This spirit had not always been displayed towards the importing merchants. Their unconscionable dealings became at an early date the subject of legislative denunciation. To such a point were these exactions carried in 1628, that a large number of colonists, as we have seen, united in exporting their own tobacco to England and there exchanging it for the articles they required, instead of passing it into the hands of the English traders in return for goods at exorbitant charges. So great was the unpopularity of this class as late in the century as 1672, that during the course of the attack which the Dutch, then at war with England, made upon the fleet of vessels, which in that year were bound out of James River with heavy cargoes on board, the planters were not anxious to furnish assistance, alleging in excuse the oppressions of the owners of the cargoes.[1] The fault, however, did not lie entirely on the side of the latter. In the year 1632, when such a dearth of manufactured supplies prevailed in Virginia that vessels loaded with grain and tobacco had to be sent out to procure them from other Colonies, Captain Tucker, a leading trader, was accused of instructing his factors to sell only at the highest rates; this he denied, claiming that the planters were already deeply in his debt for goods advanced them, and that he was not justified in incurring the risk of additional loss, since there was already no profit in the prices at which his agents were selling.
It was the most common ground of complaint against the merchants that they insisted on holding buyers to the payment of the quantity of tobacco agreed upon, notwith-
- ↑ Governor and Council to King, July 16, 1672, British State Papers, Colonial, vol. XXX; Winder Papers, vol. I, p. 265, Va. State Library.
