When Pocahontas died, the last link was broken between the Indian and the settler. Unprovoked wars of extermination were begun to dispossess these children of Nature of the very breasts of their mother, which had sustained them so long and so peacefully. For a century the Indian's name for Virginian was "Longknife." The very missionaries robbed him with one hand whilst baptizing him with the other. One story concerning the missionaries strikes us as sufficiently characteristic of the wit of the Indian and the temper of the period to be preserved. There was a branch of the Catawbas on the Potomac, in which river are to be found the best shad in the world. The missionaries who settled among this tribe taught them that it would be a good investment in their soul-assurance to catch large quantities of the shad for them, the missionaries. The Indians earnestly set themselves to the work; their reverend teachers taking the fish and sending them off secretly to various settlements in Virginia and Maryland, and making thereby large sums of money. The Indians worked on for several months without receiving any compensation, and the missionaries were getting richer and richer,—when by some means the red men discovered the trick, and routed the holy men from their neighborhood. Many years afterward the Catholics made an effort to establish a mission with this same tribe. The priest who first addressed them took as his text, "Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters,"—and went on in figurative style to describe the waters of life. When the sermon was ended, the Indians held a council to consider what they had just heard, and finally sent three of their number to the missionaries, who said, "White men, you speak in fine words of the waters of life; but before we decide on what we have heard, we wish to know whether any shad swim in those waters."
It is very certain that Christianity, as illustrated by the Virginians, did not make a good impression on these savages. They were always willing to compare their own religion with that of the whites, and generally regarded the contrast as in their favor. One of them said to Colonel Barnett, the commissioner to run the boundary-line of lands ceded by the Indians, "As to religion, you go to your churches, sing loud, pray loud, and make great noise. The red people meet once a year at the feast of New Corn, extinguish all their fires and kindle up a new one, the smoke of which ascends to the Great Spirit as a grateful incense and sacrifice. Now what better is your religion than ours?" One of the chiefs, it is said, received an Episcopal divine who wished to indoctrinate him into the mystery of the Trinity. The Indian, who was a "model of deportment," heard his argument; and then, when he was through, began in turn to indoctrinate the divine in his faith, speaking of the Great Spirit, whose voice was the thunder, whose eye was the sun. The clergyman interrupted him rather rudely, saying, "But that is not true,—that is all heathen trash!" The chief turned to his companions and said gravely, "This is the most impolite man I have ever met; he has just declared that he has three gods, and now will not let me have one!"
The valley of Virginia, its El Dorado in every sense, had a different settlement, and by a different people. They were, for the most part, Germans, of the same class with those that settled in the great valleys of Pennsylvania, and who have made so large a portion of that State into a rich ingrain-carpet of cultivation upon a floor of limestone. One day the history of the Germans of Pennsylvania and Virginia will be written, and it will be full of interest and value. They were the first strong sinews strung in the industrial arm of the Colonies to which they came; and although mingled with nearly every European race, they remain to this day a distinct people. A partition-wall rarely broken down has always inclosed them, and to this, perhaps, is due that slowness of progress which marks them. The restless ambition of Le Grand Monarque and the cruelties of Turenne converted the beautiful valley of the Rhine into a smoking desert, and the wretched peasantry of the Palatinate fled from their desolated firesides to seek a more hospitable home in the forests of New York and Pennsylvania, and thence, somewhat later, found their way into Virginia. The exodus of the Puritans has had more celebrity, but was scarcely attended with more hardship and heroism. The greater part of the German exiles landed in America stripped of their all. They came to the forests of the Susquehanna and the Shenandoah armed only with the woodman's axe. They were ignorant and superstitious, and brought with them the legends of their fatherland. The spirits of the Hartz Mountains and the genii of the Black Forest, which Christianity had not been able entirely to exorcise, were transferred to the wild mountains and dark caverns of the Old Dominion, and the same unearthly visitants which haunted the old castles of the Rhine continued their gambols in some deserted cabin on the banks of the Sherandah (as the Shenandoah was then called). Since these men left their fatherland, a great Literature and Philosophy have breathed like a tropic upon that land, and the superstitions have been wrought into poetry and thought; but that raw material of legend which in Germany has been woven into finest tissues on the brain-looms of Wieland, Tieck, Schiller, and Goethe, has remained raw material in the great valley that stretches from New York to Upper Alabama. Whole communities are found which in manners and customs are much the same with their ancestors who crossed the ocean. The horseshoe is still nailed above the door as a protection against the troublesome spook, and the black art is still practised. Rough in their manners, and plain in their appearance, they yet conceal under this exterior a warm hospitality, and the stranger will much sooner be turned away from the door of the "chivalry" than from that of the German farmer. Seated by his blazing fire, with plenty of apples and hard cider, the Dutchman of the Kanawha enjoys his condition with gusto, and is contented with the limitations of his fence. We have seen one within two miles of the great Natural Bridge who could not direct us to that celebrated curiosity; his wife remarking, that "a great many people passed that way to the hills, but for what she could not see: for her part, give her a level country."
The first German settler who came to Virginia was one Jacob Stover, who went there from Pennsylvania, and obtained a grant of five thousand acres of land on the Shenandoah. Stover was very shrewd, and does not at all justify the character we have ascribed to his race: there is a story that casts a suspicion on his proper Teutonism. The story runs, that, on his application to the colonial governor of Virginia for a grant of land, he was refused, unless he could give satisfactory assurance that he would have the land settled with the required number of families within a given time. Being unable to do this, he went over to England, and petitioned the King himself to direct the issuing of his grant; and in order to insure success, had given human names to every horse, cow, hog, and dog he owned, and which he represented as heads of families, ready to settle the land. His Majesty, ignorant that the Williams, Georges, and Susans seeking royal consideration were some squeaking in pig-pens, others braying in the luxuriant meadows for which they petitioned, issued the huge grant; and to-day there is serious reason to suppose that many of the wealthiest and oldest families around Winchester are enjoying their lands by virtue of titles given to ancestral flocks and herds.
The condition of Virginia for the period immediately preceding the Revolution was one which well merits the consideration of political philosophers. For many years the extent of the territory of the Old Dominion was undecided, no lines being fixed between that State and Ohio and Pennsylvania. Virginia claimed a large part of both these States as hers; and, indeed, there seems to be in that State an hereditary unconsciousness of the limits of her dominion. The question of jurisdiction superseded every other for the time, and the formal administration of the law itself ceased. There is a period lasting through a whole generation in which society in the western part of the State went on without courts or authorities. There was no court but of public opinion, no administration but of the mob. Judges were ermined and juries impanelled by the community when occasion demanded. Kercheval, who grew from that vicinity and state of things, and whose authority is excellent, says,—"They had no civil, military, or ecclesiastical laws,—at least, none were enforced; yet we look in vain for any period, before or since, when property, life, and morals were any better protected." A statement worth pondering by those who tell us that man is nought, government all. The tongue-lynchings and other punishments inflicted by the community upon evil-doers were adapted to the reformation of the culprit or his banishment from the community. The punishment for idleness, lying, dishonesty, and ill-fame generally, was that of "hating the offender out," as they expressed it. This was about equivalent to the [Greek: atimia] among the Greeks. It was a public expression, in various ways, of the general indignation against any transgressor, and commonly resulted either in the profound repentance or the voluntary exile of the person against whom it was directed: it was generally the fixing of any epithet which was proclaimed by each tongue when the sinner appeared,—e.g., Foultongue, Lawrence, Snakefang. The name of Extra-Billy Smith is a quite recent case of this "tongue-lynching." It was in these days of no laws, however, that the practice of duelling was imported into Virginia. With this exception, the State can trace no evil results to the period when society was resolved into its simplest elements. Indeed, it was at this time that there began to appear there signs of a sturdy and noble race of Americanized Englishmen. The average size of the European Englishman was surpassed. A woman was equal to an Indian. A young Virginian one day killed a buffalo on the Alleghany Mountains, stretched its skin over ribs of wood, and on the boat so made sailed the full length of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. But this development was checked by the influx of "English gentry," who brought laws and fashions from London. The old books are full of the conflicts which these fastidious gentlemen and ladies had with the rude pioneer customs and laws. The fine ladies found that there was an old statute of the Colony which read,—"It shall be permitted to none but the Council and Heads of Hundreds to wear gold in their clothes, or to wear silk till they make it themselves." What, then, could Miss Softdown do with the silks and breastpins brought from London? "Let her wear deer-skin and arrow-head," said the natives. But Miss Softdown soon had her way. Still more were these new families shocked, when, on ringing for some newly purchased negro domestic, the said negro came into the parlor nearly naked. Then began one of the most extended controversies in the history of Virginia,—the question being, whether out-door negroes should wear clothes, and domestics dress like other people. The popular belief, in which it seems the negroes shared, was, that the race would perish, if subjected to clothing the year round. The custom of negro men going about in puris naturalibus prevailed to a much more recent period than is generally supposed.
One by one, the barbarisms of Old Virginia were eradicated, and the danger was then that effeminacy would succeed; but a better class of families began to come from England, now that the Colony was somewhat prepared for them. These aimed to make Virginia repeat England: it might have repeated something worse, and in the end has. About one or two old mansions in Maryland and Virginia the long silvery grass characteristic of the English park is yet found: the seed was carefully brought from England by those gentlemen who came under Raleigh's administration, and who regarded their residence in these Colonies as patriotic self-devotion. On one occasion, the writer, walking through one of these fields, startled an English lark, which rose singing and soaring skyward. It sang a theme of the olden time. Governor Spottswood brought with him, when he came, a number of these larks, and made strenuous efforts to domesticate them in the neighborhood of Fredericksburg, Virginia. He did not succeed. Now and then we have heard of one's being seen, companionless. It is a sad symbol of that nobler being who tried to domesticate himself in Virginia, the fine old English gentleman. He is now seen but little oftener than the silver grass and the lark which he brought with him. But let no one think, whilst ridiculing those who can now only hide their poor stature under the lion-skin of F-F-V-ism, that the race of old Virginia gentlemen is a mythic race. Through the fair slopes of Eastern Virginia we have wandered and counted the epitaphs of as princely men and women as ever trod this continent. Yonder is the island, floating on the crystal Rappahannock, which, instead of, as now, masking the guns which aim at Freedom's heart, once bore witness to the noble Spottswood's effort to realize for the working-man a Utopia in the New World. Yonder is the house, on the same river, frowning now with the cannon which defend the slave-shamble, (for the Richmond railroad passes on its verge,) where Washington was reared to love justice and honor; and over to the right its porch commands a marble shaft on which is written, "Here lies Mary, the Mother of Washington." A little lower is the spot where John Smith gave the right hand to the ambassadors of King Powhatan. In that old court-house the voice of Patrick Henry thundered for Liberty and Union. Time was when the brave men on whose hearts rested the destinies of the New World made this the centre of activity and rule upon the continent; they lived and acted here as Anglo-Saxon blood should live and act, wherever it bears its rightful sceptre; but now one walks here as through the splendid ruins of some buried Nineveh, and emerges to find the very sunlight sad, as it reveals those who garnish the sepulchres of their ancestors with one hand, whilst with the other they stone and destroy the freedom and institutions which their fathers lived to build and died to defend.
And this, alas! is the first black line in the sketch of Virginia as it now is. The true preface to the present edition of Virginia, which, unhappily, has been for many years stereotyped, may be found in a single entry of Captain John Smith's journal:—
"August, 1619. A Dutch man-of-war visited Jamestown and sold the settlers twenty negroes, the first that have ever touched the soil of Virginia."
They have scarcely made it "sacred soil." A little entry it is, of what seemed then, perhaps, an unimportant event,—but how pregnant with evil!
The very year in which that Dutch ship arrived with its freight of slaves at Jamestown, the Mayflower sailed with its freight of freemen for Plymouth.