G. MacLaren Brydon

“ From these two first settlements thus widely separated, but with their common ideal of English civilization and English concepts of freedom and self-government, has grown the American nation of today. This nation, while welcoming all the gifts and values which people of other nations have brought to the enrichment and broadening of our common life, is still basically an English or Anglo-Saxon nation.
Many impelling motives animated the men who organized the Virginia company and labored for the establishment of a colony in America. ”

“ And seeing, Lord, the highest end of our plantation here is to set up the standard and display the banner of Jesus Christ, even here where Satan's throne is, Lord let our labour be blessed in labouring the conversion of the heathen; and because thou usest not to work such mighty works by unholy means, Lord sanctifie our spirits and give us holy hearts that so we may be thy instruments in this most glorious work. ”

“ A colony to which England could send her overplus population as part of a greater England was a real solution, and a better one than would be the raising of grain and foodstuff by foreign countries to feed the hungry of Great Britain. That men were thinking along this line appears from the action of certain large towns in paying the expense of the voyage of young people by the score or hundred to Virginia, and from the plan soon after the first settlement, whereby young women of reputable families were sent to Virginia to become wives of the colonists. ”

“ In the township system of New England a village normally became the township center and the people lived near enough to each other to enable them to meet frequently; to work and play together; to transact business; and to gossip of neighborhood affairs. In Virginia it was otherwise. In Virginia families lived on separate farms and each farm was of necessity a community within itself. Life was geared to the basic fact that tobacco was the money crop, and also was the real source of the financial strength and stability of the colony. ”

“ Every Saturday at night I exercise in Sir Thomas Dale's house. Our Church affaires be consulted on by the minister and four of the most religious men. Once every month we have a communion, and once every year a solemn fast.
This method of daily and Sunday services, as the regular rule of the Church of England, was adopted in Virginia as far as colonial conditions would permit. But apart from Jamestown itself, and the schools which came into existence, there would not be many parishes in which daily services would be feasible. The people lived too far apart on their farms. ”

“ All the surviving records of the seventeenth century go to show that, whatever during that long period may have been the infirmities or unworthy acts of individual clergymen, the great body of those officiating in Virginia were men who performed all the duties of their sacred calling in a manner entitling them to the respect, reverence and gratitude of their parishioners. ”

“ The Church in Virginia was left to itself to live or to die. It believed, according to the teachings of the Church, that bishops were necessary for the ordination of men to the ministry and for the performance of the spiritual rite of confirmation, whereby alone under the law of the Church of England baptized Christians could be admitted to the sacrament of the Holy Communion. A bishop was also necessary for the organization and leadership of a diocese, which was the governing body to which every parish and congregation must belong. ”

“ A full third of all the English people in Virginia were killed by Indians in one fatal day. The buildings at the university were burned to the ground, and every English man, woman and child in every family of the artisans and workmen was killed. The East India School was burned to the ground. Indeed the only thing that saved the colony from utter extermination was that Chanco, an Indian who had become a Christian, had learned of the plot the night before the massacre and warned the Englishman, Richard Pace, with whom he lived. Pace crossed the James River and warned the residents of Jamestown. ”

“ Men came to church in those early days. For one reason, the law of the colony required it and there was the threat of punishment if absence from church was reported to the grand jury. But there was another reason also, even though men and women were compelled to walk five or six miles to attend. That other reason was the loneliness of farm life in the early days of colonial Virginia. The churchyard on a Sunday morning was then the meeting-place of the whole community, and the only place where all could meet on the same level. ”

“ While the laws which punished interruption of religious services were still necessary and were enforced, the adoption of the proviso in the Virginian Act of 1699 was a real step forward on the way to the ultimate goal of entire freedom of worship. It made the worship of the dissenters as truly legal as that of the Established Church, and it removed from the dissenters the requirement that they attend the worship of the Anglican Church. ”

“ Moreover, no diocese in the Established Church of England has the power to select its own bishop. The King as temporal head of the Church appoints the bishops of all dioceses, and that power is exercised for the King by his prime minister. And during the colonial period in America the Governor of every colony other than Virginia and Pennsylvania appointed the rector of every Anglican parish and inducted him into office. ”

“ The General Assembly of Virginia, upon learning the action of Parliament, adopted an act in 1647 requiring the use of the Prayer Book in every church and chapel in Virginia each Sunday in the regular forms prescribed in the Prayer Book. The Act made further provision that in every parish in which the incumbent minister disobeyed the law and continued disuse of the Book of Common Prayer, his parishioners were thereby absolved from paying him any further salary. [Pg 36]
In England marriage was held to be a religious service to be performed by no one other than a priest of the Church ”

“ The Negro came to America from almost every Negro tribe and dialect in central and southern Africa; he came without any connection except his connection with other slaves when more than one were sold to the same master. He came into a highly developed civilization with great organized power of leadership and government; and through the generations of slavery [Pg 33] the Negro in America wrought for himself a national and racial consciousness within the sphere of American life. The American Negro today is the most highly educated and the most advanced Negro in the world. ”

“ It can be seen therefore that from the beginning the population of Virginia grew by immigration from various sources and that not all who came to the colony were of the best type. The New England colonies had the advantage that their immigrants came in large part from dissenters from the Established Church of England. They came for "conscience sake," however, and with their concept of theocratic government the New England colonists could make it difficult indeed for immigrants they did not welcome. ”

“ Meanwhile, the General Court ordered that the woman's plea be granted, and, in order not to set a precedent in an unsettled question, directed that she be sold out of the colony. At a subsequent meeting of the General Assembly the matter was settled so far as Virginia was concerned by enactment of a law that all persons convicted of a first offense of felony, whether male or female, bond or free, might plead benefit of clergy.
Slavery existed in the American colonies from Massachusetts and Connecticut to Virginia and the Carolinas at the end of the seventeenth century. ”

“ But it is extremely doubtful that the Jamestown settlement, after its tragic first years, continued very long to be attractive to young men seeking adventure only. Many of the families of today who boast of their generations of ancestry in Virginia descend from or married into the families of the men and women who came to the colony in these earliest years of settlement, and have ancestors buried among the unknown dead of the Jamestown cemetery and churchyard. ”

“ If we consider as a body the ministers who performed the various duties of their calling in Virginia during the Seventeenth Century, there is no reason to think they fell below the standard of conscientiousness governing the conduct of the English clergyman in the same age. ”

“ A second source, certainly in the early years, was the rapidly increasing population of the cities and towns of England. It is of record that in the days of the London Company one town appropriated funds sufficient to pay the expenses to Virginia of a large number of its unemployed, and probably the same thing was done by other towns for their unemployed. Doubtless a little "pressure" was applied in the case of young men who had no occupation and no visible means of support. ”

“ Such men were occasionally appointed to parishes by vestries who had no way of learning their true status; and if the man was thenceforth morally decent and had no great fault except occasional drunkenness, he would be allowed to stay on because of the need of a priest to celebrate the sacraments.
The vestries protected their parishes from unworthy clergymen by the uncanonical appointment of a minister as incumbent of a parish for a year at a time, rather than present him canonically to the Governor of the colony for induction into the rectorship of the parish. ”

“ Because of that question many slave-owners declined to permit the baptism of their slaves until the question was settled, and consequently in every slave-owning colony it became necessary to secure a legislative enactment establishing the legal status of a baptized slave. The question arose in Virginia, and in 1667 the following act was adopted by the General Assembly:
Whereas some doubts have risen whether children that are slaves by birth, and by the charity and piety of their owners made partakers of the blessed sacrament of baptisme, should by virtue of their baptisme be made free ”

“ By reason of sheer inability at times to provide sufficient Anglican clergymen for the parishes, clergymen of Presbyterian ordination were permitted to serve in Virginia parishes; and that was true throughout the whole seventeenth century. The last Presbyterian clergyman to hold an Anglican parish in Virginia, Rev. Andrew Jackson of Christ Church Parish, Lancaster County, died in 1710. Throughout the century the law required every citizen to attend the parish church, but there was never an ecclesiastical court in which a layman could be tried, convicted or punished as a dissenter. ”

“ Farms cannot be reduced below the number of acres required to support one family. When that has been done and there are several sons, one of them must inherit the farm and the others must seek a living elsewhere.
The broad acres of Virginia and its equable climate attracted thousands of such younger sons, and also others who had not been successful and sought opportunity in a new land. The [Pg 18] settlers came from every section of England, and from the bleak hills of Scotland; from Wales and also from Ireland. The English were mostly from the Anglican parishes of the Established Church. ”

“ So wrote Captain John Smith a number of years after his return to England. There may have been an excess of imagination in describing new and raw settlements as "faire villages," but the salary which was to be paid to the ministers was a provable fact. Tithes from the culture of the land by the parishioners amounted to as much as £120, and the minister had a glebe of 100 acres from the cultivation of which his tenants and servants through "mundall industry" might greatly increase his income. ”

“ Later, when it was found desirable to erect chapels of ease in populous parishes, enough readers were appointed in every parish to permit one of them to hold morning service each Sunday in each place of worship throughout the parish, while the minister went his usual round of service in each church or chapel upon regular schedule. Except in remote chapels the custom was to have service each Sunday in every church or chapel. ”

“ It is enacted and declared by this Grand Assembly and the authority thereof, that the conferring of baptisme doth not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or freedom; that diverse masters, freed from this doubt, may more carefully endeavour the propagation of Christianity by permitting children, though slaves, or those of greater growth if capable to be admitted to that sacrament. ”

“ Each family required a farm of sufficient acreage to raise tobacco as well as food-stuff and cattle; and throughout the whole colonial period the genius of Virginian life opposed the development of towns of greater population than was required for a shipping point and a warehouse, for the storing and grading of tobacco, and for a few agents of English and Scottish merchants. ”

“ When in 1724 the Bishop of London sent a questionary to every Anglican clergyman incumbent of a parish in America, one of the questions was, "At what times do you Catechize the Youth of your Parish?"
They have builded many pretty villages, faire houses and chapels which are growne good benefices of 120 pounds a yeare besides their own mundall [mundane] industry. ”

“ There were three sources from which the settlers came; and these sources were more or less in effect throughout the whole of Virginia's first century. First and foremost in numbers and importance were the sons of small farmers and tenant farmers, and younger sons of the laboring classes and small merchants. No matter how large the population may be, always there are positions of employment with a normal wage ”

“ A most important part of their plan was to make colonies the answer to a problem which was pressing for solution: the problem of what to do with the increasing overplus of population in many of the cities of England. The danger of a population too great for the land of England to support and feed was a real one. ”