The Colonial Council of Virginia from 1763 to 1776 Charles Stephen Weidman
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University of Richmond UR Scholarship Repository Master's Theses Student Research 1993 Whither went the upstairs gentry? : the Colonial Council of Virginia from 1763 to 1776 Charles Stephen Weidman Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.richmond.edu/masters-theses Part of the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Weidman, Charles Stephen, "Whither went the upstairs gentry? : the Colonial Council of Virginia from 1763 to 1776" (1993). Master's Theses. Paper 1134. This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Research at UR Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Master's Theses by an authorized administrator of UR Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WHITHER WENT THE UPSTAIRS GENTRY ? The Colonial Council of Virginia from 1763 to 1776 By CHARLES STEPHEN WEIDMAN B.A., University of Vermont, 1970 J. D., Villanova University, 1973 A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Richmond in Candidacy for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in History May, 1993 Richmond, Virginia LIBRA.RV UNIVERSITY OF RICHMOND VIRGINIA 23173 ABBREVIATIONS EJC Executive Journals of the Council of Colonial Virginia EVB Encyclopedia of Virginia Biography JHB Journals of the House of Burgesses LJC Legislative Journals of the Council of Colonial Virginia i i TABLE OF CONTENTS I . The Enigma . 1 II. The Perception of Decline ............... 12 III. The Heavy Shoes of Responsibility ....... 23 IV. The Power 39 A. Council Demographics ................ 39 B. Mr. Williamsburg .................... 44 c. The Two Brothers 53 V. The Glory . 65 A. The Force of 1749 66 B. The Lost Grandees 75 D. The Fringe Players ................... 92 VI. Constitutional Predicament: 1763-1768 ... 100 A. Paper Money 101 B. The Parsons Cause ................... 107 C. The Stamp Act ........................ 110 D. The Robinson Scandal ................. 117 E. Government Relations .................. 121 F. The Committee of Correspondence ...... 136 G. Planter Debt ......................... 139 H. Western Land 144 I. Coming of the Townshend Acts ......... 146 VI I. The Chimera of Self-Rule: 1768-1771 .... 149 A. Membership Changes 150 i i i B. The Council Presidency ............... 162 C. An Accommodating Governor ............ 172 D. The Nelson Year ....................... 189 VIII. Rebellion is the Choice: 1771-1776 ..... 207 A. The Last Councilors .................. 208 B. Business as Usual: a final attempt ... 229 c. The Dissolution of Government ......... 242 D. The Interregnum 260 IX. Conclusion ............................. 265 Notes .................................. 271 Bibliography ........................... 300 iv Chapter I THE ENIGMA Of the three branches of Colonial Virginia government, only two, the House of Burgesses and the Royal Governor, have been well chronicled during the period immediately preceding the American Revolution. The ignored third branch, the Colonial Council, has been largely dismissed by the few historians treating the subject as inconsequential- both as a political institution, and in the influence of its individual members. Witness both the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography and the William and Mary Quarterly, each with over a century dedicated to the nooks and crannies of all history Virginian, have collectively produced but a single article on the pre-Revolution Council, concluding tepidly that: "the area has been much neglected". 1 Only three historians have explored the pre-Revolution Virginia Council in any depth. It received a summary job description in Percy Flippin's The Royal Government in Virginia (1919); 2 and its pre-Revolution activity earned a chapter in Jackson Turner Main's 1960s survey of the upper houses in all the colonial legislatures. 3 Flippin offered no political perspective; but Main identified a relative uniqueness in the Virginia Council, as one of only four colonial councils dominated by its own native elite. 2 However, Main quickly dispelled any impression of importance by ascertaining that the Virginia elite sitting in the Council between 1763 -1776 submitted placidly to the House of Burgesses on all important matters. A fuller analysis of the pre-Revolution Council is the unpublished Ph. D. Dissertation of James Anderson (1973), comparing Virginia's Royal Council with the Proprietary Council in Pennsylvania from 1660 to 1775. 4 An extract from this Anderson work coincidentally represents the single article on the subject published in Virginia's historical journals. Anderson portrays a steady decline in both Council power and member quality after the 1720s, expressing it as " The demise of an Aristocratic Clique. 115 Yet, in curious contrast to these modern assessments, stands the 1762 view of Lt. Governor Francis Fauquier: "The power and duty of a Councillor of Virginia is very great and extensive and it requires gentlemen of the greatest abilities and understanding."6 The puzzle, then, is which appraisal to believe. If Governor Fauquier accurately portrayed the Council, as of 1762, what caused the subsequent reputation of the Virginia Council to evaporate so completely? Any glance at the formal organization of the colonial 3 Virginia government supports the Fauquier image of the Council as a powerful institution. The Council possessed three distinct roles: it served as the upper house of Virginia's legislature, with veto power over the venerable House of Burgesses; it acted as the colony's Supreme Judicial Court; and it sat with the Royal Governor as his chief body of advisors, with consent powers over many of the Governor's actions. The Council also operated as the primary dispenser of both public land and public office in the Colony, as well as the exclusive source for interim governors, sitting in place of dead or departed royal appointees--something that would happen three times between 1763 and 1776. First impressions of the nineteen men sitting on the Council at various times between 1763 to 1776 also reinforces the notion of a consequential institution. These men personify the creme de la creme of Virginia's native elite. Included in its ranks were the first son's of many of Virginia's first families: families that had supplied the Colony's political leadership since the mid-Seventeenth Century. Further, almost all holders of the principal royal offices in Virginia sat on the Council, as did the colony's chief religious and education official, and, too, a representative from the great Proprietary holdings in 4 Northern Virginia. The Council, during the two decades immediately prior to the Revolution, still contained some of the Colony's most important planters, merchants, military figures and Indian experts--a premier collection of the richest, best educated, and most politically connected Virginians of the day. The years from 1763 to 1776 were the age "when all Ame r i ca 1o o k e d up t o Vi r g i n i a t o t a k e t he 1 ea d . "7 V i r g i n i a was the richest and most populous British colony in North America; and Virginians undeniably answered the call of the Nation, providing much of America's political leadership before, during, and for a half century after the American Revolution. But what happened to the Councilors? Why did such economically, socially and politically well connected men, occupying such apparently powerful positions, disappear so completely into obscurity during this the Golden Age of Virginia leadership? If not as leaders of the winning Patriot cause, why were not the Councilors, at least, important to history as Loyalist leaders? Historians have never had an easy time explaining why colonial Virginia, with its reputation for conservatism and loyalty, supported the Patriot cause with such vigor, especially when the actual burden of British oppression fell 5 more lightly on her than other colonies.8 Some of this difficulty can be attributed to the relative lack of written documentation on the political views and actions of Virginians during this period. According to Herbert Sloan and Peter Onuf: "Eighteenth century Virginians did not often commit their political thoughts to print."9 Official journals and periodicals of the day were circumspect about details of political debates and voting records. Virginians produced a surprisingly small share of political pamphlets and letters, and had no political press in the modern sense. The major source of political literature--the Virginia Gazettes--were severely crippled by their turgid style, a preoccupation with non-American events, and the habit of using pseudonyms to disguise the authorship of political articles. Thus, most of Virginia's pre-Revolution history has been, out of necessity, extracted from the sanitized context of government records, and personal letters of a social or commercial temper. This relative lack of hard political data has led to the claim that pre-Revolution studies of Virginia history have had only a minor impact on the overall understanding of the causes of the American Revolution. 10 Any investigation into the significance of the Virginia 6 Council is, thus, hampered by the overall haziness of the individual political actions of most Virginians during this time. One starting point, however, is the generally accepted notion that the key to understanding Virginia's move to revolution "necessarily revolves around the gentry." 11 As the Council contained many of Virginia's most preeminent gentry, in both wealth and official position, it seems appropriate to inquire