The introduction to W. P. Palmer’s Calendar of Virginia State Papers, 1652-1781, summarizes the documents for the period of our present survey which are contained in the body of that book, and they largely concern the management of the Indians on the borders.[660] Among the Sparks MSS. in Harvard College library are various notes and extracts respecting Maryland and Virginia from the English records (1727-1761) in the hand of George Chalmers, as made for his own use in writing his Revolt of the American Colonies.[661]
There were various editions of the laws during the period now under consideration. What is known as the Purvis collection, dedicated to Effingham, was published in London in 1686; and a survey, giving An abridgement of the Laws in force and use in her majesty’s plantations, including Virginia, was printed in London in 1704. The acts after 1662 were published in London in 1728; while the first Virginia imprint on any edition was that of W. Parks, of Williamsburg, in 1733; and John Mercer’s Abridgment, published in Williamsburg four years later (1737), was reprinted in Glasgow in 1759. The acts since 1631 were again printed at Williamsburg in 1752.[662]
The earliest description of the country coming within the present survey is John Clayton’s Account of the several Observables in Virginia (1688), which Force has included in the third volume of his Tracts. A paper on the condition of Virginia in 1688 is the first chapter in W. H. Foote’s Sketches of Virginia (1850). An “Account of the present state and government of Virginia” is in the fifth volume (p. 124) of the Massachusetts Hist. Soc. Collections. The document was presented to that society by Carter B. Harrison, of Virginia. It seems to have been written in England in 1696-98, in the time of Andros’ governorship, and by one who was hostile to him and who had been in the colony.
Professor M. C. Tyler[663] speaks of the commissary, James Blair, as “the creator of the healthiest and most extensive intellectual influence that was felt in the Southern colonies before the Revolution.” This influence was chiefly felt in the fruition of his efforts to found the College of William and Mary.[664] The Present State of Virginia and the College, by Messieurs Hartwell, Blair and Chilton (London, 1727), contains an account, in which Blair, in Tyler’s opinion, had the chief hand. Blair’s relations to the college have had special treatment in Foote’s Sketches of Virginia (ch. ix.); in Bishop Meade’s Old Churches and Families of Virginia (vol. i. art. xii.); and in the Hist. of the American Episcopal Church (vol. i. ch. 7), by Bishop Perry, who gives two long letters from Blair to the governor of Virginia, after the originals preserved at Fulham Palace.
Additional material is garnered by Perry in his Historical Collections of the Amer. Colonial Church, which includes a large mass of Blair’s correspondence.[665]
WILLIAM AND MARY COLLEGE.
After the picture given in Meade’s Old Churches, etc., i. 157. Cf. Perry’s Amer. Episc. Church, i. 123; Gay’s Pop. Hist. U. S., iii. 60.
The original building was burned in 1705. The next building, which by scarcity of funds was long in erecting, was not completed till 1723. The above cut is of this second building. In Scribner’s Monthly, Nov., 1875, are views of the building before and after rebuilding in 1859.