Nicholas Ferrar.
Little Gidding.
The choice of Shakespeare's friend instead of Sandys made no difference whatever in the policy of the Company. From that time forth its ruling spirits were Southampton and Sandys and Nicholas Ferrar, the deputy-treasurer. The name of this young man calls for more than a passing mention. Better known in ecclesiastical than in political history, he was distinguished and memorable in whatever he undertook, and among all the thronging figures in England's past he is one of the most sweetly and solemnly beautiful. His father, the elder Nicholas Ferrar, who died in April, 1620, just before the election I have been describing, was one of London's merchant princes, and it was in the parlour of his hospitable house in St. Osyth's Lane—now known as Size Lane, near the Poultry—that the weekly meetingsof the Virginia Council were in these latter days regularly held. In this house the young Nicholas was born in 1593. He had spent seven years in study at Cambridge and five years in very extensive travel upon the continent of Europe, when at the age of twenty-seven he came to devote all his energies for a time to the welfare of the colony of Virginia. From early boyhood he was noticeable for taking a grave and earnest but by no means sombre view of life, its interests and its duties. For him frivolity had no charm, coarse pleasures were but loathsome, yet he was neither stern nor cold. Through every fibre of his being he was the refined and courteous gentleman, a true Sir Galahad fit to have found the Holy Grail. His scholarship was thorough and broad. An excellent mathematician and interested in the new dawning of physical science, he was also well versed in the classics and in modern languages and knew something of Oriental philology, but he was most fond of the devotional literature of the church. His intensely religious mood was part of the great spiritual revival of which Puritanism was the mightiest manifestation; yet Nicholas Ferrar was no Puritan either in doctrine or in ecclesiastical policy. In these matters his sympathies were rather with William Laud. At the same time his career is a living refutation of the common notion that there is a necessary connection between the religion of Laud and the politics of Strafford, for his own political views were as liberal as those of Hampden and Pym. Indeed Ferrar was a rare product of the harmonious coöperation of the tendencies represented respectively in the Renaissance and in the Reformation, tendencies which the general want of intelligence and moral soundness in mankind has more commonly brought into barren conflict. His ideal of life was much like that which Milton set forth with matchless beauty in "Il Penseroso." Its leading motive, strengthening with his years, was the feeling of duty toward the "studious cloister's pale," and the part of his career that is now best remembered is the founding of that monastic home at Little Gidding, where study and charitable deeds and prayer and praise should go on unceasing, where at whatsoever hour of day or night the weary wayfarer through the broad fen country should climb that hilly range in Huntingdon, he should hear the "pealing organ blow to the full-voiced choir below," and entering should receive spiritual comfort and strength, and go thence on his way with heart uplifted. In that blest retreat, ever busy with good works, lived Nicholas Ferrar after the downfall of the great London Company until his own early death in 1637 at the age of forty-four. Of great or brilliant deeds according to the world's usual standard this man did none; yet the simple record of his life brings us into such an atmosphere of holiness and love that mankind can never afford to let it fade and die.
This Protestant saint, withal, was no vague dreamer, but showed in action the practical sagacity that came by inheritance from London's best stock of bold and thrifty citizens. As one of the directing minds of a commercial corporation,he showed himself equal to every occasion that arose. He is identified with the last days of the London Company, and his family archives preserve the record of its downfall. It is thence that we get the account of the election of Southampton and many other interesting scenes and important facts that would otherwise have passed into oblivion.
Disputes in the Company.
After Southampton's election the king's hostility to the Company became deadly, and within that corporation itself he found allies who when once they found themselves unable to rule it were only too willing to contribute to its ruin. Sir Thomas Smith and his friends now accepted their defeat as decisive and final, and allowed themselves to become disloyal to the Company. Probably they would have expressed it differently; they would have said that out of regard for Virginia they felt it their duty to thwart the reckless men who had gained control of her destinies. Unfortunately for their version of the case, the friends of Sir Thomas Smith were charged with the burden of Argall's misdemeanours, and the regard which that governor had shown for Virginia was too much like the peculiar interest that a wolf feels in the sheepfold. It is not meant that the members of the court party who tried to screen Argall were all unscrupulous men; such was far from being the case, but in public contests nothing is more common than to see men personally stainless blindly accept and defend the rogues of their own party. In the heat of battle the private quarrelbetween Smith and the Earl of Warwick was either made up or allowed to drop out of sight. Both worked together, and in harmony with the king, to defeat Southampton and Sandys and Ferrar. In the Company's quarter sessions the disputes rose so high that the meetings were said to be more like cockpits than courts.[103]On one occasion a duel between the Earl of Warwick and Lord Cavendish, eldest son of the first Earl of Devonshire, was narrowly prevented. As Chamberlain, one of the court gossips of the day, writes: "Last week the Earl of Warwick and the Lord Cavendish fell so foul at a Virginia ... court that the lie passed and repassed, and they are [gone out] to try their fortune, yet we do not hear they are met, so that there is hope they may return safe. In the meantime their ladies forget not their old familiarity, but meet daily to lament that misfortune. The factions in [the Company] are grown so violent as Guelfs and Ghibellines were not more animated one against another; and they seldom meet upon the Exchange, or in the streets, but they brabble and quarrel."[104]
The king rebuked by the House of Commons.
In 1621 the king, having arrived at the end of his purse, seized what he thought a favourable moment for summoning Parliament, but found that body more intractable than ever. The Commons busied themselves with attacking monopolies and impeaching the Lord Chancellor Bacon for taking bribes. Then they expressed unqualified disapproval of the Spanish match, whereuponthe king told them to mind their own business and not meddle with his. "A long and angry dispute ensued, which terminated in a strong protest, in which the Commons declared that their privileges were not the gift of the Crown, but the natural birthright of English subjects, and that matters of public interest were within their province."[105]This protest so infuriated the king that he tore it into pieces, and forthwith dissolved Parliament, sending Pym, Southampton, and other leaders to prison. This was in January, 1622.
Nathaniel Butler and his pamphlet.
Some charges and answers:
As more than a hundred members of this froward Parliament were also members of the Company, it is not strange that the king should have watched more eagerly than ever for a chance to attack that corporation. A favourable opportunity was soon offered him. A certain Nathaniel Butler, governor of the Bermuda Islands, was accused of extorting a large sum of money from some Spaniards who had been shipwrecked there, and very damaging evidence was brought against him; but he seems to have known how to enlist powerful friends on his side. On being summoned to England he went first to Virginia, where his services were in demand during the brief but bloody Indian war that followed upon the massacre of 1622. Then after arriving in England he published, in April, 1623, a savage attack upon the London Company, entitled "The Unmasked Face of our Colony in Virginia." Simultaneously with the publicationof this pamphlet the charges against its author were dropped and were nevermore heard of. Such a coincidence is extremely significant; it was commonly believed at the time that Butler bought the suppression of the charges by turning backbiter. His attack upon the Company is so frivolous as plainly to indicate its origin in pure malice. It is interesting as the first of the long series of books about America printed in England which have sorely irritated their American readers. Sixteen of the old Virginia settlers who were at that moment in London answered it with convincing force. Some of this Butler's accusations, with the answers of the settlers, may fitly be cited for the side-light they throw upon the state of things in Virginia, as well as upon the peculiar sinuosities of Stuart kingcraft.
as to malaria;
"1. I found the plantations generally seated upon meer salt marishes full of infectious bogs and muddy creeks and lakes, and thereby subjected to all those inconveniencies and diseases which are so commonly found in the most unsound and most unhealthy parts of England, whereof every country and climate hath some.
"Answer: We say that there is no place inhabited but is conveniently habitable. And for the first plantation, which is Kiccoutan, ... men may enjoy their healths and live as plentifully as in any part of England, ... yet that there are marishes in some places we acknowledge.... As for bogs, we know of none in all the country, and for the rest of the plantations, as Newport's News, Blunt Point, Warriscoyak, Martin's Hundred ... and all the plantations right over against James City, and all the plantations above these (which are many) ... they are [all] very fruitful, ... pleasant, ... healthful, and high land, except James City, which yet is as high as Deptford or Ratcliffe.
as to wetting one's feet;
"2. I found the shores and sides of those parts of the main river where our plantations are settled everywhere so shallow as no boats can approach the shores, so that—besides the difficulty, danger, and spoil of goods in the landing of them—people are forced to a continual wading and wetting of themselves, and that [too] in the prime of winter, when the ships commonly arrive, and thereby get such violent surfeits of cold upon cold as seldom leave them until they leave [off] to live.
"Answer: That generally for the plantations at all times from half flood to half ebb any boat that draws betwixt 3 and 4 foot water may safely come in and land their goods dry on shore without wading. And for further clearing of his false objections, the seamen ... do at all times deliver the goods they bring to the owners dry on shore, whereby it plainly appears not any of the country people ... are by this means in danger of their lives. And at ... many plantations below James City, and almost all above, they may at all times land dry.
as to dying under hedges;
"3. The new people that are yearly sent over [who] arrive here (for the most part very unseasonably in winter) find neither guest-house, inn, nor any the like place to shroud themselves in attheir arrival; [and] not so much as a stroke is given toward any such charitable work; [so that] many of [these new comers] by want hereof are not only seen dying under hedges and in the woods, but being dead lie some of them many days unregarded and unburied.
"Answer: The winter is the most healthful time and season for arrival of new comers. True it is that as yet there is no guest-house or place of entertainment for strangers. But we aver it was a late intent ... to make a general gathering for the building of such a convenient house, which by this time had been in good forwardness, had it not pleased God to suffer this disaster to fall out by the Indians. But although there be no public guest-house, yet are new comers entertained and lodged and provided for by the governor in private houses. And for any dying in the fields through this defect, and lying unburied, we are altogether ignorant; yet that many [persons] die suddenly by the hand of God, we often see it ... fall out even in this flourishing and plentiful city [of London] in the midst of our streets. As for dying under hedges, there is no hedge in all Virginia.
as to the houses, and their situations.
"5. Their houses are generally the worst that ever I saw, the meanest cottages in England being every way equal (if not superior) with the most of the best. And besides, so improvidently and scatteringly are they seated one from another as partly by their distance but especially by the interposition of creeksand swamps ... they offer all advantages to their savage enemies....
"Answer: The houses ... were ... built for use and not for ornament, and are so far from being so mean as they are reported that throughout [England] labouring men's houses ... are in no wise generally for goodness to be compared unto them. And for the houses of men of better rank and quality, they are so much better and [so] convenient that no man of quality without blushing can make exception against them. [As] for the creeks and swamps, every man ... that cannot go by land hath either a boat or a canoe for the conveying and speedy passage to his neighbour's house...."[106]
Object of the charges.
So go the charges and the answers. It is unnecessary to cite any further. The animus of Captain Butler's pamphlet is sufficiently apparent. He wished to make it appear that things were wretchedly managed in Virginia, and that there was but a meagre and contemptible result to show for all the treasure that had been spent and all the lives that had been lost. Whatever could weaken people's faith in the colony, check emigration, deter subscriptions, and in any way embarrass the Company, he did not fail to bring forward. Not only were the sites unhealthy and the houses mean, but the fortifications were neglected, plantations were abandoned, the kine and poultry were destroyed by Indians, the assembly enacted laws wilfully divergent from the laws of England, and speculators kept engrossing wheat and maize and selling them at famine prices; so said Butler, and knowing how effective a bold sweeping lie is sure to be, in spite of prompt and abundant refutation, he ended by declaring that not less than 10,000 persons had been sent out to Virginia, of whom "through the aforenamed abuses and neglects" not more than 2,000 still remained alive. Therefore, he added, unless the dishonest practices of the Company in London and the wretched bungling of its officials in Virginia be speedily redressed "by some divine and supreme hand, ... instead of a Plantation it will shortly get the name of a slaughter house, and [will] justly become both odious to ourselves and contemptible to all the world."
The assembly denies the allegations.
All these allegations were either denied or satisfactorily explained by the sixteen settlers then in London, and their sixteen affidavits were duly sworn to before a notary public. Some months afterward, Captain Butler's pamphlet was laid before the assembly of Virginia and elaborately refuted. Nothing can be clearer than the fact that the sympathies of the people in Virginia were entirely on the side of the Company under its present management, and no fact could be more honourable to the Company. From first to last the proceedings now to be related were watched in Virginia with intense anxiety and fierce indignation.
An answer demanded of Ferrar.
On Thursday of Holy Week, 1623, a formal complaint against the Company, embodying such charges as those I have here recounted, was laid before the Privy Council, and the Lord TreasurerCranfield, better known as Earl of Middlesex, sent notice of it to Nicholas Ferrar, with the demand that a complete answer to every particular should be returned by the next Monday afternoon. Ferrar protested against such unseemly haste, but the Lord Treasurer was inexorable. Then the young man called together as many of the Company as he could find at an hour's notice that afternoon; they met in his mother's parlour, and he read aloud the complaint, which took three hours. Then Lord Cavendish, Sir Edwin Sandys, and Nicholas Ferrar were appointed a committee to prepare the answer. "These three," says our chronicle, "made it midnight ere they parted; they ate no set meals; they slept not two hours all Thursday and Friday nights; they met to admire each other's labours on Saturday night, and sat in judgment on the whole till five o'clock on Sunday morning; then they divided it equally among six nimble scribes, and went to bed themselves, as it was high time for them. The transcribers finished by five o'clock Monday morning; the Company met at six to review their labours, and by two in the afternoon the answer was presented at the Council Board."[107]
A cogent answer is returned.
Attempts to corrupt Ferrar.
This answer was a masterpiece of cogency. It proved the baselessness of the charges. Either they were complete falsehoods, or they related to disasters directly connected with the Indian massacre, which was not due to any provocation on the part of the whites, or else they showed the effects of mismanagement inSir Thomas Smith's time, especially under the tyrannical administration of Argall from which the colony had not yet fully recovered. In short, such of the charges as really bore against the Company were successfully shown up as affecting its old government under Smith and Warwick, and not its new government under Sandys and Southampton. The latter was cleared of every calumny, and its absolute integrity and vast efficiency were fully established. Such, at least, is the decisive verdict of history, but the lords of the Privy Council were not willing to accept such a result. It amounted almost to an impeachment of the court party, and it made them angry. So the Earl of Warwick succeeded in obtaining an order that Lord Cavendish, Sir Edwin Sandys, and Rev. Nicholas Ferrar,—as "chief actors in inditing and penning ... an impertinent declaration containing bitter invectives and aspersions" should be confined to their own houses until further notice.[108]The object of this was to prevent them from conferring with each other. Further hostile inquiries were prosecuted, and an attempt was made to detach Ferrar from his associates. One day, as he was answering some queries before the Privy Council, one of the lords handed him an important official letter to the governor of Virginia. "Who draws up such papers?" asked the lord. "The Company," replied Ferrar modestly. "No, no!" interrupted another lord, "we know your style; these papers are all yours, and they are masterpieces." The letter was shown to theking, who was pleased to observe, "Verily, the young man hath much worth in him." To detach him from the Company the king offered to make him clerk of the Privy Council or ambassador to the court of Savoy. Both were fine offers for a man only in his thirtieth year, but Ferrar was not to be tempted. Then an effort was made to induce him to advise the Company to surrender its charter, but he refused with some scorn. A great number of the nobility and gentry, he said, besides merchants and artisans of the city of London, relying upon the royal charter, had engaged in a noble enterprise, one of the most honourable that England had ever undertaken; many planters in Virginia had risked their estates and lives in it; the Lord had prospered their endeavours, and now no danger threatened the colony save the malice of its enemies; as for himself he was not going to abuse his trust by deserting it.
A board of commissioners.
While these things were going on, the king appointed a board of commissioners to investigate the affairs of Virginia, and the spirit in which they were appointed is sufficiently revealed by the fact that they all belonged to the disaffected faction in the Company and held their meetings at the house of Sir Thomas Smith. One of their number was the vindictive and unscrupulous ex-governor, Sir Samuel Argall,—which was much like setting the wolf to investigate the dogs. Some of these commissioners went out to Virginia and tried to entrap the assembly into asking for a new charter. It was all in vain. Governor, council, and House of Burgesses agreedthat they were perfectly satisfied with the present state of things and only wanted to be let alone. Not a morsel of evidence adverse to the present management of the Company could be obtained from any quarter. On the contrary, the assembly sent to England an eloquent appeal, afterward entitled "The Tragical Declaration of the Virginia Assembly," in which the early sufferings of the colony and its recent prosperity were passed in review; the document concluded with an expression rather more forcible than one is accustomed to find in decorous and formal state papers. After describing the kind of management under which such creatures as Argall could flourish, the document goes on to say, "Rather [than] be reduced to live under the like government, we desire his Majesty that commissioners may be sent over with authority to hang us."
Attorney-general's opinion; aquo warrantoserved.
Long before this appeal reached England, the final assault upon the Company had begun. In July, 1623, the attorney-general reported his opinion that it was advisable for the king to take the government of Virginia into his own hands. In October an order of the Privy Council announced that this was to be done. The Company's charter was to be rescinded, and its deputed powers of sovereignty were to be resumed by the king. This meant that the king would thereafter appoint the council for Virginia sitting in London. He would also appoint the governor of Virginia with his colonial council. Such a transformation would leave the joint-stock company in existence, but only as abody of traders without ascertained rights or privileges and entirely dependent upon royal favour. No settled policy could thereafter be pursued, and under the circumstances the change was a deathblow to the Company. Southampton and Ferrar refused to surrender, and referred the question to their next quarter-sessions to be held in November. Then the king brought suit against the Company in the court of King's Bench, and a writ ofquo warrantowas served.
Appeal to Parliament.
The king refuses to allow the appeal.
Then came the most interesting moment of all. The only hope of the Company lay in an appeal to Parliament, and that last card was boldly played. Early in 1624 the Spanish match, to secure which the miserable king had for ten years basely truckled and licked the hand of England's bitterest enemies, was finally broken off. War with Spain was at hand; a new policy, of helping the German Protestants, and marrying Baby Charles to a French princess, was to be considered; and much money was needed. So James reluctantly issued writs for an election, and the new Parliament, containing Sandys and Ferrar, with many other members of the Virginia Company, met in February. In April a petition was presented in behalf of the Virginia Company, and a committee had been appointed to consider it, when the Speaker read a message from the king, forbidding Parliament to meddle with the matter. He distinctly announced the doctrine that the government of colonies was the business of king and his Privy Council, and that Parliament had nothing to do with it.This memorable doctrine was just that which afterwards found favour with the American colonists for very different reasons from those which recommended it to King James. The Americans took this view because they were not represented in Parliament, and intended with their colonial assemblies to hold the crown officials, the royal governors, in check just as Parliament curbed the Crown. By the middle of the eighteenth century this had come to be the generally accepted American doctrine; it is interesting to see it asserted early in the seventeenth by the Crown itself, and in the interests of absolutism.
Attorney-general's argument.
The charter annulled, June 16, 1624.
In 1624 Parliament was not in good condition for quarrelling with the king upon too many issues at once. So it acquiesced, not without some grumbling, in the royal prohibition, and the petition of the Virginia Company was laid upon the table. A few weeks later the case on thequo warrantowas argued before the court of King's Bench. The attorney-general's argument against the charter was truly ingenious. That charter allowed the Company to carry the king's subjects across the ocean to Virginia; if such a privilege were to be exercised without limitation, it might end in conveying all the king's subjects to America, leaving Great Britain a howling wilderness! Such a privilege was too great to be bestowed upon any corporate body, and therefore the charter ought to be annulled. Such logic was irresistible, and on the 16th of June the chief justice declared "that the Patent or Charter of the Company of English Merchants trading to Virginia, and pretending to exercise a power and authority over his Majesty's good subjects there, should be thenceforth null and void." Next day Thomas Wentworth, afterward Earl of Strafford, gave vent to his glee in a private letter: "Methinks, I imagine the Quaternity before this have had a meeting of comfort and consolation, stirring up each other to bear it courageously, and Sir Edwin Sandys in the midst of them sadly sighing forth, Oh, the burden of Virginia." By the Quaternity he meant Southampton, Sandys, Ferrar, and Cavendish. On the 26th of June the Privy Council ordered Nicholas Ferrar to bring all the books and papers of the late Company and hand them over to its custody.
Ferrar has the records copied.
History of a manuscript.
Ferrar could not disobey the order, but he had made up his mind that the records of the Company must be preserved, for its justification in the eyes of posterity. As soon as he saw that the day of doom was at hand he had copies made. One of Ferrar's dearest friends was the delightful poet, George Herbert, a young man of his own age, whose widowed mother had married Sir John Danvers, a prominent member of the Company. They lived in a fine old house in Chelsea, that had once been part of the home of Sir Thomas More. There Nicholas Ferrar passed many a pleasant evening with George Herbert and his eccentric and skeptical brother, afterward Lord Herbert of Cherbury; and if ever their talk grew a bit too earnest and warm, we can fancy it mellowed again as thatother sweet poet, Dr. Donne, dropped in, with gentle Izaak Walton, as used often to happen. In that house of friends, Ferrar had a clerk locked up with the records until they were all copied, everything relating to the administrations of Sandys and Southampton, from the election of the former, in April, 1619, down to June 7, 1624. The copy was then carefully compared with the original documents, and its perfect accuracy duly attested by the Company's secretary, Edward Collingwood. Sir John Danvers then carried the manuscript to the Earl of Southampton, who exclaimed, as he threw his arms about his neck, "God bless you, Danvers! I shall keep this with my title-deeds at Tichfield; it is the evidence of my honour, and I prize it more than the evidence of my lands." About four months afterward Southampton died. Forty-three years afterward, in 1667, his son and successor passed away, and then this precious manuscript was bought from the executors by William Byrd, of Virginia, father of the famous historian and antiquary. From the Byrd library it passed into the hands of William Stith, president of William and Mary College, who used it in writing his History of Virginia, published at Williamsburg in 1747, one of the most admirable of American historical works. From Stith's hands the manuscript passed to his kinsman, Peyton Randolph, president of the Continental Congress, and after his death in 1775, Thomas Jefferson bought it. In 1814 ex-president Jefferson sold his library to the United States, and this manuscript is nowin the Library of Congress, 741 folio pages bound in two volumes. As for the original documents, they are nowhere to be found among British records; and when we recollect how welcome their destruction must have been to Sir Thomas Smith, to the Earl of Warwick, and to James I., we cannot help feeling that the chest of the Privy Council was not altogether a safe place in which to keep them.
It is to the copy preserved through the careful forethought of Nicholas Ferrar that we owe our knowledge of one of the most interesting chapters in early American history. In the development of Virginia the overthrow of the great London Company was an event of cardinal importance. For the moment it was quite naturally bewailed in Virginia as a direful calamity; but, as we shall presently see, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Stuart despotism gained not one of its ends, except the momentary gratification of spleen, and self-government in Virginia, which seemed in peril, went on to take root more deeply and strongly than before.
THE KINGDOM OF VIRGINIA.
Retrospect.
Tidewater 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 Virginia during the seventeen years of its government by a great joint-stock company. But for a correct appreciation of the situation 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-government 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,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 Virginia" is a kind of sylvan Venice. 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.
Receding frontier.
The plantations.
If in 1624 we had gone up stream to Werowocomoco, where Smith had broken the ice with his barge fifteen years before, we should probably have found very little of its strange barbaric life remaining. The first backward step of the Indian before the encroaching progress of Englishmen had been taken. The frontier was fast receding to the Pamunkey region along the line joining the site of West Point with that of Cold Harbor; and from that time forward a perpetually receding frontier ofbarbarism 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 neighbourhood 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 plantation 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 name of Southampton's enemy, the Earl 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 settlements 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 calledNonesuch. 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 Ocean. Here we may turn our prow and make our way down to Jamestown, where the House of Burgesses is in session.
Boroughs and burgesses.
Boroughs and hundreds.
It is called a House of Burgesses because its members are regarded as the representatives of boroughs, and such a name sounds queer as applied to little areas of scattered 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 appellation 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 theCity 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 awaiting it. This explanation, however, does not cover the whole case. Whatever the title of each individual settlement in oldest 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 of townships united by a common responsibility 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 responsible men—those who owned property, and paid taxes, and chose representatives—were the burgesses. 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 acompany of a hundred armed men. It was also a unit of representation in the ancient English shire-moot or county court. Now in oldest 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 instances called so. Moreover, there are indications 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 Elizabeth City should hold monthly courts.[109]Whatever 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 equivalence 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 representatives of boroughs. They were familiar with burgesses in England, but the designations "hundred-men" and "hundred-elders" had become obsolete.
The houses.
Labourers.
Indians.
Resuming our pilgrimage through the Virginia 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 therea 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 to æsthetic effects, with beams here and there roughly hewn and boards not always smoothly planed, are not so attractive in outward appearance 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 Jamestown, 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 servants, bound to their masters by indentures 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 dreadful massacre of two years ago, one sees but few; they have been driven off to the frontier, the alliance cemented by the marriage ofPocahontas 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 enimies," and it is thought fit that if any of them be found molesting cattle or lurking about any plantation, "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."[110]
Agriculture, etc.
In the plantations, thus freed from the presence of Indians, European domestic animals have become plenty. Horses, indeed, are not yet so much in demand as boats and canoes, but oxen draw the plough, the cows are milked night and 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 cabbage-like tobacco plant, but there are also many fields of waving wheat and barley, and many more 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 admitting them to the franchise and other privileges of English citizenship, because of their value to the commonwealth in these branches of industry. Skilled workmen of another sort have beensent 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 realized.
Tobacco.
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 Company 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 number, and that in spite of divers efforts to check it, the raising of tobacco encroached more and more upon all other forms of industry, 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 exported 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 industry.
Literature.
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 harvesting of the crops, or now and then the raisingof 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 nowadays often fetch such fabulous prices. 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 Virginia in 1621 as treasurer of the colony, fortified with some rather dull verses from the poet laureate, Michael Drayton:—