THE brilliant fact in the first period of the literary history of Virginia, contributed to it by the services of George Sandys, may awaken within us the expectation of finding there, as we pass onward in our researches, other facts of the same kind. But we shall scarcely find them. During the remaining years of the period that we are now studying, the intellectual life of the great colony found vent, if at all, chiefly in some other way than that of literature.

     It was but a few years after the departure of George Sandys from Virginia that the Roman Catholic nobleman, Lord Baltimore, a favorite of King Charles, paying a visit to Virginia, and being fascinated by the loveliness and the opulence of nature there, obtained for his intended colony that choice portion of Virginia which lies north of the Potomac, and which Virginia parted with only after a jealous and reluctant pang that did not cease to ache for many a year afterward. Had the colony of Maryland, for the period now under view, any story of literary achievement for us to tell, it would be fitting to tell it in this place, in immediate connection with the early literary history of Virginia. The most of what was written during those years on either side of the Potomac, was in the form of angry pamphlets relating to their local feuds,¹ or of homely histories of pioneer experience,² or of mere letters about business,—all being too crude and elemental to be of any interest to us in our present studies. The Jesuit priest, Father Andrew White, an accomplished man and a devout servant of his order, wrote in Latin an elegant account³ of the voyage of the first colonists to Maryland, and of “the manifold advantages and riches” of the new land to which he dedicated his life, and in which he hoped would “be sown not so much the seeds of grain and fruit trees as of religion and piety.”⁴

     In exploring this raw and savage time, we encounter one man, John Hammond, who became, in a small way,

an author in spite of himself, an Englishman transformed by his long residence here into a stanch and emphatic American, and belonging equally to Virginia and to Maryland. To the former colony he came in 1635; after living there nineteen years he removed to Maryland, whence at the end of two years, namely, in 1656, he went temporarily to England. Though back in the old home, he was at once homesick for the new one: “It is not long since I came from thence, . . . nor do I intend, by God’s assistance, to be long out of it again;”¹ “it is that country in which I desire to spend the remnant of my days, in which I covet to make my grave.”² As he went about England, two things greatly grieved him: one was, that he found England full of poor people, who were borne down in the press and rush for existence there, ragged, half-fed, crushed mortals, without any hope of ever rising out of their misery so long as they stayed in the old world; the second thing was, that while the most of these hapless people might escape from such troubles by going to the new world-where were room and chance enough for all—they were frightened from the attempt by certain wild and rank calumnies against America which then pervaded England. It seemed, therefore, to be his duty as an American abroad to sit down immediately and write a little book, giving the testimony of his own experience in America for “upward of one and twenty years,” and by the truth putting to flight those clouds of lies that had “blinded and kept off many from going thither whose miseries and misfortunes by staying in England are much to be lamented, and much to be pitied.”³

     Thus was produced in London, and published there, in 1656, an extremely vigorous and sprightly tract, which the author quaintly named “Leah and Rachel,”⁴ these words representing “the two fruitful sisters, Virginia and Maryland.”

Evidently John Hammond had but little practice in the use of a pen; even to himself his sentences looked “so harsh and disordered” that he was rather sorry to fix his name to them. But he was a man of strong sense; he was very much in earnest; and he spoke his mind in a language so manly, frank, and vital, that even its uncouthness cannot take away the interest with which we stop and listen to him. The charges made against Virginia and Maryland, he bluntly repeats, not softening them: “The country is reported to be an unhealthy place; a nest of rogues, . . . dissolute and rocking persons.” As regards Virginia, he admits that” at the first settling and many years after, it deserved those aspersions; nor were they then aspersions, but truths.” For then in England “were jails emptied, youth seduced, and infamous women drilled in” and sent to Virginia; where were “no civil courts of justice but under a martial law, no redress of grievances; complaints were repaid with stripes, moneys with scoffs, tortures made delights, and in a word all and the worst that tyranny could inflict. . . . Yet was not Virginia all this while without divers honest and virtuous inhabitants,” who at last rallied, put down their white barbarians, and brought about the beginning of a better state, causing good laws to be made, encouraging industry, and even sending to England for preachers. Unfortunately not many of the preachers who came in response to this appeal were of the kind to benefit the Virginians or any one else; for “very few of good conversation would adventure thither; . . . yet many came, such as wore black coats, and could babble in a pulpit, roar in a tavern, exact from their parishioners, and rather by their dissoluteness destroy than feed their flocks.”¹ But in spite of all disadvantages, Virginia had done much to redeem itself; had “become a place of pleasure and plenty,” and “a model on which industry may as much improve itself as in any

habitable part of the world;” and both Virginia and Maryland offered an almost boundless opportunity to those who in England had no opportunity at all. This was the burden of his valiant and hearty speech. He could not get over his astonishment at “the dull stupidity of people necessitated in England, who . . . live here a base, slavish, penurious life; . . . choosing rather than they will forsake England to stuff Newgate, Bridewell, and other jails with their carcasses, nay, cleave to Tyburn itself. . . . Others itch out their wearisome lives in reliance of other men’s charities, an uncertain and unmanly expectation. Some, more abhorring such courses, betake themselves to almost perpetual and restless toil and drudgeries, out of which . . . they make hard shift to subsist from hand to mouth, until age or sickness takes them off from labor, and directs them the way to beggary.”¹ One can almost see now the droll mixture of pity and impatience with which this clear-headed and forceful American, fresh from the ample elbow-room and the easy subsistence of his own country, must have stalked about the streets of London and stared at the paltry and painful devices that poor men and women had to resort to there for keeping soul and body together. How grim is the unintended satire of this picture! “I have seriously considered when I have (passing the streets) heard the several cries, and noting the commodities and the worth of them they have carried and cried up and down, how possibly a livelihood could be exacted out of them, as to cry ‘matches,’ ‘small-coal,’ ‘blacking,’ ‘pen and ink,’ ‘thread laces,’ and a hundred more such kind of trifling merchandises. Then looking on the nastiness of their linen habits and bodies, I conclude if gain sufficient could be raised out of them for subsistence, yet their manner of living was degenerate and base, and their condition . . . far below the meanest servant in Virginia.”² One day this determined student

of social science got his eye fastened upon an individual specimen of wretchedness in the London streets, a poor fagot-pedler, whom our author thereupon followed up and investigated thoroughly hour by hour. “I saw a man heavily loaden with a burden of fagots on his back, crying, ‘dry fagots,’ ‘dry fagots.’ He travelled much ground, bawled frequently, and sweat with his burden; but I saw none buy. Near three hours I followed him, in which time he rested. I entered into discourse with him; offered him drink, which he thankfully accepted of. I inquired what he got by each burden when sold: he answered me, ‘three pence.’ I further asked him what he usually got a day: he replied, ‘some days nothing, some days sixpence; sometimes more, but seldom.’ Methought it was a pitiful life, and I admired how he could live on it!”¹ Therefore he would speak out the truth about Virginia and Maryland, and thus “stop those black-mouthed babblers,” who, abusing “God’s great blessing in adding to England so flourishing a branch,” wickedly persuaded “many souls rather to follow desperate and miserable courses in England than to engage in so honorable an undertaking as to travel . . . there.”²

     This, indeed, is genuine American talk. Here, certainly, in these brusque sentences, do we find a literature smacking of American soil and smelling of American air. Here, thus early in our studies, do we catch in American writings that new note of hope and of help for humanity in distress, and of a rugged personal independence, which, almost from the hour of our first settlements in this land, America began to send back, with unveiled exultation, to Europe. Henceforward, for myriads of men and women in the ancient nations, to whom life had always been a hard battle and a losing one, this single word America blossomed into a whole vocabulary of words, all testifying plainly to them of a better time coming, of a reasonable

chance, somewhere, even in this world, of getting a fresh start in life, and of winning the victory over poverty, nastiness, and fear; nourishing within them a manly might and pride, a resolute discontent with failure, a rightful ambition to get on in the race, a healthy disdain of doing in this life anything less than one’s best. For the first time, perhaps, in the long experience of mankind on this planet, was then proclaimed this strong and jocund creed; and it was proclaimed first, as it has been since proclaimed continually, in American literature. Of that literature it still constitutes a most original, racy, and characteristic trait.

     Whatsoever distinction may be derived from the little book that has been just spoken of, Maryland and Virginia may divide it between them. We have now to mention a book the distinction of which belongs to Maryland alone. In 1666, just ten years after John Hammond’s fearless and dashing brochure started out to tilt with English misapprehensions of America, there appeared in London another brochure on a somewhat similar errand,—an errand explained in the work itself in some lines addressed to the author:

     This book, altogether a jovial, vivacious, and most amusing production, was entitled “A Character of the Province of Maryland.”² Of its author, George Alsop, little is known. He was born in 1638; and he had served in London a two years’ apprenticeship to something—probably to the profession of solicitor—when, in 1658, being just twenty years old, and breathing out threatenings and

slaughter against Oliver Cromwell, he embarked for Maryland, so poor that he bound himself, as is supposed, to repay the price of his transportation by laboring as a servant for four years after his arrival in the colony. He had the good fortune to fall into the hands of a generous master; and with his unique gift of cheerfulness he even found in his four years of servitude “a commanding and undeniable enjoyment.”¹ The restoration of King Charles brought a perfect tempest of pleasure to this original Mark Tapley; and he celebrated in verse the satisfaction with which, in his distant abiding-place, he reflected on

     As soon as he could do so, he seems to have gone back to England. Whether he remained there, or returned to Maryland, is not known. At any rate, for Maryland he cherished only kind recollections; he was willing, probably for a consideration, to be her literary champion; and in the year already named, he huddled together and printed that medley of frolicsome papers, which appear to have been written mostly in Maryland, and which set forth from various droll points of view a description of that province. There was but one other American book³ produced in the seventeenth century that for mirthful, grotesque, and slashing energy, can compare with this. Alsop’s book is written both in prose and in verse, and is a heterogeneous mixture of fact and fiction, of description and speculation, of wild fun and wild nonsense. “If I have . . . composed anything,” says this literary merry-andrew, in his dedication of the book to Lord Baltimore, “that’s wild and confused, it is because I am so myself;

and the world, as far as I can perceive, is not much out of the same trim.” Then turning to “the merchant adventurers for Maryland,” he tells them pertly: “This dish of discourse was intended for you at first, but it was manners to let my Lord have the first cut, the pie being his.” From the beginning to the end of his book, nearly everything is jocular, much of it coarse, some of it indelicate and even obscene. His good humor is of the loud-laughing kind. He is a scaramouch with pen in hand, and he pokes fun at himself as at everybody else. “I have ventured to come abroad in print, and if I should be laughed at for my good meaning, it would so break the credit of my understanding that I should never dare to show my face upon the Exchange of conceited wits again.”¹ His own praises, likewise, he sounds in lusty fashion; yet he hopes that no one will think this unjustifiable: “For I dwell so far from my neighbors, that if I do not praise myself, nobody else will.”² After the frequent manner of authors in those days, he has, besides prefatory addresses to patrons, readers, and friends in general, a prefatory address to the book itself:

     His direct account of Maryland he presents in four parts: first, the country; second, its inhabitants; third,

the arrangements for carrying poor people thither; fourth, traffic and agriculture. He then gives a description of “the wild and naked Indians of Maryland, their customs, manners, absurdities, and religion.” Finally, he inserts some of the letters—piquant and ridiculous they are—which he wrote while in Maryland to his friends at home.

     Even his rough voyage over the sea, and the disagreeable effects of it upon himself, he cannot speak of seriously. “We had a blowing and dangerous passage of it,” he says; “and for some days after I arrived I was an absolute Copernicus, it being one point of my moral creed to believe the world had a pair of long legs, and walked with the burthen of creation upon her back. For, to tell you the very truth of it, for some days upon land, after so long and tossing a passage, I was so giddy that I could hardly tread an even step; so that all things, both above and below, . . . appeared to me like the Kentish Britons to William the Conqueror—in a moving posture.”¹ Undertaking to give some idea of the topography of the province, he accomplishes it, but under a rather bold anatomical image: “Maryland is a province situated upon the large extending bowels of America;”² and the country itself is “pleasant in respect of the multitude of navigable rivers and creeks that conveniently and most profitably lodge within the arms of her green-spreading and delightful woods.”³ He is captivated by the beauty of this magnificent and merry new world: “He who out of curiosity desires to see the landskip of the creation drawn to the life, or to read nature’s universal herbal without book, may, with the optics of a discreet discerning, view Maryland dressed in her green and fragrant mantle of the Spring,”⁴ where the trees, plants, and flowers “by their dumb vegetable oratory each hour speak to the inhabitants in silent acts, that they need not look for any other terrestrial paradise to

suspend or tire their curiosity upon while she is extant.”¹ He is delighted also at the multitude and the physical thrift of the animals wandering in these illimitable forests; and he expresses his peculiar enthusiasm in his own comic and obstreperous style: “Herds of deer are as numerous in this province of Maryland as cuckolds can be in London, only their horns are not so well dressed and tipped with silver;”² “the park they traverse their ranging and unmeasured walks in, is bounded and impanelled in with no other pales than the rough and billowed ocean.”³ “Here, if the devil had such a vagary in his head as he had once among the Gadarenes, he might drown a thousand head of hogs, and they’d ne’er be missed; for the very woods of this province swarm with them.”⁴

     In the year 1676 there occurred in Virginia an outburst of popular excitement which, for a hundred and fifty years afterward, was grotesquely misrepresented by the historians, and which only within recent years has begun to work itself clear of the traditional perversion. This excitement is still indicated by the sinister name that was at first applied to it, Bacon’s rebellion. With this remarkable event the literary history of Virginia now becomes curiously involved; and it is necessary to our purposes that we should give here at least an outline of it.

     Upon the restoration of Charles the Second in 1660, the Old Dominion of Virginia, which is accurately described by its latest historian as having been “the most Anglican . . . and most loyal of the colonies,”⁵ was treated with characteristic ingratitude by the Stuart king, whose accession to power, it was wittily said, signified indemnity to his enemies and oblivion to his friends.

There was long a tradition in this country that at his coronation the restored monarch wore a robe of silk sent to him by his cavalier subjects in Virginia. “But this,” bitterly remarks the old Virginia historian, Beverley,¹ “was all the reward the country had for their loyalty.” Even this reward, however, the country did not have; for the agreeable tradition relating to the coronation-robe has now been exploded.² The first parliament under King Charles passed a series of navigation acts so selfish and so pitiless as nearly to annihilate every agricultural and commercial interest of Virginia, to lead to a general paralysis of industry there, and to excite a universal discontent and alarm. Moreover, in disregard of all valid land-titles and of all valuable improvements upon the lands, the king kept giving away to his favorites large tracts of the most populous territory in Virginia, ignoring the real owners of the soil, or transferring them with it, as if they had been but herds of cattle or gangs of serfs. These acts of parliamentary and regal injustice, continued recklessly from 1660 to 1676, were enough to destroy all public and private prosperity in Virginia, and to give to them, instead of their old loyal serenity and submissiveness, hearts burning with exasperation or sullen with a sort of lawless despair. But even this was not all. Just on the tangled western verge of the narrow territory occupied by the white settlements in Virginia, began the wilderness—the still immense and impenetrable lair of the red men. Twice before in the life of the colony, first in 1622 and again in 1639, Virginia had tasted the horrors of an Indian massacre. And now once more, in the spring of 1676, at the very moment when the minds of men were torn by anxieties at the lawless interference of the king and parliament with their most valuable rights, and were in anguish over the next possible development in this tragedy of despotism from beyond the ocean, suddenly, from the opposite quarter,

out of the abysses of the woods, there swept toward them the heart-shaking terror of an aggressive Indian war. In a tumult and thicket of miseries like this, the people called earnestly upon the royal governor, Sir William Berkeley, as their military and civil chief, to take the necessary measures for repelling these horrid assaults—to organize the people into an army and to lead them against the foe, so that a thousand scattered homes might be protected from the peril that was moving swiftly toward them. For reasons that cannot here be described in detail—the basest reasons of jealousy, indolence, selfishness, and especially avarice—this renowned governor gave to the peo ple promises of help, and promises only. But something was to be done at once by somebody. Nearer and nearer came the great danger, and still bloodier and more fre quent became the onslaughts of the Indians. Then the people arose in their anger, and since their governor would not lead them to the war, with unanimous voice they called upon one of their own number to be their leader, Nathaniel Bacon, a man only thirty years of age, of considerable landed wealth, of high social connections, a lawyer trained in the Inns of Court in London, an orator of commanding eloquence, a man who by his endowments of brain and eye and hand was a natural leader and king of men. He, already exasperated against the Indians by injuries inflicted on his own family, obeyed the call of the people. He led them against the Indians, whom he drove back with tremendous punishment. But by the jealous and haughty despot in the governor’s chair, he was at once proclaimed a rebel; a price was set upon his head; and the people who followed him were put under ban for the crime of doing the duty which the governor himself would not do—the crime of defending their own homes from butchery and flame. Then followed a series of swift conflicts, military and political, between Bacon and the governor; and at last, in that same year, Bacon himself died, suddenly and mysteriously, leaving no

competent successor to carry on the struggle; sadder than all, leaving no barrier between his devoted and now forlorn followers, and the heated vengeance of Sir William Berkeley. Twenty-five persons were hung or shot to soothe that vengeance,—an atrocious fact, which, when reported in England, drew from Charles the Second the indolent sneer that “the old fool had taken away more lives in that naked country,[”] than himself had taken for the murder of his father.¹

     It would have been strange indeed if a great popular movement like this—so deep, passionate, so full of tragic and picturesque incident, and concentrated about a hero who had every personal attribute to inthrall the imaginations of the people—had not found expression in some contemporaneous literary form. And yet for more than a hundred years afterward it was not known that there had been any such expression. Shortly after our Revolutionary War, however, it was discovered that in an old and honorable family in the Northern Neck of Virginia, some manuscripts had been preserved, evidently belonging to the seventeenth century, evidently written by one or more of the adherents of Nathaniel Bacon, and casting much new light upon Bacon’s character, and upon the tumultuous events with which his name is connected.²

     In studying these writings, produced in Virginia in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, every one will be likely to notice the total transformation in the spirit and form of prose style which they represent, when compared with the writings produced in Virginia during the first quarter of the seventeenth century. In the more modern compositions we find no longer the childlike unconsciousness, the idiomatic ease, the simple, fluent, brave picturesqueness that attracted our notice and excited our

pleasure in the earlier ones. Evidently between these two groups of writings have passed fifty years of intellectual change, during which, at the metropolis of English speech and of English literature, fantastic poetry and literary quibbling have come into vogue. Evidently in this interval the strength of writers in our tongue has been given to the chase after conceits and surprises in style; the reign of French mannerisms has come in with the reign of the second Charles, and with it the ambition for smartness of phrase, for epigram, antithesis, and pun. The author of the prose portions of these manuscripts reflects, on this side of the ocean, the literary foibles that were in fashion on the other side of the ocean. He composes his sentences as if he were writing for a club of jaded London wits, and were conscious of being unable, by the inward worth of his ideas, to hold their flabby attention, and of having to do so by continually fluttering in their faces the ribbons and tassels of his brisk phrases. But apart from the disagreeable air of verbal affectation and of effort in these writings, they are undeniably spirited; they produce before us departed scenes with no little energy and life; and the flavor of mirth which seasons them is not unpleasant.

     The writer gives, in the first place, an account of the preliminary troubles with the Indians; then of the invocation to Bacon to lead the people, who had no other leader; then of prominent events, political and military, during Bacon’s brief but most magnanimous and most efficient public career; finally of his death, and of the futile efforts of a worthless fellow named Ingram to catch the hero’s mantle, and to play out the remainder of the hero’s part. The introductory sentences of the narrative have perished, and the story opens in a broken way with a description of a band of Indians besieged in some rude, extemporized fortification of theirs, by a half-organized army of white men. The Indians “found that their store was too short to endure a long siege without making empty bellies; and that empty bellies make weak hearts,

which always makes an unfit serving man to wait upon the god of war. Therefore, they were resolved, before that their spirits were down, to do what they could to keep their stores up, as opportunities should befriend them; and although they were by the law of arms, as the case now stood, prohibited the hunting of wild deer, they resolved to see what good might be done by hunting tame horses; which trade became their sport so long that those [white men] who came on horse-back to the siege began to fear they should be compelled to trot home afoot, and glad if they scaped so too. For these beleaguered blades made so many sallies, and the besiegers kept such negligent guards, that there was very few days passed without some remarkable mischief. But what can hold out always? Even stone walls yields to the not-to-be-gainsaid summons of time.” The narrative goes on to relate how, driven by hunger, the besieged Indians at last sent out six of their chief then as commissioners to negotiate a peace with the English; and how the latter, instead of negotiating a peace with the commissioners, knocked out their brains. This unpleasant reception was somewhat discouraging to the Indians in the fort, who resolved “to forsake their station, and not to expostulate the cause any further.[”] Having made this resolution, and destroyed all things in the fort that might be serviceable to the English, they boldly, undiscovered, slip through the leaguer, leaving the English to prosecute the siege, as Schogin’s wife brooded the eggs that the fox had sucked.” Thus the Indians broke out of the pen in which they had been rather carelessly cooped up, and fled away to their forests; but they fled away only to return again at their pleasure, and in larger force, and to swoop down with unsparing havoc upon every white settlement that they could find unprotected. In this hour of extreme danger, the people called Nathaniel Bacon to be their leader, a man endeared to them not so much for what “he had yet done as the cause of their affections,” as for “what, they expected he would

do to deserve their devotion; while with no common zeal they send up their reiterated prayers, first to himself and next to heaven, that he may become their guardian angel, to protect them from the cruelties of the Indians, against whom this gentleman had a perfect antipathy.”

     An account is then given at some length of the energetic measures taken by Bacon against the Indians, of the anger of the governor against him, and of the adroitness with which the parasites of the governor devised means to inflame his anger more and more. “They began . . . to have Bacon’s merits in mistrust, as a luminary that threatened an eclipse to their rising glories; for though he was but a young man, yet they found that he was master and owner of those induements which constitute a complete man.” Meanwhile Bacon himself fell upon the Indians “with abundance of resolution and gallantry . . . in their fastness, killing a great many and blowing up their magazine of arms and powder;” though proclaimed a rebel he then returned home; was elected member of the colonial assembly; was taken prisoner by the governor, and brought to trial upon the charge of rebellion. He was, however, “not only acquitted and pardoned all misdemeanors, but restored to the council-table,” and was likewise promised a commission “as general for the Indian war to the universal satisfaction of the people who passionately desired the same. . . . And here who can do less than wonder at the mutable and impermanent deportments of that blind goddess, Fortune, who in the morning loads man with disgraces and ere night crowns him with honors, sometimes depressing and again elevating, as her fickle humor is to smile or frown. . . . For in the morning, before his trial, he was in his enemies’ hopes and his friends’ fears, judged for to receive the guerdon due to a rebel; . . . and ere night, crowned the darling of the people’s hopes and desires, as the only man fit in Virginia to put a stop unto the bloody resolutions of the heathen. And yet again, as a fuller manifestation

of Fortune’s inconstancy, within two or three days the people’s hopes and his desires were both frustrated by the governor’s refusing to sign the promised commission.” Upon this, Bacon determined no longer to be trifled with, and hurried once more to the capital at the head of five hundred men in arms. His demand for a commission, backed up by such logic, could not be refused; but he had no sooner got it and got out of sight with it, on his way to fight the Indians, than this fine old governor mustered up courage still again to proclaim the young hero a rebel. “The noise of which proclamation . . . soon reached the general’s ears not yet stopped up from listening to ap parent dangers. This strange and unexpected news put him and some with him shrewdly to their trumps. . . . It vexed him to the heart, as he was heard to say, for to think that while he was a-hunting wolves, tigers, and foxes, which daily destroyed our harmless sheep and lambs, he and those with him should be pursued in the rear with a full cry, as a more savage or no less ravenous beast.” The story is then told of the difficult part that Bacon had to play, with one arm keeping back the Indians from murdering the people, and with the other keeping back the governor from murdering him. His white enemies never dared to confront him upon the open field; and even in a campaign of stratagem, they found him more than a match for them. Of his ability to cope with them in craft as well as in force, one amusing incident is given. On learning that he had once more been treated with perfidy by the governor and had been proclaimed a rebel in spite of his commission, Bacon, “with a marvellous celerity, outstripping the swift wings of fame,” pushed back to Jamestown, and in a trice blocked up the governor there, “to the general astonishment of the whole country, especially when that Bacon’s numbers was known, which at this time did not exceed above a hundred and fifty.

     Yet not knowing but that the paucity of his numbers being once known to those in town, it might raise

their hearts to a degree of courage, having so much the odds, . . . he thought it not amiss, since the lion’s strength was too weak, to strengthen the same with the fox’s brains. . . . For immediately he despatcheth two or three parties of horse, . . . to bring into the camp some of the prime gentlewomen whose husbands were in town; where, when arrived, he sends one of them to inform her own and the others’ husbands, for what purposes he had brought them into the camp, namely, to be placed in the forefront of his men, at such time as those in town should sally forth upon him. The poor gentlewomen were mightily astonished at this project, neither were their husbands void of amazements at this subtle invention. If Mr. Fuller thought it strange.that the Devil’s black guard should be enrolled God’s soldiers, they made it no less wonderful that their innocent and harmless wives should thus be entered a white guard to the Devil. This action was a method in war that they were not well acquainted with, . . . that before they could come to pierce their enemies’ sides, they must be obliged to dart their weapons through their wives’ breast. . . . Whether it was these considerations or some others, I do not know, that kept their swords in their scabbards; but this is manifest, that Bacon knit more knots by his own head in one day than all the hands in town was able to untie in a whole week; while these ladies’ white aprons became of greater force to keep the besieged from sallying out than his works—a pitiful trench—had strength to repel the weakest shot that should have been sent into his leaguer, had he not made use of this invention.”

     But through all that terrible summer of 1676, events trod upon one another’s heels; and by the first of October the chief actor in them suddenly died-broken down, as many believed, by exposure, anxiety, and fatigue; or, as others suspected, taken off by poison. The old manuscript tells of the event in characteristic military metaphor: “Bacon having for some time been besieged by

sickness, and now not able to hold out any longer, all his strength and provisions being spent, surrendered up that fort he was no longer able to keep, into the hands of that grim and all-conquering captain, Death.”

     As the cause of his death was a mystery, so a mystery covered even the place of his burial; for his friends, desiring to save his lifeless body from violation at the hands of the victorious party, placed it secretly in the earth; “but where deposited,” says the old manuscript, “till the General Day, not known only to those who are resolutely silent in that particular.” And the love of Bacon’s followers, which in his lifetime had shown itself in services of passionate devotion, and which, after his death, thus hovered as a protecting silence over his hidden grave, found expression also in some sorrowing verses that, upon the whole, are of astonishing poetic merit. Who may have been the author of these verses, it is perhaps now impossible to discover. They are prefaced by the quaint remark that after Bacon “was dead, he was bemoaned in these following lines, drawn by the man that waited upon his person as it is said, and who attended his corpse to their burial place.” Of course this statement is but a blind the author of such a eulogy of the dead rebel could not safely avow himself. But certainly no menial of Bacon’s, no mere “man that waited upon his person,” could have written this noble dirge, which has a stateliness, a compressed energy, and a mournful eloquence, reminding one of the commemorative verse of Ben Jonson.

     Who was there in Virginia two hundred years ago with the genius and the literary practice to write these masterly verses? They alone shed splendor upon the intellectual annals of Virginia for the seventeenth century. If much of that century was for her a literary desert, these verses form a delightful oasis in it.

     During the first epoch in the history of American literature, there were but two localities which produced in the English language anything that can be called literature,—Virginia and New England. We have now inspected whatever literature sprang up in Virginia in the course of that period; and before passing to the investigation of the literature of New England for the same time, we need to stop and review the ground we have already traversed, and gather, if we may, the choicest fruit to be had from studies like these.

     As we have seen, there were in Virginia, during the first twenty years of its existence, as many as six authors who there produced writings that live yet and deserve to live. But at the end of that period and for the remainder of the century, nearly all literary activity in Virginia ceased; the only exception to this statement being the brief anonymous literary memorials which have come down to us from the wrathful and calamitous uprising of the people under Nathaniel Bacon. Even of those six writers of the first two decades, all excepting one, Alexander Whitaker, flitted back to England after a brief residence in Virginia: so that besides Whitaker, the colony had during all that period no writer who gave his name to her as being willing to identify himself permanently with

her fate, and to live and die in her immediate service. This, as we shall see in our further studies, is in startling contrast to the contemporaneous record of New England, which, even in that early period, had a great throng of writers, nearly all of whom took root in her soil.

     These, then, are the salient facts in the early literary history of Virginia. They are certainly very remarkable facts. How do we account for them?

     First of all, we need to ask, who were the people who during that great epoch founded the Old Dominion of Virginia? What sort of people were they? Of what texture of body and brain and spirit? What were they as regards industry, enterprise, thrift? What were their predominant notions concerning church and state? Especially, what did they come to America for? And what were they living for, principally, whether in America or anywhere else? If we can work out for ourselves the true answers to these questions, we shall be able to see why we might expect to get out of the people of Virginia, during the seventeenth century and afterward, no great amount of literature: hospitality, courtly manners, military leadership, political acumen, statesmanship, but not many books.

     A foolish boast still floats on the current of talk, to the effect that Virginia was originally populated to a large extent by families of wealth and of aristocratic rank in England. On the other hand a cruel taunt is sometimes heard in response to this boast, to the effect that the first families of Virginia have really sprung from the loins of bastards, bankrupts, fugitives, transported criminals, and other equivocal Englishmen, who in the seventeenth century left their country for their country’s good. The truth seems to lie in neither of these statements alone, but in both of them mixed together and mutually modified. For the first forty years the larger portion of the settlers in Virginia were of inferior quality, personally and socially: many of them were tramps from the pavements of London; vagrants who wandered to Virginia because

they had to wander somewhere; gentlemen of fashion who were out at the elbow; aristocrats gone to seed; “‘broken men,’ adventurers, bankrupts, criminals.”¹ Indeed, for some time after the first few ship-loads had gone out to Virginia, and the news had come back to England of the perils and distresses that the colonists were fallen into, not even paupers and knaves would any longer go there of their own accord, and the company in London became “humble suitors to his Majesty” to compel “vagabonds and condemned men to go thither. Nay, . . . some did choose to be hanged before they would go thither, and were.”² In the year 1611, Sir Thomas Dale sailed out to Virginia with three hundred emigrants, whom, to use his own words, he gathered “in riotous, lazy, and infected places: such disordered persons, so profane, so riotous, so full of mutiny and treasonable intendments, that in a parcel of three hundred not many gave testimony, beside their names, that they were Christians; and besides, were of such diseased and crazed bodies that the sea-voyage hither and the climate here, but a little scratching them, render them so unable, faint, and desperate of recovery, that . . . not three score may be employed upon any labor or service.”³ But by the year 1617, and thenceforward for many years, the cultivation of tobacco in Virginia became so profitable that the labor even of English convicts was welcome; and they were accordingly transported thither in large numbers and became gradually merged in the general population of the country. In 1619, the first negro slaves were imported into the colony; and thereafter their presence contributed a new element of prosperity and of woe to Virginia. From about the year 1640 to the year 1660, that is during the period of the civil war and of the commonwealth in England,

many persons of much finer and stronger quality emigrated to Virginia; men of force and weight in England, churchmen, cavaliers, who, especially when the cause of the king became hopeless, very naturally moved away to Virginia to find there a permanent home, and a refuge from the odious ascendency of Cromwell and his Puritans. At the restoration in 1660, still another class of emigrants, also forceful and worthy, passed over to Virginia, men of the Cromwellian party, a few even of his iron-sided troopers, who did not care to abide in sight of the jubilant cavaliers, and who chose Virginia in preference to New England, on account of its more genial climate. Moreover, long before the close of the seventeenth century, Virginia had placed severe restrictions upon the importation of malefactors into the colony. Of course, from the first these colonists, whether of weak type or strong, were mostly of the party of the English church, and of royalist views in politics. Unlike the first colonists in New England, they had no dispute with the established order of things in old England; and made Virginia, not a digression from English society, but, as George Bancroft happily describes it, “a continuation of English society.”¹ As compared with the people of New England, they of Virginia were less austere, less enterprising, less industrious, more worldly, more self-indulgent; they were impatient of asceticism, of cant, of long faces, of long prayers; they rejoiced in games, sports, dances, merry music, and in a free, jovial, roistering life.

     In close connection with this study of the people who in our earliest age came to Virginia, we need to observe the most characteristic features of the social organization that they formed after they got there. Though they were of the same stock and speech as the founders of New England, in ideas they were very different; and at once proceeding to incarnate their ideas in the visible

frame of society, they erected in Virginia a fabric of church and state which was of course a veracious expression of themselves, and which presents an almost perfect antithesis to the fabric of church and state which at about the same time began to be erected in New England. The germ of the whole difference between them lay in their different notions concerning the value of vicinity among the units of society. The founders of New England were inclined to settle in groups of families forming neighborhoods, villages, and at last cities; from which it resulted that among them there was a constant play of mind upon mind; mutual stimulation, mutual forbearance also; likewise an easier and more frequent reciprocation of the social forces and benefits; facility in conducting the various industries and trades; facility in maintaining churches, schools, and higher literary organizations; facility in the interchange of books, letters, and the like. The course chosen by the founders of Virginia was precisely the opposite of this: they were inclined to settle not in groups of families forming neighborhoods, but in detached establishments forming individualized domestic centres. They brought with them, as a type of the highest human felicity, the memory of the English territorial lord, seated proudly in his own castle, breasting back all human interference by miles and miles of his own land, which lay outspread in all directions from the view of his castle windows. Their ambition was to become territorial lords in Virginia; to own vast tracts of land, even though unimproved; to set up imitations—crude and cheap imitations they necessarily were—of the vast and superb baronial establishments which they had gazed at in the mother-country. And many things united to favor them in this wish. It was extremely easy to get large tracts of land in Virginia. Every settlet received at the outset a king’s grant of fifty acres for himself and for each person transported by him to Virginia; and in addition to this, by a fee of a few shillings to a clerk in the secretary’s office,

grants could be accumulated upon grants.¹ Moreover Virginia is veined by a multitude of navigable rivers; so that every man who wished to segregate himself in his own mansion, amid a vast territorial solitude, needed not to wait for the construction of a public road to enable him to get to it, and occasionally to get from it; but by erecting his house near to a river bank, he could find almost at his door a convenient shipping-point for the productions of his farm, and a convenient means of ingress and egress for himself and his friends. Thus, from the first, while the social structure of New England was that of concentration, the social structure of Virginia was that of dispersion. The one sought personal community, the other domestic isolation: the one developed cooperation in civil affairs, in mechanism, in trade, in culture, in religion; the other developed solitary action in all these, and consequently made but little progress in any of them: the one tended to mitigate individualism by a thousand social compromises; the other tended to stimulate individualism through an indulgence of it untempered by any adequate colliding personal force. Let any one cast his eye on a map of Virginia for the seventeenth century. He will find local names on that map; but those local names do not indicate cities, or even villages, but merely theoretic organizations of church and state-parishes, over which the inhabitants were so widely scattered that no man could have seen his neighbor without looking through a telescope, or be heard by him without firing off a gun. George Bancroft does not exaggerate when, in speaking of Virginia for the latter part of the seventeenth century, he says, “There was hardly such a sight as a cluster of three dwellings.”² Even Jamestown, the capital, had but a state-house, one church, and eighteen private houses.

     Since the units of this dispersed community inclined thus to isolation rather than to close fellowship, it followed that all those public tasks which depend on coöperation were ill done, or not done at all: the making of high roads, bridges; the erection of court-houses, school-houses, churches; the promotion of commercial and manufacturing establishments; postal communication; literary interchanges, the involuntary traffic of ideas. In short, the tendency of the social structure in Virginia was from the first toward a sort of rough extemporaneous feudalism, toward the grandeur and the weakness of the patriarchal state, rather than toward those complex, elaborate, and refined results which are the achievements of an advanced modern civilization, and which can be procured only by the units of society pulling together, instead of pulling apart. There was considerable individual property: there was no public thrift. Manual labor was of course scorned by the man who owned slaves, and was the master of a baronial hall with its far-stretching empire of wild lands. From him likewise descended to his inferiors the sentiment of contempt for labor,—the notion that labor was not any man’s glory, but his shame. Their earliest historian born in Virginia, Robert Beverley, himself of a distinguished Virginian family, writing just at the dawn of the eighteenth century, fills his book with sarcasms at the indolence and shiftlessness of his fellow-countrymen. Naming Virginia, he says: “I confess I am ashamed to say anything of its improvements, because I must at the same time reproach my countrymen with a laziness that is unpardonable.”¹ “They are such abominable ill-husbands,² that though their country be overrun 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.”¹ “Thus they depend altogether upon the liberality of nature, without endeavoring to improve its gifts by art or industry. They sponge upon the blessings of a warm sun and a fruitful soil, and almost grutch the pains of gathering in the bounties of the earth.”²

     The dispersed social organization of Virginia had effects as evil in the direction of religious institutions, as in the direction of material enterprise and thrift. “The Virginia parishes,” says Charles Campbell, “were so extensive that parishioners sometimes lived at the distance of fifty miles from the parish church; “hence,” paganism, atheism, or sectaries.”³

     But the result which immediately concerns us in our present studies has to do with the intellectual development of the people. First of all, then, in those highly rarefied communities, where almost nothing was in common, how could there be common schools?⁴ To have included within a school-district a sufficient number of families to constitute a school, the distances for many of the pupils would have been so great as to render attendance impracticable. For the first three generations there were almost no schools at all in Virginia. The historian Burk says that “until the year 1688 no mention is anywhere made in the records, of schools or of any provision for the instruction of youth.”⁵ Who can wonder that under such circumstances the children in most cases grew up in ignorance; and that the historian Campbell should be obliged to testify that the first and second generations

of those born in Virginia were inferior in knowledge to their ancestors?¹

     If primary education was so grossly neglected in Virginia during the seventeenth century, we hardly need to ask what could have been the condition of higher education there during the same period. Near the end of this century, when all English-speaking communities were finally delivered from the Stuart incubus, and when all those communities on both sides of the ocean seemed to take a fresh start toward nobler things in civilization, we find traces of an educational awakening in Virginia. Among other traces of this awakening was the suggestion of a college, which in 1692 took tangible form in the establishment of the institution named in honor of the monarchs, William and Mary. In the eighteenth century this college did much to stimulate and guide the intellectual life of the colony; but we must not be misled by its imposing name. It was called a college; but during its earlier years it was only a boarding-school for very young boys in very rudimental studies.

     Thus it must be seen that Virginia in the seventeenth century was entitled to the description which Sir Philip Sidney gave to Ireland in the sixteenth century,—a place “where truly learning goeth very bare.”² Indeed, so late as the year 1715, Governor Spotswood dissolved the colonial assembly of Virginia with this taunt upon the educational defects of a body composed of their principal gentry: “I observe that the grand ruling party in your house has not furnished chairmen of two of your standing committees who can spell English or write common sense, as the grievances under their own handwriting will manifest.”³

     It must not be supposed that the people of Virginia were generally indifferent to the intellectual disadvantages

accruing to them from their peculiar social organization. Especially did they grieve over the lack of educational privileges for their children; and from time to time they suggested methods for the establishment of accessible public schools. But they were in the gripe of hostile circumstances, and all their efforts were for that day vain. Besides, during a large portion of the seventeenth century, they had the affliction of a royal governor, Sir William Berkeley, who threw the whole weight of his office and the whole energy of his despotic will in favor of the fine old conservative policy of keeping subjects ignorant in order to keep them submissive. This policy, which he most consistently maintained throughout his entire administration, from 1641 to 1677, was frankly avowed by him in his celebrated reply to the English commissioners who in 1670 questioned him concerning the condition of Virginia: “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 against the best government. God keep us from both.”¹ We owe to Sir William the meed of our cordial acknowledgment that at least in this article of his creed he never failed to show his faith by his works, and that he did his best while governor of Virginia to secure the answer of his own dark prayer. And unfortunately when he was recalled from Virginia, his policy for the encouragement of popular ignorance was not recalled with him: on the contrary it was continued by the government at home, and was prescribed in the official instructions laid upon his successors. There is no record of a printing-press in Virginia earlier than 1681; and soon after a printing press was set up, the printer was summoned before Lord Culpepper and required to enter into bonds “not to print anything hereafter, until his majesty’s pleasure shall be

known,”¹—a gracious way of intimating a perpetual prohibition. In 1683, when Lord Effingham came out as governor of Virginia, he received from the ministry instructions “to allow no person to use a printing-press on any occasion whatsoever.”² From that date onward till about the year 1729, no printing was done in Virginia; and from 1729 until ten years before the Declaration of Independence, Virginia had but one printing-house, and even that “was thought to be too much under the control of the governor.”³ What a base extremity of intolerance! And how base the popular listlessness which could permit it! In other countries it has been thought hard enough to have the printing-press clogged by the interference of official licensers and spies; in Virginia the printing-press was forbidden to work at all. There, even the first thrust of the press-man’s lever was a crime.

     The whole truth with reference to the intellectual condition of Virginia in the seventeenth century will not become manifest to us, unless we rest our eyes on still another trait. Thought was not free in Virginia; religion was not free in Virginia; and this by the explicit and reiterated choice of the people of Virginia. The Puritan zealots of New England have for a hundred years borne the just censure of mankind for their religious intolerance,—their ungentle treatment of Baptists, Quakers, and witches. These pages are not to be stained by any apology for religious intolerance in New England. But in simple fairness we may not close our eyes to the fact—seldom mentioned and little known—that the jovial fox-hunters of Virginia, the cant-despising cavaliers of the Old Dominion, were not a whit less guilty of religious intolerance. We are informed by Burk⁴ of the burning of witches

in Virginia; and as to the molestation of men for their religious opinions, we are told by Campbell that so early as the year 1632 an act of the assembly of Virginia laid upon all who dissented from the Episcopal Church as there established “the penalty of the pains and forfeitures in that case appointed.”¹ Just thirty years later, the same assembly imposed a fine of two thousand pounds of tobacco on “schismatical persons” that would not have their children baptized; and on persons who attended other religious meetings than those of the established church, a penalty of two hundred pounds of tobacco for the first offence, of five hundred pounds of tobacco for the second offence, and of banishment for the third offence.² Marriage was not tolerated under any other form than that of the Prayer Book. No one, unless a member of the established church, might instruct the young, even in a private family. Any shipmaster who should convey non-conformist passengers to Virginia was to be punished. Against Quakers as well as Baptists the severest laws were passed; and in 1664 large numbers of the former were prosecuted. Indeed, religious persecution remained rampant and flourishing in Virginia long after it had died of its own shame in New England. As late as 1741 penal laws were enacted in Virginia against Presbyterians and all other dissenters.³ As late as 1746 the most savage penalties were denounced there against Moravians, New Lights, and Methodists.⁴ In the presence of this array of facts relating to the people of Virginia in its primal days, and to the social organization that they created there, is not the phenomenon of the comparative literary barrenness of Virginia fully explained?

How could literature have sprouted and thriven amid such conditions? Had much literature been produced there, would it not have been a miracle? The units of the community isolated; little chance for mind to kindle mind; no schools; no literary institutions high or low; no public libraries; no printings-press; no intellectual freedom; no religious freedom; the forces of society tending to create two great classes,—a class of vast landowners, haughty, hospitable, indolent, passionate, given to field-sports and politics, and a class of impoverished white plebeians and black serfs;—these constitute a situation out of which may be evolved country-gentlemen, loud-lunged and jolly fox-hunters, militia heroes, men of boundless domestic heartiness and social grace, astute and imperious politicians, fiery orators, and by and by, here and there, some men of elegant literary culture, mostly acquired abroad; here and there, perhaps, after a while, a few amateur literary men; but no literary class, and almost no literature.