USA > Virginia > Virginia colonial decisions : the reports by Sir John Randolph and by Edward Barradall, of decisions of the general court of Virginia, 1728-1741, v. I > Part 5
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But in 1583 Queen Elizabeth sent out Sir Humphrey Gilbert3 with an English ship, and for a mascot gave him a trinket in the shape of an anchor set with jewels, telling him that she " wished him as good hope and safety to his ship as if herself was there in person."
'Early Voyages to America. Conway Robinson, 84
"Hudson and Champlain both made their voyages along the coast in 1609, two years after the settlement at Jamestown. Hudson was off the mouth of James River in August, 1609, but did not enter.
3The half brother of Sir Walter Raleigh, and his senior by thirteen years.
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But neither the mascot nor the message brought good luck, for, having reached the island of St. John, Gilbert encountered a great storm, and went down with his vessel.1
Sir Walter Raleigh followed quick upon the course of Gilbert by sending out, in 1585, a tentative colony under Sir Richard Grenville. These adventurers landed on Roanoke Island in Albemarle Sound, but they did not stay. In a little while they had enough of it, and all embarked for England with Sir Francis Drake, who was given to sailing those southern seas in search of Spanish argosies.
In 1587, Grenville made another landing at the same place, but while White, the governor, went back to England, leaving on the island, in good condition, eighty-nine men, seventeen women and eleven children, and among the latter his granddaughter Virginia Dare, the first child of English parentage born in America, the people all left the island and disappeared forever. The mystery has never been and never can be explained, the only intelligible mark left by them being that they did not go because they were in distress. Such an incident is a fertile source for surmise and has tickled the imaginations of many a weaver of fiction. Even the staid writers of history cannot pass it by without yielding a little more credence than they desired to the romantic possibilities of the story.2
So, after all, nothing permanent came of those attempts, and, besides the lost colony, the adventure only serves to remind us of the sad fate which befell its patron the great Sir Walter Raleigh, and of the fact that because his royal mistress was a Virgin Queen, the Old Dominion bears the name of Virginia.
'Cooke's History of Virginia, 5.
"Old Virginia and Her Neighbours, Vol. I., 139. Cooke's History of Virginia. 6.
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Not until twenty years later was there another attempt at a permanent settlement made on that un- lucky shore. Then, John Smith, a plain man with a plain name, broke the back of fate, and did succeed in planting the first English Colony on American soil. Captain Christopher Newport commanded the fleet consisting of the Discovery, the Good Speed, and the Susan Constant; and Captain Bartholomew Gosnold, who commanded one of the vessels and was a wise man, was entitled to much of the credit for the ultimate success of the venture; but Captain John Smith holds the word, and is entitled to hold it, with both history and romance, for being the real founder of what be- came the State of Virginia, the first English colony in point of time, and the first to plant representative government on this continent.
Smith not only built a state, but he did that which an enemy has always wished his adversary to do, he wrote a book - perhaps too many of them. He had a fluent command of words, attractive descriptive powers, and possibly a little too much imagination; not being willing, apparently, to write anything that was not interesting. So some do say that all the things he wrote, especially about himself, are not to be taken without a grain or two of salt. There be some1 indeed, of whom Smith himself would say that they were "little better than atheists,"2 who even venture to deny the romantic story of his rescue by Pocahontas.
But Smith and Pocahontas did not want for a cham- pion in history, for he was found in Mr. William Wirt Henry in his able and most interesting address delivered before the Virginia Historical Society in 1882. This
1Mr. Charles Deane; Rev. Edward D. Neile, History of Virginia Company of London; Wm. Cullen Bryant: Henry Sydney Howard, History of America; Henry Cabot Lodge, English Colonies in America; and others.
?Works of Capt. John Smith, 386.
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is a masterly defense by a master hand, and the soul of the antiquarian, even if he be a sceptic as to the leading and earliest of Virginia romantic tales, finds delight in its perusal.
----
But whether Pocahontas saved Smith or not, there can be no doubt that Smith saved Virginia, and that to him, more than to any other single man, is due the fact that this colonial venture did not share the fate of its predecessors at Roanoke. In view of this, it seems fortunate that Raleigh had already pre-empted the name, for many an eloquent peroration that ends so finely with an invocation to the great old state, would lose its effective force if, instead, it had to con- clude with the explorer's name, "Smithonia."
Of Smith's claim to pre-eminence as the founder, Mr. Henry1 says: " As his companions freely accorded to him the honor of being the founder of Virginia, now that his work has developed into such a power for the advancement of mankind, the world should freely accord him the great honor which is his due. His name, belittled by Fuller in its insertion among the Worthies of England,' should be enrolled among the 6 ' Worthies of Mankind,' and he be forever assigned an honored place among the founders of great nations."
But Smith's claims to honor are not confined to Virginia. In 1614, he explored, with two ships, the New England coast, and made a map of the country between the Penobscot and Cape Cod.2 In his writings he speaks of Massachusetts as "the Paradise of all those parts,"3 and among his most cherished titles, with which he took care to adorn the title pages of his books, was that of Admiral of New England.
'Address, 58. 2Works of Capt John Smith, 699. 3Id., 719.
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Before Smith, Champlain had also explored the Penobscot, had entered Charles River and sailed around Cape Cod,1 but yet before the Pilgrims came Smith had come, had landed in Massachusetts, and possibly had stood on Plymouth rock six years prior to the famous landing of 1620.
But this chapter concerns only the country where our reporters lived and worked, and only of so much of that as affects conditions existing about that time. To these matters we must return.
Many histories tell of the immediate causes in Eng- land which produced the Virginia venture; of the Charter which King James drew up; of his instruc- tions to the adventurers, minute and most imprac- ticable; and of the sealing them in a box and the opening of them off Cape Henry on April 26, 1607. These papers were the real foundation of constitutional government on this continent, though the wonder is that out of such beginnings so great a growth should come.
Smith was a restless explorer and a persistent map- maker. Eight days after the opening of the sealed box off Cape Henry, and in spite of the refusal of his companions to recognize his appointment to the dignity of councilor, which the papers showed he was entitled to, with Captain Newport and twenty others he went in a barge into the broad mouth of the Pow- hatan, afterwards ignobly called the James, with the purpose of exploring it to its source. The party sailed certainly as far as the Appomatox, and, unless the narrative includes two different expeditions, up to the falls, the head of navigation. On their way back, coming to a spot on the north bank of the river, where the water was so deep that the ships could lie near
'New France and New England. Fiske, 53.
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enough to the shore to be moored to the trees, they selected it as their place of settlement, and at once set some of the men to fortifying it, while the others kept watch.1
This was May 14 (old style 3d), 1607, and they named the place Jamestown. For the location of a town hardly a worse selection could have been made, but with good fortune and bad, principally the latter, the town stood through ninety-two years, and if its commercial had to any extent approximated its historic value, it would have become a great city. In fact, it never was more than a small village, but there, said a distinguished Virginian,2 "the old world first met the new. Here the white man first wielded the axe to cut the first tree for the first log cabin; here the first log cabin was built for the first village. Here the first village was to be the first state capital; here was the first capital of our empire of states. Here was the first foundation of a nation of free men, which has stretched its dominion and its millions across the continent to the shores of another ocean."
The story of Jamestown has been too often told to need repetition here,-the story of Indian fights and massacres, of starvation and abandonment, of its de- population into the overflowing graveyard, and re- peated replenishments; of burnings and rebuildings, of contentions and reconciliations, of bad governments and good, of Bacon's revolution, also called a rebellion, and punishments by hanging and imprisonment; of the final removal of the capital and abandonment for all time of the site, the seat of government for near a century. One occurence, however, can never be told of too often, - the meeting of the first legislative
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'Cradle of the Republic. Tyler, 23.
$Henry A. Wise. Id. 21.
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assembly, the first representative body on American soil, gathered in the little wooden church, in 1619, and of this we will speak when we consider the kind of government established in the land of which this chapter is meant to be a description.
For very many years the site of Jamestown was almost covered by weeds and marshes, and much of it has yielded to the lapping waves of the great river. which washes now over much of the most interesting part of the original settlement. But in recent years patriotic energy has made full atonement for past neglect. A sea wall protects what is left of the site from further depredation by the river. The accumu- lated dust and earth of more than two hundred years has been removed, and the foundation lines of the older churches, the State House, and little village houses, uncovered, fenced around, and protected by a coating of cement from further decay. To the old church tower, though claimed to be not the oldest in the land,1 a pretty church has been added, pre- serving the old bricks found in the excavation. The ancient tombstones, protected by a permanent fence and held together by cement, continue to perpetuate the memories of those whose bones once lay beneath them, and to add greatly to the deep interest which must forever attach to the modest and homely spot where free government was born in America. But last, and by no means least, a fine statue of Captain John Smith has been erected upon the island, a most worthy memorial of a great man.
The Charter of April 10, 1606, which Newport brought with him across the sea, marked out the limits of that Southern Colony of which Jamestown was to
1The Old Brick Church. Address of R. S. Thomas before the Virginia His- torical Society. Vol. XI, 129.
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be the capital. It was to be planted "anywhere between 34 and 41 degrees of north latitude, corres- ponding to the limits of North Carolina and the mouth of the Hudson River. It was to extend fifty miles north and fifty miles south of the spot selected for the settlement; one hundred miles into the land, and to embrace any islands within that same distance of the coast."1 Between it and the northern colony there was to intervene as a sort of buffer, a zone one hundred miles wide. But by the Charter of 1609, the boundaries of the southern colony were much enlarged and made to embrace two hundred miles north and two hundred miles south of the mouth of the James River and to reach "up into the land from sea to sea."2 Out of these designated limits both Maryland and North Carolina were subsequently carved,3 but not without much contention, some by law and some by force.
For boundaries, however, at this time, the exploring mind of John Smith cared but little. What he was bent on doing was to find out where the great rivers came from and to map them out. So on his first voyage, with Captain Newport in command, they set out in a "shallop" and "took five gentlemen, four maryners and fourteen saylours, with whome he pro- ceeded with a perfect resolutyon not to returne, but either to find ye head of this Ryver, the Laake mentyoned by others heretofore, the sea againe, the mountaynes Apalatsi, or some isue."4
The first " salvage " encountered, from whom they were able to seek and obtain information, seemed to have in him some of the elements of a map maker
'Cooke's History of Virginia, 15.
?Id.
3English Colonies in America. Lodge, 98, 133.
4Works of Capt. John Smith. Vol. I., XLI.
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for the narrative says that he " offered with his foot to describe the river to us," but they gave him a pen " and he layd out the whole river from the Chessean bay to the end of it so farr as passadg was for boats."
After this first trip there were many other voyages, especially up the " five faire and delightful navigable rivers " on the west side of the bay.1 He makes it plain that he saw the " falles, rocks, shoales, etc.," of the James at Richmond, "which makes it past navi- gation any higher; " the river called " Chickahami- minia; " the " Pamaunkee; "2 the " Payankatanke; " the "Toppahanock; " the " Patowmeke; " "six or seven myles in breadth," and navigable one hundred and forty miles, and which divided " it selfe into three or four convenient branches; " the "Pawtuxent," and at the end of the bay, the best of which coming from the northwest " we could not get two miles up it with our boat for rocks." This was probably the " Sasqusahanough," and the other branches are evi- dently the Elk, the Sassafras and the inlet in the direction of northeast, for while he traces them on his map he does not, as in the cases of the other rivers, give the Indian names. The names given are not always spelled the same way, but, caught by Smith from sound and written on his maps, they are generally near enough like the names those rivers bear at the present day to be readily recognized.
In spite of great hardships, a very meagre equipment, fully two hundred miles from the settlement, "with but twelve men to performe this Discovery, when we lay above twelve weeks upon those great waters in those unknowne countries," Smith brought back with him notes enough to enable him to make his great
'Works of Capt. John Smith, 346.
?The York.
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1. 1
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map, and at last to have it " graven by William Hoole," and with it to have printed at Oxford, "by Joseph Barnes, 1612,"-"A Description of the Country, The Commodities, People, Government and Religion."1 This map is a marvel of accuracy, and after the manner of the day it is ornamented with scrolls, an elaborate picture of the compass, a "salvage " with his bow, quiver and club, and a picture of King Powatan with his chiefs and ladies, all in light attire, and an inscription showing that he "held that state and fashion when Captain Smith was delivered to him prisoner, 1607."
It was up along these rivers, except those branches of the bay mentioned, and along the rivers that crossed between them, running north and south, that, after Jamestown became a settled fact, settlements and plantations crept, going higher up and spreading further back into the forest along the branches and feeders of the greater streams; the planted ground and simple homes drawing back as Indian massacres and other calamities befell them, and then, when peace and quiet came again, venturing even further up and further back than habitations had been built before.2 These rivers were the highways of the young country. There were no cities nor great wharves at which the ocean ships could make a stopping and gathering place, but up to the very plantations, or at points convenient to several of them, the trading vessels sailed, and either anchored out in the streams or tied up to the banks and took on for their homeward voyages the products of the country, tobacco, lumber, clapboards, hides, and later, grain; and on the returning western
'Works of Capt. John Smith, 41.
"The maps show by their shadings the progress of the settlements to the years 1619-1652 and 1729, which last date is about the time of the cases reported in this volume.
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voyages they brought clothing, furniture, glass, china, silverware, paper, groceries, liquors, books, and the thousand and one things that a refined civilization, though planted in the woods, demanded. At so early a stage this creeping growth had gone so far that when, in 1619, the first assembly met at Jamestown, eleven boroughs from up and between the rivers were represented by twenty-two members;1 but at that time the country had not yet been divided into shires, or counties.
In that attractive account of early Jamestown, so well entitled the " Cradle of the Republic,"2 opposite page 120, is printed a chart of the James River for the one hundred and ten miles from Point Comfort (Old Point now) to the site of Richmond, which shows the early settlements and the thirteen counties which lie along the river banks on either side. Four of them stretch across the peninsula to York river on the north, and it was in this territory, in the counties of the eastern shore, and in those which were later formed along the Rappahannock and Potomac rivers,3 that the early Virginians lived and made its earlier colonial history; and it was more than a century after the founding of Jamestown before white men climbed the mountain range that lay so close to them and looked down upon the beautiful valley of the Shenandoah from its eastern side.
First, along the James great plantations were estab- lished, and, after a while, fine mansions lined the banks and many of them are there today. Then, along the
'But two of them were denied their seats because the patent of the land they represented exempted the owner from obedience to the laws and authority of the colony except in matters of defense. The Legislature of the Province of Virginia. Elmer 1. Miller, Ph. D., 22.
2Lyon Gardner Tyler, LL. D., President of William and Mary College.
3The map which is the frontispiece to Cooke's History of Virginia gives all the early counties.
7 17
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banks of the York, the Rappahannock, and the Potomac, and the tributary streams, there was a similar growth. Trees were cut down or girdled, fields were planted, and houses which at first were mere shelters, gave place to better houses, and these, in turn, gave place to residences which deserved the name of mansions. And as the country thus grew up and the wild beast and the wild man were superseded by domestic animals and the representatives of civilization, the reign of law, feeble at first, then severe and exacting in its requirements, grew in an almost equal proportion. But westward and away from the navigable rivers the settlement of the country had been extremely slow. The Appalachian range, our now familiar Blue Ridge, does not in its whole length through Virginia average a distance of one hundred and fifty miles from the bay. In his exploring expeditions up the Potomac, Smith and his party were at one time within fifty miles of the mountains, and in his first voyage up the James one of the possibilities aimed at was to reach " the Moun- taynes Apalatsi." And yet, so adventurous and cour- ageous a people as those who lived along the great rivers of the lower country permitted one hundred and nine years to pass from the first settlement at Jamestown, before any party of white men had climbed the mountain and looked upon the splendid prospect that lay beyond it. The story of Spotswood and his Knights of the Golden Horseshoe, who ascended the top and went down into the valley beyond, in 1716, is among the most interesting and attractive of the tales of adventure of those early times.1 1927718
" It delighted them to cross the mountains " they engraved in Latin upon the golden horseshoes which were the souvenirs of this expedition, and yet two
'Scott's History of Orange County, 98.
F
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years before this, Spotswood, the "Tubal Cain " of Virginia, had settled a colony of Germans, as iron- makers, within less than fifty miles of the mountains, before their distinguished proprietor, or any one else, was sufficiently enthused to undertake to solve the deep mystery which lay behind the blue hills where they saw the sun set every day of their lives.1
Not even a hunter, or an adventurer on his own account, seems to have crossed the Blue Ridge earlier than 1716,2 although quite a strong case is made in favor of one John Lederer, said to have once been a Franciscan monk, that as early as 1669 and 1670 he explored the Valley of the Shenandoah, and there are not a few who give full credit to the story of this transmontane Columbus.3
But so it was, that when Spotswood had once looked over the summit of the Blue Ridge the multitude soon followed after, and through the northern end of the valley from Maryland and Pennsylvania, and by all the gaps of the mountain, settlers moved in in small and large parties, the Germans occupying the lower valley up to the Augusta County line, except the eastern part of the lower or north end, where English people came. but the Scotch-Irish occupied largely Augusta and the territory beyond, to the south and southwest.
Comparatively rapid as the progress of the settle- ment of the Shenandoah Valley and the Southwest was, when it is compared with the tardiness of the tide water people, or people to the north, in commencing it.
'Col. Wm. Byrd (Writings of Byrd-Bassett, page 180) as early as 1728 speaks of the prospect of undertaking an exploring expedition to the country beyond the mountains.
21d., 100. But some must have entered its northern end much earlier, for there is strong proof of the existence there of a stone marking the grave of a woman and bearing the date. 1707. Planting of Presbyterianism. Graham, 14. Id., 12. 3The German Element of the Shenandoah Valley. Wayland, 11.
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yet these settlers too, were far from being exempt from the dangers and difficulties which such an enter- prise must always encounter in a new country. But the prairie character of the valley lands and their comparative freedom from heavy timber, caused, it is thought, by the repeated fires with which the Indians had, through countless ages, cleared this hunting ground for pasture for the game, made less difficult the fight with nature; and the population to the north, having no mountain to cross, pressed so steadily into the valley that by the time of the American revolution, about sixty years after Spotswood's expedition, the valley and the southwestern parts of Virginia were a comparatively well settled country. The advance into that part of Virginia that lay beyond the Alleghanies was slower still, and it has only been discovered in comparatively recent years that the dream of mineral wealth which enticed so many to cross the ocean a hundred years before, might have been realized in the land that lay between the Ohio River and the Alleghany Mountains.
Some visitors to the valley1 in the early period of its settlement, give us too graphic accounts of con- ditions there about the times of the making of the reports, of which this writing is an introduction, to be entirely passed over here.
Certain Moravian missionaries from about Bethlehem in Pennsylvania, on their way to North Carolina and Georgia, passed through the valley from its northern to its southern end in the fall and winter of 1743. They have recorded that on the 18th of November they came to the " Potomick" where it separates Maryland from the valley, and, pursuing their journey, they came, two days after, to the house of " Jost
, WVirginia Magazine. Vol. XI., 373.
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Hayd,"1 about six miles from Frederick Town (Win- chester), and, asking him the way to Carolina, he told of " one which was for one hundred and fifty miles through Irish settlements," by which he meant the land of the Scotch-Irish - the upper or southern portion of the Shenandoah Valley. But the missionary says in his diary, " I had no desire to take this way;" probably because he could not preach intelligibly to the Scotch-Irish in his German tongue,2 or, possibly, because he feared the same sort of opposition to his religious views that he had encountered in other por- tions of the country.3
Not ten years later Moravian missionaries from the same place did travel all along the valley, constantly in sight of what they describe with en- thusiasm as the " Blue Mountains," from the " Poto- mik " river all the way up (south) to " Augusti Court House " and beyond, through the very midst of the " Irish," and while they found that "the bad road begins there," yet the people were " very friendly and regretted that they could not help us";4 but the diary makes no mention of any preaching, something that no difficulties of a physical nature seem ever to have deterred them from doing.
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