The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 by Julian Hawthorne

J >> Julian Hawthorne >> The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1

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Such, we may imagine, were the surroundings and circumstances of this
famous gathering, the transactions of which fill so bright a page in the
annals of the early colonies. The governor asked the clergyman for a
blessing, and when the prayer was done suggested the choosing of a
chairman, or speaker. The choice fell upon John Pory, a member of the
former council. Then the governor read his letter from the company in
London.

The letter, in few words, opened the door to every reform which could
make the colony free, prosperous and happy, and declared all past wrongs
at an end. It merely outlined the scope of the improvements, leaving it to
the colonists themselves to fill in the details. "Those cruel laws were
abrogated, and they were to be governed by those free laws under which his
majesty's subjects in England lived." An annual grand assembly, consisting
of the governor and council and two burgesses from each plantation, chosen
by the people, was to be held; and at these assemblies they were to frame
whatever laws they deemed proper for their welfare. These concessions were
of the more value and effect, because they were advocated in England by
men who had only the good of the colony at heart, and possessed power to
enforce their will.

It seemed almost too good to be true: it was like the sun rising after
the long arctic night. Those sad faces flushed, and the moody eyes
kindled. The burgesses straightened their backs and lifted their heads;
they looked at one another, and felt that they were once more men. There
was a murmur of joy and congratulation; and thanks were uttered to God,
and to the Company, for what had been done. And forthwith they set to work
with life and energy, and with a judgment and foresight which were hardly
to have been looked for in legislators so untried, to construct the
platform of enactments upon which the commonwealth of Virginia was
henceforth to stand.

From the body of the delegates, two committees were selected to devise
the new laws and provisions, while the governor and the rest reviewed the
laws already in existence, to determine what part of them, if any, was
suitable for continuance. Among the articles agreed upon were regulations
relating to distribution and tenure of land, which replaced all former
patents and privileges, and set all holders on an equal footing: the
recognition of the Church of England as governing the mode of worship in
Virginia, with a good salary for clergymen and an injunction that all and
sundry were to appear at church every Sunday, and bring their weapons with
them--thus insuring Heaven a fair hearing, while at the same time making
provision against the insecurity of carnal things. The wives of the
planters as well as their husbands were capacitated to own land, because,
in a new world, a woman might turn out to be as efficient as the man. This
sounds almost prophetic; but it was probably intended to operate on the
cultivation of the silkworm. Plantations of the mulberry had been ordered,
and culture of the cocoon was an industry fitting to the gentler sex, who
were the more likely to succeed in it on account of their known partiality
for the product. On the other hand, excess in apparel was kept within
bounds by a tax. The planting of vines was also ordered; but as a matter
of fact the manufacture of neither wine nor silk was destined to succeed
in the colony; tobacco and cotton were to be its staples, but the latter
had not at this epoch been attempted. Order and propriety among the
colonists were assured by penalties on gaming, drunkenness, and sloth; and
the better to guard against the proverbial wiles of Satan, a university
was sketched out, and direction was given that such children of the
heathen as showed indications of latent talent should be caught, tamed and
instructed, and employed as missionaries among their tribes. Finally, a
fixed price of three shillings for the best quality of tobacco, and
eighteen pence for inferior brands, was appointed; thus giving the colony
a currency which had the double merit of being a sound medium for traffic,
and an agreeable consolation and incense when the labors of the day were
past.

It was a good day's work; and the assembly dissolved with the conviction
that their time had never before been passed to such advantage. Yeardley,
knowing the disposition of the managers in London, opposed no objection to
the immediate practical enforcement of the new enactments; and indeed
Sandys, when he had an opportunity of examining the digest, expressed the
opinion that it had been "well and judiciously formed." The colonists, for
their part, dismissed all anxieties and shadows from their minds, and fell
to putting in crops and putting up dwellings as men will who have a stake
in their country, and feel that they can live in it. Their confidence was
not misplaced; within a year from this time the number of the colonists
had been more than doubled, and all troubles seemed at an end.

So long, however, as James I. disgraced the throne of England, popular
liberties could never be quite sure of immunity; and during the five or
six years that he still had to live, he did his best to disturb the
felicity of his Virginian subjects. He was unable to do anything very
serious, and what he did do, was in contravention of law. He got Sandys
out of the presidency; but Southampton was immediately put in his place;
he tried to get away the patent which he himself had issued, and finally
did so; but the colony kept its laws and its freedom, though the Throne
thenceforward appointed the governors. He put a heavy tax on tobacco,
which he professed to regard as an invention of the enemy; and he
countenanced an attempt by Lord Warwick, in behalf of Argall, to continue
martial law in the colony instead of allowing trial by Jury; but in this
he was defeated. He sent out two commissioners to Virginia to discover
pretexts for harassing it, and took the matter out of the hands of
Parliament; but the Virginians maintained themselves until death stepped
in and put a final stop to his majesty's industry, and Charles I. came to
the throne.

The climate of Virginia does not predispose to exertion; yet farming
involves hard physical work; and, beyond anything else, the wealth of
Virginia was derived from farming. Manufactures had not come in view, and
were discouraged or forbidden by English decree. But, as we saw in the
early days of Jamestown, the settlers there were unused to work, and
averse from it; although, under the stimulus of Captain John Smith, they
did learn how to chop down trees. After the colony became popular, and
populous, the emigrants continued to be in a large measure of a social
class to whom manual labor is unattractive. A country in which laborers
are indispensable, and which is inhabited by persons disinclined to labor,
would seem to stand no good chance of achieving prosperity. How, then, is
the early prosperity of Virginia to be explained? The charter did not make
men work.

It was due to the employment of slave labor. Slaves in the Seventeenth
Century were easily acquired, and were of several varieties. At one time,
there were more white slaves than black. White captives were often sold
into slavery; and there was also a regular trade in indentured slaves, or
servants, sent from England. These were to work out their freedom by a
certain number of years of labor for their purchaser. Convicts from the
prisons were also utilized as slaves. In the same year that the Virginia
charter bestowed political freedom upon the colonists, a Dutch ship landed
a batch of slaves from the Guinea coast, where the Dutch had a footing.
They were strong fellows, and the ardor of the climate suited them better
than that of the regions further north. Negroes soon came to be in demand
therefore; they did not die in captivity as the Indians were apt to do,
and a regular trade in them was presently established. A negro fetched in
the market more than twice as much as either a, red or a white man, and
repaid the investment. There was no general sentiment against traffic in
human beings, and it was not settled that negroes were human, exactly.
Slavery at all events had been the normal condition of Guinea negroes from
the earliest times, and they undoubtedly were worse treated by their
African than by their European and American owners. They were born slaves,
or at least in slavery. There had of course been enlightened humanitarians
as far back as the Greek and Roman eras, who had opined that the principle
of slavery was wrong; and such men were talking still; but ordinary people
regarded their deliverances as being in the nature of a counsel of
perfection, which was not intended to be observed in practice. There are
fashions in humanitarianism, as in other matters, and multitudes who
denounced slavery in the first half of this Nineteenth Century, were in no
respect better practical moralists than were the Virginians two hundred
years before. But the time had to come, in the course of human events,
when negro slavery was to cease in America; and those whose business
interests, or sentimental prejudices, were opposed to it, added the chorus
of their disapproval to the inscrutable movements of a Power above all
prejudices. Negro slavery, as an overt institution, is no more in these
States; but he would be a bold or a blind man who should maintain that
slavery, both black and white, has no existence among us to-day. Meanwhile
the Seventeenth Century planters of Virginia bought and sold their human
chattels with an untroubled conscience; and the latter, comprehending even
less of the ethics of the question than their masters did, were reasonably
happy. They were not aware that human nature was being insulted and
degraded in their persons: they were transported by no moral indignation.
When they were flogged, they suffered, but when their bodies stopped
smarting, no pain rankled in their minds. They were treated like animals,
and became like them. They had no anxieties; they looked neither forward
nor backward; their physical necessities were provided for. White slavery
gradually disappeared, but the feeling prevailed that slavery was what
negroes were intended for. The planters, after a few generations, came to
feel a sort of affection for their bondsmen who had been born on the
estates and handed down from father to son. Self-interest, as well as
natural kindliness, rendered deliberate cruelties rare. The negroes, on
the other hand, often loved their masters, and would grieve to leave them.
The evils of slavery were not on the surface, but were subtle, latent, and
far more malignant than was even recently realized. The Abolitionists
thought the trouble was over when the Proclamation of Emancipation was
signed. "We can put on our coats and go home, now," said Garrison; and
Wendell Phillips said, "I know of no man to-day who can fold his arms and
look forward to his future with more confidence than the negro." We shall
have occasion to investigate the intelligence of these forecasts
by-and-by. But there is something striking in the fact that that country
which claims to be the freest and most highly civilized in the world
should be the last to give up "the peculiar institution." How can devotion
to liberty co-exist in the mind with advocacy of servitude? This, too, is
a subject to which we must revert hereafter. At the period we are now
treating, there were more white than black slaves, and the princely
estates of later times had not been thought of. Indeed, in spite of
their marriage to liberty, the colonists did not yet feel truly at home.
Marriage of a more concrete kind was needed for that.

This defect was understood in England, and the Company took means to
remedy it. A number of desirable and blameless young women were enlisted
to go out to the colony and console the bachelors there. The plan was
discreetly carried out; the acquisition of the young ladies was not made
too easy, so that neither was their self-respect wounded, nor were the
bachelors allowed to feel that beauty and virtue in female form were
commonplace commodities. The romance and difficulty of the situation were
fairly well preserved. There stood the possible bride; but she was
available only with her own consent and approval; and before entering the
matrimonial estate, the bridegroom elect must pay all charges--so many
pounds of tobacco. And how many pounds of tobacco was a good wife worth?
From one point of view, more than was ever grown in Virginia; but the
sentimental aspect of the transaction had to be left out of consideration,
or the enterprise would have come to an untimely conclusion. From one
hundred to one hundred and fifty pounds of the weed was the average
commercial figure; it paid expenses and gave the agents a commission; for
the rest, the profit was all the colonist's. Many a happy home was founded
in this way, and, so far as we know, there were no divorces and no
scandals. But it must not be forgotten that, although tobacco was paid for
the wife, there was still enough left to fill a quiet pipe by the conjugal
fireside. They were the first Christian firesides where this soothing
goddess had presided: no wonder they were peaceful!

Charles I. was a young man, with a large responsibility on his shoulders;
and two leading convictions in his mind. The first was that he ought to be
the absolute head of the nation; Parliament might take counsel with him,
but should not control him when it came to action. The same notion had
prevailed with James I., and was to be the immediate occasion of the
downfall of James II.; as for Charles II., his long experience of hollow
oak trees, and secret chambers in the houses of loyalists, had taught him
the limitations of the kingly prerogative before he began his reign; and
the severed head of his father clinched the lesson. But the Stuarts, as a
family, were disinclined to believe that the way to inherit the earth was
by meekness, and none of them believed it so little as the first Charles.

The second conviction he entertained was that he must have revenues, and
that they should be large and promptly paid. His whole pathetic career
--tragic seems too strong a word for it, though it ended in death--was a
mingled story of nobility, falsehood, gallantry and treachery, conditioned
by his blind pursuit of these two objects, money and power.

Upon general principles, then, it was to be expected that Charles would
be the enemy of Virginian liberties. But it happened that money was his
more pressing need at the time his attention first was turned on the
colony; he saw that revenues were to be gained from them; he knew that the
charter recently given to them had immensely increased their
productiveness; and as to his prerogative, he had not as yet felt the
resistance which his parliament had in store for him, and was therefore
not jealous of the political privileges of a remote settlement--one, too,
which seemed to be in the hands of loyal gentlemen. "Their liberties harm
me not," was his thought, "and they appear to be favorable to the success
of the tobacco crop; the tobacco monopoly can put money in my purse;
therefore let the liberties remain. Should these planters ever presume to
go too far, it will always be in my power to stop them." Thus it came
about that tobacco, after procuring the Virginians loving wives, was also
the means of securing the favor of their king. But they, naturally,
ascribed the sunshine of his smile to some innate merit in themselves, and
their gratitude made them his enthusiastic supporters as long as he lived.
They mourned his death, and opened their arms to all royalist refugees
from the power of Cromwell. When Cromwell sent over a man-of-war, however,
they accepted the situation. Virginia had by that time grown to so
considerable an importance that they could adopt a somewhat conservative
attitude toward the affairs even of the mother country.

The ten years following Charles's accession were a period of peace and
growth in the colony; of great increase in population and in production,
and of a steady ripening of political liberties. But the conditions under
which this development went on were different from those which existed in
New England and in New York. The Puritans were actuated by religious
ideals, the Dutch by commercial projects chiefly; but the Virginia
planters were neither religious enthusiasts nor tradesmen. Their tendency
was not to huddle together in towns and close communities, but to spread
out over the broad and fertile miles of their new country, and live each
in a little principality of his own, with his slaves and dependants around
him. They modeled their lives upon those of the landed gentry in England;
and when their crops were gathered, they did not go down to the wharfs and
haggle over their disposal, but handed them over to agents, who took all
trouble off their hands, and after deducting commissions and charges made
over to them the net profits. This left the planters leisure to apply
themselves to liberal pursuits; they maintained a dignified and generous
hospitality, and studied the art of government. A race of gallant
gentlemen grew up, well educated, and consciously superior to the rest of
the population, who had very limited educational facilities, and but
little of that spirit of equality and independence which characterized the
northern colonies. Towns and cities came slowly; the plantation system was
more natural and agreeable under the circumstances. Orthodoxy in religion
was the rule; and though at first there was a tendency to eschew
narrowness and bigotry, yet gradually the church became hostile to
dissenters, and Puritans and Quakers were as unwelcome in Virginia as were
the latter in Massachusetts, or Episcopalians anywhere in New England. All
this seems incompatible with democracy; and probably it might in time have
grown into a liberal monarchical system. The slaves were not regarded as
having any rights, political or personal; their masters exercised over
them the power of life and death, as well as all lesser powers. The bulk
of the white population was not oppressed, and was able to get a living,
for Virginia was "the best poor man's country in the world"; there was
little or none of the discontent that embarrassed the New Amsterdam
patroons; the charter gave them representation, and their manhood was not
undermined. Had Virginia been an island, or otherwise isolated, and free
from any external interference, we can imagine that the planters might at
last have found it expedient to choose a king from among their number, who
would have found a nobility and a proletariat ready made. But Virginia was
not isolated. She was loyal to the Stuarts, because they did not bring to
bear upon her the severities which they inflicted upon their English
subjects; but when she became a royal colony, and had to put up with
corrupt and despotic favorites of the monarch, who could do what they
pleased, and were responsible to nobody but the monarch who had made them
governor, loyalty began to cool. Moreover, men whose ability and advanced
opinions made them distasteful to the English kings, fled to the colonies,
and to Virginia among the rest, and sowed the seeds of revolt. Calamity
makes strange bedfellows: the planters liked outside oppression as little
as did the common people, and could not but make common cause with them.
The distance between the two was diminished. Social equality there could
hardly be; but political and theoretic equality could be acknowledged.
The English monarchy made the American republic; spurred its indolence,
and united its parts. Man left to himself is lax and indifferent; from
first to last it is the pressure of wrong that molds him into the form of
right. George I. gave the victory to the Americans in the Revolution as
much as Washington did. And before George's time, the colonies had been
keyed up to the struggle by years of injustice and outrage. And this
injustice and outrage seemed the more intolerable because they had been
preceded by a period of comparative liberality. It needs powerful pressure
to transform English gentlemen with loyalist traditions, and sympathies
into a democracy; but it can be done, and the English kings were the men
to do it.

Until the period of unequivocal tyranny arrived, the chief shadow upon
the colony was cast by its relations with the Indians. Powhatan, the
father of Pocahontas, and chief over tribes whose domains extended over
thousands of square miles, kept friendship with the whites till his death
in 1618. His brother, Opechankano, professed to inherit the friendship
along with the chieftainship; but the relations between the red men and
the colonists had never been too cordial, and the latter, measuring their
muskets and breastplates against the stone arrows and deerskin shirts of
the savages, fell into the error of despising them. The Indians, for their
part, stood in some awe of firearms, which they had never held in their
own hands, and the penalty for selling which to them had been made capital
years before. But they had their own methods of dealing with foes; and
since neither side had ever formally come to blows, they had received no
object lesson to warn them to keep hands off. Opechankano was intelligent
and far-seeing; he perceived that the whites were increasing in numbers,
and that if they were not checked betimes, they would finally overrun the
country. But he did not see so far as his brother, who had known that the
final domination of the English could not be prevented, and had therefore
adopted the policy of conciliating them as the best. Opechankano,
therefore, quietly planned the extermination of the settlers; the familiar
terms on which the white and red men stood played into his hands. Indians
were in the habit of visiting the white settlements, and mingling with the
people. Orders for concerted action were secretly circulated among the
savages, who were to hold themselves ready for the signal.

It might after all never have been given, but for an unlooked for
incident. A noisy and troublesome Indian, who imagined that bullets could
not kill him, fell into a quarrel with a settler, and slew him; and was
himself shot while attempting to escape from arrest. "Sooner shall the
heavens fall," devoutly exclaimed Opechankano, when informed of this
mishap, "than I will break the peace of Powhatan." But the waiting tribes
knew that the time had come.

On the morning of March 22, 1622, the settlers arose as usual to the
labors of the day; some of them took their hoes and spades and went out
into the fields; others busied themselves about their houses. Numbers of
Indians were about, but this excited no remark or suspicion; they were not
formidable; a dog could frighten them; a child could hold them in check.
Indians strolled into the cabins, and sat at the breakfast-tables. No one
gave them a second thought. No one looked over his shoulder when an Indian
passed behind him.

But, miles up the country from Jamestown lived a settler who kept an
Indian boy, whom he instructed, and who made himself useful about the
place; and of all the Indians in Virginia that day he was the only one
whose heart relented. His brother had lain with him the night before, and
had given him the word: he was to kill the settler and his family the next
morning. The boy seemed to assent, and the other went on his way. The boy
lay till dawn, his savage mind divided between fear of the great chief and
compassion for the white man who had been kind to him and taught him. In
the early morning he arose and stood beside his benefactor's bed. The man
slept: one blow, and he would be dead. But the boy did not strike; he
wakened him and told him of the horror that was about to befall.

Pace--such was the settler's name--did not wait for confirmation of the
tale; indeed, as he ran to the paddock to get his packhorse, he could see
the smoke of burning cabins rising in the still air, and could hear, far
off, the yells of the savages as they plied their work.

He sprang on the horse's back, with his musket across the withers, and
set off at a gallop toward Jamestown. Most of the colonists lived in that
neighborhood; if he could get there in time many lives might be saved. As
he rode, he directed his course to the cabins, on the right hand and on
the left, that lay in his way, and gave the alarm. Many of the savages,
who had not yet begun their work, at once took to flight; they would not
face white men when on their guard. In other places, the warning came too
late. The missionary, who had devoted his life to teaching the heathen
that men should love one another, was inhumanly butchered. Pace arrived in
season to avert the danger from the bulk of the little population; but, of
the four thousand scattered over the country-side, three hundred and
forty-seven died that morning, with the circumstances of hideous atrocity
which were the invariable accompaniments of Indian massacre. The colonists
were appalled; and for a time it seemed as if the purpose of Opechankano
would be realized. Two thousand settlers came in from the outlying
districts, panic-stricken, and after living for a while crowded together
in unwholesome quarters in the vicinity of Jamestown, took ship and
returned to England. Hardly one in ten of the plantations was not
deserted. The bolder spirits, who remained, organized a war of
extermination, in which they were supported and re-enforced by the
company, who sent over men and weapons as soon as the news was known in
England. But the campaign resolved itself into long and harassing attacks,
ambuscades and reprisals, extending over many years. There could be no
pitched battles with Indians; they gave way, but only to circumvent and
surprise. The whites were resolved to make no peace, and to give no
quarter to man, woman or child. The formerly peaceful settlement became
inured to blood and cruelty. But the red men could not be wholly driven
away. Just twenty years after the first massacre the same implacable
chief, now a decrepit old man, planned a second one; some hundreds were
murdered; but the colonists were readier and stronger now, and they
gathered themselves up at once, and inflicted a crushing vengeance. The
ancient chief was finally taken, and either died of wounds received in
fight, or was slain by a soldier after capture. After 1646, the borders
of Virginia were safe. There is no redeeming feature in this Indian
warfare, which fitfully survives, in remote parts of our country, even
now. It aided, perhaps, to train the race of pioneers and frontiersmen who
later became one of the most remarkable features of our early population.
Contact with the savage races inoculated us, perhaps, with a touch of
their stoicism and grimness. But in our conflicts with them there was
nothing noble or inspiring; and there could be no object in view on either
side but extermination. Our Indian fighters became as savage and merciless
as the creatures they pursued. The Indian must be fought by the same
tactics he adopts--cunning, stealth, surprise, and then unrelenting
slaughter, with the sequel of the scalping knife. They compel us to
descend to their level in war, and we have utterly failed to raise them to
our own in peace. Some of them have possessed certain harshly masculine
traits which we can admire; some of them have showed broad and virile
intelligence, the qualities of a general, a diplomatist, or even of a
statesman. There have been, and are, so-called tame Indians; but such were
not worth taming. As a whole, the red tribes have resisted all attempts to
lift them to the civilized level and keep them there. Roger Williams, and
the "apostle," John Eliot, were their friends, and won their regard; but
neither Williams' influence nor Eliot's Bible left any lasting trace upon
them. The Indian is irreclaimable; disappointment is the very mildest
result that awaits the effort to reclaim him. He is wild to the marrow; no
bird or beast is so wild as he. He is a human embodiment of the untrodden
woods, the undiscovered rivers, the austere mountains, the pathless
prairies--of all those parts and aspects of nature which are never brought
within the smooth sway of civilization, because, as soon as civilization
appears, they are, so far as their essential quality is concerned, gone.
To hear the yelp of the coyote, you must lie alone in the sage brush near
the pool in the hollow of the low hills by moonlight; it will never reach
your ears through the bars of the menagerie cage. To know the mountain,
you must confront the avalanche and the precipice uncompanioned, and stand
at last on the breathless and awful peak, which lifts itself and you into
a voiceless solitude remote from man and yet no nearer to God; but if you
journey with guides and jolly fellowship to some Mountain House, never so
airily perched, you would as well visit a panorama. To comprehend the
ocean, you must meet it in its own inviolable domain, where it tosses
heavenward its careless nakedness, and laughs with death; from the deck of
a steamboat you will never find it, though you sail as far as the Flying
Dutchman. But the solitude which nature reveals, and which alone reveals
her, does but prepare you for the inaproachableness that shines out at you
from the Indian's eyes. Seas are shallow and continents but a span
compared with the breadths and depths which separate him from you. The
sphinx will yield her mystery, but he will not unveil his; you may touch
the poles of the planet, but you can never lay your hand on him. The same
God that made you, made him also in His image; but if you try to bridge
the gulf between you, you will learn something of God's infinitude.

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