There is an opaque period in Virginia’s colonial history–between the 1620s and the 1670s–that seems rather dull compared to the adventures and plights of our beginnings, and the actions and revolts of Nathanial Bacon. As the colony became firmly established, the drama of uncertainty that captures an audience faded into a quotidian nature of certainty. Quests for establishment subsided into a sabbatical of geographical cultivation for a tenured colony; the artistic adventurer evolved into a calculating tradesman, concerned more with a profitable use of currency than with a current use of profit. Legislators concerned themselves more with standardizing weights and measures and regulating the use of the land than with constitutional theory or experimentation in representative governments.
But can we still learn from the boring? Can we glean from plumbous weight of mundane historical economics a lesson for today’s Virginia?
Ferries in Virginia are nearly as old as the colony itself, but they were operated privately for the first three decades, and established where they were convenient and profitable for the marketing and transporting of goods and persons. By 1640, as population growth had exploded, there became a demand for public ferries. Demand for tobacco had remained rather constant, but the supply had increased greatly, thereby reducing the price a plantation owner could receive for selling his crop. Naturally businessmen, especially the small businessman, looked for any way they could to reduce expenditures in order to maximize their profit. Free ferries, they thought, was one such method.
The first public ferries were regulated locally, financed by passenger rates, and operated by local ferrymen.[1] But in January of 1641, the General Assembly enacted that all ferries be free, that they be financed through a general taxation, and that the operator be compelled to work “from sunne rising to sunne setting.”[2]
As a result, there was certainly a freer flow of commerce at first, but out of this convenience the demand for ferry service soared. Since passengers did not see directly their expenses in the operation and maintenance of crossing the river, these trans-riverine avenues and their approaching roads became crowded and new crossings were ordered to alleviate traffic. Expenses quickly exceeded expectations, and it was the poor who suffered most from the consequent increases in taxation.
Planters of small means were disproportionately harmed by the general taxation policies enacted by the General Assembly, and many of these lower- or middle-class Virginians did not use the service for which they were taxed. And since the price of goods are always dependent upon the expenses of transportation, those who received the commercial benefits of a ferry incurred a double taxation built into items they purchased.
Perhaps some counties dissented from the General Assembly’s instructions and charged according to demand, for in March of 1643, the General Assembly affirmed their resolve to have river-crossings subsidized through taxation rather than tollage. But by 1647, the General Assembly was compelled to repent of their imposition. Presumably, popular demand was so overwhelmingly against the tax increases that the burgesses felt they had no choice but to repeal this act. It was enacted that because “the great charge of Ferryes in many counteys is very burthensome, especially to some poore people scarce att all makeing vse of the said Ferryes,” all power to maintain and establish ferries was conferred upon the county commissioners, “for such rates and vpon such conditions and to such persons as to them shall seem good and convenient,”[3] without the aid of a public levy. Selection of new crossings were determined by marketability. Additionally, ferrymen were no longer required to work from sunrise to sunset. Instead, counties determined the most profitable times for employing ferrymen, and fees during rush-hour traffic in some places were greater than the transportation doldrums.[4]
Taxes became tolls not out of convenience to the traveler, but out of sympathy for the poor. For while tolls were paid only by those who chose to use the service, a general taxation made the poor–especially those so far removed from the service–finance those who could afford it more than it made the wealthy subsidize those who would never use it.
Perhaps because Colonial Virginians operated politically on a much smaller scale than we, or perhaps because our funds more now than then are used circuitously by the mediate mechanics of bureaucracy, but the nature of a general taxation for a specific purpose was felt more bluntly by the poor than by the rich. Virginia had even enacted prior to this seventeenth-century “gas tax” a progressive taxation system in which the most impoverished were completely exempt from taxes;[5]but this did not relieve their plights in everyday commerce where rising transportation costs necessarily increased the cost of sustaining their livelihood.
