THE KINGDOM OF VIRGINIA.
Retrospect.
Tidewater Virginia.
From the busy streets of London, from the strife in Parliament and the Privy Council, we must turn once more to the American wilderness and observe what progress had been made in Virginia during the seventeen years of its government by a great joint-stock company. But for a correct appreciation of the situation we must qualify and limit this period of seventeen years. The terrible experience of the first three years left the colony at the point of death, and it was not until the administration of Sir Thomas Dale that any considerable expansion beyond Jamestown began. The progress visible in 1624 was mostly an affair of ten years' duration, dating from the abolition of communism and the beginnings of tobacco culture. By far the greater part of this progress had been achieved within the last five years, since the establishment of self-government and the greater part played by family life. In 1624 the colony of Virginia extended from the mouth of James River up nearly as far as the site of Richmond, with plantations on both banks; and it spread over the peninsula between the James and the broad stream next to the north of it, which at that time was called the Charles, but since 1642 has been known as the York River. There were also a few settlements on the Accomac peninsula east of Chesapeake Bay. It would be hard to find elsewhere upon the North American coast any region where the land is so generally and easily penetrable by streams that can be navigated. The country known as "tidewater Virginia" is a kind of sylvan Venice. Into the depths of the shaggy woodland for many miles on either side the great bay the salt tide ebbs and flows. One can go surprisingly far inland on sea-faring craft, while with a boat there are but few plantations on the old York peninsula to which one cannot approach very near. In the absence of good roads this ubiquity of navigable water was a great convenience, but doubtless the very convenience of it may have delayed the arduous work of breaking good land-routes through the wilderness, and thus have tended to maintain the partial isolation of the planters' estates, to which so many characteristic features of life in Old Virginia may be traced.
Receding frontier.
The plantations.
If in 1624 we had gone up stream to Werowocomoco, where Smith had broken the ice with his barge fifteen years before, we should probably have found very little of its strange barbaric life remaining. The first backward step of the Indian before the encroaching progress of Englishmen had been taken. The frontier was fast receding to the Pamunkey region along the line joining the site of West Point with that of Cold Harbor; and from that time forward a perpetually receding frontier of barbarism was to be one of the most profoundly and variously significant factors in the life of English-speaking America until the census of 1890 should announce that such a frontier could no longer be definitely located. In the last year of James I. the grim Opekankano and his warriors still held the Pamunkey River; in that neighbourhood and to the north of it one might have seen symptoms of the wild frontier life of the white hunter and trapper. Returning thence to the great bay, the plantation called Dale's Gift on the Accomac shore would have little about it that need detain us, and so sweeping across from Cape Charles to Point Comfort, we should come to Elizabeth City, named for King James's daughter Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia. The only plantation here, standing like a sentinel to guard the principal avenue into the colony, bears the name of the last treasurer of the Company, curtailed into Hampton. The next borough bears the name of Southampton's enemy, the Earl of Warwick, and opposite are the plantations on Warrasqueak Bay. Passing Jamestown, we arrive at the mouth of the Chickahominy, above which lies an extensive territory known as Charles City, with the plantations of Wyanoke and Westover, while over on the south side of the James the settlements known as Martin Brandon, Flowerdieu Hundred, and Bermuda successively come into sight and disappear. Then we sail around the City of Henricus, and passing the ruins of Falling Creek, destroyed by the Indians, we come at length to the charming place that Smith called Nonesuch. Here, a few miles below the spot where Richmond is in future to stand, we reach once more the frontier. Beyond are endless stretches of tangled and mysterious woods through which the sturdy Newport once vainly tried to find his way to some stream flowing into the Pacific Ocean. Here we may turn our prow and make our way down to Jamestown, where the House of Burgesses is in session.
Boroughs and burgesses.
Boroughs and hundreds.
It is called a House of Burgesses because its members are regarded as the representatives of boroughs, and such a name sounds queer as applied to little areas of scattered farms in the forest. Still more strange is the epithet "city" for tracts of woodland several miles in extent, and containing half a dozen widely isolated plantations. The apparent absurdity is emphasized on the modern map, where such names as Charles City and James City are simply names of counties. How came such names first to be used in such senses? One's mind naturally reverts to what goes on to-day in the Far West, where geographical names, like doubtful promissory notes, must usually be taken with heavy discount for an uncertain future, where in every such appellation there lurks the hope of a boom, and any collection of three or four log-cabins, with a saw-mill and whiskey-shop, surrounded by a dozen acres of blackened tree-stumps, may forthwith appear in the Postal Guide under some such title as Chain Lightning City. In oldest Virginia we may perhaps see marks of such a spirit of buoyant confidence in such names as Charles City or the City of Henricus. No doubt Sir Thomas Dale, when he fortified the little Dutch Gap peninsula and marked out its streets, believed himself to be founding a true city with urban destinies awaiting it. This explanation, however, does not cover the whole case. Whatever the title of each individual settlement in oldest Virginia,—whether plantation, or hundred, or city,—all were alike conceived, for legal and political purposes, as equivalent to boroughs, although they were not thus designated. Now the primary meaning of the word "borough" is "fortress," and in early English usage a borough was a small and thickly peopled hundred surrounded by a durable wall. A "hundred" was a small aggregation of townships united by a common responsibility for the good behaviour of its people; it was therefore the smallest area for the administration of justice, the smallest social community which possessed a court. Ordinarily the hundred was a rural community, but that special compact and fortified form of it known as the borough retained all the legal features of the ordinary hundred; it had its own court, and was responsible for its own malefactors and vagrants. In old English boroughs the responsible men—those who owned property, and paid taxes, and chose representatives—were the burgesses. Bearing always in mind this equivalence between the borough and the hundred, we may note further that in early times the hundred was a unit for military purposes; it was about such a community as could furnish to the general levy a company of a hundred armed men. It was also a unit of representation in the ancient English shire-moot or county court. Now in oldest Virginia the colonial assembly, when instituted in 1619, the earliest legislature of civilized men in the western hemisphere, was patterned after the old English county court, and it was natural that its units should be conceived as hundreds and in some instances called so. Moreover, there are indications that at times the hundred was regarded as a military division, and also as the smallest area for the administration of justice, as in the law passed in 1624 providing that Charles City and Elizabeth City should hold monthly courts.[109] Whatever names the early settlers of Virginia gave to their settlements individually, they seem to have regarded them all in the legal light of hundreds, and as they were familiar with the practical equivalence of the borough as a unit for judicial and representative purposes, it was natural that when they came to choose a general assembly they should speak of its members as if they were representatives of boroughs. They were familiar with burgesses in England, but the designations "hundred-men" and "hundred-elders" had become obsolete.