John Fiske

“ It was not only the border region where English and Spanish America marched upon each other, but it served for some time as a kind of backwoods for Virginia. Until recently one of the most important factors in American history has been the existence of a perpetually advancing frontier, where new territory has often had to be won by hard fighting against its barbarian occupants, where the life has been at once more romantic and more sordid than on the civilized seaboard, and where democracy has assumed its most distinctively American features. ”

“ It is the prolific root from which springs that luxuriant crop of humbug upon which political tricksters thrive as pigs fatten upon corn. In point of fact no such government, armed with a magic fund of its own, has ever existed upon the earth. No government has ever yet used any money for public purposes which it did not first take from its own people,—unless when it may have plundered it from some other people in victorious warfare. 34
The inhabitant of a New England town is perpetually reminded that “the Government” is “the People.” ”

“ Nay, they are such abominable Ill-husbands, that tho’ their Country be over-run with Wood, yet they have all their Wooden Ware from England; their Cabinets, Chairs, Tables, Stools, Chests, Boxes, Cart-wheels, and all other things, even so much as their Bowls, and Birchen Brooms, to the Eternal Reproach of their Laziness.... Thus they depend altogether upon the Liberality of Nature, without endeavoring to improve its Gifts, by Art or Industry. They spunge upon the Blessings of a warm Sun, and a fruitful Soil, and almost grutch the Pains of gathering in the Bounties of the Earth. ”

“ When Blair urged that a college was needed for training up clergymen, Seymour thought it was no time to be sending money to America for such purposes; every penny was wanted in Europe for carrying on the necessary and righteous war against Louis XIV. Blair could not deny that it was an eminently righteous war, but he was not thus to be turned from his purpose. “You must not forget,” said he, “that people in Virginia have souls to save, as well as people in England.” “Souls!” cried Seymour, “damn your souls! Grow tobacco!” ”

“ By no possible ingenuity of constitution-making or of legislation can a society made up of ruffians and boors be raised to the intellectual and moral level of a society made up of well-bred merchants and yeomen, parsons and lawyers. One might as well expect to see a dray horse win the Derby. It is, moreover, only when we habitually bear in mind the threads of individual relationship that connect one country with another, that we get a really firm and concrete grasp of history. Without genealogy the study of history is comparatively lifeless. ”

“ And while in the history of Massachusetts during the Revolution we are chiefly impressed with the remarkable degree in which the mass of the people exhibited the kind of political training that nothing in the world except the habit of parliamentary discussion can impart; on the other hand, Virginia at that time gave us—in Washington, Jefferson, Henry, Mason, Madison, and Marshall, to mention no others—such a group of leaders as has seldom been equalled. ”

“ I demand then, in the next place, which way shall the charge of the governments be maintained, if the Hollanders be debarred trade in Virginia and Maryland, or anything raised to defray the constant and yearly levies for the securing the inhabitants from invasions of the Indians? How shall the forts and public places be built and repaired, with many other incident charges daily arising, which must be taken care for, else all will come to destruction? ”

“ It is not long after this that we find Thomas Jefferson—himself the kindest of masters, and familiar with slavery in its mild Virginia form—thus writing about it: “The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. ”

“ Your modern manufacturer obtains legislative aid in fleecing his fellow-countrymen, while he seeks popularity by bestowing upon the public a part of his ill-gotten gains in the shape of a new college or a town library. This change from the more brutal to the more subtle devices for living upon the fruits of other men’s labour was conspicuous during the seventeenth century, and one of the most glaring instances of it was the Navigation Act of 1651, which forbade the importation of goods into England except in English ships, or ships of the nation that produced 46 the goods. ”

“ To many persons the name of rebel seems fraught with blame and reproach; but the career of mankind so abounds in examples of heroic resistance to intolerable wrongs that to any one familiar with history the name of rebel is often a title of honour. Bacon’s brief career was an episode in the perennial fight against taxation without representation, the ancient abuse of living on other men’s labour. ”

“ England has never had a noblesse. As the upper class has never been sharply distinguished politically, so it has not held itself separate socially. Families with titles have intermarried with families that have none, the younger branches of a peer’s family become untitled gentry, ancient peerages lapse while new ones are created, so that there is a “circulation of gentle blood” that has thus far proved eminently wholesome. More than two thirds of the present House of Lords are the grandsons or great-grandsons of commoners. ”

“ Among the people of Lord Baltimore’s colony, as among English-speaking people in general, one might observe a fierce spirit of political liberty coupled with engrained respect for law and a disposition to achieve results by argument rather than by violence. Such a temper leads to interminable parliamentary discussion, and in the reign of Charles II. the tongues of the Maryland assembly were seldom quiet. ”

“ Washington demanded satisfaction for the murders and other outrages committed in Virginia, but the Indians denied everything and declared that their deadly enemies the Senecas were the sole offenders. Washington then asked how it happened that several canoe-loads of beef and pork, stolen from the plantations, had been carried into the Susquehannock fort; was it their foes the Senecas who were thus supplying them with food? And how did it happen that a party of Susquehannocks just captured in Virginia were dressed in the clothes of Englishmen lately murdered? The falsehood was too palpable. ”

“ Within its proper sphere, government by town meeting is the form of government most effectively under watch and control. Everything is done in the full daylight of publicity. The specific objects for which public money is to be appropriated are discussed in the presence of everybody, and any one who disapproves of any of these objects, or of the way in which it is proposed to obtain it, has an opportunity to declare his opinions. Under this form of government people are not so liable to bewildering delusions as under other forms. ”

“ Among men of letters and science born and educated in America before the Revolution, there were three whose fame is more than national, whose names belong among the great of all times and countries. Of these, Jonathan Edwards was a native of Connecticut, Benjamin Franklin and Count Rumford were natives of Massachusetts. In such men we can trace the continuity between the intellectual life of England in the seventeenth century and that of America in the nineteenth. In Virginia, if we except political writers, we find no names so high as these. ”

“ While in England some had been esquires or country magistrates, or “lords of the manor,”—a phrase which does not mean a member of the peerage, but a landed proprietor with dependent tenants,—some had been yeomen, or persons holding farms by some free kind of tenure; some had been artisans or tradesmen in cities. All had for many generations been more or less accustomed to self-government and to public meetings for discussing local affairs. That self-government, especially as far as church matters were concerned, they were stoutly bent upon maintaining and extending. ”

“ Not only were there no towns, but there were very few large plantations with stately manor houses like those of Virginia. A great part of the country was covered with its primeval forest, in which thousands of hogs, branded with their owners’ marks, wandered and rooted until the time came for hunting them out and slaughtering them. Where rude clearings had been made in the wilderness there were small, ill-kept farms. Nearly all the people were small farmers, whose work was done chiefly by black slaves or by white servants. ”

“ History does not record a more extraordinary choice, nor one more completely justified.
This year 1753 marks the end of the period when we can deal with the history of Virginia by itself. The struggle against France, so long sustained by New York and New England, acquires a truly Continental character when Virginia comes to take part in it. Great public questions forthwith come up for solution, some of which are not set at rest until after that young land surveyor has become President of the United States. ”

“ But, with all this beauty and richness of the interior country, the obstacles presented at the coast turned the first great wave of English colonization into Virginia; and thereafter the settlement of North Carolina was determined largely, and by no means to its advantage, by the social conditions of the older colony.
Unkempt life.
In its early days North Carolina was simply a portion of Virginia’s frontier; and to this wild frontier the shiftless people who could not make a place for themselves in Virginia society, including many of the “mean whites,” flocked in large numbers. ”

“ The Cavaliers who came to Virginia were staunch and honourable men who believed—with John Winthrop and Edmund Burke and Alexander Hamilton—that society is most prosperous when a select portion of the community governs the whole. Such a doctrine seems to me less defensible than the democratic views of Samuel Adams and Thomas Jefferson and Herbert Spencer, but it is still entitled to all the courtesies of debate. ”

“ At such a crisis Governor Dinwiddie had need of the ablest man Virginia could afford, to undertake a journey of unwonted difficulty through the wilderness, to negotiate with Indian tribes, and to warn the advancing 400 Frenchmen to trespass no further upon English territory. As the best person to entrust with this arduous enterprise, the shrewd old Scotchman selected a lad of one-and-twenty, Lord Fairfax’s surveyor, George Washington. ”

“ If such was the first notion of Cecilius he promptly relinquished it and gracefully conceded the claim of the assembly to take the initiative in legislation. But the veto power, without any limitation of time, was a prerogative which he would not give up. At any moment he could use this veto power to repeal a law, and this was felt by the colonists to be a grievance. On such constitutional matters, when we read of antagonism between the proprietor and the assembly, it is the burgesses that we are to understand as in opposition, since the council was almost sure to uphold the proprietor. ”

“ By the light of those flames most hideous atrocities were to be seen,—such a carnival of cruelty and lust as would have disgraced the Middle Ages. After three bestial weeks the buccaneers departed with a long train of mules laden with booty, and several hundred prisoners, most of whom were held for ransom. Among these were many gentlewomen and children, whom Morgan treated savagely. He kept them half dead with hunger and thirst, and swore that if they failed to secure a ransom he would sell them for slaves in Jamaica. ”

“ Every such negro could raise in a single year much more indigo or rice than would repay the cost of his purchase, so that it was actually more profitable to 327 work him to death than to take care of him. Assuming, then, that human nature in South Carolina was neither better nor worse than in other parts of the civilized world, we need not be surprised when told that the relations between master and slave were noticeably different from what they were in Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina. ”

“ The list of those who were pillaged by his followers is largely a list of the names most honoured in Virginia, the great-grandfathers of the illustrious men who were among the foremost in winning independence for the United States and in building up our federal government. It is also largely a list of the names of Cavaliers who had come from England to Virginia since 1649. The political ideas of these men were surely not democratic. If they were devout disbelievers in popular government, the fact is in nowise to their discredit. ”

“ His portrait, painted from life, shows us a masterful face, clean shaven, with powerful jaw, firm-set lips, imperious eyes, and long hair flowing upon his shoulders over a red coat richly ruffled.103 Such was the man whom Stuyvesant chose to dispute Lord Baltimore’s title to the smiling fields of New Amstel and Altona. He well understood the wisdom of claiming everything, and when the discovery of North America by John Cabot was cited against him, he boldly set up the priority of Christopher Columbus as giving the Spaniards a 141 claim upon the whole hemisphere. ”