CHAPTER XIV.

SOCIETY IN THE OLD DOMINION.

[Sidenote: Tobacco and liberty.]

A learned son of Old Virginia, who is fond of wrapping up a bookful of meaning in a single pithy sentence, has declared that “a true history of tobacco would be the history of English and American liberty.” This remark occurs near the beginning of Mr. Moncure Conway’s dainty volume printed for the Grolier Club, entitled “Barons of the Potomack and the Rappahannock.” When construed liberally, as all such sweeping statements need to be, it contains a kernel of truth. It was tobacco that planted an English nation in Virginia, and made a corporation in London so rich and powerful as to become a formidable seminary of sedition: it was the desire to monopolize the tobacco trade that induced Charles I. to recognize the House of Burgesses; discontent with the Navigation Act and its effect upon the tobacco trade was potent among the causes of Bacon’s Rebellion; and so on down to the eve of Independence, when Patrick Henry won his first triumph in the famous Parson’s Cause, in which the price of tobacco furnished the bone of contention, the Indian weed has been strangely implicated with the history of political freedom.

Furthermore, when we reflect upon the splendid part played by Virginia in winning American independence and bringing into existence the political framework of our Federal Republic; when we recollect that of the five founders of this nation who were foremost in constructive work--Washington, Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, and Marshall--four were Virginians,--it becomes interesting to go back and study the social features of the community in which such leaders of men were produced. The economic basis of that community was the cultivation of tobacco on large plantations, and from that single economic circumstance resulted most of the social features which we have now to pass in review.

[Sidenote: Rapid growth of tobacco culture.]

[Sidenote: Attempts to check it.]

We have seen in a previous chapter how important was the cultivation of tobacco in setting the infant colony at Jamestown upon its feet in 1614 and the following years. In the rapid development of the colony during the reign of Charles I. other kinds of agriculture thrived, there were good crops of wheat, and Indian corn was exported. But tobacco culture increased rapidly and steadily until in the latter part of the century it nearly extinguished all other kinds of activity, except the raising of domestic animals and vegetables needed for food. Long before this result was reached, the tendency was deplored by the colonists themselves. To use a modern political phrase, it was “viewed with alarm.” This is quite intelligible. “We know now that tobacco, though not strictly a necessary of life, is one of those articles whose consumption may be looked on as certain and permanent. In the seventeenth century, men could hardly be blamed if they regarded the use of tobacco as a precarious fashion.”[123] It was also felt that in case of war it would be dangerous for Virginia to be forced to rely upon importing the manufactured necessaries of life. Moreover, the absorption of the colony’s industry in the production of a single staple made it especially easy for the home government to depress that industry by stupid legislation, as in the reign of Charles II., when the Navigation Act so seriously diminished the purchasing power of tobacco. For these various reasons many attempts were made to check the cultivation of the Indian weed. The legislation of the seventeenth century was full of instances. It was attempted to establish rival industries and to produce silk, cotton, and iron; laws were made forbidding any planter to raise more than 2,000 plants in one year’s crop, and so on. All such attempts proved futile; in spite of everything that could be done, tobacco drove all competitors from the field.

[Sidenote: Need for cheap labour.]

[Sidenote: Indented white servants.]

This tobacco was generally cultivated upon large estates. The policy of making extensive grants of land as an inducement to settlers was begun at an early date, and all that was needed to develop the system was an abundance of cheap labour. English yeomanry, such as came to New England, was too intelligent and enterprising to furnish the right sort. English yeomanry, coming to Virginia, came to own estates for itself, not to work them for others. It soon became necessary to have recourse to servile labour. We have seen negro slaves first brought into the colony from Africa in 1619, but their numbers increased very slowly, and it was only toward the end of the century that they began to be numerous. In the early period the demand for servile labour was supplied from other sources. Convicted criminals were sent over in great numbers from the mother country, as in later times they were sent to Botany Bay. On their arrival they were indented as servants for a term of years. Kidnapping was also at that time in England an extensive and lucrative business. Young boys and girls, usually but not always of the lowest class of society, were seized by press-gangs on the streets of London and Bristol and other English seaports, hurried on board ship, and carried over to Virginia to work on the plantations or as house servants. These poor wretches were not, indeed, sold into hopeless slavery, but they passed into a state of servitude which might be prolonged indefinitely by avaricious or cruel masters. The period of their indenture was short,--usually not more than four years; but the ordinary penalty for serious offences, such as were very likely to be committed, was a lengthening of the time during which they were to serve. Among such offences the most serious were insubordination or attempts to escape, while of a more venial character were thievery, or unchaste conduct,[124] or attempts to make money on their own account. Their lives were in theory protected by law, but where an indented servant came to his death from prolonged ill-usage, or from excessive punishment, or even from sudden violence, it was not easy to get a verdict against the master. In those days of frequent flogging, the lash was inflicted upon the indented servant with scarcely less compunction than upon the purchased slave; and in general the condition of the former seems to have been nearly as miserable as that of the latter, save that the servitude of the negro was perpetual, while that of the white man was pretty sure to come to an end. For him, Pandora’s box had not quite spilled out the last of its contents.

[Sidenote: Notion that Virginians are descended from convicts.]

In England the notion presently grew up that the aristocracy of Virginia was recruited from the ranks of these kidnapped paupers and convicts. This impression may have originated in statements, based upon real but misconstrued facts, such as we find in Defoe’s widely read stories, “Moll Flanders”[125] and “Colonel Jack.” So, too, in Mrs. Aphra Behn’s comedy, “The Widow Ranter, or, The History of Bacon in Virginia,” one of the personages, named Hazard, sails to Virginia, and on arriving at Jamestown suddenly meets an old acquaintance, named Friendly, whereupon the following conversation ensues:--

_Hazard._ This unexpected happiness o’erjoys me. Who could have imagined to have found thee in Virginia?...

_Friendly._ My uncle dying here left me a considerable plantation.... But prithee what chance (fortunate to me) drove thee to this part of the New World?

_Hazard._ Why, ’faith, ill company and that common vice of the town, gaming.... I had rather starve abroad than live pitied and despised at home.

_Friendly._ Would [the new governor] were landed; we hear he is a noble gentleman.

_Hazard._ He has all the qualities of a gallant man. Besides, he is nobly born.

_Friendly._ This country wants nothing but to be peopled with a well-born race to make it one of the best colonies in the world; but for want of a governor we are ruled by a council, some of whom have been perhaps transported criminals, who having acquired great estates are now become Your Honour and Right Worshipful, and possess all places of authority.[126]

[Sidenote: Malachy Postlethwayt.]

[Sidenote: Dr. Johnson.]

It is not only in novels and plays, however, that we encounter such statements. Malachy Postlethwayt, author of several valuable and scholarly treatises on commerce, tells us: “Even your transported felons, sent to Virginia instead of Tyburn, thousands of them, if we are not misinformed, have, by turning their hands to industry and improvement, and (which is best of all) to honesty, become rich, substantial planters and merchants, settled large families, and been famous in the country; nay, we have seen many of them made magistrates, officers of militia, captains of good ships, and masters of good estates.”[127] Either from the study of Postlethwayt, or perhaps simply from reading “Moll Flanders,” we may suppose that Dr. Johnson got the notion to which he gave vent in 1769 when quite out of patience because the ministry seemed ready to make some concessions to the Americans. “Why, they are a race of convicts,” cried the irate doctor, “and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging!”[128] Thus we witness the progress of generalization: first it is some Virginians that are jail-birds, or offspring of jail-birds, then it is all Virginians, finally it is all Americans. A few years ago, in the time of our Civil War, one used to find this grotesque notion still surviving in occasional polite statements of European newspapers, informing their readers that the citizens of the United States are the “offspring of the vagabonds and felons of Europe.”[129]

[Sidenote: The real question.]

The statement of the worthy Postlethwayt seems based partly on observation, partly on information, and has unquestionably been the source of inferences much more sweeping than facts will sustain. In order to arrive at clear views of the subject, we must distinguish between two questions:--

1. What sort of people, on the whole, were the indented white servants in Virginia?

2. How far did they ever succeed, as freedmen, in attaining to high social position in the colony?

[Sidenote: Redemptioners.]

In answering the first question, a mere reference to “felons” and “convicts” will carry us but little way. A considerable proportion of the indented white servants were poor but honest persons who sold themselves into slavery for a brief term to defray the cost of the voyage from England. The ship-owner received from the planter the passage-money in the shape of tobacco, and in exchange he handed over the passenger to be the planter’s servant until the debt was wiped out. Indented servants of this class were known as “redemptioners,” and many of them were eminently industrious and of excellent character. Such redemptioners came in large numbers to Virginia, Maryland, and the middle colonies, and much more rarely to New England, where the demand for any kind of servile labour was but small.

[Sidenote: Punishments for crime.]

Again, among the transported convicts were many who had been sentenced to death for what would now be considered trivial offences; the poor woman who stole a joint of meat to relieve her starving children was not necessarily a hardened criminal, yet if the price of the joint were more than a shilling she incurred the death penalty. For counterfeiting a lottery ticket, or for personating the holder of a stock and receiving the dividends due upon it, the punishment was the same as for wilful murder.[130] The favourite remedy prescribed in law was the gallows, as in medicine the lancet. Yet many judges and officers of state were conscious of the excessive severity of the system, and welcomed the device of sending the less hardened offenders out of the kingdom instead of putting them to death. There is reason for believing that murderers, burglars, and highwaymen continued to be summarily sent to Tyburn, while for offences of a lighter sort and in cases with extenuating circumstances the death penalty was often commuted to transportation. As a rule it was not the worst sort of offenders who were sent to the colonies.

[Sidenote: Number and distribution of convicts.]

The practice of sending rogues beyond sea began soon after the founding of Virginia, and continued until it was cut short in America by the War of Independence; thereafter the Australasian colonies were made a receptacle for them until the practice came to an end soon after the middle of the nineteenth century. It has been estimated that between 1717 and 1775 not less than 10,000 “involuntary emigrants” were sent from the Old Bailey alone;[131] and possibly the total number sent to America from the British islands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries may have been as high as 50,000.[132] In the lists of such offenders their particular destinations are apt to be very loosely and carelessly indicated; the name Virginia, for example, is often used so vaguely as to include the West Indies.[133] The destinations most commonly specified are Virginia, Maryland, Barbadoes, and Jamaica, but it is certain that all English colonies outside of New England received considerable numbers of convicts. Very few were brought to New England, because the demand for such labour was less than elsewhere, and therefore the prisoners would not fetch so high a price.[134] Stringent laws were made against bringing in such people. In 1700 Massachusetts enacted that every master of a ship arriving with passengers must hand to the custom-house officer a written certificate of the “name, character, and circumstances” of each passenger, under penalty of a fine of £5 for every name omitted; and the custom-house officer was obliged to deliver to the town clerk the full list of names with the accompanying certificates.[135] The existence of this wholesome statute indicates that undesirable persons had been brought into the colony; and the reënactment of it in 1722, with the fine raised from £5 to £100, is clear proof that the nuisance was not yet abated. Nevertheless, partly because of such vigilant measures of prevention, but much more because of the economic reason above alleged, the four New England colonies received but few convicts.

[Sidenote: Prisoners of war.]

A very different class of transported persons consisted of those who were not criminals at all, but merely political offenders, or even prisoners of war. For example, of the Scotch prisoners taken at Dunbar in 1650, Cromwell sent about 150 to Boston. The next year orders were issued for sending 1,610 of the Worcester captives to Virginia, but very few of them seem to have arrived there.[136] In 1652 a party of 272 men captured at Worcester were landed in Boston, but so small was the demand for their labour that they were soon exported southward,--perhaps to the West Indies in exchange for sugar or rum. After the restoration of the monarchy so many non-conformists were sold into servitude in Virginia as to lead to an insurrection in 1663, followed by legislation designed to keep all convicts out of the colony.[137] On the whole, the number of political offenders brought to those colonies that have since become the United States was certainly much smaller than the number of criminal convicts, while the latter were in all probability much less numerous than the redemptioners. During the seventeenth century the demand for wholesale servile white labour was much greater in Virginia and Maryland than elsewhere, and there are many indications that they received more convicts and redemptioners than the other colonies. In the eighteenth century, however, the middle colonies, especially Pennsylvania, probably received at least as large a share.

[Sidenote: Careers of white freedmen.]

[Sidenote: Representative Virginia families are not descended from white freedmen.]

Our survey shows that in the class of indented white servants there was a wide range of gradation, from thrifty redemptioners[138] and gallant rebels at the one extreme down to ruffians and pickpockets at the other. Bearing this in mind, we come to our second question, How far did white freedmen succeed in attaining to high social position in such a colony as Virginia? There is no doubt that, as Postlethwayt declares, some of the best of them did work their way up to the ownership of plantations. In the seventeenth century they were occasionally elected to the House of Burgesses. The composition of that assembly for 1654 affords an interesting example. One of the two members for Warwick was the worthy Samuel Mathews, soon to be elected governor; and one of the four members for Charles City was Major Abraham Wood, who, as a child of ten years, had been brought from England in 1620, and had been a servant of Mathews. John Trussel, the member for Northumberland, and William Worlidge, one of the two members for Elizabeth City, had been servants brought over in 1622, aged respectively nineteen and eighteen.[139] Whether these lads had been offenders against the law does not appear, nor do we know whether the child had come with parents not mentioned, or as the victim of kidnappers. We only know that all three were servants,[140] and, if the word is to be understood in the ordinary sense, it was much to their credit that they rose to be burgesses. Cases of ordinary indented servants thus rising were certainly exceptional in the seventeenth century, and still more so in the eighteenth. Nothing can be more certain than that the representative families of Virginia were not descended from convicts, or from indented servants of any sort. Although family records were until of late less carefully preserved than in New England, yet the registered facts abundantly prove that the leading families had precisely the same sort of origin as the leading families in New England. For the most part they were either country squires, or prosperous yeomen, or craftsmen from the numerous urban guilds; and alike in Virginia and in New England there was a similar proportion of persons connected with English families ennobled or otherwise eminent for public service.

[Sidenote: Some white freedmen became small proprietors.]

As for the white freedmen, those of the better sort often acquired small estates, while some became overseers of white servants and black slaves. The kind of life which they led is described in Defoe’s “Colonel Jack” with that great writer’s customary minuteness of information. The class of small proprietors always remained in Virginia, and included many other persons beside freedmen. With the increasing tendency toward the predominance of great estates in tidewater Virginia, there was a tendency for the smaller proprietors to move westward into the Piedmont region or southward into North Carolina, as will appear in the next chapter.

[Sidenote: Some became “mean whites.”]

While it was true that “the convicts ... sometimes prove very worthy creatures and entirely forsake their former follies,”[141] it was also true that many of them “have been and are the poorest, idlest, and worst of mankind, the refuse of Great Britain and Ireland, and the outcast of the people.”[142] These degraded freedmen were apt to be irreclaimable vagabonds. According to Bishop Meade, they gave the vestrymen a great deal of trouble. “The number of illegitimate children born of them and thrown upon the parish led to much action on the part of the vestries and the legislature. The lower order of persons in Virginia in a great measure sprang from those apprenticed servants and from poor exiled culprits. It is not wonderful that there should have been much debasement of character among the poorest population, and that the negroes of the first families should always have considered themselves a more respectable class. To this day [1857] there are many who look upon poor white folks (for so they call them) as much beneath themselves; and, in truth, they are so in many respects.”[143] Indeed, the fact that manual labour was a badge of servitude, while the white freedmen of degraded type were by nature and experience unfitted to perform any work of a higher sort, was of itself enough to keep them from doing any work at all, unless driven by impending starvation. As manual labour came to be more and more entirely relegated to men of black and brown skins, this wretched position of the mean whites grew worse and worse. The negro slave might take a certain sort of pride in belonging to the grand establishment of a powerful or wealthy master, and from this point of view society might be said to have a place for him, even though he possessed no legal rights. There was no such haven of security for the mean whites. If the negro was like a Sudra, they were simply Pariahs. Crimes against person and property were usually committed by persons of this class. They were loungers in taverns and at horse-races, earning a precarious livelihood, or violent death by gambling and thieving; or else they withdrew from the haunts of civilization to lead half-savage lives in the backwoods. In these people we may recognize a strain of the English race which has not yet on American soil become extinct or absorbed. There can be little doubt that the white freedmen of degraded type were the progenitors of a considerable portion of what is often called the “white trash” of the South. Originating in Virginia and Maryland, the greater part of it seems to have been gradually sifted out by migration to wilder regions westward and southward, much to the relief of those colonies. As to the probable manner of its distribution, something will be said in the next chapter.

[Sidenote: Development of negro slavery; treaty of Utrecht.]

[Sidenote: Anti-slavery sentiment in Virginia.]

Long before the end of the seventeenth century, Virginia and Maryland had begun to protest against the policy of sending criminals from England,[144] and as negro slaves became more numerous white servitude was greatly diminished. The rapid increase of negroes began toward the end of the century, and an immense impetus was given it by the _asiento_ clause of the treaty of Utrecht in 1713. By way of indemnifying herself for the cost of the War of the Spanish Succession, victorious England bade Spain and France keep their hands off from Africa, while she monopolized for herself the slave-trade. We are reminded by Mr. Lecky that this was the one clause in the treaty that seemed to give the most general satisfaction; and while an eminent prelate affixed his name to the treaty and a magnificent _Te Deum_ by Handel was sung in the churches, it occurred to nobody to denounce as unchristian a national scheme for kidnapping thousands of black men and selling them into slavery.[145] Before 1713 the part which English ships had taken in the slave-trade was comparatively small; and it is curious now to look back and think how Marlborough and Eugene at Blenheim were unconsciously cutting out work for Grant and Sherman at Vicksburg. In 1700 there were probably 60,000 Englishmen and 6,000 negroes in Virginia; by 1750 there were probably 250,000 whites and 250,000 blacks, while during that same half century the peopling of the Carolinas was rapidly going on.[146] This portentous increase of the slave population presently began to awaken serious alarm in Virginia. Attempts were made to restrict the importation of negroes, and at the time of the Revolutionary War the humanitarian spirit of the eighteenth century showed itself in the rise of a party in favour of emancipation. In 1784 Thomas Jefferson announced the principle upon which Abraham Lincoln was elected to the presidency in 1860, the prohibition of slavery in the national domain; Jefferson attempted to embody this principle in an ordinance for establishing territorial government west of the Alleghanies. In 1787 George Mason denounced the “infernal traffic” in flesh and blood with phrases quite like those which his grandchildren were to resent when they fell from the lips of Wendell Phillips. The life of the anti-slavery party in Virginia was short. After the abolition of the African slave-trade in 1808 had increased the demand for Virginia-bred slaves in the states farther south, the very idea of emancipation faded out of memory.

[Sidenote: Theory that negroes were non-human.]

I have already remarked upon the approval with which negro slavery was by many people regarded in the days of Queen Elizabeth. To bring black heathen within the pale of Christian civilization was deemed a meritorious business.[147] But there were people who took a lower and coarser view of the matter. They denied that the negro was strictly human; it was therefore useless to try to make him a Christian, but it was right to make him a beast of burden, like asses and oxen.[148] This point of view was illustrated in the remark made by a lady of Barbadoes, noted for her exemplary piety, to Godwyn, the able author of “The Negro’s and Indian’s Advocate;” she told him that “he might as well baptize puppies as negroes.”[149] This line of thought was pursued to all sorts of grotesque conclusions. Some held that mulattoes were made half human by the infusion of white blood, and might accordingly be baptized. Others deemed it poor economy to baptize the slave, since it would be incumbent on the master to feed Christians better than heathen, and so flog them less. And there were yet others who had heard the doctrine that Christians ought not to be held in bondage, and feared lest baptism should be judged equivalent to emancipation.[150] This notion was at first so prevalent in Virginia that in 1667 it was enacted: “Whereas some doubts have risen whether children that are slaves by birth, and by the charity and piety of their owners made partakers of the blessed sacrament of baptisme, should by vertue of their baptisme be made ffree; It is enacted and declared by this grand assembly and the authority thereof, that the conferringe of baptisme doth not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or ffreedom; that diverse masters, ffreed from this doubt, may more carefully endeavour the propagation of christianity by permitting children, though, slaves, or those of greater growth if capable, to be admitted to that sacrament.”[151]

[Sidenote: Negroes as real estate.]

During the seventeenth century the slave was regarded as personal property, but a curious statute of 1705 declared him to be for most purposes a kind of real estate. He could be sold, however, without the registry of a deed; he could be recovered by an action of trover; and he was not reckoned a part of the property qualification which entitled his master to the political privileges of a freeholder.[152]

[Sidenote: Taxes on slaves.]

In the system of taxation white servants and negro slaves played an important part. The primary tax upon all landholders was the quit-rent of a shilling for every fifty acres, payable at Michaelmas. This quit-rent was at first collected in the name of the Company, but after 1624 in the King’s name; and the proceeds were devoted to various public uses. It was always an unpopular tax, inasmuch as there was no feasible way (as now-a-days with our blessed tariffs) of making dullards believe that “the foreigner paid it,” and there were frequent complaints of delinquency. Another tax was the duty of two shillings upon every hogshead of tobacco exported. A third was the tax upon slaves and servants. At the close of the seventeenth century adult negroes were valued at from £25 to £40, and children at £10 or £12; there seems to have been little if any difference between the prices of men and women.[153] The taxation of slave property was equitable, inasmuch as it bore most heavily upon those best able to pay.

[Sidenote: Treatment of slaves.]

It is generally admitted that the treatment of slaves by their masters was mild and humane. There were instances of cruelty, of course. Cruelty forever lurks as a hideous possibility in the mildest system of slavery; it is part of its innermost essence. In every community there are brutes unfit to have the custody of their fellow-creatures. Such a ruffian was the Rev. Samuel Gray, who had his runaway black boy tied to a tree and flogged to death. Separation of families also occurred, though much less frequently than in later times. But cases of cruelty were on the whole rare. The cultivation of tobacco was not such a drain upon human life as the cultivation of sugar in the West Indies, or the raising of indigo and rice in South Carolina. It created a kind of patriarchal society in which the master felt a genuine interest in the welfare of his slaves. “The solicitude exhibited by John Page of York was not uncommon: in his will he instructed his heirs to provide for the old age of all the negroes who descended to them from him, with as much care in point of food, clothing, and other necessaries as if they were still capable of the most profitable labour.”[154] The historian, Robert Beverley, writing in 1705, tells us that “the male servants and the slaves of both sexes are employed together in tilling and manuring the ground, in sowing and planting corn, tobacco, etc. Some distinction indeed is made between them in their clothes and food; but the work of both is no other than what the overseers, the freemen, and the planters themselves do.... And I can assure you with a great deal of truth that generally their slaves are not worked near so hard, nor so many hours in a day, as the husbandmen and day-labourers in England.” As for cruelty, he exclaims, with honest fervour, “no people more abhor the thoughts of such usage than the Virginians, nor take more precaution to prevent it.”[155]

[Sidenote: Fears of insurrection.]

[Sidenote: Cruel laws.]

Nevertheless, a state of enforced servitude is something which human nature does not willingly endure. A slave-holding community must provide for catching runaways and suppressing or preventing insurrections. It is one of the remarkable facts in American history that there have been so few insurrections of negroes. There have been, however, occasional instances and symptoms which have kept slave-owners in dread and given rise to harsh legislation. In 1687 a conspiracy among the blacks on the Northern Neck was detected just in time to prevent the explosion.[156] In 1710 a similar plot in Surry County was betrayed by one of the conspirators, whom the assembly proceeded to reward by giving him his freedom with permission to remain in the colony.[157] The fears engendered by such discoveries are revealed in the statute book. Slaves were not allowed to be absent from their plantations without a ticket-of-leave signed by their master. The negro who could not show such a passport must receive twenty lashes, and was liable to be treated as a fugitive or “outlying” slave. Such runaways were formally outlawed; a proclamation issued by two justices of the peace was read on the next Sunday by the parish clerk from the door of every church in the county, after which anybody might seize the fugitive and bring him home, or kill him if he made any resistance. In the latter event the master was indemnified from the public funds. At the discretion of the county court, such mutilation might be inflicted upon the outlying negro as to protect white women against the horrible crime which then as now he was prone to commit.[158] In 1701 we find an act of the assembly directed against “one negro man named Billy,” who “has severall years unlawfully absented himselfe from his masters services, lying out and lurking in obscure places, ... devouring and destroying stocks and crops, robing the houses of and committing and threatening other injuryes to severall of his majestye’s good and leige people.” It was enacted that whosoever should bring in the said Billy alive or dead should receive a thousand pounds of tobacco in reward, and if dead, his master’s loss should be repaired with four thousand pounds. Anybody who should aid or harbour Billy was to be adjudged guilty of felony.[159] No penalty was attached to the murder of a slave by his master; but if he were killed by any one else, the master could recover his value, just as in case of damage done to a dog or a horse. Slaves were not allowed to have fire-arms or other weapons in their possession; “and whereas many negroes, under pretence of practising physic, have prepared and exhibited poisonous medicines, by which many persons have been murdered, and others have languished under long and tedious indispositions, and it will be difficult to detect such pernicious and dangerous practices if they should be permitted to exhibit any sort of medicine,” it was enacted that any slave who should prepare or administer any medicine whatsoever, save with the full knowledge and consent of the master or mistress, should suffer death.[160] The testimony of a slave could not be received in court except when one of his own race was on trial for life; then, if he should be found to testify falsely, he was to stand for an hour with one ear nailed to the pillory, and then be released by slicing off the ear; the same process was then repeated with the other ear, after which the ceremony was finished at the whipping-post with nine-and-thirty lashes on the bare back, “well laid on.”[161] Stealing a slave from a plantation was a capital offence.[162] No master was allowed to emancipate one of his slaves, except for meritorious services, in which case he must obtain a license from the governor and council. If a slave were set free without such a license, the church-wardens could forthwith arrest him and sell him at auction, appropriating the proceeds for the parish funds, and thereby lightening the taxes.[163] When a license was granted, the master received the usual indemnity, and by an act of 1699 the freedman was required to quit the colony within six months;[164] for obviously the presence of a large number of free blacks in the same community with their enslaved brethren was a source of danger. They were apt, moreover, to become receivers of stolen goods, and their shiftless habits made them paupers.[165] Nevertheless there were some free negroes in the colony, and at one time they even appear to have had the privilege of voting, for an act of 1723 deprived them of it; but no free negroes, whether men or women, were exempt from taxation.[166]

[Sidenote: Taking slaves to England.]

[Sidenote: Lord Mansfield’s decision.]

Since gentlemen from the North American colonies and from the West Indies not unfrequently visited England, and sometimes remained there for months or years, it was quite natural that they should take with them household slaves to whose personal attendance they were accustomed. In course of time the question thus arose whether the arrival of a slave upon the free soil of England worked his emancipation. According to Virginia law it did not.[167] The opinion expressed in 1729 by Lord Talbot, the attorney-general, and supported by Lord Hardwicke, agreed with the Virginia theory. These eminent lawyers held that mere arrival in England was not enough to free a slave without some specific act of emancipation, but Chief Justice Holt expressed a contrary opinion. Meanwhile masters kept carrying negroes to London until in 1764 the “Gentleman’s Magazine” asserted (surely with wild exaggeration) that no less than 20,000 were domiciled there. Escape was so easy for them that their owners felt obliged to put collars on them, duly inscribed with name and address. In 1685 the “London Gazette” advertised Colonel Kirke’s runaway black boy, upon whose silver collar the colonel’s arms and cipher were engraved; in 1728 the “Daily Journal” informs us that a stray negro has on his collar the inscription, “My Lady Bromfield’s black in Lincoln’s Inn Fields;” and in the “London Advertiser,” 1756, a goldsmith in Westminster announces that he makes “silver padlocks for Blacks’ or Dogs’ collars.” Colonel Kirke and Lady Bromfield were not American visitors, but residents in London, and there is evidence, not abundant but sufficient, that negroes were now and then bought and sold there for household service. When the forger John Rice was hanged at Tyburn in 1763, his effects were sold at auction, and a black boy brought £32. A similar sale at Richmond in 1771 was mentioned in terms of severe condemnation by the “Stamford Mercury.”[168] However the English people may have sanctioned the establishment of slavery beyond sea, they were not disposed to tolerate it at home; and in the sixty years withal since the treaty of Utrecht, the public conscience had grown tender on the subject. The days of Clarkson and Wilberforce were at hand. A cry was raised by the press, a test case was brought before the King’s Bench, and in 1772 Lord Mansfield pronounced the immortal decision that “as soon as a slave sets foot on the soil of the British islands he becomes free.”

[Sidenote: Jefferson on slavery.]

It is not long after this that we find Thomas Jefferson--himself the kindest of masters, and familiar with slavery in its mild Virginia form--thus writing about it: “The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it.... The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.... With the morals of the people their industry also is destroyed. For in a warm climate no man will labour for himself who can make another labour for him. This is so true that of the proprietors of slaves a very small proportion, indeed, are ever seen to labour. And can the liberties of the nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? that they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”[169]

[Sidenote: Sexual immoralities.]

In no respect was the system of slavery more reprehensible than in the illicit sexual relations that grew out of it. The extent of the evil may be realized when we simply reflect that the numerous race of mulattoes and quadroons did not originate from wedlock. In 1691 it was enacted that any white man or woman, whether bond or free, intermarrying with a negro, mulatto, or Indian, should be banished for life. In 1705 the penalty was changed to fine and imprisonment, and for any minister who should dare to perform the ceremony there was prescribed a fine nearly equal to his whole year’s salary.[170] Yet the “abominable mixture and spurious issue,” against which these statutes were aimed, went on, unsanctioned by law and unblessed by the church. Usually mulattoes were the children of negresses by white fathers, but it was not always so. Some of the wretched women from English jails seem to have had fancies as unaccountable as those of the frail sultanas of the Arabian Nights. In such cases the white mother, if free, was fined £15, or in default thereof was sold into servitude for five years; if she were a bondwoman, the church-wardens waited for her term of service to expire, and then sold her for five years; her child was bound to service until thirty years of age.[171] The case of the bastards of negresses was very simply disposed of by enacting that the legal status of children was the same as that of their mother.[172] This made them all slaves, from the prognathous and platyrrhine creature with woolly hair to the handsome and stately octoroon, and secured their labour to the master. At first the illicit relations between masters and their female slaves were frowned at, and in some instances visited with church discipline or punished by fines.[173] But public opinion seems to have lost its sensitiveness in the presence of a custom which lasted until slavery was abolished.[174] With the signal advance in refinement which the nineteenth century ushered in, there is reason to believe that in many a southern home there were earnest hearts that deplored the dreadful evil, and welcomed at last the downfall of the system that sustained it.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Classes in Virginia society.]

Some writers divide Old Virginia society into four classes,--the great planters, the small planters, the white servants and freedmen, and the negro slaves. The division is sound, provided we remember that between the two upper classes no hard and fast line can be drawn. Already in England the classes of rural gentry and yeomen shaded into one another; in Virginia both alike became land-holders and slave-owners, they mingled together in society, and their families intermarried. A typical instance is that of the parents of Thomas Jefferson. His paternal ancestors were yeomanry who in Virginia developed into country squires. The first Jefferson in Virginia was a member of the first House of Burgesses in 1619; Thomas’s father, who was also a burgess and county lieutenant, owned about thirty slaves. Thomas’s mother, Jane Randolph, whose grandfather migrated to Virginia in 1674, belonged to a family that had been eminent in England since the thirteenth century, including among its members a baron of the exchequer, a number of knights, a foreign ambassador, a head of one of the colleges at Oxford, etc.

[Sidenote: Huguenots in tidewater Virginia.]

There can be no doubt that the white blood of tidewater Virginia was English almost without admixture until the end of the seventeenth century, and of the very slight admixture nearly all was from the British islands. There was a desultory sprinkling of Protestant Frenchmen, Walloons, and Dutch, scarcely appreciable in the mass of the population. But after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in 1685, Virginia received a small part of the Huguenot exodus from France. The largest company, more than seven hundred in number, led by the Breton nobleman, Olivier, Marquis de la Muce, arrived in the year 1700, and settled in various places, more particularly at Monacan Town in Henrico County. A part of this company were Waldenses from Piedmont, who had taken refuge in Switzerland, and thence made their way through Alsace and the Low Countries to England.[175] Other parties came from time to time, adding to Virginia many estimable citizens whom France could ill afford to lose. Among the Huguenot names in Virginia, the reader will recognize Maury, Flournoy, Jouet, Moncure, Fontaine, Marye, Bertrand, and others.[176] Dabneys (_D’Aubigné_) and Bowdoins (_Baudouin_) came to Virginia as well as to Boston. Such was the principal foreign admixture while Virginia was still tidewater Virginia, before the crossing of the Blue Ridge. The advent of Germans and Scotch-Irish will be treated in a future chapter.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Influence of the rivers upon society.]

[Sidenote: Some exports and imports.]

Having thus considered the composition of society in its different strata, as connected with wholesale tobacco culture, let us observe one of the most conspicuous results of this industry as influenced by the physical geography of the country. One might suppose that the necessity for exporting the enormous crops of tobacco would have called into existence a large class of thriving merchants, who would naturally congregate at points favourable for shipping, and thus give rise to towns. In most countries that is what would have happened. But the manner in which the Virginia planter disposed of his crops was peculiar. Most of the large plantations lay on or near the wide and deep rivers of that tidewater country;[177] and each planter would have his own wharf, from which his own slaves might load the tobacco on to the vessels that were to carry it to England. If the plantation lay at some distance from a navigable river, the tobacco was conveyed to the nearest creek and tied down upon a raft of canoes, and so floated and paddled down stream until some head of navigation was reached, where a warehouse was ready to receive it. The vessels which carried away this tobacco usually paid for it in all sorts of manufactured articles that might be needed upon the plantations. Every manufactured article that required skill or nicety of workmanship was brought from England, in ships of which the owners, masters, and crews were for the most part either natives of the British islands or of New England. Such a ship would unload upon the planter’s wharf some part of its motley cargo of mahogany tables, chairs covered with russia leather, wines in great variety from the Azores and Madeira,[178] brandy, Gloucester cheeses, linens and cottons, silks and dimity, quilts and featherbeds, carpets, shoes, axes and hoes, hammers and nails, rope and canvas, painters’ white lead and colours, saddles, demijohns, mirrors, books,--pretty much everything.[179] If she came from a New England port she was likely to bring salted cod and mackerel, with fragrant rum, either out of the distilleries at Newport and Boston,[180] or imported from Antigua or Jamaica. Sometimes the rum came from Barbadoes, along with sugar and molasses, and occasionally ginger and lime-juice, in return for which the ship often carried away some of the planter’s live hogs or packed pork, as well as butter, and corn, and tanned leather. The landing of rum was sometimes private and confidential, for there were duties on it which lent a charm to evasion.

[Sidenote: Some domestic industries.]

It would be too much to say that there was no manufacturing done in colonial Virginia. There were probably few if any plantations where the spinning-wheel and hand-loom were not busy. Female slaves and white servants wove coarse cloth and made it up into suits of clothes[181] for people of their sort, and doubtless for some of the small planters. Such artisans as blacksmiths, carpenters, and coopers, shipwrights, tailors, tanners, and shoemakers were often to be found among the indentured servants. Boys of this class were sometimes upon their arrival made apprentices in these crafts. Occasionally negro slaves became more or less skilled as workmen, especially as coopers and joiners. There must always have been some demand for the labour of white freedmen acquainted with any of the mechanical arts, and in fact instances of free labourers in these departments are found. There can be no doubt, however, that the style of work thus attained was apt to be unsatisfactory; for we find such planters as Colonel Byrd and Colonel Fitzhugh, late in the seventeenth century, sending to England for skilled workmen, and offering to pay very high wages, on the ground that it was wasting money to employ such workmen as were to be had in the colony.[182]

[Sidenote: Beverley’s complaint against his countrymen.]

The historian Beverley, who sometimes indulged himself (like the late Matthew Arnold) in upbraiding his fellow-countrymen for their own good, says of the Virginians in 1705: “They have their Cloathing of all sorts from _England_, as Linnen, Woollen, Silk, Hats, and Leather. Yet Flax and Hemp grow no where in the World, better than there; their Sheep yield a mighty Increase, and bear good Fleeces, but they shear them only to cool them. The Mulberry-Tree, whose Leaf is the proper Food of the Silk-worm, grows there like a Weed, and Silk-worms have been observ’d to thrive extreamly, and without any hazard. The very Furrs that their Hats are made of, perhaps go first from thence; and most of their Hides lie and rot, or are made use of, only for covering dry Goods, in a leaky House. Indeed some few Hides with much adoe are tann’d, and made into Servants Shoes; but at so careless a rate, that the Planters don’t care to buy them, if they can get others; and sometimes perhaps a better manager than ordinary, will vouchsafe to make a pair of Breeches of a Deer-Skin. Nay, they are such abominable Ill-husbands, that tho’ their Country be over-run with Wood, yet they have all their Wooden Ware from _England_; their Cabinets, Chairs, Tables, Stools, Chests, Boxes, Cart-wheels, and all other things, even so much as their Bowls, and Birchen Brooms, to the Eternal Reproach of their Laziness.... Thus they depend altogether upon the Liberality of Nature, without endeavoring to improve its Gifts, by Art or Industry. They spunge upon the Blessings of a warm Sun, and a fruitful Soil, and almost grutch the Pains of gathering in the Bounties of the Earth. I should be asham’d to publish this slothful Indolence of my Countrymen, but that I hope it will rouse them out of their Lethargy, and excite them to make the most of all those happy Advantages which Nature has given them; and if it does this, I am sure they will have the Goodness to forgive me.”[183]

[Sidenote: True state of the case.]

It was not, however, as Mr. Bruce reminds us, from any “inherent repugnance” that Englishmen in Virginia did not take kindly to manufactures, and perhaps the good Beverley’s reproachful tone is a trifle overdone. When the planter could get sharp knives, well-made boots, and fine blankets at his own wharf, simply by handing over to the skipper a few hogsheads of tobacco, he was not greatly to be blamed for preferring them to such dull knives, clumsy boots, and coarse blankets as could be made by the workmen within reach. Many inconveniences, however, grew out of the absence of local means for supplying local needs, and I have little doubt that sundry trades and crafts could have been made to flourish much better than they did, had it not been for the baneful effects of a tobacco currency, which we shall presently have to consider.

[Sidenote: Absence of town life.]

The most conspicuous result of the absorption of all activities in tobacco-planting, and the absence of developed arts and trades, was the non-existence of town life. At the beginning of the eighteenth century there was hardly so much as a village in Virginia, unless we make an exception in honour of Williamsburg, the new seat of government and of the college. By the middle of the century Williamsburg contained about 200 houses, chiefly wooden, and its streets were unpaved. Richmond, founded in 1737, had a population of 3,761 in the census of 1790. The growth of Norfolk, founded in 1705, was exceptional. The trade with the West Indies, for sugar, molasses, and rum, tended to become concentrated there, and the proximity of North Carolina made it a mart for lumber at a time when Virginia forests in the lower tidewater region had been largely cleared away. Colonel Byrd in 1728 says of the Norfolk people: “They have a pretty deal of lumber from the borderers on the Dismal, who make bold with the king’s land thereabouts, without the least ceremony.” Besides boards and shingles, they sent beef and pork to the West Indies, and it was not unusual to see a score of sloops and brigantines riding in the noble harbour. Under these favourable circumstances the population of Norfolk had come by 1776 to be about 6,000. At that time Philadelphia had some 35,000 inhabitants, and New York 25,000, though the population of their two states taken together scarcely equalled that of Virginia.

[Sidenote: Futile attempts to make towns by legislation.]

The lack of urban life was deplored by the legislators at Jamestown and Williamsburg, and assiduous efforts were made to correct the evil; but neither bounties nor orders to build were of avail. To make towns on paper was as easy as to make a promissory note, but nobody would go and settle in the towns. Most of the county seats consisted simply of the court-house, flanked by the jail, the dismal country inn, and the nondescript country “store,” where the roving peddler sometimes replenished his pack on his route through the plantations. Among the legislative acts designed to encourage the building of towns, three were especially important. The act of 1662 ordered that thirty-two brick houses should be erected at Jamestown, and forbade the building or repairing of wooden houses there; all tobacco grown in the three counties of James City, Charles City, and Surry was to be sent to Jamestown and stored there for shipping, and the penalty for disobedience of this order was a fine of 1,000 lbs. of tobacco; every ship, moreover, ascending the river above Mulberry Island, must land its cargo at Jamestown and nowhere else, under penalty of forfeiting the cargo. Half of these fines was to be paid to the town, the other half to the informer.[184] The statute of 1680, commonly known as the Cohabitation Act, undertook in somewhat similar fashion to establish a town in every county; and the attempt was renewed on a larger scale in 1691.[185] But all these acts were either disregarded or suspended. When the Surry planter could effect an exchange at his own wharf, without incidental expense or risk, it was useless to command him to load his crop on shallops and send it to Jamestown, with a charge for freight, a chance of capsizing, and warehouse dues at the end of the journey. The skipper withal had no wish to be saddled with port dues, or to be hindered from stopping and trading wherever a customer hove in sight. So skipper and planter had their way, and towns refused to grow.[186] When Thomas Jefferson entered William and Mary College in 1760, a lad of seventeen years, he had never seen so many as a dozen houses grouped together.

[Sidenote: The country store.]

The country store was an important institution in Old Virginia. Under some conditions it would have formed a nucleus around which a town would have been developed, but in Virginia the store seems to have been regarded as a kind of rival against which the town could not compete.[187] It furnished a number of petty centres which did away with the need for larger centres. The store was apt to be an appendage to a plantation, unless its size became such as to reverse the relationship, after the manner of Dundreary’s dog. It might be a room in a planter’s house, or it might be a detached barn like building on the estate. Mr. Bruce tells us that to enumerate its contents would be to mention pretty much every article for which Virginians had any use. For example, the inventory of the Hubbard store in York County, taken in 1667, “contained lockram, canvas, dowlas, Scotch cloth, blue linen, oznaburg, cotton, holland, serge, kersey, and flannel in bales, full suits for adults and youths, bodices, bonnets, and laces for women, shoes, ... gloves, hose, cloaks, cravats, handkerchiefs, hats, and other articles of dress, ... hammers, hatchets, chisels, augers, locks, staples, nails, sickles, bellows, froes,[188] saws, axes, files, bed-cords, dishes, knives, flesh-forks, porringers, sauce-pans, frying-pans, gridirons, tongs, shovels, hoes, iron posts, tables, physic, wool-cards, gimlets, compasses, needles, stirrups, looking-glasses, candlesticks, candles, funnels, 25 pounds of raisins, 100 gallons of brandy, 20 gallons of wine, and 10 gallons of aqua vitæ. The contents of the Hubbard store were valued at £614 sterling, a sum which represented about $15,000 in our present currency.”[189] One can imagine how dazzling to youthful eyes must have been the miscellaneous variety of desirable things. Not only were the manufactured articles pretty sure to have come from England, but everything else, to be salable, must be labelled English, “insomuch that fanciers used to sell the songsters unknown to England, if they sang particularly well, as _English mocking-birds_.”[190]

[Sidenote: Roads]

We have seen how the rivers and creeks were used as highways of traffic; for a long time they were the only highways, and the sloop or the canoe was the only kind of vehicle, public or private, in which it was possible to get about with ease and safety.[191] Until after the middle of the eighteenth century there were but few roads save bridle-paths, and such as there were became impassable in rainy weather. There were also but few bridges, and these were very likely to be unsound, while the ferry-boats were apt to be leaky. It was often necessary for the traveller to swim across the stream, with a fair chance of getting drowned, and more than a fair chance of losing his horse. The course of the bridle-path often became so obscure that it was necessary to blaze the trees. It was not uncommon for people to lose their way and find themselves obliged to stay overnight in the woods, perhaps with the howls of the wolf and panther sounding in their ears. The highway robber was even a more uncomfortable customer to meet than such beasts of prey; and in those days, when banking was in its infancy and travellers used to carry gold coins sewed under the lining of their waistcoats, the highwayman enjoyed opportunities which in this age of railways and check-books are denied him. Nevertheless crime was far less common than in England or France, and travelling was much safer than one might suppose. This was true of the whole colonial period. In 1777 a young Rhode Island merchant, Elkanah Watson, armed with a sabre and pair of pistols, journeyed from Providence to Charleston in South Carolina, with several hundred pounds sterling in gold quilted into his coat. In seventy days he accomplished the distance of 1,243 miles, partly on horseback and partly in a sulky, without encountering any more serious mishaps than being arrested for a British spy in Pennsylvania, and meeting a large bear in North Carolina; and he has left us a narrative of his journey, which is as full of instruction as of interest.[192]

[Sidenote: Tobacco as currency.]

The traveller in Old Virginia, however, was not likely to carry large sums of money concealed on his person, for he dealt in a circulating medium too bulky for that. In the course of this book we have had frequent occasions to observe that the Virginian’s current money was tobacco. The prices of all articles of merchandise were quoted in pounds of tobacco. In tobacco taxes were assessed and all wages and salaries were paid. This use of tobacco as a circulating medium and as a standard of values was begun in the earliest days of the colony, when coin was scarce, and the structure of society was simple enough to permit a temporary return toward the primitive practice of barter. Under such circumstances tobacco was obviously the article most sure to be used as money. It was exchangeable for whatever anybody wanted in the shape of service or merchandise, and it was easily procured from the bountiful earth. But as time went on this ease of attainment made it an extremely vicious currency. In the course of our narrative we have encountered some of the disastrous financial and social results that flowed from the use of so cheap a substitute for money. Many reasons have been alleged for the scarcity of coin throughout the whole colonial period in Virginia;[193] but assuredly the chief reason was the fact that tobacco was currency. The bad money drove away the good money, as it always does. There are indications that there was always a small stock of coin in the colony, but it was hoarded or sent to other colonies or to England in the settlement of trade balances. Yet it was not easy to demonetize tobacco without a radical revolution in the industrial system and in the commercial relations of the colony.

[Sidenote: Effect upon crafts and trades.]

The nature of the currency evidently had much to do with the ill success of the attempts to encourage manufactures. The carpenter or shoemaker, after doing his work, must wait for his pay until the year’s crop of tobacco was gathered and cured. Meanwhile he had nothing to live on unless he raised it for himself; he might either plant grain and rear cattle, or else grow tobacco wherewith to buy things. But the time consumed in these agricultural operations was time taken from his handicraft. The evil was attacked by legislation. “In 1633 brickmakers, carpenters, joiners, sawyers, and turners were expressly forbidden to take part in any form of tillage.” In 1662 tradesmen and artisans were exempted from all taxes except church-rates, on condition that they should abstain from all interest, direct or indirect, in the growing of tobacco. But the evil was not cured.[194]

[Sidenote: Effect upon planters’ accounts.]

Further disaster came from the fact that tobacco was a highly speculative crop. The fluctuations in its value were liable to be great and sudden, and they affected the price of every article that was bought and sold throughout the colony. No one could estimate from one year to another, with any approach to accuracy, what the purchasing power of his income was going to be. The inevitable results of this were extravagance in living and chronic debt. The planter was drawn into a situation from which it was almost impossible to extricate himself. “The system of keeping open accounts in London was calculated to encourage extravagance; and these accounts were habitually overdrawn. Many of the merchants even made it a rule to encourage this indebtedness, so as to assure the continuance of their customers. It gave them a certain advantage in all their dealings with the planters.”[195] They charged nearly twice as much for their goods sent to Norfolk or Williamsburg as for the same goods sent to New York.[196] In all this they were aided by the Navigation Act.

[Sidenote: Hospitality.]

Extravagance in living was further stimulated by the regal hospitality for which the great planters early became famous. Although the life upon their estates was much more busy than some writers seem to suppose, yet the drudgery of business did not consume all their time; and in their rural isolation, with none of the diversions of town life, the entertainment of guests by the month together was regarded both as a duty and as a privilege; and the example set by the large plantations was followed by the smaller. Even the keeper of an inn, if he wished to make a charge for food and shelter, must notify the guest upon his arrival, for a statute of 1663 declared that in the absence of such preliminary understanding not a penny could be recovered from the guest, however long he might have staid in the house.[197] As a rule, no person whose company was at all desirable was allowed to stop at an inn, for the neighbours vied with one another in offering hospitality. Every planter kept open house, and provided for his visitors with unstinted hand.

[Sidenote: Visit to a plantation; the negro quarter.]

Let us put ourselves into the position of one of these visitors, and get some glimpses of life upon the old plantation. Our host we may suppose to be a vestryman, justice of the peace, and burgess, dwelling upon a plantation of five or six thousand acres, with his next neighbours at a distance of two or three miles.[198] The space is in great part cleared for the planting of vast fields of tobacco, but here and there are extensive stretches of woodland and coppice, with noble forest trees and luxuriant undergrowth, much rougher and wilder than an English park. The cabins for slaves present the appearance of a hamlet. These are wooden structures of the humblest sort, built of logs or undressed planks, and afflicted with chronic dilapidation. An inventory of 1697 shows us that the cabin might contain a bed and a few chairs, two or three pots and kettles, “a pair of pot-racks, a pot-hook, a frying-pan, and a beer barrel;” and advertisements for runaways describe Cuffy and Pompey as clad in red cotton, with canvas drawers, waistcoat, and wide-brimmed black hat. Their victuals, of “hog and hominy” with potatoes and green vegetables, were wholesome and palatable. If there were white servants on the estate, they were commonly but not necessarily somewhat better housed and clothed.

[Sidenote: Other appurtenances.]

[Sidenote: The Great House.]

Leaving the negro quarters, with their grinning mammies and swarms of woolly pickaninnies, one would presently come upon other outbuildings; the ample barns for tobacco and granaries for corn, the stable, the cattle-pens, a hen-coop and a dove-cot, a dairy, and in some cases a malt-house, or perhaps, as we have seen, a country store. There were brick ovens for curing hams and bacon; and the kitchen likewise stood apart from the mansion, which was thus free from kitchen odours and from undue heating in summer time. There was a vegetable garden, with “all the culinary plants that grow in England, and in far greater perfection,” besides “roots, herbs, vine-fruits, and salad-flowers peculiar to themselves,” and excellent for a relish with meat.[199] Nearer to the house, among redolent flower-beds gay with varied colours, some vine-clad arbour afforded shelter from the sun. A short walk across the mown space shaded by large trees, called, as in New England, the yard, would bring us to the mansion, very commonly known as the Great House. From this epithet no sure inference can be drawn as to the size of the building, for it simply served to contrast it with its dependent cabins and outhouses. It was often called the Home House. It was apt to stand upon a rising ground, and from its porch you might look down at the blue river and the little wharf, known as “the landing,” with pinnaces moored hard by and canoes lying lazily on the bank or suddenly darting out upon the water. Turning away from the river, the eye would rest upon an orchard bearing fruits in great variety, and a pasture devoted to horses of some special breed.

[Sidenote: Brick and wooden houses.]

The planter’s mansion might be built of wood or brick, but was comparatively seldom of stone. In tidewater Virginia, good stone for building purposes was not readily found, but there was an abundance of red clay from which excellent and durable brick could be made. A number of brick houses were built in the seventeenth century, but wood was much more commonly used, since the work of clearing away the forests furnished great quantities of timber of the finest quality. Among the many articles that were imported from England, bricks are not to be reckoned.[200] Brickmaking went on from the earliest days of the colony, and much of this work was done by white servants and freedmen. In course of time there came to be many brick houses, and chimneys were regularly of this material. For roofs the strong and durable cypress shingle was the material most commonly used. Partition walls, covered first with a tenacious clay and then white-washed, were very firm and solid. The glass windows, for protection against storms of a violence to which Englishmen had not been accustomed, had stout wooden shutters outside, which gave the house somewhat the look of a stronghold.

[Sidenote: House architecture.]

During the seventeenth century not much architectural beauty was attained. To any criticisms on this score the planters would have replied, as the early settlers did to Captain Butler, that their houses were for use and not for ornament.[201] During the eighteenth century some progress was made in this respect, but for the architectural effect of the mansions not much is to be said, though they were often highly picturesque. The earliest type, the house of greater width than depth, with an outside chimney at each end, is familiar to every one, at least in pictures. It was as characteristic of Old Virginia as the house of huge central chimney and small entryway with transverse staircase was characteristic of early New England. Both are slightly modified types of the smaller English manor houses of the Tudor period. A more picturesque style, and somewhat more stately, is that of Gunston Hall, the homestead of the Mason family; while scarcely less attractive, and still more capacious, is that of Stratford Hall, the home of the Lees. The well-known Mount Vernon shows a further departure from English models; while in Monticello both the name and the house present symptoms of the beginning of that so-called classical revival when children were baptized Cyrus and Marcellus, and dwelt in the shade of porticoes that simulated those of Greek temples.[202]

[Sidenote: The rooms.]

[Sidenote: Bedrooms and their furniture.]

The differentiation of rooms for specific uses had by no means proceeded so far as in modern houses. One mediæval English feature which was retained was the predominance of the Hall, or Great Room, used for meals and for general purposes. Along with the hall, there might be as few as five or six rooms, or as many as eighteen or twenty, upstairs and down. Stratford Hall, built about 1725-30, contained eighteen large rooms, exclusive of the central hall,[203] whereas Governor Berkeley’s house at Green Spring, built three quarters of a century earlier, had but six rooms altogether. Beside the central hall, there might be a hall parlour, equivalent to reception room and family sitting-room combined, and in this there might be chests and a bed; the others were simply bedrooms. Beds were such as we are still familiar with; their ticking might be stuffed with feathers or hair or straw, but leathers were much more commonly used than now, as they are now more commonly used in chilly England than in the fiery summers and hot-house winters of America. With sheets, blankets, and counterpane, pillows, curtains, and valances, the bed was dressed as at present, save that curtains are now departing along with the brass warming-pans, bequests from higher latitudes. Already the Virginia bed often had a protection for which England could have no use, the mosquito net. For such members of the household as were lazily inclined in the daytime there was a couch, which might be plainly covered with calico, or more expensively with russia leather or embroidered stuffs. The chairs might be upholstered likewise, or be seated with cane, wicker, or rushwork. In every bedroom was a chest for storing clothes not in immediate use. There were also the ewer and basin, and the case of drawers with looking-glass. If one of the big chimneys was accessible, there was a fireplace for wooden logs, supported on andirons of iron or brass, and guarded by iron or tin fenders; otherwise there was an open brazier, such as we see to-day in Italy. Floors were usually ill-made in those days, and woollen carpets faithfully accumulated dirt; so that the sunbeam straggling through the dimity or printed calico window-curtains would often gild long dusty rays.

[Sidenote: The dinner-table.]

[Sidenote: Napkins and forks.]

[Sidenote: Silver plate.]

[Sidenote: Wainscots and tapestry.]

In the Hall, or Great Room, the principal feature was the long dining-table of walnut or oak or cedar, flanked either by benches or by chairs. For daily use it was covered with a cloth of unbleached linen, known as holland, while on extra occasions a damask cloth was used. Napkins were abundant, and often of a fine fabric delicately embroidered. Forks, on the other hand, were in the earlier days scarce. Before the seventeenth century, forks were nowhere in general use, save in Italy. Queen Elizabeth ate with her fingers. A satirical pamphlet, aimed at certain luxurious favourites of Henry III. of France, derides them for conveying bits of meat to their mouths on a little pronged implement, rather than do it in the natural way.[204] Forks are nowhere mentioned in Shakespeare. In 1608, while travelling in Italy, one Thomas Coryat took a liking to them and introduced the fashion into England, for which he was jocosely nicknamed _Furcifer_.[205] Naturally the use of forks narrowed the functions of napkins.[206] Spoons were in much more common use, and, in the New World as in the Old, were of iron or pewter in the poor man’s house, and of silver in the rich man’s. The dishes and plates were of earthenware or pewter, but in the eighteenth century the use of chinaware increased. Pewter cups and mugs were everywhere to be seen, and now and then a drinking-horn. Well-to-do planters had silver tankards, sometimes marked with the family arms, as well as silver salt-cellars, candlesticks, and snuffers. A cupboard with glass doors, or light drapery, displayed the store of cups and dishes; while about the walls sometimes hung family portraits, and more rarely paintings of other sorts. This central hall retained many marks of its mediæval miscellaneousness of use; capacious linen-chests, guns and pistols, powder-horns, swords, saddles, bridles, and riding-whips, in picturesque and cosy confusion. In the eighteenth century a luxurious elegance was developed quite similar to that of the “colonial mansions” at the North, such as the Philipse manor house on the Hudson River, or Colonel Vassall’s house in Cambridge, where Washington dwelt for a few months, and Longfellow for many years. Panelled wainscots of oak and carved oaken chimney-pieces were common; the walls were hung with tapestry; and artistic cabinets, screens, and clocks adorned the spacious room. In the Lee homestead at Stratford the hall added to its other functions that of library. The ceiling was very high and vaulted, and parts of the panelled walls had bookshelves set into them.[207] Such rooms were warmed by huge logs of hickory or oak, burning in open fireplaces. They were lighted by candles, which might be made of beef tallow or deer suet, but the favourite material was a wax obtained by boiling the berries of a myrtle that grew profusely in marshy land. It was extremely cheap and burned with a pleasant fragrance, giving a brilliant light.

[Sidenote: The kitchen.]

The central object in the kitchen was, of course, the fireplace, which was sometimes very large. At Stratford it was “twelve feet wide, six high, and five deep, evidently capable of roasting a fair-sized ox.”[208] In the days when pains were taken not to spoil good meat with bad cooking, your haunch of venison, saddle of mutton, or stuffed turkey was not baked to insipidity in an oven meant for better uses, but was carefully turned about on an iron spit, catching rich aroma from the caressing flame, while the basting was judiciously poured from ladles, and dripping-pans caught the savoury juices. Then there was the great copper boiler imbedded in brick and heated from underneath; there were the kettles and sauce-pans, the swinging iron pot, the gridirons and frying-pans, and the wooden trays for carrying the cooked dishes to the dining-hall.

[Sidenote: Abundance of food.]

The settlers in the strange wilderness of the Powhatans had once had their Starving Time, but it would be hard to point to any part of the earth more bountifully supplied with wholesome and delicious food than civilized Old Virginia. Venison, beef, and dairy products were excellent and cheap. Mutton was less common, and was highly prized. The pork in its various forms was pronounced equal to that of Yorkshire or Westphalia. Succulent vegetables and toothsome fruits were grown in bewildering variety. Good Henry of Navarre’s peasant, had he lived in this favoured country, might have had every day a fowl in his pot; while, as for game and fish, the fame of Chesapeake Bay is world-wide for its canvas-backs, mallards, and red-heads, its terrapin, its soles, bass, and shad, and, last not least, its oysters. The various cakes which the cooks of the Old Dominion could make from their maize and other grains have also won celebrity.

[Sidenote: Beverages, native and imported.]

To wash down these native viands the Virginian had divers drinks, whereof all the best were imported. Englishmen could not in a moment leave off beer-drinking, but the generous, full-bodied and delicate-flavoured ale of the mother country has never been successfully imitated on this side of the Atlantic, and indeed seems hardly adapted to our sweltering summers. Concerning the beer brewed in Old Virginia opinions varied; but since barley soon ceased to be cultivated, and attempts were made to supply its place with maize or pumpkins or persimmons, we need not greatly regret that we were not there to be regaled with it. Cider, with its kindred beverages, was abundant,[209] and doubtless of much better quality. Apple-jack and peach brandy were distilled. Other beverages were imported, most commonly sack, of which Falstaff was so fond; the name was applied to such dry (Spanish _seco_) and strong wines as sherry and madeira. In the cellars of wealthy planters were often found choice brands of red wine from Bordeaux and white wine from the Rhineland. Cognacs were also imported, and of rum we have already spoken. Evidently our friends, the planters, had sturdy tipplers among them.[210] Fortunately for them, the manufacture of coarse whiskey from maize and rye had not yet come into vogue, while of the less harmful peaty “mountain dew” from Ireland or Scotland we hear nothing.

[Sidenote: Smyth’s picture of a planter.]

Of the daily life of a rich planter we have a graphic account from John Ferdinand Smyth, a British soldier who travelled through Virginia and other colonies, and sojourned for some years in Maryland, about the middle of the eighteenth century. I cite the description, because so much has been made of it: “The gentleman of fortune rises about nine o’clock; he may perhaps make an excursion to walk as far as his stable to see his horses, which is seldom more than fifty yards from his house; he returns to breakfast between nine and ten, which is generally tea or coffee, bread-and-butter, and very thin slices of venison, ham, or hung beef. He then lies down on a pallet on the floor, in the coolest room in the house, in his shirt and trousers only, with a negro at his head and another at his feet, to fan him and keep off the flies; between twelve and one he takes a draught of bombo, or toddy, a liquor composed of water, sugar, rum, and nutmeg, which is made weak and kept cool; he dines between two and three, and at every table, whatever else there may be, a ham and greens, or cabbage, is always a standing dish. At dinner he drinks cider, toddy, punch, port, claret, and madeira, which is generally excellent here; having drank [_sic_] some few glasses of wine after dinner, he returns to his pallet, with his two blacks to fan him, and continues to drink toddy, or sangaree, all the afternoon; he does not always drink tea. Between nine and ten in the evening he eats a light supper of milk and fruit, or wine, sugar, and fruit, etc., and almost immediately retires to bed for the night. This is his general way of living in his family, when he has no company. No doubt many differ from it, some in one respect, some in another; but more follow it than do not.”[211]

This extract seems to show that Rev. Samuel Peters was not the only writer who liked to entertain his trustful British friends with queer tales about their American cousins.[212] No doubt Mr. Smyth wrote it with his tongue in his cheek; but if he meant what he said, we must remember that the besetting sin of travellers is hasty generalization. We will take Mr. Smyth’s word for it that one or more gentlemen were in the habit of passing their days in the way he describes, and we may freely admit that a good many gentlemen might thus make shift to keep alive through some furious attack of the weather fiend in August; but his concluding statement, that this way of living was customary, is not to be taken seriously. An extract from the manuscript recollections of General John Mason, son of the illustrious George Mason, gives a different picture:--

[Sidenote: The mode of life at Gunston.]

“It was very much the practice with gentlemen of landed and slave estates ... so to organize them as to have considerable resources within themselves; to employ and pay but few tradesmen, and to buy little or none of the coarse stuffs and materials used by them.... Thus my father had among his slaves carpenters, coopers, sawyers, blacksmiths, tanners, curriers, shoemakers, spinners, weavers, and knitters, and even a distiller. His woods furnished timber and plank for the carpenters and coopers, and charcoal for the blacksmith; his cattle killed for his own consumption and for sale supplied skins for the tanners, curriers, and shoemakers; and his sheep gave wool and his fields produced cotton and flax for the weavers and spinners, and his orchards fruit for the distiller. His carpenters and sawyers built and kept in repair all the dwelling-houses, barns, stables, ploughs, harrows, gates, etc., on the plantations, and the outhouses at the house. His coopers made the hogsheads the tobacco was prized in, and the tight casks to hold the cider and other liquors. The tanners and curriers, with the proper vats, etc., tanned and dressed the skins as well for upper as for lower leather to the full amount of the consumption of the estate, and the shoemakers made them into shoes for the negroes. A professed shoemaker was hired for three or four months in the year to come and make up the shoes for the white part of the family. The blacksmiths did all the ironwork required by the establishment, as making and repairing ploughs, harrows, teeth, chains, bolts, etc. The spinners, weavers, and knitters made all the coarse cloths and stockings used by the negroes, and some of finer texture worn by the white family, nearly all worn by the children of it. The distiller made every fall a good deal of apple, peach, and persimmon brandy. The art of distilling from grain was not then among us, and but few public distilleries. All these operations were carried on at the home house, and their results distributed as occasion required to the different plantations. Moreover, all the beeves and hogs for consumption or sale were driven up and slaughtered there at the proper seasons, and whatever was to be preserved was salted and packed away for after distribution.

“My father kept no steward or clerk about him. He kept his own books and superintended, with the assistance of a trusty slave or two, and occasionally of some of his sons, all the operations at or about the home house above described.... To carry on these operations to the extent required, it will be seen that a considerable force was necessary, besides the house servants, who for such a household, a large family and entertaining a great deal of company, must be numerous; and such a force was constantly kept there, independently of any of the plantations, and besides occasional drafts from them of labour for particular occasions. As I had during my youth constant intercourse with all these people, I remember them all, and their several employments as if it was yesterday.”[213]

Now when we consider that Colonel Mason had some 500 persons on his estate, and was known to have sent from his private wharf as many as 23,000 bushels of wheat in a single shipment, it is clear that no gentleman who spent the day lolling on a couch and sipping toddy could have superintended the details of business which his son describes. George Mason was, no doubt, a fair specimen of his class, and their existence was clearly not an idle one. With the public interests of parish, county, and commonwealth to look after besides, they surely earned the leisure hours that were spent in social entertainments or in field sports.

[Sidenote: A glimpse of Mount Vernon.]

A glimpse of the life of a planter’s wife, which Bishop Meade declares to be typical, is given in a letter from Mrs. Edward Carrington to her sister, about 1798. Colonel Carrington and his wife were visiting at Mount Vernon. After telling how Washington and the Colonel sat up together until midnight, absorbed in reminiscences of bivouac and hard-fought field, she comes to Mrs. Washington, who alluded to her days of public pomp and fashion as “her lost days.” Then Mrs. Carrington continues: “Let us repair to the old lady’s [Mrs. Washington’s] room, which is precisely in the style of our good old aunt’s,--that is to say, nicely fixed for all sorts of work. On one side sits the chambermaid, with her knitting; on the other, a little coloured pet, learning to sew. An old, decent woman is there, with her table and shears, cutting out the negroes’ winter clothes, while the good old lady directs them all, incessantly knitting herself. She points out to me several pairs of nice coloured stockings and gloves she had just finished, and presents me with a pair half done, which she begs I will finish and wear for her sake.” At this domestic picture Bishop Meade exclaims: “If the wife of General Washington, having her own and his wealth at command, should thus choose to live, how much more the wives and mothers of Virginia with moderate fortunes and numerous children! How often have I seen, added to the above-mentioned scenes of the chamber, the instruction of several sons and daughters going on, the churn, the reel, and other domestic operations all in progress at the same time, and the mistress, too, lying on a sick-bed!”[214]

[Sidenote: Dress of planters and their wives.]

Although Mrs. Carrington may have finished and worn the pair of knit gloves, yet most articles of dress for well-to-do men and women were imported. London fashions were strictly followed. In the time of Bacon’s rebellion, your host would have appeared, perhaps, in a coat and breeches of olive plush or dark red broadcloth, with embroidered waistcoat, shirt of blue holland, long silk stockings, silver buttons and shoe-buckles, lace ruffles about neck and wrists, and his head encumbered with a flowing wig; while the lady of the house might have worn a crimson satin bodice trimmed with point lace, a black tabby[215] petticoat and silk hose, with shoes of fine leather gallooned; her lace headdress would be secured with a gold bodkin, and she would be apt to wear earrings, a pearl necklace, and finger-rings with rubies or diamonds, and to carry a fan.[216]

[Sidenote: Weddings and funerals.]

[Sidenote: Horse-racing.]

The ordinary chances for the ladies to exhibit their garments of flowered tabby, and beaux their new plush suits, were furnished by the Sunday services at the parish church, and by the frequent gatherings of friends at home. Weddings, of course, were high times, as everywhere and always; and the gloom of funerals was relieved by feasting the guests, who were likely to have come long distances over which they must return.[217] These journeys, like the journeys to church and to the court-house, might be made in boats; on land they were made on horseback. Carriages were very rare in the seventeenth century, but became much more common before the Revolution. In their fondness for horses the Virginians were true children of England. In the stables of wealthy planters were to be found specimens of the finest breeds, and the interest in racing was universal. Common folk, however, were not allowed to take part in the sport, except as lookers-on. One of the earliest references to horse-racing is an order of the county court of York in 1674: “James Bullocke, a Taylor, haveing made a race for his mare to runn w’th a horse belonging to Mr. Mathew Slader for twoe thousand pounds of tobacco and caske, it being contrary to Law for a Labourer to make a race, being a sport only for Gentlemen, is fined for the same one hundred pounds of tobacco and caske.”[218] Half a century later, Hugh Jones tells us that the Virginians “are such lovers of riding that almost every ordinary person keeps a horse; and I have known some spend the morning in ranging several miles in the woods to find and catch their horses only to ride two or three miles to church, to the court-house, or to a horse-race.”[219] After 1740 there was a systematic breeding from imported English thoroughbreds.[220] Thirty years later, we are told that “there are races at Williamsburg twice a year; that is, every spring and fall, or autumn. Adjoining to the town is a very excellent course for either two, three, or four mile heats. Their purses are generally raised by subscription, and are gained by the horse that wins two four-mile heats out of three; they amount to an hundred pounds each for the first day’s running, and fifty pounds each every day after, the races commonly continuing for a week. There are also matches and sweepstakes very often for considerable sums. Besides ... there are races established annually almost at every town and considerable place in Virginia; and frequent matches on which large sums of money depend.... Very capital horses are started here, such as would make no despicable figure at Newmarket; nor is their speed, bottom, or blood inferior to their appearance.... Indeed, nothing can be more elegant and beautiful than the horses here, either for the turf, the field, the road, or the coach; ... but their carriage horses seldom are possessed of that weight and power which distinguish those of the same kind in England.”[221]

[Sidenote: Fox-hunting.]

[Sidenote: Gambling.]

Since the Virginians were excellent horsemen, it was but natural that they should enjoy hunting. No sport was more dear than chasing the fox. Washington’s extreme delight in riding to the hounds is well known; he kept it up until his sixty-third year, when a slight injury to his back made such exercise uncomfortable. Washington was a true Virginian in his love for his dogs, to whom he gave such pretty names as Mopsey, Truelove, Jupiter, Juno, Rover, Music, Sweetlips, Countess, Lady, and Singer. Shooting and fishing were favourite diversions with Washington; when he was President of the United States, the newspapers used to tell of his great catches of blackfish and sea-bass.[222] In these tastes his neighbours were like him. Less wholesome sports were cock-fighting, and gambling with cards. The passion for gambling was far too strong among the Virginians. Laws were enacted against it; gambling debts were not recoverable; innkeepers who permitted any game of cards or dice, except backgammon, were subject to a heavy fine besides forfeiting their licenses.[223]

[Sidenote: A rural entertainment.]

An interesting newspaper notice, in the year 1737, shows that some of the innocent open-air sports of mediæval England still survived: “We have advice from Hanover County, that on St. Andrew’s Day there are to be Horse Races and several other Diversions, for the entertainment of the Gentlemen and Ladies, at the Old Field, near Captain John Bickerton’s, in that county (if permitted by the Hon. Wm. Byrd, Esquire, Proprietor of said land), the substance of which is as follows, viz.: It is proposed that 20 Horses or Mares do run round a three miles’ course for a prize of five pounds.

“That a Hat of the value of 20s be cudgelled for, and that after the first challenge made the Drums are to beat every Quarter of an hour for three challenges round the Ring, and none to play with their Left hand.

“That a violin be played for by 20 Fiddlers; no person to have the liberty of playing unless he bring a fiddle with him. After the prize is won they are all to play together, and each a different tune, and to be treated by the company.

“That 12 Boys of 12 years of age do run 112 yards for a Hat of the cost of 12 shillings.

“That a Flag be flying on said Day 30 feet high.

“That a handsome entertainment be provided for the subscribers and their wives; and such of them as are not so happy as to have wives may treat any other lady.

“That Drums, Trumpets, Hautboys, &c., be provided to play at said entertainment.

“That after dinner the Royal Health, His Honour the Governor’s, &c., are to be drunk.

“That a Quire of ballads be sung for by a number of Songsters, all of them to have liquor sufficient to clear their Wind Pipes.

“That a pair of Silver Buckles be wrestled for by a number of brisk young men.

“That a pair of handsome Shoes be danced for.

“That a pair of handsome silk Stockings of one Pistole[224] value be given to the handsomest young country maid that appears in the Field. With many other Whimsical and Comical Diversions too numerous to mention.

“And as this mirth is designed to be purely innocent and void of offence, all persons resorting there are desired to behave themselves with decency and sobriety; the subscribers being resolved to discountenance all immorality with the utmost rigour.”[225]

[Sidenote: Music.]

The part played by violins in this quaint programme reminds us that fiddling was an accomplishment highly esteemed in the Old Dominion. As an accompaniment for dancing it was very useful in the home parties on the plantations. The philosophic Thomas Jefferson, as a dead shot with the rifle, a skilful horseman, and a clever violinist, was a typical son of Virginia. As boys learned to play the violin, and sometimes the violoncello, girls were taught to play the virginal, which was an ancestral form of the piano. Virginals, and afterward harpsichords, were commonly to be found in the houses of the gentry, and not unfrequently hautboys, flutes, and recorders.[226] The music most often played with these instruments was probably some form of dance or the setting of a popular ballad; but what is called “classical music” was not unknown. Among the effects of Cuthbert Ogle, a musician at Williamsburg, who died in 1755, we find Handel’s “Acis and Galatea” and “Apollo’s Feast,” four books of instrumental scores of his oratorios, and ten books of his songs; also a manuscript score of Corelli’s sonatas, and concertos by the English composers, William Felton and Charles Avison, now wellnigh forgotten.[227]

[Sidenote: Other recreations.]

After 1716 there was a theatre at Williamsburg, and during the sessions of the assembly, when planters with their families came from far and wide, there was much gayety. At other seasons the monotony of rural life was varied by the recreations above described, with an occasional picnic in the woods, or a grand barbecue in honour of some English victory or the accession of a new king.

[Sidenote: Wormeley’s library.]

Some time was found for reading. The inventories of personal estates almost always include books, in some instances few and of little worth, in others numerous and valuable. The library of Ralph Wormeley, of Rosegill, contained about four hundred titles. Wormeley, who had been educated at Oriel College, Oxford, was president of the council, secretary of state, and a trustee of William and Mary College; he died in 1701. Among his books were Burnet’s “History of the Reformation,” a folio history of Spain, an ecclesiastical history in Latin, Camden’s “Britannia,” Lord Bacon’s “History of Henry VII.,” and his “Natural History,” histories of Scotland, Ireland, France, the Netherlands, and the West Indies, biographies of Richard III., Charles I., and George Castriot, Plutarch’s Lives, Burnet’s “Theory of the Earth,” Willis’s “Practice of Physick,” Heylin’s “Cosmography,” “a chirurgical old book,” “the Chyrurgans mate,” Galen’s “Art of Physick,” treatises on gout, pancreatic juice, pharmacy, scurvy, and many other medical works, Coke’s Reports and his “Institutes,” collections of Virginia and New England laws, a history of tithes, “The Office of Justice of the Peace,” a Latin treatise on maritime law, and many other law books, Usher’s “Body of Divinity,” Hooker’s “Ecclesiastical Polity,” Poole’s “Annotations to the Bible,” “A Reply to the Jesuits,” Fuller’s “Holy State” and his “Worthies,” a concordance to the Bible, Jeremy Taylor’s “Holy Living and Dying,” “The Whole Duty of Man,” a biography of St. Augustine, Baxter’s “Confession of Faith,” and many books of divinity, a liberal assortment of dictionaries and grammars of English, French, Spanish, Latin, and Greek, the essays of Montaigne and other French books, Cæsar, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Thucydides, Josephus, Quintus Curtius, Seneca, Terence, “Æsop’s Fables,” “Don Quixote,” “Hudibras,” Quarles’s poems, George Herbert’s poems, Howell’s “Familiar Letters,” Waller’s poems, the plays of Sir William Davenant, “ffifty Comodys & tragedies in folio,” “The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft,” “An Embersee from y^e East India Comp^a to y^e Grand Tartar,” “The Negro’s and Indian’s Advocate,” “A Looking Glass for the Times,” and so on.[228] Though not the library of a scholar, it indicates that its owner was a thoughtful man and fairly well informed.

[Sidenote: Libraries of Byrd and Lee.]

A more remarkable library was that of William Byrd, of Westover. It contained 3,625 volumes, classified nearly as follows: History, 700; Classics, etc., 650; French, 550; Law, 350; Divinity, 300; Medicine, 200; Scientific, 225; Entertaining, etc., 650.[229] This must have been one of the largest collections of books made in the colonial period. That of the second Richard Lee, who died in 1715, contained about 300 titles, among which we notice many more Greek and Latin writers than in Wormeley’s, especially such names as Epictetus, Aristotle de Anima, Diogenes Laertius, Lucian, Heliodorus, Claudian, Arrian, and Orosius, besides such mediæval authors as Albertus Magnus and Laurentius Valla.[230]

[Sidenote: Schools and printing.]

Such libraries were of course exceptional. In most planters’ houses you would probably have found a few English classics, with perhaps “Don Quixote” and “Gil Blas,” and an assortment of books on divinity, manuals for magistrates, and helps in farming. Virginia was not eminent as a literary or bookish community. There was no newspaper until the establishment of the “Virginia Gazette” in 1736. As for schools, the Lords Commissioners of Plantations sent over a series of interrogatories to Sir William Berkeley in 1671, and asked him, among other things, what provision was made for public instruction. His reply was characteristic: “I thank God there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience and heresy and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them, and libels against the best government. God keep us from both!”[231] Lord Culpeper seems to have been much of Berkeley’s way of thinking, for we read that, “February 21, 1682, John Buckner [was] called before the Lord Culpeper and his council for printing the laws of 1680 without his excellency’s license, and he and the printer [were] ordered to enter into bond in £100 _not to print anything_ thereafter until his majesty’s pleasure should be known.”[232] The pleasure of Charles II. was, that nobody should use a printing-press in Virginia, and so he instructed the next governor, Lord Howard, in 1684.

[Sidenote: Private free schools.]

[Sidenote: Academies and tutors.]

The establishment of a system of schools such as flourished in New England was prevented by the absence of town life and the long distances between plantations. When Berkeley said there were no free schools in Virginia, he may have had in mind the contrast with New England. No such schools were founded in Virginia by the assembly, but there were instances of free schools founded by individuals; as, for example, the Symms school in 1636, Captain Moon’s school in 1655, Richard Russell’s in 1667, Mr. King’s in 1669, the Eaton school some time before 1689, and Edward Moseley’s in 1721.[233] Indeed, there was after 1646[234] a considerable amount of compulsory primary education in Virginia, much more than has been generally supposed, since the records of it have been buried in the parish vestry-books. In the eighteenth century we find evidences that pains were taken to educate coloured people.[235] It was not unusual for the plantation to have among its numerous outbuildings a school conducted by some rustic dignitary of the neighbourhood. In the “old field schools” little more was taught than “the three Rs,” but these humble institutions are not to be despised; for it was in one of them, kept by “Hobby, the sexton,” that George Washington learned to read, write, and cipher. His father and his elder brother Lawrence had been educated at Appleby School, in England; George himself, after an interval with a Mr. Williams, near Wakefield, finished his school-days at an excellent academy in Fredericksburg, of which Rev. James Marye was master. The sons of George Mason studied two years at an academy in Stafford County kept by a Scotch parson named Buchan, “a pious man and profound classical scholar.” Afterwards John Mason was sent to study mathematics with an expert named Hunter, “a Scotchman also and quite a recluse, who kept a small school in a retired place in Calvert County, Maryland.” Much teaching was also done by private tutors. In the Mason household these were three Scotchmen in succession, of whom “the two last were especially engaged [in Scotland] to come to America (as was the practice in those times with families who had means) by my father to live in his house and educate the children.... The tutoress of my sisters was a Mrs. Newman. She remained in the family for some time.”[236]

[Sidenote: Convicts as tutors.]

Sometimes the schoolmaster or private tutor was an indented white servant who had come out as a redemptioner, or even as a convict. Among the criminals there might be persons of rank, as Sir Charles Burton, a Lincolnshire baronet, who was transported to America in 1722 for “stealing a cornelian ring set in gold;” or scholars, like Henry Justice, Esq., of the Middle Temple, Barrister, who in 1736 was convicted of stealing from the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, “a Field’s Bible with cuts, and Common-prayer, value £25, Newcastle’s Horsemanship, value £10, several other books of great value, several Tracts cut out of books, etc.” For this larceny, although Mr. Justice begged hard to be allowed to stay in England for the sake of his clients, “with several of whom he had great concerns,” he was nevertheless sent to America for seven years, under penalty of death if he were to return within that time.[237] From such examples we see that, while the convict ships may not have brought many Eugene Arams, they certainly brought men more likely to find employment in teaching than in manual labour. Jonathan Boucher, rector at Annapolis in 1768, declares that “not a ship arrives with either redemptioners or convicts, in which schoolmasters are not as regularly advertised for sale as weavers, tailors, or any other trade; with little other difference that I can hear of, except perhaps that the former do not usually fetch so good a price as the latter.”[238]

[Sidenote: Virginians at Oxford.]

Sometimes, as we have seen in the case of Augustine Washington and his son Lawrence, the young Virginians were sent to school in England. Oftener, perhaps, the education begun at the country school or with private tutors was “finished” (as the phrase goes) at one of the English universities. Oxford seems to have been the favourite Alma Mater, doubtless for the same reason that caused Cambridge to be chiefly represented among the founders of New England; Oxford was ultra-royalist in sentiment, while Cambridge was deeply tinged with Puritanism. This difference would readily establish habits and associations among the early Virginians which would be followed.[239]

[Sidenote: James Madison.]

It was not in all cases necessary to go to England to obtain a thorough education. James Madison’s tutors were the parish minister and an excellent Scotch schoolmaster; he was graduated at Princeton College in 1772, and never crossed the Atlantic; yet for the range, depth, and minuteness of his knowledge of ancient and modern history and of constitutional law, he has been rivalled by no other English-speaking statesman save Edmund Burke. Such an instance, however, chiefly shows how much more depends upon the individual than upon any institutions. There are no rules by which you can explain the occurrence of a heaven-sent genius.

[Sidenote: Contrast with New England in respect of educational advantages.]

On the whole, the facilities for education, whether primary or advanced, were very imperfect in the Old Dominion. This becomes especially noticeable from the contrast with New England, which inevitably suggests itself. It is no doubt customary with historical writers to make too much of this contrast. The people of colonial New England were not all well-educated, nor were all their country schools better than old field schools. The farmer’s boy, who was taught for two winter months by a man and two summer months by a woman, seldom learned more in the district school than how to read, write, and cipher. For Greek and Latin, if he would go to college, he had usually to obtain the services of the minister or some other college-bred man in the village. There was often a disposition on the part of the town meetings to shirk the appropriation of a sum of money for school purposes, and many Massachusetts towns were fined for such remissness.[240] This was especially true of the early part of the eighteenth century, when the isolated and sequestered life of two generations had lowered the high level of education which the grandfathers had brought across the ocean. In those dark days of New England, there might now and then be found in rural communities men of substance who signed deeds and contracts with their mark.

[Sidenote: Causes of the difference.]

After making all allowances, however, the contrast between the New England colonies and the Old Dominion remains undeniable, and it is full of interest. The contrast is primarily based upon the fact that New England was settled by a migration of organized congregations, analogous to that of the ancient Greek city-communities; whereas the settlement of Virginia was effected by a migration of individuals and families. These circumstances were closely connected with the Puritan doctrine of the relations between church and state, and furthermore, as I have elsewhere shown,[241] the Puritan theory of life made it imperatively necessary, in New England as in Scotland, to set a high value upon education. The compactness of New England life, which was favoured by the agricultural system of small farms owned by independent yeomen, made it easy to maintain efficient schools. In Virginia, on the other hand, the agricultural conditions interposed grave obstacles to such a result. There was no such pervasive organization as in New England, where the different grades of school, from lowest to highest, coöperated in sustaining each other. There were heroic friends of education in Virginia. James Blair and the faithful scholars who worked with him conferred a priceless boon upon the commonwealth; but the vitality of William and Mary College often languished for lack of sustenance that should have been afforded by lower schools, and it was impossible for it to exercise such a widespread seminal influence as Yale and Harvard, sending their graduates into every town and village as ministers, lawyers, and doctors, schoolmasters and editors, merchants and country squires.

[Sidenote: Illustrations from history of American intellect.]

Among the founders of New England were an extraordinary number of clergymen noted for their learning, such as Hooker and Shepard, Cotton and Williams, Eliot and the Mathers; together with such cultivated laymen as Winthrop and Bradford, familiar with much of the best that was written in the world, and to whom the pen was an easy and natural instrument for expressing their thoughts. The character originally impressed upon New England by such men was maintained by the powerful influence of the colleges and schools, so that there was always more attention devoted to scholarship and to writing than in any of the other colonies. Communities of Europeans, thrust into a wilderness and severed from Europe by the ocean, were naturally in danger of losing their higher culture and lapsing into the crudeness of frontier life. All the American colonies were deeply affected by this situation. While there were many and great advantages in the freedom from sundry Old World trammels, yet in some respects the influence of the wilderness was barbarizing. It was due to the circumstances above mentioned that the New England colonies were more successful than the others in resisting this influence, and avoiding a breach of continuity in the higher spiritual life of the community. This is strikingly illustrated by the history of American literature. Among men of letters and science born and educated in America before the Revolution, there were three whose fame is more than national, whose names belong among the great of all times and countries. Of these, Jonathan Edwards was a native of Connecticut, Benjamin Franklin and Count Rumford were natives of Massachusetts. In such men we can trace the continuity between the intellectual life of England in the seventeenth century and that of America in the nineteenth. In Virginia, if we except political writers, we find no names so high as these. But there is one political book which must not be excepted, because it is a book for all time. “The Federalist” is one of the world’s philosophical and literary masterpieces, and of its three authors James Madison took by far the deepest and most important part in creating it.[242]

[Sidenote: Virginia’s historians; Robert Beverley.]

Among books of a second order,--books which do not rank among classics,--there are some which deserve and have won a reputation that is more than local. Of such books, Hutchinson’s “History of Massachusetts Bay” is a good example. In the colonial times historical literature was of better quality than other kinds of writing; and Virginia produced three historical writers of decided merit. With Robert Beverley the reader has already made some acquaintance through the extracts cited in these pages. His “History of Virginia,” published in London in 1705, is a little book full of interesting details concerning the country and the life of its red and white inhabitants. The author’s love of nature is charming, and his style so simple, direct, and sprightly that there is not a dull page in the book. It was written during a visit to London, where Beverley happened to see the proof-sheets of Oldmixon’s forthcoming “British Empire in America,” and was disgusted with the silly blunders that swarmed on every page. He wrote his little book as an antidote, and did it so well that many coming generations will read it with pleasure.

[Sidenote: William Stith.]

A book of more pretension and of decided merit is the “History of Virginia” by Rev. William Stith, who was president of William and Mary College from 1752 to his death in 1755. The book, which was published at Williamsburg in 1747, was but the first volume of a work which, had it been completed on a similar scale, would have filled six or eight. It covers only the earliest period, ending with the downfall of the Virginia Company in 1624; and among its merits is the good use to which the author put the minutes of the Company’s proceedings made at the instance of Nicholas Ferrar.[243] Stith’s work is accurate and scholarly, and his narrative is dignified and often graphic. His account of James I. is pithy: “He had, in truth, all the forms of wisdom,--forever erring very learnedly, with a wise saw or Latin sentence in his mouth; for he had been bred up under Buchanan, one of the brightest geniuses and most accomplished scholars of that age, who had given him Greek and Latin in great waste and profusion, but it was not in his power to give him good sense. That is the gift of God and nature alone, and is not to be taught; and Greek and Latin without it only cumber and overload a a weak head, and often render the fool more abundantly foolish. I must, therefore, confess that I have ever had ... a most contemptible opinion of this monarch; which has, perhaps, been much heightened and increased by my long studying and conning over the materials of this history. For he appears in his dealings with the Company to have acted with such mean arts and fraud ... as highly misbecome majesty.”[244] From the refined simplicity of this straightforward style it was a sad descent to the cumbrous and stilted Johnsonese of the next generation, which too many Americans even now mistake for fine writing.

[Sidenote: William Byrd.]

Contemporary with Beverley and Stith was William Byrd, one of the most eminent men of affairs in Old Virginia, and eminent also--probably without knowing it--as a man of letters. His father came to Virginia a few years before Bacon’s rebellion, and bought the famous estate of Westover, on the James River and in Charles City County, with the mansion, which is still in the possession of his family, and is considered one of the finest old houses in Virginia. From his uncle Colonel Byrd inherited a vast estate which included the present site of Richmond. He sympathized strongly with his neighbour, Nathaniel Bacon, and held a command under him; but after the collapse of the rebellion he succeeded in making his peace with the raging Berkeley. He became one of the most important men in the colony, and was commissioned receiver-general of the royal revenues. On his death, in 1704, his son succeeded him in this office. The son had studied law in the Middle Temple, and for proficiency in science was made a fellow of the Royal Society. He was for many years a member of the colonial council, and at length its president. He lived in much splendour on his estate of Westover, and we have seen what a library he accumulated there. A professional man of letters he was not, and perhaps his strong literary tastes might never have led to literary production but for sundry interesting personal experiences which he deemed it worth while to put on record. In 1727 he was one of the commissioners for determining the boundary between Virginia and North Carolina. In the journeys connected with that work he selected the sites where the towns of Richmond and Petersburg were afterwards built; and he wrote a narrative of his proceedings so full of keen observations on the people and times as to make it an extremely valuable contribution to history.[245] Among early American writers Byrd is exceptional for animation of style. There is a quaintness of phrase about him that is quite irrepressible. After a dry season he visits a couple of mills, and “had the grief to find them both stand as still for the want of water as a dead woman’s tongue for want of breath. It had rained so little for many weeks above the falls that the Naiads had hardly water enough left to wash their faces.” He suggests, of course with a twinkle in his eye, that the early settlers of Virginia ought to have formed matrimonial alliances with the Indians: “Morals and all considered, I can’t think the Indians were much greater heathens than the first adventurers, who, had they been good Christians, would have had the charity to take this only method of converting the natives to Christianity. For after all that can be said, a sprightly lover is the most prevailing missionary that can be sent among these, or any other infidels. Besides, the poor Indians would have had less reason to complain that the English took away their land, if they had received it by way of portion with their daughters.... Nor would the shade of the skin have been any reproach at this day; for if a Moor may be washed white in three generations, surely an Indian might have been blanched in two.”[246] With such moralizing was this amiable writer wont to relieve the tedium of historical discourse. We shall again have occasion to quote him in the course of our narrative.

[Sidenote: Science; John Clayton.]

Among other works by writers reared before the Revolution, the well-known “Notes on Virginia,” by Thomas Jefferson, deserves high praise as an essay in descriptive sociology. Of American poetry before the nineteenth century, scarcely a line worth preserving came from any quarter. In 1777 James McClurg, an eminent physician, afterward a member of the Federal Convention, wrote his “Belles of Williamsburg,” a specimen of pleasant society verse; but it had not such vogue as its author’s “Essay on the Human Bile,” which was translated into several European languages. Science throve better than poetry, and was well represented in Virginia by John Clayton, who came thither from England in 1705, being then in his twentieth year, and dwelt there until his death in 1773, on the eve of the famous day which saw the mixing of tea with ice-water in Boston harbour. Clayton was attorney-general of Virginia, and for fifty years clerk of Gloucester County. His name has an honourable place in the history of botany; he was member of learned societies in nearly all the countries of Europe; and in 1739 his “Flora of Virginia” was edited and published by Linnæus and Gronovius.

[Sidenote: Physicians.]

[Sidenote: Washington’s last illness.]

In Old Virginia, as in all the other colonies, the scientific study and practice of medicine had scarcely made a beginning. Those were everywhere the days of “kill or cure” treatment, when there was small hope for patients who had not enough vitality to withstand both drugs and disease. In the light of the progress achieved since the mighty work of Bichat (1798-1801), the two preceding centuries seem a period of stagnation. Strong plasters, jalap, and bleeding were the universal remedies. Mr. Bruce gives us the items of a bill rendered by Dr. Haddon, of York, about 1660, for performing an amputation. “They included one highly flavoured and two ordinary cordials, three ointments for the wound, an ointment precipitate, the operation of letting blood, a purge _per diem_, two purges electuaries, external applications, a cordial and two astringent powders, phlebotomy, a defensive and a large cloth.” On another occasion the same doctor prescribed “a purging glister, a caphalick and a cordial electuary, oil of spirits and sweet almonds, a purging and a cordial bolus, purging pills, ursecatory, and oxymell. His charge for six visits after dark was a hogshead of tobacco weighing 400 pounds.”[247] Of the many thousand victims of these heroic methods, the most illustrious was George Washington, who, but for medical treatment, might probably have lived a dozen or fifteen years into the nineteenth century. When Washington in full vigour found that he had caught a very bad cold he sent for the doctors, and meanwhile had half a pint of blood taken from him by one of his overseers. Of the three physicians in attendance, one was his dear friend, the good Scotchman, Dr. James Craik, “who from forty years’ experience,” said Washington, “is better qualified than a dozen of them put together.” His colleague, Dr. Elisha Dick, said, “Do not bleed the General; he needs all his strength.” But tradition prevailed over common sense, and three copious bleedings followed, in the last of which a quart of blood was taken. The third attendant, Dr. Gustavus Brown, afterward expressed bitter regret that Dr. Dick’s advice was not followed. Besides this wholesale bleeding, the patient was dosed with calomel and tartar emetic and scarified with blisters and poultices; or, as honest Tobias Lear said, in a letter written the next day announcing the fatal result, “every medical assistance was offered, but without the desired effect.”[248]

[Sidenote: Virginia parsons.]

The physician in Old Virginia was very much the same as elsewhere, but the parson was a very different character from the grave ministers and dominies of Boston and New York. He belonged to the class of wine-bibbing, card-playing, fox-hunting parsons, of which there were so many examples in the mother country after the reaction against Puritanism had set in. The religious tone of the English church during the first half of the eighteenth century was very low, and it was customary to send out to Virginia and Maryland the poorest specimens of clergymen that the mother country afforded. Men unfit for any appointment at home were thought good enough for the colonies. The royal governor, as vicegerent of the sovereign, was head of the colonial church, while ecclesiastical affairs were superintended by a commissary appointed by the Bishop of London. The first commissary, Dr. Blair, as we have seen, was president of the college, and in his successors those two offices were usually united. Several attempts were made to substitute a bishop for the commissary, but the only result of the attempts was to alienate people’s sympathies from the church, while the conduct of the clergy was such as to destroy their respect for it. Bishop Meade has queer stories to tell of some of these parsons. One of them was for years the president of a jockey club. Another fought a duel within sight of his own church. A third, who was evidently a muscular Christian, got into a rough-and-tumble fight with his vestrymen and floored them; and then justified himself to his congregation next Sunday in a sermon from a text of Nehemiah, “And I contended with them, and cursed them, and smote certain of them, and plucked off their hair.” In 1711 a bequest of £100 was made to the vestry of Christ Church parish in Middlesex, providing that the interest should be paid to the minister for preaching four sermons each year against “the four reigning vices,--viz.: atheism and irreligion, swearing and cursing, fornication and adultery, and drunkenness.” Later in the century the living was held for eighteen years, and the sermons were preached, by a minister who was notoriously guilty of all the vices mentioned. He used to be seen in the tavern porch, reeling to and fro with a bowl of toddy in his hand, while he called to some passer-by to come in and have a drink. When this exemplary man of God was dying in delirium, his last words were halloos to the hounds. In 1726 a thoughtful and worthy minister named Lang wrote to the Bishop of London about the scandalous behaviour of the clergy, of whom the sober part were “slothful and negligent,” while the rest were debauched and “bent on all manner of vices.”[249] This testimony against the clergy, it will be observed, comes from clergymen. Yet it seems clear that the cases cited must have been extreme ones,--cases of the sort that make a deep impression and are long remembered. A few such instances would suffice to bring down condemnation upon the whole establishment; and not unjustly, for a church in which such things could for a moment be tolerated must needs have been in a degraded condition. This state of things afforded an excellent field for the labours of Baptist and Presbyterian revivalist preachers, and to such good purpose did they work that by the time of the Revolution it was found that more than half of the people in Virginia were Dissenters. At that time the Episcopal clergy were not unnaturally inclined to the Tory side, and this last ounce was all that was needed to break down the establishment and cast upon it irredeemable discredit. The downfall of the Episcopal church in Virginia and its resurrection under more wholesome conditions make an interesting chapter of history.

[Sidenote: Freethinking.]

In imputing to his tipsy parson the “vice” of atheism, Bishop Meade warns us that he does not mean a denial of the existence of God, but merely irreligion, or “living without God in the world.” In 1724 the Bishop of London was officially informed that there were no “infidels” in Virginia, negroes and Indians excepted. A few years later, “when the first infidel book was imported, ... it produced such an excitement that the governor and commissary communicated on the subject with the authorities in England.” In those days freethinkers, if prudent, kept their thoughts to themselves. All over Christendom the atmosphere was still murky with intolerance, and men’s conceptions of the universe were only beginning to emerge from the barbaric stage. Virginia was no exception to the general rule.

[Sidenote: Superstition and crime.]

In respect also of superstition and crime the Old Dominion seems to have differed but little from other parts of English America. Belief in witchcraft lasted into the eighteenth century, and the statute-book reveals an abiding dread of what rebellious slaves might do; but there were no epidemics of savage terror, as at Salem in 1692, or in the negro panic of 1741 in New York. Of violent crime there was surely much less than in the England of Jack Sheppard and Jonathan Wild, but probably more than in the colonies north of Delaware Bay; and its perpetrators seem to have been chiefly white freedmen and “outlying negroes.”[250] Duelling seems to have been infrequent before the Revolution.[251] Murder, rape, arson, and violent robbery were punished with death; while pillory, stocks, whipping-post, and ducking-stool were kept in readiness for minor offenders. The infliction of the death penalty in a cruel or shocking manner was not common. Negroes were occasionally burned at the stake, as in other colonies, north and south; and an instance is on record in which negro murderers were beheaded and quartered after hanging.[252] No white persons were ever burned at the stake by any of the colonies.[253]

[Sidenote: Lawyers.]

In the early days of Virginia there was not much practice of law except by the county magistrates in their work of maintaining the king’s peace. The legal profession was at first held in somewhat low repute, being sometimes recruited by white freedmen whose careers of rascality as attorneys in England had suddenly ended in penal servitude. But after the middle of the seventeenth century the profession grew rapidly in importance and improved in character. During the eighteenth century the development in legal learning and acumen, and in weight of judicial authority, was remarkable. The profession was graced by such eminent names as Pendleton, Wythe, and Henry, until in John Marshall the Old Dominion gave to the world a name second to none among the great judges of English race and speech.

[Sidenote: A government of laws.]

One cause of this splendid development of legal talent was doubtless the necessarily close connection between legal and political activity. The Virginia planter meant that his government should be one of laws. With his extensive estates to superintend and country interests to look after, his position was in many respects like that of the country squire in England. In his House of Burgesses the planter had a parliament; and in the royal governor, who was liable to subordinate local to imperial interests, there was an abiding source of antagonism and distrust, requiring him to keep his faculties perpetually alert to remember all the legal maxims by which the liberties of England had been guarded since the days of Glanvil and Bracton. On the whole, it was a noble type of rural gentry that the Old Dominion had to show. Manly simplicity, love of home and family, breezy activity, disinterested public spirit, thorough wholesomeness and integrity,--such were the features of the society whose consummate flower was George Washington.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Some characteristics of Maryland.]

This chapter must not close without a brief mention of the social features of Maryland, but a brief mention is all that is needed for my purpose, since the portraiture just given of Leah will answer in most respects for her younger sister Rachel. The English colonists in Maryland were of the same excellent class as the Cavaliers who were the strength of Virginia. Though tidewater Virginia at the beginning of the eighteenth century contained but few people who did not belong to the Church of England, on the other hand, in Maryland, not more than one sixth of the white population belonged to that church, while one twelfth were Roman Catholics, and three fourths were Puritans. But these differences in religion did not run parallel with differences in birth, refinement, or wealth. Naturally, from the circumstances under which the colony was founded, some of the best human material was always to be found among the Catholics; and they wielded an influence disproportionately greater than their numbers.

For the first three generations tobacco played as important a part in Maryland as in Virginia. Nearly all the people became planters. Cheap labour was supplied at first by indented white servants and afterwards by negro slaves, who never came, however, to number more than from one fourth to one third of the whole population. There was the same isolation, the same absence of towns, the same rudeness of roads and preference for water-ways, as in Virginia. The facilities for education were somewhat poorer; there was no university or college, no public schools until 1728, no newspaper until 1745.

But early in the eighteenth century there came about an important modification of industries, which was in large part due to the rapid growth of Maryland’s neighbour, Pennsylvania. In the latter colony a great deal of wheat was raised, and the export of flour became very profitable. This wheat culture extended into Maryland, where wheat soon became a vigorous rival of tobacco. In 1729 the town of Baltimore was founded, and at once rose to importance as a point for exporting flour. Moreover, as Pennsylvania exported various kinds of farm produce, besides large quantities of valuable furs, and as she had no seacoast and no convenient maritime outlet save Philadelphia, her export trade soon came to exceed the capacities of that outlet, and a considerable part of it went through Baltimore, which thus had a large and active rural district dependent upon it, and grew so fast that by 1770 it had become the fourth city in English America, with a population of nearly 20,000. The growth of Annapolis was further stimulated by these circumstances; and this development of town life, with the introduction of a wealthy class of merchants and the continual intercommunication with Pennsylvania, went far toward assimilating Maryland with the middle colonies while it diminished to some extent her points of resemblance to the Old Dominion.