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Book Review
| Warren M. Billings, A Little Parliament: The Virginia General Assembly in the Seventeenth Century, Richmond: The Library of Virginia with Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, 2004. Pp. xxi + 284. $35.00 (ISBN 0-88490-202-1).
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| Sometimes you can tell a book by its cover. Warren M. Billings's A Little Parliament: The Virginia General Assembly in the Seventeenth Century is bound in the same orange as Richard B. Morton's classic and indispensable two-volume history Colonial Virginia (1960). Given the erudition so evident in the new volume, all three belong together on any bookshelf. Billings modestly states (ix) that his new book "responds to a single, plain question. How did the General Assembly work throughout the seventeenth century?" This is as simple as asking for a description of the role of tobacco in that period. |
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The answer, which he amply provides, reaches into law, politics, society, economics, and transatlantic imperial growth. Billings began his study of Virginia as a graduate student whose 1968 dissertation ("'Virginia's Deploured Condition,'1660–1676: The Coming of Bacon's Rebellion," Northern Illinois University) placed its focus on county institutions. Written before the profusion of revolutionary Chesapeake studies in the next decade, it portrayed a world in chaos, partly, he concluded, because above the localities "the General Assembly remained an amorphous, undeveloped entity ... " (xix). Since then he has drawn heavily on subsequent scholarship and has delved on his own far more deeply into the surviving records in Virginia and England, and he has rejected his former interpretation. In its place a different Virginia Assembly—within a very different Virginia—emerges. In large part, the canvas on which he paints this new interpretation is suffused with law and legal procedures. Law looms above all, a concept that gave stability and identity to the fledgling colony despite the absence of many trained lawyers or court officials among the middling immigrants who served as the foundation of its institutions. This notion of law, marked by an increasing tendency toward regularity and bureaucracy, was a feature of Tudor and Stuart government and was brought with them as a way of life and as a template to be imposed by "assemblymen [who] had settled in an uncivilized place. For their colony to become orderly it needed recognizable rules and structures to govern those who inhabited it. Seeking models, they rummaged their cultural heritage for examples to emulate" (xv–xvi). They found their model set out explicitly in the manuals and reports of the late Elizabethan and early Stuart eras, which elevated "law as the bond that held everyone in civilized communion with one another" (131). |
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Virginia assemblies repeatedly revised the colony's statutory code to achieve clarity and consistency and laid down rules for proper parliamentary procedures. The powers that it delegated to localities the assembly carefully delimited: justices of the peace would have no authority, for example, to try felonies. This slow emergence of Virginia's version of "due process" was a prosaic development, marked less by open conflict than by cautious provision against arbitrary government and the protection of communal norms: in felony trials, conducted in Jamestown, at least six of the twelve trial jurors would be brought from the county where the act was committed. The impulse toward local accountability became the touchstone of Virginia politics and impelled changes that departed from English precedent when in conflict with them. "In a sense, then, the General Assembly merely happened" (xvii), he writes, and magistrates protected their local interests by creating a de facto system of actual representation in place of the virtual representation of Parliament. |
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Localism would serve Virginia well in the next century, an age of conflict between imperial governors and the legislatively grounded local powers of the colony. But its foundations were laid by middle of the seventeenth century, when decentralization and bicameralism empowered Virginians protective of colonial and personal interests within an adversarial framework. Though skillfully managed by Sir William Berkeley, it eventually overpowered him and structured Virginia politics after his demise. Lesser executives, following the imperatives of imperial reorganization, were thrown into a political and legal system that was at once similar to and in conflict with their own experiences. They succeeded, by main force, to alter many of the specific changes that conflicted with imperial goals, and before the end of the century the Assembly lost many of its privileges. No longer was the full Assembly the colony's court of last resort, and its laws were increasingly subject to executive review and disallowance. The eighteenth century would see many of these battles led by the Council of State rather than the Burgesses, but the template of legislative assertiveness and localism could not be destroyed. Billings's Assembly was a little parliament that could. Its story, though local, is in Billings's hands a model of colonial history. |
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| David Thomas Konig
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| Washington University in St. Louis |
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