212 XIV. CHARACTER AND CONDITION OF THE VIRGINIANS. 4 CHAP. such as nature provides in her wilds; no education but such as parents in the desert could give their offspring.' The paths were bridleways rather than roads; and the highway surveyors aimed at nothing more than to keep them clear of logs and fallen trees. I doubt if there existed what we should call a bridge in the whole Dominion, though it was intended to build some. Visits were made in boats, or on horseback through the forests; and the Virginian, travelling with his pouch of tobacco for currency, swam the rivers, where there was neither ferry nor ford. Almost every planter was his own mechanic. The houses, for the most part of but one story, and made of wood, often of logs, the windows closed by convenient shutters for want of glass, were sprinkled at great distances on both sides of the Chesapeake, from the Potomac to the line of Carolina. There was hardly such a sight as a cluster of three dwellings. Jamestown was but a place of a statehouse, one church, and eighteen houses, occupied by about a dozen families. Till very recently, the legislature had assembled in the hall of an alehouse. Virginia had neither towns nor lawyers. A few of the wealthier planters lived in braver state at their large plantations, and, surrounded by indented servants and slaves, produced a new form of society, that has sometimes been likened to the manners of the patriarchs, and sometimes to the baronial pride of feudalism. The inventory of Sir William Berkeley gave him seventy horses, as well as large flocks of sheep. "Al 1 Berkeley, in Chalmers. 2 Hening, ii. 103. 3 Ibid. Burk, ii. App. xxxiii. 4 Hammond's Lear and Rachel. 5 8 5 Mass. Hist. Coll. xi. 53. 6 Hening, ii. 204. 7 Burk, ii. 159. 8 Document in Burk, ii. 263. DAWN OF THE IDEAS OF POLITICAL FREEDOM. 213 XIV. most every man lived within sight of a lovely river." CHAP. The parish was of such extent, spreading over a tract which a day's journey could not cross, that the people met together but once on the Lord's day, and sometimes not at all; the church, rudely built in some central solitude, was seldom visited by the more remote families, and was liable to become inaccessible by the broken limbs from forest-trees, or the wanton growth of underwood and thickets. Here was a new form of human nature. A love of freedom inclining to anarchy pervaded the country. Among the people, loyalty was a feebler passion than the love of liberty. Existence "without government" seemed to promise to "the general mass"-it is a genuine Virginia sentiment" a greater degree of happiness" than the tyranny " of the European gov"of ernments." Men feared injustice more than they feared disorder. In Europe, people gathered in towns; here they lived by themselves. In the Old World, even the peasantry crowded together into compact villages. The farmers of Virginia lived asunder, and in their mild climate were scattered very widely, rarely meeting in numbers, except at the horse-race or the county court.1 It was among such a people, which had never been disciplined to resistance by the heresies of sects or the new opinions of "factious" parties, which, till the restoration, had found the wilderness a safe protection against tyranny, and had enjoyed "a fifty years' experience of a government easy to the people," that the pressure of increasing grievances began to excite open discon 1 Hammond's Lear and Rachel. Yet society without government is 4 Burk, ii. App. xlix. 214 XIV. FIRST MOVEMENT TOWARDS AN INSURRECTION. A CHAP. tent. Men gathered together in the gloom of the forests to talk of their hardships. The common people, half conscious of their wrongs, half conscious of the rightful remedy, were ripe for insurrection. collision between prerogative and popular opinion, between that part of the wealth of the country which was allied with royalism, and the great mass of the numbers and wealth of the country, resting on popular power, between the old monarchical system and the American popular system, was at hand. American freedom had then the principle of life, but was unconscious of its vitality, as the bird that just begins to peck at the shell. Opinions were coming into life; and the plastic effort of modern political being was blindly, but effectually at work.1 1674. On the first spontaneous movement of the common people, the men of wealth and established consideration kept aloof. It is always so in revolutions. The revolt was easily suppressed by the calm advice "of some discreet persons," in whom the people had confidence. Yet the movement was not without effect; the county commissioners were ordered to levy no more taxes for their own emoluments.3 But as the great abuses continued unreformed, the mutinous discontents of the people were not quieted. The common people were rendered desperate by taxes, which 1675 deprived labor of nearly all its earnings; and the ex1676. citement was increased, when, after a year's patience to under accumulated oppressions, they received from the envoys of the colony, themselves by their heavy expenses a new burden, no hope of a remedy from 1 Bland, in Burk, ii. 247, 151. 3 Hening, ii. 315, 316. 4 Ibid. 539. CONTESTS WITH THE INDIANS. 215 England. To produce an insurrection, nothing was CHAP. wanting but an excuse for appearing in arms. XIV. The causes which had driven the Indians of New 1674. England to despair, acted with equal force on the natives of Virginia. The English had at first seemed to occupy no more than the skirts of the bay. By degrees they had explored the interior; the remote mountains had become an object of curiosity; and a little band of adventurers had at length crossed the first range of mountains, and, descending into the valley of the Blue Ridge, had examined the heart of Virginia, and proclaimed the beauty of the lands which form a succession of the most picturesque valleys in the world. How could jealousies fail to be excited? 4 The Seneca Indians, a tribe of the Five Nations, had 1674. driven the Susquehannahs from their abode at the head of the Chesapeake to the vicinity of the Piscataways on the Potomac; and Maryland had become involved in a war with the Susquehannahs and their confederates. Murders had been committed on the 1675. soil of Virginia, and had been avenged by the militia on the borders. As dangers increased, the River Potomac was guarded; and a body of Virginians, under the command of John Washington, the great grandfather of George Washington, himself perhaps a surveyor, who had emigrated from the north of England to America eighteen years before, and had planted himself as a farmer in the county of Westmoreland, crossed the river to assist the people of Maryland 1 Beverley, 66. 2 Hening, i. 281. 4 T. M.'s Beginning, Progress, and Conclusion of Bacon's Rebellion, p. 9. 5 Bacon's Laws of Maryland, 1674, c. xxvii, and xxviii. 6 T. M.'s Account, 8. 7 A. Cotton's Account of our Late Troubles in Virginia, p. 3. 216 CONTESTS WITH THE INDIANS. The warfare was CHAP. in besieging the common enemy. XIV. conducted with vengeful passions. 1675. hostile chieftains presented themselves as messengers to treat of a reconciliation, in the blind fury of the moment they were murdered.' 1675 to The outrage was rebuked by Berkeley with abrupt energy. The old Cavalier declared, "If they had killed my father and my mother, and all my friends, yet if they had come to treat of peace, they ought to have gone in peace."9 The monopoly of the beaver trade in Virginia3 is also said to have prevailed on the avarice of the governor to favor the Indians.1 Meantime the natives, having escaped from their fort, 1676. roamed by stealth from plantation to plantation, from the vicinity of Mount Vernon to the Falls of James River, carrying terror to every grange in the province; murdering, in blind fury, till their passions were glutted; and for each one of their chiefs ten of the English had been slain. Now, according to their wild superstitions, would the souls of their great men repose pleasantly in the shades of death. Proposals of peace were renewed by the Susquehannahs and their confederates. The proposals were rejected. The Indians, subject to Virginia, begin to assert independence. The horrors of insecurity visit every log-house on the frontier; the plantations are laid waste; death ranges the land under the hideous forms of savage cruelty. The spirit that favored popular liberty, awakes to demand the natural right 1 Burwell Account of Bacon and Ingram's Rebellion, first printed in Mass. Hist. Coll. xi. 27, &c. Reprinted by P. Force in 1835. So, too, Cotton, p. 3. 2 T. M.'s Account, p. 12. 3 Hening, ii. 20, 124, 140. 4 T. M.'s Account, p. 11. "Passion and avarice, to which the governor was more than a little addicted." |