments stood the secretary, whose profits came mainly from fees. He collected something for nearly every official document issued or recorded in the colony: 80 pounds of tobacco for every land patent, 40 pounds for every marriage license, and two shillings sixpence (doubtless collected in tobacco at the going rate) from every person leaving the colony. He appointed all clerks of county courts and received a percentage of the fees they charged in every action at law. He issued writs for elections to the assembly and thereby collected a fee of 350 pounds from each county, or a total of about 7,000 pounds for every meeting.’41 At the end of the century the secretary’s total was running over 135,000 pounds of tobacco annually, worth at that time from £600 to £1,200 sterling or more.42
The members of the council were directly rewarded only by, £350 sterling proportioned among them for expenses in attending meetings; but they were first in line for valuable positions as secretary, escheator,43 or collector, which they could hold simultaneously with their seats on the council.44 Every officer involved in the collection of revenues in Virginia claimed a share of them. The auditor got 5 percent (later 7½ percent) of the 2 shillings per hogshead duty simply for examining the collectors’ accounts;45 and the high sheriff in each county added 10 percent for himself to the taxes he collected, as well as charging assorted fees for serving warrants and making arrests. All public officers exacted fees for performing their duties and continually increased their charges, authorized and unauthorized, for both real and nominal services.
The largest expense borne by Virginia’s taxpayers arose from meetings of the assembly, which usually lasted less than a month. Besides the secretary’s fees for summoning the meeting, each session entailed payments ranging from 6,000 to 20,000 pounds of tobacco apiece for the speaker, the clerk of the House of Burgesses, the clerk of the council, and the clerk of the assembly.46 In the 1670s the House sometimes passed special acts naturalizing foreigners and awarded the speaker 800 pounds and clerk 400 from each of them. Thus ten new Virginians paid the speaker 8,000 and the clerk 4,000 in September, 1672.47 Even the three doorkeepers got 1,500 pounds each per session, and the drummer who alerted members to the daily sittings got 3,000, a good deal more than a man could make in a year in the fields.48 The individual counties paid their representatives in the House of Burgesses on a per diem basis, 150 pounds a day until 1677, when the amount was reduced to 120 pounds. In addition each burgess was entitled to miscellaneous expenses and also to a servant and horse or else to a boat with servants to row it, depending on whether he came to the assembly by road or water. Even after the reduction of the per diem rate the cost, to the county for a session lasting less than a month could run to 4,000 or 5,000 per burgess, besides the 300-pound fee each county paid the clerk of the assembly for a copy of the laws passed.49 By comparison the inhabitants of New England starved their representatives on two or three shillings a day (equivalent to twenty or thirty pounds of tobacco) from which they had to pay all expenses, including travel. Other New England government officers were paid proportionately; for example, the elected governor got £120 a year in Massachusetts, £80 in Connecticut, and £10 in Rhode Island.50
The princely sums exacted from Virginians for support of their government, as well as those they paid for ministers’ salaries and the building and upkeep of churches, came almost entirely from poll taxes, levied by the county courts on every “tithable” person (defined in general as men over fifteen and any women engaged in tobacco production).’51 Since masters were obliged to pay the tax for their bound servants, and since servants were a principal form of wealth, the poll tax was a less inequitable form of taxation than would have been the case in a society where wealth lay more in land or goods than in people. Nevertheless, the burden lay heavy on a new freedman who had only his own labor to support him. He might have to pay in direct taxes anywhere from a hundred to two hundred or more pounds of tobacco a year, which could amount to 10 percent of his total income. And after the numbers of freemen began to increase, few of them could expect to share, by holding public office, in the benefits of the taxes they paid. A study of the House of Burgesses in the period 1660–1706 has shown that no servant who arrived after 1640 made it into the ranks of the burgesses.52 And certainly no former servant after 1640 became a member of the council. Virginia in the second half of the seventeenth century may still have been by comparison with England a land of opportunity, but the range of opportunity had narrowed. The largest opportunities were preempted by those who had already achieved success, either in Virginia or in England.
It was the already successful who could lay claim to government office and to the perquisites that went with it. And the office was generally commensurate with the success. Only the very successful could expect the highest offices. Governor Nicholson, in recommending trustworthy Virginians to the king for high position, revealed the premise when he declined to recommend appointment to the council for Thomas Milner, speaker of the House of Burgesses in 1691. Though Nicholson praised Milner for having “behaved himself very well” as speaker, he simply did not have “Estate enough to bee a Counsellor.” Nicholson therefore recommended that the king give him some lesser “place of Profitt.”53 The same assumption was evident when the people of Warwick County complained in 1677 that too many places of profit were held by the same men: they were told that if properly qualified men were confined to one office, there would not be enough men of the right sort to fill the places.54 Multiple officeholding was the rule not only among Virginia councillors but also at the county level. The coveted position of high sheriff was held on an annual basis, and the commissioners in a county generally rotated it among themselves, though the formal appointment came from the governor.55
Virginia’s successful men were usually as quick to defer to those who ranked above them as they were to demand deference from those they had surpassed, for it was to their advantage that men be big enough to fit the offices they held. When Lord Culpeper in 1680 condescended to spend some time in the colony he governed, they were delighted to welcome a real peer as governor, for they knew that he could press their interests far more effectively than a lesser man. Culpeper lived up to expectations. He had the aristocrat’s contempt for bureaucrats and could nonchalantly brush aside instructions they sent him if people on the spot persuaded him they were unwise. For example, he had orders to discharge Robert Beverley as clerk of the assembly because of complaints received in England about Beverley’s rapacity. But when the assembly unanimously supported Beverley for the position, rapacious though he indeed was, Culpeper had none of the compunctions that an ordinary governor might have felt in paying more heed to the local pecking order than to instructions concocted by superiors whom he did not really consider superior: he accordingly reappointed Beverley forthwith and scarcely bothered to apologize for doing so.56
Before leaving for Virginia, Culpeper had discovered that one Robert Ayleway had managed to wangle from the Privy Council an appointment as auditor general of Virginia. Rightly suspecting that this intrusion of a non-resident into a “place of profit” formerly reserved for residents would offend aspiring Virginians, Culpeper told Ayleway flatly that he was dismissed. When Ayleway pleaded that he held a commission under the Great Seal, which Culpeper had no authority to revoke, His Lordship was unimpressed. It took more than the Great Seal to frighten him, and he assured the hapless Ayleway that if he succeeded in hanging on to the office, he, Culpeper, would see to it that “it should not bee worth to him one penny.”57 The burgesses were so grateful for this gesture that they passed an act, urgently desired by the king, that they had unanimously been refusing to accept.58
In supporting Beverley and suppressing Ayleway, Culpeper did what to him seemed best both for the peaceful government of the colony and for his own fortune. Culpeper, like other official beneficiaries of Virginia tobacco, had reason to seek the well-being of the colony. The larger the revenue a man drew from the planters’ labors, the more interest he had in seeing that revenue continue undiminished. The king, the governor, the councillors, the burgesses, the sheriffs—the fortunes of all seemed to be linked to the colony’s prosperity. Yet the prosperity that Virginia had enjoyed in the 1620s from high tobacco prices was no boon to the rights and liberties of those who worked for other men. In the prosaic decades that followed, Virginians had developed institutions that gave a greater security and freedom and even a kind of prosperity to ordinary men, especially to those who managed to survive the term of years when a master could claim their services. But after midcentury the prosperity of Virginia’s big men, in the face of low tobacco prices and rising crops and population, could not be widely shared, nor could the governmental authority that made it possible. As death loosened its grip on the colony, kings and captains and governors tightened theirs and began once more to reduce the rights of those on whose labors they depended.
1 Beer, Origins of the British Colonial System, 117–42; Gray, History of Agriculture, I, 238–40.
2 Beer, Origins, 142–75; Gray, History of Agriculture, I, 240–41.
3 RVC, I, 537.
4 12 Charles II, c. 18.
5 Hening, II, 526.
6 1 James II, c. 4.
7 Sloane Mss. 2717, British Museum. In the period 1712–17 home consumption was calculated at 8,175,226 pounds annually and reexports at 17,142,755. King’s Mss. 205, British Museum. Jacob M. Price, The Tobacco Adventure to Russia, American Philosophical Society, Transactions, n.s., LI, part 1 (1961), 1–120, at p. 5.
8 The total imports for these years were 197,203,000 pounds, of which 118,062,000 were reexported. Gray and Wyckoff, “International Tobacco Trade,” 25.
9 Egerton Mss. 921, British Museum.
10 C.O. 1/21, ff.109–12; VMHB, IV (1896–97), 237; Gray, History of Agriculture, 264. See note 29.
11 Assuming a modest crop of 1,200 pounds per man and reexportation of one-third. VMHB, IV (1896–07), 237.
12 See chap. 9, note 39.
13 Berkeley, Discourse and View of Virginia, 5; C.O. 1/30, f.113; C.O. 1/48, f.53.
14 C.O. 1/57, f.300.
15 C.O. 5/1311, f.29.
16 C.O. 5/1306, No. III; Lewis H. Jones, “Some Recently Discovered Data Relating to Capt. Roger Jones,” WMQ, 1st ser., xxvii (1918–19), 1–18; W. R. Palmer, ed., Calendar of Virginia State Papers (Richmond, 1875), I, 38–40.
17 Richard B. Davis, ed., William Fitzhugh and His Chesapeake World, 1676–1701 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1963), 193, 215. The activities of Crofts and Allen are detailed in C.O. 1/62, ff.179–200.
18 C.O. 1/62, f.195a.
19 C.O. 1/62, f.194.
20 C.O. 1/62, ff.204–5.
21 C.O. 5/1313, ff.133–34.
22 Hening, I, 491–92, 498, 523; II, 130–32, 176–77, 466, 469.
23 Hening, II, 443–44; Hartwell, Blair, and Chilton, Present State of Virginia, 58–59; Ms. Locke C. 30, f.61, Bodleian Library, Oxford; Journals of the House of Burgesses, 1659/60–1693, 500, 502; Minutes of Council, 424. The office of naval officer was separated from that of collector in 1699, on instructions from England, in spite of protests from the councillors. VMHB, IV (1896–97), 52; Hening, III, 195–97; C.O. 5/1310 (Library of Congress transcript), pp. 165–70.
24 Sloane Mss. 3511, ff.133–34, British Museum.
25 To William Blathwayt, April 21, 1692. Blathwayt Papers, Colonial Williamsburg.
26 C.O. 5/1309, No. 55.
27 C.O. 1/47, f.78.
28 C.O. 1/51, ff.37–41; C.O. 5/1305, No. 61.
29 Russell R. Menard, “Farm Prices of Maryland Tobacco, 1659–1710,” Maryland Historical Magazine, LXVIII (1973), 80–85, has constructed a useful table of tobacco prices in Maryland during this period. The figures, based on valuations in inventories, generally averaged from 6 to 8 shillings per 100 and seldom rose above 10 shillings per 100 (1.2d per pound). Virginia prices were probably somewhat higher, but no such table is available for Virginia, and it seems unlikely that a reliable one could be constructed. The usual conversion rate in Virginia in official transactions during the four decades from 1660 to 1700 was 10 shillings per 100. See Norfolk V, 63a (1667); VI, 33 (1669); Hening, II, 55 (1662), 222 (1665), 288 (1671), 419 (1677); III, 153 (1696); Davis, Fitzhugh, 138 (1683), 176 (1686), 209 (1687), 237 (1688); C.O. 5/1306, No. 32 (1691). But it is likely that the actual price often fell below this rate to a penny a pound or less: Norfolk VIII, 15a (1687), 108 (1689), 171 (1692); Henrico II, 31 (1678), 240 (1689), 323 (1691); Davis, Fitzhugh, 226 (1687), 252 (1689). See also references in note 10 and Kelly, “Economic and Social Development of Surry County,” 256.
In 1698 the price went up to 20 shillings per 100 for Orinoco and 25 shillings for sweet-scented, but it was back to 10 shillings by 1700. See C.O. 5/1309, No. 74; Letter Book of Robert Anderson, Junior, Alderman Library; Gray, History of Agriculture, I, 264–67. In 1705 Robert Beverley reported that “of late years” tobacco had generally sold at nearly 20 shillings per 100. History and Present State of Virginia, 262. The problem of tracing the actual course of Virginia tobacco prices is complicated by the fact that sales were commonly made in barter for English goods. Such goods were sometimes stated to be valued “at the first penny” of their cost in England. That is, the planter was to pay nothing for the freight charges. But often an “advance” was made on the first cost of the goods. Obviously a price of tobacco calculated in goods “at the first penny” cannot be compared with a price calculated in goods at an “advance.” Yet where we have records of sales, there is usually no way to tell which sort of transaction has taken place. For indication of the effect of these different kinds of reckoning on prices see Davis, Fitzhugh, 224–27, and Francis Jerdone to William Buchanan, May 26, 1750, WMQ, 1st ser., IX (1902–3), 156–57.
30 Hening, II, 10. There were about 11,000 tithables in the colony, and corn was worth about 20 pounds of tobacco per bushel (100 pounds a barrel). Thus the gift would have amounted to 220,000 pounds of tobacco at a time when tobacco was worth about 10 shillings per 100.
31 Journals of the House of Burgesses, 1659/60–1693, 60, 141; Hening, II, 17. Berkeley, in a letter to Thomas Ludwell in 1676, expressed relief, in the midst of growing discontent over taxes, that the assembly had given him no gifts in the preceding three years (C.O. 1/36, ff.67–68); but according to Giles Bland the assembly’s gifts to the governor were nevertheless a source of discontent (CO. 1/36, ff.III, 113).
32 Hening, II, 133, 315; Journals of the House of Burgesses, 1659/60–1693, 501. The governor was already collecting a similar fee (60 pounds of tobacco per hogshead) in the 1650s. See Northampton V, 82a. A hogshead at this time might hold from 350 to 670 pounds of tobacco. See Appendix, note 48.
33 Norfolk IV, 309.
34 Effingham in 1686 said that this was now much reduced and worth only £50 a year. Minutes of the Council, April 24, 1686, Effingham Papers.
35 Hening, II, 20, 55, 113; C.O. 1/38, f.81.
36 Hening, II, 464–65; C.O. 1/64, ff.46–48, 66; Beverley, History and Present State of Virginia, 89.
37 Hartwell, Blair, and Chilton, Present State of Virginia, 32.
38 Effiingham Correspondence (the volume so labeled consists of Effingham’s letters to his wife), Effingham Papers.
39 Davis, Fitzhugh, 215.
40 Effingham Correspondence.
41 Hening, II, 144–45.
42 VMHB, VIII (1900–1901), 184. In 1699 tobacco was up to 20 or 25 shillings the 100 pounds (see note 29). This price was not maintained, but even at 10 shillings the 100 the secretary would have made £675.
43 Escheators, of whom there were four, got £5 sterling from the purchaser of every tract of land that had reverted to the king because the owner had died without heirs. Hartwell, Blair, and Chilton, Present State of Virginia, 20.
44 Ibid., 33–36; Michael Kammen, ed., “Virginia at the Close of the Seventeenth Century: An Appraisal by James Blair and John Locke,” VMHB, LXXIV (1966), 141–69, at 167–68; Ms. Locke e 9, ff.144–47, Bodleian Library, Oxford.
45 Journals of the House of Burgesses, 1659/60–1693, 500, 502; Coventry Papers, LXXVI, 319; Virginia Historical Register, III (1850), 187.
46 Surviving records of the authorized disbursements of particular assemblies are in Mss. Clarendon 82 (for 1662); Journals of the House of Burgesses, 1659/60–1693, 499–502 (for 1675, 1676); Coventry Papers, LXXVI, 294, 319 (for 1673, 1674).
47 Hening, II, 289–90, 302.
48 References in note 46.
49 Hening, II, 23, 106, 309, 398–99. The costs to a county are usually detailed in the county court records in November or December of each year.
50 N. B. Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay (Boston, 1853–54), I, 228; IV, part I, 154; J. H. Trumbull, ed., The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut (Hartford, 1850–90), III, 129, 165, 191, 219, 245; J. R. Bartlett, ed., Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (Providence, R.I., 1856–65), II, 443, 473; III, 309; Edward J. Brandon, ed., The Records of the Town of Cambridge … 1630–1703 (Cambridge, Mass., 1901), 102. When Massachusetts acquired a royal governor under her new charter of 1691, his salary was £500 and rose to £1,000. L. W. Labaree, Royal Government in America (New Haven, 1930), 352–53.
51 On the changing definition of “tithable” see Appendix.
52 Quitt, “Virginia House of Burgesses,” 274.
53 C.O. 5/1306, No. 41. Milner was accordingly given the post of escheator for the south side of the James. Executive Journals, I, 239.
54 C.O. 1/39, f.222.
55 This practice was prescribed by statute in 1662 (Hening, II, 78) and is evident in all the surviving county court records. See also CO. 1/20, ff.220–21.
56 C.O. 1/47, ff.258–60.
57 C.O. 1/45, f.169. Though Culpeper was momentarily victorious, Ayleway did hang on to his commission and years later was able to sell his interest in it to William Byrd. Philip A. Bruce, Institutional History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1910), II, 599; VMHB, XXV (1917), 263; XXVI (1918), 133, 390.
58 C.O. 1/47, ff.258–0; Hening, II, 466–69; Journals of the House of Burgesses, 1659/60–1693, 130, 134–5, 144–5.