Raleigh, North Carolina

“ Queen Elizabeth, after whom the new land was named “Virginia,” is easily the premier sovereign of England; Sir Walter Raleigh, poet, soldier, and statesman, and the inspiration and financial mainstay of the Roanoke Island project, is the best remembered of gallant English courtiers; Sir Richard Grenville, of the Revenge, who brought the first colony to America in 1585 and left another small group there in 1586, is the Elizabethan hero who in 1592 taught English sailors how to dare and die in the face of overwhelming odds ”

“ Governor White could not finance another expedition to America himself, and Raleigh, although enjoying a large income at times, spent lavishly. Some of the money and energy that might have gone into the Virginian enterprise, Raleigh expended, during 1587-1602, in colonizing estates which he had received in Ireland. The Virginian enterprise would have required a prince’s purse, but Raleigh was not a prince. Walsingham died in 1590, a blow to Raleigh. In July 1592, Raleigh was disgraced and imprisoned for marrying Elizabeth Throckmorton without 27 the Queen’s knowledge or consent. ”

“ Ralegh's settlement on the Virginian coast, the first attempt which Englishmen had made to claim North America for their own, had soon proved a failure. The introduction of tobacco and the potato into Europe dates from his voyage of discovery, but the energy of his colonists was distracted by the delusive dream of gold, the hostility of the native tribes drove them from the coast, and it is through the gratitude of later times for what he strove to do, rather than for what he did, that Raleigh, the capital of North Carolina, preserves his name. ”

“ They will ever remain the foundation-stones of the great structure known and respected among nations as the United States of America, and were laid by Sir Walter Raleigh at Roanoak Island, on the coast of North Carolina, which was then called Virginia. The intervening years have brought great results, those early struggles have ripened into success and greatness beyond Raleigh's most sanguine dreams. A new race has arisen, yet bearing the characteristics of the race from which it sprung. ”

“ The first undertakings at colonization from England were inspired and led by Sir Walter Raleigh. After unsuccessful attempts, in conjunction with his elder half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, to establish settlements in Newfoundland, Raleigh obtained a grant from Queen Elizabeth, in 1584, under which he planted a colony of 108 settlers, commanded by Ralph Lane, on Roanoke Island, within the boundaries of the present State of North Carolina. ”

“ Fort Raleigh, because of the tragic mystery of the “Lost Colony,” memorializes better than any other site the cost of early English colonial effort. To a certain degree it also commemorates a forgotten part of the price that England paid for English liberty. The colonists at Fort Raleigh were, in a sense, sacrificed that England might employ all her fighting strength against the juggernaut of Spain in the battle against the Armada. To relieve the Roanoke colony in 1588, in the place of Grenville’s warships, only two small pinnaces could be spared, and these did not reach Roanoke. ”

“ A female seminary of real excellence and great popularity had been founded in 1804, and young ladies from all the Southern States were receiving a good education in this retired and healthful region.
4. Raleigh then contained about eight hundred people: Fayetteville twice as many. Wilmington and New Bern were the largest and most important towns in the State, but were still limited in population and trade. Edenton and Halifax had each lost importance, and many villages were surpassing them both in number of inhabitants and in extent of trade. ”

“ The inhabitants, indignant at being transferred without their consent, revolted and set up the State of Franklin. Governor Caswell was able to cause the dissolution of this abortive State, and the lands were again ceded in 1790. The next year the capital was located at Raleigh. In 1795 the State University was opened for students. The question of a market for their products was a serious one to the residents of the middle and eastern counties. After 1820 much money was spent in the fruitless attempt to make the shallow rivers navigable, and to connect them by canals. ”

“ The heart of the People, North and South, is for the Union. Indications, too plain to be mistaken, announce the fact, both in the East and the West of the States in rebellion. In North Carolina and Arkansas the fatal charm at length is broken. At Raleigh and Little Rock the dips of honest and brave men are unsealed, and an independent press is unlimbering its artillery. When its rifled cannon shall begin to roar, the hosts of treasonable sophistry — the mad delusions of the day — will fly like the Rebel army through the passes of yonder mountain. ”

“ For this cause Roger Green, a clergyman, in 1653, led a considerable colony to the banks of the Chowan and Roanoke Rivers; but even before this, there were probably scattered settlements over most all the region north of the Albemarle Sound, of which we have no reliable account.
QUESTIONS. 1. What is said of the attempted settlement upon Roanoke Island?
2. What had the expedition cost Raleigh?
3. What was Raleigh's greatest loss?
4. Who succeeded Queen Elizabeth? What kind of a man was King James I. ? ”

“ No man is perfect, nor was Raleigh perfect. But he was a great man, and although all his plans failed we remember him as the first great coloniser, the first Englishman to gain possession of any part of North America. ”

“ Realisation of the queen’s dream, and desire after a shorter route via the north-west to China, was the professed object of the adventurers, but Raleigh was careful to secure subsidiary material advantages, and the charter gave full powers to the adventurers to inhabit or retain, build or fortify, at Raleigh’s discretion, any remote lands that he might find hitherto unoccupied by any Christian power. ”

“ So, Raleigh is a city in which there is love of beauty, and interest in education; but the common people of the county are at least forty years behind the same class of people in Vermont. Moreover, in Macon are many very fine residences, and the city may boast of its gentility and its respect for the nourishing elegancies of life; but a dozen miles out are large neighborhoods not yet half-civilized. ”

“ History has preserved no stranger, more mysterious story than the next experiment of Sir Walter Raleigh. To insure the permanence of his second colony, he decided to send families, women and children, to the fruitful Islands of Roanoke, to make a permanent home, and found "the City of Raleigh." A fleet of transport ships carried eighty-nine men, seventeen women, and eleven little children, with every appliance [10] for comfort, and ample provision of implements of husbandry. The colony arrived in August, after a five months' voyage, and were dismayed to find the island strewn with human bones. ”

“ We know not any man's history more romantic in its commencement, or more touching in its close, than that of Raleigh—from the first dawn of his fortunes, when he threw his cloak before the foot of royalty, throughout his brilliant rise and long imprisonment, to the hour when royalty rejoiced in his merciless martyrdom. ”

“ But Raleigh was an energetic man of business as well as a poet, a man of action more than of dreams, and, during his residence in Ireland, he did much in various ways to promote the material prosperity of the people. ”

“ Raleigh's tall and handsome figure, his dark hair, lofty forehead, resolute bearing, alert expression and spirited wit combined to form an imposing personality, and all the advantages that nature had given him were heightened by a gorgeous splendor in dress and jewels. ”

“ Lord Warden of the Stannaries; business which of course keeps him in England, business which he performs, as he does all things, wisely and well. Such a generation as this ought really to respect Raleigh a little more, if it be only for his excellence in their own especial sphere—that of business. Raleigh is a thorough man of business. He can ‘toil terribly,’ and what is more, toil to the purpose. In all the everyday affairs of life, he remains without a blot ”

“ The government is administered under a charter of 1899, which provides for a mayor, elected biennially, and a unicameral council that controls elections of subordinate officials, excepting the tax collector and city clerk, who are chosen by popular vote. Population, in 1890, 12,678; in 1900, 13,643. The site of Raleigh was selected as a location of the permanent capital of the State in 1792, and in the same year the city was laid out and named in honor of Sir Walter Ralegh. In 1794 the Legislature met here for the first time, and by acts of 1795 and 1803 Raleigh was incorporated. ”

“ To Raleigh the change was the setting of a great hope, for to Queen Elizabeth he owed his fortunes, and was proud of the debt. To Raleigh more than to any other one man, notwithstanding his many faults, the Queen owed the brilliancy of her Court, the efficacy and terror of her navy, the enterprise and intelligent energy of her people, to say nothing of the adventurous spirit of colonization which he awoke in his efforts in Western Planting. The glory of his achievements today is the glory alike of England and English America. King James let no man down so far as he did Raleigh. ”

“ Raleigh’s spirit is stirred within him. If ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ fiction as it is, once excited us, how must a far worse reality have excited Raleigh, as he remembered that these Spaniards are as yet triumphant in iniquity, and as he remembered, too, that these same men are the sworn foes of England, her liberty, her Bible, and her Queen? What a deed, to be beforehand with them for once! To dispossess them of one corner of that western world, where they have left no trace but blood and flame! He will go himself: he will find El Dorado and its golden Emperor ”

“ While Raleigh has not the look of age which characterizes many old southern cities, causing them to delight the eye and the imagination, its broad streets have here and there a building old enough to remove from the town any air of raw newness, and to make it a homelike looking place. ”

“ He took a confidential place by the Queen's side, but so unobtrusively that in these earliest years, at least, his presence leaves no perceptible mark on the political history of the country. Great in so many fields, eminent as a soldier, as a navigator, as a poet, as a courtier, there was a limit even to Raleigh's versatility, and he was not a statesman. ”

“ Raleigh, in his better days, was too much occupied in action to have cultivated all the powers of a poet, which require solitude and perpetual meditation, and a refinement of sensibility, such as intercourse with business and the world deadens! ”

“ There was a ball at the Old Raleigh during the Christmas holydays, to which the city as well as its vicinity sent a numerous representation of those soft, fragile and dove-like females, who, springing like so many Venus' from the bosom of the sea, claim their home only in the tranquil and affectionate hearths of tide-water Virginia. Like the mocking bird, their dwelling place is amid the ripple of the murmuring tide, while their song is the melody which thrills into life the fearful and eternal solitude of the pine forests. ”

“ There is a blessing upon the meek of the earth, but I do not present Raleigh to you as a humble-minded man. In that wonderful Elizabethan age there were blossoming, side by side, the meekness of Hooker, the subtlety of Bacon, the platonic dream of Spenser, the imperturbable wisdom of Shakespeare. ”

“ This famous passage is one of those over which the virtuosity of modern times, rejoicing in evil, has hung so fondly, as giving melancholy proof of the ‘duplicity of Raleigh’s character’; as if a man who once in his life had told an untruth was proved by that fact to be a rogue from birth to death: while others have kindly given him the benefit of a doubt whether the letter were not written after a private marriage, and therefore Raleigh, being ‘joined unto’ some one already, had a right to say that he did not wish to be joined to any one. ”

“ Sir Walter Raleigh was executed on the twenty-ninth day of October, 1618, in the Old Palace Yard. He died with Christian heroism. Distinguished as a navigator and discoverer, a naval and military commander, an author in prose and verse, a wit, a courtier, a statesman and philosopher, there is perhaps in English history no name associated with such lofty and versatile genius, so much glorious action, and so much wise reflection. ”

“ The existing documents which illustrate Raleigh's life in Ireland during 1581, and they are somewhat numerous, give the student a much higher notion of his brilliant aptitude for business and of his active courage than of his amiability. His vivacity and ingenuity were sources of irritation to him, as the vigour of an active man may vex him in wading across loose sands. There was no stability and apparently no hope or aim in the policy of the English leaders, and Raleigh showed no mock-modesty in his criticism of that policy. ”

“ We must try to realise to ourselves the way in which such men as Raleigh looked not only at Elizabeth, but at all the world. There was, in plain palpable fact, something about the Queen, her history, her policy, the times, the glorious part which England, and she as the incarnation of the then English spirit, were playing upon earth, which raised imaginative and heroical souls into a permanent exaltation—a ‘fairyland,’ as they called it themselves, which seems to us fantastic, and would be fantastic in us, because we are not at their work, or in their days. ”