Mr. Barrett Wendell, in his admirable work, "A Literary History of America," discourses with great brilliancy and charm upon the Elizabethan influences that governed in a large measure the development of the Puritan and the Virginian race. The reader of the present paper will note with curious interest the bearing of the following quotations from this work upon the theories which the present writer has discussed. "Broadly speaking," he says, "all our Northern colonies were developed from those planted in Massachusetts; and all our Southern from that planted in Virginia." The statement is "socially" true, he says, to an extraordinary degree. The Elizabethan type of character "displayed a marked power of assimilating whatever came within its influence." This trait, akin to that which centuries before had made the conquered English slowly but surely assimilate their Norman conquerors, the Yankees of our own day have not quite lost. Our native type still "absorbs" the foreign. The children of immigrants insensibly become native. The irresistible power of a common language and of the common ideals which underlie it still dominates. This tendency, he adds, declared itself from the earliest settlements of Jamestown and Plymouth. "North and South alike may be regarded as regions finally settled by Elizabethan Englishmen." The dominant traits of the English race of that time were "spontaneity, enthusiasm, and versatility." But the Elizabethan English of Virginia, he says, were notably different in this: they were men of a less "austere" type of character than their compatriots of the North; of more adventurous "instincts," and were "men of action" as the New Englanders were "men of God." The peculiar power of assimilation and the "pristine alertness of mind" were the same in both. The economic superiority of the North was manifest; the political ability of the South seemed generally superior. Pleasantly putting aside the traditional claims of exclusive "cavalier" descent, Mr. Wendell says: "At least up to the Civil War the personal temper of the better classes in the South remained more like that of the better classes in Seventeenth Century England than anything else in the modern world." He frankly concedes that the most eminent statesmen of Colonial and Revolutionary days were Virginians. Recalling what has been said in regard to the constitutional sluggishness of the Anglo-Saxon, his mental inertness, his settled or stereotyped habits of thought, and his absolute lack of racial initiative until the Norman came, we read the following passage from Mr. Wendell with curious interest: "Such literature as the English world has left us bespeaks a public whose spontaneous alertness of mind, whose instant perception of every subtle variety of phrase and allusion, was more akin to that of our contemporary French than to anything which we are now accustomed to consider native to insular England." This transformation Mr. Wendell attributes to "the spontaneous, enthusiastic versatility of the English temperament," in the spacious Elizabethan days. What has produced or determined this extraordinary differentiation of race? What are the original, genetic factors behind this varied manifestation of power in that old, Elizabethan stock? With the advent of the Seventeenth Century; with the turbulence, and trouble, and austerity of Cromwellian days; with migrations following Cromwellian war; with the evolution of a transatlantic type of the English race, there came an end to those spacious and splendid days—to the creative, prolific epoch of the Virgin Queen.
HONORABLE JOHN C. BRECKINRIDGE.
The most trivial fact that connects the name of Shakespeare with Virginia is of interest to the Virginian and his multitudinous clans. Captain Newport, Vice-Admiral of Virginia, commanded the ship Sea Adventure, which was wrecked on the Devil's Islands. Sir George Somers, sitting on the poop and misled by a flaming apparition on the masts, unconsciously guided the vessel in a fatal course. William Strachey, "Secretary in Virginia," wrote the account of the "Tempest" published in Purchas. Thus was the "king's ship" boarded and burned by the spirit Ariel at the command of his master Prospero, and wrecked on those "Bermoothes" which are "still vext" by that rude, tempestuous sea. It is of interest, too, to note that the special Supervisors and Directors of this Elizabethan colony were William Shakespeare's friends—the Earl of Southampton; the Earl of Pembroke; the Earl of Montgomery; Viscount Lisle (brother of Sir Philip Sidney); Lord Howard of Walden; Lord Sheffield; and Lord Carew of Clopton, who sold Shakespeare, in 1597, the house in which he lived till 1616—all of them Elizabethan cavaliers derived from Anglo-Norman stock. There is another Elizabethan name of still greater interest to all people of the Anglo-Virginian race—Sir Edwin Sandys, the author of the political charters upon which the free institutions of Virginia rest; and not only Virginia, but the United States. Educated at Geneva and the son of an English Archbishop, he was thoroughly seasoned with the doctrines of the Genevan school; and aimed not only to found the American Republic on Genevan lines by the creation of a "free state" on the Atlantic coast, but to make ample provision in the charter itself for the ultimate "expansion" of the young republic toward the Pacific Ocean. This statement may not, even yet, be universally accepted; but it is incontestably true.
[XI]
In the spring of 1885, a pamphlet was published by a citizen of Kentucky directing attention to the effect of certain racial influences in molding the institutions of this State. It was entitled "The Genesis of a Pioneer Commonwealth." The suggestions offered by the writer as to the sources of our organic life were subsequently illustrated and confirmed by an eminent Virginian scholar, Dr. Alexander Brown, in his "Genesis of the United States," published in 1890—a marvel of masterly investigation; a work which throws a flood of light upon the broad expanse of early American history, and is especially remarkable for the critical elaboration, lucidity, and acuteness with which the author has arranged the results of his extensive scheme of historic research. In this work he has noted and traced, from English records contemporary with the first settlement of Virginia, the beginnings of that great duel between conflicting civilizations which closed with the destruction of Spain's naval power at Manila and Santiago. And every scholar who seeks a precise comprehension of the origines of the late war should closely follow the course of investigation pursued by Dr. Brown. Every accessible detail of the desperate and protracted Anglo-Spanish conflict—including the exploits of Elizabeth's captains and the destruction of the Great Armada—come out under this historic searchlight as distinctly and vividly as material objects under the light of day. To citizens of Kentucky who have a critical and philosophic interest in the historic evolution of the Commonwealth, it will be peculiarly attractive in the circumstance that it connects, and in a special sense includes, the Genesis of Kentucky with that of the United States. He suggests in a most interesting way that this Commonwealth is not only a lineal product of the Elizabethan civilization which he has sought to trace, but that—cartographically at least—it formed an integral part of the first Republic established in the New World. In an explanatory communication addressed some years ago to the present writer, Dr. Brown says: "The bounds of the charters which contained the popular charter rights which were the germ of this republic extended between thirty-four degrees (34°) and forty degrees (40°) north latitude, and from ocean to ocean. Kentucky, therefore, was embraced within the first Republic in America."
The sagacious statesmen of Spain were not slow to detect the menacing significance of this Virginian settlement, small as it was; and the conflict then initiated did not cease until the navies of Spain went down under the guns of Dewey and Schley. The persistent machinations of Spanish intrigants to obtain control of Kentucky in the closing years of the Eighteenth Century were part of the same prolonged contest for supremacy upon American soil. Every resource of diplomacy, intrigue, and corruption—or, in modern phrase, of craft and graft—was exhausted by Spain to wrest the germinant Commonwealth from the parent stem. On the other hand, no scheme was more popular with the bold and enterprising Kentuckians—the Vikings of the West—than to wrest the control of the Mississippi River from the desperate grasp of Spain. Even the splendid and seducing allurement of a Spanish alliance was powerless against the transmitted instincts of a Scandinavian or Anglo-Norman stock. But the racial inclination for territorial expansion Kentucky never lost. There was a later manifestation of this spirit or instinct in the annexation of California; an appropriation by force, to be sure, but under recognized "legal forms"; and, still later, it was manifested in disastrous expeditions to the Cuban coast, in which the reckless survivors barely escaped, like the man of Uz, with the skin of their teeth—thanks to a swift steamship and to an indulgent interpretation of the violated law. In the near future, perhaps, we shall have an annexation of the Island under forms which will fully justify the act; annexation on the old lines. As far as race could make them so, the daring adventurers who poured to foreign war from the vast network of streams and streamlets that flowed seaward from the mountains and lowlands of Kentucky were Vikings, with all the fighting characteristics of that ancient breed.[6] Not Vi-Kings, nor "kings" of any sort, but simply the Vik-ings or "Creek-men" who followed their expatriated Jarls wherever a dragon-prow would float; to the land of the Saxon under his greatest king; to the heart of Ireland, where the natives were already "absorbing" the alien Norse; to the ancient Kingdom of Gaul; to Scotland and to the islands of the Atlantic Ridge; and above all to Iceland, the land of mist and snow and fire; to the incomparable mistress of the Northern seas. Through the beautiful Mediterranean, too, they sailed; and gathering to the support of the decadent despotisms of the East, became famous in history and romance as the Varangian Guard which held at bay the Saracen and the Hun. They were "rebels" when they fled from the consolidating despotism of Harold Fairhair. They have been rulers or rebels ever since.
But the story of their greatest exploits you read in the histories of the English race. We have analyzed the claims which Mr. Barrett Wendell has made for the Elizabethan settler upon the Atlantic Coast; and it is instructive to note that another gifted son of New England, Mr. John Fiske, has reached conclusions which he at least would acknowledge give confirmation to the present views, as strong as proof of Holy Writ. "The descendants of these Northmen," he says, "formed a very large proportion of the population of the East Anglian counties, and consequently of the men who founded New England. The East Anglian counties have been conspicuous for resistance to tyranny and for freedom of thought." By parity of reasoning, we may easily prove that the kindred Norman was the founder of civilization in England, and, in direct sequence and by filiation of race, of civilization in the Colony of Virginia; and, by a gradual evolution, in the States of the South and West.