[Illustration: Frontispiece]
American Statesmen
STANDARD LIBRARY EDITION
[Illustration: _The Home of the Washington Family_]
* * * * *
GEORGE WASHINGTON
BY
HENRY CABOT LODGE
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. I.
1889
PREFACE
This edition has been carefully revised, and although very little has
been added of late years to our knowledge of the facts of Washington's
life, I have tried to examine all that has appeared. The researches of
Mr. Waters, which were published just after these volumes in the first
edition had passed through the press, enable me to give the Washington
pedigree with certainty, and have turned conjecture into fact. The
recent publication in full of Lear's memoranda, although they tell
nothing new about Washington's last moments, help toward a completion
of all the details of the scene.
H.C. LODGE.
WASHINGTON, February 7, 1898.
* * * * *
CONTENTS
CHAPTER.
INTRODUCTION
I. THE OLD DOMINION
II. THE WASHINGTONS
III. ON THE FRONTIER
IV. LOVE AND MARRIAGE
V. TAKING COMMAND
VI. SAVING THE REVOLUTION
VII. "MALICE DOMESTIC, AND FOREIGN LEVY"
VIII. THE ALLIES
IX. ARNOLD'S TREASON, AND THE WAR IN THE SOUTH
X. YORKTOWN
XI. PEACE
INDEX
ILLUSTRATIONS
GEORGE WASHINGTON
From the painting by Gilbert Stuart in the Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston. This painting is owned by the Boston Athenæum and is known as
the Athenæum portrait.
Autograph is from Washington's signature to a bill of exchange, from
"Talks about Autographs" by George Birkbeck Hill.
The vignette of the residence of the Washington family is from "Homes
of American Statesman," published by Alfred W. Putnam, New York.
LAWRENCE WASHINGTON
From an original painting in the possession of Lawrence Washington,
Esq., Alexandria, Va., a great-great-great-nephew.
Autograph from MS. in New York Public Library, Lenox Building.
MISS MARY CARY
From an original painting owned by Dr. James D. Moncure of Virginia,
one of her descendants.
No autograph can be found.
MISS MARY PHILIPSE
From Irving's "Washington," published by G.P. Putnam's Sons.
Autograph from Appleton's "Cyclopædia of American Biography."
WASHINGTON CROSSING THE DELAWARE
From the original painting by Emanuel Leutze in the New York
Metropolitan Museum. The United States flag shown in the picture is an
anachronism. The stars and stripes were first adopted by Congress in
June, 1777; and any flag carried by Washington's army in December,
1776, would have consisted of the stripes with the crosses of St.
George and St. Andrew in the blue field where the stars now appear.
INTRODUCTION
February 9 in the year 1800 was a gala day in Paris. Napoleon had
decreed a triumphal procession, and on that day a splendid military
ceremony was performed in the Champ de Mars, and the trophies of the
Egyptian expedition were exultingly displayed. There were, however,
two features in all this pomp and show which seemed strangely out
of keeping with the glittering pageant and the sounds of victorious
rejoicing. The standards and flags of the army were hung with crape,
and after the grand parade the dignitaries of the land proceeded
solemnly to the Temple of Mars, and heard the eloquent M. de Fontanes
deliver an "Eloge Funèbre."[1]
[Footnote 1: A report recently discovered shows that more even was
intended than was actually done.
The following is a translation of the paper, the original of which
is Nos. 172 and 173 of volume 51 of the manuscript series known as
_Etats-Unis_, 1799, 1800 (years 7 and 8 of the French republic):--
"_Report of Talleyrand, Minister of Foreign Affairs, on the
occasion of the death of George Washington_.
"A nation which some day will he a great nation, and which today
is the wisest and happiest on the face of the earth, weeps at the
bier of a man whose courage and genius contributed the most to
free it from bondage, and elevate it to the rank of an independent
and sovereign power. The regrets caused by the death of this
great man, the memories aroused by these regrets, and a proper
veneration for all that is held dear and sacred by mankind, impel
us to give expression to our sentiments by taking part in an event
which deprives the world of one of its brightest ornaments, and
removes to the realm of history one of the noblest lives that ever
honored the human race.
"The name of Washington is inseparably linked with a memorable
epoch. He adorned this epoch by his talents and the nobility of
his character, and with virtues that even envy dared not assail.
History offers few examples of such renown. Great from the outset
of his career, patriotic before his country had become a nation,
brilliant and universal despite the passions and political
resentments that would gladly have checked his career, his fame
is to-day imperishable,--fortune having consecrated his claim to
greatness, while the prosperity of a people destined for grand
achievements is the best evidence of a fame ever to increase.
"His own country now honors his memory with funeral ceremonies,
having lost a citizen whose public actions and unassuming grandeur
in private life were a living example of courage, wisdom, and
unselfishness; and France, which from the dawn of the American
Revolution hailed with hope a nation, hitherto unknown, that was
discarding the vices of Europe, which foresaw all the glory that
this nation would bestow on humanity, and the enlightenment of
governments that would ensue from the novel character of the
social institutions and the new type of heroism of which
Washington and America were models for the world at
large,--France, I repeat, should depart from established usages
and do honor to one whose fame is beyond comparison with that of
others.
"The man who, amid the decadence of modern ages, first dared
believe that he could inspire degenerate nations with courage to
rise to the level of republican virtues, lived for all nations and
for all centuries; and this nation, which first saw in the life
and success of that illustrious man a foreboding of its destiny,
and therein recognized a future to be realized and duties to be
performed, has every right to class him as a fellow-citizen. I
therefore submit to the First Consul the following decree:--
"Bonaparte, First Consul of the republic, decrees as follows:--
"Article 1. A statue is to be erected to General Washington.
"Article 2. This statue is to be placed in one of the squares of
Paris, to be chosen by the minister of the interior, and it shall
be his duty to execute the present decree."]
About the same time, if tradition may be trusted, the flags upon the
conquering Channel fleet of England were lowered to half-mast in token
of grief for the same event which had caused the armies of France to
wear the customary badges of mourning.
If some "traveler from an antique land" had observed these
manifestations, he would have wondered much whose memory it was that
had called them forth from these two great nations, then struggling
fiercely with each other for supremacy on land and sea. His wonder
would not have abated had he been told that the man for whom they
mourned had wrested an empire from one, and at the time of his death
was arming his countrymen against the other.
These signal honors were paid by England and France to a simple
Virginian gentleman who had never left his own country, and who when
he died held no other office than the titular command of a provisional
army. Yet although these marks of respect from foreign nations were
notable and striking, they were slight and formal in comparison with
the silence and grief which fell upon the people of the United States
when they heard that Washington was dead. He had died in the fullness
of time, quietly, quickly, and in his own house, and yet his death
called out a display of grief which has rarely been equaled in
history. The trappings and suits of woe were there of course, but what
made this mourning memorable was that the land seemed hushed with
sadness, and that the sorrow dwelt among the people and was neither
forced nor fleeting. Men carried it home with them to their firesides
and to their churches, to their offices and their workshops. Every
preacher took the life which had closed as the noblest of texts, and
every orator made it the theme of his loftiest eloquence. For more
than a year the newspapers teemed with eulogy and elegy, and both
prose and poetry were severely taxed to pay tribute to the memory of
the great one who had gone. The prose was often stilted and the verse
was generally bad, but yet through it all, from the polished sentences
of the funeral oration to the humble effusions of the obscurest poet's
corner, there ran a strong and genuine feeling, which the highest art
could not refine nor the clumsiest expression degrade.
From that time to this, the stream of praise has flowed on, ever
deepening and strengthening, both at home and abroad. Washington alone
in history seems to have risen so high in the estimation of men that
criticism has shrunk away abashed, and has only been heard whispering
in corners or growling hoarsely in the now famous house in Cheyne Row.
There is a world of meaning in all this, could we but rightly
interpret it. It cannot be brushed aside as mere popular superstition,
formed of fancies and prejudices, to which intelligent opposition
would be useless. Nothing is in fact more false than the way in which
popular opinions are often belittled and made light of. The opinion
of the world, however reached, becomes in the course of years or
centuries the nearest approach we can make to final judgment on
human things. Don Quixote may be dumb to one man, and the sonnets of
Shakespeare may leave another cold and weary. But the fault is in
the reader. There is no doubt of the greatness of Cervantes or
Shakespeare, for they have stood the test of time, and the voices of
generations of men, from which there is no appeal, have declared them
to be great. The lyrics that all the world loves and repeats, the
poetry which is often called hackneyed, is on the whole the best
poetry. The pictures and statues that have drawn crowds of admiring
gazers for centuries are the best. The things that are "caviare to the
general" often undoubtedly have much merit, but they lack quite as
often the warm, generous, and immortal vitality which appeals alike to
rich and poor, to the ignorant and to the learned.
So it is with men. When years after his death the world agrees to call
a man great, the verdict must be accepted. The historian may whiten or
blacken, the critic may weigh and dissect, the form of the judgment
may be altered, but the central fact remains, and with the man, whom
the world in its vague way has pronounced great, history must reckon
one way or the other, whether for good or ill.
When we come to such a man as Washington, the case is still stronger.
Men seem to have agreed that here was greatness which no one could
question, and character which no one could fail to respect. Around
other leaders of men, even around the greatest of them, sharp
controversies have arisen, and they have their partisans dead as they
had them living. Washington had enemies who assailed him, and friends
whom he loved, but in death as in life he seems to stand alone, above
conflict and superior to malice. In his own country there is no
dispute as to his greatness or his worth. Englishmen, the most
unsparing censors of everything American, have paid homage to
Washington, from the days of Fox and Byron to those of Tennyson and
Gladstone. In France his name has always been revered, and in distant
lands those who have scarcely heard of the existence of the United
States know the country of Washington. To the mighty cairn which the
nation and the states have raised to his memory, stones have come
from Greece, sending a fragment of the Parthenon; from Brazil and
Switzerland, Turkey and Japan, Siam and India beyond the Ganges. On
that sent by China we read: "In devising plans, Washington was more
decided than Ching Shing or Woo Kwang; in winning a country he was
braver than Tsau Tsau or Ling Pi. Wielding his four-footed falchion,
he extended the frontiers and refused to accept the Royal Dignity. The
sentiments of the Three Dynasties have reappeared in him. Can any man
of ancient or modern times fail to pronounce Washington peerless?"
These comparisons so strange to our ears tell of a fame which has
reached farther than we can readily conceive.
Washington stands as a type, and has stamped himself deep upon the
imagination of mankind. Whether the image be true or false is of no
consequence: the fact endures. He rises up from the dust of history as
a Greek statue comes pure and serene from the earth in which it has
lain for centuries. We know his deeds; but what was it in the man
which has given him such a place in the affection, the respect, and
the imagination of his fellow men throughout the world?
Perhaps this question has been fully answered already. Possibly every
one who has thought upon the subject has solved the problem, so that
even to state it is superfluous. Yet a brilliant writer, the latest
historian of the American people, has said: "General Washington is
known to us, and President Washington. But George Washington is an
unknown man." These are pregnant words, and that they should be true
seems to make any attempt to fill the great gap an act of sheer and
hopeless audacity. Yet there can be certainly no reason for adding
another to the almost countless lives of Washington unless it be done
with the object in view which Mr. McMaster indicates. Any such attempt
may fail in execution, but if the purpose be right it has at least an
excuse for its existence.
To try to add to the existing knowledge of the facts in Washington's
career would have but little result beyond the multiplication of
printed pages. The antiquarian, the historian, and the critic have
exhausted every source, and the most minute details have been and
still are the subject of endless writing and constant discussion.
Every house he ever lived in has been drawn and painted; every
portrait, and statue, and medal has been catalogued and engraved. His
private affairs, his servants, his horses, his arms, even his clothes,
have all passed beneath the merciless microscope of history. His
biography has been written and rewritten. His letters have been drawn
out from every lurking place, and have been given to the world in
masses and in detachments. His battles have been fought over and
over again, and his state papers have undergone an almost verbal
examination. Yet, despite his vast fame and all the labors of the
antiquarian and biographer, Washington is still not understood,--as a
man he is unfamiliar to the posterity that reverences his memory. He
has been misrepresented more or less covertly by hostile critics and
by candid friends, and has been disguised and hidden away by the
mistaken eulogy and erroneous theories of devout admirers. All that
any one now can do, therefore, is to endeavor from this mass of
material to depict the very man himself in the various conjunctures of
his life, and strive to see what he really was and what he meant then,
and what he is and what he means to us and to the world to-day.
In the progress of time Washington has become in the popular
imagination largely mythical; for mythical ideas grow up in this
nineteenth century, notwithstanding its boasted intelligence, much as
they did in the infancy of the race. The old sentiment of humanity,
more ancient and more lasting than any records or monuments, which led
men in the dawn of history to worship their ancestors and the founders
of states, still endures. As the centuries have gone by, this
sentiment has lost its religious flavor, and has become more and
more restricted in its application, but it has never been wholly
extinguished. Let some man arise great above the ordinary bounds of
greatness, and the feeling which caused our progenitors to bow down
at the shrines of their forefathers and chiefs leads us to invest
our modern hero with a mythical character, and picture him in our
imagination as a being to whom, a few thousand years ago, altars would
have been builded and libations poured out.
Thus we have to-day in our minds a Washington grand, solemn, and
impressive. In this guise he appears as a man of lofty intellect, vast
moral force, supremely successful and fortunate, and wholly apart
from and above all his fellow-men. This lonely figure rises up to our
imagination with all the imperial splendor of the Livian Augustus, and
with about as much warmth and life as that unrivaled statue. In this
vague but quite serious idea there is a great deal of truth, but
not the whole truth. It is the myth of genuine love and veneration
springing from the inborn gratitude of man to the founders and chiefs
of his race, but it is not by any means the only one of its family.
There is another, equally diffused, of wholly different parentage.
In its inception this second myth is due to the itinerant parson,
bookmaker, and bookseller, Mason Weems. He wrote a brief biography of
Washington, of trifling historical value, yet with sufficient literary
skill to make it widely popular. It neither appealed to nor was read
by the cultivated and instructed few, but it reached the homes of the
masses of the people. It found its way to the bench of the mechanic,
to the house of the farmer, to the log cabins of the frontiersman and
pioneer. It was carried across the continent on the first waves of
advancing settlement. Its anecdotes and its simplicity of thought
commended it to children both at home and at school, and, passing
through edition after edition, its statements were widely spread, and
it colored insensibly the ideas of hundreds of persons who never had
heard even the name of the author. To Weems we owe the anecdote of the
cherry-tree, and other tales of a similar nature. He wrote with Dr.
Beattie's life of his son before him as a model, and the result is
that Washington comes out in his pages a faultless prig. Whether Weems
intended it or not, that is the result which he produced, and that is
the Washington who was developed from the wide sale of his book. When
this idea took definite and permanent shape it caused a reaction.
There was a revolt against it, for the hero thus engendered had
qualities which the national sense of humor could not endure in
silence. The consequence is, that the Washington of Weems has afforded
an endless theme for joke and burlesque. Every professional American
humorist almost has tried his hand at it; and with each recurring 22d
of February the hard-worked jesters of the daily newspapers take it
up and make a little fun out of it, sufficient for the day that is
passing over them. The opportunity is tempting, because of the ease
with which fun can be made when that fundamental source of humor, a
violent contrast, can be employed. But there is no irreverence in it
all, for the jest is not aimed at the real Washington, but at the
Washington portrayed in the Weems biography. The worthy "rector of
Mount Vernon," as he called himself, meant no harm, and there is a
good deal of truth, no doubt, in his book. But the blameless and
priggish boy, and the equally faultless and uninteresting man, whom he
originated, have become in the process of development a myth. So in
its further development is the Washington of the humorist a myth.
Both alike are utterly and crudely false. They resemble their great
original as much as Greenough's classically nude statue, exposed to
the incongruities of the North American climate, resembles in dress
and appearance the general of our armies and the first President of
the United States.
Such are the myth-makers. They are widely different from the critics
who have assailed Washington in a sidelong way, and who can be better
dealt with in a later chapter. These last bring charges which can be
met; the myth-maker presents a vague conception, extremely difficult
to handle because it is so elusive.
One of our well-known historical scholars and most learned
antiquarians, not long ago, in an essay vindicating the "traditional
Washington," treated with scorn the idea of a "new Washington" being
discovered. In one sense this is quite right, in another totally
wrong. There can be no new Washington discovered, because there never
was but one. But the real man has been so overlaid with myths and
traditions, and so distorted by misleading criticisms, that, as
has already been suggested, he has been wellnigh lost. We have
the religious or statuesque myth, we have the Weems myth, and the
ludicrous myth of the writer of paragraphs. We have the stately hero
of Sparks, and Everett, and Marshall, and Irving, with all his great
deeds as general and president duly recorded and set down in polished
and eloquent sentences; and we know him to be very great and wise and
pure, and, be it said with bated breath, very dry and cold. We are
also familiar with the common-place man who so wonderfully illustrated
the power of character as set forth by various persons, either from
love of novelty or because the great chief seemed to get in the way of
their own heroes.
If this is all, then the career of Washington and his towering fame
present a problem of which the world has never seen the like. But this
cannot be all: there must be more behind. Every one knows the famous
Stuart portrait of Washington. The last effort of the artist's cunning
is there employed to paint his great subject for posterity. How serene
and beautiful it is! It is a noble picture for future ages to look
upon. Still it is not all. There is in the dining-room of Memorial
Hall at Cambridge another portrait, painted by Savage. It is cold and
dry, hard enough to serve for the signboard of an inn, and able, one
would think, to withstand all weathers. Yet this picture has something
which Stuart left out. There is a rugged strength in the face which
gives us pause, there is a massiveness in the jaw, telling of an iron
grip and a relentless will, which has infinite meaning.
"Here's John the Smith's rough-hammered head. Great eye,
Gross jaw, and griped lips do what granite can
To give you the crown-grasper. What a man!"
In death as in life, there is something about Washington, call it
greatness, dignity, majesty, what you will, which seems to hold men
aloof and keep them from knowing him. In truth he was a most difficult
man to know. Carlyle, crying out through hundreds of pages and myriads
of words for the "silent man," passed by with a sneer the most
absolutely silent great man that history can show. Washington's
letters and speeches and messages fill many volumes, but they are all
on business. They are profoundly silent as to the writer himself. From
this Carlyle concluded apparently that there was nothing to tell,--a
very shallow conclusion if it was the one he really reached. Such an
idea was certainly far, very far, from the truth.
Behind the popular myths, behind the statuesque figure of the orator
and the preacher, behind the general and the president of the
historian, there was a strong, vigorous man, in whose veins ran warm,
red blood, in whose heart were stormy passions and deep sympathy for
humanity, in whose brain were far-reaching thoughts, and who was
informed throughout his being with a resistless will. The veil of his
silence is not often lifted, and never intentionally, but now and then
there is a glimpse behind it; and in stray sentences and in little
incidents strenuously gathered together; above all, in the right
interpretation of the words, and the deeds, and the true history known
to all men,--we can surely find George Washington "the noblest figure
that ever stood in the forefront of a nation's life."
* * * * *
GEORGE WASHINGTON
CHAPTER I
THE OLD DOMINION
To know George Washington, we must first of all understand the society
in which he was born and brought up. As certain lilies draw their
colors from the subtle qualities of the soil hidden beneath the water
upon which they float, so are men profoundly affected by the obscure
and insensible influences which surround their childhood and youth.
The art of the chemist may discover perhaps the secret agent which
tints the white flower with blue or pink, but very often the elements,
which analysis detects, nature alone can combine. The analogy is
not strained or fanciful when we apply it to a past society. We can
separate, and classify, and label the various elements, but to combine
them in such a way as to form a vivid picture is a work of surpassing
difficulty. This is especially true of such a land as Virginia in the
middle of the last century. Virginian society, as it existed at that
period, is utterly extinct. John Randolph said it had departed before
the year 1800. Since then another century, with all its manifold
changes, has wellnigh come and gone. Most important of all, the last
surviving institution of colonial Virginia has been swept away in the
crash of civil war, which has opened a gulf between past and present
wider and deeper than any that time alone could make.
Life and society as they existed in the Virginia of the eighteenth
century seem, moreover, to have been sharply broken and ended. We
cannot trace our steps backward, as is possible in most cases, over
the road by which the world has traveled since those days. We are
compelled to take a long leap mentally in order to land ourselves
securely in the Virginia which honored the second George, and looked
up to Walpole and Pitt as the arbiters of its fate.
We live in a period of great cities, rapid communication, vast and
varied business interests, enormous diversity of occupation, great
industries, diffused intelligence, farming by steam, and with
everything and everybody pervaded by an unresting, high-strung
activity. We transport ourselves to the Virginia of Washington's
boyhood, and find a people without cities or towns, with no means
of communication except what was afforded by rivers and wood roads;
having no trades, no industries, no means of spreading knowledge, only
one occupation, clumsily performed; and living a quiet, monotonous
existence, which can now hardly be realized. It is "a far cry to
Loch-Awe," as the Scotch proverb has it; and this old Virginian
society, although we should find it sorry work living in it, is both
pleasant and picturesque in the pages of history.
The population of Virginia, advancing toward half a million, and
divided pretty equally between the free whites and the enslaved
blacks, was densest, to use a most inappropriate word, at the water's
edge and near the mouths of the rivers. Thence it crept backwards,
following always the lines of the watercourses, and growing ever
thinner and more scattered until it reached the Blue Ridge. Behind
the mountains was the wilderness, haunted, as old John Lederer said a
century earlier, by monsters, and inhabited, as the eighteenth-century
Virginians very well knew, by savages and wild beasts, much more real
and dangerous than the hobgoblins of their ancestors.
The population, in proportion to its numbers, was very widely
distributed. It was not collected in groups, after the fashion with
which we are now familiar, for then there were no cities or towns
in Virginia. The only place which could pretend to either name was
Norfolk, the solitary seaport, which, with its six or seven thousand
inhabitants, formed the most glaring exception that any rule
solicitous of proof could possibly desire. Williamsburg, the capital,
was a straggling village, somewhat overweighted with the public
buildings and those of the college. It would light up into life and
vivacity during the season of politics and society, and then relapse
again into the country stillness. Outside of Williamsburg and Norfolk
there were various points which passed in the catalogue and on the map
for towns, but which in reality were merely the shadows of a name. The
most populous consisted of a few houses inhabited by storekeepers and
traders, some tobacco warehouses, and a tavern, clustered about the
church or court-house. Many others had only the church, or, if a
county seat, the church and court-house, keeping solitary state in the
woods. There once a week the sound of prayer and gossip, or at longer
intervals the voices of lawyers and politicians, and the shouts of the
wrestlers on the green, broke through the stillness which with the
going down of the sun resumed its sway in the forests.
There was little chance here for that friction of mind with mind, or
for that quick interchange of thought and sentiment and knowledge
which are familiar to the dwellers in cities, and which have driven
forward more rapidly than all else what we call civilization. Rare
meetings for special objects with persons as solitary in their lives
and as ill-informed as himself, constituted to the average Virginian
the world of society, and there was nothing from outside to supply the
deficiencies at home. Once a fortnight a mail crawled down from
the North, and once a month another crept on to the South. George
Washington was four years old when the first newspaper was published
in the colony, and he was twenty when the first actors appeared at
Williamsburg. What was not brought was not sought. The Virginians did
not go down to the sea in ships. They were not a seafaring race, and
as they had neither trade nor commerce they were totally destitute of
the inquiring, enterprising spirit, and of the knowledge brought
by those pursuits which involve travel and adventure. The English
tobacco-ships worked their way up the rivers, taking the great staple,
and leaving their varied goods, and their tardy news from Europe,
wherever they stopped. This was the sum of the information and
intercourse which Virginia got from across the sea, for travelers were
practically unknown. Few came on business, fewer still from curiosity.
Stray peddlers from the North, or trappers from beyond the mountains
with their packs of furs, chiefly constituted what would now be called
the traveling public. There were in truth no means of traveling except
on foot, on horseback, or by boat on the rivers, which formed the
best and most expeditious highways. Stage-coaches, or other public
conveyances, were unknown. Over some of the roads the rich man, with
his six horses and black outriders, might make his way in a lumbering
carriage, but most of the roads were little better than woodland
paths; and the rivers, innocent of bridges, offered in the uncertain
fords abundance of inconvenience, not unmixed with peril. The taverns
were execrable, and only the ever-ready hospitality of the people
made it possible to get from place to place. The result was that the
Virginians stayed at home, and sought and welcomed the rare stranger
at their gates as if they were well aware that they were entertaining
angels.
It is not difficult to sift this home-keeping people, and find out
that portion which was Virginia, for the mass was but an appendage
of the small fraction which ruled, led, and did the thinking for the
whole community. Half the people were slaves, and in that single
wretched word their history is told. They were, on the whole, well
and kindly treated, but they have no meaning in history except as an
institution, and as an influence in the lives, feelings, and character
of the men who made the state.
Above the slaves, little better than they in condition, but separated
from them by the wide gulf of race and color, were the indented white
servants, some convicts, some redemptioners. They, too, have their
story told when we have catalogued them. We cross another gulf and
come to the farmers, to the men who grew wheat as well as tobacco on
their own land, sometimes working alone, sometimes the owners of a few
slaves. Some of these men were of the class well known since as the
"poor whites" of the South, the weaker brothers who could not resist
the poison of slavery, but sank under it into ignorance and poverty.
They were contented because their skins were white, and because they
were thereby part of an aristocracy to whom labor was a badge of
serfdom. The larger portion of this middle class, however, were
thrifty and industrious enough. Including as they did in their ranks
the hunters and pioneers, the traders and merchants, all the freemen
in fact who toiled and worked, they formed the mass of the white
population, and furnished the bone and sinew and some of the
intellectual power of Virginia. The only professional men were the
clergy, for the lawyers were few, and growing to importance only as
the Revolution began; while the physicians were still fewer, and as a
class of no importance at all. The clergy were a picturesque
element in the social landscape, but they were as a body very poor
representatives of learning, religion, and morality. They ranged from
hedge parsons and Fleet chaplains, who had slunk away from England
to find a desirable obscurity in the new world, to divines of real
learning and genuine piety, who were the supporters of the college,
and who would have been a credit to any society. These last, however,
were lamentably few in number. The mass of the clergy were men who
worked their own lands, sold tobacco, were the boon companions of the
planters, hunted, shot, drank hard, and lived well, performing their
sacred duties in a perfunctory and not always in a decent manner.
The clergy, however, formed the stepping-stone socially between
the farmers, traders, and small planters, and the highest and most
important class in Virginian society. The great planters were the
men who owned, ruled, and guided Virginia. Their vast estates were
scattered along the rivers from the seacoast to the mountains. Each
plantation was in itself a small village, with the owner's house in
the centre, surrounded by outbuildings and negro cabins, and the
pastures, meadows, and fields of tobacco stretching away on all sides.
The rare traveler, pursuing his devious way on horseback or in a boat,
would catch sight of these noble estates opening up from the road or
the river, and then the forest would close in around him for several
miles, until through the thinning trees he would see again the white
cabins and the cleared fields of the next plantation.
In such places dwelt the Virginian planters, surrounded by their
families and slaves, and in a solitude broken only by the infrequent
and eagerly welcomed stranger, by their duties as vestrymen and
magistrates, or by the annual pilgrimage to Williamsburg in search of
society, or to sit in the House of Burgesses. They were occupied by
the care of their plantations, which involved a good deal of riding in
the open air, but which was at best an easy and indolent pursuit made
light by slave labor and trained overseers. As a result the planters
had an abundance of spare time, which they devoted to cock-fighting,
horse-racing, fishing, shooting, and fox-hunting,--all, save the
first, wholesome and manly sports, but which did not demand any undue
mental strain. There is, indeed, no indication that the Virginians
had any great love for intellectual exertion. When the amiable
attorney-general of Charles II. said to the Virginian commissioners,
pleading the cause of learning and religion, "Damn your souls! grow
tobacco!" he uttered a precept which the mass of the planters seem to
have laid to heart. For fifty years there were no schools, and down to
the Revolution even the apologies bearing that honored name were
few, and the college was small and struggling. In some of the great
families, the eldest sons would be sent to England and to the great
universities: they would make the grand tour, play a part in the
fashionable society of London, and come back to their plantations fine
gentlemen and scholars. Such was Colonel Byrd, in the early part of
the eighteenth century, a friend of the Earl of Orrery, and the author
of certain amusing memoirs. Such at a later day was Arthur Lee,
doctor and diplomat, student and politician. But most of these young
gentlemen thus sent abroad to improve their minds and manners led a
life not materially different from that of our charming friend, Harry
Warrington, after his arrival in England.
The sons who stayed at home sometimes gathered a little learning from
the clergyman of the parish, or received a fair education at the
College of William and Mary, but very many did not have even so much
as this. There was not in truth much use for learning in managing a
plantation or raising horses, and men get along surprisingly well
without that which they do not need, especially if the acquisition
demands labor. The Virginian planter thought little and read less,
and there were no learned professions to hold out golden prizes and
stimulate the love of knowledge. The women fared even worse, for
they could not go to Europe or to William and Mary's, so that after
exhausting the teaching capacity of the parson they settled down to a
round of household duties and to the cares of a multitude of slaves,
working much harder and more steadily than their lords and masters
ever thought of doing.
The only general form of intellectual exertion was that of governing.
The planters managed local affairs through the vestries, and ruled
Virginia in the House of Burgesses. To this work they paid strict
attention, and, after the fashion of their race, did it very well and
very efficiently. They were an extremely competent body whenever they
made up their minds to do anything; but they liked the life and habits
of Squire Western, and saw no reason for adopting any others until it
was necessary.
There were, of course, vast differences in the condition of the
planters. Some counted their acres by thousands and their slaves by
hundreds, while others scrambled along as best they might with one
plantation and a few score of negroes. Some dwelt in very handsome
houses, picturesque and beautiful, like Gunston Hall or Stratford, or
in vast, tasteless, and extravagant piles like Rosewell. Others were
contented with very modest houses, consisting of one story with a
gabled roof, and flanked by two massive chimneys. In some houses there
was a brave show of handsome plate and china, fine furniture, and
London-made carriages, rich silks and satins, and brocaded dresses.
In others there were earthenware and pewter, homespun and woolen, and
little use for horses, except in the plough or under the saddle.
But there were certain qualities common to all the Virginia planters.
The luxury was imperfect. The splendor was sometimes barbaric. There
were holes in the brocades, and the fresh air of heaven would often
blow through a broken window upon the glittering silver and the costly
china. It was an easy-going aristocracy, unfinished, and frequently
slovenly in its appointments, after the fashion of the warmer climates
and the regions of slavery.
Everything was plentiful except ready money. In this rich and poor
were alike. They were all ahead of their income, and it seems as if,
from one cause or another, from extravagance or improvidence, from
horses or the gaming-table, every Virginian family went through
bankruptcy about once in a generation.
When Harry Warrington arrived in England, all his relations at
Castlewood regarded the handsome young fellow as a prince, with his
acres and his slaves. It was a natural and pleasing delusion, born of
the possession of land and serfs, to which the Virginians themselves
gave ready credence. They forgot that the land was so plentiful that
it was of little value; that slaves were the most wasteful form of
labor; and that a failure of the tobacco crop, pledged before it was
gathered, meant ruin, although they had been reminded more than once
of this last impressive fact. They knew that they had plenty to eat
and drink, and a herd of people to wait upon them and cultivate their
land, as well as obliging London merchants always ready to furnish
every luxury in return for the mortgage of a crop or an estate. So
they gave themselves little anxiety as to the future and lived in the
present, very much to their own satisfaction.
To the communities of trade and commerce, to the mercantile and
industrial spirit of to-day, such an existence and such modes of life
appear distressingly lax and unprogressive. The sages of the bank
parlors and the counting-rooms would shake their heads at such
spendthrifts as these, refuse to discount their paper, and confidently
predict that by no possibility could they come to good. They had their
defects, no doubt, these planters and farmers of Virginia. The life
they led was strongly developed on the animal side, and was perhaps
neither stimulating nor elevating. The living was the reverse of
plain, and the thinking was neither extremely high nor notably
laborious. Yet in this very particular there is something rather
restful and pleasant to the eye wearied by the sight of incessant
movement, and to the ear deafened by the continual shout that nothing
is good that does not change, and that all change must be good. We
should probably find great discomforts and many unpleasant limitations
in the life and habits of a hundred years ago on any part of the
globe, and yet at a time when it seems as if rapidity and movement
were the last words and the ultimate ideals of civilization, it is
rather agreeable to turn to such a community as the eighteenth-century
planters of Virginia. They lived contentedly on the acres of their
fathers, and except at rare and stated intervals they had no other
interests than those furnished by their ancestral domain. At the
court-house, at the vestry, or in Williamsburg, they met their
neighbors and talked very keenly about the politics of Europe, or the
affairs of the colony. They were little troubled about religion, but
they worshiped after the fashion of their fathers, and had a serious
fidelity to church and king. They wrangled with their governors over
appropriations, but they lived on good terms with those eminent
persons, and attended state balls at what they called the palace, and
danced and made merry with much stateliness and grace. Their every-day
life ran on in the quiet of their plantations as calmly as one of
their own rivers. The English trader would come and go; the infrequent
stranger would be received and welcomed; Christmas would be kept in
hearty English fashion; young men from a neighboring estate would
ride over through the darkening woods to court, or dance, or play
the fiddle, like Patrick Henry or Thomas Jefferson; and these simple
events were all that made a ripple on the placid stream. Much time was
given to sports, rough, hearty, manly sports, with a spice of danger,
and these, with an occasional adventurous dash into the wilderness,
kept them sound and strong and brave, both in body and mind. There was
nothing languid or effeminate about the Virginian planter. He was a
robust man, quite ready to fight or work when the time came, and well
fitted to deal with affairs when he was needed. He was a free-handed,
hospitable, generous being, not much given to study or thought, but
thoroughly public-spirited and keenly alive to the interests of
Virginia. Above all things he was an aristocrat, set apart by the
dark line of race, color, and hereditary servitude, as proud as the
proudest Austrian with his endless quarterings, as sturdy and vigorous
as an English yeoman, and as jealous of his rights and privileges
as any baron who stood by John at Runnymede. To this aristocracy,
careless and indolent, given to rough pleasures and indifferent to the
finer and higher sides of life, the call came, as it comes to all men
sooner or later, and in response they gave their country soldiers,
statesmen, and jurists of the highest order, and fit for the great
work they were asked to do. We must go back to Athens to find another
instance of a society so small in numbers, and yet capable of such an
outburst of ability and force. They were of sound English stock, with
a slight admixture of the Huguenots, the best blood of France; and
although for a century and a half they had seemed to stagnate in
the New World, they were strong, fruitful, and effective beyond the
measure of ordinary races when the hour of peril and trial was at
hand.