The Beginnings Of Virginia

( Originally Published 1913 )

ADDRESS DELIVERED AT JAMESTOWN ISLAND, VIRGINIA, APRIL 17, 1907, ON THE TERCENTENARY OF THE FIRST ENGLISH SETTLEMENT IN VIRGINIA.

ON this day three hundred years ago two small ships and a pinnace coming from England by way of the Canary Islands and the West Indies anchored here and landed their passengers, being about one hundred and twenty persons fn number, upon this Island. They came from London under a charter from the King, James the First of England and Sixth of Scotland, by which there was claimed for the Crown of England the whole of North America between the thirty-fourth and forty-fifth degrees of latitude, being the territory then called Virginia. In the London which these settlers had just left, Shakespeare was then living. Some of them may have seen him, perhaps with Ben Jonson beside him, watching the first performance of Hamlet four or five years before. Sir Francis Bacon — the one name naturally suggests the other — was living, though not yet Lord Chancellor. Some of the emigrants may have heard him arguing cases in the courts. John Milton was born the next year ; Sir Walter Raleigh was a man of fifty-five and then a prisoner in the Tower of London ; Sir Philip Sidney had been killed at Zutphen in 1586 and Edmund Spenser had died in 1599 ; Pym was a youth of seventeen ; John Hampden a boy of seven ; Oliver Cromwell a boy of eight.

The England of those famous men was the England whence the emigrants came, a land fitted to give birth to large and noble enterprises. Measured by what it did for the world, it was a great England, with great poets, great thinkers, and strong men who did great deeds. Never before and never since has such a constellation of brilliant and memorable names glittered in the English sky. But measured by population, England was a little nation, though her states-men and sailors had not long before won immortal fame by their defeat of the Invincible Armada. There were only some five million inhabitants in the country. Ireland was still but half conquered, and Scotland, though her King had lately inherited the English throne, was a distinct and not too friendly kingdom. And the settlers were few indeed to venture on the task of occupying the vast continent on which they we're landing. How feeble must their enterprise have seemed to the men of Spain, which held not only Mexico and the immense territories north of Mexico, but also the whole of South America and all the Antilles ! But God had chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which were mighty, and the things which were not to bring to nought the things that were. The Empire of Spain was to decay and dissolve and vanish away, while from this spot, this islet two miles long, where now we see nothing but a few mouldering walls, the power of another race was to spread out to the Alleghanies and beyond them to the Mississippi, and thence to the Rocky Mountains and the far-off coasts of the Pacific. The oak of English dominion on the continent of North America lay hidden in the acorn that was planted on this island in the James River, just as the germ of English dominion in the East was to be found in the charter that had been granted by Queen Elizabeth to the East India Company seven years before this settlement.

The landing of these few men was one of the great events in the history of the world — an event to be compared for its momentous consequences with the over-throw of the Persian Empire by Alexander ; with the destruction of Carthage by Rome ; with the conquest of Gaul by Clovis ; with the taking of Constantinople by the Turks — one might almost say with the discovery of America by Columbus. Did any idea of the magnitude of this event rise in the minds of the little band of settlers when they read their Royal charter on board ship before landing; or when they held their first religious service and set to the building of their fort, a rude stockade called after the King, " James Town," and began to sow their fields with wheat, and build that tiny church which the pious care of this generation is restoring? There is nothing to show that they had any such presentiments. Many a settlement tried before upon the American coasts had failed since the half-mythic and by that time long-forgotten landing of Erik the Red in the far Northeast; and they had other things than the distant future to think of, for the Spanish power to the south of them, though then nominally at peace, was jealous of their intrusion, and the Indians around them were suspicious and hostile. But of them it may be said that they, and those who sent them forth from England, had the true spirit of practical men who saw the opportunity which a new country offered to a growing people. They were of the stuff which makes good settlers, and they did that which the needs of the time required.

All the dangers and difficulties that were seen or foreseen they overcame. The power of the mother country kept them safe against the jealous bitterness of Spain. They soon proved themselves able to repel any attacks from the native Indians, and presently ceased to fear these enemies, though they had for many years to stand on guard against them. They suffered so severely from malverdana fevers, for in those days the value of quinine as a remedy had not yet become known, that after ninety-three years the colonial legislature decided to remove itself from James Town island to Williamsburg, eight miles to the northeast, and at last, in 178o, the capital of Virginia was planted on the higher and healthier ground of Richmond. But one mistake was committed, destined to breed troubles far worse than any which Indians or sickness threatened. Twelve years after the first settlement, a Dutch ship landed a cargo of African negroes, the first that ever came into the dominions of the English Crown. This step — a step taken with no prevision of all that was to issue from it, and one for which the colonists them-selves were not to blame — established the system of agricultural slave labor in North America, a system which we can now see to have been, apart from the other objections to it, uneconomic and unnecessary; for those who have studied, in the light of modern science, the physical conditions of Virginia and the country south and southwest of it, tell us that nearly all the area of the States in which slavery existed seventy years ago, all, in fact, except the hottest and dampest regions along the coast, could be cultivated by the labour of white men. The country would, no doubt, have been developed more slowly, but there would have been no Civil War and no race problems such as now occupy your thoughts. Let it not be forgotten, however, that Virginia was the first community in the world to recognize the evils which the slave trade brought with it. Not only did she, in colonial days, seek in vain to check or abolish it, but in 1778, in the first years of her independence, when both in England and in the Northern States powerful interests were still defending and supporting the slave trade, she absolutely forbade the bringing of any slaves into her territory. And you know how many of the greatest Virginians, George Mason and Thomas Jefferson among them, sought to rid their State of slavery.

Let us, however, return to those first founders of Virginia whom we are to-day commemorating. Of the qualities that distinguished them, one, the spirit of adventure, was common to them with many others who had crossed the Western Sea. Think of Columbus when he first showed the path that so many were to follow; of Magellan when he threaded his way through the savage solitudes of the Strait that bears his name, and traversed week after week and month after month, with a crew part of which had lately been in mutiny against him, hard-pressed by thirst and hunger and scurvy, the seemingly boundless wastes of the unknown Pacific. Think of Champlain and La Salle when they found their way among fierce Indian tribes, through the Northern forests or along the shores of the Great Lakes as far as the Mississippi. For mere daring and self-reliant hardihood no expedition has ever surpassed, if indeed any has equalled, that of Hernando Cortez, when after burning his ships he marched up far away from the coast with a tiny band of cavaliers into the heart of the vast and warlike dominion of the Aztecs. But there was another quality in which our country-men and your forefathers stood preeminent. They came from a free country, though its freedom had not yet been placed on a secure foundation, for that was to be the work of the century that had just begun in England ; and the spirit of liberty and the love of self-government glowed in their hearts.

Herein lay the great contrast between the English of that day and the not less valiant adventurers who had already gone forth from Spain. That the former went to cultivate the soil and the latter primarily to win gold and silver, whether by conquest or by the discovery of mines, is a difference that has often been dwelt upon. But the future fortunes of the two sets of emigrants were even more affected by the difference in their political temper and ideas. The Englishmen, though loyal to their sovereign at home, were not disposed to acquiesce in the uncontrolled rule of his deputies. They had a company to represent in England their needs and wishes, and they soon set up in the new land a system of local courts and assemblies, modelled on the lines and principles of that which they had left behind. They valued this inherited freedom, and as the enjoyment of it had strengthened the character and developed the independent and self-reliant spirit of the individual citizen during three centuries in England, so it began to do the same wholesome work on these remote and silent shores.

Modern writers have speculated as to what was the cargo that these three vessels carried. Of that we know less than we could wish. Bibles and prayer-books they certainly had, for they were God-fearing men, and one of their prime objects was "the planting of Christianity amongst heathens." Whether they had any law books does not appear. But they carried in their breasts the principles and traditions of the common law of England, which of all the legal systems that have ever been framed is the one most fully pervaded with the spirit of liberty and the most favorable to the development of personal self-reliance and individual responsibility. That spirit showed itself from the first among the colonists of Virginia. They soon organized their Assembly and began to govern them-selves so far as the King allowed them. They were well supported by the Virginia Company in London. Its debates and the liberal tendencies it evinced caused disquiet to the Court party and to the King, whose shrewd and suspicious mind already noted the rising of the wind which was to swell thirty-three years later into the tempest of the great Civil War.

How the spirit of freedom and that assertion of individual rights which the doctrines of the Common Law favoured went on working through the annals of colonial Virginia as in those of the great sister and rival colony of Massachusetts ; how the same spirit prompted Virginia's action when an unwise English Ministry, ignorant of the circumstances and feelings of the colonists, blundered into a conflict which ended in their severance from England ; how the greatest of all Virginians, clarum et venerabile nomen, led his colony and its fellow colonies in that conflict; how the statesmanship of Virginia, matured by the experience of nearly two centuries, bore its part, and an eminently useful part it was, in framing the Constitution of 1787, and gave to the Union four out of its five first Presidents ; how one of Virginia's most illustrious sons, Chief Justice Marshall, so expounded and developed the Constitution as to become almost its second author, — of all this I must not here and now attempt to speak. Sixty years ago dark days descended upon Virginia. The fatal error committed in early years, from the consequences of which Virginia had vainly sought to extricate herself, had now borne fatal fruit. War came, with all the evils that war brings in its train, and on Virginia those evils fell more heavily than on any other State. Those were days of unspeakable sadness and suffering, suffering borne with the characteristic gallantry of Virginians, and they produced in Robert E. Lee one of the finest characters of that age, a man whose purity of heart and loftiness of soul live in the revering memory not of America only but of the world of English-speaking men. But out of the storm there emerged a State delivered from the blot of slavery, which has now regained its old prosperity, and there emerged also a national Republic more truly united than it ever was before. The jealousies of States, the antagonism of North and South, the rivalry of Virginia and Massachusetts, have now happily vanished in a far vaster nation. The Carolina of Calhoun and the Illinois of Lincoln can both look back without bitterness on those Virginia battle-fields where Lee and Grant won undying fame. The problems that occupy the thoughts of your people and tax to the utmost the wisdom of your statesmen, have, with one exception, that problem which slavery bequeathed, nothing to do with geographical boundaries. Never was there in this country so strong a sense that whatever the future may have in store, the Federal Union — "an indestructible union of indestructible States" — must and will be preserved. It is guarded not only by your national patriotism, but by nature herself, who has made your land one from the Atlantic to the Rocky Mountains, a land fit to be the home of one undivided nation.

In this season of fair weather it is natural that your eyes should look back across the sea to the ancient Motherland, from whom you were for a time divided by clouds of misunderstanding that have now melted away into the blue. Between you and her there is now an affection and a sympathy such as perhaps there never was before in the days of your political connection. To-day she rejoices with you in your prosperity and your unity. She is proud of you, and among her many achievements there is none of which she is more proud than this, that she laid the foundation of your vast and splendid Republic, giving you those institutions under which, remodelled to suit your new conditions and your extended area, your ninety millions of people now live in peace in freedom.

You have asked me to say what England's message to America would be on this three hundredth anniversary of the birth of the American nation.

On the occasion of the opening of the Jamestown Tercentenary Exposition a fortnight ago, I had the honour of transmitting to the President of the United States a greeting from the King and his Government in the following words : —

"On the occasion of the celebrations commemorating the tercentenary of the foundation of the first English settlement on the American continent at Jamestown and the birth of the American nation, his Majesty's Government wish to offer their warmest congratulations to the United States Government on the magnificent progress and development which have brought the United States into the first rank among the greatest nations of the world, not only in material prosperity, but also in culture and peaceful civilization. The connection which must ever exist in history between the British and American nations will never be for gotten, and will contribute to increase and foster ties of affection between the two peoples."

These words express the sentiment of the British people, their sentiment of affection and of pride, of pride in what you have done already, of hope for what you may do in the future.

If any words were to be added in which Englishmen who have reflected upon your history and their own history would seek to convey their view of the teachings of English and American experience, I would ask Could the ancient Motherland with her recollections of four-teen centuries of national life and seven centuries of slow but steady constitutional development send to her mighty daughter a better message than this ? " Cherish alike and cherish together Liberty and Law. They are always inseparable. Without liberty', there is no true law, because where law expresses the will not of the whole community, but merely of an arbitrary ruler or a selfish class, it has neither moral force nor guarantee of permanence. Without order and law duly enforced and equal for all, there is no true liberty, for anarchy means that the rights of the gentle and the weak are overridden by the violent. In the union of ordered liberty with a law gradually remoulded from age to age to suit the changing needs of the people, has lain and will always lie the progress and peace both of Britain and of America."