Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 by Various

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One can scarcely imagine a finer device for Virginia to have adopted
than that of the Indian maiden protecting the white man from the
tomahawk. But, alas! with the departure of Smith the soul seems to have
left the Colony. The beautiful lands became a prey to the worn-out
English gentry, who spent their time cheating the simple-hearted red
men. These called themselves gentlemen, because they could do nothing.
In a classification of seventy-eight persons at Jamestown we are
informed that there were "four carpenters, twelve laborers, one
blacksmith, one bricklayer, one sailor, one barber, one mason, one
tailor, one drummer, one chirurgeon, and fifty-four gentlemen." To this
day there seems to be a large number in that vicinity who have no other
occupation than that of being gentlemen, and it is evidently in many
cases just as much as they can do.

When Pocahontas died, the last link was broken between the Indian and
the settler. Unprovoked wars of extermination were begun to dispossess
these children of Nature of the very breasts of their mother, which had
sustained them so long and so peacefully. For a century the Indian's
name for Virginian was "Longknife." The very missionaries robbed him
with one hand whilst baptizing him with the other. One story concerning
the missionaries strikes us as sufficiently characteristic of the wit
of the Indian and the temper of the period to be preserved. There was a
branch of the Catawbas on the Potomac, in which river are to be found
the best shad in the world. The missionaries who settled among
this tribe taught them that it would be a good investment in their
soul-assurance to catch large quantities of the shad for them, the
missionaries. The Indians earnestly set themselves to the work; their
reverend teachers taking the fish and sending them off secretly to
various settlements in Virginia and Maryland, and making thereby
large sums of money. The Indians worked on for several months without
receiving any compensation, and the missionaries were getting richer and
richer,--when by some means the red men discovered the trick, and routed
the holy men from their neighborhood. Many years afterward the Catholics
made an effort to establish a mission with this same tribe. The
priest who first addressed them took as his text, "Ho, every one that
thirsteth, come ye to the waters,"--and went on in figurative style to
describe the waters of life. When the sermon was ended, the Indians held
a council to consider what they had just heard, and finally sent three
of their number to the missionaries, who said, "White men, you speak in
fine words of the waters of life; but before we decide on what we have
heard, we wish to know _whether any shad swim in those waters_."

It is very certain that Christianity, as illustrated by the Virginians,
did not make a good impression on these savages. They were always
willing to compare their own religion with that of the whites, and
generally regarded the contrast as in their favor. One of them said to
Colonel Barnett, the commissioner to run the boundary-line of lands
ceded by the Indians, "As to religion, you go to your churches, sing
loud, pray loud, and make great noise. The red people meet once a year
at the feast of New Corn, extinguish all their fires and kindle up a
new one, the smoke of which ascends to the Great Spirit as a grateful
incense and sacrifice. Now what better is your religion than ours?" One
of the chiefs, it is said, received an Episcopal divine who wished to
indoctrinate him into the mystery of the Trinity. The Indian, who was
a "model of deportment," heard his argument; and then, when he was
through, began in turn to indoctrinate the divine in _his_ faith,
speaking of the Great Spirit, whose voice was the thunder, whose eye was
the sun. The clergyman interrupted him rather rudely, saying, "But
that is not true,--that is all heathen trash!" The chief turned to his
companions and said gravely, "This is the most impolite man I have ever
met; he has just declared that he has three gods, and now will not let
me have one!"

The valley of Virginia, its El Dorado in every sense, had a different
settlement, and by a different people. They were, for the most part,
Germans, of the same class with those that settled in the great valleys
of Pennsylvania, and who have made so large a portion of that State into
a rich ingrain-carpet of cultivation upon a floor of limestone. One day
the history of the Germans of Pennsylvania and Virginia will be written,
and it will be full of interest and value. They were the first strong
sinews strung in the industrial arm of the Colonies to which they came;
and although mingled with nearly every European race, they remain to
this day a distinct people. A partition-wall rarely broken down has
always inclosed them, and to this, perhaps, is due that slowness of
progress which marks them. The restless ambition of _Le Grand Monarque_
and the cruelties of Turenne converted the beautiful valley of the Rhine
into a smoking desert, and the wretched peasantry of the Palatinate fled
from their desolated firesides to seek a more hospitable home in the
forests of New York and Pennsylvania, and thence, somewhat later,
found their way into Virginia. The exodus of the Puritans has had more
celebrity, but was scarcely attended with more hardship and heroism. The
greater part of the German exiles landed in America stripped of their
all. They came to the forests of the Susquehanna and the Shenandoah
armed only with the woodman's axe. They were ignorant and superstitious,
and brought with them the legends of their fatherland. The spirits
of the Hartz Mountains and the genii of the Black Forest, which
Christianity had not been able entirely to exorcise, were transferred to
the wild mountains and dark caverns of the Old Dominion, and the same
unearthly visitants which haunted the old castles of the Rhine continued
their gambols in some deserted cabin on the banks of the Sherandah (as
the Shenandoah was then called). Since these men left their fatherland,
a great Literature and Philosophy have breathed like a tropic upon that
land, and the superstitions have been wrought into poetry and thought;
but that raw material of legend which in Germany has been woven into
finest tissues on the brain-looms of Wieland, Tieck, Schiller, and
Goethe, has remained raw material in the great valley that stretches
from New York to Upper Alabama. Whole communities are found which in
manners and customs are much the same with their ancestors who crossed
the ocean. The horseshoe is still nailed above the door as a protection
against the troublesome spook, and the black art is still practised.
Rough in their manners, and plain in their appearance, they yet conceal
under this exterior a warm hospitality, and the stranger will much
sooner be turned away from the door of the "chivalry" than from that of
the German farmer. Seated by his blazing fire, with plenty of apples and
hard cider, the Dutchman of the Kanawha enjoys his condition with gusto,
and is contented with the limitations of his fence. We have seen one
within two miles of the great Natural Bridge who could not direct us to
that celebrated curiosity; his wife remarking, that "a great many people
passed that way to the hills, but for what she could not see: for her
part, give her a level country."

The first German settler who came to Virginia was one Jacob Stover, who
went there from Pennsylvania, and obtained a grant of five thousand
acres of land on the Shenandoah. Stover was very shrewd, and does not at
all justify the character we have ascribed to his race: there is a story
that casts a suspicion on his proper Teutonism. The story runs, that,
on his application to the colonial governor of Virginia for a grant of
land, he was refused, unless he could give satisfactory assurance that
he would have the land settled with the required number of families
within a given time. Being unable to do this, he went over to England,
and petitioned the King himself to direct the issuing of his grant; and
in order to insure success, had given human names to every horse, cow,
hog, and dog he owned, and which he represented as heads of families,
ready to settle the land. His Majesty, ignorant that the Williams,
Georges, and Susans seeking royal consideration were some squeaking
in pig-pens, others braying in the luxuriant meadows for which they
petitioned, issued the huge grant; and to-day there is serious reason
to suppose that many of the wealthiest and oldest families around
Winchester are enjoying their lands by virtue of titles given to
ancestral flocks and herds.

The condition of Virginia for the period immediately preceding the
Revolution was one which well merits the consideration of political
philosophers. For many years the extent of the territory of the Old
Dominion was undecided, no lines being fixed between that State and Ohio
and Pennsylvania. Virginia claimed a large part of both these States
as hers; and, indeed, there seems to be in that State an hereditary
unconsciousness of the limits of her dominion. The question of
jurisdiction superseded every other for the time, and the formal
administration of the law itself ceased. There is a period lasting
through a whole generation in which society in the western part of the
State went on without courts or authorities. There was no court but of
public opinion, no administration but of the mob. Judges were ermined
and juries impanelled by the community when occasion demanded.
Kercheval, who grew from that vicinity and state of things, and whose
authority is excellent, says,--"They had no civil, military, or
ecclesiastical laws,--at least, none were enforced; yet we look in vain
for any period, before or since, when property, life, and morals were
any better protected." A statement worth pondering by those who tell
us that man is nought, government all. The tongue-lynchings and other
punishments inflicted by the community upon evil-doers were adapted to
the reformation of the culprit or his banishment from the community. The
punishment for idleness, lying, dishonesty, and ill-fame generally, was
that of "hating the offender out," as they expressed it. This was about
equivalent to the [Greek: atimia] among the Greeks. It was a public
expression, in various ways, of the general indignation against any
transgressor, and commonly resulted either in the profound repentance or
the voluntary exile of the person against whom it was directed: it was
generally the fixing of any epithet which was proclaimed by each tongue
when the sinner appeared,--_e.g.,_ Foultongue, Lawrence, Snakefang.
The name of Extra-Billy Smith is a quite recent case of this
"tongue-lynching." It was in these days of no laws, however, that the
practice of duelling was imported into Virginia. With this exception,
the State can trace no evil results to the period when society was
resolved into its simplest elements. Indeed, it was at this time
that there began to appear there signs of a sturdy and noble race of
Americanized Englishmen. The average size of the European Englishman was
surpassed. A woman was equal to an Indian. A young Virginian one day
killed a buffalo on the Alleghany Mountains, stretched its skin over
ribs of wood, and on the boat so made sailed the full length of the Ohio
and Mississippi Rivers. But this development was checked by the influx
of "English gentry," who brought laws and fashions from London. The old
books are full of the conflicts which these fastidious gentlemen and
ladies had with the rude pioneer customs and laws. The fine ladies found
that there was an old statute of the Colony which read,--"It shall be
permitted to none but the Council and Heads of Hundreds to wear gold
in their clothes, or to wear silk till they make it themselves." What,
then, could Miss Softdown do with the silks and breastpins brought from
London? "Let her wear deer-skin and arrow-head," said the natives. But
Miss Softdown soon had her way. Still more were these new families
shocked, when, on ringing for some newly purchased negro domestic, the
said negro came into the parlor nearly naked. Then began one of the most
extended controversies in the history of Virginia,--the question being,
whether out-door negroes should wear clothes, and domestics dress like
other people. The popular belief, in which it seems the negroes shared,
was, that the race would perish, if subjected to clothing the year
round. The custom of negro men going about _in puris naturalibus_
prevailed to a much more recent period than is generally supposed.

One by one, the barbarisms of Old Virginia were eradicated, and the
danger was then that effeminacy would succeed; but a better class of
families began to come from England, now that the Colony was somewhat
prepared for them. These aimed to make Virginia repeat England: it might
have repeated something worse, and in the end has. About one or two old
mansions in Maryland and Virginia the long silvery grass characteristic
of the English park is yet found: the seed was carefully brought from
England by those gentlemen who came under Raleigh's administration,
and who regarded their residence in these Colonies as patriotic
self-devotion. On one occasion, the writer, walking through one of
these fields, startled an English lark, which rose singing and soaring
skyward. It sang a theme of the olden time. Governor Spottswood brought
with him, when he came, a number of these larks, and made strenuous
efforts to domesticate them in the neighborhood of Fredericksburg,
Virginia. He did not succeed. Now and then we have heard of one's being
seen, companionless. It is a sad symbol of that nobler being who tried
to domesticate himself in Virginia, the fine old English gentleman. He
is now seen but little oftener than the silver grass and the lark which
he brought with him. But let no one think, whilst ridiculing those who
can now only hide their poor stature under the lion-skin of F-F-V-ism,
that the race of old Virginia gentlemen is a mythic race. Through
the fair slopes of Eastern Virginia we have wandered and counted the
epitaphs of as princely men and women as ever trod this continent.
Yonder is the island, floating on the crystal Rappahannock, which,
instead of, as now, masking the guns which aim at Freedom's heart,
once bore witness to the noble Spottswood's effort to realize for the
working-man a Utopia in the New World. Yonder is the house, on the same
river, frowning now with the cannon which defend the slave-shamble, (for
the Richmond railroad passes on its verge,) where Washington was reared
to love justice and honor; and over to the right its porch commands
a marble shaft on which is written, "Here lies Mary, the Mother of
Washington." A little lower is the spot where John Smith gave the right
hand to the ambassadors of King Powhatan. In that old court-house the
voice of Patrick Henry thundered for Liberty and Union. Time was when
the brave men on whose hearts rested the destinies of the New World made
this the centre of activity and rule upon the continent; they lived and
acted here as Anglo-Saxon blood should live and act, wherever it bears
its rightful sceptre; but now one walks here as through the splendid
ruins of some buried Nineveh, and emerges to find the very sunlight sad,
as it reveals those who garnish the sepulchres of their ancestors with
one hand, whilst with the other they stone and destroy the freedom and
institutions which their fathers lived to build and died to defend.

And this, alas! is the first black line in the sketch of Virginia as
it now is. The true preface to the present edition of Virginia, which,
unhappily, has been for many years stereotyped, may be found in a single
entry of Captain John Smith's journal:--

"August, 1619. A Dutch man-of-war visited Jamestown and sold the
settlers twenty negroes, the first that have ever touched the soil of
Virginia."

They have scarcely made it "sacred soil." A little entry it is, of what
seemed then, perhaps, an unimportant event,--but how pregnant with
evil!

The very year in which that Dutch ship arrived with its freight of
slaves at Jamestown, the Mayflower sailed with its freight of freemen
for Plymouth.

Let us pause a moment and consider the prospects and opportunities which
opened before the two bands of pilgrim. How hard and bleak were the
shores that received the Mayflower pilgrims! Winter seemed the only
season of the land to which they had come; when the snow disappeared, it
was only to reveal a landscape of sand and rock. To have soil they must
pulverize rock. Nature said to these exiles from a rich soil, with her
sternest voice,--"Here is no streaming breast: sand with no gold mined:
all the wealth you get must be mined from your own hearts and coined by
your own right hands!"

How different was it in Virginia! Old John Rolfe, the husband of
Pocahontas, writing to the King in 1616, said,--"Virginia is the same as
it was, I meane for the goodness of the scate, and the fertilenesse of
the land, and will, no doubt, so continue to the worlds end,--a countrey
as worthy of good report as can be declared by the pen of the best
writer; a countrey spacious and wide, capable of many hundred thousands
of inhabitants." It must be borne in mind that Rolfe's idea of an
inhabitant's needs was that he should own a county or two to begin with,
which will account for his moderate estimate of the number that could be
accommodated upon a hundred thousand square miles. He continues,--"For
the soil, most fertile to plant in; for ayre, fresh and temperate,
somewhat hotter in summer, and not altogether so cold in winter as in
England, yet so agreable is it to our constitutions that now 't is more
rare to hear of a man's death than in England; for water, most wholesome
and verie plentifull; and for fayre navigable rivers and good harbors,
no countrey in Christendom, in so small a circuite, is so well stored."
Any one who has passed through the State, or paid any attention to its
resources, may go far beyond the old settler's statement. Virginia is a
State combining, as in some divinely planned garden, every variety of
soil known on earth, resting under a sky that Italy alone can match,
with a Valley anticipating in vigor the loam of the prairies: up to that
Valley and Piedmont stretch throughout the State navigable rivers, like
fingers of the Ocean-hand, ready to bear to all marts the produce of
the soil, the superb vein of gold, and the iron which, unlocked from
mountain-barriers, could defy competition. But in her castle Virginia is
still, a sleeping beauty awaiting the hero whose kiss shall recall her
to life. Comparing what free labor has done for the granite rock called
Massachusetts, and what slave labor has done for the enchanted garden
called Virginia, one would say, that, though the Dutch ship that brought
to our shores the Norway rat was bad, and that which brought the Hessian
fly was worse, the most fatal ship that ever cast anchor in American
waters was that which brought the first twenty negroes to the settlers
of Jamestown. Like the Indian in her own aboriginal legend, on whom a
spell was cast which kept the rain from falling on him and the sun from
shining on him, Virginia received from that Dutch ship a curse which
chained back the blessings which her magnificent resources would have
rained upon her, and the sun of knowledge shining everywhere has left
her to-day more than eighty thousand white adults who cannot read or
write.

It was at an early period as manifest as now that a slave population
implied and rendered necessary a large poor-white population. And whilst
the pilgrims of Plymouth inaugurated the free-school system in their
first organic law, which now renders it impossible for one sane person
born in their land to be unable to read and write, Virginia was boasting
with Lord Douglas in "Marmion,"

"Thanks to Saint Bothan, son of mine
Could never pen a written line."

Sir William Berkeley, Governor of Virginia for thirty-six years,
beginning with 1641, wrote to the King as follows:--"I thank God, there
are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these
hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience and heresy and
sects into the world, and printing has divulged them, and libels upon
the best governments. God keep us from both!" Most fearfully has the
prayer been answered. In Berkeley's track nearly all the succeeding ones
went on. Henry A. Wise boasted in Congress that no newspaper was printed
in his district, and he soon became governor.

It gives but a poor description of the "poor-white trash" to say that
they cannot read. The very slaves cannot endure to be classed on their
level. They are inconceivably wretched and degraded. For every rich
slave-owner there are some eight or ten families of these miserable
tenants. Both sexes are almost always drunk.

There is no better man than the Anglo-Saxon man who labors; there is no
worse animal than the same man when bred to habits of idleness. When
Watts wrote,

"Satan finds some mischief still
For idle hands to do,"

he wrote what is much truer of his own race than of any other. This
law has been the Nemesis of the young Virginian. His descent demands
excitement and activity; and unless he becomes emasculated into a
clay-eater, he obtains the excitement that his ancestors got in war, and
the New-Englander gets in work, in gaming, horse-racing, and all manner
of dissipation. His life verifies the proverb, that the idle brain is
the Devil's workshop. He is trained to despise labor, for it puts him on
a level with his father's slaves. At the University of Virginia one may
see the extent of demoralization to which eight generations of idleness
can bring English blood. There the spree, the riot, and we might almost
say the duel, are normal. About five years ago we spent some time
at Charlottesville. The evening of our arrival was the occasion of
witnessing some of the ways of the students. A hundred or more of them
with blackened or masked faces were rushing about the college yard; a
large fire was burning around a stake, upon which was the effigy of a
woman. A gentleman connected with the University, with whom we were
walking, informed us that the special occasion of this affair was, that
a near relative of Mrs. Stowe's, a sister, perhaps, had that day arrived
to visit her relative, Mrs. McGuffey. The effigy of Mrs. Stowe was
burned for her benefit. The lady and her friends were very much alarmed,
and left on the early train next morning, without completing their
visit.

"They will close up by all getting dead-drunk," said our friend, the
Professor.

"But," we asked, "why does not the faculty at once interfere in this
disgraceful procedure?"

"They have got us lately," he replied, "where we are powerless. Whenever
they wish a spree, they tackle it on to the slavery question, and know
that their parents will pardon everything to the spirit of the South
when it is burning the effigy of Mrs. Stowe or Charles Sumner, or the
last person who furnishes a chance for a spree. To arrest them ends only
in casting suspicion of unsoundness on the professor who does it."

Virginia has had, for these same causes, no religious development
whatever. The people spend four-and-a-half fifths of their time arguing
about politics and religion,--questions of the latter being chiefly as
to the best method of being baptized, or whether sudden conversions are
the safest,--but they never take a step forward in either. Archbishop
Purcell, of Cincinnati, stated to us, that, once being in Richmond,
he resolved to give a little religious exploration to the surrounding
country. About seven miles out from the city he saw a man lying
down,--the Virginian's natural posture,--and approaching, he made
various inquiries, and received lazy Yes and No replies. Presently he
inquired to what churches the people in that vicinity usually went.

"Well, not much to any."

"What are their religious views?"

"Well, not much of any."

"Well, my friend, may I inquire what are _your_ opinions on religious
subjects?"

"The man, yet reclining," said the Archbishop, "looked at me sleepily a
moment, and replied,--

"'My opinion is that them as made me will take care of me.'"

The Archbishop came off discouraged; but we assured him that the man
was far ahead of many specimens we had met. We never see an opossum in
Virginia--a fossil animal in most other places--but it seems the sign
of the moral stratification around. There are many varieties of
opossum in Virginia,--political and religious: Saturn, who devours his
offspring, has not come to Virginia yet.

Old formulas have, doubtless, to a great extent, lost their power there
also, but there is not vitality enough to create a higher form. For no
new church can ever be anywhere inaugurated in this world until the
period has come when its chief corner-stone can be Humanity. Till then
the old creeds in Virginia must wander like ghosts, haunting the old
ruins which their once exquisite churches have become. Nothing can be
more picturesque, nothing more sad, than these old churches,--every
brick in them imported from Old England, every prayer from the past
world and its past need: the high and wide pews where the rich sat
lifted some feet above the seats of the poor represent still the faith
in a God who subjects the weak to the strong. These old churches, rarely
rebuilt, are ready now to become rocks imbedding fossil creeds. In these
old aisles one walks, and the snake glides away on the pavement, and the
bat flutters in the high pulpit, whilst moss and ivy tenderly enshroud
the lonely walls; and over all is written the word DESOLATION. Symbol it
is of the desolation which caused it, even the trampled fanes and altars
of the human soul,--the temple of God, whose profanation the church has
suffered to go on unrebuked, till now both must crumble into the same
grave.

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