[Illustration: ATHENÆUM PORTRAIT, BY GILBERT STUART]
_George Washington_
BY
WOODROW WILSON
PHD., LITT.D., LL.D.
COPIOUSLY ILLUSTRATED
FROM
OLD PRINTS, PAINTINGS
AND DRAWINGS BY
HOWARD PYLE
[Illustration]
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
BOOKS BY
WOODROW WILSON
INTERNATIONAL IDEALS
GUARANTEES OF PEACE
IN OUR FIRST YEAR OF WAR
WHY WE ARE AT WAR
A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE
WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF
ON BEING HUMAN
THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES
HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK
[ESTABLISHED 1817]
COPYRIGHT, 1896, BY HARPER & BROTHERS
COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY WOODROW WILSON
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
M.A.
TO
E. A. W.
WITHOUT WHOSE SYMPATHY AND COUNSEL
LITERARY WORK WOULD LACK
INSPIRATION
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. IN WASHINGTON’S DAY 3
II. A VIRGINIAN BREEDING 45
III. COLONEL WASHINGTON 69
IV. MOUNT VERNON DAYS 99
V. THE HEAT OF POLITICS 117
VI. PILOTING A REVOLUTION 153
VII. GENERAL WASHINGTON 179
VIII. THE STRESS OF VICTORY 213
IX. FIRST IN PEACE 233
X. THE FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES 265
INDEX 315
ILLUSTRATIONS
ATHENÆUM PORTRAIT, BY GILBERT STUART _Frontispiece_
GEORGE WASHINGTON _Facing p._18
TIDE-WATER, VIRGINIA, 1738 (MAP) “ 22
WILLIAM BYRD “ 26
JAMES BLAIR “ 34
ALEXANDER SPOTSWOOD “ 38
FACSIMILE OF THE ENTRY OF WASHINGTON’S BIRTH _Page_ 41
THOMAS, SIXTH LORD FAIRFAX _Facing p._48
MOUNT VERNON AT THE PRESENT DAY “ 52
LAWRENCE WASHINGTON “ 58
FRENCH AND ENGLISH IN NORTH AMERICA, 1755 (MAP) “ 60
GENERAL EDWARD BRADDOCK “ 82
THE BURIAL OF BRADDOCK “ 90
WASHINGTON AND MARY PHILIPSE “ 92
LEAVING MOUNT VERNON FOR THE CONGRESS OF THE
COLONIES “ 100
“THE WHITE HOUSE,” ON THE PAMUNKEY “ 104
TAZEWELL HALL, THE HOME OF THE RANDOLPHS “ 120
WILLIAM AND MARY COLLEGE, FROM AN OLD PRINT “ 120
PEYTON RANDOLPH “ 132
GEORGE MASON “ 136
IN THE OLD RALEIGH TAVERN “ 146
WASHINGTON, FROM A PORTRAIT BY REMBRANDT PEALE “ 158
CARPENTER’S HALL, PHILADELPHIA “ 166
WASHINGTON’S HEADQUARTERS AT VALLEY FORGE “ 198
THE ESCAPE OF ARNOLD “ 208
THE BUST OF ECKSTEIN “ 218
FRAUNCE’S TAVERN, NEW YORK “ 226
WASHINGTON BRINGING HIS MOTHER INTO THE BALL-ROOM,
FREDERICKSBURG “ 240
THOMSON, THE CLERK OF CONGRESS, ANNOUNCING TO
WASHINGTON, AT MOUNT VERNON, HIS ELECTION TO
THE PRESIDENCY “ 266
THE FIRST PRESIDENTIAL MANSION, NEW YORK “ 272
WASHINGTON MANSION, PHILADELPHIA “ 272
WASHINGTON, AFTER A PAINTING BY SAVAGE “ 276
CONGRESS HALL, 1790-1800 “ 282
ELEANOR PARKE CUSTIS “ 286
WASHINGTON AND NELLY CUSTIS “ 300
DEATH OF WASHINGTON “ 304
HANOVER COURT-HOUSE “ 310
THE OLD TOMB, MOUNT VERNON “ 310
IN WASHINGTON’S DAY
GEORGE WASHINGTON
CHAPTER I
George Washington was bred a gentleman and a man of honor in the free
school of Virginian society, with the generation that first learned what
it meant to maintain English communities in America in safety and a
self-respecting independence. He was born in a season of quiet peace,
when the plot of colonial history was thickening noiselessly and almost
without observation. He came to his first manhood upon the first stir of
revolutionary events; caught in their movement, he served a rough
apprenticeship in arms at the thick of the French and Indian war; the
Revolution found him a leader and veteran in affairs at forty-four;
every turn of fortune confirmed him in his executive habit of foresight
and mastery; death spared him, stalwart and commanding, until, his
rising career rounded and complete, no man doubted him the first
character of his age. “Virginia gave us this imperial man,” and with him
a companion race of statesmen and masters in affairs. It was her natural
gift, the times and her character being what they were; and Washington’s
life showed the whole process of breeding by which she conceived so
great a generosity in manliness and public spirit.
The English colonies in America lay very tranquil in 1732, the year in
which Washington was born. It fell in a season betweentimes, when
affairs lingered, as if awaiting a change. The difficulties and
anxieties of first settlement were long ago past and done with in all
the principal colonies. They had been hardening to their “wilderness
work,” some of them, these hundred years and more. England could now
reckon quite six hundred thousand subjects upon the long Atlantic
seaboard of the great continent which had lain remote and undiscovered
through so many busy ages, until daring sailors hit upon it at last
amidst the stir of the adventurous fifteenth century; and there was no
longer any thought that her colonists would draw back or falter in what
they had undertaken. They had grown sedate even and self-poised, with
somewhat of the air of old communities, as they extended their
settlements upon the coasts and rivers and elaborated their means of
self-government amidst the still forests, and each had already a bearing
and character of its own. ’Twas easy to distinguish the New-Englander
from the man of the southern colonies; and the busy middle provinces
that stretched back from the great bay at New York and from the waters
of the spreading Delaware had also a breed of their own, like neither
the men of the south nor the men of the northeast. Each region had bred
for itself its characteristic communities, holding their own distinctive
standards, knowing their own special purposes, living their own lives
with a certain separateness and independence.
Virginia, the oldest of the colonies, was least to be distinguished by
any private character of her own from the rural communities of England
herself. Her population had come to her almost without selection
throughout every stage of quick change and troubled fortune that England
had seen during the fateful days since James Stuart became king; and
Englishmen in Virginia were in no way radically distinguishable from
Englishmen in England, except that they were provincials and
frontiersmen. They had their own tasks and ways of life, indeed, living,
as they did, within the old forests of a virgin continent, upon the
confines of the world. But their tastes and temperament, spite of change
and seclusion, they had in common with Englishmen at home. They gave
leave to their opinions, too, with a like downright confidence and
hardihood of belief, never doubting they knew how practical affairs
should go. They had even kept the English character as they had received
it, against the touch of time and social revolution, until Virginians
seemed like elder Englishmen. England changed, but Virginia did not.
There landed estates spread themselves with an ample acreage along the
margins of the streams that everywhere threaded the virgin woodland;
and the planter drew about him a body of dependants who knew no other
master; to whom came, in their seclusion, none of that quick air of
change that had so stirred in England throughout all her century of
revolution. Some were his slaves, bound to him in perpetual subjection.
Others were his tenants, and looked upon him as a sort of patron. In
Maryland, where similar broad estates lay upon every shore, the law
dubbed a great property here and there a “manor,” and suffered it to
boast its separate court baron and private jurisdiction. Virginian
gentlemen enjoyed independence and authority without need of formal
title.
There was but one centre of social life in Virginia: at Williamsburg,
the village capital, where the Governor had his “palace,” where stood
the colonial college, where there were taverns and the town houses of
sun-dry planters of the vicinage, and where there was much gay company
and not a little formal ceremonial in the season. For the rest, the Old
Dominion made shift to do without towns. There was no great mart to
which all the trade of the colony was drawn. Ships came and went upon
each broad river as upon a highway, taking and discharging freight at
the private wharves of the several plantations. For every planter was
his own merchant, shipping his tobacco to England, and importing thence
in return his clothes, his tools, his household fittings, his knowledge
of the London fashions and of the game of politics at home. His
mechanics he found among his own slaves and dependants. Their “quarters”
and the offices of his simple establishment showed almost like a village
of themselves where they stood in irregular groups about his own square,
broad-gabled house, with its airy hall and homelike living-rooms. He
might have good plate upon his sideboard and on his table, palatable old
wine in his cellar, and on the walls about him portraits of the stately
men and dames from whom he took his blood and breeding. But there was
little luxury in his life. Plain comfort and a homely abundance sufficed
him. He was a gentleman, owned all he saw around him, exercised
authority, and enjoyed consideration throughout the colony; but he was
no prince. He lived always in the style of a provincial and a gentleman
commoner, as his neighbors and friends did.
Slaves, dependants, and planters, however, did not by any means make up
the tale of Virginia’s population. She had been peopled out of the
common stock of Englishmen, and contained her own variety. Most of the
good land that lay upon the lower courses of the James, the York, the
Rappahannock, and the Potomac rivers, and upon the bay on either hand,
had been absorbed into the estates of the wealthier planters, who began
to conceive themselves a sort of aristocracy; but not a few plain men
owned their own smaller tracts within the broad stretches of country
that lay back from the rivers or above their navigable depth. Upon the
western front of the colony lived sturdy frontiersmen; and no man was so
poor that he might not hope by thrift to hold his own with the best in
the country. Few could own slaves in any number, for the negroes counted
less than a third in a reckoning of the whole population. There were
hired servants besides, and servants bound for a term of years by
indenture; even criminals who could be had of the colony for private
service; but most men must needs work their own plots of ground and
devise a domestic economy without servants. A wholesome democratic
spirit pervaded the colony, which made even the greater planters
hesitate to give themselves airs. A few families that had thriven best
and longest, and had built up great properties for themselves, did
indeed lay claim, as royal governors found to their great displeasure,
to a right to be heard before all others in the management of the
government. But they could of course show no title but that of pride and
long practice. ’Twas only their social weight in the parish vestries, in
the Council, and in the House of Burgesses that gave them ascendency.
It was the same in church as in state. Virginia prided herself upon
having maintained the Establishment without schism or sour dissent; but
she had maintained it in a way all her own, with a democratic
constitution and practice hardly to be found in the canons. Nominally
the Governor had the right of presentation to all livings; but the
vestries took care he should seldom exercise it, and, after they had had
their own way for a century, claimed he had lost it by prescription.
They chose and dismissed and ruled their ministers as they would. And
the chief planters were nowhere greater figures than in the vestries of
their own parishes, where so many neighborhood interests were passed
upon--the care of the poor, the survey of estates, the correction of
disorders, the tithe rates, and the maintenance of the church and
minister. Sometimes the church building was itself the gift of the chief
land-owner of the parish; and the planters were always the chief
rate-payers. Their leadership was natural and unchallenged. They enjoyed
in their own neighborhood a sort of feudal pre-eminence, and the men
about them easily returned in thought and estimation to that elder
order of English life in which the chief proprietor of the country-side
claimed as of course the homage of his neighbors. There were parishes,
not a few, indeed, in which there was no such great planter to command
consideration by a sort of social primacy. It was, after all, only here
and there, and in the older parts of the colony, that affairs awaited
the wish of privileged individuals. But it was the ascendency of the
greater planters which most struck the imagination, and which gave to
Virginia something of the same air and tone and turn of opinion that
existed in England, with its veritable aristocracy, its lordly country
gentlemen, its ancient distinctions of class and manners.
Those who took counsel in England concerning colonial affairs had
constant occasion to mark the sharp contrast between the easy-going
Virginians, who were no harder to govern than Englishmen everywhere, and
the men of the northeastern colonies, with their dry reserve and their
steadfast resolution not to be governed at all. These seemed unlike
Englishmen elsewhere; a whit stiffer, shrewder, more self-contained and
circumspect. They were, in fact, a peculiar people. Into New England had
come a selected class, picked out of the general mass of Englishmen at
home by test of creed. “God sifted the whole nation,” one of their own
preachers had told them, at election-time, in the far year 1668, “that
he might send choice grain out into this wilderness.” But the variety of
the old life in England had been lost in the sifting. The Puritan, for
all he was so strong and great a figure in his day, was but one man
among a score in the quick and various English life. His single standard
and manner of living, out of the many that strove for mastery in the
old seats where the race was bred, had been transferred to New England;
and he had had separate and undisputed ascendency there to build new
commonwealths as he would. The Puritan Commonwealth in England had been
the government of a minority. Cromwell had done his work of chastening
with a might and fervor which he found, not in the nation, but in
himself and in the stout men-at-arms and hardy reformers who stood with
him while he purified England and brought upon all her foes a day of
reckoning. The people had stood cowed and uneasy while he lived, and had
broken into wild excess of joy at their release when he died. But in New
England an entire community consented to the Puritan code and mastery
with a hearty acquiescence. It was for this liberty they had come over
sea.
And the thoughtful, strong-willed men who were their leaders had built,
as they wished, a polity that should last. Time wrought its deep changes
in New England, as elsewhere, but the stamp set upon these Puritan
settlements by the generation that founded them was not effaced. Trade
made its characteristic mark upon them. Their merchants had presently
their own fleets and markets. Their hardy people took more and more to
the sea, lived the rough life of the ocean ways with a relish, beat in
their small craft up and down the whole coast of the continent, drove
bargains everywhere, and everywhere added a touch to their reputation as
doughty sea-dogs and shrewd traders. The population that after a while
came to New England did not stay to be sifted before attempting the
voyage out of the Old World, and the quaint sedateness of the
settlements began to be broken by a novel variety. New men beset the
old order; a rough democracy began to make itself felt; and new
elements waxed bold amidst the new conditions that time had wrought. The
authority of the crown at last made a place of command for itself,
despite every stubborn protest and astute evasion. It became necessary
to be a trifle less observant of sect and creed, to cultivate, as far as
might be, a temper of tolerance and moderation. But it was a slow change
at best. The old order might be modified, but it could not so soon be
broken. New England, through all her jurisdictions, remained a body of
churches, as well as a body of towns, submissive to the doctrine and
discipline of her learned clergy, keeping the old traditions distinct,
indubitable, alike in her schools and her meeting-houses. Even in Rhode
Island, where there had from the first been such diversity of creed and
license of individual belief, there was little variety of type among the
people, for all they counted themselves so free to be what they would.
There was here a singular assortment, no doubt, of the units of the
stock, but it was of the Puritan stuff, none the less, through all its
variety.
New England, indeed, easily kept her character, for she lived apart. Her
people mustered a full hundred thousand strong before the seventeenth
century was out; her towns numbered many score, both upon the margins of
the sea and within the forests; but she still lay within a very near
frontier, pushed back only a short journey from the coast. Except where
the towns of Connecticut ran in broken line close to the westward strait
of Long Island Sound, a broad wilderness of untouched woodland, of
thicketed hills and valleys that no white man yet had seen, stretched
between them and Hudson’s river, where New York’s settlements lay upon
the edge of a vast domain, reaching all the way to the great lakes and
the western rivers. Not till 1725 did adventurous settlers dare go so
far as the Berkshire Hills. “Our country,” exclaimed Colonel Byrd, of
Virginia, who had seen its wild interior, “has now been inhabited more
than a hundred and thirty years, and still we hardly know anything of
the Appalachian Mountains, which are nowhere above two hundred and fifty
miles from the sea.” A full century after the coming of the Pilgrims,
New England, like Virginia, was still a frontier region, shut close
about on every hand by thick forests beset by prowling bands of savages.
She had as yet no intimate contact with the other colonies whose
fortunes she was to share. Her simple life, quickened by adventure, but
lacking the full pulse of old communities, kept, spite of slow change,
to a single standard of conduct, made her one community from end to end,
her people one people. She stood apart and compact, still soberly
cultivating, as of old, a life and character all her own. Colonel Byrd
noted how “New England improved much faster than Virginia,” and was fain
to think that “though these people may be ridiculed for some Pharisaical
particularities in their worship and behavior, yet they were very useful
subjects, as being frugal and industrious, giving no scandal or bad
example.” Public men in England, who had to face these “particularities
in behavior,” would hardly have agreed that the men of New England were
good subjects, though they must have admitted their excellent example in
thrift, and Virginia’s need to imitate it.
This contrast between the northern and southern set tlements was as old
as their establishment, for Virginia had from the first been resorted to
by those who had no other purpose than to better their fortunes, while
New England had been founded to be the home of a creed and discipline;
but it was not until the Commonwealth was set up in England that the
difference began to be marked, and to give promise of becoming
permanent. The English in Virginia, like the bulk of their countrymen at
home, had stood aghast at a king’s death upon the scaffold, and had
spoken very hotly, in their loyalty, of the men who had dared do the
impious deed of treason; but when the _Guinea_, frigate, brought the
Commonwealth’s commission into the river to demand their submission,
even Sir William Berkeley, the redoubtable Cavalier Governor, who had
meant stubbornly to keep his province for the second Charles, saw he
must yield; perceived there was too nice a balance of parties in the
colony to permit an execution of his plans of resistance; heard too many
plain men in his Council, and out of it, declare themselves very much of
a mind with the Puritans for the nonce in politics--very willing to set
up a democracy in Virginia which should call itself a part of the
Puritan state in England. But a great change had been wrought in
Virginia while the Commonwealth lasted. When the Commonwealth’s frigate
came in at the capes she counted scarcely fifteen thousand settlers upon
her plantations, but the next twenty years saw her transformed. By 1670
quite twenty-five thousand people were added to the reckoning; and of
the new-comers a great multitude had left England as much because they
hated the Puritans as because they desired Virginia. They were drawn out
of that great majority at home to whom Cromwell had not dared resort to
get a new parliament in the stead of the one he had “purged.” Many of
them were of the hottest blood of the Cavaliers.
It was in these years Virginia got her character and received her
leading gentry for the time to come--the years while the Commonwealth
stood and royalists despaired, and the years immediately following the
Restoration, when royalists took heart again and Englishmen turned with
a new ardor to colonization as the times changed. Among the rest in the
great migration came two brothers, John and Lawrence Washington, of a
stock whose loyalty was as old as the Conquest. They came of a Norman
family, the men of whose elder branch had for two hundred years helped
the stout Bishops of Durham keep the border against the Scots; and in
every branch of which men had sprung up to serve the king, the state,
and the church with steadfastness and honor: dashing soldiers ready for
the field at home or abroad, stout polemical priors, lawyers who knew
the learning of their day and made their way to high posts in
chancery, thrifty burghers, gallant courtiers, prosperous
merchants--public-spirited gentlemen all. It was Colonel Henry
Washington, cousin to the Virginian refugees, who had been with Rupert
when he stormed Bristol, and who, with a handful of men, had made good
an entrance into the town when all others were beaten back and baffled.
It was he who had held Worcester for his master even after he knew
Charles to be a prisoner in the hands of the parliamentary forces.
“Procure his Majesty’s commands for the disposal of this garrison,” was
all he would answer when Fairfax summoned him to surrender; “till then I
shall make good the trust reposed in me. The worst I know and fear not;
if I had, the profession of a soldier had not been begun.” But it was an
ill time to revive the traditions of the knights of Durham; loyalty only
brought ruin. The Reverend Lawrence Washington, uncle to the gallant
colonel who was the King’s Governor at Worcester, had been cast out of
his living at Purleigh in 1643 by order of Parliament, upon the false
charge that he was a public tippler, oft drunk, and loud to rail against
the Parliament and its armies; but really because, with all his race, he
was a royalist, and his living one of the best in Essex. It was his sons
who left off hoping to see things mend in England and betook themselves
to Virginia. His ruin had come upon him while they were yet lads. He had
been a brilliant university scholar, fellow and lector of Brasenose, and
rector of Oxford; but he could give his sons neither a university career
nor hope of fortune in the humble parish pitying friends had found for
him in an obscure village of Essex; and when he was dead they saw no
reason why they should stay longer in England, where Cromwell was
master.
John Washington, the oldest son of the unfortunate rector, reached
Virginia in 1656, having made his way to the colony as “second man” to
Edward Prescott, merchant and ship-owner, in whose company he had come;
and his brother Lawrence, after passing to and fro between England and
the colony several times upon errands of business, presently joined him
in permanent residence upon the “northern neck” of rich land that lay
between the Rappahannock and the Potomac rivers. It was a region where
every settlement as yet was new. A few families had fixed themselves
upon it when Maryland drove Captain Clayborne and his Virginian
partisans forth from Kent Island in the years 1637 and 1638; and they
had mustered numbers enough within a few years to send a representative
to the House of Burgesses at Jamestown. But it was not till 1648 that
the Assembly gave their lands a regular constitution as the County of
Northumberland; for it was to this region the Indians had been driven by
the encroachment of the settlements on the James and York, and for a
while the Assembly had covenanted with the red men to keep it free from
settlers. When once the ban was removed, however, in 1648, colonization
set in apace--from the older counties of Virginia, from Maryland across
the river and England over sea, from New England even, as if by a common
impulse. In 1651 the Assembly found it necessary to create the two
additional counties of Gloucester and Lancaster, and in 1653 still
another, the County of Westmoreland, for the region’s proper government,
so quickly did it fill in; for the tide out of England already began to
show its volume. The region was a natural seat of commerce, and
merchants out of the trading ports of England particularly affected it.
Rich land was abundant, and the Potomac ran strong and ample there, to
carry the commerce alike of Virginia and Maryland to the bay, upon whose
tributaries and inlets lay all the older settlements of both colonies.
Lawrence Washington, though he still described himself, upon occasion,
as “of Luton, County Bedford, merchant,” found his chief profit where he
made his home, with his brother John, in the new County of Westmoreland
in Virginia. About them lived young men and old, come, like themselves,
out of England, or drawn from the older settlements by the attractions
of the goodly region, looking out, as it did, on either hand to a broad
river and an easy trade. They felt it scarcely an expatriation to live
there, so constantly did ships come and go between their wharves and the
home ports at Bristol and London. It soon grew to be nothing singular to
see well-to-do men go every year to England upon some errand of profit
or pleasure.
It was with such a region and such stirring neighbors that the young
Washingtons identified themselves while they were yet youths in their
twenties; and there they prospered shrewdly with the rest. Prudent men
and men of character readily accumulated estates in the untouched glades
and forests of Westmoreland. The season of their coming, moreover, sadly
as things seemed to go in 1656, turned out propitious. The Restoration
opened a new era in the settlement of the country. Englishmen bestirred
themselves to take actual possession of all the great coast-line they
had so long claimed without occupying. “The Dutch had enjoyed New
Netherland during the distractions of the reign of Charles I. without
any other interruption” than the seizure of their post upon the
Connecticut by the New-Englanders, and the aggressions alike of Swedes
and English upon the Delaware; but the ministers of Charles II., though
“for some time perplexed in what light to view them, whether as subjects
or as aliens, determined at length that New Netherland ought in justice
to be resumed,” and the thing was presently accomplished in true
sovereign fashion by force of arms. To the ducal province of New York,
Penn presently added the thrifty Quaker colony which so promptly created
a busy town and mart of trade at Philadelphia, and which pushed its
rural settlements back so speedily into the fertile lands that lay
towards the west. Then, while the new colonizing impulse still ran
strong, New Jersey, too, was added, with her limits at one end upon the
Hudson and the great bay at New York, where she depended upon one rival
for a port of entry, and at the other upon the Delaware, where another
rival presided over the trade of her southern highway to the sea. To the
southward straggling settlements upon Albemarle Sound grew slowly into
the colony of North Carolina; and still other settlements, upon the
rivers that lay towards Florida, throve so bravely that Charleston
presently boasted itself a substantial town, and South Carolina had
risen to be a considerable colony, prosperous, well ordered, and showing
a quick life and individuality of her own.
A new migration had come out of England to the colonies, and Englishmen
looked with fresh confidence to see their countrymen build an empire in
America. And yet perhaps not an empire of pure English blood. New York
was for long scarcely the less a Dutch province, for all she had changed
owners, and saw Englishmen crowd in to control her trade. There were
Swedes still upon the Delaware; and Pennsylvania mustered among her
colonists, besides a strange mixture out of many nations--Germans,
French, Dutch, Finns, and English. Even in Virginia, which so steadily
kept its English character, there were to be found groups of French
Huguenots and Germans who had been given an ungrudging welcome; and
South Carolina, though strongly English too, had taken some of her best
blood out of France when Louis so generously gave the world fifty
thousand families of the finest breed of his kingdom by the revocation
of the Edict of Nantes (1685).
[Illustration: GEORGE WASHINGTON
(From a portrait painted in 1772 by C. V. Peale, now owned by General
George Washington Custis Lee, of Lexington, Virginia)]
The second quarter of the eighteenth century saw Scots-Irish enter
Virginia and the middle colonies in hosts that for a time numbered ten
thousand by the year. Pennsylvania alone, in the single year 1729, could
reckon five thousand of these sturdy people who had come to multiply and
strengthen her settlements.
It was to the middle colonies that most foreigners came, and their
coming gave to the towns and farms of that region a variety of tongues
and customs, of manners and trades and ways of life and worship, to be
found nowhere else. Boston, with all its trade and seafaring, had no
touch of that cosmopolitan character which New York had taken on quite
inevitably in the course of her varying fortunes, and which Philadelphia
had assumed by choice; and rural Virginia scarcely felt amidst her
scattered plantations the presence of the few families who lived by
standards that were not English. The common feature of the new time,
with its novel enterprises and its general immigration, was that the
colonies everywhere, whether young or old, felt a keen stimulation and a
new interest in affairs beyond their borders. A partial exchange of
population began, a noticeable intercolonial migration. Whole
congregations came out of New England to found towns in New Jersey, and
individuals out of every colony ventured more freely than before to
exchange one region for another, in order to coax health or fortune.
Population was thus not a little compacted, while the colonies were
drawn by insensible degrees to feel a certain community of interest and
cultivate a certain community of opinion.
An expanding life, widened fields of enterprise and adventure, quickened
hopes, and the fair prospects of a growing empire everywhere heartened
strong men in the colonies to steady endeavor when the new century
opened--the scheming, calculating eighteenth century, so unimpassioned
and conventional at first, so tempestuous at last. The men of the
colonies were not so new as their continent in the ways of civilization.
They were Old World men put upon fresh coasts and a forest frontier, to
make the most of them, create markets, build a new trade, become masters
of vast resources as yet untouched and incalculable; and they did their
work for the most part with unmatched spirit and energy, notwithstanding
they were checked and hampered by the statutes of the realm. The
Navigation Acts forbade the use of any but English ships in trade;
forbade all trade, besides, which did not run direct to and from the
ports of England. The colonies must not pass England by even in their
trade with one another. What they could not produce themselves they must
bring straight from England; what they had to dispose of they must send
straight to England. If they would exchange among themselves they must
make England by the way, so that English merchants should be their
middlemen and factors; or else, if they must needs carry direct from
port to port of their own coasts, they must pay such duties as they
would have paid in English ports had they actually gone the intermediate
voyage to England preferred by the statutes. ’Twas the “usage of other
nations” besides England “to keep their plantation trade to themselves”
in that day, as the Parliament itself said and no man could deny, and
’twas the purpose of such restrictions to maintain “a greater
correspondence and kindness between” England and her subjects in
America, “keeping them in a firmer dependence,” and at the same time
“rendering them yet more beneficial and advantageous” to English seamen,
merchants, wool-growers, and manufacturers; but it cost the colonists
pride and convenience and profit to obey.
Some, who felt the harness of such law too smartly, consoled themselves
by inventing means to escape it. The coast was long; was opened by many
an unused harbor, great and small; could not everywhere and always be
watched by king’s officers; was frequented by a tolerant people, who had
no very nice conscience about withholding taxes from a sovereign whose
messages and commands came quickly over sea only when the wind held fair
for weeks together; and cargoes could be got both out and in at small
expense of secrecy and no expense at all in duties. In short, smuggling
was easy. ’Twas a time of frequent wars, moreover, and privateering
commissions were to be had for the asking; so that French ships could be
brought in with their lading, condemned, and handsomely sold, without
the trouble of paying French prices or English port dues. Privateering,
too, was cousin-german to something still better; ’twas but a sort of
formal apprenticeship to piracy; and the quiet, unused harbors of the
coast showed many a place where the regular profession might be set up.
Veritable pirates took the sea, hunted down what commerce they
would--English no less than French and Dutch and Spanish--rendezvoused
in lonely sounds, inlets, and rivers where king’s officers never came,
and kept very respectable company when they came at last to dispose of
their plunder at New York or Charleston, being men very learned in
subterfuges and very quick-fingered at bribing. And then there was “the
Red Sea trade,” whose merchants sent fleets to Madagascar in the season
to exchange cargoes with rough men out of the Eastern seas, of whom
they courteously asked no questions. The larger ports were full of
sailors who waited to be engaged, not at regular wages, but “on the
grand account”; and it took many weary years of hangman’s labor to bring
enough pirates to the gallows to scotch the ugly business. In 1717 it
was reported in the colonies that there were quite fifteen hundred
pirates on the coast, full one-half of whom made their headquarters,
very brazenly, at New Providence in the Bahamas; and there were
merchants and mariners by the score who had pangs of keen regret to see
the breezy trade go down, as the century drew on a decade or two,
because of the steady vigilance and stern endeavor of Governors who had
been straitly commanded to suppress it.
The Navigation Acts bred an irritation in the colonies which grew with
their growth and strengthened with their consciousness of strength and
capacity. Not because such restrictions were uncommon, but because the
colonies were forward and exacting. There was, indeed, much to commend
the legislation they resented. It attracted the capital of English
merchants to the American trade, it went far towards securing English
supremacy on the seas, and it was strictly within the powers of
Parliament, as no man could deny. Parliament had an undoubted right to
regulate imperial interests, of this or any other kind, even though it
regulated them unreasonably. But colonies that reckoned their English
population by the hundred thousand and lived by trade and adventure
would not long have brooked such a policy of restraint had they had the
leisure to fret over it. They did not as yet have the leisure. The
French stood menacingly at their western gates, through which the great
[Illustration: TIDE-WATER VIRGINIA, 1738
(From Sir William Keith’s _History of the British Plantation in
America_)]
fur trade made its way; where the long rivers ran which threaded the
central valleys of the continent; where the Mississippi stretched itself
from north to south like a great body of dividing waters, flanking all
the coast and its settlements--where alone a true mastery of the
continent and its resources could be held. It would be time enough to
reckon with Parliament touching the carrying trade when they had made
good their title to what they were to trade withal.
The French had been a long time about their work, for they had done it
like subjects, at the bidding of an ambitious king, rather than like
free men striving as they pleased for themselves. But what they had done
they had done systematically and with a fixed policy that did not vary,
though ministers and even dynasties might come and go. The English had
crowded to the coasts of the continent as they pleased, and had mustered
their tens of thousands before the French reckoned more than a few
hundreds. But the French had hit upon the mighty river St. Lawrence,
whose waters came out of the great lakes and the heart of the continent;
their posts were garrisons; what men they had they put forward, at each
step of discovery, at some point of vantage upon lake or river, whence
they were not easily dislodged. Their shrewd fur-traders and dauntless
priests struck everywhere into the heart of the forests, leading forward
both trade and conquest, until at last, through the country of the
Illinois and out of far Lake Michigan, the streams had been found which
ran down into the west to the flooding Mississippi. Colonists were sent
to the mouth of the vast river, posts presently dotted its banks here
and there throughout its length, trade passed up and down its spreading
stream, and the English, their eyes at last caught by the stealthy
movement, looked in a short space to see French settlements “running all
along from our lakes by the back of Virginia and Carolina to the Bay of
Mexico.”
This was a business that touched the colonies to the quick. New York had
her western frontiers upon the nearer lakes. Thence, time out of mind,
had come the best furs to the markets at Albany, brought from tribe to
tribe out of the farthest regions of the northwest. New England, with
the French at her very doors, had to look constantly to her northern
borders to keep them against the unquiet savage tribes the French every
year stirred up against her. Virginia felt the French power among her
savage neighbors too, the moment her people ventured across the Blue
Ridge into the valley where many an ancient war-path ran; and beyond the
Alleghanies she perceived she must stand in the very presence almost of
the French themselves. English frontiersmen and traders, though they had
no advancing military posts behind them, were none the less quick to go
themselves deep into the shadowed wilderness, there to meet the French
face to face in their own haunts. The Carolinas were hardly settled
before their more adventurous spirits went straight into the far valley
of the Tennessee, and made trade for themselves there against the coming
of the French. Out of Virginia, too, and out of Pennsylvania, as well as
out of New York, traders pressed towards the West, and fixed their
lonely huts here and there along the wild banks of the Ohio. ’Twas
diamond cut diamond when they met their French rivals in the wigwams of
the Indian villages, and their canoes knew the waterways of the
wilderness as well as any man’s. ’Twas they who learned at first hand
what the French were doing. They were like scouts sent out to view the
ground to be fought for.
This hazardous meeting of rival nations at the heart of the continent
meant many a deep change in the fortunes of the colonies. European
politics straightway entered their counsels. Here was an end of their
separateness and independence of England. Charles and James and William
all showed that they meant to be veritable sovereigns, and had no
thought but that the colonists in America, like all other Englishmen,
should be their subjects; and here was their opportunity to be masters
upon an imperial scale and with an imperial excuse. In Europe, England
beheld France her most formidable foe; she must look to it that Louis
and his ministers take no advantage in America. The colonies, no less
than the Channel itself, were become the frontiers of an empire--and
there must be no trespass upon English soil by the French. The colonists
must be rallied to the common work, and, if used, they must be ruled and
consolidated.
As it turned out, the thing was quite impossible. The colonies had too
long been separate; their characters, their tempers, their interests,
were too diverse and distinct; they were unused to co-operate, and
unwilling; they were too slow to learn submission in anything. The plan
of grouping several of them under a single governor was attempted, but
they remained as separate under that arrangement as under any other.
Massachusetts would interest herself in nothing beyond her own
jurisdiction that did not immediately touch her safety or advantage; New
York cared little what the French did, if only the Iroquois could be
kept quiet and she could get her furs in the season, and find a market
for them abroad or among the French themselves; Virginia had no eye for
any movement upon the frontiers that did not menace her own fair valleys
within the mountains with hostile occupation; the Carolinas were as yet
too young to be serviceable, and New Jersey too remote from points of
danger. Nowhere could either men or supplies be had for use against the
French except by the vote of a colonial assembly. The law of the empire
might be what it would in the mouths of English judges at home; it did
not alter the practice of the colonies. The courts in England might say
with what emphasis they liked that Virginia, “being a conquered country,
their law is what the King pleases”; it was none the less necessary for
the King’s Governor to keep on terms with the people’s representatives.
“Our government is so happily constituted,” writes Colonel Byrd to his
friend in the Barbadoes, “that a governor must first outwit us before he
can oppress us. And if ever he squeeze money out of us, he must first
take care to deserve it.” Every colony held stoutly to a like practice,
with a like stubborn temper, which it was mere folly to ignore. One and
all they were even then “too proud to submit, too strong to be forced,
too enlightened not to see all the consequences which must arise” should
they tamely consent to be ruled by royal command or parliamentary
enactment. Their obedience must be had on their own terms, or else not
had at all. Governors saw this plainly enough, though the ministers at
home could not. Many a governor had his temper sadly soured by the
contentious obstinacy of the colonial assembly he was set to deal with.
One or two died of sheer exasperation. But the situation was not altered
a whit.
[Illustration: WILLIAM BYRD]
When there is friction there must, sooner or later, be adjustment, if
affairs are to go forward at all, and this contest between imperial
system and colonial independence at last brought some things that had
been vague to a very clear definition. ’Twas plain the colonies would
not of themselves combine to meet and oust the French. They would supply
neither men nor money, moreover. England must send her own armies to
America, fight France there as she would have fought her in Europe, and
pay the reckoning herself out of her own treasury, getting from the
colonies, the while, only such wayward and niggardly aid as they chose
to give. The colonies, meanwhile, might gather some of the fruits of
experience; might learn how safe it was to be selfish, and how unsafe,
if they hoped to prosper and be free; might perceive where their common
interests lay, and their common power; might in some degree steady their
lives and define their policy against the coming of more peaceful times.
Two wars came and went which brought France and England to arms against
each other in America, as in Europe, but they passed away without
decisive incident in the New World, and there followed upon them thirty
years of uneventful peace, during which affairs hung at a nice balance,
and the colonies took counsel, each for itself, how they should prosper.
Virginia, meanwhile, had got the charter she was to keep. From the
Potomac to the uncertain border of the Carolinas she had seen her
counties fill with the men who were to decide her destiny. Her people,
close upon a hundred thousand strong, had fallen into the order of life
they were to maintain. They were no longer colonists merely, but
citizens of a commonwealth of which they began to be very proud, not
least because they saw a noble breed of public men spring out of their
own loins to lead them. Though they were scattered, they were not
divided. There was, after all, no real isolation for any man in
Virginia, for all that he lived so much apart and was a sort of lord
within his rustic barony. In that sunny land men were constantly abroad,
looking to their tobacco and the labor of all kinds that must go
forward, but would not unless they looked to it, or else for the sheer
pleasure of bestriding a good horse, being quit of the house, and
breathing free in the genial air. Bridle-paths everywhere threaded the
forests; it was no great matter to ride from house to house among one’s
neighbors; there were county-court days, moreover, to draw the
country-side together, whether there was much business or little to be
seen to. Men did not thrive thereabouts by staying within doors, but by
being much about, knowing their neighbors, observing what ships came and
went upon the rivers, and what prices were got for the cargoes they
carried away; learning what the news was from Williamsburg and London,
what horses and cattle were to be had, and what dogs, of what breeds. It
was a country in which news and opinions and friendships passed freely
current; where men knew each other with a rare leisurely intimacy, and
enjoyed their easy, unforced intercourse with a keen and lasting relish.
It was a country in which men kept their individuality very handsomely
withal. If there was no town life, there were no town manners either, no
village conventionalities to make all men of one carriage and pattern
and manner of living. Every head of a family was head also of an
establishment, and could live with a self-respect and freedom which
were subject to no man’s private scrutiny. He had leave, in his
independence, to be himself quite naturally, and did not need to justify
his liberty by excuses. And yet he had responsibilities too, and a
position which steadied and righted him almost in spite of himself. It
required executive capacity to make his estate pay, and an upright way
of life to maintain his standing. If he was sometimes loud and
hectoring, or over-careless what he said or did, ’twas commonly because
he was young or but half come into his senses; for his very business, of
getting good crops of tobacco and keeping on dealing terms with his
neighbors, demanded prudence and a conduct touched with consideration.
He had to build his character very carefully by the plumb to keep it at
an equilibrium, though he might decorate it, if it were but upright, as
freely, as whimsically even, as he chose, with chance traits and
self-pleasing tastes, with the full consent and tolerance of the
neighborhood. He was his own man, might have his own opinions if he held
them but courteously enough, might live his own life if he but lived it
cleanly and without offence. ’Twas by their living rather than by their
creed or their livelihood that men were assessed and esteemed.
It was not a life that bred students, though it was a life that begot
thoughtfulness and leadership in affairs. Those who fell in the way of
getting them had not a few books upon their shelves, because they
thought every gentleman should have such means of knowing what the world
had said and done before his day. But they read only upon occasion, when
the weather darkened, or long evenings dragged because there were no
guests in the house. Not much systematic education was possible where
the population was so dispersed and separate. A few country schools
undertook what was absolutely necessary, and gave instruction in such
practical branches as every man must know something of who was to take
part in the management of private and public business. For the rest,
those who chose could get the languages from private tutors, when they
were to be had, and then go over sea to read at the universities, or to
Williamsburg when at last the colony had its own college of William and
Mary. More youths went from the Northern Neck to England for their
education, no doubt, than from any other part of Virginia. The counties
there were somewhat closer than the rest to the sea, bred more merchants
and travellers, kept up a more intimate correspondence both by travel
and by letter with Bristol and London and all the old English homes. And
even those who stayed in Virginia had most of them the tradition of
refinement, spoke the mother tongue purely and with a proper relish, and
maintained themselves somehow, with perhaps an added touch of simplicity
that was their own, in the practices of a cultivated race.
No one in Virginia thought that “becoming a mere scholar” was “a
desirable education for a gentleman.” He ought to “become acquainted
with men and things rather than books.” Books must serve only to deepen
and widen the knowledge he should get by observation and a free
intercourse with those about him. When Virginians wrote, therefore, you
might look to find them using, not studied phrases, but a style that
smacked fresh of all the free elements of good talk--not like scholars
or professed students, but like gentlemen of leisure and cultivated men
of affairs--with a subtle, not unpleasing flavor of egotism, and the
racy directness of speech, withal, that men may use who are sure of
their position. Such was the writing of Robert Beverley, whose _History
and Present State of Virginia_, published in London in 1705, spoke at
first hand and authoritatively of affairs of which the world had heard
hitherto only by uncertain report. He did not write the manly book
because he had a pricking ambition to be an author, but because he loved
Virginia, and wished to give such an account of her affairs as would
justify his pride in her. He came of an ancient English family, whose
ample means were scarcely more considerable in Virginia than they had
been in Beverley, in Yorkshire. He had himself been carefully educated
in England, and had learned to feel very much at home there; but the
attractions of the old home did not wean him from his love of the new,
where he had been born--that quiet land where men dealt with one another
so frankly, where Nature was so genial in all her moods, and men so
without pretence. Official occupations gave him occasion while yet a
very young man to handle familiarly the records of the colony, the
intimate letters of its daily life, and he took a proud man’s pleasure
in extracting from them, and from the traditions of those who still
carried much of the simple history in their own recollections of a
stirring life, a frank and genial story of what had been done and seen
in Virginia. And so his book became “the living testimony of a proud and
generous Virginian”--too proud to conceal his opinions or withhold
censure where it was merited, too generous not to set down very
handsomely whatever was admirable and of good report in the life of his
people. His own manly character, speaking out everywhere, as it does,
in lively phrase and candid meaning, is itself evidence of the wholesome
native air he so praises in Virginia.
He thought himself justified in loving a country where “plantations,
orchards, and gardens constantly afford fragrant and delightful walks.
In their woods and fields they have an unknown variety of vegetables and
other rarities of nature to discover and observe. They have hunting,
fishing, and fowling, with which they entertain themselves in a thousand
ways. Here is the most good nature and hospitality practised in the
world, both towards friends and strangers; but the worst of it is this
generosity is attended now and then with a little too much intemperance.
The neighborhood is at much the same distance as in the country in
England, but with this advantage, that all the better sort of people
have been abroad and seen the world, by which means they are free from
that stiffness and formality which discover more civility than kindness.
And besides, the goodness of the roads and the fairness of the weather
bring people oftener together.”
Of a like quality of genuineness and good breeding is the writing of
Colonel William Byrd, the accomplished master of Westover, who was of
the same generation. He may well have been the liveliest man in
Virginia, so piquant and irrepressible is the humor that runs through
almost every sentence he ever wrote. It must be he wrote for pastime. He
never took the pains to publish anything. His manuscripts lay buried a
hundred years or more in the decent sepulture of private possession ere
they were printed, but were even then as quick as when they were
written. Beverley had often a grave smile for what he recorded, or a
quiet sarcasm of tone in the telling of it. “The militia are the only
standing forces in Virginia,” he says, very demurely, and “they are
happy in the enjoyment of an everlasting peace.” But Colonel Byrd is
very merry, like a man of sense, not contriving the jest, but only
letting it slip, revealing it; looks very shrewdly into things, and very
wisely, too, but with an easy eye, a disengaged conscience, keeping
tally of the score like one who attends but is not too deeply concerned.
He was, in fact, very deeply engaged in all affairs of importance--no
man more deeply or earnestly; but when he wrote ’twas not his chief
business to speak of that. He was too much of a gentleman and too much
of a wit to make grave boast of what he was doing.
No man born in Virginia had a greater property than he, a house more
luxuriously appointed, or a part to play more princely; and no man knew
the value of position and wealth and social consideration more
appreciatively. His breeding had greatly quickened his perception of
such things. He had had a long training abroad, had kept very noble
company alike in England and on the Continent, had been called to the
bar in the Middle Temple and chosen a Fellow of the Royal Society, and
so had won his freedom of the world of letters and of affairs. Yet he
had returned to Virginia, as all her sons did, with only an added zest
to serve and enjoy her. Many designs for her development throve because
of his interest and encouragement; he sought her advantage jealously in
her Council, as her agent in England, as owner of great tracts of her
fertile lands. ’Twas he who brought to her shores some of her best
settlers, gave her promise of veritable towns at Richmond and
Petersburg, fought arbitrary power wherever it showed itself in her
government, and proved himself in every way “a true and worthy inheritor
of the feelings and opinions of the old cavaliers of Virginia.” But
through all his busy life he carried himself like the handsome,
fortunate man he was, with a touch of gayety, a gallant spirit of
comradeship, a zest for good books, spirited men, and comely
women--heartily, like a man who, along with honor, sought the right
pleasures of the world.
Nothing daunted the spirits of this manly gentleman, not even rough work
at the depths of the forest, upon the public business of determining the
southern boundary-line of the colony, or upon the private business of
seeing to his own distant properties in North Carolina. It gave him only
the better chance to see the world; and he was never at a loss for
something to do. There were stray books to be found even in the cabins
of the remotest settlers; or, if not, there was the piquant literary
gossip of those laughing times of Queen Anne, but just gone by, to
rehearse and comment upon. Colonel Byrd was not at a loss to find
interesting ways in which even a busy man might make shift to enjoy “the
Carolina felicity of having nothing to do.” A rough people lived upon
that frontier in his day, who showed themselves very anxious to be put
upon the southern side of the line; for, if taken into Virginia, “they
must have submitted to some sort of order and government; whereas in
North Carolina every one does what seems best in his own eyes.” “They
pay no tribute,” he laughs, “either to God or to Cæsar.” It would not be
amiss, he thinks, were the clergy in Virginia, once in two or three
years--not to make the thing burdensome--to “take a turn among these
gentiles.” “’Twould
[Illustration: JAMES BLAIR]
look a little apostolical,” he argues, with the characteristic twinkle
in his eye, “and they might hope to be requited for it hereafter, if
that be not thought too long to tarry for their reward.” A stray parson
was to be found once and again even at the depths of the forest--on the
Virginian side--though to find his humble quarters you must needs thread
“a path as narrow as that which leads to heaven, but much more dirty”;
but a stray parson was no great evangel. Colonel Byrd was too sound a
gentleman not to be a good churchman; but he accounted it no sin to see
where the humor lurks even in church. “Mr. Betty, the parson of the
parish, entertained us with a good, honest sermon,” he chronicles upon
occasion; “but whether he bought it, or borrowed it, would have been
uncivil in us to inquire. Be that as it will, he is a decent man, with a
double chin that fits gracefully over his band.... When church was done
we refreshed our teacher with a glass of wine, and then, receiving his
blessing, took horse.” ’Tis likely Colonel Byrd would have found small
amusement in narrating the regular course of his life, his great errands
and permanent concerns of weighty business. That he could as well leave
to his biographer, should he chance to have one. For himself, he chose
to tell the unusual things he had seen and heard and taken part in, and
to make merry as well as he might by the way.
The Virginian writers were not all country gentlemen. There were austere
and stately scholars, too, like the Reverend William Stith, who had held
modest livings in more than one parish, had served the House of
Burgesses as chaplain, and the college, first as instructor and then as
president, until at length, having won “perfect leisure and retirement,”
he set himself in his last days to straighten into order the confusion
of early Virginian history. “Such a work,” he reflected, “will be a
noble and elegant entertainment for my vacant hours, which it is not in
my power to employ more to my own satisfaction, or the use and benefit
of my country.” What with his scholarly love of documents set forth at
length, however, his painstaking recital of details, and his roundabout,
pedantic style, his story of the first seventeen years of the colony
lingered through a whole volume; and his friends’ laggard subscriptions
to that single prolix volume discouraged him from undertaking another.
There was neither art nor quick movement enough in such work, much as
scholars have prized it since, to take the taste of a generation that
lived its life on horseback and spiced it with rough sport and direct
speech. They could read with more patience the plain, business-like
sentences of the Reverend Hugh Jones’s _Present State of Virginia_, and
with more zest the downright, telling words in which the Reverend James
Blair, “commissary” to the Bishop of London, spoke of their affairs.
James Blair, though born and bred in Scotland, educated at Edinburgh,
and engaged as a minister at home till he was close upon thirty years of
age, was as much a Virginian in his life and deeds as any man born in
the Old Dominion. ’Twas he who had been the chief founder of the College
of William and Mary, and who had served it as president through every
vicissitude of fortune for fifty years. For fifty years he was a member,
too, of the King’s Council in the colony, and for fifty-eight the chief
adviser of the mother Church in England concerning ecclesiastical
affairs in Virginia. “Probably no other man in the colonial time did so
much for the intellectual life of Virginia” as did this “sturdy and
faithful” Scotsman. To the colonists, oftentimes, he seemed overbearing,
dictatorial even, and, for all their “gentlemanly conformity to the
Church of England,” they did not mean to suffer any man to be set over
them as bishop in Virginia; while to the royal governors he seemed
sometimes a headstrong agitator and demagogue, so stoutly did he stand
up for the liberties of the people among whom he had cast his lot. He
was in all things a doughty Scot. He made very straight for the ends he
deemed desirable; dealt frankly, honestly, fearlessly with all men
alike; confident of being in the right even when he was in the wrong;
dealing with all as he thought he ought to deal, “whether they liked it
or not”; incapable of discouragement, as he was also incapable of
dishonor; a stalwart, formidable master of all work in church and
college, piling up every day to his credit a great debt of gratitude
from the colony, which honored him without quite liking him.
It was very noteworthy that masterful men of many kinds took an
irresistible liking to Virginia, though they were but sent upon an
errand to it. There was Alexander Spotswood, for example, who, after he
had been twelve years Lieutenant-Governor in the stead of his lordship
the Earl of Orkney, spent eighteen more good years, all he had left,
upon the forty-odd thousand acres of land he had acquired in the fair
colony, as a country gentleman, very busy developing the manufacture of
iron, and as busy as there was any need to be as Postmaster-General of
the colonies. He came of a sturdy race of gentlemen, had seen service
along with Marlborough and my uncle Toby “with the army in Flanders,”
had gone much about the world upon many errands and seen all manner of
people, and then had found himself at last in Virginia when he was past
forty. For all its rough life, he liked the Old Dominion well enough to
adopt it as his home. There was there, he said, “less swearing, less
profaneness, less drunkenness and debauchery, less uncharitable feuds
and animosities, and less knavery and villany than in any part of the
world” where his lot had been. Not all of his neighbors were gentlemen;
not very many could afford to send their sons to England to be educated.
Men of all sorts had crowded into Virginia: merchants and gentlemen not
a few, but also commoner men a great many--mariners, artisans, tailors,
and men without settled trades or handicrafts of any kind. Spotswood had
found it no easy matter when he was Governor to deal patiently with a
House of Burgesses to which so many men of “mean understandings” had
been sent, and had allowed himself to wax very sarcastic when he found
how ignorant some of them were. “I observe,” he said, tartly, “that the
grand ruling party in your House has not furnished chairmen of two of
your standing committees who can spell English or write common-sense, as
the grievances under their own handwriting will manifest.”
’Twas not a country, either, where one could travel much at ease, for
one must ford the streams for lack of bridges, and keep an eye sharply
about him as he travelled the rude forest roads when the wind was high
lest a rotten tree should fall upon him. Nature was so bountiful,
yielded so easy a largess of food, that few men took pains to be
thrifty, and some parts of the colony were little more advanced in the
arts of life than North Carolina, where, Colonel Byrd said, nothing was
dear “but law, physic, and strong drink.” No doubt the
[Illustration: ALEXANDER SPOTSWOOD]
average colonist in Virginia, when not sobered by important cares, was
apt to be a fellow of coarse fibre, whose
“addiction was to courses vain;
His companies unlettered, rude, and shallow;
His hours fill’d up with riots, banquets, sports;
And never noted in him any study,
Any retirement, any sequestration
From open haunts and popularity.”
But to many a scapegrace had come “reformation in a flood, with such a
heady current, scouring faults,” as to make a notable man of him. There
were at least the traditions of culture in the colony, and enough men of
education and refinement to leaven the mass. Life ran generously, even
if roughly, upon the scattered plantations, and strong, thinking,
high-bred men had somehow a mastery and leadership in it all which made
them feel Virginia their home and field of honor.
Change of time and of affairs, the stir of growing life in Virginia as
she ceased from being a mere colony and became a sturdy commonwealth,
boasting her own breed of gentlemen, merchants, scholars, and statesmen,
laid upon the Washingtons, as upon other men, a touch of transformation.
Seventy-six years had gone by since John Washington came out of
Bedfordshire and took up lands on Bridges’ Creek in Westmoreland in
Virginia, and still his children were to be found in the old seats he
had chosen at the first. They had become thorough Virginians with the
rest, woven into the close fibre of the new life. Westmoreland and all
the counties that lay about it on the Northern Neck were strictly of a
piece with the rest of Virginia, for all they had waited long to be
settled. There the Washingtons had become country gentlemen of
comfortable estate upon the accepted model. John had begotten Lawrence,
and Lawrence had begotten Augustine. John had thriftily taken care to
see his offspring put in a way to prosper at the very first. He had
acquired a substantial property of his own where the land lay very
fertile upon the banks of the Potomac, and he had, besides, by three
marriages, made good a very close connection with several families that
had thriven thereabouts before him. He had become a notable figure,
indeed, among his neighbors ere he had been many years in the colony--a
colonel in their militia, and their representative in the House of
Burgesses; and they had not waited for his death to call the parish in
which he lived Washington Parish. His sons and grandsons, though they
slackened a little the pace he had set them in his energy at the outset,
throve none the less substantially upon the estates he had left them,
abated nothing of the dignity and worth they had inherited, lived
simply, and kept their place of respect in the parish and state. Wars
came and went without disturbing incident for them, as the French moved
upon the borders by impulse of politics from over sea; and then long
peace set in, equally without incident, to stay a whole generation,
while good farming went quietly forward, and politicians at home and in
the colonies planned another move in their game. It was in the
mid-season of this time of poise, preparation, and expectancy that
George Washington was born, on the 22d of February, in the year 1732,
“about ten in the morning,” William Gooch, gentlest of Marlborough’s
captains, being Governor in Virginia. He came into the world at the
plain but spacious homestead on Bridges’ Creek, fourth son, fifth child,
of Augustine Washington, and of the third generation from John
Washington, son of the one-time rector of Purleigh. The homestead stood
upon a green and gentle slope that fell away, at but a little distance,
to the waters of the Potomac, and from it could be seen the broad
reaches of the stream stretching wide to the Maryland shore beyond, and
flooding with slow, full tide to the great bay below. The spot gave
token of the quiet youth of the boy, of the years of grateful peace in
which he was to learn the first lessons of life, ere war and the
changing fortunes of his country hurried him to the field and to the
council.
[Illustration: FAC-SIMILE OF THE ENTRY OF WASHINGTON’S BIRTH IN HIS
MOTHER’S BIBLE]
A VIRGINIAN BREEDING