George Washington (Wilson)/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 every- where 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 sundry 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 enjo}'ed 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 landowner 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 counts-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 meetinghouses. 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 Neyv 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 Brase- nose, 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 bis 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 re- gion, 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). 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 lonety 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 ex- change 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 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 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 besffurs 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 tUe waterways of the wilderness as well as any throughout its length, trade passed up and down its 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 sepa- rateness 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 rulea 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.
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 utfeventful peace, during which affairs hung at a nice balance, and the colonies took counsel, each for itself, how they should prosper.
Yirginia, 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 trait's and self-pleasing tastes, with the full consent and tolerance of the neighborhood. He was bis 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 ^<- ntleman 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 pos- sible 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 every- where, 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, wron 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 Cassar." 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 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 be 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 coufd as well leave to his biographer, should he chance to have one. For himself, he chose to tell the unusual tilings 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 ; md 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 Vir- ginian 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 Marlbor- ough 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 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 flll'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.