Profound effect upon Virginia.
This settlement of the Valley soon began to work profound modifications in the life of Old Virginia. Hitherto it had been purely English and predominantly Episcopal, Cavalier, and aristocratic. There was now a rapid invasion of Scotch Presbyterianism, with small farms, few slaves, and democratic ideas, made more democratic by life in the backwoods. It was impossible that two societies so different in habits and ideas should coexist side by side, sending representatives to the same House of Burgesses, without a stubborn conflict. For two generations there was a ferment which resulted in the separation of church and state, complete religious toleration, the abolition of primogeniture and entails, and many other important changes, most of which were consummated under the leadership of Thomas Jefferson between 1776 and 1785. Without the aid of the Valley population, these beginnings of metamorphosis in tidewater Virginia would not have been accomplished.
Frontier phase of democracy.
Jefferson is often called the father of modern American democracy; in a certain sense the Shenandoah Valley and adjacent Appalachian regions may be called its cradle. In that rude frontier society, life assumed many new aspects, old customs were forgotten, old distinctions abolished, social equality acquired even more importance than unchecked individualism. The notions, sometimes crude and noxious, sometimes just and wholesome, which characterized Jacksonian democracy, flourished greatly on the frontier and have thence been propagated eastward through the older communities, affecting their legislation and their politics more or less according to frequency of contact and intercourse. Massachusetts, relatively remote and relatively ancient, has been perhaps least affected by this group of ideas, but all parts of the United States have felt its influence powerfully. This phase of democracy, which is destined to continue so long as frontier life retains any importance, can nowhere be so well studied in its beginnings as among the Presbyterian population of the Appalachian region in the eighteenth century.
Lord Fairfax and George Washington.
The Shenandoah Valley, however, was not absolutely given up to Scotchmen and Germans; it was not entirely without English inhabitants from the tidewater region. Among these, one specially interesting group arrests our attention. At the northern end of the Valley was a little English colony gathered about Lord Fairfax’s home at Greenway Court, a dozen miles southwest from the site of Winchester. We have seen how Lord Culpeper, in relinquishing his proprietary claims upon Virginia, had retained the Northern Neck. This extensive territory passed as a dowry with Culpeper’s daughter Catharine to her husband, the fifth Lord Fairfax;[340] and in 1745 their son, the sixth Lord Fairfax, came to spend the rest of his days in Virginia. There was much surveying to be done, and the lord of Greenway Court gave this work to a young man for whom he had conceived a strong affection. The name of Fairfax’s youthful friend was George Washington, and it is impossible to couple these two names without being reminded of a letter written a hundred years before, in 1646, when Charles I. had been overthrown and taken prisoner, and Henry Washington, royalist commander at Worcester, still held out and refused to surrender the city without authority from the king. Thus wrote the noble commander to the great General Fairfax, commander of the Parliament army: “It is acknowledged by your books, and by report of your own quarter, that the king is in some of your armies. That granted, it may be easy for you to procure his Majesty’s commands for the disposal of this garrison. Till then I shall make good the trust reposed in me. As for conditions, if I shall be necessitated I shall make the best I can. The worst I know and fear not; if I had, the profession of a soldier had not been begun nor so long continued by your Excellency’s humble servant,—Henry Washington.”[341]
Effect of the Westward advance upon the military situation.
The Gateway of the West.
Advance of the French.
There is a ring to this letter which sounds not unlike the utterance of that scion of the writer’s family who was destined to win independence for the United States. It is pleasant to know that General Fairfax obtained the order from King Charles and granted most honourable terms to the brave Colonel Washington. In the following century a member of the house of Fairfax, in engaging the younger Washington to survey his frontier estates, put him into a position which led up to his wonderful public career. For this advance of the Virginians from tidewater to the mountains served to bring on the final struggle with France. The wholesale Scotch-Irish immigration was fast carrying Virginia’s frontier toward the Ohio River, and making feasible the schemes of Spotswood in a way that no man would have thought of. Hitherto the struggle with the house of Bourbon had been confined to Canada at one end of the line and Carolina at the other, while the centre had not been directly implicated. In the first American Congress, convened by Jacob Leisler at New York in 1690 for the purpose of concerting measures of defence against the common enemy, Virginia (as we have seen) took no part. The seat of war was then remote, and her strength exerted at such a distance would have been of little avail. But in the sixty years since 1690 the white population of Virginia had increased fourfold, and her wealth had increased still more. Looking down the Monongahela River to the point where its union with the Alleghany makes the Ohio, she beheld there the gateway to the Great West, and felt a yearning to possess it; for the westward movement was giving rise to speculations in land, and a company was forming for the exploration and settlement of all that Ohio country. But French eyes were not blind to the situation, and it was their king’s pawns, not the English, that opened the game on the mighty chess-board. French troops from Canada crossed Lake Erie, and built their first fort where the city of Erie now stands. Then they pushed forward down the wooded valley of the Alleghany and built a second fortress and a third. Another stride would bring them to the gateway. Something must be done at once.