The colony, which began with bad men, was increased by worse. In November, 1619, King James wrote to the Virginia Company, “commanding them forthwith to send away to Virginia an hundred dissolute persons, which Sir Edward Zouch, the Knight Marshal, would deliver to them.”[387] Thus by royal command was this colony made a Botany Bay.
The Company, not content with the “hundred dissolute persons” supplied by the king’s order, entreated for more, until Captain John Smith, the hero of Virginia, was moved to express his disgust. He testified to the evil, when he wrote in 1622: “Since I came from thence, the Honorable Company have been humble suitors to his Majesty to get vagabond and condemned men to go thither; nay, so much scorned was the name of Virginia, some did choose to be hanged, ere they would go thither, and were.”[388] This was bad enough.
But the Virginia Company was insensible to the shame of such a settlement. Its agents and orators vindicated the utility of the colony. In a work entitled “Nova Britannia, offering most Excellent Fruits by Planting in Virginia,” published in London in 1609, and dedicated to “one of his Majesty’s Council for Virginia,” it was openly argued, that, unless “swarms of idle persons in lewd and naughty practices” were sent abroad, “we must provide shortly more prisons and corrections for their bad conditions”; and that it was “most profitable for our state to rid our multitudes of such as lie at home, pestering the land with pestilence and penury, and infecting one another with vice and villany, worse than the plague itself.”[389] Dr. Donne, Dean of St. Paul’s, poet also, in a sermon “preached to the Honorable Company of the Virginian Plantation, November 30th, 1622,” thus sets forth the merits of the colony: “The plantation shall redeem many a wretch from the jaws of death, from the hands of the executioner.… It shall sweep your streets and wash your doors from idle persons and the children of idle persons, and employ them.”[390] Such were the puffs by which recruits were gained for Virginia.
History records the unquestionable result, and here authorities multiply. Sir Josiah Child, in his “Discourse of Trade,” published in 1694, says: “Virginia and Barbadoes were first peopled by a sort of loose, vagrant people, vicious, and destitute of means to live at home, … such as, had there been no English foreign plantation in the world, could probably never have lived at home to do service to their country, but must have come to be hanged or starved, or died untimely of some of those miserable diseases that proceed from want and vice, or else have sold themselves for soldiers, to be knocked on the head or starved in the quarrels of our neighbors.”[391] Dr. Douglass, in his “British Settlements in North America,” printed in 1749, is very positive, saying, “Virginia and Maryland have been for many years, and continue to be, a sink for transported criminals.”[392] “Our plantations in America, New England excepted, have been generally settled, (1.) by malcontents with the Administrations from time to time; (2.) by fraudulent debtors, as a refuge from their creditors; (3.) and by convicts or criminals, who chose transportation rather than death.”[393] Grahame, the Scotch historian, who has written so conscientiously of our country, speaking of the first settlers, says of Virginia: “A great proportion of the new emigrants consisted of profligate and licentious youths, sent from England by their friends, with the hope of changing their destinies, or for the purpose of screening them from the justice or contempt of their country, … with others like these, more likely to corrupt and prey upon an infant commonwealth than to improve or sustain it.”[394] The historian of Virginia, William Stith, whose work was published at Williamsburg in the last century, is not less explicit. “I cannot but remark,” he says, “how early that custom arose of transporting loose and dissolute persons to Virginia, as a place of punishment and disgrace, which, although originally designed for the advancement and increase of the colony, yet has certainly proved a great prejudice and hindrance to its growth; for it hath laid one of the finest countries in British America under the unjust scandal of being a mere hell upon earth, another Siberia, and only fit for the reception of malefactors and the vilest of the people; so that few people, at least few large bodies of people, have been induced willingly to transport themselves to such a place, and our younger sisters, the Northern Colonies, have accordingly profited thereby.”[395] But this is not all. Another historian of Virginia, of our own day, whose work was published at Richmond in 1848, while showing that pride in his State which would change every settler into a “cavalier,” is compelled to make the following most rueful confession: “Gentlemen, reduced to poverty by gaming and extravagance, too proud to beg, too lazy to dig; broken tradesmen, with some stigma of fraud yet clinging to their names; footmen, who had expended in the mother country the last shred of honest reputation they had ever held; rakes, consumed with disease and shattered in the service of impurity; libertines, whose race of sin was yet to run; and unruly sparks, packed off by their friends to escape worse destinies at home: these were the men who came to aid in founding a nation, and to transmit to posterity their own immaculate impress.”[396] And this same historian confesses that social life in Virginia, beginning in such baseness, after more than a century, had developed “an aristocracy neither of talent nor learning nor moral worth, but of landed and slave interest.”[397] So much for the testimony of history, even when written and printed in Virginia. In harmony with this testimony was the honest exclamation of a Virginian in 1751: “In what can Britain show a more sovereign contempt for us than by emptying their jails into our settlements, unless they would likewise empty their jakes on our tables?”[398]
I know not the number of desperate persons shipped to Virginia; but there were enough to leave an indelible impress on the colony, and to give it a name in the literature of the time. It was this colony which suggested to Bacon the most pregnant words of one of his Essays, which furnished to De Foe several striking passages in one of his romances, which furnished a confirmatory article in the Dictionary of Postlethwayt, and which provoked Massinger to a dialogue in one of his dramas. Glance for a moment at these illustrations.
It is in the Essay on “Plantations” that Bacon thus brands the early settlement of Virginia: “It is a shameful and unblessed thing to take the scum of people and wicked condemned men to be the people with whom you plant; and not only so, but it spoileth the plantation, for they will ever live like rogues.” Surely there is nothing in this out of which to construct a “cavalier.”
In the narrative of Moll Flanders, the author of “Robinson Crusoe,” who gives to all his sketches such life-like character that they seem to be sun-pictures, exhibits this same colony. Here is a glimpse. “The greatest part of the inhabitants of that colony came thither in very indifferent circumstances from England. Generally speaking, they were of two sorts: either, first, such as were brought over by masters of ships to be sold as servants; or, second, such as are transported, after having been found guilty of crimes punishable with death. When they come here, we make no difference; the planters buy them, and they work together in the field till their time is out.… Hence many a Newgate bird becomes a great man; and we have several justices of the peace, officers of the trained bands, and magistrates of the towns they live in, that have been burnt in the hand.… Some of the best men in the country are burnt in the hand, and they are not ashamed to own it. There’s Major ——, he was an eminent pickpocket; there’s Justice Ba——r, was a shoplifter; and both of them were burnt in the hand; and I could name you several such as they are.”[399] Nothing is said here of “cavaliers.”
The author of the “Dictionary of Commerce,” quoted often in courts, confirms the testimony of Moll Flanders, when he says: “Even your transported felons, sent to Virginia instead of Tyburn, thousands of them, if we are not misinformed, have, by turning their hands to industry and improvement, and, which is best of all, to honesty, become rich, substantial planters and merchants, settled large families, and been famous in the country; nay, we have seen many of them made magistrates, officers of militia, captains of good ships, and masters of good estates.”[400] Here, again, is nothing said of “cavaliers.”
Another writer, who travelled through the colonies in 1742-3, says, in the same vein, that “several of the best planters, or their ancestors, have in the two colonies [Virginia and Maryland] been originally of the convict class, and therefore are much to be praised and esteemed for forsaking their old courses.”[401]