Although it is said that “old Virginny never tires,” it must have been because she had a robust constitution, for a busier body never existed. Always resisting the attempts made by the profligate royal governors upon her virginity, she had to watch them, day and night, for fear that they would steal her hard earnings and run away with them. In fact, during the sixty years that succeeded her birth at Jamestown, in 1606, she was constantly on the alert, putting up scarecrows on her cornfields, and notices of spring-guns, to warn away intruders; but these, so far from frightening away, only attracted the curious bills of the Indians. She was also forced to hold fast with might and main to the scanty wardrobe brought out by her from England, and with which those dissolute fellows, the young, titled, rakish, good-for-nothing overseers, were always taking liberties. Fortunately for her, as well as her sisters, the two Carolinas and Georgia, her shoulders were well covered by capes, so securely fastened on that they could not be snatched away, and their charms exposed to the rude stare or prying curiosity of idle visitors from France and England, and even from staid, sober Holland. And we here take the opportunity of repelling the slander so often circulated upon Virginia, that she is “the mother of States,”—an aspersion which, if true, would stain her virgin fame, and leave a bar sinister across the shields of the States thus born out of wedlock.
The first suitor for the budding affections of the youthful Georgia, or Georgiana, although bearing the suspicious name of Ogle-thorpe, proved to be a man of honorable intentions, high-minded, and in every respect faithful to his ardent vows,—a constant mate in all her joys and trials during his residence on the Savannah River, from 1732 to 1743. Virginia’s royal lovers, on the contrary, although always protesting their good intentions, were almost uniformly faithless. The last one bore the ill-omened, but appropriate name of Dun-more. He was very importunate, and in every way attempted to get her to make over her then valuable property to him, but in vain; and at last so mercenary did he become, and so disagreeable did he make himself, that she was obliged to show him the door.
The spirited damsel was always plucky, and soon after this domestic difficulty made up her mind to be wholly independent, and so in fact publicly gave out to the whole world, saying that “she didn’t care who knew it.” Massachusetts gallantly stood by the young girl in her declaration, and so did all her brothers and sisters; even little Rhody tossing up her jaunty sailor’s cap, and shouting out that, under Providence, she was ready to “sail in.”
The name of Sir Walter Raleigh is greenly twined through the earliest settlements of North Carolina. In her coasts he took a constantly augmenting interest, and furnished to the State its capital. His love for the new settlement only ceased to beat with his heart. His verse, which the author of “The Fairy Queen” describes as “sprinkled with nectar,” and “vieing with the notes of the summer nightingale,” was musical with her praises; and his “History of the World” lays at her feet the tribute of his warm, chivalric nature.
The duty which he felt and gave to the two Colonies, Virginia and North Carolina, was very different from the duties which his successors endeavored to draw from them,—duties so onerous as to drain not only the pockets but the hearts of the young communities from which they were pressed out.
But amid all the trials to which Virginia was subjected by the rapacity of her governors and the unsated appetites of councils, named by the home board corporators, there was one point which she could always contemplate with satisfaction, namely, Old Point Comfort,—a grandmotherly place, which her children then, and since, often visited, laying their hot heads lovingly in her lap, until her pleasant breezes cooled their feverish throbbings.
Tobacco was first grown in Virginia in 1616; and we crave leave to add, that although much piped about ever since, has never ceased to create a smoke; its curls hanging thickly and gracefully around the heads of its world-wide admirers from that time down to the present,—an instance of unchanged custom rarely seen.
Virginia, however, did not grow all of her luxuries; for, in 1620, we find her importing ninety respectable unmarried girls, who, on their arrival, and after payment of customary duties, were soon disposed of. This successful invoice was followed, the succeeding year, by a cargo of sixty more, the price for whom increased, after they were landed, from one hundred and twenty to one hundred and fifty pounds of tobacco. How this advance affected the relations between them and the lower-priced wives of the preceding year, whether it laid the foundation for the difference between the F. F. V.’s and the white trash, the want of newspapers and of well-preserved family bills does not enable us to judge.
Certain it is that this commercial rape was as cordially acquiesced in by the seized damsels, as was the rape of the Sabines by those young ladies; and proved to be as beneficial to the growth of the infant settlement as that novel match-making on the banks of the Tiber.
The descendants of these unions on the James and Potomac would have been more numerous had not their numbers been thinned off by Indian knives, which were very busy in 1622, 1623, and 1644–1646. This last war was followed, three years later, by a petty imitation of the civil strife which had raged for seven years between the Parliament and Charles I. in England, and which ended, in the latter country, by taking off the king’s head, and in Virginia by taking away many of their former constitutional privileges. Cromwell fumigated them thoroughly in their own tobacco-smoke, until all the smell of loyalty was gone. Upon the accession of Charles II., in 1660, arbitrary legislation was sought here, as in England, to stamp out the rights of the people which had silently but steadily grown up into a stiff crop; but resistance followed, and in this struggle between Virginia and the crown the succeeding years were spent, until 1754.