Beginning of the seventy years’ struggle with France.

Nothing did so much toward bringing the several colonies face to face with a great continental situation as the struggle with France which began with the expulsion of the Stuarts in 1689 and was not to be decided until seventy years later, when Wolfe climbed the Heights of Abraham. The destruction of the Invincible Armada, a century before the downfall of James II., had shown that Great Britain was to belong to the Protestant Reformers; the latter event had shown that she was not to be won back to the Catholic Counter-Reformation which, starting with the election of Paul IV. in 1555, had gained formidable strength in many quarters. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, when the colony of Virginia was founded, the France of Henry IV. was in sympathy with England and hostile to Spain. Before the end of that century the France of Louis XIV. had been won over to the Counter-Reformation. The dethronement of England’s Catholic king came almost like a rejoinder to the expulsion of a million Protestants from France. The mighty struggle which then began was to determine whether North America should be controlled by Protestantism and Whiggery, or by the Counter-Reformation and the Old Régime.

The Continental Congress of 1690.

The first notable effect wrought in English America by the outbreak of hostilities was the assembling of a Continental Congress at New York in 1690, the first meeting of that sort in America. The continental aspects of the situation were not as yet apparent save to a few prescient minds. The infant settlements in Carolina hardly counted for much. Virginia was too far from Canada to feel deeply interested in the organization of resistance to the schemes of Frontenac, and so the southernmost colony represented in the first American Congress was Maryland.

Franklin’s plan for a Federal Union.
Origin of the Stamp Act.

It was not long, however, before the continental aspects of the situation began to grow more conspicuous. The reader will remember how, in 1708, the government at Charleston, in an official report on the military resources of the colony, laid stress upon the circumstance that Carolina was a frontier to all the English settlements on the mainland. The occasion for this emphasis was the great European war that broke out in 1701, when Louis XIV. put his grandson, Philip of Anjou, on the vacant throne of Spain. The alliance of Spain with France threatened English America at both ends of the line. The destruction of Deerfield by an expedition from Canada in 1704, and the attempt upon Charleston by an expedition from Florida in 1706, were blows delivered by the common enemy, Louis XIV., the persecutor of Huguenots, the champion of the Counter-Reformation, the accomplice of the Stuarts. From that moment we may date the first dawning consciousness of a community of interests all the way from Massachusetts to Carolina. But it was only a few clear-headed persons that were quick to understand the situation. The average members of a legislature were not among these; their thoughts were much more upon the constituencies “to whom they owed their elections” than upon any wide or far-reaching interests. Such of the royal governors as were honest and high-minded men saw the situation much more clearly, since it was their business to look at things from the imperial point of view. Especially such a man as Spotswood, a soldier of noted ability, who had himself been scarred in fighting the common enemy, could not fail to understand the needs of the hour. His official letters abundantly show his disgust over the froward and niggardly policy that refused prompt aid to hard-pressed Carolina.321 To sit wrangling over questions of prerogative while firebrand and tomahawk were devouring their brethren on the frontier! To our valiant soldier such behaviour seemed fit only for churls; while waiting for the danger to come upon one, instead of marching forth to attack the danger, was surely as impolitic as unchivalrous. So, without waiting on the uncertain temper and devious arguments of many-headed King Demos, the governor hurried his men on board ship as fast as he could enlist and arm them, well knowing that in a “dangerous conjuncture” the more precious minutes one loses, the more costly grow those that are left. During half of the eighteenth century, as the conflict with France was again and again renewed, such experiences as those of Spotswood with his burgesses were repeated in most of the colonies, until the royal governors became profoundly convinced that the one thing most needed in English America was a Continental Government that could impose taxes, according to some uniform principle, upon the people of all the colonies for the common defence. At the Albany Congress of 1754, when the war-clouds were blacker than ever, Benjamin Franklin came forward with a scheme for creating such a central government for purely federal purposes. That scheme would have inaugurated a Federal Union, with president appointed by the crown; it would have lodged the power of taxation, for continental purposes, in a federal council representing the American people; and it would have left with the several states all governmental functions and prerogatives not explicitly granted to the central government. Had Franklin’s plan been adopted and proved successful in its working, the political separation between English America and English Britain would not have occurred when it did, and possibly might not have occurred at all. But Franklin’s plan failed of adoption just at the moment when American politics were becoming more completely and conspicuously continental than ever before. In the presence of a gigantic war that extended “from the coast of Coromandel to the Great Lakes of North America,”322 the need for a continental government and the evils that flowed from the want of it were felt with increasing severity; the old difficulties which had beset honest Spotswood were renewed in manifold ways; until, when the war was over, Parliament, with the best of intentions but without due consideration, undertook in the Stamp Act to provide a steady continental revenue for America. When the Americans refused to accept Parliament as their continental legislature, and, in alliance with Pitt and his New Whigs, won a noble victory in the repeal of the Stamp Act, a great American question became entangled in British politics, and a situation was thus created which enabled the unscrupulous and half-crazy George III. to force upon America the quarrel that parted the empire in twain. Nowhere in history is the solidarity of events, in their causal relations, more conspicuous than in America during the eighteenth century; and for this reason the disputes of the royal governors with their refractory assemblies are nearly always rich in political lessons.

The unknown West.
Spotswood crosses the Blue Ridge, 1716.

Looking back from the present time at Spotswood’s administration, we find its incidents perpetually reminding us that the colonies were already entering upon that long period of revolution from which they were not to emerge until the adoption of our Federal Constitution. We never lose consciousness of the French and Indian background against which the events are projected. Toward this vast dim background Spotswood set his face in 1716, in his memorable expedition across the Blue Ridge. For more than a century since the founding of Jamestown had the beautiful valley of the Shenandoah remained unknown to Virginians. It was still part of the strange, unmeasured wilderness that stretched away to the remote shores which Drake had once called by the name New Albion.323 Some of its most savage solitudes had in Spotswood’s youth been traversed by the mighty La Salle, and other adventurous Frenchmen kept up explorations among freshwater seas to the northwestward, where English and Scotch officials of the Hudson Bay Company were beginning to come into contact with them. What was to be found between those freshwater seas and the Gulf of Mexico no Englishman could tell, save that it had been found to be solid land, and not a Sea of Verrazano.324 So much might Spotswood have gathered from reading and from hearsay, but not through any work done by Englishmen. In the early days, as we have seen, Captain Newport had tried to reach the mountains and failed.325 In 1653 it was enacted that, “whereas divers gentlemen have a voluntarie desire to discover the Mountains and supplicated for lycence to this Assembly, ... that order be granted unto any for soe doing, Provided they go with a considerable partie and strength both of men and amunition.”326 But nothing came of this permission. In Spotswood’s time the very outposts of English civilization had not crept inland beyond tidewater. A strip of forest fifty miles or more in breadth still intervened between the Virginia frontier and those blue peaks visible against the western sky. This stalwart governor was not the man to gaze upon mountains and rest content without going to see what was behind them. Especially since the French were laying claim to the interior, since they had for some time possessed the Great Lakes, and since they had lately been busy in erecting forts at divers remote places in the western country,327 it was worth while for Englishmen to take a step toward them by crossing the mountains.328 The expedition was extremely popular in Virginia. A party of fifty gentlemen, with black servants, Indian guides, and packhorses, started out toward the end of August and made quite an autumn picnic of it. One can fancy what prime shooting it was in the virgin forest all alive with the finest of game. To wash down so much toothsome venison and grouse, the governor brought along several casks of native wines—red and white Rapidan, so to speak—made by his Spottsylvania Germans; but cognac and cherry cordial were not forgotten, and champagne-corks popped merrily in the wilderness. Crossing the Blue Ridge at Swift Run Gap,329 on nearly the same latitude as Fredericksburg, the party entered the great valley a little north of the present site of Port Republic, and about eighty miles southwest from Harper’s Ferry. The exploits of Stonewall Jackson in 1862 have clothed the region with undying fame. Spotswood called the river the Euphrates, an early instance of the vicious naming by which the map of the United States is so abundantly disfigured, but happily the melodious native name of Shenandoah has held its place. On the bank of that fair stream one of the empty bottles was buried, with a paper inside declaring that the river and all the soil it drained were the property of the King of Great Britain. Having thus taken formal possession of the valley, the picnickers returned to their tidewater homes.

Knights of the Golden Horseshoe.

A letter of Rev. Hugh Jones, who preached in Bruton Church, says that Spotswood cut the name of George I. upon a rock at the summit of the highest peak which the party climbed, and named it Mount George, whereupon some of the gentlemen called the next one Mount Alexander, in honour of the governor. “For this expedition,” says Mr. Jones, “they were obliged to provide a great quantity of horseshoes, things seldom used in the lower parts of the country, where there are few stones. Upon which account the governor upon their return presented each of his companions with a golden horseshoe, some of which I have seen, studded with valuable stones, resembling the heads of nails, with this inscription ... Sic juvat transcendere montes.330 This he instituted to encourage gentlemen to venture backwards and make discoveries and new settlements, any gentleman being entitled to wear this golden shoe that can prove his having drank [sic] his Majesty’s health upon Mount George.”331 In later times this incident was called instituting the order of Knights of the Golden Horseshoe.

Spotswood’s view of the situation.

Spotswood’s letters to the Lords of Trade, in which he mentions this expedition to the mountains, are testimony to the soundness of his military foresight. In recent years, he says, the French have built fortresses in such positions “that the Brittish Plantations are in a manner Surrounded by their Commerce w’th the numerous Nations of Indians seated on both sides of the Lakes; they may not only Engross the whole Skin Trade, but may, when they please, Send out such Bodys of Indians on the back of these Plantations as may greatly distress his Maj’ty’s Subjects here, And should they multiply their settlem’ts along these Lakes, so as to joyn their Dominions of Canada to their new Colony of Louisiana, they might even possess themselves of any of these Plantations they pleased. Nature, ’tis true, has formed a Barrier for us by that long Chain of Mountains w’ch run from the back of South Carolina as far as New York, and w’ch are only passable in some few places, but even that Natural Defence may prove rather destructive to us, if they are not possessed by us before they are known to them. To prevent the dangers w’ch Threaten his Maj’ty’s Dominions here from the growing power of these Neighbours, nothing seems to me of more consequence than that now while the Nations are at peace, and while the French are yet uncapable of possessing all that vast Tract w’ch lies on the back of these Plantations, we should attempt to make some Settlements on ye Lakes, and at the same time possess our selves of those passes of the great Mountains, w’ch are necessary to preserve a Communication w’th such Settlements.”332

He goes on to say that the purpose of his late expedition across the Blue Ridge was to ascertain whether Lake Erie, occupying as it did a central position in the French line of communication between Canada and Louisiana, was easily accessible from Virginia. Information gathered from Indians led him to believe that it was thus accessible.333 He therefore proposed that an English settlement should be made on the south shore of Lake Erie, whereby the English power might be thrust like a wedge into the centre of the French position; and he offered to take a suitable body of men across the mountains and reconnoitre the country for the purpose of finding a site. As for the expense of such an enterprise, the king need not be concerned about it; for there was enough surplus from quitrents in the colonial treasury to defray it. One cannot read such a letter without admiring the writer’s honest frankness, his clear insight, his prudence, and his courage.

Spotswood’s last years.

But with all Spotswood’s virtues and talents, and in spite of his popularity, he fell upon the same rock upon which Andros and Nicholson had been wrecked: he quarrelled with Dr. Blair, who tells us that “he was so wedded to his own notions that there was no quarter for them that went not with him.”334 With a change of name, perhaps the same might have been said of the worthy doctor. The quarrel seems to have originated in the question as to the right of appointing pastors, and it ended, as Blair’s contests always ended, in the overthrow of his antagonist. Nobody could stand up against that doughty Scotch parson.335 Spotswood was removed from his governorship in 1722, but continued to live in the Virginia which he loved. As postmaster-general for the American colonies, he had by 1738 got the mail running regularly from New England as far south as James River. It took a week to carry the mail from Philadelphia to Williamsburg; for points further south the post-rider started at irregular intervals, whenever enough mail had accumulated to make it worth while. In 1740 Spotswood received a major-general’s commission, and was about to sail in Admiral Vernon’s expedition against Cartagena,336 when he suddenly died. He was buried on his estate of Temple Farm, near Yorktown. In later days the surrender of Lord Cornwallis was negotiated in the house which had sheltered the last years of this noble governor.337

Gooch and Dinwiddie.

Spotswood was succeeded by Hugh Drysdale, who died in 1726, and next came William Gooch, another military Scotchman, quiet, modest, and shrewd, who managed things for twenty-two years, from 1727 to 1749, with marked ability and success. After an interval, Gooch was followed by Robert Dinwiddie, still another Scotchman, who came in 1751 and staid until 1758, and whose administration is the last one that calls for mention in the present narrative.

The Scotch-Irish.

The period of Gooch’s government was remarkable for the development of the westward movement prefigured in Spotswood’s expedition across the Blue Ridge. This development occurred in a way that even far-seeing men could not have predicted. It introduced into Virginia a new set of people, new forms of religion, new habits of life. It affected all the colonies south of Pennsylvania most profoundly, and did more than anything else to determine the character of all the states afterward founded west of the Alleghanies and south of the latitude of middle Illinois. Until recent years, little has been written about the coming of the so-called Scotch-Irish to America, and yet it is an event of scarcely less importance than the exodus of English Puritans to New England and that of English Cavaliers to Virginia. It is impossible to understand the drift which American history, social and political, has taken since the time of Andrew Jackson, without studying the early life of the Scotch-Irish population of the Alleghany regions, the pioneers of the American backwoods. I do not mean to be understood as saying that the whole of that population at the time of our Revolutionary War was Scotch-Irish, for there was a considerable German element in it, besides an infusion of English moving inward from the coast. But the Scotch-Irish element was more numerous and far more important than all the others. A detailed account of it belongs especially with the history of Pennsylvania, since that colony was the principal centre of its distribution throughout the south and west; but a brief mention of its coming is indispensable in any sketch of Old Virginia and Her Neighbours.338

Colonization of Ulster by James I.

Who were the people called by this rather awkward compound name, Scotch-Irish? The answer carries us back to the year 1611, when James I. began peopling Ulster with colonists from Scotland and the north of England. The plan was to put into Ireland a Protestant population that might ultimately outnumber the Catholics and become the controlling element in the country. The settlers were picked men and women of the most excellent sort. By the middle of the seventeenth century there were 300,000 of them in Ulster. That province had been the most neglected part of the island, a wilderness of bogs and fens; they transformed it into a garden. They also established manufactures of woollens and linens which have ever since been famous throughout the world. By the beginning of the eighteenth century their numbers had risen to nearly a million. Their social condition was not that of peasants; they were intelligent yeomanry and artisans. In a document signed in 1718 by a miscellaneous group of 319 men, only 13 made their mark, while 306 wrote their names in full. Nothing like that could have happened at that time in any other part of the British Empire, hardly even in New England.

When these people began coming to America, those families that had been longest in Ireland had dwelt there but for three generations, and confusion of mind seems to lurk in any nomenclature which couples them with the true Irish. The antipathy between the Scotch-Irish as a group and the true Irish as a group is perhaps unsurpassed for bitterness and intensity. On the other hand, since love laughs at feuds and schisms, intermarriages between the colonists of Ulster and the native Irish were by no means unusual, and instances occur of Murphys and McManuses of Presbyterian faith. It was common in Ulster to allude to Presbyterians as “Scotch,” to Roman Catholics as “Irish,” and to members of the English church as “Protestants,” without much reference to pedigree. From this point of view the term “Scotch-Irish” may be defensible, provided we do not let it conceal the fact that the people to whom it applied are for the most part Lowland Scotch Presbyterians, very slightly hibernicized in blood.

Ulster’s grievances.

The flourishing manufactures in Ulster aroused the jealousy of rival manufacturers in England, who in 1698 succeeded in obtaining legislation which seriously damaged the Irish linen and woollen industries and threw many workmen out of employment. About the same time it became apparent that an epidemic fever of persecution had seized upon the English church. The violent reaction against the Counter-Reformation, with the fierce war against Louis XIV., had stimulated intolerance in all directions. The same persecuting spirit which we have above witnessed as making trouble for the Carolinas and Maryland found also a vent in the severe disabilities inflicted in 1704 and following years upon Presbyterians in Ireland. They were forbidden to keep schools, marriages performed by their clergy were declared invalid, they were not allowed to hold any office higher than that of petty constable, and so on through a long list of silly and outrageous enactments. For a few years this tyranny was endured in the hope that it was but temporary. By 1719 this hope had worn away, and from that year, until the passage of the Toleration Act for Ireland in 1782, the people of Ulster kept flocking to America.

The migration of Ulster men to America.
Scotch-Irish in the southwest.

Of all the migrations to America previous to the days of steamships, this was by far the largest in volume. One week of 1727 landed six ship-loads at Philadelphia. In the two years 1773 and 1774 more than 30,000 came. In 1770 one third of the population of Pennsylvania was Scotch-Irish. Altogether, between 1730 and 1770, I think it probable that at least half a million souls were transferred from Ulster to the American colonies, making not less than one sixth part of our population at the time of the Revolution. Of these, very few came to New England; among their descendants were the soldiers John Stark and Henry Knox, and more lately the great naturalist Asa Gray. Those who went to Pennsylvania received grants of land in the western mountain region. The policy of the government was to interpose them as a buffer between the expanding colony and the Indian frontier. Once planted in the Alleghany region, they spread rapidly and in large numbers toward the southwest along the mountain country through the Shenandoah Valley and into the Carolinas. At a later time they formed almost the entire population of West Virginia, and they were the men who chiefly built up the commonwealths of Kentucky and Tennessee. Among these Scotch-Irish were the Breckinridges, Alexanders, Lewises, Prestons, Campbells, Pickenses, Stuarts, McDowells, Johnstons, and Rutledges; Richard Montgomery, Anthony Wayne, Daniel Boone, James Robertson, George Rogers Clark, Andrew Jackson, Thomas Benton, Samuel Houston, John Caldwell Calhoun, Stonewall Jackson. It was chiefly Scotch-Irish troops that won the pivotal battle at King’s Mountain, that crushed the Indians of Alabama, and overthrew Wellington’s veterans of the Spanish peninsula in that brief but acute agony at New Orleans. When our Civil War came these men were a great power on both sides, but the influence of the chief mass of them was exerted on the side of the Union; it held Kentucky and a large part of Tennessee, and broke Virginia in twain.

Settlement of the Shenandoah Valley.

It was about 1730 that the Scotch-Irish began to pour into the Shenandoah Valley. “Governor Gooch was then dispensing the Valley lands so freely and indiscriminately that one Jacob Stover, it is said, secured many acres by giving his cattle human names as settlers; and a young woman, by dressing in various disguises of masculine attire, obtained several large farms.”339 Small farms, however, came to be the rule. The first Scotch-Irish settled along the Opequon River; and their very oldest churches, the Tuscarora Meeting-house near Martinsburg and the Opequon Church near Winchester, are still standing. The Germans were not long in following them, and we see their mark on the map in such names as Strasburg and Hamburg.

Profound effect upon Virginia.

This settlement of the Valley soon began to work profound modifications in the life of Old Virginia. Hitherto it had been purely English and predominantly Episcopal, Cavalier, and aristocratic. There was now a rapid invasion of Scotch Presbyterianism, with small farms, few slaves, and democratic ideas, made more democratic by life in the backwoods. It was impossible that two societies so different in habits and ideas should coexist side by side, sending representatives to the same House of Burgesses, without a stubborn conflict. For two generations there was a ferment which resulted in the separation of church and state, complete religious toleration, the abolition of primogeniture and entails, and many other important changes, most of which were consummated under the leadership of Thomas Jefferson between 1776 and 1785. Without the aid of the Valley population, these beginnings of metamorphosis in tidewater Virginia would not have been accomplished.

Frontier phase of democracy.

Jefferson is often called the father of modern American democracy; in a certain sense the Shenandoah Valley and adjacent Appalachian regions may be called its cradle. In that rude frontier society, life assumed many new aspects, old customs were forgotten, old distinctions abolished, social equality acquired even more importance than unchecked individualism. The notions, sometimes crude and noxious, sometimes just and wholesome, which characterized Jacksonian democracy, flourished greatly on the frontier and have thence been propagated eastward through the older communities, affecting their legislation and their politics more or less according to frequency of contact and intercourse. Massachusetts, relatively remote and relatively ancient, has been perhaps least affected by this group of ideas, but all parts of the United States have felt its influence powerfully. This phase of democracy, which is destined to continue so long as frontier life retains any importance, can nowhere be so well studied in its beginnings as among the Presbyterian population of the Appalachian region in the eighteenth century.

Lord Fairfax and George Washington.

The Shenandoah Valley, however, was not absolutely given up to Scotchmen and Germans; it was not entirely without English inhabitants from the tidewater region. Among these, one specially interesting group arrests our attention. At the northern end of the Valley was a little English colony gathered about Lord Fairfax’s home at Greenway Court, a dozen miles southwest from the site of Winchester. We have seen how Lord Culpeper, in relinquishing his proprietary claims upon Virginia, had retained the Northern Neck. This extensive territory passed as a dowry with Culpeper’s daughter Catharine to her husband, the fifth Lord Fairfax;340 and in 1745 their son, the sixth Lord Fairfax, came to spend the rest of his days in Virginia. There was much surveying to be done, and the lord of Greenway Court gave this work to a young man for whom he had conceived a strong affection. The name of Fairfax’s youthful friend was George Washington, and it is impossible to couple these two names without being reminded of a letter written a hundred years before, in 1646, when Charles I. had been overthrown and taken prisoner, and Henry Washington, royalist commander at Worcester, still held out and refused to surrender the city without authority from the king. Thus wrote the noble commander to the great General Fairfax, commander of the Parliament army: “It is acknowledged by your books, and by report of your own quarter, that the king is in some of your armies. That granted, it may be easy for you to procure his Majesty’s commands for the disposal of this garrison. Till then I shall make good the trust reposed in me. As for conditions, if I shall be necessitated I shall make the best I can. The worst I know and fear not; if I had, the profession of a soldier had not been begun nor so long continued by your Excellency’s humble servant,—Henry Washington.”341

Effect of the Westward advance upon the military situation.
The Gateway of the West.
Advance of the French.

There is a ring to this letter which sounds not unlike the utterance of that scion of the writer’s family who was destined to win independence for the United States. It is pleasant to know that General Fairfax obtained the order from King Charles and granted most honourable terms to the brave Colonel Washington. In the following century a member of the house of Fairfax, in engaging the younger Washington to survey his frontier estates, put him into a position which led up to his wonderful public career. For this advance of the Virginians from tidewater to the mountains served to bring on the final struggle with France. The wholesale Scotch-Irish immigration was fast carrying Virginia’s frontier toward the Ohio River, and making feasible the schemes of Spotswood in a way that no man would have thought of. Hitherto the struggle with the house of Bourbon had been confined to Canada at one end of the line and Carolina at the other, while the centre had not been directly implicated. In the first American Congress, convened by Jacob Leisler at New York in 1690 for the purpose of concerting measures of defence against the common enemy, Virginia (as we have seen) took no part. The seat of war was then remote, and her strength exerted at such a distance would have been of little avail. But in the sixty years since 1690 the white population of Virginia had increased fourfold, and her wealth had increased still more. Looking down the Monongahela River to the point where its union with the Alleghany makes the Ohio, she beheld there the gateway to the Great West, and felt a yearning to possess it; for the westward movement was giving rise to speculations in land, and a company was forming for the exploration and settlement of all that Ohio country. But French eyes were not blind to the situation, and it was their king’s pawns, not the English, that opened the game on the mighty chess-board. French troops from Canada crossed Lake Erie, and built their first fort where the city of Erie now stands. Then they pushed forward down the wooded valley of the Alleghany and built a second fortress and a third. Another stride would bring them to the gateway. Something must be done at once.

George Washington’s first appearance in history.

At such a crisis Governor Dinwiddie had need of the ablest man Virginia could afford, to undertake a journey of unwonted difficulty through the wilderness, to negotiate with Indian tribes, and to warn the advancing Frenchmen to trespass no further upon English territory. As the best person to entrust with this arduous enterprise, the shrewd old Scotchman selected a lad of one-and-twenty, Lord Fairfax’s surveyor, George Washington. History does not record a more extraordinary choice, nor one more completely justified.

This year 1753 marks the end of the period when we can deal with the history of Virginia by itself. The struggle against France, so long sustained by New York and New England, acquires a truly Continental character when Virginia comes to take part in it. Great public questions forthwith come up for solution, some of which are not set at rest until after that young land surveyor has become President of the United States. With the first encounter between Frenchmen and Englishmen in the Alleghanies, the stream of Virginia history becomes an inseparable portion of the majestic stream in which flows the career of our Federal Union.

INDEX.

INDEX.