Chapter II

THE SETTLEMENTS OF VIRGINIA, DELAWARE, MARYLAND, THE CAROLINAS, AND
GEORGIA.

Colored Views whitened.—Blue Ridges and Black Welts in
Virginia.—Virginia, smothered up in Infancy by Charters, survives
Royal nursing.—Her Vigilance against her Suitors.—Cotton
introduced.—How the World managed previously.—Charles I. and his
numerous Autographs.—Georgia and Oglethorpe.—Charleston set up.—A
Point on Old Point Comfort.—Tobacco first piped about.—Unmarried Girls
as Articles of Import.—Estimated in, if not by, Pounds.—The Fancy
Constitution of John Locke for North Carolina.—Its own Length, but
Short Life.—South Carolina Rivers do not run up.—Popular Errors
corrected.—John Wesley.—Singular Effect of his Preaching on the
Indians.—Maryland as a Duck of a Colony canvassed.

Colored views are too apt to be given and taken of these six States, shading down from the dead African black, through every gradation of tint, to a hue almost unimpeach-ably Caucasian.

It is true that Virginia carried on her bosom a Blue Ridge, as in later times some of her progeny have borne on their backs darker ridges; but until 1620 no welts of the latter character stood out on her fair shoulders; and these, be it said to his shame, were raised by the master of a Dutch man-of-war who, on the very day in August that the Pilgrim party embarked in the Mayflower, at Delft-Haven, in his own country, landed twenty negroes for sale on the banks of the James River, leaving a black mark which two hundred and forty-five years have barely succeeded in washing out. In her very cradle, in 1606, Virginia was loaded down and half smothered with that royal blanket, a charter. Not content with this comforter, the royal nurses from London kept piling other blankets of the same kind upon the vigorous infant, and because it was vigorous, until within the short space of fourteen years no less than four were heaped upon her. These were far from being counter-panes, but on the contrary served in that warm climate to distress the child, and eventually to bring out eruptions. Under the second of these, in 1609, Maryland was tucked up in the same bed with Virginia; but in 1621, not finding the company agreeable, she was taken out by Lord Baltimore, and put into a pleasant and comfortable trundle-bed of her own; the chivalrous young lord naming the baby after Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I., and daughter of the gallant Henry of Navarre, afterwards Henry IV. of France. The year 1621 was emphasized in the infant settlement of Virginia by the introduction of cotton and the first written constitution,—two prolific American seeds that have each borne large harvests. Considering the varied uses to which the former is now applied in clothing human bodies and habitations, and the latter in padding political addresses and lawsuits, we are puzzled to conceive how the world got on, and especially how congressmen managed to make speeches, or lawyers to live, prior to those great discoveries,—discoveries more important in some aspects than those of iron, the Reformation, Illinois divorces, gunpowder, steam, the doctrine of legal insanity, Brandreth’s pills, and others, without which of course no well-ordered or well-digesting family can long proceed.

Seven years later Charles I. contracted to take the entire tobacco crop of Virginia; hoping probably by the free use of this narcotic to drug the alarmed political conscience of England.

The ship that took the first Maryland emigrants up the Potomac to their new settlement was called the Ark and the Dove, and carried in its beak the olive-branch of religious toleration.

In 1630, the same liberality in disposing of broad strips of American territory was shown by King Charles I. in granting a deed, embracing North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, to Sir Robert Heath; but in 1663 his son, the second Charles, desirous of improving his own handwriting, which had been somewhat neglected from his eighth year, in consequence of the necessarily active business life Cromwell had obliged him to lead, put his signature, early one foggy morning, to a paper which somebody laid in his way, and which, when brought out to the light, proved to be a grant to Lord Clarendon and several other pleasant, gentlemanly fellows, of this same small North American farm. This select little knot of farmers, after building a few barns on their farm, discovered that it was not large enough for their purposes. Like the Irishman who wanted an additional sixpence to drink the health of the gentleman who had generously given him a five-dollar bill, they desired a back field to dump manure on; and they finally obtained a second autograph from the obliging Charles to a bit of paper, allowing them to use forever the small patch lying westward to the Pacific. The farm was kept together until 1729, when it was divided up by George II. into two parts, called North and South Carolina; the latter half being, three years later, again split into two, and the lower part named, after the burly old landlord, Georgia. Nearly fifty years, however, before this division, upon a tongue of land called Oyster Point, and bivalved between the Ashley and Cooper Rivers, Charleston was first set upon its uneasy foundations. Whether affected by the contiguity of Folly Island, by the use of too much pepper—always cheap in warm regions—upon the native oysters, or whether unduly exhilarated by too exclusive a contemplation of the cotton seed, which seems to have enlarged its dilated and dilating pupils, the place, although but seven feet above high tide, has always been given to high notions, and subject to a certain vertigo. An admirable ingredient, the Protestant Huguenot element, tossed out of France by the revoked edict of Nantes, was infused into the young settlement of South Carolina in 1685. The plant of liberty, however, early struck its anchoring roots close by the side of the cotton-plant; and although the governors, sent out by the royal proprietors from England, continually hacked into its smooth trunk, it still grew apace, and its bracing tonic odors filled not only the regions watered by the Santee and Pedee, but were wafted northwards and over the sister Colonies.

Although it is said that “old Virginny never tires,” it must have been because she had a robust constitution, for a busier body never existed. Always resisting the attempts made by the profligate royal governors upon her virginity, she had to watch them, day and night, for fear that they would steal her hard earnings and run away with them. In fact, during the sixty years that succeeded her birth at Jamestown, in 1606, she was constantly on the alert, putting up scarecrows on her cornfields, and notices of spring-guns, to warn away intruders; but these, so far from frightening away, only attracted the curious bills of the Indians. She was also forced to hold fast with might and main to the scanty wardrobe brought out by her from England, and with which those dissolute fellows, the young, titled, rakish, good-for-nothing overseers, were always taking liberties. Fortunately for her, as well as her sisters, the two Carolinas and Georgia, her shoulders were well covered by capes, so securely fastened on that they could not be snatched away, and their charms exposed to the rude stare or prying curiosity of idle visitors from France and England, and even from staid, sober Holland. And we here take the opportunity of repelling the slander so often circulated upon Virginia, that she is “the mother of States,”—an aspersion which, if true, would stain her virgin fame, and leave a bar sinister across the shields of the States thus born out of wedlock.

The first suitor for the budding affections of the youthful Georgia, or Georgiana, although bearing the suspicious name of Ogle-thorpe, proved to be a man of honorable intentions, high-minded, and in every respect faithful to his ardent vows,—a constant mate in all her joys and trials during his residence on the Savannah River, from 1732 to 1743. Virginia’s royal lovers, on the contrary, although always protesting their good intentions, were almost uniformly faithless. The last one bore the ill-omened, but appropriate name of Dun-more. He was very importunate, and in every way attempted to get her to make over her then valuable property to him, but in vain; and at last so mercenary did he become, and so disagreeable did he make himself, that she was obliged to show him the door.

The spirited damsel was always plucky, and soon after this domestic difficulty made up her mind to be wholly independent, and so in fact publicly gave out to the whole world, saying that “she didn’t care who knew it.” Massachusetts gallantly stood by the young girl in her declaration, and so did all her brothers and sisters; even little Rhody tossing up her jaunty sailor’s cap, and shouting out that, under Providence, she was ready to “sail in.”

The name of Sir Walter Raleigh is greenly twined through the earliest settlements of North Carolina. In her coasts he took a constantly augmenting interest, and furnished to the State its capital. His love for the new settlement only ceased to beat with his heart. His verse, which the author of “The Fairy Queen” describes as “sprinkled with nectar,” and “vieing with the notes of the summer nightingale,” was musical with her praises; and his “History of the World” lays at her feet the tribute of his warm, chivalric nature.

The duty which he felt and gave to the two Colonies, Virginia and North Carolina, was very different from the duties which his successors endeavored to draw from them,—duties so onerous as to drain not only the pockets but the hearts of the young communities from which they were pressed out.

But amid all the trials to which Virginia was subjected by the rapacity of her governors and the unsated appetites of councils, named by the home board corporators, there was one point which she could always contemplate with satisfaction, namely, Old Point Comfort,—a grandmotherly place, which her children then, and since, often visited, laying their hot heads lovingly in her lap, until her pleasant breezes cooled their feverish throbbings.

Tobacco was first grown in Virginia in 1616; and we crave leave to add, that although much piped about ever since, has never ceased to create a smoke; its curls hanging thickly and gracefully around the heads of its world-wide admirers from that time down to the present,—an instance of unchanged custom rarely seen.

Virginia, however, did not grow all of her luxuries; for, in 1620, we find her importing ninety respectable unmarried girls, who, on their arrival, and after payment of customary duties, were soon disposed of. This successful invoice was followed, the succeeding year, by a cargo of sixty more, the price for whom increased, after they were landed, from one hundred and twenty to one hundred and fifty pounds of tobacco. How this advance affected the relations between them and the lower-priced wives of the preceding year, whether it laid the foundation for the difference between the F. F. V.’s and the white trash, the want of newspapers and of well-preserved family bills does not enable us to judge.

Certain it is that this commercial rape was as cordially acquiesced in by the seized damsels, as was the rape of the Sabines by those young ladies; and proved to be as beneficial to the growth of the infant settlement as that novel match-making on the banks of the Tiber.

The descendants of these unions on the James and Potomac would have been more numerous had not their numbers been thinned off by Indian knives, which were very busy in 1622, 1623, and 1644–1646. This last war was followed, three years later, by a petty imitation of the civil strife which had raged for seven years between the Parliament and Charles I. in England, and which ended, in the latter country, by taking off the king’s head, and in Virginia by taking away many of their former constitutional privileges. Cromwell fumigated them thoroughly in their own tobacco-smoke, until all the smell of loyalty was gone. Upon the accession of Charles II., in 1660, arbitrary legislation was sought here, as in England, to stamp out the rights of the people which had silently but steadily grown up into a stiff crop; but resistance followed, and in this struggle between Virginia and the crown the succeeding years were spent, until 1754.

The principal event in the history of the settlement of North Carolina was the fancy constitution furnished for it in 1669, by John Locke, whose understanding about it differed wholly from that of the people, through whose heads it never could be got. Besides having plenty of time on his hands, Locke made his constitution so long, and divided it up into so many parts, that the youngest settler died before he had read it half through, and bequeathed the further perusal of it to his descendants, with all his shares in what it most resembled,—the Dismal Swamp.

A sniff of this vague, shadowy constitution, or bundle of airy rights, by the adjacent settlement of South Carolina, affected her with such a fit of sneezing, that it kept on from that time until 1865, and from which she only found relief now and then in her cotton pocket-handkerchiefs.

We may remark that it is a vulgar error to suppose that the rivers in South Carolina run up hill,—just as it is a common mistake to believe that the Tar River, in North Carolina, originates in a turpentine district, and flows in a thick stream into Pamlico Sound. We may as well, also, correct the almost universal notion, that the inhabitants of Charleston have a particular fondness for fire as a steady, every-day diet.

The chief incident which marked the uneventful record of the Georgia settlement was the advent, in 1736, of John Wesley.

He preached in the Methodist language to the Creeks, Choctaws, and Cherokees; but those short-lived tribes, attending on a certain occasion one of his camp-meetings, and listening to the benevolent missionary giving out one of his brother Charles’s hymns, became so discouraged that they went back to their own camp and ways.

In addition to what we have already said of Maryland, we would state that its mild climate attracted canvas-back ducks, as its mild principles of religious toleration brought to its borders swarms of emigrants. Both have had a damp residence amid its amphibious shores, where the land seems two thirds water, and the water a little more moist than elsewhere.

MAP OF MARYLAND.
(p. 105)
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