United States -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775
In March, 1629, Captain West went back to England, and a new
commission was issued to Sir John Harvey as governor.[37] He did not
come to the colony till the next year, and in the interval Dr. John
Pott acted as his deputy. At the assembly called by Pott in October,
1629, the growth of the colony was represented by twenty-three
settlements as against eleven ten years before. As in England, there
were two branches of the law-making body, a House of Burgesses, made
up of the representatives of the people, and an upper house consisting
of the governor and council. In the constitution of the popular branch
there was no fixed number of delegates, but each settlement had as
many as it chose to pay the expenses of, a custom which prevailed
until 1660, when the number of burgesses was limited to two members
for each county and one member for Jamestown.[38]
In March, 1630, Harvey arrived, and Pott's former dignity as governor
did not save him from a mortifying experience. The council was not
only an upper house of legislation, but the supreme court of the
colony, and in July, 1630, Pott was arraigned before this tribunal for
stealing cattle, and declared guilty. Perhaps Harvey realized that
injustice was done, for he suspended the sentence, and on petition to
the king the case was re-examined in England by the commissioners for
Virginia, who decided that "condemning Pott of felony was very
rigorous if not erroneous."[39]
The year 1630 was the beginning of a general movement of emigration
northward, and in October Chiskiack, an Indian district on the south
side of the York, about twenty-seven miles below the forks of the
river where Opechancanough resided, was occupied in force. So rapid
was the course of population that in less than two years this first
settlement upon the York was divided into Chiskiack and York. One year
after Chiskiack was settled, Kent Island in Chesapeake Bay was
occupied by a company under William Claiborne, the secretary of state;
and in 1632 Middle Plantation (afterwards Williamsburg) was laid out
and defended by a line of palisades from tide-water to tide-water.[40]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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