USA > Virginia > Old Virginia and her neighbours > Part 16
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21
.CHAPTER VII.
THE KINGDOM OF VIRGINIA.
FROM the busy streets of London, from the strife in Parliament and the Privy Council, we must turn once more to the American wilderness and observe what progress had been made in Vir- ginia during the seventeen years of its
government by a great joint-stock con- Retrospect. pany. But for a correct appreciation of the sit- uation we must qualify and limit this period of seventeen years. The terrible experience of the first three years left the colony at the point of death, and it was not until the administration of Sir Thomas Dale that any considerable expansion beyond Jamestown began. The progress visible in 1624 was mostly an affair of ten years' duration, dating from the abolition of communism and the beginnings of tobacco culture. By far the greater part of this progress had been achieved within the last five years, since the establishment of self-gov- ernment and the greater part played by family life. In 1624 the colony of Virginia extended from the mouth of James River up nearly as far as the site of Richmond, with plantations on both banks; and it spread over the peninsula between the James and the broad stream next to the north of it, which at that time was called the Charles,
224 OLD VIRGINIA AND HIER NEIGHBOURS.
but since 1642 has been known as the York River. There were also a few settlements on the Accomac peninsula east of Chesapeake Bay. It would be hard to find elsewhere upon the North American coast any region where the land is so generally and easily penetrable by streams that can be navigated. The country known as "tidewater
Tidewater Virginia " is a kind of sylvan Venice. Virginia. Into the depths of the shaggy woodland for many miles on either side the great bay the salt tide ebbs and flows. One can go surprisingly far inland on sea-faring craft, while with a boat there are but few plantations on the old York peninsula to which one cannot approach very near. In the absence of good roads this ubiquity of navigable water was a great convenience, but doubtless the very convenience of it may have delayed the arduous work of breaking good land- routes through the wilderness, and thus have tended to maintain the partial isolation of the planters' estates, to which so many characteristic features of life in Old Virginia may be traced.
If in 1624 we had gone up stream to Wero- wocomoco, where Smith had broken the ice with his barge fifteen years before, we should prob- ably have found very little of its strange bar- baric life remaining. The first backward step of the Indian before the encroaching progress of Englishmen had been taken. The frontier was Receding fast receding to the Pamunkey region
frontier. along the line joining the site of West Point with that of Cold Harbor; and from that time forward a perpetually receding frontier of
225
THE KINGDOM OF VIRGINIA.
barbarism was to be one of the most profoundly and variously significant factors in the life of . English-speaking America until the census of 1890 should announce that such a frontier could no longer be definitely located. In the last year of James I. the grim Opekankano and his warriors still held the Pamunkey River; in that neigh- bourhood and to the north of it one might have seen symptoms of the wild frontier life of the white hunter and trapper. Returning thence to the great bay, the plantation called Dale's Gift on the Accomac shore would have little about it that need detain us, and so sweeping across from Cape Charles to Point Comfort, we should come to Elizabeth City, named for King James's daughter Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia. The only planta- tion here, standing like a sentinel to guard the principal avenue into the colony, bears the name of the last treasurer of the Company, curtailed into Hampton. The next borough bears the The name of Southampton's enemy, the Earl plantations.
of Warwick, and opposite are the plantations on Warrasqueak Bay. Passing Jamestown, we arrive at the mouth of the Chickahominy, above which lies an extensive territory known as Charles City, with the plantations of Wyanoke and Westover, while over on the south side of the James the set- tlements known as Martin Brandon, Flowerdieu Hundred, and Bermuda successively come into sight and disappear. Then we sail around the City of Henricus, and passing the ruins of Falling Creek, destroyed by the Indians, we come at length to the charming place that Smith called
226 OLD VIRGINIA AND HIER NEIGHBOURS.
Nonesuch. Here, a few miles below the spot where Richmond is in future to stand, we reach once more the frontier. Beyond are endless stretches of tangled and mysterious woods through which the sturdy Newport once vainly tried to find his way to some stream flowing into the Pacific Occan. Here we may turn our prow and make our way down to Jamestown, where the House of Burgesses is in session.
It is called a House of Burgesses because its members are regarded as the representatives of boroughs, and such a name sounds queer Boroughs and as applied to little areas of scattered burgesses. farms in the forest. Still more strange is the epithet " city " for tracts of woodland several miles in extent, and containing half a dozen widely isolated plantations. The apparent absurdity is emphasized on the modern map, where such names as Charles City and James City are simply names of counties. How came such names first to be used in such senses ? One's mind naturally reverts to what goes on to-day in the Far West, where geographical names, like doubtful promissory notes, must usually be taken with heavy discount for an uncertain future, where in every such appel- lation there lurks the hope of a boom, and any collection of three or four log-cabins, with a saw- mill and whiskey-shop, surrounded by a dozen acres of blackened tree-stumps, may forthwith appear in the Postal Guide under some such title as Chain Lightning City. In oldest Virginia we may perhaps see marks of such a spirit of buoyant confidence in such names as Charles City or the
227
THE KINGDOM OF VIRGINIA.
City of Henricus. No doubt Sir Thomas Dale, when he fortified the little Dutch Gap peninsula and marked out its streets, believed himself to be founding a true city with urban destinies await- ing it. This explanation, however, does not cover the whole case. Whatever the title of each indi- vidual settlement in oldlest Virginia, -- whether plantation, or hundred, or city, -- all were alike conceived. for legal and political purposes, as equivalent to boroughs, although they were not thus designated. Now the primary meaning of the word " borough " is " fortress." and in early English usage a borough was a small and thickly peopled hundred surrounded by a durable wall. A " hundred " was a small aggregation Boroughs
of townships united by a common re- and hundreds. sponsibility for the good behaviour of its people ; it was therefore the smallest area for the administration of justice, the smallest social community which possessed a court. Ordinarily the hundred was a rural community, but that special compact and fortified form of it known as the borough retained all the legal features of the ordinary hundred ; it had its own court, and was responsible for its own malefactors and vagrants. In old English boroughs the respon- sible men - those who owned property, and paid taxes, and chose representatives - were the bur- gesses. Bearing always in mind this equivalence between the borough and the hundred, we may note further that in early times the hundred was a unit for military purposes ; it was about such a community as could furnish to the general levy a
228 OLD VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBOURS.
company of a hundred armed men. It was also a unit of representation in the ancient English shire- moot or county court. Now in oldlest Virginia the colonial assembly, when instituted in 1619, the earliest legislature of civilized men in the western hemisphere, was patterned after the old English county court, and it was natural that its units should be conceived as hundreds and in some in- stances called so. Moreover, there are indica- tions that at times the hundred was regarded as a military division, and also as the smallest area for the administration of justice, as in the law passed in 1624 providing that Charles City and Eliza- beth City should hold monthly courts.1 What- ever names the early settlers of Virginia gave to their settlements individually, they seem to have regarded them all in the legal light of hundreds, and as they were familiar with the practical equiva- lence of the borough as a unit for judicial and representative purposes, it was natural that when they came to choose a general assembly they should speak of its members as if they were repre- sentatives of boroughs. They were familiar with burgesses in England, but the designations " Inin- dred - men " and " hundred - elders " had become obsolete.
Resuming our pilgrimage through the Virgini: of 1624, we find no walls of massive masonry with frowning turrets encompassing these rudimentary boroughs, but at the most exposed points we meet with stout wooden blockhouses and here and there
1 Ingle, " Local Institutions of Virginia," J. H. U. Studi iii. 148.
229
THE KINGDOM OF VIRGINIA.
a row of palisades. At some places there are wharves for the convenient shipping of tobacco, but now and then, if the tide is not just right, we may be in danger of wetting our feet in going ashore, about which that ill-disposed Captain Butler has lately made so much fuss. The wooden frame houses, having been built without regard The houses. to æsthetic effects, with beams here and
there roughly hewn and boards not always smoothly planed, are not so attractive in outward appear- ance as they might be, but they are roomy and well-aired, and the settlers already point to them with some degree of pride as more comfortable than the houses of labouring men in England. These houses usually stand at wide intervals, and nowhere, perhaps, except at Henricus and James- town, would one see them clustering in a village with streets. Here and there one might come across a handsomer and more finished mansion, like an English manor house, with cabins for servants and farm buildings at some distance. Of negroes scarcely any are to be seen, only twenty-two all told, in this population of perhaps 4,000 souls. Cheap labour is supplied by white ser- Labourers. vants, bound to their masters by inden-
tures for some such term as six or seven years ; they are to some extent a shiftless and degraded set of creatures gathered from the slums and jails of English seaport towns, but many of them are of a better sort. Of red men, since the Indians.
dreadful massacre of two years ago, one
sees but few : they have been driven off to the frontier, the alliance cemented by the marriage of
-
230
OLD VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBOURS.
Pocahontas is at an end, and no more can white men be called Powhatans. On this point the statute book speaks in no uncertain tones: "Ffor the Indians we hould them our irrecosileable eni- mies," and it is thought fit that if any of them be found molesting cattle or lurking about any plan- tation, "then the commander shall have power by virtue of this act to rayse a sufficient partie and fall out uppon them, and persecute them as he shall finde occasion." 1
In the plantations, thus freed from the presence of Indians, European domestic animals have be- come plenty. Horses, indeed, are not yet so much in demand as boats and canoes, but oxen draw the Agriculture, plough, the cows are milked night and etc. morning, sheep and goats browse here and there, pigs and chickens are innumerable. Pigeons coo from the eves, and occasionally one comes upon a row of murmurous bee-hives. The broad clearings are mostly covered with the cab- bage-like tobacco plant, but there are also many fields of waving wheat and barley, and many inore of the tasselled Indian corn. John Smith's scheme for manufacturing glass and soap has not yet been abandoned ; the few workmen from Poland, brought here by him, have remained, or else others have come in place of them, for we find the House of Burgesses passing a statute ad- mitting them to the franchise and other privileges of English citizenship, because of their value to the commonwealth in these branches of indus- try. Skilled workmen of another sort have been
1 Hening's Statutes at Large, i. 176. 193.
231
THE KINGDOM OF VIRGINIA.
sent over by Nicholas Ferrar from France, for since mulberries grow in Virginia it has been thought that silk-worms might be profitably raised here, but such hopes are not destined to be real- ized.
Such was the outward aspect of things along the banks of the James River in the year when, amid general grief and forebodings, the London Com- pany was dissolved ; and such it continued to be for many a year to come, save that the cultivated area increased in extent and the settlers in num- ber, and that in spite of divers efforts to check it. the raising of tobacco encroached more Tobacco. and more upon all other forms of indus-
try, tending to crush them out of existence, while at the same time the plantations grew larger and the demand for cheap labour was vastly increased. For some time the cultivation of Indian corn assumed considerable proportions, so that not only was there enough for home consumption, but in 1634 more than ten thousand bushels were ex- ported to Winthrop's new colony on Massachusetts Bay. Nevertheless the encroachments of tobacco went on without cessation, until the features of social life in old Virginia came to be those of a wealthy and powerful community economically based upon one single form of agricultural indus- try.
In the Virginia of 1624 one could not look for any highly developed forms of social recreation, or for means of education or literary attainment. Various episodes of farm work, such as the har- vesting of the crops, or now and then the raising
232 OLD VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBOURS.
of the frame of a house or barn, seem to have been occasions for a gathering of neighbours with some sort of merrymaking, very much as in other primitive rural communities. Among the leading colonists were men of university education who brought with them literary tastes, and in their houses might have been found ponderous tomes of controversial theology, as well as those little thin quarto tracts of political discussion that nowa- days often fetch such fabulous prices.
Literature.
Captain John Smith was spending his last years quietly in England, making maps and writing or editing books. His "General History of Virginia," published in 1624, can hardly fail to have been read with interest in the colony ; and the same ship that brought it may well have brought the first folio edition of Shakespeare's complete works, which came from the press in the preceding year. Literary production of a certain sort went on in the colony. Such tracts as Ralph Hamor's " True Discourse " and Whitaker's "Good News from Virginia," though books of rare interest and value, will perhaps hardly come under the category of pure literature. But the translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses by George Sandys. youngest brother of Sir Edwin, has been well known and admired by scholars from that time to our own. George Sandys came to Vir- ginia in 1621 as treasurer of the colony, fortified with some rather dull verses from the poet lau- reate, Michael Drayton : --
" And worthy George, by industry and use Let's see what lines Virginia will produce;
233
THE KINGDOM OF VIRGINIA.
Entice the Muses thither to repair,
Entreat them gently. train them to that air ; For they from hence may thither hap to fly."
On the bank of James River the worthy George entreated the Muses with success and wrote the greater part of his poetical version, which was published at London in 1626.
But the Muses could not be enticed to stay long in Virginia without some provision for higher education there. and this was well under- stood by Sir Edwin Sandys and the Education. enlightened gentlemen who supported him. In 1621 the Company resolved that funds should be appropriated " for the erecting of a public free school .. . for the education of children and grounding of them in the principles of religion. Civility of life and humane learning," said the committee's report, "seemed to carry with it the greatest weight and highest consequence unto the plantations as that whereof both Church and Com- monwealth take their original foundation and happy estate, this being also like[ly] to prove a work most acceptable unto the planters, through want whereof they have been hitherto constrained to their great costs to send their children from thence hither to be taught." Rev. Patrick Cope- land, a missionary returning from the East Indies, raised £70 toward the erdowment of this school, and was busily engaged in doing more for it. It was accordingly called the East India School, it was to be established in Charles City, Project for a and i's courses of study were to- be pre- university,
paratory to those of a university which was to be
234 OLD VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBOURS.
set up in the city of Henricus. Great interest was felt in this university. Like Harvard Col- lege, founded somewhat later, it was designed not only for the education of white youthis but also for civilizing and missionary work among the Indians. The Bishop of London raised by subscription £1,000 for the enterprise; one anonymous bene- factor gave a silver communion service ; another, who signed himself " Dust and Ashes," sent £550, and promised, after certain progress should have been made, to add £450 more ; this man was after- ward discovered to be a member of the Company, named Gabriel Barber. The elder Nicholas Ferrar left £300 in his will, and various contributions were added by his sons, A tract of land in Henricus was appropriated for the site of the col- lege, and George Thorpe was sent out to be its rector, or, as we should say, its president. But Thorpe, as well as others who were interested in the enterprise, perished in the Indian massaere of 1622. It seems that Copeland was about to be sent to take his place, and the enterprise was about to be vigorously pushed on by Ferrar and his friends, when the overthrow of the Company took away all control over Virginian affairs from the people most interested in this work. So the scheme for a college remained in a state of sus- pended vitality for seventy years, until Dr. Blair revived it in 1692, and established it in the town of Williamsburg.
Everybody knows that the college of William and Mary is the oldest in the United States, after Harvard. It is not so generally known that the
235
THE KINGDOM OF VIRGINIA.
former was planned and all but established in 1622, eight years before Winthrop and his follow- ers came to Massachusetts Bay. It is a just and wholesome pride that New England people feel in recalling the circumstances under which Harvard College was founded, in a little colony Puritans and
but six years of age, still struggling Liberal Churchmen.
against the perils of the wilderness and
the enmity of its sovereign. Such an event is quite properly cited in illustration of the lofty aims and intelligent foresight of the founders of Mas- sachusetts. But it should not be forgotten that aims equally lofty and foresight equally intelligent were shown by the men who fromn 1619 to 1624 controlled the affairs of Virginia. One of the noblest features in the great Puritan movement was its zeal for education, elementary education for everybody and higher education for all who could avail themselves of it. It is important to remember that this zeal for education, as well as the zeal for political liberty, was not confined to the Puritans. Within the established Church of England and never feeling a desire to leave it, were eminent men who to the political principles of Pymn joined a faith in education as strong as Locke's. The general temper of these men, of whom Richard Hooker was the illustrious master, was broadly tolerant. Sir Edwin Sandys was friendly to the Leyden Pilgrims, and it was under his administration that the Virginia Company granted them the patent under which they would have founded their colony on the coast of New Jersey or Delaware, had not foul weather driven
236 OLD VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBOURS.
the Mayflower to Cape Cod. It was Sandys and Nicholas Ferrar that were most energetic in the attempt to found a college in Virginia, and there were some curious points of resemblance between their situation in 1622 and the situation of Win- throp and his friends while they were laying the foundations of Harvard College. In 1622, while James I. was plotting the overthrow of the Lon- don Company, the horrors of Indian massacre, as sudden as lightning from a cloudless sky, fell upon the people of Virginia. In 1637 the people of Massachusetts had the Peqnot war on their hands, and Charles I. was plotting the overthrow of the Company of Massachusetts Bay, against whose charter he was on the point of issuing a writ of quo warranto, when in St. Giles's church at Edin- burgh one Sunday old Jenny Geddes threw her camp-stool at the bishop's head, and in the ensu- ing turmoil American affairs were quite forgotten.
The comparison reminds us that the Company of Massachusetts Bay knew how to profit by the fate of its great predecessor, the London Company
Massachu- for Virginia. In the summer of 1629.
setts and when things were looking very dark in
Virginia. England, the leaders of the Massachu- setts Bay Company held a meeting at Cambridge and decided to carry their company, with its char- ter, across the ocean to New England, where they might work out their purposes without so much danger from royal interference. This transfer of the Company to America was the most funda- mental circumstance in the early history of New England. The mere physical fact of distance
237
THE KINGDOM OF VIRGINIA.
transformed the commercial company into a self- governing republic, which for more than fifty years managed its own affairs in almost entire independence of the British government. Diffi- culty of access and infrequency of communication were the safeguards of the Massachusetts Bay Company. If it had held its meetings and pro- mulgated its measures in London, its life woukl not have been worth a five years purchase. It had the fate of the Virginia Company for a warning, and most adroitly did it profit by the lesson. If the Virginia Company could have been transferred bodily to America in 1620, it might perhaps have become similarly changed into a self-governing semi-independent republic ; the interests of the Company would have been permanently identified with those of the colony, and the course of Virgin- ian history might have been profoundly affected. As it was, Virginia attained through the fall of the Company to such measure of self-government as it had throughout the colonial period. a self- government much like that of Massachusetts after 1692, but far less complete than that of Massa- chusetts before 1684.
It was not the intention of James I. that the overthrow of the Company should contribute in any way to increase the liberties of the colony of Virginia. All colonizable territory claimed by Great Britain was, in his opinion, just so much royal domain, something which came to him by inheritance like the barony of Renfrew or the manor of Windsor ; it was his to do what he liked with it, and for settlers in such territory no better
238 OLD VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBOURS.
law was needed than such as he could make for
Death of them himself. A shadow of doubt as to
James I. his own omniscience was never one of James's weaknesses, and no sooner had the Com- pany's charter been annulled than he set himself to work to draw up a constitution for Virginia. It was work of a sort that he thoroughly enjoyed, but what might have come of it will never be known, for while he was busy with it there came upon him what the doctors called a tertian ague, which carried him off in March, 1625.
In the history of England no era is marked by the accession of Charles I. In its policy and methods, and in the political problems at issue, his reign was merely the continuation of his father's. But in the history of Virginia his acces- sion marks an important era. For if James had lived to complete his constitution for Virginia he would in all probability have swept away the repre- sentative government introduced by Sir Edwin Sandys; but Charles allowed it to stand. As . the situation was left by the death of James, so it remained without essential change until 1776. The House of Burgesses was undisturbed, but the governor and council were thenceforth appointed
Effect of the by the crown. The colony was thus left
downfall of less independent than it would have been
the Com-
pany. if the Company, with its power of elect- ing its own executive officers, could have been transferred bodily to Virginia ; but it was left more independent than it would have been if the existence of the Company had been continued in London. The change from governors appointed
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.