involves hard physical work; and, beyond anything else, the wealth of
Virginia was derived from farming. Manufactures had not come in view,
and were discouraged or forbidden by English decree. But, as we saw in
the early days of Jamestown, the settlers there were unused to work,
and averse from it; although, under the stimulus of Captain John Smith,
they did learn how to chop down trees. After the colony became popular,
and populous, the emigrants continued to be in a large measure of a
social class to whom manual labor is unattractive. A country in which
laborers are indispensable, and which is inhabited by persons
disinclined to labor, would seem to stand no good chance of achieving
prosperity. How, then, is the early prosperity of Virginia to be
explained? The charter did not make men work.
It was due to the employment of slave labor. Slaves in the Seventeenth
Century were easily acquired, and were of several varieties. At one
time, there were more white slaves than black. White captives were
often sold into slavery; and there was also a regular trade in
indentured slaves, or servants, sent from England. These were to work
out their freedom by a certain number of years of labor for their
purchaser. Convicts from the prisons were also utilized as slaves. In
the same year that the Virginia charter bestowed political freedom upon
the colonists, a Dutch ship landed a batch of slaves from the Guinea
coast, where the Dutch had a footing. They were strong fellows, and the
ardor of the climate suited them better than that of the regions
further north. Negroes soon came to be in demand therefore; they did
not die in captivity as the Indians were apt to do, and a regular trade
in them was presently established. A negro fetched in the market more
than twice as much as either a red or a white man, and repaid the
investment. There was no general sentiment against traffic in human
beings, and it was not settled that negroes were human, exactly.
Slavery at all events had been the normal condition of Guinea negroes
from the earliest times, and they undoubtedly were worse treated by
their African than by their European and American owners. They were
born slaves, or at least in slavery. There had of course been
enlightened humanitarians as far back as the Greek and Roman eras, who
had opined that the principle of slavery was wrong; and such men were
talking still; but ordinary people regarded their deliverances as being
in the nature of a counsel of perfection, which was not intended to be
observed in practice. There are fashions in humanitarianism, as in
other matters, and multitudes who denounced slavery in the first half
of this Nineteenth Century, were in no respect better practical
moralists than were the Virginians two hundred years before. But the
time had to come, in the course of human events, when negro slavery was
to cease in America; and those whose business interests, or sentimental
prejudices, were opposed to it, added the chorus of their disapproval
to the inscrutable movements of a Power above all prejudices. Negro
slavery, as an overt institution, is no more in these States; but he
would be a bold or a blind man who should maintain that slavery, both
black and white, has no existence among us to-day. Meanwhile the
Seventeenth Century planters of Virginia bought and sold their human
chattels with an untroubled conscience; and the latter, comprehending
even less of the ethics of the question than their masters did, were
reasonably happy. They were not aware that human nature was being
insulted and degraded in their persons: they were transported by no
moral indignation. When they were flogged, they suffered, but when
their bodies stopped smarting, no pain rankled in their minds. They
were treated like animals, and became like them. They had no anxieties;
they looked neither forward nor backward; their physical necessities
were provided for. White slavery gradually disappeared, but the feeling
prevailed that slavery was what negroes were intended for. The
planters, after a few generations, came to feel a sort of affection for
their bondsmen who had been born on the estates and handed down from
father to son. Self-interest, as well as natural kindliness, rendered
deliberate cruelties rare. The negroes, on the other hand, often loved
their masters, and would grieve to leave them. The evils of slavery
were not on the surface, but were subtle, latent, and far more
malignant than was even recently realized. The Abolitionists thought
the trouble was over when the Proclamation of Emancipation was signed.
"We can put on our coats and go home, now," said Garrison; and Wendell
Phillips said, "I know of no man to-day who can fold his arms and look
forward to his future with more confidence than the negro." We shall
have occasion to investigate the intelligence of these forecasts
by-and-by. But there is something striking in the fact that that
country which claims to be the freest and most highly civilized in the
world should be the last to give up "the peculiar institution." How can
devotion to liberty co-exist in the mind with advocacy of servitude?
This, too, is a subject to which we must revert hereafter. At the
period we are now treating, there were more white than black slaves,
and the princely estates of later times had not been thought of.
Indeed, in spite of their marriage to liberty, the colonists did not
yet feel truly at home. Marriage of a more concrete kind was needed for
that.
This defect was understood in England, and the Company took means to
remedy it. A number of desirable and blameless young women were
enlisted to go out to the colony and console the bachelors there. The
plan was discreetly carried out; the acquisition of the young ladies
was not made too easy, so that neither was their self-respect wounded,
nor were the bachelors allowed to feel that beauty and virtue in female
form were commonplace commodities. The romance and difficulty of the
situation were fairly well preserved. There stood the possible bride;
but she was available only with her own consent and approval; and
before entering the matrimonial estate, the bridegroom elect must pay
all charges--so many pounds of tobacco. And how many pounds of tobacco
was a good wife worth? From one point of view, more than was ever grown
in Virginia; but the sentimental aspect of the transaction had to be
left out of consideration, or the enterprise would have come to an
untimely conclusion. From one hundred to one hundred and fifty pounds
of the weed was the average commercial figure; it paid expenses and
gave the agents a commission; for the rest, the profit was all the
colonist's. Many a happy home was founded in this way, and, so far as
we know, there were no divorces and no scandals. But it must not be
forgotten that, although tobacco was paid for the wife, there was still
enough left to fill a quiet pipe by the conjugal fireside. They were
the first Christian firesides where this soothing goddess had presided:
no wonder they were peaceful!
Charles I. was a young man, with a large responsibility on his
shoulders; and two leading convictions in his mind. The first was that
he ought to be the absolute head of the nation; Parliament might take
counsel with him, but should not control him when it came to action.
The same notion had prevailed with James I., and was to be the
immediate occasion of the downfall of James II.; as for Charles II.,
his long experience of hollow oak trees, and secret chambers in the
houses of loyalists, had taught him the limitations of the kingly
prerogative before he began his reign; and the severed head of his
father clinched the lesson. But the Stuarts, as a family, were
disinclined to believe that the way to inherit the earth was by
meekness, and none of them believed it so little as the first Charles.
The second conviction he entertained was that he must have revenues,
and that they should be large and promptly paid. His whole pathetic
career--tragic seems too strong a word for it, though it ended in
death--was a mingled story of nobility, falsehood, gallantry and
treachery, conditioned by his blind pursuit of these two objects, money
and power.
Upon general principles, then, it was to be expected that Charles would
be the enemy of Virginian liberties. But it happened that money was his
more pressing need at the time his attention first was turned on the
colony; he saw that revenues were to be gained from them; he knew that
the charter recently given to them had immensely increased their
productiveness; and as to his prerogative, he had not as yet felt the
resistance which his parliament had in store for him, and was therefore
not jealous of the political privileges of a remote settlement--one,
too, which seemed to be in the hands of loyal gentlemen. "Their
liberties harm me not," was his thought, "and they appear to be
favorable to the success of the tobacco crop; the tobacco monopoly can
put money in my purse; therefore let the liberties remain. Should these
planters ever presume to go too far, it will always be in my power to
stop them." Thus it came about that tobacco, after procuring the
Virginians loving wives, was also the means of securing the favor of
their king. But they, naturally, ascribed the sunshine of his smile to
some innate merit in themselves, and their gratitude made them his
enthusiastic supporters as long as he lived. They mourned his death,
and opened their arms to all royalist refugees from the power of
Cromwell. When Cromwell sent over a man-of-war, however, they accepted
the situation. Virginia had by that time grown to so considerable an
importance that they could adopt a somewhat conservative attitude
toward the affairs even of the mother country.
The ten years following Charles's accession were a period of peace and
growth in the colony; of great increase in population and in
production, and of a steady ripening of political liberties. But the
conditions under which this development went on were different from
those which existed in New England and in New York. The Puritans were
actuated by religious ideals, the Dutch by commercial projects chiefly;
but the Virginia planters were neither religious enthusiasts nor
tradesmen. Their tendency was not to huddle together in towns and close
communities, but to spread out over the broad and fertile miles of
their new country, and live each in a little principality of his own,
with his slaves and dependants around him. They modeled their lives
upon those of the landed gentry in England; and when their crops were
gathered, they did not go down to the wharfs and haggle over their
disposal, but handed them over to agents, who took all trouble off
their hands, and after deducting commissions and charges made over to
them the net profits. This left the planters leisure to apply
themselves to liberal pursuits; they maintained a dignified and
generous hospitality, and studied the art of government. A race of
gallant gentlemen grew up, well educated, and consciously superior to
the rest of the population, who had very limited educational
facilities, and but little of that spirit of equality and independence
which characterized the northern colonies. Towns and cities came
slowly; the plantation system was more natural and agreeable under the
circumstances. Orthodoxy in religion was the rule; and though at first
there was a tendency to eschew narrowness and bigotry, yet gradually
the church became hostile to dissenters, and Puritans and Quakers were
as unwelcome in Virginia as were the latter in Massachusetts, or
Episcopalians anywhere in New England. All this seems incompatible with
democracy; and probably it might in time have grown into a liberal
monarchical system. The slaves were not regarded as having any rights,
political or personal; their masters exercised over them the power of
life and death, as well as all lesser powers. The bulk of the white
population was not oppressed, and was able to get a living, for
Virginia was "the best poor man's country in the world"; there was
little or none of the discontent that embarrassed the New Amsterdam
patroons; the charter gave them representation, and their manhood was
not undermined. Had Virginia been an island, or otherwise isolated, and
free from any external interference, we can imagine that the planters
might at last have found it expedient to choose a king from among their
number, who would have found a nobility and a proletariat ready made.
But Virginia was not isolated. She was loyal to the Stuarts, because
they did not bring to bear upon her the severities which they inflicted
upon their English subjects; but when she became a royal colony, and
had to put up with corrupt and despotic favorites of the monarch, who
could do what they pleased, and were responsible to nobody but the
monarch who had made them governor, loyalty began to cool. Moreover,
men whose ability and advanced opinions made them distasteful to the
English kings, fled to the colonies, and to Virginia among the rest,
and sowed the seeds of revolt. Calamity makes strange bedfellows: the
planters liked outside oppression as little as did the common people,
and could not but make common cause with them. The distance between the
two was diminished. Social equality there could hardly be; but
political and theoretic equality could be acknowledged. The English
monarchy made the American republic; spurred its indolence, and united
its parts. Man left to himself is lax and indifferent; from first to
last it is the pressure of wrong that molds him into the form of right.
George I. gave the victory to the Americans in the Revolution as much
as Washington did. And before George's time, the colonies had been
keyed up to the struggle by years of injustice and outrage. And this
injustice and outrage seemed the more intolerable because they had been
preceded by a period of comparative liberality. It needs powerful
pressure to transform English gentlemen with loyalist traditions, and
sympathies into a democracy; but it can be done, and the English kings
were the men to do it.
Until the period of unequivocal tyranny arrived, the chief shadow upon
the colony was cast by its relations with the Indians. Powhatan, the
father of Pocahontas, and chief over tribes whose domains extended over
thousands of square miles, kept friendship with the whites till his
death in 1618. His brother, Opechankano, professed to inherit the
friendship along with the chieftainship; but the relations between the
red men and the colonists had never been too cordial, and the latter,
measuring their muskets and breastplates against the stone arrows and
deerskin shirts of the savages, fell into the error of despising them.
The Indians, for their part, stood in some awe of firearms, which they
had never held in their own hands, and the penalty for selling which to
them had been made capital years before. But they had their own methods
of dealing with foes; and since neither side had ever formally come to
blows, they had received no object lesson to warn them to keep hands
off. Opechankano was intelligent and far-seeing; he perceived that the
whites were increasing in numbers, and that if they were not checked
betimes, they would finally overrun the country. But he did not see so
far as his brother, who had known that the final domination of the
English could not be prevented, and had therefore adopted the policy of
conciliating them as the best. Opechankano, therefore, quietly planned
the extermination of the settlers; the familiar terms on which the
white and red men stood played into his hands. Indians were in the
habit of visiting the white settlements, and mingling with the people.
Orders for concerted action were secretly circulated among the savages,
who were to hold themselves ready for the signal.
It might after all never have been given, but for an unlooked for
incident. A noisy and troublesome Indian, who imagined that bullets
could not kill him, fell into a quarrel with a settler, and slew him;
and was himself shot while attempting to escape from arrest. "Sooner
shall the heavens fall," devoutly exclaimed Opechankano, when informed
of this mishap, "than I will break the peace of Powhatan." But the
waiting tribes knew that the time had come.
On the morning of March 22, 1622, the settlers arose as usual to the
labors of the day; some of them took their hoes and spades and went out
into the fields; others busied themselves about their houses. Numbers
of Indians were about, but this excited no remark or suspicion; they
were not formidable; a dog could frighten them; a child could hold them
in check. Indians strolled into the cabins, and sat at the
breakfast-tables. No one gave them a second thought. No one looked over
his shoulder when an Indian passed behind him.
But, miles up the country from Jamestown lived a settler who kept an
Indian boy, whom he instructed, and who made himself useful about the
place; and of all the Indians in Virginia that day he was the only one
whose heart relented. His brother had lain with him the night before,
and had given him the word: he was to kill the settler and his family
the next morning. The boy seemed to assent, and the other went on his
way. The boy lay till dawn, his savage mind divided between fear of the
great chief and compassion for the white man who had been kind to him
and taught him. In the early morning he arose and stood beside his
benefactor's bed. The man slept: one blow, and he would be dead. But
the boy did not strike; he wakened him and told him of the horror that
was about to befall.
Pace--such was the settler's name--did not wait for confirmation of the
tale; indeed, as he ran to the paddock to get his packhorse, he could
see the smoke of burning cabins rising in the still air, and could
hear, far off, the yells of the savages as they plied their work.
He sprang on the horse's back, with his musket across the withers, and
set off at a gallop toward Jamestown. Most of the colonists lived in
that neighborhood; if he could get there in time many lives might be
saved. As he rode, he directed his course to the cabins, on the right
hand and on the left, that lay in his way, and gave the alarm. Many of
the savages, who had not yet begun their work, at once took to flight;
they would not face white men when on their guard. In other places, the
warning came too late. The missionary, who had devoted his life to
teaching the heathen that men should love one another, was inhumanly
butchered. Pace arrived in season to avert the danger from the bulk of
the little population; but, of the four thousand scattered over the
country-side, three hundred and forty-seven died that morning, with the
circumstances of hideous atrocity which were the invariable
accompaniments of Indian massacre. The colonists were appalled; and for
a time it seemed as if the purpose of Opechankano would be realized.
Two thousand settlers came in from the outlying districts,
panic-stricken, and after living for a while crowded together in
unwholesome quarters in the vicinity of Jamestown, took ship and
returned to England. Hardly one in ten of the plantations was not
deserted. The bolder spirits, who remained, organized a war of
extermination, in which they were supported and re-enforced by the
company, who sent over men and weapons as soon as the news was known in
England. But the campaign resolved itself into long and harassing
attacks, ambuscades and reprisals, extending over many years. There
could be no pitched battles with Indians; they gave way, but only to
circumvent and surprise. The whites were resolved to make no peace, and
to give no quarter to man, woman or child. The formerly peaceful
settlement became inured to blood and cruelty. But the red men could
not be wholly driven away. Just twenty years after the first massacre
the same implacable chief, now a decrepit old man, planned a second
one; some hundreds were murdered; but the colonists were readier and
stronger now, and they gathered themselves up at once, and inflicted a
crushing vengeance. The ancient chief was finally taken, and either
died of wounds received in fight, or was slain by a soldier after
capture. After 1646, the borders of Virginia were safe. There is no
redeeming feature in this Indian warfare, which fitfully survives, in
remote parts of our country, even now. It aided, perhaps, to train the
race of pioneers and frontiersmen who later became one of the most
remarkable features of our early population. Contact with the savage
races inoculated us, perhaps, with a touch of their stoicism and
grimness. But in our conflicts with them there was nothing noble or
inspiring; and there could be no object in view on either side but
extermination. Our Indian fighters became as savage and merciless as
the creatures they pursued. The Indian must be fought by the same
tactics he adopts--cunning, stealth, surprise, and then unrelenting
slaughter, with the sequel of the scalping knife. They compel us to
descend to their level in war, and we have utterly failed to raise them
to our own in peace. Some of them have possessed certain harshly
masculine traits which we can admire; some of them have showed broad
and virile intelligence, the qualities of a general, a diplomatist, or
even of a statesman. There have been, and are, so-called tame Indians;
but such were not worth taming. As a whole, the red tribes have
resisted all attempts to lift them to the civilized level and keep them
there. Roger Williams, and the "apostle," John Eliot, were their
friends, and won their regard; but neither Williams' influence nor
Eliot's Bible left any lasting trace upon them. The Indian is
irreclaimable; disappointment is the very mildest result that awaits
the effort to reclaim him. He is wild to the marrow; no bird or beast
is so wild as he. He is a human embodiment of the untrodden woods, the
undiscovered rivers, the austere mountains, the pathless prairies--of
all those parts and aspects of nature which are never brought within
the smooth sway of civilization, because, as soon as civilization
appears, they are, so far as their essential quality is concerned,
gone. To hear the yelp of the coyote, you must lie alone in the sage
brush near the pool in the hollow of the low hills by moonlight; it
will never reach your ears through the bars of the menagerie cage. To
know the mountain, you must confront the avalanche and the precipice
uncompanioned, and stand at last on the breathless and awful peak,
which lifts itself and you into a voiceless solitude remote from man
and yet no nearer to God; but if you journey with guides and jolly
fellowship to some Mountain House, never so airily perched, you would
as well visit a panorama. To comprehend the ocean, you must meet it in
its own inviolable domain, where it tosses heavenward its careless
nakedness, and laughs with death; from the deck of a steamboat you will
never find it, though you sail as far as the Flying Dutchman. But the
solitude which nature reveals, and which alone reveals her, does but
prepare you for the inaproachableness that shines out at you from the
Indian's eyes. Seas are shallow and continents but a span compared with
the breadths and depths which separate him from you. The sphinx will
yield her mystery, but he will not unveil his; you may touch the poles
of the planet, but you can never lay your hand on him. The same God
that made you, made him also in His image; but if you try to bridge the
gulf between you, you will learn something of God's infinitude.