The Beginners of a Nation

IV

Wine. It was also proposed to produce wine in Virginia for English consumption. No more gold and silver should go out of the realm to buy port and canary to the profit of foreigners and the impoverishment of the good and loyal subjects of his Majesty. The instructions on this point were clear, and before the Virginia exiles had secured bread to stay their hunger they had made wine of the sour wild grapes of the country. French vine-dressers were sent over a little later and were forbidden to plant tobacco, but were compelled to employ themselves about vines, with the care of silkworms for variety. MS. Rec. Va. Co. i, 343. In 1621 these Frenchmen sent to England a cask of wine, the arrival of which was duly celebrated. Other experimental casks of wine were afterward sent to England from America at long intervals, but without decreasing the profits of wine growers in the Old World.

All the commodities sought from Virginia were unsuited to conditions in a new country. Other products sought. To the folly of making such experiments at all where living itself was an experiment, the managers added the folly of crowding a multiplicity of problematic enterprises on the colony at the same time. With a virgin continent in which to produce novelties, all things seemed possible in an age so hopeful. Plants of every clime grew rank in the imagination of projectors. Virginia was a wonderland, and it was readily believed without evidence that the "soyle and clymate" were "very apt and fit for sugar canes"; "also linseed and rapeseeds to make oiles," as a black-letter pamphlet of 1609 expresses it. Nova Brittania. Along with "orenges, limons, and almonds," this official writer proposes to plant "anniseeds, rice, cummin, cottonwool, carroway seeds, ginger, madder, olives, oris, sumacke," and, as if this breathless list were not enough for one new land, he adds, "and many such like that I can not now name." If we may trust the publications of the company, various West India plants were tried in the very first days of the colony, while the threefold peril of death from famine, pestilence, and savage war was imminent.

Timber and naval stores. But it was not enough to wring from an infant colony the products of the south; those derived from the north of Europe were straightway to be got there also. MS. Rec. Va. Co. 31 May and 23 June, 1620. German millwrights – "Dutch carpenters," in the phrase of the records – were brought from Hamburg by John Ferrar to build Virginia sawmills; timber was still sawed by hand in England. Pitch, tar, and potash were to be produced by Poles sent out for the purpose in the second year of the colony. Patriotism dictated that England should be relieved of her dependence on foreign countries for naval stores. Virginia had forests: why should she not produce these things? 28

It had been found that the savages eagerly received glass beads in exchange for corn and peltries. Glass-making. Nothing more was required to prove the profitableness of glass-making. Some Germans were sent to the colony in 1608, and glass works were established. 29 For some reason no proper materials were available at first, and it became necessary to request that sand might be sent from England to make Virginia glass of at the glass works in the woods near Jamestown. The German glass blowers were prone to run away to the Indians, among whom work was lighter and food more abundant. The tribesmen encouraged these desertions by providing dusky wives for the men whose skill with tools and weapons they valued highly. In 1621 the glass business was revived, and this time it was intrusted to Italian workmen. Iron works. About the same time iron works were established at Falling Creek, with "forty skilled workmen from Sussex to carry them forward." 30 Twenty-five ship carpenters were sent to ply their trade on the James River, and it was also arranged that oil was to be distilled from walnuts by the "apothecaries." George Sandys was sent over in July, 1621, to have entire control of all schemes for staple commodities. There was a certain fitness in intrusting these creatures of the imagination to a poet. Pineapples, plantains, and other fruits were to be started forthwith. There was once again great hope from the "rich commodity of silk," an endowed school for Indians was founded, and the little Virginia pool became iridescent with many frail bubbles. Result of the massacre. The sudden and frightful massacre by the savages in March, 1622, obliterated instantly all vain and premature projects. This calamity did not cause the failure of these foredoomed schemes; it only saved them from a painful and lingering death, and provided their friends with a decent epitaph for them. The people who survived the massacre were decimated by an epidemic in the following year. What strength they could spare from frequent battles with the savages they spent in growing corn and tobacco, which last, of all the things tried, proved to be the only commodity profitable for export.

V

Tobacco. Against tobacco King James had written a book. A Covnter-Blaste to Tobacco, 1604. It was denounced in Parliament and regarded by all public-spirited men as an evil. Nevertheless, it turned the scale and saved the colony. In colony-planting the problem is fundamentally an economic one, and economic problems are solved by coarse and homely means. 31 John Rolfe, the first Englishman that ventured to wed an Indian, planted the first tobacco at Jamestown in 1612, and by 1616 the better West India variety had perhaps been substituted for the harsh kind grown by the Virginia Indians, and by them called "uppowoc" or "apooke." Tobacco prospered and was profitable, to the disgust of the pedantic king and the sorrow of all who had cherished hopes of beautiful products from a colony upon which so much poetic sentiment had been lavished. Neither gold nor spices came as had been expected; the strings of pearls seen by Ralegh's men were not again to be found, or were perhaps transformed on investigation into wampum beads; the silver mine once discovered on the upper James had vanished forever; tropical fruits refused to grow; even madder and woad failed, and, though the indigo plant would readily mature, nobody knew how to manufacture the dye. Silk was troublesome and unprofitable, shipbuilding, and such coarse but patriotic products as naval stores had come to naught. But the detestable "weed," as King James had dubbed it, throve apace. As early as 1617 the waste margins of the broad streets of Jamestown were planted with it by the eager settlers. The English merchants grasped at the profits of it, the farmers of the customs rejoiced in the heavy duties imposed on it, and a powerful mercenary interest in the prosperity of Virginia was established. 32 By 1624, when the Virginia Company was dissolved, the danger that the colony would be abandoned as a result of Spanish intrigues, Indian massacres, or prolonged discouragement had passed away. Public spirit, patriotism, and religious enthusiasm no longer guarded it as a feeble house plant. It had struck root in the outdoor soil of human self-interest and its life was assured. From that time the colony that had been for seventeen years a fairyland to dreamers in England and a perdition to its inhabitants, became a sober money-making enterprise, uninteresting to enthusiasts and philanthropists. 33

VI

Motives of sentiment. In the preceding sections of this chapter we have traced what may be called the series of commercial motives that, sometimes in succession, often in co-operation, propelled the Virginia movement. The agitation for a colony was primarily a commercial one. The London or Virginia Company by which it was carried forward had been organized in the form of the great trading corporations of the time, such as the Muscovy Company and the East India Company, and it was expected to yield large returns. But though commercial in form and purpose, the Virginia Company from the outset was able to appeal successfully in every emergency to motives that were far from mercenary. Into the chain-threads of commercial enterprise was woven a woof of patriotic feeling and religious sentiment.

VII

Rise of the patriot party in the Virginia Company. Dale's empty-handed return, and Argall's homecoming with hands full of the spoil of both colony and colonists, were severe blows to the hope of profit from Virginia, and thereafter commercial motives fell to a second place. The company began to pass more and more out of the control of traders like Sir Thomas Smyth and Alderman Johnson, and the corrupt clique of predatory merchants, as well as out of the reach of voracious noblemen like Warwick. More and more it passed into the hands of the great liberal statesmen whose leader was the incorruptible Sir Edwin Sandys, a man of rare gifts and knowledge and of great resoluteness. These men had suffered some disappointment, no doubt, in their struggle for parliamentary freedom in England. They might have succeeded better had their antagonist been a strong king, but against the pusillanimity, the vanity, the vacillation, and the pedantic dogmatism of James little permanent headway could be made. Without relinquishing the conflict in the House of Commons, they took it up in the Quarter Courts of the Virginia Company. In this new field they found themselves afresh confronted by the obstinacy of the king, who was stirred up to oppose them by the discarded governor, Sir Thomas Smyth, and his friends, by Warwick, and by all the partisans of high prerogative and all the advocates of the Spanish match. Woodnoth's Short Collection, p. 6. "Bedchamber men" and others about the king's person were engaged to work upon the king to come to the rescue of Sir Thomas Smyth's "honor." Peckard's Ferrar, 113. The Spanish ambassador Gondomar, who had spies in the Virginia Company, took pains to feed James's discontent. He told the king that it was time for him to look into the Virginia courts, which were held in the great hall of the house of the Ferrar family. Too many of the king's nobility and gentry resorted thither, in order to be in company with the popular Lord Southampton and the dangerous Sandys. They were deep politicians, and they entertained designs beyond a tobacco plantation. Their leaders, he said, were "subtle men of high courage who regarded neither his master nor their own."

Sir Edwin Sandys. Sandys, as assistant to Sir Thomas Smyth and virtual governor, had already succeeded in establishing in Virginia a constitutional state with a representative government. Royal Hist. MS. Comm. viii, II, 45. He was furthering plans for the foundation of the little separatist state of New Plymouth, and his enemies set agoing tales that he had dark designs of removing with the Pilgrims to America, in order to found a democratic state there. In 1619 Sir Thomas Smyth tendered his resignation, and the company, to his surprise, it would appear, accepted it, and chose Sandys to his place. When, in 1620, his first year of government drew to a close, Sir Edwin Sandys erected an elegant ballot-box in the midst of the hall of the Ferrars, that the brilliant assemblage of noblemen, knights, gentlemen, and merchants might by a secret vote exercise the right of choice without any constraint. The king's interference. Just as the assemblage was about to begin voting, two clerks of the signet were announced with a message from the king forbidding the company to choose Sandys. 1620. "Choose the devil, if you will, but not Sir Edwin Sandys," was one form in which the king expressed his aversion. Southampton, braving the king's displeasure, allowed himself to be elected, with Sandys for deputy. In June, 1621, both Southampton and Sandys were imprisoned. A land of freedom. This attracted attention to Virginia as a "refuge from a more oppressive government in England." In three months' time twenty-five ships set sail for the colony, which gained an impetus from the king's opposition that put it beyond the danger of destruction by the calamities of the next two years. Even before the massacre and pestilence of 1622 and 1623, Southampton was assured by friends at court that it would come to "push of pike," and that the company would be overthrown. 34 The charter of the company was vacated in 1624, but free government had so taken root in the colony that it could never afterward be quite extirpated. A new English state with a popular government had been founded of deliberate purpose by a group of English statesmen, at the head of which, and easily first, was Sir Edwin Sandys, whose great service to the people and nation that were to come has been almost forgotten.

VIII

Religious propagandism. We shall not have taken a just account of Virginia colonization if we do not reckon religious motives among the many forces that carried that wavering enterprise to success. From the excitement about American exploration and colonization the English church caught its first missionary impulse. The Indian captives brought from America at various times gave to Englishmen the novel sight of men and women from beyond the bounds of Christendom; people who had never been baptized, and had never learned to wear English garments, "naked slaves of the devil," as one of the early Virginia clergymen described them. To the benevolent desire of Englishmen for the deliverance of the savages from devil-worship and semi-nudity, there was added the natural wish for ecclesiastical extension. The separation of England from the Roman hierarchy had been a blow to the aspiration for an unattainable catholicity cherished in one form or another by Christian ecclesiastics of almost every school. It was not possible that the great men who were leaders of the English church in the reigns of Elizabeth and James should be content with the narrow limits of "the little English paddock," while Spanish conquerors and missionary priests were winning for the Roman communion a new and vast dominion in America. 35 English ecclesiastics felt keenly the reproach made against them by the Roman Catholics that they were not "converters of infidels."

Zeal of the clergy. Perhaps the earliest of all Anglican missionaries was Robert Hunt, the first minister in Virginia, a light shining in a dark place indeed. He bore with unfaltering courage and a sweet-hearted patience rarely equaled in the history of martyrdom the accumulating miseries of Jamestown, until he also perished in the general mortality. His nobleness of spirit softened the detestable rivalries of the early leaders. The most active and influential writers in favor of colonization were clergymen such as Hakluyt, Symonds, Purchas, and Crashaw. Other clergymen, following in the footsteps of Hunt, risked life itself in the Virginia colony, while devout laymen spent their money in its behalf. Thus did Anglican zeal further a colonization that, by a curious perversity of outcome, resulted in founding a nation of dissenters.

IX

The Ferrars. In the great hall of the house of Nicholas Ferrar, a London merchant, the courts or meetings of the Virginia Company were held for years. The two sons of this Nicholas Ferrar, John and Nicholas, served in turn as deputy governors of the Virginia Company. This pious Ferrar family, as it became influential, lent to the scheme of colonizing Virginia something of the air of a project for propagating the gospel. Nicholas, the father, gave money for the education of infidels in Virginia. A school was founded there by the gifts of the pious, and rewards were given to those colonists who would educate Indian children in their families. After the younger Nicholas, who was a man of remarkable zeal and activity, tinged with a romantic enthusiasm, became deputy in 1622, the production of silk and wine and iron and the educating of Indians in Christianity traveled on abreast. A college was proposed, for which an endowment of thirteen hundred pounds was collected, and to which a valuable library was bequeathed by a settler. Practical men grumbled at the prematurity of all this, and complained of those in charge that "they spent Michaelmas rent in mid-summer moone." The governor of the colony, honest Sir Francis Wyatt, wished that "little Mr. Ferrar were in Virginia, where he might add to his zeal a knowledge of the country."

The horrible massacre of March, 1622, made the Indian question something other than the Ferrars saw it. All schemes for educating the savages were obliterated in a day. The only thought after this was how to put the savages to death, old and young, men and women, more often by foul means than by fair. The settlers even emulated, if they did not surpass, the treachery of the Indians. With the dissolution of the company by quo warranto proceedings in 1624 the government of the colony passed to the Crown, and the Ferrars had no more to do with Virginia.

X

Later History of the Ferrars. The later career of Nicholas Ferrar the younger, though without direct relation to colonization, throws light on the age of colony beginnings. Rejecting the offer of a rich bride, he bought for his mother, now a widow, the manor lordship of Little Gidding, in Huntingdonshire, and took the entire Ferrar family, including his brother and his sister with eighteen children, into religious retirement. Here this half-domestic, half-monastic community gave alms to the poor, illuminated manuscripts of the Bible, and worshiped in its little chapel with genuflections and other observances that procured for it the nickname of the "Protestant Nunnery," and brought down upon it the pious fury of the Puritans. Nicholas Ferrar, who had taken deacon's orders, was the real head of the community. He prepared at Little Gidding what is perhaps the earliest English monatesseron of the four gospels. By means of relays of worshipers the Ferrars kept their devotions always in progress. The entire Psalter was chanted antiphonally during each twenty-four hours. Those whose turn it was to keep vigil were wont to leave a candle at the door of Nicholas and to wish him good-morrow at one o'clock in the morning, at which hour he was accustomed to rise and begin the exercises of the day. The strength of this belated mediæval saint gave way under a discipline so austere, and he died in 1637. Peckard's Life of N. Ferrar. Arminian Nunnery 1641. Little Gidding, with its "fair grove and sweet walks letticed and gardened on both sides," was devastated a few years later by the counter-zeal of the Puritans, who showed an especial indignation against the organ, which they broke into pieces to light fires for roasting the sheep of the Ferrars. Hearne's Langtoft's Chronicle, App. to Pref., cix. Behold an epitome of the first half of the seventeenth century – its idealism in affairs, and its war to the death of opposing ideals in religion!

Advent of Puritanism. In the very years during which the Ferrars were most active on behalf of Virginia the earliest Puritan movement toward America set in. The attenuated mediævalism of the Ferrars did not lack a certain refined beauty, but it was hardly suited to the rough work of hewing a road along which civilization might march into a savage wilderness. The Puritans, with their robust contempt for æsthetic considerations – making firewood of organs with delight, and feasting without scruple on the sheep of those whom they esteemed idolaters – were much the fitter to be champions against the American Canaanites.

BOOK II.

THE PURITAN MIGRATION

CHAPTER THE FIRST.

RISE AND DEVELOPMENT OF PURITANISM

I

Love of display in Elizabeth's time. Not religious disputants only, but the world in general, exaggerated the importance of vestments and ceremonies in the reign of Elizabeth. The love of formality and display that characterized the Renascence was then at its height. It was a time of pomps and royal progresses. Great historic characters went about dressed like performers in a show. Some of the queen's gowns were adorned with jewels on every available inch of space. These bespangled robes were draped over vast farthingales, which spread out like tables on which her arms might rest, and her appearance when thus attired has been compared to that of an Oriental idol. Her courtiers and statesmen were equally fond of dazzling the spectator. Ralegh wore a pendent jewel on his hat feather, and the value of the gems on his shoes was estimated at six thousand six hundred pieces of gold. The love of pomp was not confined to the court; every nobleman and country gentleman kept his house filled with idle serving men, the sons of neighboring gentlemen or yeomen, whose use was to "grace the halls" of their patron by their attendance and to give dignity to his hospitality. 36 High sheriffs and other officials performed their functions with thirty or forty men in livery at their heels, even borrowing the retainers of their friends to lend state to their office. Machyn's Diary, 324, note. Edward VI set out upon a progress in 1551 with a train of four thousand mounted men. These were noblemen and gentlemen with their retainers. He was obliged to dismiss all but a hundred and fifty of this vast army of display lest it should "eat up the country." The gorgeous progresses of Elizabeth are too well known to need description. A painting of the time shows her to us in the act of making a friendly call on her cousin-german, Lord Hunsdon. She is sitting under a canopy, and is borne on the shoulders of men and attended by a brilliant train of lords and ladies on foot. It was truer in the days of Shakespeare than it has been since that "all the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players."

The age of the drama. A passionate love of the theater was inevitable in such a time. The best poetry then took a dramatic form; even history was taught from the stage; and satire and polemics felt the attraction and were often put into imaginary dialogues. It was Shakespeare's good fortune that he happened to live among a people fond of show and in an age dramatic as well as poetic to its very core. Genius is nourished by sympathy, and supremely great performance is rendered possible only by the rare coincidence of the great man and a fitting environment.

Display in dress. Dress signified more to the men of the time of Elizabeth and James than it is easy for us moderns to imagine. Greatness declared itself by external display. The son of a rich merchant when he returned from his travels decked himself in gorgeous apparel, and formally made his appearance on the Exchange like a butterfly newly emerged. Peckard's Life of Ferrar. It was thus that his parents brought the young man out in the world. A sum equal in purchasing power to several thousand dollars in our time is said to have been spent on one pair of trunk hose. Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses, passim. Men of the lowest ranks, desirous of appearing more than they were, impoverished themselves in buying expensive hats and hose; and it is recorded that women suffering for the necessaries of life sometimes contrived to adorn themselves with velvet. For the very reason that so much importance was attached to dress, laws were made to repress inappropriate display in people of lower rank. 37 Even the severe Puritan moralists did not object to the pomp of the great, but to the extravagant imitation of it by those who had no right to such ostentation. It was with difficulty that men could conceive of greatness without display. To refuse a bishop his vestments was to abate something of his lofty rank.

II

Observance of ceremonies. Along with a love for external show went a scrupulous observance of decorous and often pompous ceremonies. Englishmen in the sixteenth and the early part of the seventeenth century never omitted to observe proper formality, no matter how dire the emergency. One may see this exemplified by reverting to some of the earliest events in American history. Compare supra, p. 41. When Gates arrived at Jamestown near the close of the "starving time," he found only the gaunt ghosts of men clamoring to be taken from the scene of so many horrible miseries. Instead of giving immediate attention to the sufferings of the people, he caused the little church bell to be rung. Such of the inhabitants as could drag themselves out of their huts repaired once more to the now ruined and unfrequented church with its roof of sedge and earth supported by timbers set in crotches. Here the newly arrived chaplain offered a sorrowful prayer, and then George Percy, the retiring governor, delivered up his authority to Sir Thomas Gates, who thus found himself in due and proper form installed governor of death, famine, and desperation. When Gates abandoned the wrecked town with his starving company he fired a "peale of small shott," in order not to be wanting in respect for a royal fort; and when De la Warr arrived, a few days later, he made his landing with still greater pomp than that of Gates. There was a flourish of trumpets on shipboard before he struck sail in front of Jamestown. A gentleman of his party bore the colors of the governor before him. The governor's first act when he set foot on American soil was to fall on his knees and offer a long, silent prayer, which was probably sincere though theatrical, after the manner of the age. He rose at length and marched up into the ruined town. As he passed into the stockade by the water gate, which was shabbily off its hinges, the color bearer dropped down before him and allowed the colors to fall at the feet of his lordship, who proceeded to the tumble-down chapel, under the earthen roof of which the authority over the colony was duly transferred to his hands with such solemnities as were thought proper. Whenever Lord De la Warr went to church at Jamestown he was attended by the councilors, captains, and gentlemen, and guarded by fifty men with halberds, wearing De la Warr's livery of showy red cloaks. Strachey, in Purchas, iv, 17-54. The governor's seat was a chair covered with green velvet. De la Warr's letter, in Strachey's Virginia, p. xxix. It was in the choir of the now reconstructed little church, and a velvet cushion lay on the table before him to enable him to worship his Maker in a manner becoming the dignity of a great lord over a howling wilderness. More than a quarter of the able-bodied men in Virginia were needed to get the governor to church and back again aboard the ship where he dwelt.