The valley of Virginia has been more written about locally than the eastern parts. Beside the old history of Kercheval,[682] W. H. Foote has embraced it in the second series of his Sketches of Virginia (Philad., 1855), and it has recently been treated in J. Lewis Peyton’s History of Augusta County, Va. (Staunton, Va., 1882), a region once embracing the territory from the Blue Ridge to the Mississippi.
Norfolk has been made the subject of historical study, as in W. S. Forrest’s Norfolk and Vicinity (1853), but with scant attention to the period back of its rise to commercial importance.
The ecclesiastical element forms a large part of Virginia history in the earlier times. Some general references have been given in another place.[683] At the opening of our present period, there were of the established church in Virginia fifty parishes, with one hundred churches and chapels and thirty ministers,—according to Bray’s Apostolic Charity (London, 1700).[684] The church history has been well studied by Dr. Hawks,[685] Bishop Perry,[686] and Dr. De Costa,[687] in this country, and by Anderson in his History of the Colonial Church (1856),—a book which Doyle calls “laborious and trustworthy on every page.” Bishop Meade has treated the subject locally in his Old Churches and Families of Virginia,[688] as has Dr. Philip Slaughter in his Saint George’s Parish, Saint Mark’s Parish and Bristol Parish,[689] and he has given a summary of the leading churches of colonial Virginia in a section of Bishop Perry’s Amer. Episc. Church (vol. i. p. 614).
The dissenting element was chiefly among the Presbyterians, whose later strongholds were away from the tide-water among the mountains. The Reverend Francis Mackemie[690] had been principal leader among them, and he was the first dissenter who had leave to preach in Virginia. Their story is best told in C. A. Briggs’ American Presbyterianism (p. 109), and in both series of W. H. Foote’s Sketches of Virginia (Phil., 1850, 1855).
The Baptists in Virginia did not attain numerical importance till within the decade preceding the American Revolution, and they had effected scarcely any influence among the opponents of establishment during the period now under consideration.[691] The Huguenots brought good blood, and affected religious life rather individually than as a body.[692]
In depicting the society of Virginia during this period, we must get what glimpses we can from not very promising sources. The spirit which despised literature and schools was in the end dispelled, in part at least, but it was at this time dominant enough to prevent the writing of books; and consequently the light thrown upon social life by literature is wanting almost entirely. The Virginians were apparently not letter-writers and diarists, as the New Englanders were, and while we have a wealth of correspondence in Massachusetts to help us comprehend the habits of living, we find little or nothing in Virginia. We meet, indeed, with some letters of the Byrds[693] and the Fontaines,[694] and the official correspondence of Spotswood and Dinwiddie; but the latter touch only in a casual way upon the habits of living. A few descriptive and political tracts, like Hugh Jones’ Present State,[695] give us small glimpses. Later Virginia writers like Bishop Meade[696] and Dr. Philip Slaughter,[697] have gathered up whatever of tradition has floated down in family gossip; and Foote[698] and Esten Cooke[699] have drawn the picture from what sources they could command, as Irving has in his Life of Washington.[700] The most elaborate survey of the subject, with philosophic impulses, has been made by Eben Greenough Scott in his Development of Constitutional Liberty in the English Colonies of America (New York, 1882),[701] in which he contrasts the manners of the lowland aristocracy with those of the farmers of the valley and with the wilder life of the frontiers.[702] The most elaborate composite of data derived from every source is the chapter on “Virginia in 1765,” in Henry Cabot Lodge’s Short History of the English Colonies, in which he depends very largely on the survival of manners in the days when Burnaby, Anburey, Robin, Smyth, Brissot de Warville, Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, and Weld travelled in the country,—material which has the great disadvantage of being derived from chance observation, with more or less of generalization based on insufficient instances, as Dr. Dwight has pointed out in the case of Weld at least.[703]