During the Stuart period Virginia was the refuge of many Puritans. They were, however, looked upon with disfavor by the prevailing royalist sentiment and the activities of Sir William Berkeley as Governor were such that not less than a thousand left the colony. Their place was taken by Royalists, invited by the Governor to find a refuge in Virginia as soon as news arrived of the execution of Charles I. Within the next twelve months probably a thousand Royalists appeared bringing many of the family names which have been conspicuous in the Old Dominion ever since. Richard Lee came a little earlier, in 1642, but it is after the death of Charles I that one begins to meet in Virginia such names as Randolph, Cary, Parke, Robinson, Marshall, Washington, and Ludwell.
The place of origin in Great Britain of most of the Royalists is not so easily traced as is that of the Massachusetts Puritans who came to America in groups, sometimes as entire congregations, but random samples of families which afterwards furnished distinguished leadership show that they came from practically all over England and Scotland: Washingtons from Northamptonshire, Marshalls and Jeffersons from Wales, Lees from the part of Shropshire adjoining Wales, and Randolphs from Warwickshire. James Monroe's ancestors were Scotch and Patrick Henry's father was born in Aberdeen. They had at least one thing in common, that they were of English and Nordic stock. Examination of lists in the land office at Richmond indicates that fully 95 per cent of the names of landowners during the seventeenth century were unmistakably Anglo-Saxon.
The tidewater population was fecund and spread steadily up to the fall-line of the rivers, by its own multiplication. Men and women married early. Colonel Byrd described his daughter, Evelyn, as an "antique virgin" when she was twenty. "Either our young fellows are not smart enough for her or she seems too smart for them," he moaned. With a high death rate second marriages were common. It has been the custom of late for sentimental feminists to refer to the large families of the Colonial period as having been produced by husbands who thus killed off one wife after another. Such nonsense is easily refuted by an examination of genealogies and of tombstones. Many a husband had to marry several wives because of the high death rate, but equally many wives had to marry several husbands apiece for the same reason.
The toll taken by hard work, unhygienic conditions, and childbirth without proper care among pioneer women, was no greater than the toll taken by hard work, unhygienic conditions, and Indian warfare among the men. If Colonel John Carter married five wives successively, in an age when divorce was unknown, Elizabeth Mann married six husbands.
While a purely Nordic population was thus occupying tidewater Virginia east of the Blue Ridge, another Nordic invasion from a wholly different source was entering upland Virginia on the other side of the mountains. The Shenandoah Valley is virtually an extension of the interior valleys of Pennsylvania; and while an occasional pioneer pushed his way to it through the mountains from the eastern front, the real settlement came through the side door beginning about 1725 and reaching the proportions of an invasion about 1732.
Ulster Scots coming down through Pennsylvania began that penetration of the Piedmont from north to south which is such a striking feature of the history of the South Atlantic coast during the next century. With them were some Alpines, mostly Germans from the Palatine, representative of the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch stock.
When General Braddock, whose army was nearly wiped out by the French and Indians in 1755, sighed, "Who would have thought it?" and expired, he nevertheless had cleared a road for the rapid spread of this immigration along the mountain valleys, not merely into Virginia but on through the Carolinas and to Georgia. His road was followed a few years later by General Forbes' road through the same country, and the way was open.
The upland and mountain sections of Virginia therefore came to be represented by a group with a very different outlook from those of the tidewater, dominated as it was by large landholders. This diversity of original settlement, which was of sufficient importance to effect in the Civil War a cleavage of the State and establish West Virginia as free soil, is still apparent and makes itself felt in the twentieth century.
North Carolina represents an overflowing from Virginia to the South. It was a frontier for the Old Dominion where landless men could find new homes more easily than to the westward, where they encountered the Blue Ridge. In 1653 a settlement was begun at Albemarle by Virginians who were not in accord either with the established religion or else with the political control of their colony. Most of these were Quakers.