a
limited fashion. This was one of the benefits--to the frontiersmen--of
living under English law. The government could not effectively restrain
the Englishman nor protect the Indian. As a result the reckless
expansion went on into the lands of other tribes. As each new Indian
tribe was reached the same dismal pattern of subjugation or extirpation
was repeated, despite the efforts of the Governor and Council to see
that the rights of the Indians were preserved.

Every extension of settlement strengthened local rule. In May 1652 the
people of Northampton County, which comprised the whole of the Eastern
Shore of Virginia, protested to the Assembly against a tax levied on
them, asserting that since they had not sent representatives to the
Assembly since 1647, except for one Burgess in 1651, they did not think
the Assembly could tax them. They asked that they be allowed to have a
separate government and the right to try all causes in their own courts.
Although Northampton was not allowed to dissociate itself entirely from
the rest of Virginia, acts of 1654 and 1656 allowed the county to
constitute laws and customs for itself on matters dealing with Indians
and manufactures.

Virginia's most important frontier region in the 1650's was the area
along the Potomac River, although settlement went on simultaneously
westward up the James, York, and Rappahannock, southward into Carolina,
and northward up the Eastern Shore to Maryland. Sometimes individuals
obtained grants to explore, settle, and monopolize the trade of these
regions. But usually the expansion was catch as catch can. Since land
travel was still more difficult than water travel, expansion up the
Potomac, the last great unsettled tidewater river, was fastest.
Individuals who already had plantations in the older areas of settlement
around Jamestown sailed their barques up the Potomac and, without
bothering to go ashore, took the bounds of likely pieces of land. The
best spots were often the corn fields of the Indians and sometimes the
very towns where they lived. The fact that the Indians occupied the land
counted for little in the thoughts of the settlers and speculators who
flocked to the area. Following their surveys, the explorers rushed back
to James City and put in claims for the waterfront acreages, presenting
one "headright"--proof that someone had been imported into the colony by
their agency--for every fifty acres. The Patent Books of the colony
frequently