All this was nobody’s fault. It was a combination of circumstances against which the unenlightened human nature of that period could not possibly have made head.
Few men saw anything wrong in slavery. No man knew much about the laws that control the prosperity of States. No man understood the science of agriculture. Every one with whom those proud and thoughtless planters dealt plundered them, and the mother country discouraged every attempt of the colonists to manufacture their own supplies. There were so many charges upon tobacco, in its course from the planter’s packing-house to the consumer’s pipe, that it was no very uncommon thing, in dull years, for the planter to receive from his agent in London, in return for his hogsheads of tobacco, not a pleasant sum of money, nor even a box of clothes, but a bill of charges which the price of the tobacco had not covered. One of the hardships of which the clergy complained was, that they did not “dare” to send their tobacco to London, for fear of being brought into debt by it, but had to sell it on the spot to speculators much below the London price. The old Virginia laws and records so abound in tobacco information that we can follow a hogshead of tobacco from its native plantation on the James to the shop of the tobacconist in London.
In the absence of farm vehicles—many planters who kept a coach had no wagon—each hogshead was attached to a pair of shafts with a horse between them, and “rolled” to a shed on the bank of the stream. When a ship arrived in the river from London, it anchored opposite each plantation which it served, and set ashore the portion of the cargo belonging to it, continuing its upward course until the hold was empty. Then, descending the river, it stopped at the different plantations, taking from each its hogsheads of tobacco, and the captain receiving long lists of articles to be bought in London with the proceeds of the tobacco. The rivers of Virginia, particularly the James and the Potomac, are wide and shallow, with a deep channel far from either shore, so that the transfer of the tobacco from the shore to the ship, in the general absence of landings, was troublesome and costly. To this day, as readers remember, the piers on the James present to the wondering passenger from the North a stretch of pine planks from an eighth to half a mile long. The ship is full at length, drops down past Newport News, salutes the fort upon Old Point Comfort, and glides out between the capes into the ocean.
How little the planters foresaw the desolation of their Province is affectingly attested by many of the relics of their brief affluence. They built their parish churches to last centuries, like the churches to which they were accustomed “at home.” In neighborhoods where now a congregation of fifty persons could not be collected, there are ruins of churches that were evidently built for the accommodation of numerous and wealthy communities; a forest, in some instances, has grown up all around them, making it difficult to get near the imperishable walls. Sometimes the wooden roof has fallen in, and one huge tree, rooted among the monumental slabs of the middle aisle, has filled all the interior. Other old churches long stood solitary in old fields, the roof sound, but the door standing open, in which the beasts found nightly shelter, and into which the passing horseman rode and sat on his horse before the altar till the storm passed. Others have been used by farmers as wagon-houses, by fishermen to hang their seines in, by gatherers of turpentine as storehouses. One was a distillery, and another was a barn. A poor drunken wretch reeled for shelter into an abandoned church of Chesterfield County—the county of the first Jeffersons—and he died in a drunken sleep at the foot of the reading-desk, where he lay undiscovered until his face was devoured by rats. An ancient font was found doing duty as a tavern punch-bowl; and a tombstone, which served as the floor of an oven, used to print memorial words upon loaves of bread. Fragments of richly-colored altar-pieces, fine pulpit-cloths, and pieces of old carving used to be preserved in farm-houses and shown to visitors. When the late Bishop Meade began his rounds, forty years ago, elderly people would bring to him sets of communion-plate and single vessels which had once belonged to the parish church, long deserted, and beg him to take charge of them.
FRANCIS PARKMAN.
HISTORIAN OF THE FRENCH AND INDIAN CONFLICT.