Limits on how far settlers could venture from home not beFirst Virginia Assembly, Sidney King 14 yond 20 miles and how long they could undertake a voyage without permission none longer than seven days were also established.
A judicial system similar to English law replaced the harsh administration of martial law. The close link between church and state continued, including a series of requirements for ministers. Even though this assembly in was a turning point in the governing structure of Jamestown, it did not end the economic difficulties brought on by war with the Indians, disputes among factions and bad investments.
However, the first meeting of the General Assembly in set a pattern for political life in Virginia that endured after with the abolishment of the Company. The idea of a system of checks and balances was later embodied in the Unites States Constitution, and the present Virginia General Assembly continues the tradition established by the first twenty Virginia burgesses that hot summer day in Thomas West, Third Baron de la Warr. First Virginia Assembly, Sidney King.
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Agency Planning and Performance publicreports. Auditor of Public Accounts apa. Symbolically, the House of Burgesses required that the governor and Council must take new oaths of office before the lower House. For reasons that are not known, he did not call for another general election until the spring of This group of legislators sat for seventeen annual sessions between March and May , earning them the nickname the Long Assembly a reference to the Long Parliament of Charles I.
During this period the assembly remained the most powerful organ of government in Virginia. It created counties and parishes , which even Parliament did not do in England; it also adopted formal rules of procedure and established the basis of representation as two members from each county and one from the colonial capital, Jamestown.
In the assembly limited the right to vote for burgesses to adult men who owned land. That June, under threat of violence from Bacon, the assembly voted to create a 1,man army with Bacon as commanding general. But the assembly passed several other important laws during the session, redressing local grievances about high taxes levied by county governments on small farmers and the poor, reducing the power of county justices of the peace and clerks, and repealing the law that restricted the vote to landowners.
Over the next twenty-five years the Crown sent a succession of governors to Virginia with instructions to limit the power of the assemblies. The governors seized from the burgesses the right to appoint the clerk of the House, though the body retained the right to appoint their speaker and other officers.
In subsequent decades, the House of Burgesses successfully defended the interests of the tobacco plantation economy its members represented. In Lieutenant Governor Alexander Spotswood pushed through the assembly a law to require in every county the construction of a public tobacco warehouse where inspectors would grade all tobacco before export. The objective was to increase the quality of exported tobacco and thereby increase the price that English merchants paid Virginia planters.
Spotswood appointed several burgesses to lucrative inspector positions. In the election the voters in many counties, fearing that the lieutenant governor was gaining too much influence with representatives dependent on him for their income, defeated many of those burgesses. The new members of the House passed a bill to repeal the law, but Spotswood killed the bill. Two years later Virginia planters succeeded in having the king veto the original law.
The General Assembly then passed a law requiring that if the governor or lieutenant governor appointed any burgess to the office of sheriff or any other office of profit, the burgess had to resign from the House. Later, in , when Lieutenant Governor William Gooch proposed a new tobacco inspection law , the assembly enacted it and retained the provisions that prevented the executive from appointing burgesses in an attempt to increase his influence in the assembly.
Well before the beginning of the eighteenth century the House of Burgesses had developed a set of formal parliamentary procedures and operated with standing committees that assisted, as in the House of Commons, with the flow of business. Veteran members of the House usually chaired the most important of the standing committees, providing leadership and experience for committee work and for legislative deliberations.
The body already held strong fiscal control over the colony. It had been setting the tax rate since the seventeenth century, and it authorized the payment of all claims against Virginia in the eighteenth.
During the third quarter of the century, for reasons that are not entirely clear, fewer burgesses chose not to run for reelection or were defeated when they did. The longer services of those members augmented the institutional memory of the House and provided its members with the ability to challenge royal governors and British policies in the interest of protecting the power of their governmental institutions and their economic and cultural values.
The office of speaker became a highly sought-after post of honor and influence. In the assembly created an office of treasurer of the colony to collect and disburse the tax money raised under its authority.
From to , John Robinson Jr.
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