University of Virginia Library

7. CHAPTER VII.
TRACES OF THE FEUDAL SYSTEM.

Virginia has the sentiments and opinions of an
independent nation. She enjoyed in the colonial
state a high degree of the favour of the mother country;
and the blandishments of her climate, together
with the report of her fertile soil and her hidden territorial
resources, from the first attracted the regard
of the British emigrants. Her early population,
therefore, consisted of gentlemen of good name and
condition, who brought within her confines a solid
fund of respectability and wealth. This race of men
grew vigorous in her genial atmosphere; her cloudless
skies quickened and enlivened their tempers,
and, in two centuries, gradually matured the sober
and thinkin Englishman into that spirited, imaginative
being that now inhabits the lowlands of this
state. When the Revolution broke out, she was
among the first of its champions, ardent in the assertion
of the principles upon which it turned, and brave
in the support of them. Since that period, her annals
have been singularly brilliant with the fame of
orators and statesmen. Four Presidents have been
given to the Union from her nursery. The first, the

brightest figure of history; the others also master
spirits, worthy to be ranked amongst the greatest of
their day. In the light of these men, and of their
gallant contemporaries, she has found a glory to
stimulate her ambition, and to minister to her pride.
It is not wonderful that in these circumstances she
should deem herself an ascendant star in the Union.
It is a feature in her education and policy to hold
all other interests subordinate to her own.

Her wealth is territorial; her institutions all savour
of the soil; her population consists of landholders,
of many descents, unmixed with foreign alloy. She
has no large towns where men may meet and devise
improvements or changes in the arts of life. She
may be called a nation without a capital. From
this cause she has been less disturbed by popular
commotions, less influenced by popular fervours,
than other communities. Her laws and habits, in
consequence, have a certain fixedness, which even
reject many of the valuable improvements of the day.
In policy and government she is, according to the
simplest and purest form, a republic: in temper and
opinion, in the usages of life, and in the qualities of
her moral nature, she is aristocratic.

The gentlemen of Virginia live apart from each
other. They are surrounded by their bondsmen and
by their dependants; and the customary intercourse of
society familiarizes their minds to the relation of high
and low degree. They are scattered about like the
chiefs of separate clans, and propagate opinions
in seclusion, that have the tincture of baronial independence.

They frequently meet in the interchange
of a large and thriftless hospitality, in which
the forms of society are foregone for its comforts,
and the business of life thrown aside for the enjoyment
of its pleasures. Their halls are large, and
their boards ample; and surrounding the great family
hearth, with its immense burthen of blazing
wood casting a broad and merry glare over the congregated
household and the numerous retainers, a
social winter party in Virginia affords a tolerable picture
of feudal munificence.

Frank Meriwether is a good specimen of the class
I have described. He professes to value the sober
and hearty virtues of the country. He has a natural
liking for that plain, unadorned character that
grows up at home. He seeks companionship with
men of ability, and is a zealous disseminator of the
personal fame of individuals who have won any portion
of renown in the state. Sometimes, I even think
he exaggerates a little, when descanting upon the
prodigies of genius that have been reared in the Old
Dominion; and he manifestly seems to consider that
a young man who has astonished a whole village
in Virginia by the splendour of his talents, must, of
course, be known throughout the United States;—
for he frequently opens his eyes at me with an air
of astonishment, when I happen to ask him who is
the marvel he is speaking of.

I observe, moreover, that he has a constitutional
fondness for paradoxes, and does not scruple to adopt
and republish any apothegm that is calculated to

startle one by its novelty. He has a correspondence
with several old friends, who were with him at college,
and who have now risen into an extensive political
notoriety in the state:—these gentlemen furnish
him with many new currents of thought, along
which Frank glides with a happy velocity. He is
essentially meditative in his character, and somewhat
given to declamation; and these traits have
communicated a certain measured and deliberate
gesticulation to his discourse. I have frequently seen
him after dinner stride backward and forward across
the room, for some moments, wrapped in thought,
and then fling himself upon the sofa, and com out
with some weighty doubt, expressed with a solemn
emphasis. In this form he lately began a conversation,
or rather a speech, that for a moment quite
disconcerted me. “After all,” said he, as if he had
been talking to me before, although these were the
first words he uttered—then making a parenthesis,
so as to qualify what he was going to say—“I don't
deny that the steamboat is destined to produce valuable
results—but after all, I much question—(and
here he bit his upper lip, and paused an instant)—if
we are not better without it. I declare, I think it
strikes deeper at the supremacy of the states than
most persons are willing to allow. This annihilation
of space, sir, is not to be desired. Our protection
against the evils of consolidation consists in the very
obstacles to our intercourse. Splatterthwaite Dubbs
of Dinwiddie—(or some such name,—Frank is famous
for quoting the opinions of his contemporaries.
This Splatterthwaite, I take it, was some old college
chum that had got into the legislature, and I dare say
made pungent speeches,) Dubbs of Dinwiddie made
a good remark—That the home material of Virginia
was never so good as when her roads were at
their worst.” And so Frank went on with quite a
harangue, to which none of the company replied one
word, for fear we might get into a dispute. Every
body seems to understand the advantage of silence
when Meriwether is inclined to be expatiatory.

This strain of philosophizing has a pretty marked
influence in the neighbourhood, for I perceive that
Frank's opinions are very much quoted. There is a
set of under-talkers about these large country establishments,
who are very glad to pick up the crumbs
of wisdom that fall from a rich man's table; secondhand
philosophers, who trade upon other people's
stock. Some of these have a natural bias to this
venting of upper opinions, by reason of certain dependencies
in the way of trade and favour: others
have it from affinity of blood, which works like a
charm over a whole country. Frank stands related,
by some tie of marriage or mixture of kin,
to an infinite train of connexions, spread over the
state; and it is curious to learn what a decided
hue this gives to the opinions of the district. We
had a notable example of this one morning, not long
after my arrival at Swallow Barn. Meriwether had
given several indications, immediately after breakfast,
of a design to pour out upon us the gathered ruminations
of the last twenty-four hours, but we had

evaded the storm with some caution, when the arrival
of two or three neighbours,—plain, homespun
farmers,—who had ridden to Swallow Barn to execute
some papers before Frank as a magistrate, furnished
him with an occasion that was not to be lost.
After despatching their business, he detained them,
ostensibly to inquire about their crops, and other
matters of their vocation,—but, in reality, to give
them that very flood of politics which we had escaped.
We, of course, listened without concern, since
we were assured of an auditory that would not
flinch. In the course of this disquisition, he made
use of a figure of speech that savoured of some previous
study, or, at least, was highly in the oratorical
vein. “Mark me, gentlemen,” said he, contracting
his brow over his fine thoughtful eye, and pointing
the forefinger of his left hand directly at the face
of the person he addressed, “Mark me, gentlemen,
—you and I may not live to see it, but our children
will see it, and wail over it—the sovereignty of this
Union will be as the rod of Aaron;—it will turn
into a serpent, and swallow up all that struggle with
it.” Mr. Chub was present at this solemn denunciation,
and was very much affected by it. He rubbed
his hands with some briskness, and uttered his
applause in a short but vehement panegyric, in which
were heard only the detached words—“Demosthenes
and Philip.”

The next day Ned and myself were walking by
the schoolhouse, and were hailed by Rip, from one
of the windows, who, in a sly under tone, as he beckoned

us to come close to him, told us, “if we wanted
to hear a regular preach, to stand fast.” We
could look into the schoolroom unobserved, and there
was our patriotic pedagogue haranguing the boys
with a violence of action that drove an additional
supply of blood into his face. It was apparent that
the old gentleman had got much beyond the depth of
his hearers, and was pouring out his rhetoric more
from oratorical vanity than from any hope of enlightening
his audience. At the most animated part of
his strain, he brought himself, by a kind of climax,
to the identical sentiment uttered by Meriwether the
day before. He warned his young hearers—the oldest
of them was not above fourteen—“to keep a
lynx-eyed gaze upon that serpent-like ambition which
would convert the government at Washington into
Aaron's rod, to swallow up the independence of their
native state.”

This conceit immediately ran through all the lower
circles at Swallow Barn. Mr. Thong, the overseer,
repeated it at the blacksmith's shop, in the presence
of the blacksmith and Mr. Absalom Bulrush,
a spare, ague-and-feverish husbandman who occupies
a muddy slip of marsh land, on one of the river
bottoms, which is now under mortgage to Meriwether;
and from these it has spread far and wide,
though a good deal diluted, until in its circuit it has
reached our veteran groom Carey, who considers the
sentiment as importing something of an awful nature.
With the smallest encouragement, Carey will
put on a tragi-comic face, shake his head very slowly,

turn up his eye-balls, and open out his broad,
scaly hands, while he repeats with laboured voice,
“Look out, Master Ned! Aaron's rod a black
snake in Old Virginny!” Upon which, as we fall into
a roar of laughter, Carey stares with astonishment
at our irreverence. But having been set to acting
this scene for us once or twice, he now suspects us
of some joke, and asks “if there is'nt a copper for an
old negro,” which if he succeeds in getting, he runs
off, telling us “he is too 'cute to make a fool of himself.”

Meriwether does not dislike this trait in the society
around him. I happened to hear two carpenters,
one day, who were making some repairs at the
stable, in high conversation. One of them was
expounding to the other some oracular opinion o
Frank's touching the political aspect of the country,
and just at the moment when the speaker was most
animated, Meriwether himself came up. He no
sooner became aware of the topic in discussion than
he walked off in another direction,—affecting not to
hear it, although I knew he heard every word. He
told me afterwards that there was “a wholesome
tone of feeling amongst the people in that part of the
country.”