Old Dominion

“ In this city, the capital of the Old Dominion, the heart of the commonwealth, which by one ventricle receives and through the other discharges the life blood of intelligence and public spirit throughout your empire, aye, and from a quarter and from many quarters where such a voice was least expected its tones have been firm, manly, and intrepid. ”

“ And why in the three hundred years of American history it should be given to the Old Dominion to be the grand mother, not only of States, but of the men by whom States and empires are formed, it might be curious were it possible for us to inquire. ”

“ There are great plantation houses still standing in the Old Dominion, which were spared the torch of war by the mercy of God, and whose walls hold aloft the handiwork of the finest painters of England, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ”

“ About this time arrived Claude de Richebourg with a number of Huguenots who settled above the Falls. First and last, Virginia received many of this good French strain. The Old Dominion had now a population of over eighty thousand persons—whites, Indians in no great number, and negroes. The red men are mere scattered dwellers in the land east of the mountains. There are Indian villages, but they are far apart. Save upon the frontier fringe, the Indian attacks no more. But the African is here to stay. ”

“ Virginia, no less than Massachusetts, was aware of the importance of intercolonial coöperation. In the middle of the seventeenth century, the Old Dominion began treaties of commerce and amity with New York and the colonies of New England. In 1684 delegates from Virginia met at Albany with the agents of New York and Massachusetts to discuss problems of mutual defense. A few years later the Old Dominion coöperated loyally with the Carolinas in defending their borders against Indian forays. ”

“ They share faithfully in the national development, and honourably serve the welfare of the whole Dominion—sometimes with a too careful and unsympathetic reserve—but within their own beloved province they retain as zealously and more jealously than the most devoted Highland men their language and their customs, and faithfully conserve the civil laws which mark them off as clearly from the English provinces as Jersey and Guernsey are distinguished from the United Kingdom. ”

“ The Dominion is steadily and surely rising in wealth, in unity of feeling, in all that makes a nation. Our territories are enormous, and no one need travel far in any Province, but he will find new clearings and fresh settlements; while land in abundance and of great excellence, as compared with much in the old country, can be had almost for the asking.
Throughout our greater Britain, and steadily and surely upon these our eastern coasts, the people increase from decade to decade, notwithstanding the great attractions offered by the prairie lands of the interior. ”

“ Virginia is not only one of the Middle States, she is the middle State of the Union in many other respects, but especially in her theological attitude. While, to the north and east of her, religious systems that have weathered the storms of centuries are rocking to their foundations, nay, tumbling before our very eyes, undermined by the incessant rush of opinions ever newer, more radical, more aggressive; and while, to the southward and westward, we see the instability and recklessness inseparable from younger communities, the Old Dominion stands immovable as a rock ”

“ The day was dark to John Quincy Adams and his followers, not only because they had been deprived of power, but because the rural sections of the East, the towns and villages which had been active and prosperous from 1783 to 1807, showed almost as many signs of stagnation and premature decay as did the Old Dominion, where public men were in a state of alarm and dismay. ”

“ Not only did the first English colony establish itself in Virginia, and the first known tobacco come from there—a point the importance of which cannot be overstated—but the history of the Old Dominion is in every way more romantic and heroic than that of any other State. The first popular government existed there long before the Revolution, and at the time of the break with the mother country Virginia was the most wealthy and populous of the Colonies. ”

“ The best families of the Old Dominion, tide-water tobacco planters of considerable estates, admirers and imitators of the minor aristocracy of England, took it as a matter of course that the political fortunes of the province were committed to their care and for many generations had successfully maintained the public interest against the double danger of executive tyranny and popular licentiousness. ”

“ His wealth and vigorous progressive spirit had given him a certain degree of influence among the middle classes of the community, but his uncouth manner, and a suspicion that he was not altogether free from the degradation of slave-dealing, had, to his great mortification and in spite of his persistent efforts, excluded him from social intercourse with the aristocracy of the Old Dominion. ”

“ James Otis in 1765 declared the Virginia Resolutions to be treasonable. It was precisely their treasonable flavor that electrified the country, while the fact that they came from the Old Dominion made men think that a union of the colonies, so essential to successful resistance, might 78 be achieved in spite of all. The Old Dominion, counted the most English of the colonies in respect to her institutions and her sympathies, had a character for loyalty that, in any matter of opposition to Britain, gave double weight to her action. ”

“ So while the Old-World feudalism and despotism underlaid the colonization enterprise of New France, and sought to reproduce and reconstruct itself among these forests on our North and West, a pure and rejuvenated democracy was rooting itself and rearing its popular institutions and sway among the hard-working farmers of New England when their settlements were still on the seaboard. Possibly if France had allowed and encouraged, instead of expressly prohibiting, her heretic Huguenots to represent her in her New-World colonization, she might still have had provinces and dominion here. ”

“ Health and joy to them all—as many as are now alive! I owe them a thanksgiving for their early benevolence.
"Swallow Barn exhibits a picture of country life in Virginia, as it existed in the first quarter of the present century. Between that period and [Pg 152] the present day, time and what is called "the progress," have made many innovations there, as they have done every where else. The Old Dominion is losing somewhat of the raciness of her once peculiar, and—speaking in reference to the locality described in these volumes—insulated cast of manners. ”

“ New France was not only as much a part of the empire as any portion of the realm, but it was to be, so far as circumstances would allow, administered as a home province, with a transfer of feudal institutions, seigniories, bishoprics, proprietary rights, noble and privileged orders, and stingy allotments for common people. As the event proved, these distinctive and primary characteristics of French dominion in America, so widely contrasted with the course and principles of the English colonists, could not be transferred from the Old World so that they would take root here. ”

“ Though these pioneers were generously aided by the British Government with grants of land and supplies, their hardships and disappointments during the first years in the wilderness were such as would have daunted any but brave and desperate men and women whom fate had winnowed. Yet all but a few, who drifted back to their old homes, held out; and the foundations of two more provinces of the future Dominion—New Brunswick and Upper Canada—were thus broadly and soundly laid by the men whom future generations honored as "United Empire Loyalists." ”

“ It would be difficult to meet at the North or in England two men with their faces turned away from the old times more completely than these, more averse from the old plantation ways; and, as far as I could learn or hear, they are fair specimens of the kind of men who are taking possession of the Old Dominion. Their neighbors consist of three classes: men who had by extraordinary exertions saved some or all of their land after the war, and had by borrowing or economizing managed to stock it, and are now prospering, by dint of close management and constant attention, on the Northern plan ”

“ Unfortunately, this young Dominion, whose history as a European settlement is comprised within the lifetime of its oldest inhabitants, is already reproducing some of the saddest problems of civilization which perplex the people of the Old World. We started with every advantage in the shape of a favourable climate and rich natural resources. The original settlers were, for the most part, men and women of sturdy determination, enterprising spirit, and strong physique. ”

“ As your former member is about to join the number of your friends who are already there, you will allow him to say a good word for those provinces of the Dominion, the threshold of which civilisation has already passed, and whose fair vacant chambers tempt the settler from the Old World to enter further and to occupy. ”

“ Silently we gazed at the ancient pile, the most impressive ruin of English colonization. A hollow shaft of brick, with two high arched openings, a crumbling top, and a hold on the heart of every American.
How fitting that the four little broken walls alone remaining of all that the colonists built, should be not the walls of house or tavern or fort, but of the tower of the village church! Almost with the solemn significance of a tomb above the ashes of the dead, stands the sacred pile over the buried remains of old James Towne. ”

“ Somewhat careless of the feelings of the Hudson's Bay Company officers, and also of the views of the old settlers of the Colony—especially of the French-speaking section—the Dominion Government sent a reckless body of men to survey the lands near the French settlements and to rouse animosity in the minds of the Metis. ”

“ As Gadabout sturdily headed her stubby bow up the wide, majestic waterway, we looked about us. After all, what had three centuries done to this gateway of American civilization? Surely not very much. Keeping one's eyes in the right direction it was easy to blot out three hundred years, and to feel that we were looking upon about the same scene that those first colonists beheld—just the primeval waste of rolling waters, lonely marsh, and wooded shore.
But eyes are unruly things ”

“ When at last, in 1699, the long struggle was given up and the seat of government was removed to Williamsburg, nothing but utter dissolution was left for James Towne.
The fated little village had played its part. Through untold suffering and a woeful cost of human life, it had fought on until England obtained a firm hold in America—a hold that was to make the New World essentially Anglo-Saxon. Then this pioneer colony's mission was ended. ”

“ However, the place in those old days was not exactly an island, although even the early colonists often called it so. There was a low isthmus (that has since been washed away) connecting with the mainland; so that the site of the settlement was in reality a peninsula. It was a low and marshy peninsula, an unhealthful place for the site of a colony. The settlers had a hard time from the beginning. They would have had a harder time but for the presence of a remarkable man among them. He was one of the best of men, or he was one of the worst—dependent upon which history you happen to pick up. ”

“ Here, Captain Newport left them, and sailed back to England. Here, too, he found them again—a pitiful few of them—when he returned the next winter with reinforcements for the colony. By another winter, the palisaded village had extended somewhat, mostly eastward. It then included, so far as we could make out, all the land now within the Confederate fort and probably also the site of the present ruined church and graveyard. Upon this little four-acre settlement hung the destiny of a hemisphere for the next few years. ”

“ Surveys were begun immediately; and by 1876, under the direction of Sandford Fleming, an engineer of eminence, the Intercolonial Railway was completed. It never succeeded in making ends meet financially, but it did make ends meet politically. In great measure it achieved the purpose of national solidification for which it was mainly designed.
Meanwhile the bounds of the Dominion were being pushed westward to the Pacific. The old province of Canada, as the heir of New France, had vague claims to the western plains, but the Hudson's Bay Company was in possession. ”

“ They darken the air when they come and go. There in the forest stand the deer, waiting for your bullet; badgers and foxes, bears, wolves, and catamounts are more plentiful than are hares in England. You taste pleasure indeed when you ride full tilt through the frosty moonlight, down the ringing glades of the forest, and hear the hounds in full cry, and see before you, black against the silver snow, a pack of yelling wolves. ”

“ In the month of August, 1619, a Dutch man-of-war visited Jamestown and sold the settlers twenty negroes, the first introduced into Virginia. Some time before this, Captain Argall sent out, at the expense of the Earl of Warwick, on a "filibustering" cruise to the West Indies, a ship called the Treasurer, manned "with the ablest men in the colony," under an old commission from the Duke of Savoy against the Spanish dominions in the western hemisphere. ”