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For God, King, and People Forging Commonwealth Bonds in Renaissance Virginia
Alexander B. Haskell
Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 2017 Hardcover. viii+387 pages. ISBN 9781469618029. $45
Reviewed
by Christopher N. Fritsch
This is a work centered upon the development of the ideas of commonwealth. The author focuses on a number of key historical events, broad intellectual changes and shifts in the development of the state. He places events, such as the founding of Jamestown, into a larger historical framework of Renaissance exploration and the period’s intellectual climate. Jamestown thus becomes the embodiment of Renaissance political ideas and Christian perception of social and state formation. He concludes the volume with a discussion of Bacon’s Rebellion (1676). We see the emergence of the Restoration empire. The growing conflict across the Atlantic was not merely a political or economic debate between London and the Virginia colony, but a clash between deeply ingrained perceptions of the political relationship between colony and empire. This led to a growing disagreement over the status of plantations and the people who resided in them. Enlightenment thought moved the conversation away from Christian humanism to a rationalist perception of the state. The transatlantic dialogue moved beyond these foundations of humanism and rationalism for society to issues of historical study and interpretation. In the years following Bacon’s Rebellion, man’s role on both sides of the Atlantic moved towards the development of the state. The Christian humanist idea of equal participation in and the fulfilment of duty to society shifted from this theological ground and moved to a more rationalist discussion of the relationship between the state and the subject. Haskell describes a shift from a Christian humanist basis for the social contract towards one that relied upon rationalism. The construction of an American plantation was fraught with difficulty in Elizabethan and early Stuart England. Renaissance and Reformation thought called men to pursue earthly goals for divine ends. Divine order and godly approval was imperative. These ideals called to English colonists. Plantation formation and building was not just to satisfy personal needs, but had lasting consequences for the salvation of the individual, and the nation. Plantations became important for the advance of a Protestant nation in its efforts to extend and build a Christian commonwealth. Personal and national desires needed to be subordinated to divine ends. Virginia redefined English kingship and English commonwealth. The wills of both monarch and planter had to be subsumed by a greater civic virtue, to fulfill God’s plan, and carry out England’s Protestant beliefs. John Smith participated in an English historical process by becoming a cultural bridge. He became an advocate for the creation of opportunities to encourage the world view of monarch, court politician, investor, clergy, and planter. Smith presented a world in which an English monarch took his rightful place as a participant in transatlantic commonwealth development. Others in England fulfilled their roles and each worked for the moral advancement of Jamestown. For Smith and the rest of the commonwealth, their shared duties reflected civic virtue. Circumstances in Virginia changed goals and perceptions. This was certainly true for Jamestown and the colony of Virginia. Prior to its founding of Jamestown, James I publicly wrote of the dangers of tobacco use. By 1620, both he and his son, Charles, moved the Crown into the lucrative position of taxing tobacco, and controlling the colony that produced it. However, the political decision was not met quietly. Merchants and members of the Virginia Company looked to secure their ownership of the colony and control of its production. The commonwealth ideal of equal participation disintegrated into a race for control of production, markets, and profit [232]. The conflict grew among Crown, Parliament, the Virginia Company, and planters. The author sets this conflict against the changes and disruptions in English politics—Charles and his growing argument with Parliament. The control of Virginia and the production and marketing of tobacco came at a very opportune moment for the king. Charles saw the creation of a royal colony as political and economic advantage. Merchant investors argued that the charter was a contract and that the contract entitled them to the profits of colonial production. The history of plantation building and colonial development was at stake. This history provided the backdrop for how the company, the monarchy, the planters, and the Virginia government used the past as a means of constructing an interpretive base for present political action. Planters believed that the colony, as a commonwealth, could be furthered, as long as, the king ruled “Virginia as he would any of his kingdoms” [233]. Virginians believed that the king’s participation would provide the ground to construct a transatlantic commonwealth that moved beyond tobacco contracts and company greed. As Virginians continued to call for the construction of a commonwealth polity through the participation of the king, England’s intellectual climate began to change. The publication of Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes moved the conversation of state development in new directions. Hobbes presented the idea that colonies descended from a commonwealth but were, in fact, subservient to the needs of the mother-country. Plantations functioned as colonies in order to provide materials which could not be produced at home. For Charles I, control over tobacco fit neatly into this viewpoint. However, Hobbes’s political theory moved the conversation further. Hobbes’s attracted a growing audience of what the author calls, “establishmentarians”. Increasingly, the dialogue in England and in some ways in the plantations centered upon a familiar dichotomy. Establishmentarian Anglicans believed order was best achieved through an established church, the monarchy, and public assemblies. The church and the state became the means to lawful order. They opposed the chaotic administration of Puritans and disruptive Anabaptists, or the overarching control of Catholic monarchies, such as Spain. Tempered, balanced, and ordered, not unlike the heavens under investigation by Tyco Brahe and Isaac Newton, described the best of all state systems. Charles I endorsed these established structures and Oliver Cromwell did as well. Under Charles I, Archbishop Laud led a movement to consolidate the power of the Church of England. Two decades later, Cromwell and his parliament passed the first Navigation Act. Centralisation existed not only as a tool for the monarch, but for the Cromwell republic. Virginia learned how to navigate through these times. Colonists learned how to present a history of Virginia that maintained the idea of its relationship within the English commonwealth. Now the battle lines reformed around ideas of commonwealth and a Christian humanist perspective and a growing English centralized state. The author concludes with Bacon’s Rebellion. Nathaniel Bacon and Governor William Berkeley are presented in a complex and complete fashion. Bacon saw his Christian obligation to them as perhaps many other Puritans would have. God called him to protect and defend neighbors. Berkeley was caught between a developing sense of empire and a frontier world that defined government differently. Berkeley sought to maintain and re-establish positive relations with local Native Americans. He believed that treaties bound both the English and the natives in a positive relationship. Bacon’s Rebellion, not unlike one nearly a century later, pitted frontier colonists (who believed that the state’s main obligation was to protect its subjects) against the centralized state. Berkeley believed that the state arrived when all of its members had fulfilled their civic duty. Haskell concludes with a discussion of the foundations of Virginia, the Revolution and the American Republic. Haskell’s spokesman for Virginia, William Bland, like many of his colonial predecessors, writes of Virginia’s foundations as reflecting a Christian humanist world. The Hobbesian-Lockean Enlightenment ideas of the state presented a politically and economically powerful empire. Parliament and the monarchy replaced the Renaissance state with one of imperial-colonial structures. The author writes that Bland appeared in conflict between the Enlightenment world in which he lived and the Renaissance world which he studied. Although the problem of history is discussed throughout the work, Haskell’s use of Bland drives home the problems that all historians face. Philosophically, we study the past with one foot in that past and one foot still firmly in the present. As Haskell wrote of Bland, it is not easy for us to disengage from ourselves and our present to see the past fully. Such a perception of Bland’s use of the past, presents one further question. Haskell connects both sides of the Atlantic. He creates context for both causes and effects. Through Bland, he delivers us at the American Revolution. Haskell leaves us asking how the generation after Bland saw Renaissance Virginia and its Christian humanism. Haskell’s work is based on meticulous research. He covers a number of topics that have extensive historiographical backgrounds, including Renaissance political thought and Stuart England. Haskell covers this ground by a re-examination of sources. In this new light, the Virginia plantation became the means by which we understand Renaissance civic humanism, the development of Anglican orthodoxy, and Enlightenment state building. The sources may be familiar but the interpretation is new. Haskell presents the intricacies of transatlantic research by showing how events are affected by and impact events on both sides of the ocean.
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