LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON
BOOK I
CHAPTER I
COLONIAL VIRGINIA AND JEFFERSON'S BOYHOOD
Consider likewise what commodities the soil where the Plantation is doth naturally yield, that they may someway help to defray the charge of the plantation, as it hath fared with tobacco in Virginia."
If an Englishman, seeking good society in an agreeable climate, and wishing to gratify a taste for history, romance, and natural scenery, not without sport by land and water, were offered a year's residence in any one of the forty-eight states which compose the American Union, his choice would very likely fall on Virginia. Virginia was the first planted of all the English colonies in North America. Projected by Sir Walter Raleigh and named by the Virgin Queen, its origins recall a golden age of poetry and adventure—the spacious days of great Elizabeth—when Shakespeare was an English playwright, Bacon an English lawyer, and Drake an English sea captain. The first Virginian settlers, led by the valiant Captain John Smith, and financed by a London Company, could remember England in the glorious year of 1588,
The richest spoils of Mexico, the stoutest hearts of Spain."
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