Parson's Cause

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A lengthy legal dispute over the remuneration of the Anglican clergy in what was then the British colony of Virginia in the years 1758 to 1763 became known as Parson's Cause .

In church history, the conflict in which the clergy positioned themselves not only against the parliament and the governor of Virginia, but also against the economic interests of broad sections of the population in the colony, marked the beginning of a drastic loss of authority and trust in the official church in Virginia. In the course of the Parson's Cause , fundamental questions about the relationship between the motherland, the Kingdom of Great Britain and the British colonies, were discussed, which became the focus of political debate in the ensuing crisis over the stamp law and the beginning of the American Revolution .

course

prehistory

Contemporary representation of tobacco sellers on Chesapeake Bay

The Virginia Colony economy has been tobacco-growing since its inception in the early 17th century . Tobacco and share certificates on tobacco stacks in the colony's warehouses were also the most common means of payment ; With the exception of a few Spanish coins, there was hardly any cash in circulation. Like the functionaries of the colonial administration, the clergy of the Anglican state church has always been rewarded with tobacco, with each community having to raise this salary itself. In 1748 the minister's salary was increased to 17,280 pounds of tobacco annually, which was worth about £ 110 at an average market price of just over one and a half pence per pound . When it became apparent that a bad harvest would lead to a shortage of tobacco and a rising price of tobacco, the legislature of the colony, consisting of the elected lower house (the House of Burgesses ) and the council of the king-appointed governor, decided in October 1755 that private and public debts and salaries could also be paid in money for a period of 10 months, the equivalent of a pound of tobacco being fixed at 2 pence. The governor signed the law in spite of the fact that he was acting against the royal instructions not to arbitrarily change laws that the king had already approved.

The intention of the law, soon to be briefly referred to as the Two Penny Act , was to relieve debtors who, at the time of a low tobacco price, had taken on debt payable in tobacco and who would now have been hard hit by the rapidly rising tobacco price; the law was therefore in the interests of broad sections of the population. In fact, the price of tobacco soon rose as high as 6 pence a pound. There was initially little resistance to this measure among the clergy in the colony, even if the law prevented them from benefiting from the rising tobacco price. Some of them met on November 29, 1755 at the College of William & Mary and drafted a letter of protest against the measure to the Bishop of London (whose diocese was generally believed to include the colonies), but the seven signatories made only a small number of around 80 pastors in the colony.

escalation

When the crop failed again in 1758, the Two Penny Act was reinstated for a year. This time the move resulted in an open confrontation between the Anglican clergy and the colony government. At a meeting at William & Mary College, 35 pastors decided to send one of their own, the Rev. John Camm , to London to protest the law in front of the Privy Council and thus obtain its repeal. After Camm had described his concern to the Lords Commissioners in charge , they actually recommended to the King that the law should be repealed, since its effects were not only detrimental to the living conditions of the clergy, but also stood in direct contradiction to the royal instructions, to which the governor of the colony was bound. The king, influenced by the Bishop of London, thereupon pronounced a disallowance of the law. Camm himself was entrusted with delivering the decision and the new instructions to the acting governor of Virginia, Francis Fauquier . When Camm arrived in Virginia, however, there was a scandal; Fauqier accused him of having slandered him and of having read the instructions entrusted to him without authorization, and expelled him from the house. On the one hand, the pastors were now in open conflict with the Virginia government, which saw its powers restricted by the royal repeal of one of its laws; on the other hand, they faced the hostility of their own congregations and councils, who had to bear the financial burden of the decision. Economic and political aspects of the conflict visibly overlapped in this situation, as the tax-paying planters who were affected by the decision were represented in the House of Burgesses . When the first pastors began to demand the outstanding tobacco from their parishes, the House of Commons decided to reimburse the parishes for the costs of defending the pending court cases.

By 1763, three of these trials had been negotiated. The first was brought by the Rev. Warrington, pastor of Charles Parish in Westmoreland County , while Camm was still in England, but the court dismissed the suit as the king had not yet decided. After the repeal of the law was announced, Warrington sued again in the Elizabeth City County Court ; this time he received modest compensation, but the court reiterated the effectiveness of the Two Penny Act in open contradiction to the royal directive . The same thing happened to Camm, who then referred his case to the Colony's General Court , which in turn ruled against him because the King had disallowed the law , but not annulled it, so that no compensation was due retrospectively. Camm then appealed again to the Privy Council, which, however, did not consider his submission due to a formal error.

The Hanover County Trial

Patrick Henry presents his defense.
Painting by George Cooke , 1834.

The climax - and presumably also the conclusion, because no further trials are documented afterwards - found the dispute in a trial brought by the Rev. James Maury against his community in the Hanover County court . On November 5, 1763, the court, chaired by Judge John Henry, ruled that the Two Penny Act was completely and retrospectively ineffective by royal instruction and ruled in favor of Maury. The decision on the amount of compensation was entrusted to a lay judge . The judge's decision caused great resentment throughout the colony. On the next day of the trial, December 1st, a large number of spectators from near and far came to follow the further course of the process. For the defense, the Maurys parish now enlisted the services of the young lawyer Patrick Henry , the judge's son. Henry, who in the following years rose to become one of the leading figures of the American Revolution in Virginia and was to become the first Republican governor of the state in 1776, presented arguments in his plea that contained some political explosives and seem to anticipate the rhetoric of the revolutionary years. However, his speech is not documented in the original, but only in a reconstruction of William Wirt , who in 1816, 40 years after the United States ' declaration of independence , presented a first biography of Patrick Henry. It is therefore entirely possible that Wirt projected the republican spirit of his era onto Henry's 1763 speech; the same problem arises with Henry's most famous speech Give me Liberty, or give me Death! (1775), which was also only given its version known to this day by Wirt.

Henry therefore surprised everyone present in his speech, as his argumentation took up the point of contention that the court had already decided: the question of the legality of the Two Penny Act . The laws of Great Britain and the colony, according to Henry, are based on a reciprocal agreement between rulers and rulers, which is solely committed to the increase of the common good . With his decision to repeal the law passed by the colony with regard to this matter, the king terminated this agreement. The colony, for its part, is now released from its duties to the king and thus empowered to regulate its own affairs without taking the king into account. With his decision, the king had therefore proven that he was little more than a tyrant to whom no one owes obedience. " Treason !" Is said to have been shouted from several sides in the courtroom , but the majority of the audience was visibly impressed. The members of the jury then withdrew for deliberation and after a short time announced their decision: they awarded Maury compensation of one penny, the lowest possible amount. Henry is said to have been carried out of the courtroom on hands by a cheering crowd after the decision.

meaning

Historiography assigns the Parson's Cause a significance that goes beyond Virginia and church history, because already here conflicts between the colonies and the motherland became clear, which soon intensified in the course of the subsequent American Revolution . For Patrick Henry the Fall marked the beginning of his political career; In 1765 he was elected as a member of the Louisa County Member of the House of Burgesses, where he soon made a name for himself as the most eloquent opponent of the Stamp Act , which at that time moved the residents of the thirteen colonies to protests and pushed them to the brink of open rebellion. Henry's defense speech in the Hanover County courtroom appears in this context as the direct forerunner of the Virginia Resolves , which the House of Burgesses passed on his proposal in 1765 and which attacked the King and Parliament of Great Britain with previously unthinkable severity.

The Parson's Cause was not only carried out in front of the judge's seat, but also in the colonial press for years. Between 1759 and 1765, in addition to numerous articles in the colony's newspapers, a number of pamphlets by proponents of the Two Penny Act appeared in which, on the one hand, the clergy were verbally abused, but on the other, the legal basis of the conflict was discussed; on the part of the clergy, these attacks were answered by two pamphlets by Camm himself. A pamphlet by Richard Bland ( The Colonel Dismounted , 1764) is of particular importance in this "pamphlet war" . Bland, a long-time member of the House of Burgesses, posed the fundamental question of who exercises sovereignty in Virginia. Citing the English constitutional tradition, he argued that rule was always based on an agreement between the ruled and the rulers, and that the residents of Virginia conveyed their agreement through their own government, i.e. through the House of Burgesses. There are areas such as foreign policy, in which an “external” government, i.e. the British Parliament, alone has the power to make decisions, since they apply beyond the borders of Virginia. In matters that only affect the inhabitants of the colony within its geographical borders, these decisions, according to Bland, belong solely to their own "internal" government. Even if Bland was not aware of the British government's plans to introduce a stamp duty in the colonies when he wrote his pamphlet , his constitutional considerations anticipate central demands of the American Revolution such as the right to self- taxation ( no taxation without representation ) .

In addition to the political one, the Parson's Cause also revealed a denominational conflict. In the Crown Colony of Virginia, the Church of England was not only an official church, but until 1748 also the only church that was tolerated at all; The English act of tolerance of 1689 was not recognized in Virginia until 1748, so that the non-conformist sects ( dissenters ), such as Presbyterians and Baptists, which were growing rapidly, especially in the interior (the Piedmont ), had to resist religious persecution here for longer than in the motherland. The fact that three dissenters were found among the four jurors at the Hanover trial suggests that religious motives also played a role in the decision. During and after the trials, the official church lost considerable support among the population. During the revolution, its officials saw themselves not only as " papists " for religious reasons , but were also hated as representatives of the king for political reasons. After independence, the Parliament of Virginia completely dissolved the official church, and its successor, the Episcopal Church , had a bad reputation in the state for decades and had a difficult position in comparison to the continuously growing Calvinist churches. From this circumstance, however, it can hardly be inferred, as has occasionally been attempted, that the religious caused or promoted the political and social dissent, because at least in the case of the Parson's Cause the opponent of the clergy was primarily the local religious establishment of the colony itself , that is, the landowner and trader class that made up the parish councils (vestries) . For them the religious development of the time posed a double threat: while in the 1740s and 1750s they tried to curb the influence of the Dissenters by political and legal means, their own church was increasingly falling out over secular matters.

literature

  • Bernard Bailyn (Ed.): Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1750–1776 . Volume I. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1965. pp. 293ff.
  • Richard R. Beeman : Patrick Henry . McGraw-Hill, New York 1974.
  • A. Shrady Hill: The Parson's Cause . In: Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church . 46: 1, 1977, pp. 5-35.
  • Rhys Isaac : Religion and Authority: Problems of the Anglican Establishment in Virginia in the Era of the Great Awakening and the Parson's Cause . In: The William and Mary Quarterly . Third Series, 30, 1973, pp. 3-36.
  • Richard L. Morton: Colonial Virginia. Volume II. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 1960.
  • Arthur P. Scott: The Constitutional Aspects of the "Parson's Cause" . In: Political Science Quarterly 31: 4, 1916, pp. 558-577.
  • Glenn C. Smith: The Parson's Cause, 1755-65 . In: Tyler's Quarterly Historical and Genealogical Magazine 21, 1940, pp. 140-171.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hill, The Parson's Cause , pp. 8-9.
  2. ^ Robert Middlekauff: The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 . 2nd, expanded edition. Oxford University Press, New York 2005, p. 82.
  3. ^ Bailyn, Pamphlets of the American Revolution , p. 293.
  4. ^ Hill, The Parson's Cause , p. 16.
  5. ^ Hill, The Parson's Cause , p. 19.
  6. ^ Hill, The Parson's Cause , pp. 20-21.
  7. ^ Hill, The Parson's Cause , p. 22.
  8. ^ Hill, The Parson's Cause , p. 23.
  9. ^ Hill, The Parson's Cause , pp. 22-23.
  10. ↑ See Stephen T. Olsen: Patrick Henry's “Liberty or Death” Speech: A Study in Disputed Authorship . In: Thomas W. Benson (Ed.): American Rhethoric: Context and Criticism . Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale 1989, pp. 19-66.
  11. ^ William Wirt: Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry. Desilver, Thomas & Co., Philadelphia 1836, pp. 37-49.
  12. ↑ Bailyn, Pamphlets of the American Revolution , pp. 293-299; reprinted from The Colonel Dismounted follows on pp. 301–354.
  13. ^ Hill, The Parson's Cause , pp. 11-14, pp. 25.
  14. ^ Hill, The Parson's Cause , p. 31.
  15. ↑ Isaac, especially pp. 24-29 and 35-36.
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on July 26, 2010 .