USA > Virginia > Westmoreland County > Westmoreland County > Westmoreland County, Virginia : parts I and II : a short chapter and bright day in its history > Part 6
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Ordered, That the Clerk transmit a copy of the foregoing Reso- lutions to the Printer as soon as conveniently may be, in order that the same may be published in the Gazette.
JAMES DAVENPORT, Clerk Com'tee.
At a committee held for Westmoreland County, May 23, 1775, Resolved, That every Merchant or Factor who shall import European Goods into this County from any other Colony or Dis- trict shall, before he be permitted to sell such Goods, produce to the Chairman, or any one of the Committee, a certificate from the Committee of the Colony, County, or District from whence such Goods were purchased, of their having been imported agreeable to the terms of the Association of the Continental Congress.
JAMES DAVENPORT, Clerk.
The above is a true copy of what appears in American Archives, Fourth Series, Vol. II., p. 682.
H. R. MCILWAINE, Librarian of the Virginia State Library. July 16, 1910.
1910, October 18th, Received and truly entered.
M. L. HUTT, Clerk of the Circuit Court of Westmoreland Co., Va.
We give the text of the brilliant address of Senator George F. Hoar, of Massachusetts, before the Virginia Bar Association at Old Point, July, 1898 :
I am not vain enough to take this invitation from the famous Bar of your famous Commonwealth as a mere personal compliment.
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I like better to think of it as a token of the willingness of Vir- ginia to renew the old relations of esteem and honor which bound your people to those of Massachusetts when the two were the leaders in the struggle for independence, when John Adams and Sam Adams sat in Council with Jefferson and Henry and Lee; when the voice of Massachusetts summoned Washington to the head of the armies, and Marshall to the judgment seat; when Morgan's riflemen marched from Winchester to Cambridge in twenty-one days to help drive the invader from the Bay State, and when these two great States were seldom divided in opinion-never in affec- tion.
These two States, so like in their difference, so friendly even in their encounters, so fast bound even when they seem most asun- der, are, as I think, destined by God for leadership somewhere. I thank Him-we can all thank Him-that He permits us to believe that that leadership is hereafter to be exercised on a scale worthy of their origin and worthy of the training He has given them. Nothing smaller than a continent will hold the people who follow where they lead. When the Massachusetts boy reads the history of Virginia. It will be with the property of a countryman in her fame. When the Virginian hears the anthem of Niagara. he will know the music as his own. When he comes to Boston, the mighty spirits that haunt Faneuil Hall will hear, well pleased, a footstep which sounds like that of the companions and comrades with which, in danger and in triumph, they were so familiar of cldi.
As is natural for communities of high spirit, independent in thought, of varying employment and interest, they have had their differences. But if you take a broad survey of human history, it will be hard for you to find two peoples more alike. They are the two oldest American States. It was but four years from the land- ing at Jamestown to the landing at Plymouth. Each has been, in its own way, a leader. Each has been the mother of great States. Each is without a rival in history, except the other. in the genius for framing Constitutions and the great statutes which, like Consti- tutions, lie at the foundation of all government. When Virginia framed the first written Constitution, unless we except the compact on board the Mayflower, ever known among men, her leaders studied the history and delighted to consult the statesmen of Massachusetts. "Would to God." writes Patrick Henry to John Adams from Wil- liamsburg, where the Constitutional Convention of Virginia was sit- ting, "would to God you and your Sam Adams were here. We should think we had attained perfection if we had your approval." When a Virginian pen drafted the Declaration of Independence, Massa-
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chusetts furnished its great advocate on the floor. When Virginia produced Washington, Massachusetts called him to the head of the army. When Virginia gave Marshall to jurisprudence, it was John Adams, of Massachusetts, who summoned him to his exalted seat. The men who have moulded the history of each sprung from the same great race from which they inherited the sense of duty and the instinct of honor. Both have always delighted in the discus- sion of the profoundest principles in government, in theology, and in morals. Rich as have been their annals in names illustrious in civil life, the history of each has been largely a military history.
There is no more touching story of the munificence and bounty of one people to another than that of Virginia to Massachusetts when the port of Boston was shut up by act of Parliament and by a hostile English fleet. I dare say generous Virginia has disdained to remember the transaction. Massachusetts never will forget it. Little had happened which bore hardly upon Virginia. You were an agricultural people. The great grievance of New England after all was not taxation, but the suppression of her manufacture. There was no personal suffering here. It was only the love of lib- esty that inspired the generous people of the Old Dominion to stand by Massachusetts.
The statute of 14 George III., known as the Boston Port Bill, entitled, "An Act to Discontinue in Such Manner and for Such Time as are Therein Mentioned, the Landing and Discharging, the Lading or Shipping of Goods, Wares, Merchandise at the Town and Within the Harbor of Boston in the Province of Massachusetts Bay," was enacted by the British Parliament in March, 1774. It was meant to punish the people of Boston for their unlawful re- sistance to the tea tax and to compel the province to submission. "If you pass this act with tolerable unanimity," said Lord Mans- field, "Boston will submit, and all will end in victory without carn- age." The act took effect at 12 o'clock on the 1st of June, 1774. Boston depended almost wholly on her commerce. In a few weeks business was paralyzed, and the whole town was suffering. But George III. and his councillors had Virginia as well as Massachu- setts to reckon with. Her generous people rose as one man. Not only letters of sympathy came pouring in to the selectmen of Bos- ton, but there came substantial contributions of money and food, which, considering the poverty of the time and the difficulty of communication and transport, are almost without a parallel in his- tory. The House of Burgesses appointed a day of fasting and prayer, and ordered "that the members do attend in their places to proceed with the Speaker and the Mace to Church for the purposes aforesaid."
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But they did not leave Boston to fast. Meetings were held all over the Old Dominion. In Fairfax county George Washington was chairman and headed the subscription with £50. The Conven- tion over which he presided recommended subscriptions in every county in Virginia. Mason ordered his children to keep the day strictly and to attend church clad in mourning. In Westmoreland county John Augustine Washington was chairman. He enclosed in his letter a bill of lading for 1,092 bushels of grain. The gen- erous flame spread among the backwoodsmen. Not only from tide- water, but from over the mountains, where the roads were little better than Indian trails, the farmers denied themselves to make their generous gifts. Their wagons thronged all the roads, as they brought their gifts of corn and grain to tidewater. Among the committees by which they were forwarded are the renowned Vir- ginia names-some of them renowned in every generation-Upshaw and Beverley and Ritchie and Lee and Randolph and Watkins and Carey and Archer. But for this relief, in which Virginia was the leader and example to the other Colonies, Boston, as Sam Adams declared, must have been starved and have submitted to degrading conditions.
The Norfolk committee say in their letter: "It is with pleasure we can inform you of the cheerful accession of the trading in- terest of this Colony to the association of the Continental Congress. We wish you perseverance, moderation, firmness, and success in this grand contest, which we view as our own in every respect."
Virginia and Massachusetts have moved across the continent in parallel lines. Each has learned much from the other. What each has learned and what each has originated have been taught to many new commonwealths as to docile pupils. I will not under- take to discuss to which, in this lofty and generous rivalry, should be awarded the pre-eminence. Indeed, it would be hard to settle that question unless we could settle the question, impossible of solution, which owes most to the other. But I am frank to confess that, whatever natural partiality may lead her sons to claim for Massachusetts, the world will be very slow to admit that among the men who have been founders of States in Christian liberty and law, there will be found anywhere the equals to the four names of Jefferson, Marshall, Madison, and Henry, to say nothing of the supreme name of Washington. As the old monk said of King Arthur: "The old world knows not his peer; nor will the future show us his equal; he alone towers over other kings, better than the past ones and greater than those that are to be."
No man, when he utters his admiration for the excellence of
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woman, brings his own mother into the comparison. It would be singularly unbecoming for any son of Massachusetts to be speak- ing or thinking of the rank which belongs to her in history on an occasion like this. But saving, therefore, my allegiance to her, I affirm without hesitation that the history of no other civilized com- munity on earth of like numbers, since Athens, for a like period, can be compared with that of Virginia from 1765 or 1770 down to 1825. What her gallant soldier, Henry Lee, said of her most illustrious son may well be said of her : First in war, first in peace. What a constellation then rose upon the sky! The list of her great names of that wonderful period is like a catalogue of the fixed stars. For all time the American youth who would learn the principles of liberty protected by law ; who would learn how to frame constitutions and statutes; who would seek models of the character of the patriot, of the statesman, of the gentleman, of the soldier, may seek instruction from her-may study her history as in a great university.
One thing is remarkable in the history of Virginia. It is true, I think, of no other American State. Notwithstanding the splendid constellation of burning and blazing names which she gave to the country in the period of the Revolution and of framing and in- augurating the Constitution, if by some miracle they had been gathered together in one room, we will say in the year 1770, or in 1780, and had perished in one calamity, Virginia could have sup- plied their places and have maintained almost entirely the same pre-eminence. I do not know that she could have furnished a second Marshall or a second Washington, but the substance of what she accomplished for America and for mankind in those great days she would have accomplished still. She was like a country made up of rolling hills, where, if those which bound the horizon were levelled, other ranges would still appear beyond and beyond.
The mouth of the James river is the gateway through which civilization and freedom entered this continent. The Spaniard and the Frenchman, and perhaps the Norseman had been in America before. But when Jamestown was planted the English- man came. It is no matter what was his political creed or his reli- gious creed-whether Cavalier or Roundhead, Puritan or Church- man-the emigrant was an Englishman, and every Englishman then and since held the faith that liberty was his of right, and when liberty is put on the ground of right it implies the assertion that government must be founded on right, and that liberty belongs to other men also; and that implies government by law. Nullum jus sine officio: Nullum officium sine jure.
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Other races have furnished great law givers, great writers on jurisprudence and a few great judges. But the sense of the obli- gation of law as that upon which depends individual right, the feeling that life, liberty, property are not privileges but rights whose security to the individual depends upon his own respect for them as of right belonging to other men also, a sense pervading all classes in the State, is peculiar to the Englishman and the American alone. It is this which is the security of our mighty mother and of her mighty daughter against the decay which has attended alike the empires and the republics of the past. It is for this that England will be remembered if she shall perish.
Whatever harmonies of law The growing world assume, Thy work is thine; the single note Of that deep chord which Hampton smote Shall vibrate to the doom.
The people of Virginia have ever been renowned for two qual- ities-marks of a great and noble nature-hospitality and courage. Now, this virtue of hospitality, and this virtue of courage as pro- duced by men of generous nature, mean something more than a provision for physical wants or than a readiness for physical en- counter with an antagonist. The true hospitality to a man is a hospitality to his thought; and the highest courage is a readiness for an encounter of thoughts."-The Reports Virginia State Bar Association, Vol. XI., 1898, pp. 247 -.
The writer of this little booklet, in reading the above address of Senator Hoar, cannot help feeling and believing that the comity and affection between these ancient commonwealths have been kept up and beautifully recognized in the brilliant speech of Senator Lodge of Massachusetts in February, 1911, in the United States Senate on the death of Senator Daniel of Virginia :
He loved his country and he loved her history. He cherished with reverence her institutions and her traditions. It could not be otherwise, for he was a Virginian, and the history and traditions of his own State outran all the rest. Others may disregard the past or speak lightly of it, but no Virginian ever can, and Senator Daniel was a Virginian of Virginians.
He believed, as I am sure most thoughtful men believe, that the nation or the people who cared naught for their past would themselves leave nothing for their posterity to emulate or to re-
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member. He had a great tradition to sustain. He represented the State where the first permanent English settlement was founded. He represented the State of George Washington.
I will repeat here what I have said elsewhere, that, except in the golden age of Athens, I do not think that any community of equal size, only a few thousands in reality, has produced in an equally brief time as much ability as was produced by the Vir- ginian planters at the period of the American Revolution. Wash- ington and Marshall, Jefferson and Madison, Patrick Henry, the Lees and the Randolphs, Masons and Wythe-what a list it is of soldiers and statesmen, of orators and lawyers. The responsibility of representing such a past and such a tradition is as great as the honor. Senator Daniel never forgot either the honor or the re- sponsibility. Can more be said in his praise than that he worthily guarded the one and sustained the other ?
The Civil War brought many tragedies to North and South alike. None greater, certainly, than the division of Virginia. To a State with such a history, with such memories and such tradi- tions, there was a peculiar cruelty in such a fate. Virginia alone among the States has so suffered. Other wounds have healed. The land that was rent in twain is one again. The old enmities have grown cold; the old friendships and affections are once more warm and strong as they were at the beginning. But the wound which the war dealt to Virginia can never be healed. There and there alone the past can not be restored. One bows to the inevitable, but as a lover of my country and my country's past I have felt a deep pride in the history of Virginia, in which I, as an American, had a right to share, and I have always sorrowed that an inexorable destiny had severed that land where so many brave and shining memories were garnered up. That thought was often in my mind as I looked at Senator Daniel in this Chamber. Not only did he fitly and highly represent the great past, with all its memories and traditions, but he also represented the tragedy, as great as the his- tory, which had fallen upon Virginia to the cause in which she believed and to which in her devotion she had given her all, even a part of herself. The maimed soldier with scars which com- manded the admiration of the world finely typified his great State in her sorrows and her losses as in her glories and her pride .- Con- gressional Record, 61st Congress, 3rd Session, p. 3111.
IV.
Tribute to Washington by Lord Brougham and Lord Byron.
Some of the Sayings of Washington-His Anti-Slavery Senti- ments-Some Witticisme Concerning Him-Washington and Lee, the Castor and Pollux, the Two Turin Stars.
In this little booklet of res disjecto membro we have net the space, if we so desired. to give the names of the great mem of Westmoreland. much less their biographical sketches. who have embellished her history. In the words of Senator Hoar. of Massachusetts: "What a constellation then arose upon the sky! The list of her great names of that wonderful period is like a catalogue of fixed stars." We can not even give full sketches of Washington and Lee, two of the greatest fig- ures in American history, and two of the greatest soldiers in the history of the English speaking people. The reader is famCiar with the events of their Lives. We shall only insert extracts from the most distinguished sources. Washington and Let-the Castor and Pollux of the gallery-the two twin stare that brilliantly shine in the firmament. and the most exalted figures of the world's bis tory.
Safe comes the ship to haven, Through billows and through gales. If once the Great Twin Brethren, Sit shining on the wild.
Masavlay's Lays of Ancient Rome
The grandest tributes mary paid to montal man have been ton. dered by England's mont externe representatives in Washington and echoed by the meget wie weet more in every atto divilipend loud First read the grand as some of Wardian Bonaparte, of Valley rand as Minister of Poway. After for Brands of Haddone, At Guizot, and other. Bare Cions called him " poitrine"
But the prophet www. p that of Aman who worth the splendid charac! xe nagual dead. at "The Fallen of Him
.
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Country." How exquisite and touchingly eloquent Governor Henry Lee on the death of Washington, Rufus Choate on the birthday of Washington, George Wm. Curtis on the value of Washington, and Chauncey M. Depew on the majestic eminence of Washington. Then the opinions of Albert Barnes, D. D., William E. Channing, and George W. P. Custis. Then the histories by Chief Justice Marshall, Jared Sparks, the Fords, and still later the histories of Henry Cabot Lodge, the present brilliant Senator from Massa- chusetts, and Woodrow Wilson, late of Princeton, and now Governor of New Jersey, the rising star of American statesmanship, bringing us in closer touch with the true Washington.
We insert the tribute paid to the character of Washington by Lord Brougham, Lord Chancellor of England, where he contrasts him with Napoleon :
How grateful the relief which the friend of mankind, the lover of virtue experiences when, turning from the contemplation of such a character, his eye rests upon the greatest man of our own or any other age. In Washington we truly behold a mar- vellous contrast to almost every one of the endowments and the vices which we have been contemplating; and which are so well fitted to excite a mingled admiration, and sorrow, and abhorrence. With none of that brilliant genius which dazzles ordinary minds; with not even any remarkable quickness of apprehension; with knowledge less than almost all persons in the middle ranks, and many well educated of the humbler class possess, this eminent person is presented to our observation clothed with attributes as modest, as unpretending, as little calculated to strike, or astonish, as if he had passed through some secluded region of private life. But he had a judgment sure and sound; a steadiness of mind which never suffered any passion, or even any feeling to ruffle its calm; a strength of understanding worked, rather than forced its way through all obstacles-removing or avoiding rather than overleap- ing them. His courage, whether in battle or in council, was as perfect as might be expected from this pure and steady temper of soul. A perfectly just man, with a thoroughly firm resolution never to be misled by others, any more than by others to be over- awed; never to be seduced, or betrayed, or hurried away by his own weakness, or self-delusions, any more than by other men's arts; nor even to be disheartened by the most complicated difficulties, any more than be spoilt on the giddy heights of fortune-such was this great man-whether we regard him alone sustaining the whole weight of campaigns all but desperate, or gloriously terminating a
THE REVOLUTION.
Cornwallla parole. Yorktown. October 25, 1751.
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just warfare by his resources and his courage; presiding over the jarring elements of his political council, alike deaf to the storms of all extremes-or directing the formation of a new government for a great people, the first time so vast an experiment had been tried by man; or finally retiring from the supreme power to which his virtue had raised him over the nation he had created and whose destinies he had guided as long as his aid was required-retired with the veneration of all parties, of all nations, of all mankind, in order that the rights of men might be preserved, and that his example might never be appealed to by vulgar tyrants.
This is the consummate glory of the great American; a trium- phant warrior, where the most sanguine had a right to despair; a successful ruler in all the difficulties of a course wholly untried; but a warrior whose sword only left its sheath when the first law of our nature commanded it to be drawn; and a ruler who, having tasted of supreme power, gently and unostentatiously desired that the cup might pass from him, nor would suffer more to wet his lips than the most solemn and sacred duty to his country and his God required !
To his latest breath did this great patriot maintain the noble character of a captain, the patron of peace; and a statesman, the friend of justice. Dying, he bequeathed to his heirs the sword he had worn in the war for liberty, charging them "never to take it from the scabbard but in self defence, or in defence of their coun- try and her freedom," and commanding them that when it should thus be drawn, they should never sheath it, nor ever give it up, but prefer falling with it in their hands to the relinquishment thereof- words the majesty and simple eloquence of which are not surpassed in the oratory of Athens and Rome.
It will be the duty of the historian and the sage in all ages to omit no occasion of commemorating this illustrious man, and until time shall be no more, will be a test of the progress which our race has made in wisdom and in virtue, to be derived from the venera- tion paid to the immortal name of Washington !
Byron pays homage to Washington repeatedly in his poems, and wrote of him that, "To be the first man (not the Dictator), not the Scylla, but the Washington, or Aristides, the leader in talent and truth, is to be next to the Divinity." We have not space to quote from the fourth canto of "Childe Harold," "The Age of Bronze," "Don Juan," Canto VIII., 5, nor Canto IX. of "Don Juan," but we give the last stanza in his "Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte":
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.
"Where may the wearied eye repose When gazing on the great, Where neither guilty glory glows, Nor despicable state? Yes, one-the first-the last-the best- The Cincinnatus of the West, Whom envy dare not hate, Bequeath the name of Washington, To make man blush there was but one !"
THE ANTI-SLAVERY SENTIMENTS OF GEORGE WASHINGTON.
George Washington, writing in 1786, to Robert Morris, of Phil- adelphia, after alluding to an Anti-Slavery Society of Quakers in that city and suggesting that unless their practices were discon- tinued, "None of those whose misfortune it is to have slaves as attendants will visit the city if they can possibly avoid it," con- tinues :
"I hope it will not be conceived from these observations that it is my wish to hold the unhappy people, who are the subjects of this letter in slavery. I can only say that there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it. But there is only one proper and effectual mode by which it can be accomplished, and that is by legislative authority; and this, as far as my suffrage will go shall never be wanting."
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