Years later, between 1730 and 1739, Spotswood was Postmaster General for British America and, with his young friend Benjamin Franklin, extended the postal service network north of Williamsburg and improved its efficiency.

Promoted to major general, he was put in command of the colonial troops stationed in America with the task of preparing a military action against the Spanish stronghold of Cartagena de Indias, but, in Annapolis, where he was to consult with the local governors, he died suddenly in 1740.

[3] In 1684, following attacks of native Berber troops under the guide of governor Ali ben Abdallah, the city of Tangier was evacuated and the Spotswood family returned to England, where the father died in 1688.

But Duke of Marlborough, once again the winner of the battle, obtained his release by negotiating personally with the enemy, and Spotswood returned to his duties as quartermaster general to oversee the corn supply for the troops.

On April 3, Spotswood left for the Americas from the port of Spithead, in southern England, aboard the man-of-war HMS Deptford, in convoy with other British ships to ward off pirate attacks.

[7] The export of tobacco was still one of the most lucrative activities, but in recent times, due to the war against the French and the consequent closure of the Atlantic trade routes, it was not as rewarding as in the past, and overproduction had caused prices to drop.

Now, considering the low revenues, the Crown had decided to return to the old method of trade, but the Governor's Council, whose members controlled the public sale of tobacco, refused to implement the new rule.

A group of refugees from the Palatinate,[27] arrived in America in 1709 with the approval of Queen Anne following the destruction of their lands during the War of Spanish Succession,[43] had settled in the region and they had discovered deposits of silver and iron.

[26] During the assembly of the House of Burgesses following the event, Spotswood proclaimed the new king, George I of Great Britain, and claimed the results obtained during the summer: the frontier had been secured; the economy was improving and the defence costs had been reduced thanks to the building of Fort Christanna, which made it easier to control the Indians by concentrating their commercial interests in a single area, and thanks to Germanna, where mining was already a profitable activity.

The following winter, Spotswood gave each member of the expedition a miniature gold horseshoe with engraved in Latin: Sic juvat transcendere montes ("This is the way to cross the mountains").

A few months after the company's return, a humanities professor at the College of William & Mary, Arthur Blackamore wrote a short poem in Latin celebrating the expedition: Expeditio Ultramontana.

[61] At the beginning of the year 1717, a large group of influential London merchants wrote a letter to the Board of Trade declaring that the legislation promoted by Spotswood harmed the commercial interests of both the motherland and Virginia itself.

[64] In all probability, the hostility of the House of Burgesses, rather than to a genuine intention to favour trade, was due to its tendency to oppose the actions of the governor, who had been fighting for years with the representatives for the effective control of the colony.

The most determined among them was the Reverend James Blair, delegate of the Bishop of London and president of the College of William & Mary, one of the most powerful men in the colony, who had already been behind the dismissal of past governors Edmund Andros and Francis Nicholson.

[66] The reason for this opposition was once again to be found in the resistance, on the part of the Virginians, to royal prerogatives affirmed by Spotswood, who claimed for the governor the right to appoint judges in criminal trials (through procedures called oyer and terminer).

[68] In a letter sent in August 1717 to Secretary of State Joseph Addison, Spotswood reported that the only sources of concern left to impair the peace and quiet of the colony were piracy and the aggressive nature of the Indians.

One night, some Seneca or Mohawk Indians – enemies of the Catawba – entered the fort, where the governor was lying asleep, and killed some members of the delegation, who were not bearing arms as Spotswood had imposed.

Initially, the Catawba accused the British of having betrayed them and started to leave, but Spotswood, who was in danger of seeing his plans to secure the border undermined, sent a contingent to recover the abducted, reaffirmed his friendship with the Indians, and promised them greater protection.

The most famous and feared among them, Edward Teach, who went down in history as Blackbeard, had recently returned to sail the seas, having received the King's pardon and having later surrendered to the governor of North Carolina, Charles Eden, who was probably in cahoots with him.

[82] Since the assembly failed to reach a decision, the situation remained unchanged and thus Blair was the winner of the contest[83] This growing hostility of the council had already manifested itself during the previous year and Spotswood, unable to bring it under control, had tried to change its composition.

[84] The Board of Trade did not fully comply with Spotswood's requests: only two of the men he proposed were appointed and the only councillor removed, Byrd – who returned to Virginia early in 1720 – was almost immediately reinstated.

He had already obtained an accurate map of the entire western area of the Mississippi River System, hitherto virtually unknown to the British, to be used for an expedition to Lake Erie, where Spotswood intended to establish a settlement.

[90] In February 1720, Spotswood proposed to go on a secret mission to London to present these ideas to the government and to illustrate in detail how it was possible and necessary to conquer Spanish Florida by attacking the Spaniards in St. Augustine, in order to prevent the French fleet from entering the waters of the Thirteen colonies from the Gulf of Mexico.

On August 29 the conference began, and Spotswood gave the inaugural address, during which he expressed hope for the continuing collaboration between the British and the Indians and reaffirmed that the Virginia tribes had had nothing to do with the death of the three Iroquois ambassadors in Williamsburg a few months earlier.

Then he asked officially for confirmation of their commitment of the previous year to put an end to the raids in Piedmont and to respect the natural boundaries of the Blue Ridge Mountains and of the Potomac River.

During the farewell ceremony with the Indian leaders, Spotswood made a gesture of high symbolic value: he detached from the collar of his jacket a gold pin in the shape of a miniature horseshoe, like the one he had given to his companions for the Transmontane Expedition, which he used to wear as a good luck charm, and gave it to the Iroquois sachems, explaining that they could use it as a pass to go on a mission to Williamsburg.

[105] Among modern historians prevails a generally positive opinion about the Spotswood administration: brilliant and significant in its character; a strong guide in a period of economic growth and cultural development.

[4][106] Historian John Fiske, in the late nineteenth century, described Spotswood as one of the best and most capable governors of the British colonial period in America and praised him in particular for the founding of the Germanna smelting plant and for the audacity of the Transmontane Expedition.

For the other activities, mining and agriculture, Spotswood made use at first of the Palatine refugees he had introduced in Germanna almost ten years earlier, and when the contract that bound them to him expired, he resorted to slaves from Africa.

Spotswood accepted instead a less up-front mandate, which allowed him to return to projects developed during his years as governor: in 1730 he was appointed with a ten-year term Postmaster General for the thirteen colonies and the West Indies.