Meanwhile, after a short service in the governor’s office by Hugh Drysdale (1722)[617] and Robert Carter, in 1727 William Gooch took the chair, and held it for twenty-two years. It was a time of only chance excitement, and the province prospered in wealth and population. The governor proved conciliatory and became a favorite of the people. He granted toleration to the Presbyterians, who were now increasing on the frontiers, where Mackemie and the Scotch-Irish were beginning to gain influence, and the sturdy pioneers were thinking of the country beyond the mountains.[618] Some of the tide-water spirit was pushing that way, and in 1745 Lord Fairfax settled in the valley, built his Greenway Court, and passed his life in chasing game and giving it to his guests, with other hospitable cheer.[619] Tall and gaunt of person, sharp in his visage and defective in his eyesight, if he had little of personal attraction for strangers, he had the inheritance of some of the best culture of England, and could hand to his guests a volume of the Spectator, open at his own essays. Disappointed in love at an early day, Fairfax added a desire for seclusion to a disposition naturally eccentric. He had come to America for divertisement, and, enamored of the country and its easy life, he had finally determined on settling on his property. The mansion, which he had intended to erect with all the dignity of its manorial surroundings, was never begun; but he built a long one-story building, with sloping roof and low eaves. Here he lived on through the Revolution, a pronounced Tory, but too respected to be disturbed, until the news of Yorktown almost literally struck him dead at ninety-two.
Along the river bottoms of the lowlands, while Major Mayo[620] was laying out Richmond (1733), and while all tradition was scorned in the establishment of the Virginia Gazette (1736),[621] the ruling classes of the great estates felt that they were more rudely jostled than ever before, when Whitefield passed that way, harrying the church,[622] and even splitting the communions of the Presbyterians as he journeyed in other parts.
When Governor Gooch returned to England, in 1749, he left the council in power, who divided (1751) the province into four military districts, and to the command of one of them they assigned a young man of nineteen, George Washington by name. Late in the same year (November 20, 1751) a notable character presented himself in Robert Dinwiddie, and the College of William and Mary welcomed the new executive with a formal address.[623] Dinwiddie had been unpopular as a surveyor of customs, as such officers almost invariably are; and he came to his new power in Virginia at a trying time, just as a great war was opening, and he and the burgesses could not escape conflict on the question of the money needed to make Virginia bear a creditable part in that war. When it was the northern frontiers towards Canada which were threatened, neither Maryland nor Virginia could be made to feel the mortification that their governors felt, if the northern colonies were left to fight alone the battles in which all the English of the continent were interested.
But the struggle was now for the thither slope of the Alleghanies and the great water-shed of the Ohio. In this conflict Virginia presented a frontier to be ravaged, as she soon learned to her cost. The story of that misfortune is told in another chapter,[624] as well as of the outbreak which Dinwiddie forced, when he sent Washington to Le Bœuf. The exigencies of the conflict, however, were not enough to prevent the assembly from watching jealously every move of the governor for asking money from them; and he in turn did little to smooth the way for their peaceable acquiescence, when he exacted unusual fees for his own emolument. The aristocracy were still powerful, and, working upon the fears entertained by the masses that their liberties were in danger, all classes contrived to keep Dinwiddie in a pretty constant turmoil of mind, a strain that, though past sixty, he bore unflinchingly. If, by his presentation of the exigencies, he alarmed them, they would vote, somewhat scantily, the money which he asked for: but they embarrassed him by placing its expenditure in the hands of their own committee. Dinwiddie was often compelled to submit to their exasperating requirements, and was obliged to inform the Lords of Trade that there was no help for it.
It was war indeed, but this chapter is concerned chiefly with civil affairs. Nothing, therefore, can be said here of the disaster of Braddock and its train of events down to the final capture of DuQuesne. Forts were built,[625] and the Indians were pursued[626], and Virginia incurred a debt during it all of £400,000, which she had to bear with the concomitants of heavy taxes and a depreciated paper money. At the end of the war, Norfolk, with its 7,000 inhabitants, was still the only considerable town.
Dinwiddie had ruled as the deputy of Lord Albemarle. When Lord Loudon came over in July, 1756, to assume the military command in the colonies, he became the titular governor of Virginia; but he was never in his province in person, and Dinwiddie ruled for him till January, 1758, when he sailed for England.
[CRITICAL ESSAY ON THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION.]
SINCE the enumeration of the records of Maryland was made in another volume,[627] the Maryland Historical Society, having now in custody the early archives of the province, has begun the printing of them, under the editorship of Mr. William Hand Browne, three volumes of which having been thus far published.[628] The publication committee of that society have also made to the legislative assembly of the State a printed report,[629] dated November 12, 1883, in which they give an account of the efforts made in the past to care for the documents. To this they append a Calendar of State Archives, many of which come within the period covered by the present chapter.[630]