CHAPTER XIV

TOBACCO AND SLAVERY

We turn now to the South and retrace our steps a few years. The psychology of the men who first settled Virginia does not require the detailed study given to the Puritans. Social conditions in Massachusetts were different from Virginia, which more nearly reproduced those of England on a smaller scale. The theocracy which was set up in Massachusetts found no lodgment in Virginia. Each community followed its natural impulse, and each developed along certain lines that were to mark the distinction between the North and South. The character of Massachusetts was laid in its theocratic system, that of Virginia in its system of slavery and the production of tobacco; and the effect of those influences, tobacco and slavery, we are now to see. The American character was formed no less by Virginia than it was by Massachusetts, and each contributed its own share to that composite and complex nature.

In 1607, thirteen years before the little band of Pilgrims found meagre shelter on the inhospitable coast of Massachusetts, a company of Englishmen laid the foundation for a Greater England at Jamestown in Virginia. "I shall yet live to see Virginia

an English nation," Raleigh with inspired vision wrote to Sir Robert Cecil shortly before the accession of James I, and the prophecy was fulfilled. It was the Puritan who was the heart of the new civilization, who brought to the New World a new concept of life and who gave birth to a new system of political philosophy, but it was the Virginian who gave to the heart its life's blood and supplied an element that saved a theocracy from subordinating the liberties of a people to the narrow and iron bound rule of the church. Had the original design of the first settlers of Massachusetts succeeded, had this New England across the sea been merely the old morality amidst new surroundings, had the church grasped the power which for long centuries it fought to retain and made America church-governed and priest-ridden, the story which has been written in the last three centuries would have a different meaning.

It has been the fashion to talk of Puritan New England and Cavalier Virginia, and inexact historians and careless writers have created the misleading impression that the men who first settled Virginia were drawn from a higher social scale than the Puritans, and that morally and intellectually they were their superiors. The legend of the South is no less fantastic than that of the North. Whatever the vices or the faults of these founders of a nation they were first of all men, and the majority of them, those who survived and from whose loins the

nation sprung, were strong, courageous men who would have laughed at attempts of dilettante admirers to effeminize them.

That the Virginians at the beginning were "aristocrats," to distinguish them from the "plain people" who planted Massachusetts, is as mythical as the common belief that Puritanism stamped out all natural affection and sunk its believers in perpetual gloom. Between the Englishman who in the early days of the seventeenth century went to Virginia and the Englishman who later followed him to Massachusetts there is little difference, and that difference is in favor of the men who established themselves in the north. More than a half of these first planters of Virginia "were poor gentlemen who were unaccustomed to manual labor and despised it; many were small tradesmen or servants; some are described as jewelers, gold refiners, and a perfumer"; not the stuff out of which empires are fashioned, and yet they were the beginnings of Virginia. The Puritan of the early days was animated by a very high and noble purpose, mistaken as we now see his views and aspirations often were, but every man who clings steadfastly to an ideal is the better for it. The Virginian was under no such influence. Religious persecution, sublime devotion to a higher cause, a passionate craving for the spiritual, did not drive him forth. He went to Virginia as an adventurer, with the spirit of the gambler and the speculator in him, to find there the

fortune which had eluded him at home. And in the early days many of them went there because they had no option, because they were criminals and paupers; they were transported by the Government, as in later days English criminals were sent to Botany Bay.

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An Englishman whose book on Slavery appeared shortly after the outbreak of the Civil War and was much quoted at the time, has with diligent dullness packed a surprising amount of misinformation into a couple of pages. "Massachusetts and the other New England States," he tells us, were colonized principally from the élite of the middle and lower classes — by people who, being accustomed to labour with their hands, would feel less need of slaves; and who, moreover, owing to their political views, having little to hope for in the way of assistance from the country they had quitted, would have little choice but to trust to their own personal exertions. On the other hand, the early emigration to Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas was for the most part composed of the sons of gentry, whose ideas and habits but ill fitted them for the struggle with nature in the wilderness. Such emigrants had little disposition to engage personally in the work of clearance and production, nor were they under the same necessity for this as their brethren in the north; for, being composed in great part of cavaliers and loyalists, they were, for many years after the first establishment of the settlements, sustained and petted by the home government; being fur

nished not merely with capital in the shape of constant supplies of provisions and clothing, but with laborers in the shape of convicts, indented servants, and slaves. In this way the colonists of the Virginia group were relieved of the necessity of personal toil, and in this way, it is said, slavery, which found little footing in the North, and never took firm root there, became established in the Southern States." 1

As a matter of fact, Virginia instead of being petted was exploited for British profit, as was customary in a day when a colony was simply regarded as valuable according to the revenue it put into the pockets of its proprietors. “We find one governor recommending that an act of Parliament should be passed forbidding the Virginians to make their own clothes. If the British merchants complained of one of the colony's laws it was promptly suspended." Charles I "petted" his royal colony by trying to obtain a monopoly of its tobacco crop. Nor does the careful historian forget that Navigation Act passed in the interest of English merchants and shipowners and aimed at the growing competition of Virginia and the other American colonies, which led to the first defiance of English authority when Nathaniel Bacon indicted Sir William Berkeley for abusing his Majesty's prerogative.

From such statements as this and those of other writers it has come to be commonly believed that while there was a fashionable, highly cultivated and

1 Cairnes: The Slave Power, pp. 34-35.