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Virginia was impoverished; the low price of to-
bacco left the planter without hope.
The assembly had attempted by legislation to call towns into being, and cherish manufactures.
With little regard to colonial liberties, it also petitioned the king to prohibit by proclamation the planting of tobacco in the colonies for one year.
The first measure could not countervail the navigation acts; with regard to the second, riots were substituted for the royal proclamation, and mobs collected to cut up the fields of tobacco-plants.
The country was wretched, and therefore restless.
Culpepper returned to reduce
Virginia to quiet, and
to promote his own interests as proprietor of the
Northern Neck.
A few victims on the gallows silenced discontent.
The assembly was convened, and its little remaining control over the executive was wrested from it. The council constituted the General Court of
Virginia; according to usage, appeals lay from it to the General Assembly.
The custom was eminently favorable to the power of the people; it menaced
Culpepper with defeat in his attempts to appropriate to himself the cultivated plantations of the
Northern Neck.
The artful magistrate fomented a dispute between the council and the assembly.
The burgesses, in their high court of appeal, claimed to sit alone, excluding the council from whose decision the appeal was made; and
Culpepper, having referred the question to the king for decision, soon announced that no appeals
whatever should be permitted to the assembly, nor to the king in council, under the value of one hundred pounds sterling.
It shows the spirit of the counsil of
Virginia, that it welcomed the new rule, desiring only
