Respecting the religious history of the colony, besides the general historians, there have been several special treatments. Mr. Neill has written upon the Puritan affinities in Hours at Home, November, 1867, and on Thomas Harrison and the Virginia Puritans in his English Colonization, where is also a chapter on the planting of the Church of England.
Patrick Copland’s sermon, Virginia’s God be thanked, was preached before the Company in London, April 18, 1622; a copy of which is in Harvard College Library. Cf. Mr. Neill’s Memoir of Rev. Patrick Copland, New York, 1871, p. 52, and his English Colonization, p. 104.
Further, see Hawkes’s Contributions to the Ecclesiastical History of the United States, “Virginia,” 1836; Hening’s Statutes; Papers relating to the History of the Church in Virginia, 1650-1770, by W. S. Perry, 1870; Hammond’s Leah and Rachel, 1656; Bishop Meade’s Old Churches, etc., 1855; “Notes on the Virginia Colonial Clergy” in the Episcopal Recorder, and reprinted separately by E. D. Neill, 1877; Savage’s Winthrop’s History of New England, and Anderson’s Church of England in the Colonies, 1856.
The writer has also in his possession the Records of the Monthly Meeting of Henrico County, June 10, 1699-1797, which he designs to use in a history of the Society of Friends in Virginia. He has also earlier isolated records, and a partial registry of births, marriages, and deaths of those of the faith of the Society in Henrico and Hanover counties in the eighteenth century.
For an account of early manufactures in Virginia, see Bishop’s History of American Manufactures, 1866. For a view of the early agriculture, see a paper by the present writer on the History of Tobacco in Virginia from its Settlement to 1790; Statistics, Agriculture, and Commerce, prepared for the Tenth Census; History of Agriculture in Virginia, by N. F. Cabell, 1857; the Farmers’ Register, 1833-42; Transactions of the State Agricultural Society of Virginia, 1855; and “Virginia Colonial Money and Tobacco’s Part therein,” by W. L. Royall, in Virginia Law Journal, August, 1877.
For a view of slavery in the colony, see Bancroft, ch. v.; O’Callaghan’s Voyages of the Slavers; Wilson’s Rise and Fall of the Slave Power; Cobb’s Inquiry; and the works of Cabell, Fitzhugh, Fletcher, Hammond, Ross, Stringfellow, and general histories.
It is evident that no single author has yet given an adequate history of Virginia; and while it is true that much precious material therefor has perished, it is believed that the original record is yet not wanting for such a representation of the past of the State as would be at once more intelligible as to the motives which occasioned events, and more convincingly just in the recital of them.
