When Col. Alexander Spotswood arrived in Virginia as the new Lt. Governor in the summer of 1710, he met William Byrd, the owner of tracts of land known to have iron ore. Spotswood saw there were immense advantages to England in pursuing the refining of this ore. He proposed to the Assembly that they sponsor the mines and the furnace.
One advantage to the people of Virginia would have been a weakening of the dependence on the single commodity, tobacco. Virginia had all of the necessary resources, labor, iron ore, water power, and timber for making charcoal. If the ore were shipped to England, it would help there in several ways. First, they had been producing so much iron that they had consumed the trees used to make the charcoal. They were reduced to importing iron from the Baltic nations. This put them into an untentable defensive posture. During wars, their supply of iron, and naval stores also, could be limited. Also the off shore purchases hurt their trade balance.
The assembly declined to sponsor the iron mine and the furnace. There may have been some politics involved. William Byrd, who owned the land, voluteered to surrender the land if he would be given a managerial position in the operation. The Burgesses may have been voting more against Byrd than in favor of the soundness of the idea. After the Assembly turned thumbs down on the job, Spotswood wrote to the Council of Trade proposing that the Queen herself undertake this task. No favorable reply was coming from England.
The common characteristic of the Assembly and the Queen is that they had deep pockets. Spotswood knew that it would take a lot of capital or perhaps Byrd gave him estimates. A century before, the Southhampton Adventurers had raised 4,000 pounds sterling and, in the early eighteenth century in Virginia, it was proven to take about 10,000 pounds.
After the rebuff from the Assembly and the lack of a favorable response from England, Spotswood let the subject of iron drop for many years. He certainly could not afford to sponsor a mine and furnace. He lived on a modest income and his expenses were heavy. He kept about eight personal servants, such as a doctor and a private secretary. His income was small, consisting of half pay for the job of Governor (he split the pay with Lord Orkney, the Governor of Virginia).
Many years later, about 1717, Spotswood started getting interested in a personal way in iron. His comments in 1710 about iron do not represent a personal statement but are the voice of a Governor seeking an alternative to the ups and downs of the Virginia tobacco economy. Because he was a later iron industrialist, some people have thought that these early comments about iron were expressing a personal interest.
The letters of Spotswood on official business are collected in the volume, " Collections of the Virginia Historical Society ", volume 1 published in 1882. In this R.A. Brock was the editor for The Official Letters of Alexander Spotswood. Bruce P. Lenman wrote a modern article, Alexander Spotswood and the Business of Empire, in " Colonial Williamsburg ", Autumn 1990, p. 46. George Park Fisher in " The Colonial Era ", New York, 1910, p. 280 says Spotswood's salary was 800 pounds.
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