Nicholas Spencer - Becoming A Virginia Administrator and Agent

Becoming A Virginia Administrator and Agent

On his arrival in the colony, Spencer secured an appointment as a customs collector, in addition to his post as the administrator of his cousin's Virginia estates. (Spencer's job as agent for his Colepeper cousins included such prosaic tasks as seizing 'winter beaver skins' or casks of tobacco for debts owed the Colepeper interests). Spencer and John Washington jointly held the post of customs collector on the Potomac. (After Washington's death in 1679, Spencer was sole customs collector on the Potomac.) He also won his own land grant. But Spencer was, unlikely as it sounds, apparently an efficient administrator on his own, later being appointed to additional posts in Virginia by virtue of his abilities.

Spencer was apparently a pragmatic administrator. He was also a hard-nosed capitalist. When it came to slavery, for instance, Spencer weighed the benefits of enslaved labor in a strictly cost-benefit way. "The low price of Tobacco," Spencer wrote, "requires it should bee made as cheap as possible, and that Blacks can make it cheaper than Whites." Spencer's rationale for slavery was probably as succinctly heartless as any committed to paper.

Spencer's role as an aristocratic bureaucrat in the new colony was a tricky one. He was navigating the shoals of dilemmas which have perplexed a nation for centuries. While simultaneously attempting to rationalize slavery, Spencer was also writing to the Privy Council in England about the Virginia Colony's precarious place on the edge of Catholic Maryland. "Unruly and unorderly spirits lay hold of ye motion of affairs," Spencer wrote, "and that under the pretext of Religion, soe as from those false glasses to pretend to betake themselves to Arms... from the groundless Imaginacon (sic) that the few Papists in Maryland and Virginia had conspired to hyre the Seneca Indians, to ye Cutting off, and totall distroying of all ye Protestants."

At the same time, the forces that were propelling the Virginia Colony into the forefront of American economic and social might – primarily the raising of tobacco based on slavery – were simultaneously making Spencer's administrative role tricky. The Virginia colony of the era was, as the eminent colonial historian Edmund S. Morgan wrote, "the volatile society." There were popular uprisings such as Bacon's Rebellion, as well as the tobacco plant-cutting riots. A communication to the Crown in 1674 noted that his opposition to the Bacon Rebellion, for instance, had taken a toll on Spencer's estates. Having done the country "very good service against the Rebells, in that hee affected part of the Country where he resided, and as wee are credibly informed, by his Correspondence here is much Impaired in his Estate by the late Rebells."

In 1682 Spencer wrote to London in the wake of the events roiling Virginia. "Bacon's Rebellion," Spencer told colonial overseers in London, "had left an itching behind it". It was "plaine" that the class tensions stirred by the Rebellion had lingered, with a "mutinous mob" subsequently engaged in "wild and extravagant" rioting, going from farm to farm, tearing tobacco plants out by their roots. The Virginia government reacted harshly with militia patrols and the promise of steep fines. The "frenzy," according to Spencer, destroyed crops on over 200 plantations, and was driven by a glutted tobacco market which had depressed prices. Even the wives, Spencer wrote, took up hoes laid down by their husbands and continued to rip out the plants. Such civil disobedience, Nicholas Spencer saw, was the price paid by colonial administrators acting the foil for the empire's merchants back home.

For an aristocratic Englishman accustomed to centuries-old protocol, the mix must have been dizzying. One can almost sense Spencer's wish for some good old-fashioned English authority when, taken with symptoms of illness, he wrote to his brother in England outlining his pains, asking him to consult an English doctor and send him the diagnosis as quickly as possible.

Nor was Spencer's role as his Colepeper cousins' agent an easy job. As landlords of an almost-feudal domain eventually encompassing over five million acres (20,000 km²) in the new colony, the Colepeper Northern Neck grant, eventually passed on to their Fairfax heirs, came to be seen by some colonists as an onerous reminder of English aristocratic privilege. In Colepeper's absence, it fell to their relation Spencer to do the heavy-lifting of collecting rents and taxes on the Colepeper barony.

In the meantime, Spencer married Frances, the daughter of Col. John Mottrom of Coan Hall of Northumberland County, Virginia. Mottrom was likely the first white settler of the Northern Neck in the early seventeenth century. He later served as the first Burgess for Northumberland in 1645, and presided over the county court for four years. Mottrom's daughter and her husband Nicholas Spencer named one of their sons, Mottrom, after John Mottrom. Another Spencer son, William, returned to England for schooling and remained there, serving as a Whig Member of Parliament for Bedfordshire. William Spencer, the son of the Virginia emigrant Nicholas, married Lady Catherine Wentworth, daughter of Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Cleveland. (Following the early death of William, his brother Nicholas Jr. returned to England to succeed to the family estates.)

Nicholas Spencer was prominent in the affairs of the Virginia colony, residing at his plantation on Nomini Creek. Westmoreland County's Cople Parish, the Anglican parish which embraced half the county, was renamed in 1668 to honor Spencer and his English birthplace at Cople. The Spencer family were connected to the Washington family in England, and later in Virginia. Col. Spencer patented the 5,000-acre (20 km2) land grant at Mount Vernon with his friend Lt. Col. John Washington in 1674, with Spencer acting as the go-between in the sale. The successful patent on the acreage was due largely to Spencer, who acted as agent for his cousin Thomas Colepeper, 2nd Baron Colepeper, who controlled the Northern Neck of Virginia, in which the tract lay.