This Week in History

October 18 - 24, 1693

Lord Thomas Fairfax Becomes an American and Helps the Colonies Break Through to the West

October 22, 1693 was the birth date of Thomas Fairfax, the Sixth Baron Cameron and heir to the estates in England and Virginia of a very interesting family. The Fairfaxes were known as statesmen and soldiers who also showed talent in the literary field. The third Lord Fairfax, also a Thomas, became Commander of the New Model Army in 1645 during the English Civil War. He was superceded by Oliver Cromwell, whom Fairfax did not support because he suspected Cromwell was heading for a military dictatorship.

Fairfax resigned his commission when he was ordered to invade Scotland, and he also resigned his appointment as a judge at the subsequent trial of King Charles I, when he realized that the king's execution had been predetermined. This Thomas Fairfax was also responsible for saving the priceless contents of the Bodleian Library when it was threatened with destruction during the Civil War.

The Thomas Fairfax born in 1693 was only sixteen years old when his father died. He succeeded to the title of Baron Cameron only a few days before he was to leave for college at Oxford. According to contemporary accounts, most students at the Oxford of that time lived a riotous, pleasure-seeking life, but although Thomas Fairfax was sociable, he studied seriously and became known for his accomplishments in literature. It is said he contributed an article to "The Spectator," a well-known literary magazine which also printed many articles by Jonathan Swift.

Thomas's mother, Lady Fairfax, was active in Whig circles in England, and the unofficial leader of those circles was Jonathan Swift, recognized today for his brilliant satires, but less known for his activities as a statesman. Swift and his circle had succeeded, during the reign of Queen Anne, in freeing England from the "perpetual war" policy of the Venetian Party and its leader, the Duke of Marlborough. Swift was also able to see that the colonies of Virginia and New York/New Jersey received able governors who promoted the development of the colonies, and supported their attempts to break through the Appalachian Mountains to the fertile lands of the Ohio Valley.

When Thomas Fairfax left college, Swift's circles were battling a new threat. This was the return to power in England of the Venetian Party's Robert Walpole, a man so corrupt that he was popularly known as "Bob Booty." Walpole had coined, so to speak, the phrase "Every man has his price," and he proceeded to demonstrate it by bribing the Commons, the Lords, and even the King. Walpole was also an inveterate enemy of any attempt to develop the American colonies beyond an existence as coastal depots for exporting raw materials to England.

As soon as Walpole became prime minister in 1721, Thomas Fairfax, an anti-Walpole Whig, was thrown out of his post as Deputy to the Treasurer of the King's Chamber. Fairfax was able to obtain a commission as Cornet in the Royal Regiment of Horse Guards, commanded by the anti-Walpole Marquis of Winchester.

During this time, Fairfax was trying to administer his family's English estates while dealing with a clone of Robert Walpole in America.

This second embodiment of greed was Robert "King" Carter, who had been appointed many years previously to oversee the Fairfax Proprietary in Virginia.

This proprietary, like William Penn's in Pennsylvania, was nominally under the British Crown, but was administered by the Fairfax Barons under a grant from the King. The Northern Neck Proprietary, as the Fairfax Grant was called, extended from the western shore of Chesapeake Bay up the peninsula between the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers. In 1688, King James II had amended the grant to state that the grant went westward as far as the "first heads or springs" of those two rivers.

This was a very crucial statement, for the Fairfax lands extended northwestward like an arrow toward the Ohio River, and that was where the colonists would have to go to be able to extend their settlements across the continent. But King Carter had marked out huge tracts of Fairfax lands for himself, his family, and his cronies, and used them as a speculative investment, not for the development of farms and towns. As a result, settlers wanting to move west had to leapfrog over Carter's huge and empty holdings, leaving the pioneers with no infrastructure or military support immediately behind them. And the Virginia Council, of which Carter was a member, was pressing London to declare that the Potomac River only extended to its confluence with the Shenandoah River, not to the high Allegheny Mountains.

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