Chapter XIV: Society in the Old Dominion (3)

Among the founders of New England were an extraordinary number of clergymen noted for their learning, such as Hooker and Shepard, Cotton and Williams, Eliot and the Mathers; together with such cultivated laymen as Winthrop and Bradford, familiar with much of the best that was written in the world, and to whom the pen was an easy and natural instrument for expressing their thoughts. The character originally impressed upon New England by such men was maintained by the powerful influence of the colleges and schools, so that there was always more attention devoted to scholarship and to writing than in any of the other colonies. Communities of Europeans, thrust into a wilderness and severed from Europe by the ocean, were naturally in danger of losing their higher culture and lapsing into the crudeness of frontier life. All the American colonies were deeply affected by this situation. While there were many and great advantages in the freedom from sundry Old World trammels, yet in some respects the influence of the wilderness was barbarizing. It was due to the circumstances above mentioned that the New England colonies were more successful than the others in resisting this influence, and avoiding a breach of continuity in the higher spiritual life of the community. This is strikingly illustrated by the history of American literature. Among men of letters and science born and educated in America before the Revolution, there were three whose fame is more than national, whose names belong among the great of all times and countries. Of these, Jonathan Edwards was a native of Connecticut, Benjamin Franklin and Count Rumford were natives of Massachusetts. In such men we can trace the continuity between the intellectual life of England in the seventeenth century and that of America in the nineteenth. In Virginia, if we except political writers, we find no names so high as these. But there is one political book which must not be excepted, because it is a book for all time. “The Federalist” is one of the world’s philosophical and literary masterpieces, and of its three authors James Madison took by far the deepest and most important part in creating it.[242]

[Sidenote: Virginia’s historians; Robert Beverley.]

Among books of a second order,--books which do not rank among classics,--there are some which deserve and have won a reputation that is more than local. Of such books, Hutchinson’s “History of Massachusetts Bay” is a good example. In the colonial times historical literature was of better quality than other kinds of writing; and Virginia produced three historical writers of decided merit. With Robert Beverley the reader has already made some acquaintance through the extracts cited in these pages. His “History of Virginia,” published in London in 1705, is a little book full of interesting details concerning the country and the life of its red and white inhabitants. The author’s love of nature is charming, and his style so simple, direct, and sprightly that there is not a dull page in the book. It was written during a visit to London, where Beverley happened to see the proof-sheets of Oldmixon’s forthcoming “British Empire in America,” and was disgusted with the silly blunders that swarmed on every page. He wrote his little book as an antidote, and did it so well that many coming generations will read it with pleasure.

[Sidenote: William Stith.]

A book of more pretension and of decided merit is the “History of Virginia” by Rev. William Stith, who was president of William and Mary College from 1752 to his death in 1755. The book, which was published at Williamsburg in 1747, was but the first volume of a work which, had it been completed on a similar scale, would have filled six or eight. It covers only the earliest period, ending with the downfall of the Virginia Company in 1624; and among its merits is the good use to which the author put the minutes of the Company’s proceedings made at the instance of Nicholas Ferrar.[243] Stith’s work is accurate and scholarly, and his narrative is dignified and often graphic. His account of James I. is pithy: “He had, in truth, all the forms of wisdom,--forever erring very learnedly, with a wise saw or Latin sentence in his mouth; for he had been bred up under Buchanan, one of the brightest geniuses and most accomplished scholars of that age, who had given him Greek and Latin in great waste and profusion, but it was not in his power to give him good sense. That is the gift of God and nature alone, and is not to be taught; and Greek and Latin without it only cumber and overload a a weak head, and often render the fool more abundantly foolish. I must, therefore, confess that I have ever had ... a most contemptible opinion of this monarch; which has, perhaps, been much heightened and increased by my long studying and conning over the materials of this history. For he appears in his dealings with the Company to have acted with such mean arts and fraud ... as highly misbecome majesty.”[244] From the refined simplicity of this straightforward style it was a sad descent to the cumbrous and stilted Johnsonese of the next generation, which too many Americans even now mistake for fine writing.

[Sidenote: William Byrd.]

Contemporary with Beverley and Stith was William Byrd, one of the most eminent men of affairs in Old Virginia, and eminent also--probably without knowing it--as a man of letters. His father came to Virginia a few years before Bacon’s rebellion, and bought the famous estate of Westover, on the James River and in Charles City County, with the mansion, which is still in the possession of his family, and is considered one of the finest old houses in Virginia. From his uncle Colonel Byrd inherited a vast estate which included the present site of Richmond. He sympathized strongly with his neighbour, Nathaniel Bacon, and held a command under him; but after the collapse of the rebellion he succeeded in making his peace with the raging Berkeley. He became one of the most important men in the colony, and was commissioned receiver-general of the royal revenues. On his death, in 1704, his son succeeded him in this office. The son had studied law in the Middle Temple, and for proficiency in science was made a fellow of the Royal Society. He was for many years a member of the colonial council, and at length its president. He lived in much splendour on his estate of Westover, and we have seen what a library he accumulated there. A professional man of letters he was not, and perhaps his strong literary tastes might never have led to literary production but for sundry interesting personal experiences which he deemed it worth while to put on record. In 1727 he was one of the commissioners for determining the boundary between Virginia and North Carolina. In the journeys connected with that work he selected the sites where the towns of Richmond and Petersburg were afterwards built; and he wrote a narrative of his proceedings so full of keen observations on the people and times as to make it an extremely valuable contribution to history.[245] Among early American writers Byrd is exceptional for animation of style. There is a quaintness of phrase about him that is quite irrepressible. After a dry season he visits a couple of mills, and “had the grief to find them both stand as still for the want of water as a dead woman’s tongue for want of breath. It had rained so little for many weeks above the falls that the Naiads had hardly water enough left to wash their faces.” He suggests, of course with a twinkle in his eye, that the early settlers of Virginia ought to have formed matrimonial alliances with the Indians: “Morals and all considered, I can’t think the Indians were much greater heathens than the first adventurers, who, had they been good Christians, would have had the charity to take this only method of converting the natives to Christianity. For after all that can be said, a sprightly lover is the most prevailing missionary that can be sent among these, or any other infidels. Besides, the poor Indians would have had less reason to complain that the English took away their land, if they had received it by way of portion with their daughters.... Nor would the shade of the skin have been any reproach at this day; for if a Moor may be washed white in three generations, surely an Indian might have been blanched in two.”[246] With such moralizing was this amiable writer wont to relieve the tedium of historical discourse. We shall again have occasion to quote him in the course of our narrative.

[Sidenote: Science; John Clayton.]

Among other works by writers reared before the Revolution, the well-known “Notes on Virginia,” by Thomas Jefferson, deserves high praise as an essay in descriptive sociology. Of American poetry before the nineteenth century, scarcely a line worth preserving came from any quarter. In 1777 James McClurg, an eminent physician, afterward a member of the Federal Convention, wrote his “Belles of Williamsburg,” a specimen of pleasant society verse; but it had not such vogue as its author’s “Essay on the Human Bile,” which was translated into several European languages. Science throve better than poetry, and was well represented in Virginia by John Clayton, who came thither from England in 1705, being then in his twentieth year, and dwelt there until his death in 1773, on the eve of the famous day which saw the mixing of tea with ice-water in Boston harbour. Clayton was attorney-general of Virginia, and for fifty years clerk of Gloucester County. His name has an honourable place in the history of botany; he was member of learned societies in nearly all the countries of Europe; and in 1739 his “Flora of Virginia” was edited and published by Linnæus and Gronovius.

[Sidenote: Physicians.]

[Sidenote: Washington’s last illness.]

In Old Virginia, as in all the other colonies, the scientific study and practice of medicine had scarcely made a beginning. Those were everywhere the days of “kill or cure” treatment, when there was small hope for patients who had not enough vitality to withstand both drugs and disease. In the light of the progress achieved since the mighty work of Bichat (1798-1801), the two preceding centuries seem a period of stagnation. Strong plasters, jalap, and bleeding were the universal remedies. Mr. Bruce gives us the items of a bill rendered by Dr. Haddon, of York, about 1660, for performing an amputation. “They included one highly flavoured and two ordinary cordials, three ointments for the wound, an ointment precipitate, the operation of letting blood, a purge _per diem_, two purges electuaries, external applications, a cordial and two astringent powders, phlebotomy, a defensive and a large cloth.” On another occasion the same doctor prescribed “a purging glister, a caphalick and a cordial electuary, oil of spirits and sweet almonds, a purging and a cordial bolus, purging pills, ursecatory, and oxymell. His charge for six visits after dark was a hogshead of tobacco weighing 400 pounds.”[247] Of the many thousand victims of these heroic methods, the most illustrious was George Washington, who, but for medical treatment, might probably have lived a dozen or fifteen years into the nineteenth century. When Washington in full vigour found that he had caught a very bad cold he sent for the doctors, and meanwhile had half a pint of blood taken from him by one of his overseers. Of the three physicians in attendance, one was his dear friend, the good Scotchman, Dr. James Craik, “who from forty years’ experience,” said Washington, “is better qualified than a dozen of them put together.” His colleague, Dr. Elisha Dick, said, “Do not bleed the General; he needs all his strength.” But tradition prevailed over common sense, and three copious bleedings followed, in the last of which a quart of blood was taken. The third attendant, Dr. Gustavus Brown, afterward expressed bitter regret that Dr. Dick’s advice was not followed. Besides this wholesale bleeding, the patient was dosed with calomel and tartar emetic and scarified with blisters and poultices; or, as honest Tobias Lear said, in a letter written the next day announcing the fatal result, “every medical assistance was offered, but without the desired effect.”[248]

[Sidenote: Virginia parsons.]

The physician in Old Virginia was very much the same as elsewhere, but the parson was a very different character from the grave ministers and dominies of Boston and New York. He belonged to the class of wine-bibbing, card-playing, fox-hunting parsons, of which there were so many examples in the mother country after the reaction against Puritanism had set in. The religious tone of the English church during the first half of the eighteenth century was very low, and it was customary to send out to Virginia and Maryland the poorest specimens of clergymen that the mother country afforded. Men unfit for any appointment at home were thought good enough for the colonies. The royal governor, as vicegerent of the sovereign, was head of the colonial church, while ecclesiastical affairs were superintended by a commissary appointed by the Bishop of London. The first commissary, Dr. Blair, as we have seen, was president of the college, and in his successors those two offices were usually united. Several attempts were made to substitute a bishop for the commissary, but the only result of the attempts was to alienate people’s sympathies from the church, while the conduct of the clergy was such as to destroy their respect for it. Bishop Meade has queer stories to tell of some of these parsons. One of them was for years the president of a jockey club. Another fought a duel within sight of his own church. A third, who was evidently a muscular Christian, got into a rough-and-tumble fight with his vestrymen and floored them; and then justified himself to his congregation next Sunday in a sermon from a text of Nehemiah, “And I contended with them, and cursed them, and smote certain of them, and plucked off their hair.” In 1711 a bequest of £100 was made to the vestry of Christ Church parish in Middlesex, providing that the interest should be paid to the minister for preaching four sermons each year against “the four reigning vices,--viz.: atheism and irreligion, swearing and cursing, fornication and adultery, and drunkenness.” Later in the century the living was held for eighteen years, and the sermons were preached, by a minister who was notoriously guilty of all the vices mentioned. He used to be seen in the tavern porch, reeling to and fro with a bowl of toddy in his hand, while he called to some passer-by to come in and have a drink. When this exemplary man of God was dying in delirium, his last words were halloos to the hounds. In 1726 a thoughtful and worthy minister named Lang wrote to the Bishop of London about the scandalous behaviour of the clergy, of whom the sober part were “slothful and negligent,” while the rest were debauched and “bent on all manner of vices.”[249] This testimony against the clergy, it will be observed, comes from clergymen. Yet it seems clear that the cases cited must have been extreme ones,--cases of the sort that make a deep impression and are long remembered. A few such instances would suffice to bring down condemnation upon the whole establishment; and not unjustly, for a church in which such things could for a moment be tolerated must needs have been in a degraded condition. This state of things afforded an excellent field for the labours of Baptist and Presbyterian revivalist preachers, and to such good purpose did they work that by the time of the Revolution it was found that more than half of the people in Virginia were Dissenters. At that time the Episcopal clergy were not unnaturally inclined to the Tory side, and this last ounce was all that was needed to break down the establishment and cast upon it irredeemable discredit. The downfall of the Episcopal church in Virginia and its resurrection under more wholesome conditions make an interesting chapter of history.

[Sidenote: Freethinking.]

In imputing to his tipsy parson the “vice” of atheism, Bishop Meade warns us that he does not mean a denial of the existence of God, but merely irreligion, or “living without God in the world.” In 1724 the Bishop of London was officially informed that there were no “infidels” in Virginia, negroes and Indians excepted. A few years later, “when the first infidel book was imported, ... it produced such an excitement that the governor and commissary communicated on the subject with the authorities in England.” In those days freethinkers, if prudent, kept their thoughts to themselves. All over Christendom the atmosphere was still murky with intolerance, and men’s conceptions of the universe were only beginning to emerge from the barbaric stage. Virginia was no exception to the general rule.

[Sidenote: Superstition and crime.]

In respect also of superstition and crime the Old Dominion seems to have differed but little from other parts of English America. Belief in witchcraft lasted into the eighteenth century, and the statute-book reveals an abiding dread of what rebellious slaves might do; but there were no epidemics of savage terror, as at Salem in 1692, or in the negro panic of 1741 in New York. Of violent crime there was surely much less than in the England of Jack Sheppard and Jonathan Wild, but probably more than in the colonies north of Delaware Bay; and its perpetrators seem to have been chiefly white freedmen and “outlying negroes.”[250] Duelling seems to have been infrequent before the Revolution.[251] Murder, rape, arson, and violent robbery were punished with death; while pillory, stocks, whipping-post, and ducking-stool were kept in readiness for minor offenders. The infliction of the death penalty in a cruel or shocking manner was not common. Negroes were occasionally burned at the stake, as in other colonies, north and south; and an instance is on record in which negro murderers were beheaded and quartered after hanging.[252] No white persons were ever burned at the stake by any of the colonies.[253]

[Sidenote: Lawyers.]

In the early days of Virginia there was not much practice of law except by the county magistrates in their work of maintaining the king’s peace. The legal profession was at first held in somewhat low repute, being sometimes recruited by white freedmen whose careers of rascality as attorneys in England had suddenly ended in penal servitude. But after the middle of the seventeenth century the profession grew rapidly in importance and improved in character. During the eighteenth century the development in legal learning and acumen, and in weight of judicial authority, was remarkable. The profession was graced by such eminent names as Pendleton, Wythe, and Henry, until in John Marshall the Old Dominion gave to the world a name second to none among the great judges of English race and speech.

[Sidenote: A government of laws.]

One cause of this splendid development of legal talent was doubtless the necessarily close connection between legal and political activity. The Virginia planter meant that his government should be one of laws. With his extensive estates to superintend and country interests to look after, his position was in many respects like that of the country squire in England. In his House of Burgesses the planter had a parliament; and in the royal governor, who was liable to subordinate local to imperial interests, there was an abiding source of antagonism and distrust, requiring him to keep his faculties perpetually alert to remember all the legal maxims by which the liberties of England had been guarded since the days of Glanvil and Bracton. On the whole, it was a noble type of rural gentry that the Old Dominion had to show. Manly simplicity, love of home and family, breezy activity, disinterested public spirit, thorough wholesomeness and integrity,--such were the features of the society whose consummate flower was George Washington.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Some characteristics of Maryland.]

This chapter must not close without a brief mention of the social features of Maryland, but a brief mention is all that is needed for my purpose, since the portraiture just given of Leah will answer in most respects for her younger sister Rachel. The English colonists in Maryland were of the same excellent class as the Cavaliers who were the strength of Virginia. Though tidewater Virginia at the beginning of the eighteenth century contained but few people who did not belong to the Church of England, on the other hand, in Maryland, not more than one sixth of the white population belonged to that church, while one twelfth were Roman Catholics, and three fourths were Puritans. But these differences in religion did not run parallel with differences in birth, refinement, or wealth. Naturally, from the circumstances under which the colony was founded, some of the best human material was always to be found among the Catholics; and they wielded an influence disproportionately greater than their numbers.

For the first three generations tobacco played as important a part in Maryland as in Virginia. Nearly all the people became planters. Cheap labour was supplied at first by indented white servants and afterwards by negro slaves, who never came, however, to number more than from one fourth to one third of the whole population. There was the same isolation, the same absence of towns, the same rudeness of roads and preference for water-ways, as in Virginia. The facilities for education were somewhat poorer; there was no university or college, no public schools until 1728, no newspaper until 1745.

But early in the eighteenth century there came about an important modification of industries, which was in large part due to the rapid growth of Maryland’s neighbour, Pennsylvania. In the latter colony a great deal of wheat was raised, and the export of flour became very profitable. This wheat culture extended into Maryland, where wheat soon became a vigorous rival of tobacco. In 1729 the town of Baltimore was founded, and at once rose to importance as a point for exporting flour. Moreover, as Pennsylvania exported various kinds of farm produce, besides large quantities of valuable furs, and as she had no seacoast and no convenient maritime outlet save Philadelphia, her export trade soon came to exceed the capacities of that outlet, and a considerable part of it went through Baltimore, which thus had a large and active rural district dependent upon it, and grew so fast that by 1770 it had become the fourth city in English America, with a population of nearly 20,000. The growth of Annapolis was further stimulated by these circumstances; and this development of town life, with the introduction of a wealthy class of merchants and the continual intercommunication with Pennsylvania, went far toward assimilating Maryland with the middle colonies while it diminished to some extent her points of resemblance to the Old Dominion.