THE MELTING POT
Thus far we have been noting the arrival of Virginians from Tidewater.
Rich or poor, great landowners or squatters, gentlemen of position and
influence or the mere riff-raff of the settlements, with all the varying
gradation between those extremes, they had at least in common their
English blood and traditions and being the product of Virginia life,
either through birth or years of residence. It is now time to consider
other and wholly dissimilar strains which, during this period of early
settlement, were coming into the newly opened country and which were to
have such a lasting influence on its population.
As early as 1725 there was, it is said, a group of Irish immigrants
which had established itself on the Virginia bank of the Potomac,
opposite the mouth of the Monocacy. This particular cluster had come
from Maryland having, perhaps, been attracted to the large grant between
the Monocacy and the Point of Rocks which, before 1700, had been
acquired by the first Charles Carroll, founder of his family in Maryland
who, when he acquired the land on the Monocacy, was acting as Agent for
Maryland's Proprietor, Lord Baltimore. Later his grandson, another
Charles Carroll, inherited the grant, added greatly thereto, bestowed
upon it the name of Carrollton Manor and in signing the _Declaration of
Independence_ as Charles Carroll of Carrollton, gave it and himself
immortality. The Carrolls were Irish and Roman Catholics; perhaps they
had encouraged these newcomers to go out to their great holdings on the
Monocacy where life could be begun anew and there was less danger of
interference with their religion than in the strongly Protestant east.
However, whether encouraged or not, our particular covey of Irish seem
eventually to have crossed to the Virginia shore and there planted
themselves with small formality and no title. All was wilderness on both
sides of the Potomac. The matter of a legal title was probably the least
of our adventurers' troubles.
In the first half-century following the founding of Jamestown, few Irish
were to be encountered in Virginia. The Colony was overwhelmingly
English with, it is true, occasional Welsh, Irish and Scotch here and
there; but these were accidental and the basic and dominating race of
the settlers was so wholly Anglo-Saxon that the few others were
submerged and lost in the English flood. But between 1653 and 1660,
hundreds of unfortunate Irish, resisting Cromwell, were shipped as
political prisoners and little better than white slaves to Virginia and
the other Colonies. Again, after the defeat in 1690 of James II and his
Irish supporters by William III at the Battle of the Boyne and the
resultant Treaty of Limerick the next year, great numbers of the Irish
were banished or condemned to transportation and of these many were sent
to Maryland and Virginia where as servants or labourers on the land,
their services were in demand. While the majority thus transported were
ignorant peasants, feudal vassals of their lords, the "Kerns and
gallowglasses" of Macaulay, numbers of the nobility and gentry were
exiled as well, of which we have already recorded a prominent example in
Daniel McCarty. Inasmuch as those transported were so treated as
punishment for their uprising in favour of James and against the de
facto English government of William, they were stigmatized as criminals,
although, as shown, their offense was purely political. But Irish
offenders against the penal laws other than political were also from
time to time condemned to transportation and as the demand for labourers
by wealthier planters in Virginia grew and until negro slaves later were
generally available to them, there was also much kidnapping of wholly
innocent Irish who, too, were taken to the Colonies and sold into
servitude. Among this heterogeneous mass of unfortunates there were
undoubtedly many who were disorderly, depraved and vicious and who, we
know, subsequently gave great trouble to the Virginians; but to classify
all the Irish forcibly transported as criminals or lawless would be as
unjust as it would be untrue. It well may be borne in mind that to most
of the English, they were a strange, impulsive and foreign people and
equally or even more damning, Romanists in an intensely anti-Roman
community. As such, we may well believe, they seldom enjoyed the benefit
of a doubt of their inherent depravity.
The town of Waterford was, according to tradition, founded by an
Irishman, one Asa Moore, who is reputed to have built his, the first
house there in 1732, naming the new settlement for the place of his
nativity. Later it received many English, Scotch-Irish, Germans and,
particularly, Quakers to whom it largely owed the prosperity and
progress it was then to enjoy.
During the interminable wars of the seventeenth century--in ghastly
refutation as they were of those blissful dreams of the solidarity of
Europe and that international brotherhood of peace and culture so fondly
entertained by the Erasmian school only a few generations before--few
parts of that same Europe had suffered more hideously than the land
known as the Palatinate along the Rhine. The so-called Thirty Years War,
from 1618 to 1648, brought devastation particularly to its lower
portion. In 1688 its whole territory was invaded again by the French of
Louis XIV--an invasion which, for sheer savage brutality to the people
there and the inconceivable atrocities perpetrated on them, is difficult
to parallel in the annals of civilized nations but which, with its
certain legacies of distrust and hatred, is somewhat conveniently
forgotten by the professional French patriot of today. The land was
reduced to little more than a desert and such of its inhabitants as
survived, to the utmost want and privation. For nine years, until the
Treaty of Ryswick (1697), the French scourging of the land ground it to
dust. A few years of quiet followed, in which the poor Palatines sought
to restore their ruined towns and farms but fate seemed resolved on
their annihilation. In 1703 another war, that of the Spanish Succession,
broke out and raged until 1713 and the Palatinate again and again was
overrun by hostile armies. It was during these years and after, that
those left with the breath of life in their bodies appeared to give up
hope of ever again occupying their homeland in peace. A great emigration
began, ten thousand fugitives first going to England where they were
received kindly by Queen Anne and her people and given much aid; but, in
an England where work was none too plentiful, the Germans soon became an
economic and social problem. About 3,800 were sent to Ireland where, in
Munster, their descendants are still to be found; but many more were
sent to America, some to New York but the greater number to
Pennsylvania. In the latter Colony they were so well received that they
sent back word encouraging others to follow them; and soon the harassed
Germans began to arrive in such swarms that between 40,000 and 50,000
are believed to have come to Pennsylvania between 1702 and 1727, wholly
changing its complexion. The Colony's Governor, George Thomas, writing
to the Bishop of Exeter in 1747 stated his belief that the Germans then
comprised three-fifths of the population of that Province. But of the
early arrivals many of the most impoverished worked out toward the
cheaper and still wild lands on the then frontier and thence south
through the strong and fertile regions of western Maryland.
Meanwhile Virginia had been encouraging settlements of refugee Europeans
on her frontiers in an effort to form buffer groups between the inimical
French and Indians to the north and the seated parts of her domain. In
1730 a grant of 10,000 acres on the Shenandoah River was made to one
Stover for settlement by Germans who began to pour south from
Pennsylvania and Maryland and soon the Valley was taking on that
perceptible Teutonic colour with which it is still dyed.
In 1731 there came to the present Loudoun the first colony of Germans
from the Valley. Of all the early settling it is doubtful if any was
more intelligently planned or more reasonably could anticipate success.
Instead of a few individuals pioneering in haphazard fashion, there was
a compact and homogeneous group of about sixty families, the men almost
without exception artisans of various trades or peasants skilled in
thrifty farming; and their lot had heretofore been so harsh and their
fortune so adverse that the hardships inseparable from making a new home
in the wilderness were, by comparison, a kindly dispensation of a
hitherto hostile fate. On crossing the Blue Ridge they and those
following them settled the land between the Catoctin Mountains and the
Short Hills, north of the present Morrisonville, which from that time on
has been known as the German Settlement and than which no part of
Loudoun has been more industriously and providently farmed. Little
those early Teutons spent on luxury or even comfort; a sound and certain
living was their objective and the land and its increase, rather than
ornate dwellings, received their uttermost effort. Even as late as 1853,
Yardley Taylor was moved to record that their "farms are generally small
and well cultivated and the land rates high. This class of population
seldom goes to much expense in building houses ... many old log houses
that are barely tolerable are in use by persons abundantly able to build
better ones." But if their houses were primitive, the occupants were
generally prosperous and free from debt and in later years comfortable
and commodious farmhouses have taken the place of the earlier cabins.
These earliest Germans, having neither speech nor habits in common with
their neighbours, developed a self-sustained and independent community
wholly different and set off from those of others around them and to
this day their locality measurably carries on its distinctive life.
Following so closely upon the advent of the Germans that there has
arisen some dispute as to which actually entered first, we find the
arrival of the Quakers. "In 1733 Amos Janney left his residence at the
Falls of the Delaware in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and migrating to
Virginia with his family, established himself at Waterford"[26] and many
other Quakers soon joined him. Local tradition places, even earlier than
Janney, David Potts (another Pennsylvania Quaker) as a pioneer in the
northern part of the present county but no record confirms his presence
before the 16th November, 1746, when he leased 866 acres on "Kittockton
Run" from Catesby Cocke for five shillings in hand paid with right of
purchase. Legend may or may not be correct; the earliest settlers, as we
have seen, often seated themselves without title. Both Janney and Potts
were founders of well known families in the county where their
descendants still worthily bear their names. It is definitely known,
however, that soon the Quakers became very numerous; and as ever since
they have been such a conspicuous element in the diversified population
of the county, a brief narration of their story and migration is of
interest.
[26] _Landmarks of Old Prince William_, I., 267.
The "Friends" or "Quakers" as they were subsequently called, are a
religious sect founded by George Fox in England in 1647 when he was but
twenty-three years old. They owe their name of Quakers to their
tendency, in their early religious meetings, to have become so wrought
up in individual enthusiasm as to be seized with an emotional trembling
or quaking and the earlier Friends "definitely asserted that those who
did not know quaking and trembling, were strangers to the experience of
Moses, David and other Saints."[27] Their characteristic tenets included
the doctrine of non-resistance and opposition to all formalism in
religious services and as Fox began his activities at a time of intense
religious fanaticism met by relentless persecution, it was not long
before he and his followers were in open conflict with the constituted
authorities. From proselyting in public and interrupting conventional
religious services, the more extravagant of the zealots indulged in
activities which can only be ascribed to religious mania and the
authorities promptly met their challenge.[28] Merciless whippings,
dragging at cart-tails, the pillory, branding with hot irons and even
occasional execution were their fate; but in common with other religious
persecution their growth in number seems to have been coincident with
the most vigourous efforts made to suppress them. Fox, a man of humble
birth, with no advantages of formal education, possessed tireless energy
and great bodily vigour coupled with the assurance of a natural and
magnetic evangelist; and although equally detested by Churchmen and
Puritans and in conflict with every other religious body, his following
rapidly grew throughout England. Journeys by his proselytes to
continental America, the West Indies, Holland, Germany, Austria, Hungary
and Italy left converts where they preached and this was particularly so
in the American Colonies where Fox himself came in 1672.
[27] _Encyclopedia Britannica_, _"Friends, Society of."_
[28] Fiske's _Beginnings of New England_.
The first of the Colonies to hear Quaker preaching was Massachusetts in
1656, but Virginia was a close second; for in the following year Thomas
Thurston and Josiah Cole of Bristol arrived in the Old Dominion and are
said to have made a number of converts before they were promptly
banished. The Quakers were as little welcome in either Massachusetts or
Virginia as in England itself and both Colonies passed stringent laws
for their repression. Virginia ordained that any shipmaster found guilty
of smuggling in Quakers was to be fined L100 and upon the third return
of a Quaker after banishment, he was to be treated as a felon. But even
before the passage of the English Toleration Act of 1689 the persecution
had died down. By the end of the century they had so increased in number
that they were a major element in Rhode Island, controlled New Jersey
and Delaware and had, under William Penn in 1681, founded and were
supreme in Pennsylvania. Penn declared for liberty of conscience in the
Colony he termed his "experiment," with absolute religious freedom "for
Papists, Protestants, Jews and Turks"--if not an absolutely unique, at
least a sorely needed attitude in the seventeenth century religious
life. Thence forward Pennsylvania was to be a great centre of Quakerism
and from it mainly but also from Maryland, New York and other Colonies,
as well as directly from Great Britain, were recruited the Quakers of
Loudoun. Undoubtedly the familiar combination of economic pressure, the
cheaper and more fertile lands of the new settlement and the pioneering
spirit inherent in the British race explains the migration. It is
interesting to note that by 1694 a Quaker had become Governor of South
Carolina and that from 1725 to 1775 there was a constant flow of Friends
from Pennsylvania, New York, New England and Great Britain to that
State. As a main north-and-south highway, the famous Carolina Road,
passed through the Loudoun to be, doubtless many came that way and we
may believe that not a few of those emigrants joined their
coreligionists who they found living in such comfort and prosperity in
their fertile Virginia colony.
The Quakers of Loudoun had with characteristic shrewdness picked out for
their settlement that part of the far-famed Loudoun Valley, between the
Catoctin Hills and the Blue Ridge, that lies in the central part of the
present county--perhaps the best and most fertile land the county
boasts; and there the so-called "Quaker Settlement" continues to the
present time. In common with their German neighbours to the north, they
tended to form a more-or-less compact colony, segregated from the other
pioneers. They were frugal, industrious, far better farmers than their
Virginia neighbours; but between Germans and Quakers no love was lost
and, though each was isolated from the Tidewater element, there was
little or no intermingling. Nevertheless we find them occasionally
making common cause against the slaveholding portion of the community
and, in the next century in the War Between the States, both German and
Quaker adhered to the Federal cause and were, at least for the time
being, more than ever cut off from their then intensely Confederate
neighbours. Time has softened and gradually worn down these old-time
edges of difference and today, perhaps more than ever before, we find
the descendants of these earlier opponents living in concord and mutual
respect.
Our melting-pot is slowly filling. In the Scotch-Irish it now takes
another human ingredient as distinct from the Anglo-Saxon as were the
Germans or Irish but destined to make a major contribution not only to
the new population of the Piedmont but to that of Virginia generally and
the other Colonies as well. They were splendid pioneering material with
the persistent industry and frugality of the German and Quaker but,
unlike them, mixing freely with the other settlers, planting themselves
anywhere and everywhere they found conditions and lands to their liking
and so soon and freely intermarrying with their Virginia neighbours that
their blood today is found very generally mixed with the older Virginia
strain. Concerning their origin and history there has been much
misinformation and occasionally rather prejudiced and heated argument;
but the main facts are not obscure.
In the sixth century one of the Irish tribes known as the Scotti or
Scots, inhabiting the island then known as Scotia, but which we now call
Ireland, crossed the Irish Sea and made a mass descent on the west coast
of ancient Caledonia; and driving before them the Picts they found
occupying the land, they settled down in possession of their newly
conquered territory, covering roughly the present Argyle. Five centuries
later the descendants of these invaders, having waxed mightily in power
and numbers and become one of the four tribal kingdoms of Caledonia,
united with the others, the Picts, British and Angles, to make the
Kingdom of Scotland to which they gave their name and of which their
history thenceforth was a part. Thus apparently their future destiny was
fixed for all time in Scotland; but Providence had not forgotten them
and had other plans.
In all Ireland, never renowned for its meekness nor pacification, there
was in Elizabethan days and before, probably no part more constantly and
consistently embroiled than the Province of Ulster. More or less
continuous fighting between its people and Elizabeth's soldiers
gradually wore down the Irish and their final complete collapse came in
1607 when their native princes, the Earls of Tyrconnel and Tyrone,
deserted them and fled to the Continent. Thereupon the first James of
England, having succeeded Elizabeth, declared all the lands of the
Province forfeited and escheated to the English Crown, thus providing a
convenient and legal basis for dispossessing the native Irish of their
holdings, which the King thereupon undertook to repopulate with English
and Scotch. But the English did not view the King's inducements with
enthusiasm. Inasmuch as, in comparison with the Scotch, they "were a
great deal more tenderly bred at home in England, and entertained in
better quarters than they could find in Ireland, they were unwilling to
flock thither except to good land such as they had before at home, or to
good cities where they might trade, both of which in those days were
scarce enough" in Ulster.[29] But the Scotch, many of them from Argyle
found Ulster, their old homeland, to their liking and James, Scotch
himself, seems to have preferred them for his purpose. They came in
great numbers, took root immediately and soon were creating a peace and
prosperity in the Province unknown there for many a long day, their
ranks being later heavily augmented by Covenanters fleeing from the
persecution of Charles I. But between these Presbyterian newcomers and
the native Irish Roman Catholics, their neighbours, there was friction
and hostility from the beginning which has lasted unabated to the
present day.
[29] Testimony of a contemporary, the Rev. Andrew Stewart. _The
Scotch-Irish Settlers in the Valley of Virginia_, by Bolivar Christian.
Had the English government the wit and policy to have let this new
settlement alone all would have been well; but the England of those days
had yet to learn, from the costly experience of the American Revolution,
that art of governing colonies in which she is today without peer. After
the final crushing of the Irish at the Battle of the Boyne, in which the
new Ulster population was of no small assistance, the English merchants
grew jealous of the trade, manufactures and aggressive competition of
the Province and in 1698 succeeded in obtaining from Parliament
restrictive laws which all but ruined her industries, particularly in
linen and woolen then, as now, outstanding. And now to the ruin of their
trades was to be added religious coercion. Although, as we have seen, a
Toleration Act had been passed for England in 1689, it was not until
nearly one hundred years later that in 1782 the Toleration Act for
Ireland became law. From 1704 on there was a great effort to force the
Presbyterians of Ulster, as well as those of Scotland, to conform to the
English Church and those who refused were forbidden to keep schools,
marriages performed by their ministers were declared invalid and other
civil disabilities were imposed. By 1719 the people of Ulster had been
made desperate by this senseless interference and persecution and they,
too, began to flock to America. As with the others, the movement, once
started, grew rapidly and in this instance reached such proportions that
it became by far the greatest immigration that, until the later day of
steam, was to come to America's shores. Again Philadelphia appears to
have been the chief port to receive them, as many as six shiploads
landing there in one week alone. Before the emigration was eased by the
Toleration Act and a generally saner attitude in England, it is
estimated that half a million of the Scotch-Irish had crossed the
Atlantic, carrying with them a deep resentment toward England, for which
she later was to pay a heavy price in the stubborn and valiant support
these people and their descendants gave to the American side in the war
of the Revolution.
As most of these Scotch-Irish immigrants were very poor, many paid for
their passage by selling their services and labour for a term of years,
becoming a part of that flood of "indentured servants" which we shall
soon consider. Fairfax Harrison in his _Landmarks of Old Prince William_
vividly describes their advent and early distribution in the Northern
Neck. As soon as the earlier arrivals had worked out their contracted
years of servitude, Colonel Robert Carter, about 1723, began seating
them around Brent Town and Elk Marsh. But as their numbers grew, they
soon shewed a disinclination to become tenants, preferring to push
further into the wilderness "where they could and did take up small
holdings on the same terms that Colonel Carter took up his great ones
and in that process they scattered."[30] Being too poor to purchase
negro slaves and the supply of "redemptioners" or indentured servants by
that time beginning to diminish, they bought the cheaper convicts for
labourers and the Piedmont backwoods of the Proprietary acquired a
reputation for turbulence and lawlessness to which both master and
servant contributed his share. But they settled the land, planted
tobacco and corn as persistently and relentlessly as did their more
prosperous neighbours and in common with them laboured to develop the
future Loudoun.
[30] _Landmarks of Old Prince William_, I., 235.
To understand the status of the "indentured servants," who were so
numerous in the Virginia Colony and were such a large and important
factor in the population of the Northern Neck, it is well to first
consider the meaning of the term. In the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries the word servant was not at all confined to one who was
engaged in a menial task but broadly referred to anyone who, for
compensation, rendered service to another and it was customary in all
occupations, calling for especial training or instruction, to take on
apprentices "bound to serve for a certain time in consideration of
instruction in an art or trade"--the apprentice to be fed, lodged and
clothed by the master during the term and to give his labour and
services in compensation for his support and instruction. This custom
obtained not only in the various crafts and trades but even in the
professions as well, lawyers and doctors taking students on similar
terms. In modern England the broader and older meaning of the word
persists in the expression "civil servant" in reference to a government
clerk or employe in what in America, too, is known as the Civil Service.
Virginia's agriculture was based on the cultivation of tobacco and
corn--both hand-hoed crops, with practically no use whatever of the
plow. As land was plentiful and the plantations increased in size, the
great and pressing need was always for labor--and more labor. This
system of indentured service in Virginia began very early and opened a
great supply of labor not otherwise available. There were many in
England of the poorer class and even of those once more affluent who had
for one reason or another become the victims of misfortune and sought a
fresh start in the colonies but were without the money to pay their
passage. No small number of those who had become bankrupt became
indentured servants. The severe English laws against debtors forced many
to fly from that country and Virginia was a safe escape; for in 1642 a
law had been passed in Virginia protecting these fugitives from their
English creditors.[31] Little social stigma seems to have attached to
the indentured servants as such. Frequently they lived with the family
of their master, especially so when he was one of the smaller
proprietors, and as they became proficient and earned their master's
confidence they were often made overseers of their fellow workers.
Although by far the greater demand was always for workers on the land,
not all of them were so employed; some were artisans, some of the better
educated became teachers and it was not unusual for the wealthier
planters to seek and purchase these latter for that purpose. George
Washington is said to have thus received his earlier schooling. As a
whole, they appear to have been well and humanely treated in Virginia,
or at least after the earlier days of their introduction, with little or
none of the shocking brutality they are known to have met with upon
occasion in Maryland, such as called for that Colony's legislation of
1664, 1681, etc.[32]
[31] Hening, 256. Also _Patrician and Plebeian in Virginia, T. J.
Wertenbaker_, p. 164.
[32] E. I. McCormac's _White Servitude in Maryland_, p. 67.
That there had been some earlier harshness, but more probably to
convicts, is suggested by the effort made by Robert Beverley, in his
_History of Virginia_, first published in 1705, to refute rumours of
ill-treatment or undue hardship in the lives of these people which had
been spread abroad in the England of his day. No doubt the writings of
Defoe and other authors without personal knowledge of what they
undertook to describe, had had their affect. "A white woman is rarely or
never put to work on the ground, if she be good for anything else,"
Beverley declares and further on has this to say:
"Because I have heard how strangely cruel and severe the service of this
country is represented in some parts of England, I can't forebear
affirming, that the work of the servants and slaves is no other that
what every common freeman does; neither is any servant required to do
more in a day than his overseer; and I can assure you, with great truth,
that generally their slaves are not worked so hard, nor so many hours in
a day, as the husbandman and day labourer in England. An overseer is a
man, that having served his time, has acquired the skill and character
of an experienced planter, and is therefore entrusted with direction of
the servants and slaves ... all masters are under the correction and
censure of the County Courts to provide for their servants food and
wholesome diet, clothing and lodging."
And again:
"If a master should be so cruel, as to use his servant ill, that is
fallen sick or lame in his service, and thereby rendered unfit for
labor, he must be removed by the churchwardens out of the way of such
cruelty, and boarded in some good planters home till the time of his
freedom, the charge of which must be laid before the next county court,
which has power to levy the same, from time to time, upon the goods and
chattels of the master, after which, the charge of such boarding is to
come upon the parish in general.... No master of a servant can make a
new bargain for service or other matter with his servant, without the
privity and consent of the County Court, to prevent the masters
over-reaching, or scaring such servant into an unreasonable compliance."
Moreover, when the servant had redeemed himself by working out his time,
he received from his former master, as assistance to start out for
himself "ten bushels of corn (which is sufficient for almost a year) two
new suits of clothes, both linen and woolen, and a gun, twenty dollars
value"; all of which were given to him as his due. He had the right to
take up fifty acres of unpatented land and thereupon took his place,
according to his merit and industry, in the free life of the Colony.
The system was necessary from the first; for if the servants had not
been bound they promptly would have secured tracts of land to work for
themselves, leaving those who had paid for their passage in the lurch.
That it was advantageous to both master and servant is indicated by its
growth. Its end in Virginia was caused by a cheaper labor supply having
become available rather than from any lack of those seeking
transportation. It has been estimated that, between the years 1635 and
1680, from 1,000 to 1,600 came annually to Virginia under its conditions
and that from first to last not less than eighty thousand persons so
arrived. But with the importation of negroes, beginning on a larger
scale about 1680, the custom declined until by the middle of the
eighteenth century, it seems to have practically ended in Virginia.
The transporting of convicts by England to her American Colonies--a far
greater injustice to them than the later taxation by which they were
lost to her--began early and was, in Virginia, at once and most
vigourously opposed; but the everpressing demand for laborers seems to
have rapidly modified the opposition, at least on the part of the larger
proprietors whose power and influence was out of all proportion to their
number; and it was not long before convicts were not only accepted
without protest but even sought. It is the old story, in America as
elsewhere, of a selfish economic advantage blinding those in power to
the welfare of the State as a whole, although many continued to hold
misgivings of the outcome. Thus we find Beverley in a later edition of
his history, recording: "as for malefactors condemned to transportation,
the greedy planters will always buy them, yet it is to be feared that
they will be very injurious to the Country, which has already suffered
many murders and robberies, the effect of that new law of England."[33]
[33] He refers to the Act passed in 1718, on the transportation of
convicts.
But a loose assumption that all the convicts or prisoners arriving were
moral derelicts, or those whose offense essentially involved moral
depravity, and that the proportion these bore to others leaving Europe
for Virginia fixes the ratio of their descendants or influence in the
Old Dominion's later population, would be wholly and demonstrably
untrue. We must be much more discerning and analytical than that and, as
in another instance, look to our definitions.
The penal law of England, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
was far more severe than today. Literally scores of offenses were
punishable by death or transportation which today are either not crimes
or, if still so considered, are punishable only by fine or imprisonment.
Among the transgressions most severely dealt with, were purely political
offenses; and a political offense was essentially to have picked the
wrong side in the many religious, dynastic or civic disturbances of the
period. After the various Irish upheavals of the seventeenth
century--and that island, it may be said, was conquered by the English
no less than three times within less than a hundred years--there was
banishment or transportation of many of the losing side. The
transportation was especially ruthless after Cromwell's operations and
again, a generation or more later, after the Battle of the Boyne. But
the Irish were not the only political victims. When the forces of
Parliament defeated the Stuart followers, they condemned to
transportation a goodly number of their opponents; treatment which was
promptly reciprocated by the triumphant Royalists after the Restoration
who meted out the same punishment to former Cromwellian soldiers and
non-conformists as well. Again, after the abortive effort made in 1685
by the Duke of Monmouth to seize his uncle's crown, the vicious and
bloody Jeffries and his colleagues, in their less frenzied moments,
sentenced, as criminals, multitudes of the unfortunate followers of
Monmouth to transportation to Virginia--there to be sold into as virtual
slavery as any thug convicted of murder or highway robbery who had, in
one way or another, been lucky enough to escape hanging. On arrival they
sold for from L10 to L15 each; and we find the King adding his gentle
touch to the work. "Take all care" wrote James to the Council of
Virginia "that they shall serve for ten years at least; and that they be
not permitted to return themselves by money or otherwise until that term
be fully expired. Prepare a bill for the Assembly of our Colony, with
such clauses as shall be requisite for that purpose." Thus the king; but
in four years he has lost his throne and William III is issuing a full
pardon for all political offenders.
Hence no small part of the convicts were unfortunates, rather than
criminals, to our modern way of thought. But there remained a large and
unpalatable number who had been convicted of crimes of all degrees and
in their ranks were found a motley crew ranging from the lowest type of
profligate, whose escape from the noose had been a public misfortune, to
the minor offenders punished for a first violation of law. However even
this evil residue was fated to leave but a minor contamination of the
Colony's bloodstream. A great death-toll was taken by sickness on the
transporting ships, particularly by the dreaded "goal distemper" as it
was called. Those who survived the voyage naturally received far less
consideration from their purchasers than was accorded the indentured
servant; the unaccustomed climate took its quota and all in all the
mortality was very great. Of those who outlived their period of
servitude, some rose to positions of trust; many of the incorrigibles
soon made the Colony too hostile for their comfort and took themselves
off either voluntarily or as fugitives--sometimes to the more remote and
unseated parts of Piedmont or, more generally, to the North Carolina
backwoods, a favorite refuge for the dregs of Virginia's Colonial
population. And at length, in 1740, came an opportunity for a great and
general house-cleaning. In raising the Virginia levies for the ill-fated
expedition against Carthagena, many a convict was pressed into service
and, in the disasters attending that adventure, ended his turbulent
career. But unfortunately the polluted stream continued to pour in on
Virginia's shores until after the Revolution.
An unduly large proportion of these undesirables appears to have found
its way into the backwoods of the Northern Neck which, in 1730, Governor
Gooch described as "a part of the Country remote from the Seat of
Government where the common people are generally of a more turbulent and
unruly disposition than anywhere else, and are not like to become better
by being the Place of all this Dominion where most of transported
Convicts are sold and settled."[34] One may, without an undue straining
of the imagination, discover the descendants of some of these people in
modern Loudoun's small lawless element.
[34] _Landmarks of Old Prince William_, I., 162.
The negro slaves were practically confined to the eastern and southern
parts of Loudoun. They were all but unknown in the German Settlement and
the Quakers as a sect were so opposed to the very institution of slavery
that, as early as the eighteenth century, the Society in America reached
the decision to disown any member thereof who held slaves.
In all this varied assortment of population, it is a tribute to the
natural leadership of the Tidewater Virginian that he maintained his
supremacy and control. From him the county inherits all that is best and
most attractive in its social life--the courtesy of its people, the
unfailing hospitality, the love of social intercourse, the ardour for
outdoor sports, particularly the devotion to horses, dogs and
fox-hunting, all of which so definitely distinguish it today and
contribute to the outstanding and well-recognized charm of its life.