When will the papers of William Berkeley arrive from
the publisher? I have been eagerly awaiting them...

Kind regards,

Charles

--- "Warren M. Billings" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Rarely do I disagree with the historical judgments
> of Fred Fausz or Jon
> Kukla, but I must respectfully dissent from their
> briefs for William
> Claiborne as the most significant Virginia colonist
> of the seventeenth
> century. That distinction clearly belongs to Sir
> William Berkeley, whose
> record of achievement surpasses Claiborne's by some
> considerable distance.
> To be sure, the twom men shared common attributes.
> Both made themselves
> into Virginians. Both men sought in Virginia places
> and preferments that
> they could not achieve in England. Berkeley also had
> an Atlantic trading
> network, and it was arguably more extensive than
> Claiborne's which was
> centered on London, whereas Berkeley's extended to
> continental Europe as
> well as New England, the Caribbean, and the British
> Isles. Berkeley's
> Indian policy differed not all that much from
> Claiborne's, and after 1646
> it kept relations between the two peoples reasonably
> quiet. (Of course,
> Berkeley could do little to stem the tide of English
> immigration that
> swept over the reserve lands north of the York.)They
> rivalled one another,
> though they were never enemies. Berkeley got the
> better of Claiborne in
> the 1640s, whereas Claiborne outed Berkeley in 1652,
> only to help bring
> him back as governor in 1660. Thereafter, Claiborne
> was retired from
> public life and remained mainly in seculsion til his
> death, though Berkely
> advance his sons in public life.
>
> Sir William governed longer than any other chief
> executive, colonial or
> modern, he set in train developments that translated
> the General Assembly
> from a corporate appendage to a little Parliament,
> and he erected the
> offices of attorney general and auditor general.
> (His encouragement of
> bicameralism had profound implications for the rise
> of Virginia's self-
> governing tradition.) He abetted the emergence of
> the great planters and
> became one of them. Moreover he was one of the
> largest landholders in the
> colony, and if one includes his eighth share in the
> Carolina proprietary,
> he ranked with the greatest landowners anywhere in
> English North America.
> In the 1660s he spearheaded urban renewal at
> Jamestown and touted
> diversification of the economy. He came within a few
> whiskers of
> succeeding with the latter goal, but its failure
> assured that a single-
> crop, bound labor based, plantation agricultural
> base would be the norm
> for centuries to come. His other great
> failure--bumbling into Bacon's
> Rebellion--contributed to a vigorous reassertion of
> royal authority in the
> colony after 1677 with the result that Virginia was
> cut more closely to
> the Stuart model of empire. Consequently, the
> General Assembly lost much
> of the autonomy it had enjoyed from the 1640s to the
> 1670s. And whereas
> the politics of accommodation drove the relationship
> between Berkeley, his
> councillors, and the burgesses, confrontation
> generally dictated the
> responses of royal governors-general and colonial
> leaders to one another
> from 1677 to the Revolution.
>
> In short, Sir William stands ahead of Claiborne as
> the most significant
> seventeenth-century English Virginian.
>
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>


Charles K. Ortel
42 Route 343
Millbrook, N.Y. 12545

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