The status of the House of Burgesses as the dominant chamber in the assembly became very visible in March , when Governor Samuel Mathews — attempted to dissolve the General Assembly before it had finished its business. The House of Burgesses unanimously declared that the governor did not have that authority and prevailed. 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 s the House asserted its sole authority to tax Virginians. In May at the last session of the House that Washington attended, burgesses called for a day of "fasting, Humiliation and prayer," to show support for Boston inhabitants subjected to the acts designed by Parliament to punish them for the Boston Tea party.
Many of the burgesses, including Washington, met the next day to sign a non-importation association. Three days later Washington joined the burgesses remaining in Williamsburg to sign a resolution calling for a meeting in August which would become the first Virginia Revolutionary convention.
The membership of the five Revolutionary conventions was almost entirely made up of burgesses. Dunmore did not call the House again until June of The House adjourned on June 24 and never again achieved a quorum enough members to conduct business.
The last entry in the House journal, written on May 6, , proclaims, "Several Members met, but did neither proceed to Business, nor adjourn, as a House of Burgesses. While Washington commanded the continental army in New York, about four hundred miles south in Williamsburg, the end of the House of Burgesses signaled the end of British political rule in Virginia.
Notes: 1. Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, — , ed. At this time, England took much more control of things in Virginia, restricting the powers of the House of Burgesses. Through the years leading up to the Revolutionary War , many leaders of the move toward independence made their names in the House of Burgesses. Patrick Henry introduced seven resolutions against the Stamp Act there in The fact that the burgesses could make their own laws was very much on the mind of many people in the American colonies, especially when Great Britain continued to pass harsh laws that the colonists viewed as "taxation without representation.
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