without a license, at rates to be fixed by the county com- CHAPTER missioners. XV. The hope of introducing new branches of industry was 1662. not yet abandoned. To encourage Colonel Scarborough's salt works in Northampton, the importation of salt into that county is prohibited. The planting of mulberry trees was still enforced, and premiums are offered for silk, for ships built, and for woolen and linen cloth made in the colony. Two acres of corn or pulse, or one acre of wheat, were to be cultivated for every tithable. A tan-house, with curriers and shoe-makers attached, was to be established at the public expense in each county; hides received at a fixed price, to be manufactured into shoes, and sold at rates prescribed in the statute. does not appear what success attended this curious scheme for introducing a kind of manufacture already "naturalized," and successfully carried on, as we have seen, in New England. Spanish pieces of eight-that is, dollars are declared current at the rate of five shillings, and the exportation of money in sums above forty shillings is prohibited. The exportation of mares and sheep Masters of vessels transporting any person out of the colony without a pass, are liable for his debts. is also forbidden. It The provisions of this code respecting the Indians are conceived in a more humane and candid spirit than any previous enactments on the same subject. The mutual discontents, complaints, jealousies, and fears of the colonists and the Indians are declared to proceed chiefly from the violent intrusion of divers English upon Indian lands, the Indians being provoked to revenge themselves by killing the cattle and hogs of the colonists; whence arise reports and rumors of hostile intentions. The law prohibiting the transfer of Indian lands except at quarter XV. CHAPTER Courts had failed of its purpose. It was easy to frighten the Indians into an acknowledgment of sales they had 1662. never made, or to cheat them by false interpreters. All future purchases from Indians were accordingly declared void, and all persons encroaching upon Indian lands were to be removed. Indians might be licensed by two justices to fish and collect oysters and wild fruits within the English bounds, but those so licensed were to have certain badges, by which they might be identified if they did mischief. None were to trade with the Indians without license from the governor. No Indians entertained as servants were to be sold into slavery, or for a longer period than English indented servants of a like age. Several persons, apparently of wealth and consideration, were heavily fined by the Assembly for wrongs done to the Indians and intrusions upon them. By subsequent acts, shortly after, if a white man were murdered, the 1663. inhabitants of the nearest Indian town were to be held 1665. responsible. The appointment of their own chiefs was taken from the Indians and conferred upon the governor, and any refusing to obey the chiefs thus appointed were to be treated as enemies and rebels. There exists, also, 1660. an order of a little earlier date, authorizing the seizure and sale "into a foreign country" of so many Indians. of a certain tribe as might be necessary to produce compensation for damages with which they were charged, provided they refused satisfaction otherwise. A curious instance of collision with Massachusetts was brought, at this same session, to the Assembly's no1661. tice. The indented servant of William Drummond, an inhabitant of Virginia, had been discharged from his master's service by "the court of Boston, in New England," without any sufficient reason, it was thought, though probably on the authority of Deuteronomy, chap. XV. xxiii., ver. 15: "Thou shalt not deliver unto his mas- CHAPTER ter the servant which is escaped from his master unto. thee." The governor and council had written to Boston 1662. about it, but had received no satisfactory answer. In this state of the case, the Assembly ordered, "as the least of ill expedients," for the master's indemnification, that the value of £40 should be seized out of the property of some citizens of Massachusetts then within the jurisdiction of Virginia. Upon the restoration of the proprietary authority in 1660. Maryland, the old system of religious toleration had been re-established; but it did not avail the Quakers. Preachers of that sect were ordered to be apprehended and whipped, not, indeed, as heretics, but as "vagabonds, who dissuade the people from complying with military discipline, from holding offices, giving testimony, and serving as jurors." A mint was now set up in Maryland, which continued in operation for the next thirty years. A tonnage duty, for the sole benefit of the proprietary, was also imposed upon all vessels arriving in the colony-a perpetual item henceforward of proprietary revenue. Charles Calvert, then a very young man, son and presumptive heir of the proprietary, soon arrived in 1662. Maryland with a commission as governor. Berkeley returned about the same time; and the Virginia Assembly, at a session held shortly after, in compliance with suggestions which he had brought out from England, passed an act for converting Jamestown, which still remained a paltry hamlet, into a city of thirty-two brick houses. Each of the seventeen coun ties was required to build one house, for which laborers might be impressed at certain fixed rates. For the encouragement of private persons to undertake the others, Dec. XV. CHAPTER they were to receive from the public for every house built a reward of ten thousand pounds of tobacco, with 1662. exclusive rights to build storés, and lots to build them on. To meet the expenses of this scheme, a general poll tax of thirty pounds of tobacco was imposed. All persons settling in the town were to be privileged from arrest for two years; and all tobacco made in the three neighboring counties was to be brought to Jamestown, and stored there for shipment. It was designed to establish, by a similar process, other towns on the York River, the Rappahannoc, the Potomac, and the eastern shore. 1663. At this same session an act was passed, the first statute of Virginia which attempts to give a legislative basis to the system of hereditary servitude. The right to hold heathen Africans and their posterity as slaves would seem to have been thought so fully sanctioned by the English law as to require no special colonial legislation. But mulatto children had been born in the col ony. Their parentage, on one side or the other, must be Christian. What should be their condition? The English courts had held, in relation to serfdom, that the condition of the child must be determined by that of the father; and that all children not born in lawful wedlock must be esteemed free, as having no legal fathers-doctrines which had gone far to bring serfdom to an end. By a very questionable exercise of authority, hardly to be reconciled with their late professions of reverence for the law of England, the Virginia Assembly saw fit to adopt the rule of the civil law, so much more convenient for slaveholders, by enacting that children should be held bond or free," according to the condition of the mother." The subject of slavery attracted, also, the attention XV. of the Maryland Legislature. It was provided, by the CHAPTER first section of an act now passed, that "all negroes and. other slaves within this province, and all negroes and 1663. other slaves to be hereafter imported into this province, shall serve during life; and all children born of any negro or other slave, shall be slaves, as their fathers were, for the term of their lives." The second section recites that"divers free-born English women, forgetful of their free condition, and to the disgrace of our nation, do intermarry with negro slaves;" and for deterring from such "shameful matches," it enacts that, during their husbands' lives, white women so intermarrying shall be servants to the masters of their husbands, and that the issue of such marriages shall be slaves for life. Shortly after Berkeley's return, a conspiracy among some indented servants-betrayed, however, by one of the conspirators in season to prevent mischief—occasioned a great alarm in Virginia. A guard was appointed for the governor and council; and the Assembly voted to observe the 13th of September, "the day this villainous plot should have been put in execution," as a perpetual holiday, in memory of the escape of the colony. By The severe persecuting laws against the Quakers, left out of the new code, were now again re-enacted. an act of the previous session, all who refused, "out of averseness to the orthodox established religion, or the new-fangled conceits of their own heretical inventions," to have their children baptized by "the lawful minister," had been subjected to a fine of two thousand pounds of tobacco. One of the burgesses, accused of Anabaptist and Quaker opinions, was expelled the house. This religious persecution seems to have occasioned an emigration to the banks of the Chowan, where a few noncon |