Yet, as if prophetic of the long political issues of which she was destined to be the scene of conflict, the colonial star of Virginia was early obscured by misfortune. When John Smith left her shores for the last time in 1609, discontent and disaster had already marred the prospects of the new settlement; and, in half a year, Gates, Somers, Newport arrived to find but sixty colonists remaining, and they resolved to abandon the enterprise; but on encountering Delaware, they were induced to return, and Jamestown was again the scene of life and labor. Ten years of comparative success ensued; and then one hundred and sixty poor women were imported for wives, at a cost of about the same number of pounds of tobacco; but simultaneously with this requisite provision for domestic growth and comfort, the germ of Virginia's ruin came: a Dutch vessel entered the James river, bringing twenty African captives, which were purchased by the colonists. Two years later the Indians made a destructive foray upon the thriving village; the king became alarmed at the freedom of political discussion, dissolved the Virginia company, and appointed a governor and twelve councillors to rule the province;—the father's policy was followed by Charles the First, many of whose zealous partisans found a refuge from Cromwell in the province. At last came the Revolution and the Union. Meantime slavery was dying out; its abolition was desired; and had free labor then and there superseded it, far different would have been the destiny of the fair State; whose western portion affords such a contrast to that wherein this blight induced improvidence and deterioration, the tokens whereof were noted by every visitor in the spare and desultory culture of the soil, the neglected resources, the dilapidated fences and dwellings, and the absence of that order and comfort which inevitably attaches to legitimate industry and self-reliance. This melancholy perversion of great natural advantages was the result of slave breeding for the Southern market. Otherwise Virginia would have continued the prosperous development initiated in her colonial days. The exigencies of the cotton culture, rendered immensely profitable by a mechanical invention which infinitely lessened the cost of preparing the staple for the market, had thus renewed and prolonged the original and fast-decaying social and political bane of a region associated with the noblest names and most benign prospects. Chief-Justice Marshall aptly described to an English traveller this sad and fatal transition:
'He said he had seen Virginia the leading State for half his life; he had seen her become the second, and sink to be the fifth. Worse than this, there was no arresting her decline if her citizens did not put an end to slavery; and he saw no signs of any intention to do so, east of the mountains at least. He had seen whole groups of estates, populous in his time, lapse into waste. He had seen agriculture exchanged for human stock breeding; and he keenly felt the degradation. The forest was returning over the fine old estates, and the wild creatures which had not been seen for generations were reappearing; numbers and wealth were declining, and education and manners were degenerating. It would not have surprised him to be told that on that soil would the main battles be fought when the critical day should come which he foresaw.'
That day it is our lot to behold. Forced at the point of the bayonet to arrogate to herself the illegal claims she had vainly sought to establish by popular suffrage, as reserved rights, in 1787, and the resolutions of 1798, the Secession Ordinance was nominally passed and summarily enforced, despite the protests of the citizens and the withdrawal of the western counties; and thus the traitors of the Cotton States made Virginia the battle field between slaveocracy and constitutional government. As early as 1632 a fierce controversy for territorial rights occurred on the Chesapeake, when that portion of Virginia, now Maryland, was brought into dispute by Claiborne, who began to trade, notwithstanding the grant which Lord Baltimore had secured: this, the first conflict between the whites, and two Indian massacres, made desolate the region so lately devastated by the civil war. Nor was the original enjoyment of remarkable political rights coincident with American independence; for, while Charles the Second was an exile, and Parliament demoralized, the fugitive king still held nominal sway in Virginia; and when the flight of Richard Cromwell left the kingdom without a head, that distant colony was ruled by its own assembly, and enjoyed free suffrage and free trade: then came what is called Bacon's rebellion—an effective protest against oppressive prohibitions. Nor did these civil discords end with the Restoration; many old soldiers of Cromwell emigrated to Virginia, and, under their auspices, an insurrection 'against the tobacco plot' was organized; and this was followed by numerous difficulties in home legislation, by violent controversies with royal governors; deputies continually were sent to England to remonstrate with the king against 'intolerable grants' and the exportation of jailbirds. Their despotic master over the sea appropriated the lands of the colonists, while their own representatives monopolized the profits; cruel or obstinate was the sway of Berkeley, Spottwood, Dinwiddie, and Dunmore; and after the people had succumbed as regards military opposition, they continued to maintain their rights by legislative action. Under James the Second, Lord Howard repealed many of these conservative acts and prorogued the House of Burgesses. A respite, attested by glad acclaim, marked the accession of William and Mary, and the recall of Howard. Andros was sent over in 1692. The skirmish with Junonville initiated the French war and introduced upon the scene its most hallowed name and character, when Colonel Washington appeared first as a soldier, strove in vain against the ignorance and self-will of Dinwiddie, and shared Braddock's defeat, to be signally preserved for the grandest career in history.
And when the war of the Revolution gave birth to the nation, not only was Virginia the native State of its peerless chief, but some of its memorable scenes and heroes there found scope; Steuben and Lafayette there carried on military operations, there the traitor Arnold was wounded, Hamilton and Rochambeau gained historic celebrity, and there the great drama was closed by the surrender of Cornwallis. In the debates incident to the adoption of the Federal Constitution, there was manifested in Virginia that jealousy of a strong central government, which thwarted the wise advocacy and ignored the prophetic warnings of the best statesmen, thereby confirming the fundamental error destined, years after, to give facility to treasonable usurpation: the Constitution was only ratified, at last, by a majority of ten. In the war of 1812, Hampton, Craney Island, White House, and various places on and near the Potomac, since identified with fierce encounters and forays in the war of the rebellion, witnessed gallant deeds in behalf of the Republic. In 1829 a convention assembled in Virginia to modify the Constitution. Long having the most extensive territory and largest slaveholders, the aristocratic element disturbed and overmastered democratic principles. During Cromwell's rule, when virtually independent, Virginia proffered a fleet to the fugitive monarch; who, when restored, in gratitude ordered her arms to be quartered with those of England, Scotland, and Ireland; in exile even accepted her invitation to migrate thither and assume the privileges of royalty: coins of the Old Dominion yet testify this projected despotism. Instead of Dissenters as in New England, Quakers as in Pennsylvania, or Romanists as in Maryland, Virginia, from her earliest colonization, was identified with the Church of England. It was regarded, says one of her historians, as an 'unrighteous compulsion to maintain teachers; and what they called religious errors were deeply felt during the regal government:' the children of the more prosperous colonists were sent to England to be educated; their pursuits and habits, on returning, were unfavorable to study; and, therefore, the advantage thus gained was, for the most part, confined to 'superficial good manners,' and the ideal standard attained that of 'true Britons and true churchmen;' the former was a more cherished distinction there than elsewhere in America. In 1837 was copied from a tombstone in an old-settled part of the State, this inscription: 'Here lyes the body of Lieut. William Harris, who died May ye 16, 1608—a good soldier, husband, and neighbor: by birth a Briton.' In these facts of the past and normal tendencies we find ample means and motives to account for the anomalous political elements involved in the history—social and civic—of Virginia. While boasting the oldest university where four Presidents of the United States were educated, she sustained a slave code which was a bitter satire on civilized society: the law of entail long prevailed in a community ostensibly democratic, and only by the strenuous labors of Jefferson was church monopoly abolished. It is not surprising, in the retrospect, that her roll of famous citizens includes the noblest and the basest names which illustrate the political transitions of the land; the architects and subverters of free polity, the magnanimous and the perfidious. When the ameliorating influence of time and truth had, in a degree, harmonized the incongruous elements of opinion and developed the economical resources, while they liberalized the sentiments and habitudes of the people; when, says Caines, 'slavery, by exhausting the soil, had eaten away its own profits, and the recolonization by free settlers had actually begun, came suddenly the prohibition of the African slave trade, and nearly at the same time, the vast enlargement of the field for slavery, by the purchase of Louisiana; and these two events made Virginia again profitable as a means of breeding for exportation and sale at the South.
The future geographer who elaborately applies the philosophy of that science, as interpreted by its modern professors, to our own history, will find in the events of the last few years in Virginia the richest and most impressive illustrations of local and physical causes in determining political and social destinies. Between the eastern and western portion of that State it will be demonstrated that nature placed irreconcilable barriers to the supremacy of slave labor and slave property; and the economical value of each will be shown thus and there tested with emphatic truth; so that by the laws of physical geography the first effect of an appeal to arms to maintain the one, was to alienate, as a civic element, the other, and give birth to a new State, by virtue of the self assertion incident to the violation of a normal instinct and necessity of civilization.
What a change came over the scene when the grave civic interests so long and recklessly involved in the conflict of opinion were submitted to the arbitrament of battle! Along the river on whose shores the ashes of Washington had slept for more than half a century in honored security, batteries thundered upon each passing craft that bore the flag of the nation: every wood became a slaughter pen, every bluff a shrine of patriotic martyrdom; bridges were destroyed and rebuilt with alacrity; the sentinel's challenge broke the stillness of midnight; the earth was honeycombed with riflepits; campfires glowed on the hills; thousands perished in the marshes; creeks were stained with human blood; here sank the trench; there rose a grave mound or a fortress; pickets challenged the wanderer; every ford and mountain pass witnessed the clash of arms and echoed with the roar of artillery; the raid, the skirmish, the bivouac, the march, and the battery successively spread desolation and death; Arlington House, full of peaceful trophies, once dear to national pride, was the headquarters of an army; balloons hung in the sky, whence the movements of the foe were watched. Gaps and junctions were contested unto death; obscure towns gained historic names and bloody memories; and each familiar court-house and village came to be identified with valorous achievements or sanguinary disaster.
And this land of promise, this region which so long witnessed the extremes of political magnanimity and turpitude, this arena where the vital question of labor, as modified by involuntary servitude, and free activity, found its most practical solution—was, and is, legitimately, appropriately, and naturally, the scene of the fiercest strife for national existence—where the claims and the climax of freedom and faith culminated in all the desolation of civil war. A more difficult country for military operations can scarcely be imagined. Early in the struggle it was truly said:
'Virginia is the Switzerland of the continent—a battle field every three miles—a range of hills streaming where Hill may retire five miles by five miles till he reaches Richmond—a conquest, undoubtedly, if the North perseveres, but won at such a cost and with such time as to prolong unnecessarily the struggle. The Richmond of the South lies in the two millions of blacks that are within the reach of cannon of our gunboats in the rivers that empty into the Gulf.'
How wearisome the delays and how constant the privations of the army of occupation in such a region, wrote an experienced observer:
'Dwelling in huts, surrounded by a sea of mud, may appear to be very romantic—on paper—to some folks, but the romance of this kind of existence with the soldiers soon wears away, and to them any change must necessarily be for the better; they therefore hail with delight, as a positive relief, the opportunity once more to practise their drill which the recent change of weather has afforded them. For the last three months, the time of the soldier has passed heavily enough, with the long winter nights, and little else to relieve the monotony of his life but stereotyped guard duty.'