 | The Old Dominion |  |
VII
THE OLD DOMINION SINCE THE WAR.
I
" `The Virginia? What is he good for? I always thought
he was good for nothing but to cultivate tobacco and my grandmother,'
says my lord, laughing.
"She struck her hand upon the table with an energy that made
the glasses dance. `I say he was the best of you all.' "
—Thackeray.
THE traveller to-day who takes a run
through Virginia on one of the roads
which cut across her from Washington to the
south or southwest gets a very inadequate idea
of that which is in fact the Old Dominion, for in
localities throughout this section, poor as it appears,
lie some of the best farming-lands in the
State—the lands, in fact, which once made her
wealthy; and much besides her lands enters into
that which is the Old Dominion.
Virginia is, in the speech of her people,
divided geographically into sections.
Of these sections the richest, and by far the
most beautiful, are "the Valley" and "the
Southwest," whilst the oldest and the best known
Side") and "the Piedmont."
The mountains, once inaccessible to the outer
world, are rich enough in iron and coal to attract
the attention of Northern investors and to draw
capital almost unlimited, and sundry railway lines
recognizing their future, have penetrated them,
placing alike their ore-filled ranges and their fertile
valleys in direct communication with the outer
world, and opening the way for enterprise and
capital to make this long-closed portion of the
Old Dominion one of the great manufacturing
centres of the country. A trip down the Valley
of Virginia or across the rolling Piedmont will,
especially in the summer, well repay the trouble,
though one should never leave his car; for there
are few more beautiful sections of this country
than that from the Potomac to the Cumberland
Mountains.
The idea, however, which one gets from his
car-window in passing through eastern Virginia
will be very incorrect.
From Washington to Petersburg the railway
passes along the former army-track; from Petersburg
to the southern border it is in what was
known years ago as the "Black Belt," and
neither section has yet fully recovered.
This region, now so largely grown up in forest
with comfortable homesteads and well-cultivated
farms. It was here that much of the early
history of "Old Virginia" was enacted. From
this region sprang that wonderful body of great
men who during the Revolutionary period and
for long afterwards gave the Old Dominion the
title of Mother of States and Statesmen. A
single county produced George Washington and
all the Lees. In one room of the Lee mansion,
Stratford, were born two Signers of the Declaration
of Independence and Robert E. Lee.
Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and John Marshall
were from the Piedmont, a little nearer the Blue
Ridge; Patrick Henry and Henry Clay came
from the same county, lower down. Even now
the region through which the road passes conveys,
with its leagues of forest, but an inadequate idea
of the life within it. To know this one must leave
the train and strike out into the country. There
he shall find Virginia. It is true he will frequently
find the lands poorly cultivated, if not
poor; he will find old homesteads dishevelled
and worn, and he will find the old houses, the
home of charming hospitality and refinement,
sadly dilapidated and unfurnished. He will be
struck by the apparent want of things to which he
is accustomed elsewhere, and for the possession
time he will forget this; he will be in an atmosphere
which will soothe his senses and lull him
into a state of rare content, and he will become
aware that there is something even amid this simplicity
which he had not before discovered, a certain
restful feeling with which the external is in
harmony, and in which it is well with the spirit.
Assuming that he was not in a Pullman—for
all Pullmans and all their passengers are alike—or
is not simply passing over like a bird of passage,
he has discovered that he is in a new region, or,
more accurately, a new environment, from the
time he crossed the Potomac. The low, soft,
slow speech, with its languid, long vowels and
neglected final endings, has caught his ear, and
he listens to it as music without trying to follow
the words. There is a difference not only in the
manner, but in the matter. There is a difference,
too, not very marked at first, but still perceptible,
in the dress. The people all seem to know each
other, and they talk with easy familiarity of personal
concerns as members of one family. The
conversation is more personal for that reason,
the tones less repressed. The women will appear
less expensively dressed. A man will
probably not notice this; for they will be generally
prettier than those he left the other side
about them—an air, a manner, a something—
which will be more attractive. Among the
older persons, men and women, he will note a
gentler air than he has seen on the other side.
They will in a way be more individual, too; there
will be individualities of dress. He will see more
men offer seats to ladies, and more as a matter
of course. He will be surprised to see how many
get off at Alexandria. Should he, however,
stop there, and be so fortunate as to know some
of his fellow-travellers who have got off, he will
discover that the view of the town which he has
had from the car-window gives but an indifferent
idea of the place itself. He will find it old, it is
true, and bearing unmistakable marks of the absence
of the wealth which has made the glittering
Capital on the other side of the Potomac;
but the want of money is not poverty, and the old
age is not decrepitude. The streets until just
now were paved in the old-fashioned way with
cobble-stones, which looked strange to one who
had been rolling through the asphalt avenues of
Washington; the houses are often antiquated,
and sometimes out of repair, but there is something
impressive in it all. There are no marble
palaces on the street corners, but the old square
houses with their classic porticos, on the streets,
homes, not mere monuments of wealth and
pride; the stain on them is that of time and of
the elements, not a chemist's concoction; and
they have sheltered through generations a pure,
kindly, and home-loving people. The splendid
marble shaft that towers to the memory of Washington
is on the other side of the river in the city
which bears his venerated name, and which is even
a more splendid monument than this to the great
Virginian; but the old church where he met his
neighbors and worshipped God and the civilization
from which he sprang are in Alexandria.
It was on this side of the river that he learned
the sublime lessons which have made him the
foremost American and the greatest citizen that
the world has known. Down the broad river only
a short distance is the home where he lived as a
Virginia gentleman, and the simplicity of which
he adorned with the elegance of a noble life.
As soon as we reach the old town we are on
historical ground. The house where Braddock
rested when the young Virginian who was to be
known as the Father of his Country was his
volunteer aide is still shown, and the road that
leads away towards the west is still called
"Braddock's Road," after the brave but ill-fated
British general. Here, too, British troops
was but a village; and here in the civil war came
the first army which invaded Virginia to march
on Richmond and end the war during a summer
holiday. Away to the westward, only a little
distance, is Bull Run, where the summer-encampment
idea was so terribly destroyed, and
here the shattered army returned to prepare
for war in earnest. From here to Culpeper and
to Petersburg lies the way that the armies took in
campaign after campaign, and this explains in
part the appearance that the country still presents.
This region was, to use the old phrase,
"swept by the besom of war," and the besom of
war sweeps clean. Time not only repairs the ravages
of war and heals its physical wounds, but it
heals the wounds of the spirit as well. It takes
time to do so, however, and the length of time required
is proportioned to the severity of the injuries.
Thus, the country here has not yet recovered.
In the lapse of years men forget the conditions
that once existed. When the war had been going
on three years there was not a fence and scarcely
a tree left standing from Alexandria to Fredericksburg.
When the war closed, from Alexandria
to Danville, almost on the North Carolina
border, was little more than a waste. In
portions of the counties of Culpeper, Fauquier
left standing within five miles of the railway on
either side, and a bill was introduced in the
Legislature empowering the railway company to
buy the lands within five miles on either side.
As the road turns south it shortly reaches
again the noble Potomac, and for many miles
follows its winding marge, with the bluffs of
Maryland rising bold and blue on the other side
of the broad stream. When it touches the river,
however, it has left in the angle it has made,
Mount Vernon, the home of George Washington,
and Gunston Hall, the home of George
Mason, who drew the Virginia Constitution and
the Virginia Bill of Rights, among the noblest
papers ever drawn by man. Then, after a run
across the same poor-looking country, the train
suddenly crosses a high bridge over a small river,
with a hamlet on the near side and a town on
the other, in a plain between the river-bank and
a line of semi-circular hills. The little village
is Falmouth, where George Washington went to
school. The town on the other side is Fredericksburg,
and the heights which bend around
it are the far-famed Marye's Heights (pronounced
Maree, from the old Virginia family
whose residence crowned them). It was up
these heights that Meagher's brigade charged
with a loss of seventeen hundred in fifteen minutes,
and on the plain below men were mowed
down like grass. The country all around here
has been a battle-ground, for this is Spottsylvania,
where much of the war was fought. To
the westward a dozen miles lies Chancellorsville,
where Stonewall Jackson, after one of the most
brilliant military movements ever conceived,
which only genius could have planned and only
genius could have executed, fell at the age of
thirty-nine with his fame established. Not a hundred
yards from the railway a half score miles
below Fredericksburg, in a garden, stands the
little quaint house in which he died one Sunday
morning, alternately giving orders to forward his
infantry to the front, and whispering of passing
over the river to rest under the shade of the
trees.
A singular circumstance has recently come
to light. On a part of the battlefield of Chancellorsville
have been discovered the site and
remains of Governor Spotswoods' furnace, the
first iron furnace ever established in America.
The old race has been traced, the foundation of
the old stack uncovered, and the beginning of
that industry which is now said to control general
commerce has been laid open to the sight.
Only a short distance to the south lies the
country not inaptly called the Wilderness, but
back a little along the rivers are many fine farms
and pleasant sections.
The valley of the Rappahannock was in the
old times a famous grain-region, and some of
the finest plantations in Virginia still lie there
around the old colonial mansions which sheltered
in the past the great Virginians.
Fredericksburg itself was formerly well-nigh
unique among the towns of Virginia. The
gentry generally lived in the country on their
plantations, but in Fredericksburg there were
many of that class who kept town-houses.
Washington's mother spent her declining years
here, and the little old house where she lived still
stands, with its quaint roof and its garden
stretching around it as when she received,
flower-pot in hand, the nation's benefactor,
Lafayette, "without the parade of changing her
dress." Fredericksburg gave to the country
three of the most noted men who have honored
our navy; for here lived, from the age of thirteen
Paul Jones, that "foreigner of the South" who,
with the Bonhomme Richard on fire and sinking,
replied to a demand to surrender that he was
just beginning to fight, lashed the Serapis to
her, and forced her to strike her colors; and
F. Maury. Some of the old mansions still
stand embowered in trees, impressive as in
the old days when they were the homes of
wealth and ease as well as of elegance and
refinement.
A picture of the town recalled by memory rises
before the writer when it was very different from
its present placid condition. It is as it looked
forty-eight hours after the great battle when for
days and nights it had been in the focus of the
fire of two armies. It was whilst the heroic dead
were being buried under a flag of truce, and, once
seen, its appearance could never be forgotten
—the battered and riddled houses; the dug-up
and littered streets with raw earthworks thrown
across them, on which groups of children had
planted little Confederate flags, whilst they
played at levelling them with fire-shovels; the
torn gardens; the shattered fences, behind which
men had poured out their blood like water; the
long, red trench on the common where the Path
of Glory ended; the roadways filled with broken
vehicles and fleeing refugees. All combined to
leave on the memory the ineffaceable picture of
a bombarded town.
Some fifty miles further on, across an unending
battle-field, is Richmond, the capital of the
of the Confederate States, about which the war
surged for four years.
As the train runs out on the high bridge
which crosses the James, and one sees the historical
river boiling beneath it over its granite
ledges, with the beautiful city spread out for
miles along its curving bank, and with Belle
Isle in the middle, and Manchester on its further
side, he must agree that it was a wise man who
selected the spot for a city, and that he had an
eye for the picturesque as well as for the material
advantages of a location. He was Colonel
William Byrd, one of the old Virginia grandees
—a wit, a humorist, a colonial Councillor, a man
of affairs, and the Virginia author of greatest
note during her colonial history. He wrote the
"Trip to the Mines," which contains in sidelights
the best picture of life in the Old Dominion
that illumines her colonial period. His descendants
in Virginia are numerous, and many
of the Virginia families trace back to the founder
of her capital.
He laid it off at the falls of the James, the
river on which his own beautiful home, Westover,
one of the handsomest types of colonial
architecture remaining, was situated, a score or
two of miles lower down; and, sorrowful to relate
a lottery to dispose of his lots. The place
had already been long known. Christopher Newport,
Admiral of Virginia, and her good angel,
planted a cross on an island here as long ago as
Whitsunday, 1607, when he explored the James to
its falls. Here Nat Bacon, the Rebel, had a place,
and Bacon's Quarter Branch perpetuates the
memory of the spot where the young planter had
his plantation, little knowing of the fame that
should come to him when he struck the first
armed blow on American soil for constitutional
rights.
The Falls of the James stretch in a reverse
curve for about seven miles, boiling over granite
ledges and slipping between islands covered
with birch, sycamore, and willow, which,
although several railway lines occupy the banks,
are as wild and beautiful to-day as they were
when Indians hunted upon the wooded bluffs
which hem them in. All old travellers unite in
their praise. They might have extended their
eulogies to the whole river; for, from its source
among the blue Alleghanies to where it widens
into Hampton Roads, it is not only the most
historical river in this country, but is one of the
most beautiful.
It may be that nativity in Virginia and many
the mind of the writer to idealize the city's loveliness,
yet he knows no city in the United States
more beautiful. It is not that the houses generally
are handsome, but there are sections of
the city where the yards, filled with trees, look
like bowers, and the public squares are among
the most beautiful in the country. "The Capitol
Square," with its leafy slopes, its fine old
Capitol lifting itself on its eminence with the
simple grandeur of an old temple, and with its
broad walk, with the splendid Washington
Monument at one end, and the impressive old
"Governor's Mansion" at the other, is perhaps
the prettiest park of its size in the country.
It is certainly this to a Virginian; for many proud
or tender associations cling about the place.
For a hundred years and more the city has been
associated with all that Virginians are proud of.
In old St. John's Church assembled the great
Virginia convention which prepared for the public
defence and led the way to the Independence
of the Colonies. Here in Richmond sat the
great Convention for the ratification of the Constitution,
when Kentucky was a district of Virginia;
here have assembled her law-makers, her
jurists, and all that have contributed to make
the Old Dominion renowned and great. Here
their wives and daughters, to enjoy the gay life
of the capital of the Old Dominion, which they
adorned by their presence and made memorable
by their genius. Here sat and deliberated
the Secession Convention during the period
when Virginia stood as the peace-maker
between the two sections. Here, upon the
President's call for troops, she finally declared
her decision to secede from the Union. Here
Lee received the command of the Virginia
forces, and here he was appointed later to the
command of the armies of the Confederacy. Here
the Confederate Government passed its brief but
strenuous life, and from here the Southern side
of the war was fought. To seize Richmond the
armies and energies of the North were directed,
and for it they strove. Whilst it stood the Confederacy
stood, and it fell only when the South
was exhausted.
The country to the south of Richmond is like
that to the northward; for it went through the
same experience—if anything, worse. For not
only has war been here, but after the war it underwent
an evil from which the other section of the
State was exempt. This was the Black Belt, and
on it rested the heaviest burden any portion
of Virginia had to bear. Before the war this
the most "comfortably off" of any in the State;
there were more negroes here than elsewhere,
and though the lands were not so fertile as those
in the Valley, or generally even as those in the
Piedmont, they were readily susceptible of improvement,
and were in a state of good cultivation.
Negro emancipation meant necessarily a
change in this; but Negro domination meant its
destruction.
It was of this section in old times that George
W. Bagby used to write his charming sketches,
such as "My Uncle Flatback's Plantation,"[1]
with
touches of delicious local color, and with a delicate
sentiment that made the reader homesick
to get out under the trees and roll on the grass.
Yet, some years back, I have oftener than once
gone from Richmond almost entirely across this
section, and outside of the towns never seen
a single farm-animal—this in a region once
filled with well-stocked and well-cultivated farms.
Even then there were good sections back from
the railways, and some of the most beautiful
plantations in the State lay along the rivers; but
these were at that time the exception. My Uncle
Flatback's sons were dead—one of camp-fever,
he himself slept in the old garden, where
the roses and hollyhocks used to bloom; and his
sweet daughters used to walk with their lovers
in the old times; his plantation was let or deserted,
and the home with its cheer and charm
was gone. War and its followers had eaten
up the land.
As stated, the lands along the railways in
this part of Virginia give but an indifferently
true idea even of the soil and its culture; and
what is viewed from a car-window gives none
of the life which is the real Virginia. Poor as
the soil appears on the ridges, it is kindly. It
is easily susceptible of improvement, and produces
grain and tobacco of a peculiar quality. It
was in this eastern part of Virginia (in Hanover)
that the most famous race-horses of the country
were bred in old times, such as "Boston," "Nina,"
"Planet," "Fanny Washington," and many
others of the great plate-winners. Of late years
"Fanny Washington's" great son "Eolus" and
his wonderful progeny have justified the boast
of the old Virginians that this is the home of
the thoroughbred. Virginia colts have won
the great "Futurity," and in one year four
out of twelve Virginia entries stood the training
and ran in the race, a fine test of bone,
highly esteemed that they are eagerly sought
after.
Perhaps, nowhere in the country has the
external and material been less indicative of
the internal or spiritual than in the Old Dominion.
The life has been so sequestered, so
self-contained, and the people have been so indifferent
to public opinion—at least, of all public
opinion outside of Virginia itself—and have cared
so little for show, that from the outward appearance
a wrong conception has often been drawn
of that which was within. Back from these
ridges along which the railways run, on the
rivers and little streams which empty into the
rivers, are peaceful valleys filled with sweet
homesteads, where the life flows on as calmly
and undisturbed as the limpid streams which
slip so silently between their mirrored willows.
This, after all, is Virginia—the Virginia which
is not seen any more than the air or the perfume
of the fields is visible to the eye, but which is
felt and known through its silent influence. In
those secluded homes, under their great oaks,
far from the bustle and din and strife of the world
grew and ripened the Virginians who made the
Old Dominion what she was: mother of States
and of Statesmen.
II
To understand Virginia and the Virginians
it is necessary to know something of her history.
That furnishes the key to much of their character.
It entered into the Virginian's life, influenced
his tendencies, and tempered his spirit.
He was proud of being a Virginian, and he
never forgot the fact. To him the Old Dominion
was what she had appeared to the earliest
chroniclers: "Most plentiful, sweet, wholesome
and fruitful of all other." It was, indeed, a
picturesque history that lay back of him; beginning
to come into being like a glimmering
dawn, with the mighty figures of great Elizabeth
accepting the name bestowed as an honor to her
Majesty, and Sir Walter Raleigh, courtier, soldier,
discoverer, statesman, historian, poet, Admiral
and Shepherd of the Ocean, proud to style himself,
"Lord and Chief Governor of Virginia."
She had not been won easily. Many had
"come to leave their bodies in testimonie of
their mindes"; but in the Virginian's mind the
prize had been worth the striving for. He
loved Virginia with a passionate love. Abana
and Pharpar were better than all the waters of
Israel. The James was greater to him than
Jordan, Tiber, Nile, or Thames. It was on
on this continent first found a lodgement.
It was here that it reached its highest development.
The Virginian knew, as no one else did,
all the attendant history of sorrows and joys,
hardships and triumphs. He treasured the picturesque
history of the bold chevalier Captain
Smith, a story which, notwithstanding all his detractors,
survives to-day with the romance of the
old paladins. He knew him and he believed
in him. To him he was what he was to his contemporaries:
"deare noble captain and loyal
hearte." He always thought of him as a Virginian,
and was proud to claim him. He believed
that Pocahontas saved his life, and he
held her in high esteem. Any reflection upon her
offended him as if she had been a member of his
family, however remote. In any event she was
a benefactress of Virginia, and that called forth
his gratitude.
The life in the Old Dominion was not unlike
that in England, and the Virginian treasured
the idea of resemblance. Shakespeare had been
inspired by an event in her romantic story to write
the "Tempest," and, before her limits were curtailed,
Ariel inhabited the airs that blew upon
her shores. During all the colonial period this
resemblance to the mother country had been
that the rich planters with their indented servants
and slaves had advantages which brought
them great wealth, and they knew how to enjoy
it. They patterned their life on that in England;
built large country-houses on English
models, and established "their fine seats upon
the rivers"; kept their coaches and four; entertained
with a lavishness and cordiality which
established the custom of hospitality with the
authority of a law; bred horses which rivalled
the cracks of the turf in the old country; monopolized
the offices of honor; passed laws recognizing
"quality"; and endeavored, as far as
they might, to perpetuate old England in the
Old Dominion.
But so far from their love of England impeding
their development along their own lines, it
fostered it. They cherished their resemblance
to England so warmly that they never admitted a
difference, and always insisted on equal rights.
Sir Walter Raleigh's charter had guaranteed
them "all the privileges of free denizens and
natives of England," and they never ceased to
be jealous of them. Within twelve years from
their first coming they had a General Assembly,
with every freeman having a vote for the representatives.
"The Virginia courts are but a summary
ambassador had told James, and it proved
to be measurably true. One of the things this
first elective Assembly of Burgesses did was to
claim of the company at home a right "to allow
or disallow their orders of court, as his
Majesty had given them power to allow or disallow
our laws." This was but the beginning
of a long and continuous line of claims of right,
insistence on which has become a fixed characteristic
of the Virginian, and on which he has
been ready always to stand to the end. If the
royal governors held their prerogatives in high
esteem, the people held their privileges in no
less esteem. They or their rulers named their
rivers after kings and queens, and their boroughs
and counties after royal princes and princesses,
so that the chronology of the settlement of Virginia
may be told by the geographical names;
they declared their loyalty with piled-up asseveration,
but they never forgot their chartered
rights. The General Assembly addressed James
in terms of worship extraordinary to a republican
ear of this year of grace, but when the King
sent over commissioners to inspect their records
they refused to exhibit them, and when their clerk
furnished the commissioners a copy the Virginians
put him in the pillory and cut off one of his ears.
"Whole for monarchy," one wrote of Virginia
when the struggle came between the Crown
and the people—whatever she is "for" she is
always "whole for"—but she was even more
whole for her rights; and though, as old Beverly
says, she was the last to give up for the King
and the first to assert his restoration, and though
in his defeat she offered an asylum to his discomfited
followers, she stood up boldly against
Charles I., and refused her sanction to his
claims to the tobacco monopoly. When Charles
II., to whom she had offered a crown when he
was a fugitive, attempted to invade her privileges
and violate her grants, she grew ready
for resistance. When his Governor refused her
rights she actually burst into revolution, and,
under command of "Nat Bacon the Rebel,"
stormed and took the colonial capital; the young
commander capturing, it is said, the wives of
the chief supporters of the Crown, and standing
them in white aprons before his men whilst
he threw up his breastworks preparatory to his
attack on Jamestown. Later on new elements
came into the Dominion. Stout Scotch-Irish
settlers filled up the Valley, and made it a different
type social and religious, whilst similar politically.
They were Presbyterians, and they
made a new force in the colony. They made
frontier, worshipped God agreeably to the dictates
of their own consciences, and became, with
another infusion of religious refugees who came
later—the Huguenots—a new element of force
in the Old Dominion.
From all these different elements came the
Virginian character, a character with some
singular contradictions in detail, and yet with
certain general basic principles which govern
it and give it its form and force. From it
came in one generation that extraordinary body
of men who did so much in the Revolution
and afterwards, to create and establish this
nation.
The master of characterization, the profound
student of life, the ablest analyst of our
time, knowing the Old Virginia life, deemed
the Old Dominion a worthy refuge and home,
in his later years, for Henry Esmond. If there
is one character described in the literature of
our race by which one would have the race
judged, it, perhaps, is the scholar, the soldier, the
courtier, the man, the gentleman, Henry Esmond.
Recognizing the virtue of the old Virginia
life, the great novelist deemed Virginia the
most fitting place in which to have Colonel Esmond
end his days and leave his blood, and the
entitled, "The Virginians."
The elements of character which the Virginian
of the Revolutionary time inherited from
his father he transmitted to his children.
At the close of the Revolution new conditions
had supervened, new energies were demanded,
and those men were most successful
who could adapt themselves best to the new conditions.
Out of this came men like John Marshall,
James Madison, James Monroe, and
John Randolph of Roanoke, who were still the
leaders in the country, as the older generation
had been before them.
Virginia entered upon her new career with a
full recognition of her commanding position.
The people had become more homogeneous.
The participation by all in the war and in the
subsequent creation of the new Government
had done away with privilege, and opened the
way to all. Still, the great leaders were in the
prime of their intellectual vigor, and they necessarily
still led. The social order was too firmly
established to be radically changed at once even
by the sterling republicanism which had supervened,
and the most republican leaders alongside
of their strong republicanism maintained
a social order with many aristocratic features.
with primogeniture, but still built their seats
on the loftiest hills, and maintained their establishments
as nearly like those of the English
gentry as they might, Jefferson himself levelling
the top of a mountain for his mansion. It was
one of this class (John Page, of Rosewell) who
in Congress prevented the stamping of the President's
head on the national coin, and had substituted
therefor the figure of Liberty with her
cap on her pike.
The Negro question about this time began to
assume new importance, and thenceforward it
was to be an even more potent factor in all that
related to the life of Virginia. Virginia was the
first State to declare the slave-trade piracy, and
in 1832 she came within one vote of abolishing
slavery. The opening up of the West had
brought in new elements, political and social.
Many of the hardiest of Virginia's sons had
gone with their wives and children across the
mountains to settle in Kentucky and Tennessee,
and had taken with them the political tenets of
their mother State. Perhaps, in no other States
did politics ever stand so closely related to the
social life as in Virginia and Kentucky. It assumed
a personal character, and families were
divided by their political faiths. In Virginia
matrimonial alliances. Fathers interposed
objections to their sons paying addresses to girls
in families of a different political faith.
Virginia was not even before the war one of
the rich States like the cotton and sugar States
of the South, but she was at least fairly well off.
In those States were many splendid fortunes;
in Virginia there were but few of these; but there
were many persons who were "comfortably off."
They were still almost entirely an agricultural
people, and naturally the large fortunes lay in
the rich grain-producing belts along the low
grounds of the James, the Rappahanock, the
Roanoke, etc., or in the fertile valleys. Here
the bare-armed wheat-cutters en echelon cradled
the wheat that fed the country when the great
Western grain sections and the reaper which
mows them, and which was invented by a Virginian,
were alike unknown.
The history of the commonwealth had left
its strong impress on the Virginians, and they,
perhaps, still were more like the English than
were the people of any other State. They continued
to pattern their life on that of the old
country, even after they had lost the conscious
knowledge of the source from which it came.
Their social customs were continued. They
but as substitutes they maintained
William and Mary College in the Tidewater,
and founded the University of Virginia in the
beautiful Piedmont, Jefferson devoting the end
of his life to the establishment of the latter,
and drawing with his own hand the plans for
its charming and classical structures. They
preserved the language they brought over, and
English travellers remarked on the purity of
their English. It is said that Thackeray stated
that he heard the purest Saxon English in Virginia
that he had ever heard. Freeman and Matthew
Arnold are quoted to the same effect at a
later time. Be that as it may, the Virginians preserved
through all their republicanism a strong
feeling, almost like kinship, towards the English.
Many of the old families kept up a sort of
association with the old country; filled their
shelves with English books; took English reviews,
and kept abreast of English politics.
When the war broke out, it was to England
that they looked for recognition and support,
and the failure to realize that expectation was
scarcely enough to shake their confidence or
change their sentiment.
The resemblance in the life was not merely
fancied—in the tone at least. It has been called
the most accurate nomenclature. The old
feudal features had in the main passed away
with the stanch republicanism that succeeded
the Revolution. The aristocratic features were
so modified by the introduction of the same
factor that what remained was rather a feeling
than a condition. There were classes, it is
true, and there was, perhaps, a stronger class-feeling
than existed anywhere else on this side
of the water, unless it was in South Carolina;
but the class distinction was not based upon
those elements which marked it elsewhere.
Birth counted for something, it is true—that
is, that a man's forefathers had been gentlemen
before him—but it was not sufficient to
keep him in the pale if his personal character
and address were not up to the standard, and
it was not requisite to admit him if they were.
What was demanded was a certain personal
standard of education, address, and character.
The pedigrees, at best, in the great majority of
cases, ran back only to some one who had been
distinguished in Virginia's history, and if more
were asked it was comfortable to believe that
it might easily be extended back further without
making the attempt to verify it. Wealth
meant absolutely nothing.
The standard was personal. Ties of blood
were recognized to an extent which has excited
the astonishment of the outer world, and cousinship
was claimed as long as the common strain
could be traced. It was felt that the relationship
gave a claim, and the claim was ever
honored.
The Virginian still kept open-house, as his
fathers had done before him, and hospitality
was the invariable law of every class. It had
been noted since long before the Revolution.
English travellers recorded how gentlemen sent
their servants to invite strangers to make their
houses their homes, and how the poorer people
gave up their beds to make them comfortable.
This custom continued. Relatives and friends
"came by" with their carriages and servants, summer
after summer, on their annual passage to
the White Sulphur Springs, or to stay as long as
they liked, assured that with their hospitable
hosts it was always, "the longer the better." It
was, indeed, a purely pastoral life that they led.
The large planter on his great plantation with
scores of slaves, and the poorer one on his smaller
farm with but a few servants, differed only in
degree. The life was substantially the same on
both estates. The character of the masters was
the same: proud, self-contained, brave, generous,
loving Virginia idolatrously, and knowing little
of and caring less for what was outside of her;
his chief glory was that he was a Virginian.
Money made no difference to them or in them.
There were handsome estates along the rivers
—old colonial mansions with their wings and "offices,"
terraced gardens and imposing gates, along
the Potomac, the lower James, the Rappahannock,
the York, etc.; fine houses of a Greek,
Gothic, or Italian style on the upper James, the
Staunton, the Dan, and in certain portions of
the Piedmont and the Valley, etc.; but in the
main the houses were plain, unpretentious
wooden structures, with additions put on from
time to time as the family increased or the demands
of hospitality required. Often they had
been built for overseers' houses, with the intention
of building better mansions as means increased,
but the families increased more rapidly
than the means. In these unpretentious houses
the old Virginian made his home. Here he
governed his plantation, raised the wheat, corn,
and tobacco which made the Old Dominion
wealthy; entertained like a gentleman whoever
came within his gates; shot partridges (styled
simply "birds") in the fall, fox-hunted in the
winter, and at Christmas gathered his children,
and with bowls of apple-toddy and eggnog, amid
holly and mistletoe, with peace on earth and
good-will towards men, dispensed an abounding
hospitality, worshipping God and loving
his fellow-men to the best of his ability, having
wealth without riches and content without display.
This was the life in Virginia when the John
Brown raid shocked her from the Potomac to
the North Carolina line. It was "a fire-bell
in the night." Every man sprang to attention,
and "every mother clutched her babe
closer to her bosom."
When the law was vindicated, Virginia settled
down again, but there was no longer any possibility
of the old repose. When the convention
called to consider the question of secession
assembled, the great majority were Whigs, undoubted
Union men. They resisted secession,
with the hope that they might effect a reconciliation,
and almost as late as the eve of attack
on Sumter rejected it by a vote of more than
two to one; they appointed peace commissioners,
and used every effort to preserve peace.
Then came the President's call for troops,
and, finding that she was to be invaded and
must fight on one side or the other, Virginia
Union.
The outer world has never appreciated the
spirit in which the South went to war. It was
like a conflagration. After it started, the people
outstripped the leaders. Gray-headed men who
had been the stanchest maintainers of the Union
enlisted and marched to the Peninsular under
Magruder or to Manassas under Beauregard.
Boys ran away from home to join the army;
women cut up their gowns to make flags, and
their under-clothes for lint and bandages.
The slavery question, which had been prominent
in the previous agitation, now, fused in
the furnace, passed completely out of sight, and
the battle-cry was the Invasion of the South.
With this the entire population of old Virginia
rallied to the standard as one man.
It was in this period, and that more terrible
one which followed it, that the people of Virginia
showed their character. They accepted
victory and defeat with equal constancy. No
success elated them unduly. No disaster cast
them down. Their zeal never flagged, their enthusiasm
never wavered. The exactions of war
sapped their strength and engulfed their property.
There were not men enough left at home
to bury the dead, and women not infrequently
Rich women sent their sons to fight, gave up their
jewels to help the cause, or sold their lands to
reinvest in Confederate bonds or gunboat-stock.
Poor women wrote to their husbands that they
were starving, but that they must stand to their
duty. This was the spirit all the way through.
They never doubted, never flagged. Subsequent
events showed that wisdom would have pointed
to a different decision; but he would have been
rash who would have dared to hint of making
peace on any terms less honorable than complete
independence. The failure of the Hampton
Roads Conference was based on the universal
sentiment of the people.
The condition of the city of Richmond at
that time will give an idea of the condition of
the country as well. At first only the excitement
of war was felt, only its pomp was seen;
but in a little time its graver side was understood,
and when McClellan's army was within
sight of the city's steeples the terrors of war began
to be recognized. "The Seven Days' Battles
around Richmond" were fought within
sound of the church-bells of the capital, and
the roar of the artillery floated in at her windows,
and drew throngs out into the streets and
gardens. There was no panic as some have
the situation. Women nerved themselves for
the struggle. Soldiers, already wounded, crawled
from their beds and made their way to the battlefields
to die.
It was a terrible time indeed. None knew
what the next day might bring forth. A
general and his staff breakfasted at a country-house
just outside of the city. Within three days
an ambulance passed through the place on its
way from a battle-field with three of the gay
breakfast party in it in their coffins. When
McClellan fell back the city reacted from the
tension, and social life once more began. A
memoir of General Pendleton, Lee's Chief of
Artillery, written by a lady who was present,
gives a picture of the time. "Hearts grew light,"
it says, "at the knowledge that Richmond was
safe and free, and could pet and praise her defenders
to her fill; eyes smiled through their tears
upon dear ones still left to them; and strangers
and friends coming daily to look for others reported
`wounded' or `missing' were received
with cordial and limitless hospitality. The city
kept `open house' for every one who had fought
or prayed for her safety."
After this thousands flocked to the city,
"refugeeing" before the invading armies, until
such circumstances amusement is necessary, and
life in the capital grew gay. The entertainments
were termed "starvation parties," because
there was nothing to eat. Provisions were
too high to be wasted at a mere social entertainment,
and even if money had not been
wanting, the necessaries of life were too precious
to be squandered in revelling. A breakfast
came to cost more than a year's pay of a private
and a month's pay of a captain; a pair of boots
cost a thousand dollars; coffee, tea, sugar, and
such articles came to be things unknown. Yet
the life was not without its compensations, even
its joys. There was a pleasure in self-sacrifice
where all were vying with each other. Lovemaking
went on all the more prosperously that
young Mars who courted in a captain's bars
might lay a colonel's stars or even a brigadier's
wreath at his lady's feet before the campaign
was over. When Petersburg was in a state of
siege the favorite ride was across a bridge which
was under Federal fire, and horseback rides in
the autumn afternoons were all the more exciting
in that a dash across the open space might
be followed by a shell crashing across behind
the horses.
It was not only provisions, but everything,
the ingenuity of people, and called forth
all their cleverness. Old garrets were explored,
old trunks were ransacked, and everything available
was utilized. Hats were plaited of wheat- or
oat-straw by the girls; old silk-stockings were
made over into gloves; ball-dresses were fashioned
from old lace-curtains and ladies' slippers
were made from bits of old satin which might
have been remnants of ball-dresses worn by the
fair wearers' great-grandmothers at Lady Washington's
levees.
When Lee surrendered at Appomattox the
war ended.
The home-coming of the disbanded remnants
of the Southern armies was the saddest hour
her people had ever known. Up to that time
Virginia and the South at large had not dreamed
of final failure.
At first, the news of Lee's surrender came
borne, so to speak, by the winds, so vague was
the whispered rumor, then taking palpable
shape, as it were, as weary stragglers passed
along the country roads, stopping in at the naked
farms to get a meal, if there were enough left to
feed a hungry man. Then little parties passed
by with details of the surrender that no longer
left any room for even the faintest doubt. And
days in which it was not known whether loved
ones might not have been captured or killed in
the last engagement, they came home foot-sore
and broken, dragging themselves along the
cannon-worn roads they had marched down so
bravely four years before, and, flinging themselves
into the arms of weeping mothers or
wives or sisters gathered to receive them, surrendered
for the first time to despair.
Even then they had no thought of what the
immediate future had in store for them. The
conditions which existed and the period which
ensued were utterly without precedent. The
Negroes took prompt advantage of their new
freedom, and almost without exception went
off, some openly, some by night—those that
went openly declaring that "the word had come
from Richmond for them." Generally speaking,
they returned home after a brief and
sad experience of travel and sojourn among
strangers.
For a time there appeared danger of some
friction under the evil influence of that species
of visiting adventurer wittily termed, from the
smallness of his personal belongings, "the
carpet-bagger," but good sense and the good
feeling engendered by long association between
passed away.
The soldiers returning from the army found
Virginia almost as war-worn as themselves.
In many sections the country was swept
clean, and the disorganization of labor and the
depletion of teams had prevented the proper
preparation of a crop. The horses which the
soldiers had brought home from Appomattox
were not infrequently the chief dependence for
a new crop, and before the huzzas over the returning
armies of the Union had died away in
the North, the soldiers of the other army which
had held them at bay so long were working in
the fields, trying to build up again the waste
places of their States. There is scarcely a professional
man over the age of fifty to-day who
did not work at the plough during those first
years after the war.
The complete prostration of Virginia—indeed,
of the whole South—at the close of the
war has never been fully apprehended by the
outside world. It was not only that property
values had been swept away, but that everything
expect the bare land from which property values
can be created had been extirpated. The entire
personal property of the State had been destroyed;
the laboring class of a country dependent upon its
laborers into vagrants, with no property to make
them conservative and no authority to hold them
in check. Their dependence was suddenly shifted
from their former masters to strangers, whose indirect,
if not their direct teaching was hostility
to the former owners. The country was left
overwhelmed with debt, with nothing remaining
from which the debts could be paid. It is
difficult to conceive of this even as applied to
a small section, but when it embraces a great
territory covering a dozen great States, with
their entire population of many millions, the
mind refuses to take it in. Yet such was the
case at the South.
It was amid such conditions as these that
Virginia and the other Southern States addressed
themselves to the new life.
For a time there was a condition which was
peculiar. The old life survived for a period
in a sort of after-glow; the people thought they
could reconstruct the shattered fragments and
live it over. They undertook to reorganize their
Governments and their life. The one was as
vain as the other; but, at least, the dignity and
courage with which they set about it call forth
unqualified admiration. Certain laws were
passed looking to the control of labor. The
The military rulers viewed all such action with
possibly not unnatural suspicion, and assumed
a fuller control than ever. Whatever disputes
arose between whites and blacks were reviewed
by the military authorities.
The fact that the land had survived gave it
a peculiar if not a fictitious value. It was estimated
and appraised highly. Money was borrowed
on it to restock and plant it, and the old
life went on for a while almost as before, as a
wheel continues to turn with its own propulsion
even after the motive power is removed.
For a time, under the reaction resulting from
the wear and tear of war, the spirit rebounded.
After the fatigue of war the meanest home was
comfort, and the life was almost gay, even amid
the ruins. The South had been overwhelmed, not
whipped, and the indomitable spirit of her people
survived. So the young soldiers patched up the
broken farm-implements, hitched up their thin
army-horses, and worked at their crops. They
worked like laborers, but they were not mere laborers.
They kept ever in view the fact that they
were more than ploughmen. Classical schools
sprang up again almost as soon as the war closed,
and colleges opened with fees fixed at the lowest
conceivable sum, and board provided at the lowest
they were too poor to pay even that and had to
mess as they had done in the army. They went
to town and took positions as watchmen, brakemen,
street-car drivers, foremen in factories,
anything that would enable them to support
themselves and those dependent on them, and
would aid them in educating themselves. There
was no feeling of indignity, no repining. A man
who had hitched the horses to a gun under fire
and brought it off under a storm of shot and
shell could drive a street-car without chagrin.
He had expected to be a brigadier-general then;
now he expected to be some day president of
the line.
It was a strange spectacle, the people commonly
supposed to be the proudest in the land
engaging in the work of laborers and losing
no caste by it. When night came they dressed
up in their best, whatever that was, and went to
see the girls, the fair sweet, brave young gentlewomen
of the South, or, with their eyes fixed on
some profession, they devoted themselves to study,
and in the evenings one might find visiting in
the parlors, with that old-time courtesy of manner
which had made notable the Virginia
gentleman, the same men to be seen in the day
at the plough or on their engines.
The girls were not less brave than the men.
They accepted and married them without a
dollar, and, with a sublime faith in their lovers
which was a happy augury of the future, went
with them to live in the old broken farm-houses
or in upper stories in town, planted flowers, hung
baskets in their windows, and made their homes
fragrant with sweetness and content.
Then came the Reconstruction period. The
Negroes were enrolled by the carpet-bag leaders
in what was known as the Union League, and
were drilled in political antagonism to the whites.
And pandemonium came.
The six or eight years of carpet-bag rule were
the worst that the South has ever known. It is
the writer's belief based on serious study of
the facts that the Southern States were poorer
when these years ended than when the war
closed. However theorists may regard it, it was
an object-lesson which the Southern States can
never forget. The conditions then existing paralyzed
every energy but one, and withdrew the
South from the common movement of progress.
The States which went through it could think only
of existence; they had to struggle for mere life.
Even after these States obtained control of their
governments, the conditions were for a while
such that there could be no advance. It was
most. She was in the "Black Belt," and the
incubus upon her was a burden which kept her
down.
The Negro question was a theory or a sentiment
with the outside world; with the South it
was and still is a vital fact. Only time can solve
it. It has already solved some of its problems.
Before it did so, however, much injury had been
done Virginia and the other Southern States,
from which they are but now recovering. The
Virginia Negroes, however, either because of
their close relations with their masters or because
of other conditions, appear to be of a higher
grade generally than those of States further
South, and the relations between the races is
in the main amicable and pleasant.
Virginia has always been a great colonizer,
and her sons have gone forth from her to build
up with their energy the great States which lie
to the south and west, and to strengthen them
with their brain and character. They are to
be found in every Western and Northwestern
State, where they began as cowboys on ranches,
as mechanics in factories, as brakemen on railways,
clerks in law-offices, anything that was
honorable, and have worked themselves up to
the highest positions of trust and responsibility.
chief executive of their States down, and always
with honor. But this has been at a terrible
loss to the old mother State, and the pride in
her sons' success has had something of pain
that they no longer live within her borders and
strengthen her with their strength.
The disorganization of the laboring class in
Virginia and the condition of her transportation
facilities, coupled with universal lack of means
at that time, almost destroyed her agriculture.
The Negro as a slave was an excellent laborer;
as a freeman, at least under conditions which
have existed in the country, he is not. Under
compulsion he works laboriously, but otherwise
not steadily, and generally only when he is
obliged to work. Cincinnatus is the only recorded
instance of a statesman who was also a
good ploughman. At the ordinary cost of corn
and bacon in Virginia, a man can for $25 obtain
meat and bread enough to give him three
meals a day for the whole year.
The old planter-system proved generally
wholly unsuited to the new conditions, and
under the continued depression of agriculture,
and such agricultural products as it had been
the custom to raise in Virginia, it almost entirely
disappeared. When labor only gave a
man could afford to farm who was independent
of labor. Thus, the old planter-class gradually
passed away, the young representatives of it
going to cities and seeking other fields of enterprise
for the application of their faculties, and
their place has been taken by the small-farmer,
who works at the plough himself, or who hires
a few "hands" to work under his own eye.
Few outside of the South dream of the privations
which the old planter-class have gone
through in these years. That they have endured
in silence is their best testimonial. A
few years ago it was not unusual to find in old
neighborhoods in certain sections the best
houses shut up and the farms abandoned or let
to tenants at a rental which was merely nominal
—homes which had once been the centres of a
life as elegant and charming as ever graced any
people. Some places were held on to, but went
steadily down year by year, there being absolutely
no money to keep them up. Yet, through
all the poverty there remained just that something
which preserved in them without money
that which distinguished the Virginia homes
when they were the seats of ease and elegance,
and about which the light of romance yet lingers.
There life still is based on the old foundations
of the present, it still keeps the simplicity
of the past. Hospitality and the domestic
virtues yet survive, and notwithstanding
some changes, the old standards of gentility and
righteousness of life still stand. One may yet
drive through the country, from one end of Virginia
to the other, and never pay a cent; and if
he were to stall or break down in the road, there
is not a Virginia farmer who would not cheerfully
turn out of his bed to help pull him out.
The conditions have of late been changing.
Virginia, instead of being, as the cant phrase
went, "a good country to come from," has become
once more a good country to come to. He
advantages of location and climate have ever
been recognized, and of late other advantages
also have been discovered. Her transportation
facilities have been steadily improving, her mineral
resources have attracted the attention of
capital, and, being examined, have been found
to be wonderful both in quantity and quality.
Her coal produces the highest speed in the ocean
racers, and her iron brings the best prices at the
Northern forges.
The improvement in her transportation facilities
was the beginning of her new era; her
timber regions have been penetrated, and have
ignorance of the value of her forests
has led to their devastation and is steadily
tending to their destruction. The judge of one
of her southwestern counties, being shown in
Chicago a few years ago suites of walnut furniture
as something remarkable, said, "Young
man, in my country we make fence-rails of walnut."
The development of her mineral resources
has given an impetus to manufactures, and factories
have been and are being established;
villages are springing up on all sides and are
becoming towns, whilst the towns are growing
into cities.
Richmond has long been a manufacturing
city. Over one-fourth of her entire population
is engaged in manufactures, and some of
the largest manufactories in the country are
there.
The diversity of life in the Old Dominion
may be illustrated by the fact that one of the
greatest ship-yards in this country, and one
of the greatest winter health-resorts—those
at Newport News and Old Point Comfort
respectively—have been established only six
miles apart, at the mouth of the great river
on which our race first found a lodgement in
this country, and the names of both places
settlers endured.
If at one time the interest in Virginia's mineral
resources grew to excitement and the progress
ran into a "boom," it was but the natural
and common result of the conditions which
were suddenly disclosed, and though inexperience
and folly ran away with the movement,
and wound up, as every one in his sober senses
knew it must end, yet the general result was
growth; the advance never wholly receded. What
were believed to be incipient cities are, at least,
growing villages, the conditions which first caused
the excitement still exist, and the progress is
going on steadily, on an ever firmer and firmer
basis. The beauty of that section of Virginia
cannot be overstated, and it seems to the writer
destined to become one of the most prosperous
and wealthy regions in the entire country.
It is, however, not only the southwest that is
now improving; other sections as well are in the
movement, and after the long night the day seems
at last to have broken. Even the poorest section
is beginning to advance. One large portion of
it, lying within the influence of the Chesapeake,
has been found admirably adapted to truck farming,
and now furnishes fruits and vegetables for
the markets of Baltimore, Philadelphia, New
hundred miles further inland; other portions
produce bright tobacco which brings many times
the price of the common leaf; in yet others, other
resources are being developed. The farmer has
learned in the school of experience where to let
out and where to take in. He no longer confines
himself to cereals and tobacco. Stock is
being raised more generally than before and
agriculture is placed on a more scientific basis.
A gauge of Virginia's advance may be found
in the fact that whilst other classical schools and
colleges continue to maintain their number of
students, the University of Virginia, the pride of
the State, has doubled her number within the last
few years. The country is once more filling
up. The cheapness of the lands, the salubriety
of the climate and the charm of the life
have arrested attention, and the beautiful old
country-houses are being bought up by Northerners
of capital, or as Virginians have made
money in cities the old instinct has awakened,
and they are returning to the country, buying
and fitting up country-places in which to bring
up their children and spend their declining years
amid scenes associated with their happy youth.
The climate is attracting those who can no longer
stand the rigors of a Northern winter, and many
where wealth is not needed, and contentment
yet has its home. The old country
places are thus being opened again, and the old
life pure, sweet, and gracious which made her
distinguished in the past is beginning under new
conditions to be lived once more in the Old
Dominion.
| The Old Dominion | |