While Francis Makemie was entering the lists in the interest of “cohabitation,” gaining thereby not much respect from the tide-water great-estate owners, and printing in London (1705) his Plain and friendly perswasive to the inhabitants of Virginia and Maryland for promoting towns and cohabitation, setting forth the loss to virtue by the dispersal of sympathizers in religion, Robert Beverley was publishing anonymously in London (1705) his History and Present State of Virginia, in four parts. 1. The History of the First Settlement of Virginia, and the Government thereof, to the present time. 2. The Natural Productions and Conveniences of the Country, suited to Trade and Improvement. 3. The Native Indians, their Religion, Laws, and Customs, in War and Peace. 4. The Present State of the Country, as to the Polity of the Government, and the Improvements of the Land,[666] which, as will be seen in the last section of the title, particularly sets forth the condition of the colony at that time, offering some foundation for Mackemie’s arguments.[667]
About twenty years later we have another exposition of the condition of the colony in Hugh Jones’s Present State of Virginia, giving a particular and strict account of the Indian, English, and negro inhabitants of that colony, published in London in 1724.[668] Jones was rector of Jamestown and a professor in the college at Williamsburg, and his book was a missionary enterprise to incite attention among the benevolent in the mother country to the necessities of the colony. “His book,” says Tyler,[669] is one “of solid facts and solid suggestions, written in a plain, positive style, just sufficiently tinctured with the gentlemanly egotism of a Virginian and a churchman.”
The single staple of Virginia was the cause of constant concern, whether of good or bad fortune, and the case was summed up in 1733, in a tract published at London, Case of the planters of tobacco in Virginia, as represented by themselves, with a vindication.[670] Bringing the history of the colony down to about the date of the period when Jones made his survey, Sir William Keith in 1738 published his History of the British Plantations in America, containing the History of Virginia: with Remarks on the Trade and Commerce of that Colony.[671] Nine years later (1747) Stith published his history, but it pertained only to the early period, and in his preface, dated at Varina, December 10, 1746, he acknowledged his indebtedness to William Byrd.[672]
When Burk published his History of Virginia in 1804,[673] the days of the Revolution had separated him from those that were in reality the formative period of the Virginian character, which had grown out of conditions, then largely a mere record. One would have expected to find the eighteenth century developed in Burk better than it is. The more recent authorities have studied that period more specifically, though Bancroft does not much enlarge upon it.[674] Lodge[675] is chiefly valuable for the conspectus he affords of the manners of the time. Doyle in his English in America (London, 1882) depends on the “Colonial Entry Books” and “Colonial Papers” of the State Paper Office in London. Since Howison’s,[676] the latest history is that by a Virginian novelist, John Esten Cooke, and styled Virginia, a history of the people (Boston, 1883),[677] in which he aims to show, through succeeding generations of Virginians, how the original characteristics of their race have been woven into the texture of the population from the Chesapeake to the Mississippi, as those of New England have controlled the north from the Atlantic to the Lakes. He laments that there has never been a study of the Southern people to the same extent as of the Northern, and says that some of the greatest events in the annals of the whole country need, to understand them, a contemplation of the Virginian traits, losing sight, as he expresses it, of “the fancied dignity of history.” Guided somewhat by this canon, the author has modelled his narrative, dividing the periods into what he calls the Plantation, the Colony, and the Commonwealth,—the second more than covering the years now under consideration. He places first among his authorities for this period The Statutes at Large, being a Collection of all the Laws of Virginia, by William Walter Hening, in thirteen volumes, as the most important authority on social affairs in Virginia. He speaks of its unattractive title failing to suggest the character of the work, and says, with perhaps an excess of zeal, that “as a picture of colonial time, it has no rival in American books.”
The institutional history of Virginia has of late received some particular attention at the hands of Mr. Edward Ingle, who printed in the Mag. of Amer. History (Dec., 1884, p. 532) a paper on “County Government in Virginia,” which he has reprinted with other papers on the Land Tenure, the Hundreds, the English Parish in America, and the Town, in a contribution called Local Institutions of Virginia, which makes parts ii. and iii. of the third series (1885) of the Johns Hopkins University Studies in History and Political Science.[678]
We are fortunate in possessing the official correspondence of the two most notable royal governors of the eighteenth century. The letters of Alexander Spotswood were used by Bancroft, and were then lost sight of till they were recovered in England in 1873.[679] They are now published in two volumes (Richmond, 1882, 1885) as The official letters of Alexander Spotswood, lieutenant-governor of Virginia, 1710-1722; now first printed from the manuscript in the collections of the Virginia Historical Society, with an introduction and notes by R. A. Brock, constituting the initial volumes of a new series of the Collections of the Virginia Historical Society. Spotswood’s official account of his conflict with the burgesses is printed in the Virginia Hist. Register; and we best see him as a man in William Byrd’s “Progress to the Mines,” included in Wynne’s edition of the Byrd Manuscripts. Palmer draws Spotswood’s character in the introduction to his Calendar of Virginia State Papers, p. xxxix.[680]
Of the other collection of letters, The official records of Robert Dinwiddie, lieutenant-governor of Virginia, 1751-1758; now first printed from the manuscript in the collections of the Virginia Historical Society, with an introduction and notes by R. A. Brock, Richmond, Va., 1883-84, being vols iii. and iv. of the new series of the same Collections, a more special account is given in another place.[681]