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 6
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On this trip, however, leaving the " Irish " far to the west, the missionaries crossed the Blue Ridge and pursued their journey along the eastern side. The diarist says that he crossed the " Tschanator " (Shenan- doah) into Eastern Virginia and by the 25th of the
'He spelled his name " Heydt." but being pronounced Hite, others so spelled it. and his descendants for nearly a hundred and fifty years have so written it. The missionary describes him as " a rich man, well known in the region. He was the first settler here." Virginia Magazine, Vol. XI. 373. For a full account of Jost or Joist Hite, see the April number, 1903. of the West Virginia Historical Magazine. 2Note of J. A. Waddell. Virginia Magazine. Vol. XII., 202.
3The " Irish " came from Pennsylvania and so did the Moravians, and the former were there regarded as " pugnacious." See post.
4Virginia Magazine. Vol. XII. 147.
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month had crossed the " Repehenick" (Rappahannock) and stayed all night not far from Germanna in Orange County, which was near the site of the iron-making enterprise of Col. Spotswood. There, he says, he was " told of an English minister1 living in the country, who receives sixteen thousand pounds of tobacco, and a German minister who gets eight thousand pounds. He has also nine negroes and a fine plantation." These facts seem to have shocked the worthy Moravians,2 for the immediate comment of the diarist is " we were silent, drying our clothes and other things."
The other visitor, at about the same date, was George Washington, who too kept a diary of his journey beyond the Blue Mountains in 1747-48. He was just sixteen years old, and the object of his expedition was to make surveys for Lord Fairfax, who employed him in this business for several years.
After arriving at "Greenway Court," the hunting lodge of Fairfax, about twelve miles from Winchester, Washington notes3 that "we sent our baggage to Captain Hites, 4 near Frederick Town."
After making a number of surveys for settlers in what is now Clarke County, where he stayed at a house at which he was obliged to sleep on a bed on which there was not "anything else but only one thred Bear blanket with double its weight of Vermin such as Lice, Fleas, etc.,"5 he traveled on to Frederick Town (Winchester) " & took a Review of y Town & thence reurned to our Lodgings where we had a good Dinner prepar'd for us Wine & Rum Punch in Plenty & a
'Rev. John Thompson, who on November 9, 1742, had married the widow of Governor Spotswood. Virginia Magazine. Vol. XI
2For other journeys of these self-sacrificing people through the valley, see Virginia Magazine, Vol. XIL, 134, 202, 271.
3Journal, 24. Edited by Dr. J. M. Toner.
4The " Jost Hayd " of the missionary.
3Journal, 26.
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good Feather Bed with clean sheets which was a very agreeable regale."
From Winchester, Washington went up to the south branch of the Potomac, where he made numerous sur- veys, going at one trip " about 40 miles from Polks I believe y worst Road that ever was trod by Man or Beast."
The field notes taken and accurately preserved in his diary, show a considerable movement of people over into that remote section, and although he says of some of them that near the mouth of the south branch he "was attended by a great company of People men women & children that attended us through ye woods as we went showing there1 Antick tricks I really think they seem to be as Ignorant a set of People as the Indians they would never speak English but when spoken to they speak all Dutch," yet it was for these people that he was surveying the land, and, ignorant as they were, they were intelligent enough to desire to have good titles to their property and well and dis- tinctly defined limits to their farms.
This trip took from March 14 (from Winchester) to the 11th of April, on which day " we travell'd from Codays down to Frederick Town where we reached about 12 oClock we dined in Town and then went to Capt Hites & Lodged."
Just one hundred and fifteen years later, about one o'clock in the morning, a boy soldier, tired and hungry, who knew the place well and wanted to get from its occupants something to satisfy his hunger and thirst. left the column of troops that was moving in the night slowly along the road, and tried to open the gate that led into the yard of the stone house that " Jost Hayd "
'The writers of the day were, as a rule, not remarkable for good spelling and seem altogether averse to punctuation
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had built.1 Finding that something prevented the gate from opening, and looking down to discover it, he ascertained that it was a dead soldier, of his enemies, with his head close to the gate and a rifle ball through it, while close to his head was a hole in the panel of the gate through which the ball had passed. These soldiers had been fighting in the dark about some questions growing out of the government which the young George Washington later had been the chief figure in founding, and, besides the man at the gate, there were others, dead and wounded, behind the lilac hedge which shut off the road, along which the troops were marching in the night, from the house that " Jost Hayd " had built, and which had sheltered both the Moravian missionary and George Washington. There is a not very remote association between these events, but that is another and a longer story.
So it was, that about this time land purchases and speculation, questions of titles, the making and break- ing of contracts, both in the old, or what Rev. Hugh Jones, in his contemporary narrative, calls "the ancient and best settled colony," and in that much newer part so rapidly opening and filling up, were sending grist to the mill of the courts at Williamsburg, in the shape of suits; and Barradall and Randolph were writing down the decisions of them, that future courts might be guided by them, but of which, indeed, we find that they took but little heed.
The opening up and development of the south- western parts of the state, and of that portion which lay beyond the Alleghany Range, out to the Ohio River,
'In 1752 Hite, or his son, built a new stone house, to which wings and a large colonial porch were added by a subsequent owner, and so the house stands today. . In 1862 the original house where Washington lodged was still standing and used for negro quarters. It was of stone, a story and a half high, and built against a bank.
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was naturally slower than that of the valley had been. The advantage of the valley country in point of prox- imity and accessibility to the older settlements de- termined this. But it was many years before the extent of the mineral wealth and the value of the fine pasture ranges of these sections were understood and appreciated. The Southwest however, followed close upon the Valley in acquiring a white population, which, as in the valley country south of Rockingham County, was largely of Scotch-Irish nationality. In spite of the lapse of nearly two centuries, and of the mixing and assimilation of populations by marriage, emigra- tion and immigration, each of these sections of the state retains in large degree the characteristics that distinguished them at the beginning. These are most notably observed in the names of families and in their political and religious affiliations.
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CHAPTER III THE PEOPLE
There is not much to be said here of the Indian people, or of the negroes, except so far as the colonial laws bore directly upon their conditions, for they had no hand in making the laws. They were governed, but they did not govern. The real people of the colony, who effected its permanent status, were the gentry and the commons, with the recognized distinctions between them brought over from England, somewhat modified by associations among a new people in a new land.
These were the people who first cut down the forest trees; who legislated and adjudicated; the landowners and the tenantry; the great planters and the small; professional men and mechanics; employers and la- borers,-all of whom from time to time made contracts, and sometimes broke them.
It was by them and for them that the laws of the colony were adjusted from what they were at first when England sent them over, as from time to time England permitted or could not prevent their modi- fication by the colonial people to suit conditions that England had no very realizing sense of; for, indeed, England's foot-rule did not always measure just twelve inches in her dealings with her American colonies.
Among the people that came over with Newport and Capt. John Smith in 1607, and with the subsequent supplies, up to 1609 and beyond, there were, for the success of such an expedition, quite too many " poor gentlemen," being in the proportion of five to one to tradesmen and mechanics, and among the five there
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were, no doubt, adventurers of a low type who left their country for their country's good.1
More than half of those who came in the first voyage with Newport and Smith had never used an axe, though, under necessity, they learned to do so effec- tively.2 Among them were jewelers, gold refiners and a perfumer; a strange band to found an empire in the wilderness.3 Of them, Capt. John Smith said: "Ten good workmen would have done more Substan- tial worke in a day than ten of them in a weeke."4
When Smith left Virginia, in 1609, there were about five hundred people, men, women and children, in the colony, of whom about two hundred were trained to fight the Indians, but nearly all of them soon perished.5 But more ships came, with more people of an im- proving sort. Near a hundred maidens, poor but modest, were sent over for wives for the settlers, and, naturally, they went like hot cakes. King James too, in his wisdom, sent about an equal number of convicts, but the folly and wickedness of this was to some extent neutralized by the settlers scattering them to distant plantations and making them work.6 Not a few men came " indented " to serve as laborers or servants for a term of years." and in 1619, the year of the estab- lishment of free representative government, came also Pandora's open box. in the shape of a Dutch ship with twenty negro slaves. Not much was thought then of this little importation, but more came, and they in- creased so in numbers, by births and importation, that about the year 1700 there were twenty-three
'English Col mies in America. Luge, 3.
"Economic History ( Vrsta. Bruce, Vol. I, 196. 3Cooke's History Capt. John Sonth . ich,
Preface, XIV, page 486
Cooke's History of Virgins TT. NO. Md .. 122-147.
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thousand negro slaves in a population of ninety-five thousand, in Virginia alone.1 Of the seventy-two thousand whites six thousand were servants,2 so there were twenty-nine thousand of the menial class, to sixty-three thousand white men of the higher classes.
After the execution of Charles I, in 1649, quite a body of distressed cavaliers came to Virginia, and through all the time of the Commonwealth in England there was a steady stream of immigrants of this class.3 While some of these had saved something from the wreck of their English fortunes, many of them were poor. Most of them were of good, and many of them of high social position and rank in the old country. They distinctly impressed themselves upon the colony, then and their descendants thereafter, for from them came such men as Washington, Mason, Pendleton, the Lees, the Randolphs, Carys, Madison, Monroe, the Lunsfords,4 and many others.5 In
straight line from this ancestry, were Jefferson, Marshall and Robert E. Lee, with a common grand- father not very far back; and of the same stock were very many of the fighting and marching men of Lee's armies, even those who fought in the ranks.
About the year 1700 came also another immigration of men of fine rich blood, some of the Huguenots from France. Among them were the Maurys, Flournoys, Jouets, Moncures, Fontaines, Maryes, Bertrands, Dab- neys, Bowdoins, and many others, whose names and the high qualities shown by their descendants in pri- vate and public life, avouch their ancestry from those men of worth who came over in 1685. The vestry
1Old Virginia and Her Neighbors. Fiske, Vol. 2, 169.
2Cooke's History of Virginia, 228. 3Old Virginia and Her Neighbors. Vol .. 2, 169. Virginia Magazine. Vol. XVII, 26, 32. 5Cooke's History of Virginia, 229.
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book of Bristol Parish1 contains many names of Huguenot families, and is full of interest to those who love to turn these old furrows.
Of this cavalier population Mr. Fiske2 says: "There can be little doubt that the cavaliers were the men who made the greatness of Virginia. To them it is due that her history represents ideas and enshrines events which mankind will always find interesting."
But the population of Virginia in colonial times, worthy of mention, is not, by any means, confined to the " first families." This class of the people was, indeed, necessarily in the minority, for in the eighteenth century the majority of the white people was made up of the longshoremen of the tide-water section, the merchants or factors of the villages and crossroads, the small planters, tenants of the large landholders, ministers of the established and dissenting churches, the large frontier population of the Southwest, and, after 1720, the Scotch-Irish and German settlers of the Valley, of the Southwest, and west of the Alleghanies, though among them all there were not a few of cavalier descent, whose descendants by marriage through the female side have lost the names and often the memory of their more aristocratic ancestry.
Many, especially of the families living upon the edge of civilization, and those on or near the mountains, where very cheap lands could be had, and of some of whom Washington gives a graphic and by no means complimentary description,3 were very rough and un- couth, but the small landholders, who were merely planters on a small scale, because, being freeholders.
"Transcribed and published in 198 by Churchill Gibson Chamberlayne. See. also, Huguenot Emigration to Virgama. Vol. V. Virginia Historical Society Col- lection.
"Old Virginia and Her Neighbors Vol. 2. 2s.
3Ante page 40
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they had the right to vote, were most important factors in the public, that is, the economic and politi- cal, interests of the day. Of small beginnings in many instances, sometimes the tenants of the larger land- holders by thrift and enterprise improved their pecuniary conditions, and by education and refinement they acquired and deserved the kind of social position which Virginians, especially, have always regarded as adding much to the pleasure of life.
Of this part of the population, Cooke says:1 " The impression that this class were men of inferior charac- ter, having a great jealousy of the planter, has nothing whatever to support it. .... The proof is everywhere seen in the old records that the planter and the small landholders lived in entire harmony, and had a mutual respect and regard for each other. They opposed Berkeley together, and fought side by side under Bacon, stood shoulder to shoulder in the Revolution, and as neighbors and fellow-citizens were associated and worked together for issues as dear to one class as to the other."
It is true, however, that in the first half of the eigh- teenth century what is known as society was chiefly made up of the planters, professional men, merchants, their kin, connections, and close acquaintances, minis- ters, teachers and the like.
The Rev. Hugh Jones, who is described as " the dis- tinguished professor of mathematics in the College of William and Mary," who preached at Jamestown in 1719, was chaplain of the General Assembly and lecturer at Bruton Church, holding also important clerical charges, and who died in 1760 at the age of ninety-one, published, in 1724, a valuable work called " The Present State of Virginia." Of what he wrote
'History of Virginia, 368
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on this subject Howe,1 the historian, whose quotation from Mr. Jones' book is repeated here, says of his rather florid description of the people of the colony, that " he appears pleased with everybody and every- thing around him," and then quotes this on the subject we are considering: " The habits, life, customs, com- putations, etc., of the Virginians, are much the same as about London, which they esteem their home, and, for the most part, have contemptible notions of England and wrong sentiments of Bristol and the other seaports, which they entertain from seeing and hearing the common dealers, sailors and servants that come from these towns, and the country places in England and Scotland, whose language and manners are strange to them. For these planters, and even the native negroes, generally talk good English, without idiom or tone, and can discourse handsomely on most common subjects. Conversing with persons belonging to trades and navigation from London, for the most part they are much civilized and wear the best of clothes, according to their stations, nay, sometimes too good for their circumstances, being for the gener- ality comely, handsome persons of good features and fine complexions,- if they take care - of good man- ners and address. The climate makes them bright, and of excellent sense and sharp in trade; an idiot or deformed native being almost a miracle. Thus they have good natural notions, and will soon learn art and science, but are generally diverted by business or inclination from profound study and prying into the depths of things; being ripe for management of their affairs before they have laid so good a foundation for learning and had such instructions and acquired such accomplishments as might be instilled into such
'Virginia, its History and Antiquities, 330.
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naturally good capacities. Nevertheless, through their quick apprehensions they have a sufficiency of knowl- edge and fluency of tongue, though this learning for the most part be but superficial. They are more in- clinable to read men by business and conversation than to dive into books, and are, for the most part, only desirous of learning what is absolutely necessary, in the shortest and best method. ... As for education, several are sent to England for it, though the Virgin- ginians, being naturally of good parts, as I have already hinted, neither require nor admire as much learning as we do in Britain; yet more would be sent over, were they not afraid of the small-pox, which most commonly proves fatal to them. But, indeed, when they come to England, they are generally put to learn to persons that know little of their temper, who keep them drudging on what is of least use to them, in pedantick methods too tedious for their volatile genius. ... If New England be called a receptacle for dissenters and an Amsterdam of religion, Penn- sylvania a nursery of Quakers, Maryland the retire- ment of Roman Catholics, North Carolina the refuge of runaways, and South Carolina the delight of Buc- caneers and Pyrates, Virginia may be justly esteemed the happy retreat of the Britons, and true churchmen for the most part; neither soaring too high nor dropping too low, consequently should merit the greater esteem and encouragement.
"The common planters leading easy lives, don't much admire labour, or any manly exercise, except horse-racing, nor diversion, except cock fighting, in which some greatly delight. This easy way of living, and the heat of the summer, makes some very lazy, who are then said to be climate-struck. The saddle horses, though not very large, are hardy, strong and
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fleet; and will pace naturally and pleasurable at a prodigious rate. They 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 courthouse, or to a horse race, where they generally appoint to meet on business, and are more certain of finding those that they want to speak or deal with, than at their homes. No people can entertain their friends with better cheer and welcome; and strangers and travellers are here treated in the most free, plenti- ful and hospitable manner, so that a few inns or ordinaries on the road are sufficient."
This narrative statement of contemporary conditions, comes nearer to being the testimony of a witness, though a rather willing one, than the record of a historian. Corroborating circumstances, too, prove it to be a fairly good picture, certainly well drawn, and taken from several points of view.
But there are historians who have gleaned carefully in those old fields, and the most of what they say and their most attractive stories are of later times than those of which Mr. Jones wrote, yet the collective narratives are all consistent and serve to light up the picture which Jones has drawn.
We read1 of a country of great estates, entailed as in England, and worked by slaves and indented servants; without free schools or newspapers "to make poor people dissatisfied"; of education in the earlier times generally derived from the tutorship of ministers; of conformity of worship enforced by aw;
'Cooke's History of Virginia. Old Virginia and Her Neighbors, Fiske. Williamsburg, Tyler. Social. Life of Virginia, Bruce. First Republic in America. Brown. Old Churches and Families, Meade.
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of attendance upon church services under the penalty (by the statute) of fines; of life in the country, tranquil and free from worry and, comparatively, from care; of unlimited hospitality; of the gentry sitting as magistrates, burgesses, councilors and as such even as judges in the General Court, and later a practically self-perpetuating body, in the county courts; of intense loyalty to the King, but with the most determined insistence upon representative gov- ernment, individual freedom and home rule; of fine riders on fine horses over bad roads; of barges rowed or sloops sailed on the broad rivers, the oars manned by slaves who had little use and no desire for freedom; of horse racing and attendance on the monthly courts, where men meet for business and to discuss the crops, or sometimes to grumble over some real or fancied public grievance; of a strong partisan feeling for the church, and much emnity towards both Puritans and Papists; of intolerance towards all dissenters and, after a while, equal intolerance by the dissenters against the churchmen; of sweet and attractive family relations where the head of the house was almost as a feudal patriarch; where wine and sherry and canary were drunk at every gentleman's table, and there was none in the land to think it wrong; of great open fires in yawning chimney places; of fine coaches and fine clothes, - silks and laces and all else of luxury that England could send back on the ships in exchange for tobacco; of sports in the hunting fields, fox hunts, and shooting on the rivers and in the woods. Then we read of brave displays on public occasions, of a governor driven from his palace to his capitol in a su- perb coach drawn by six milk-white horses; his dress "a very handsome rich costume and his coat, which was of a light red colour, was heavy with gold thread tissue."
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Then of the assemblage to do honor to the King's representation, of much that was great, and more that was fair to look upon, gathered from plantations along the river banks and crowding to the little capitol in great coaches over the rutty roads, or brought by barges on the streams; of dancing and feasting, and of both the triumph and despair of lovers,-such as without change, except in environment and degree, the world has always seen and will ever continue to see. The residences, even of the largest and richest planters were generally of wood with brick chimneys and under- pinning, the houses being low and spreading over much ground with expansive wings. The halls were large, and there were many sleeping chambers to meet the demands of hospitality. The library1 held many books, largely of the classics and without the changes which the flood of publications of modern times creates. The beds had hangings and mosquito nets, " with the finest linen sheets, and very often with silk counterpanes, whilst the sides were adorned with valances of gold and silver texture."2 There were couches covered with Russian leather or Turkish cloth, and chairs with seats and backs of the same material. The floors were covered with carpets and the windows shaded by curtains. Sometimes the walls were adorned with tapestry, and the faces of the fairest of women and the bravest of men, often a long line of ancestry, looked down from their frames upon their descendants, where entailed lands and abundant resources in what was, after all. a very simple life, assured the continued possession of estates in the same families for many generations.
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