Page:Encyclopedia of Virginia Biography volume 1.djvu/91

 COLONIAL PRESIDENTS AND GOVERNORS

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tlie island of Derniuda, which position he held till 1738, when in recognition of his exposing a long practiced system of fraud in the col- lecting of the customs of the West India Islands, he received the appointment of "sur- veyor-general of customs in the southern parts of the continent of America."" He was named as his predecessors had been a member of all the councils of the American colonies. Though his claim to sit in the \'irginia council was resisted by the councillors, the board of trade in May, 1742, ordered that the royal purpose should be enforced. On August 17, 1746, he was specially commissioned inspector general to examine into the duties of the collector of customs of the Island of Barbadoes. In the discharge of his duties he exposed a great defalcation in the revenues there. In 1749 he appears to have resided in London as a merchant engaged in trade with the colonies. He was appointed lieutenant-governor of \'ir- ginia, July 29, 1751 and with his wnfe Rebecca nee Affleck and two daughters, Elizabeth and Rebecca, arrived in the colony November 20, 1 75 1. His administration began rather inaus- picuously, as he almost immediately fell into altercation with the house of burgesses over the fee of a pistole which he required for issuing patents. A similar fee had been exacted b\ Lord Culpeper many years before, and the remonstrance of the assembly had caused the king to forbid its collection. The Virginians regarded the present fee as a tax, and they sent John Randolph to England to represent their cause. The board of trade, after hearing the argument on both sides, recommended a com- promise, and the fee w^as only permitted to be charged for large grants of land, and for none whatever beyond the mountains, where nearly all the ungranted land lay at this time.

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This altercation had an important influence upon the endeavors of Dinwiddie in another direction. Dinwiddie had become a member of the Ohio Company and he had a direct in- terest in the destinies of the western coun- try. W hen. therefore, the French began to plant settlements on the Ohio and occupied \'enango, an Indian trading post at the junc- tion of the Alleghany river and French creek, Dinwiddie sent (ieorge Washington to pro- test to the l'>ench commandant at Fort Le Boeuf. When no satisfactory answer was brought back, he sent orders to Captain Wil- liam Trent to build) a log fort at the junction of the .Alleghany and Monongahela, where Pittsburgh now stands. This position was considered on all hands as the key to the situation in the West. The French were not long in driving the Virginians out and occupy- ing the post themselves. While this was occurring, Washington with some 300 troops was marching to the assistance of Trent, when meeting with a scouting party of the French he attacked and killed some twenty of them, with a loss of only one man. This w^as the beginning of a war which was to spread prac- tically over the whole civilized world. Din- widdie more than any one else realized the sit- uation, and he displayed prodigious energy in his efTorts to arouse the British government and the colonists to the importance of the crisis. The home government was slow to move and the other colonies generally were indifferent, as was the Virginia assembly itself, who distrusting the purposes of Dinwiddie and deeming him too precipitate w'ould not grant the money asked for, except on condi- tions calculated to humble the pride of the governor. So during the time that Dinwiddie held the government of Virginia, the war with