It is not long after this that we find Thomas Jefferson—himself the kindest of masters, and familiar with slavery in its mild Virginia form—thus writing about it: “The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it.... The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.... With the morals of the people their industry also is destroyed. For in a warm climate no man will labour for himself who can make another labour for him. This is so true that of the proprietors of slaves a very small proportion, indeed, are ever seen to labour. And can the liberties of the nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? that they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”169

In no respect was the system of slavery more reprehensible than in the illicit sexual relations that grew out of it. The extent of the evil may be realized when we simply reflect that the numerous race of mulattoes and quadroons did not originate from wedlock. In 1691 it was enacted that any white man or woman, whether bond or free, intermarrying with a negro, mulatto, or Indian, should be banished for life. In 1705 the penalty was changed to fine and imprisonment, and for any minister who should dare to perform the ceremony there was prescribed a fine nearly equal to his whole year’s salary.170 Yet the “abominable mixture and spurious issue,” against which these statutes were aimed, went on, unsanctioned by law and unblessed by the church. Usually mulattoes were the children of negresses by white fathers, but it was not always so. Some of the wretched women from English jails seem to have had fancies as unaccountable as those of the frail sultanas of the Arabian Nights. In such cases the white mother, if free, was fined £15, or in default thereof was sold into servitude for five years; if she were a bondwoman, the church-wardens waited for her term of service to expire, and then sold her for five years; her child was bound to service until thirty years of age.171 The case of the bastards of negresses was very simply disposed of by enacting that the legal status of children was the same as that of their mother.172 This made them all slaves, from the prognathous and platyrrhine creature with woolly hair to the handsome and stately octoroon, and secured their labour to the master. At first the illicit relations between masters and their female slaves were frowned at, and in some instances visited with church discipline or punished by fines.173 But public opinion seems to have lost its sensitiveness in the presence of a custom which lasted until slavery was abolished.174 With the signal advance in refinement which the nineteenth century ushered in, there is reason to believe that in many a southern home there were earnest hearts that deplored the dreadful evil, and welcomed at last the downfall of the system that sustained it.

Some writers divide Old Virginia society into four classes,—the great planters, the small planters, the white servants and freedmen, and the negro slaves. The division is sound, provided we remember that between the two upper classes no hard and fast line can be drawn. Already in England the classes of rural gentry and yeomen shaded into one another; in Virginia both alike became land-holders and slave-owners, they mingled together in society, and their families intermarried. A typical instance is that of the parents of Thomas Jefferson. His paternal ancestors were yeomanry who in Virginia developed into country squires. The first Jefferson in Virginia was a member of the first House of Burgesses in 1619; Thomas’s father, who was also a burgess and county lieutenant, owned about thirty slaves. Thomas’s mother, Jane Randolph, whose grandfather migrated to Virginia in 1674, belonged to a family that had been eminent in England since the thirteenth century, including among its members a baron of the exchequer, a number of knights, a foreign ambassador, a head of one of the colleges at Oxford, etc.

There can be no doubt that the white blood of tidewater Virginia was English almost without admixture until the end of the seventeenth century, and of the very slight admixture nearly all was from the British islands. There was a desultory sprinkling of Protestant Frenchmen, Walloons, and Dutch, scarcely appreciable in the mass of the population. But after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in 1685, Virginia received a small part of the Huguenot exodus from France. The largest company, more than seven hundred in number, led by the Breton nobleman, Olivier, Marquis de la Muce, arrived in the year 1700, and settled in various places, more particularly at Monacan Town in Henrico County. A part of this company were Waldenses from Piedmont, who had taken refuge in Switzerland, and thence made their way through Alsace and the Low Countries to England.175 Other parties came from time to time, adding to Virginia many estimable citizens whom France could ill afford to lose. Among the Huguenot names in Virginia, the reader will recognize Maury, Flournoy, Jouet, Moncure, Fontaine, Marye, Bertrand, and others.176 Dabneys (D’Aubigné) and Bowdoins (Baudouin) came to Virginia as well as to Boston. Such was the principal foreign admixture while Virginia was still tidewater Virginia, before the crossing of the Blue Ridge. The advent of Germans and Scotch-Irish will be treated in a future chapter.

Having thus considered the composition of society in its different strata, as connected with wholesale tobacco culture, let us observe one of the most conspicuous results of this industry as influenced by the physical geography of the country. One might suppose that the necessity for exporting the enormous crops of tobacco would have called into existence a large class of thriving merchants, who would naturally congregate at points favourable for shipping, and thus give rise to towns. In most countries that is what would have happened. But the manner in which the Virginia planter disposed of his crops was peculiar. Most of the large plantations lay on or near the wide and deep rivers of that tidewater country;177 and each planter would have his own wharf, from which his own slaves might load the tobacco on to the vessels that were to carry it to England. If the plantation lay at some distance from a navigable river, the tobacco was conveyed to the nearest creek and tied down upon a raft of canoes, and so floated and paddled down stream until some head of navigation was reached, where a warehouse was ready to receive it. The vessels which carried away this tobacco usually paid for it in all sorts of manufactured articles that might be needed upon the plantations. Every manufactured article that required skill or nicety of workmanship was brought from England, in ships of which the owners, masters, and crews were for the most part either natives of the British islands or of New England. Such a ship would unload upon the planter’s wharf some part of its motley cargo of mahogany tables, chairs covered with russia leather, wines in great variety from the Azores and Madeira,178 brandy, Gloucester cheeses, linens and cottons, silks and dimity, quilts and featherbeds, carpets, shoes, axes and hoes, hammers and nails, rope and canvas, painters’ white lead and colours, saddles, demijohns, mirrors, books,—pretty much everything.179 If she came from a New England port she was likely to bring salted cod and mackerel, with fragrant rum, either out of the distilleries at Newport and Boston,180 or imported from Antigua or Jamaica. Sometimes the rum came from Barbadoes, along with sugar and molasses, and occasionally ginger and lime-juice, in return for which the ship often carried away some of the planter’s live hogs or packed pork, as well as butter, and corn, and tanned leather. The landing of rum was sometimes private and confidential, for there were duties on it which lent a charm to evasion.

It would be too much to say that there was no manufacturing done in colonial Virginia. There were probably few if any plantations where the spinning-wheel and hand-loom were not busy. Female slaves and white servants wove coarse cloth and made it up into suits of clothes181 for people of their sort, and doubtless for some of the small planters. Such artisans as blacksmiths, carpenters, and coopers, shipwrights, tailors, tanners, and shoemakers were often to be found among the indentured servants. Boys of this class were sometimes upon their arrival made apprentices in these crafts. Occasionally negro slaves became more or less skilled as workmen, especially as coopers and joiners. There must always have been some demand for the labour of white freedmen acquainted with any of the mechanical arts, and in fact instances of free labourers in these departments are found. There can be no doubt, however, that the style of work thus attained was apt to be unsatisfactory; for we find such planters as Colonel Byrd and Colonel Fitzhugh, late in the seventeenth century, sending to England for skilled workmen, and offering to pay very high wages, on the ground that it was wasting money to employ such workmen as were to be had in the colony.182

The historian Beverley, who sometimes indulged himself (like the late Matthew Arnold) in upbraiding his fellow-countrymen for their own good, says of the Virginians in 1705: “They have their Cloathing of all sorts from England, as Linnen, Woollen, Silk, Hats, and Leather. Yet Flax and Hemp grow no where in the World, better than there; their Sheep yield a mighty Increase, and bear good Fleeces, but they shear them only to cool them. The Mulberry-Tree, whose Leaf is the proper Food of the Silk-worm, grows there like a Weed, and Silk-worms have been observ’d to thrive extreamly, and without any hazard. The very Furrs that their Hats are made of, perhaps go first from thence; and most of their Hides lie and rot, or are made use of, only for covering dry Goods, in a leaky House. Indeed some few Hides with much adoe are tann’d, and made into Servants Shoes; but at so careless a rate, that the Planters don’t care to buy them, if they can get others; and sometimes perhaps a better manager than ordinary, will vouchsafe to make a pair of Breeches of a Deer-Skin. Nay, they are such abominable Ill-husbands, that tho’ their Country be over-run with Wood, yet they have all their Wooden Ware from England; their Cabinets, Chairs, Tables, Stools, Chests, Boxes, Cart-wheels, and all other things, even so much as their Bowls, and Birchen Brooms, to the Eternal Reproach of their Laziness.... Thus they depend altogether upon the Liberality of Nature, without endeavoring to improve its Gifts, by Art or Industry. They spunge upon the Blessings of a warm Sun, and a fruitful Soil, and almost grutch the Pains of gathering in the Bounties of the Earth. I should be asham’d to publish this slothful Indolence of my Countrymen, but that I hope it will rouse them out of their Lethargy, and excite them to make the most of all those happy Advantages which Nature has given them; and if it does this, I am sure they will have the Goodness to forgive me.”183

It was not, however, as Mr. Bruce reminds us, from any “inherent repugnance” that Englishmen in Virginia did not take kindly to manufactures, and perhaps the good Beverley’s reproachful tone is a trifle overdone. When the planter could get sharp knives, well-made boots, and fine blankets at his own wharf, simply by handing over to the skipper a few hogsheads of tobacco, he was not greatly to be blamed for preferring them to such dull knives, clumsy boots, and coarse blankets as could be made by the workmen within reach. Many inconveniences, however, grew out of the absence of local means for supplying local needs, and I have little doubt that sundry trades and crafts could have been made to flourish much better than they did, had it not been for the baneful effects of a tobacco currency, which we shall presently have to consider.

The most conspicuous result of the absorption of all activities in tobacco-planting, and the absence of developed arts and trades, was the non-existence of town life. At the beginning of the eighteenth century there was hardly so much as a village in Virginia, unless we make an exception in honour of Williamsburg, the new seat of government and of the college. By the middle of the century Williamsburg contained about 200 houses, chiefly wooden, and its streets were unpaved. Richmond, founded in 1737, had a population of 3,761 in the census of 1790. The growth of Norfolk, founded in 1705, was exceptional. The trade with the West Indies, for sugar, molasses, and rum, tended to become concentrated there, and the proximity of North Carolina made it a mart for lumber at a time when Virginia forests in the lower tidewater region had been largely cleared away. Colonel Byrd in 1728 says of the Norfolk people: “They have a pretty deal of lumber from the borderers on the Dismal, who make bold with the king’s land thereabouts, without the least ceremony.” Besides boards and shingles, they sent beef and pork to the West Indies, and it was not unusual to see a score of sloops and brigantines riding in the noble harbour. Under these favourable circumstances the population of Norfolk had come by 1776 to be about 6,000. At that time Philadelphia had some 35,000 inhabitants, and New York 25,000, though the population of their two states taken together scarcely equalled that of Virginia.

The lack of urban life was deplored by the legislators at Jamestown and Williamsburg, and assiduous efforts were made to correct the evil; but neither bounties nor orders to build were of avail. To make towns on paper was as easy as to make a promissory note, but nobody would go and settle in the towns. Most of the county seats consisted simply of the court-house, flanked by the jail, the dismal country inn, and the nondescript country “store,” where the roving peddler sometimes replenished his pack on his route through the plantations. Among the legislative acts designed to encourage the building of towns, three were especially important. The act of 1662 ordered that thirty-two brick houses should be erected at Jamestown, and forbade the building or repairing of wooden houses there; all tobacco grown in the three counties of James City, Charles City, and Surry was to be sent to Jamestown and stored there for shipping, and the penalty for disobedience of this order was a fine of 1,000 lbs. of tobacco; every ship, moreover, ascending the river above Mulberry Island, must land its cargo at Jamestown and nowhere else, under penalty of forfeiting the cargo. Half of these fines was to be paid to the town, the other half to the informer.184 The statute of 1680, commonly known as the Cohabitation Act, undertook in somewhat similar fashion to establish a town in every county; and the attempt was renewed on a larger scale in 1691.185 But all these acts were either disregarded or suspended. When the Surry planter could effect an exchange at his own wharf, without incidental expense or risk, it was useless to command him to load his crop on shallops and send it to Jamestown, with a charge for freight, a chance of capsizing, and warehouse dues at the end of the journey. The skipper withal had no wish to be saddled with port dues, or to be hindered from stopping and trading wherever a customer hove in sight. So skipper and planter had their way, and towns refused to grow.186 When Thomas Jefferson entered William and Mary College in 1760, a lad of seventeen years, he had never seen so many as a dozen houses grouped together.

The country store was an important institution in Old Virginia. Under some conditions it would have formed a nucleus around which a town would have been developed, but in Virginia the store seems to have been regarded as a kind of rival against which the town could not compete.187 It furnished a number of petty centres which did away with the need for larger centres. The store was apt to be an appendage to a plantation, unless its size became such as to reverse the relationship, after the manner of Dundreary’s dog. It might be a room in a planter’s house, or it might be a detached barn like building on the estate. Mr. Bruce tells us that to enumerate its contents would be to mention pretty much every article for which Virginians had any use. For example, the inventory of the Hubbard store in York County, taken in 1667, “contained lockram, canvas, dowlas, Scotch cloth, blue linen, oznaburg, cotton, holland, serge, kersey, and flannel in bales, full suits for adults and youths, bodices, bonnets, and laces for women, shoes, ... gloves, hose, cloaks, cravats, handkerchiefs, hats, and other articles of dress, ... hammers, hatchets, chisels, augers, locks, staples, nails, sickles, bellows, froes,188 saws, axes, files, bed-cords, dishes, knives, flesh-forks, porringers, sauce-pans, frying-pans, gridirons, tongs, shovels, hoes, iron posts, tables, physic, wool-cards, gimlets, compasses, needles, stirrups, looking-glasses, candlesticks, candles, funnels, 25 pounds of raisins, 100 gallons of brandy, 20 gallons of wine, and 10 gallons of aqua vitæ. The contents of the Hubbard store were valued at £614 sterling, a sum which represented about $15,000 in our present currency.”189 One can imagine how dazzling to youthful eyes must have been the miscellaneous variety of desirable things. Not only were the manufactured articles pretty sure to have come from England, but everything else, to be salable, must be labelled English, “insomuch that fanciers used to sell the songsters unknown to England, if they sang particularly well, as English mocking-birds.”190

We have seen how the rivers and creeks were used as highways of traffic; for a long time they were the only highways, and the sloop or the canoe was the only kind of vehicle, public or private, in which it was possible to get about with ease and safety.191 Until after the middle of the eighteenth century there were but few roads save bridle-paths, and such as there were became impassable in rainy weather. There were also but few bridges, and these were very likely to be unsound, while the ferry-boats were apt to be leaky. It was often necessary for the traveller to swim across the stream, with a fair chance of getting drowned, and more than a fair chance of losing his horse. The course of the bridle-path often became so obscure that it was necessary to blaze the trees. It was not uncommon for people to lose their way and find themselves obliged to stay overnight in the woods, perhaps with the howls of the wolf and panther sounding in their ears. The highway robber was even a more uncomfortable customer to meet than such beasts of prey; and in those days, when banking was in its infancy and travellers used to carry gold coins sewed under the lining of their waistcoats, the highwayman enjoyed opportunities which in this age of railways and check-books are denied him. Nevertheless crime was far less common than in England or France, and travelling was much safer than one might suppose. This was true of the whole colonial period. In 1777 a young Rhode Island merchant, Elkanah Watson, armed with a sabre and pair of pistols, journeyed from Providence to Charleston in South Carolina, with several hundred pounds sterling in gold quilted into his coat. In seventy days he accomplished the distance of 1,243 miles, partly on horseback and partly in a sulky, without encountering any more serious mishaps than being arrested for a British spy in Pennsylvania, and meeting a large bear in North Carolina; and he has left us a narrative of his journey, which is as full of instruction as of interest.192

The traveller in Old Virginia, however, was not likely to carry large sums of money concealed on his person, for he dealt in a circulating medium too bulky for that. In the course of this book we have had frequent occasions to observe that the Virginian’s current money was tobacco. The prices of all articles of merchandise were quoted in pounds of tobacco. In tobacco taxes were assessed and all wages and salaries were paid. This use of tobacco as a circulating medium and as a standard of values was begun in the earliest days of the colony, when coin was scarce, and the structure of society was simple enough to permit a temporary return toward the primitive practice of barter. Under such circumstances tobacco was obviously the article most sure to be used as money. It was exchangeable for whatever anybody wanted in the shape of service or merchandise, and it was easily procured from the bountiful earth. But as time went on this ease of attainment made it an extremely vicious currency. In the course of our narrative we have encountered some of the disastrous financial and social results that flowed from the use of so cheap a substitute for money. Many reasons have been alleged for the scarcity of coin throughout the whole colonial period in Virginia;193 but assuredly the chief reason was the fact that tobacco was currency. The bad money drove away the good money, as it always does. There are indications that there was always a small stock of coin in the colony, but it was hoarded or sent to other colonies or to England in the settlement of trade balances. Yet it was not easy to demonetize tobacco without a radical revolution in the industrial system and in the commercial relations of the colony.

The nature of the currency evidently had much to do with the ill success of the attempts to encourage manufactures. The carpenter or shoemaker, after doing his work, must wait for his pay until the year’s crop of tobacco was gathered and cured. Meanwhile he had nothing to live on unless he raised it for himself; he might either plant grain and rear cattle, or else grow tobacco wherewith to buy things. But the time consumed in these agricultural operations was time taken from his handicraft. The evil was attacked by legislation. “In 1633 brickmakers, carpenters, joiners, sawyers, and turners were expressly forbidden to take part in any form of tillage.” In 1662 tradesmen and artisans were exempted from all taxes except church-rates, on condition that they should abstain from all interest, direct or indirect, in the growing of tobacco. But the evil was not cured.194

Further disaster came from the fact that tobacco was a highly speculative crop. The fluctuations in its value were liable to be great and sudden, and they affected the price of every article that was bought and sold throughout the colony. No one could estimate from one year to another, with any approach to accuracy, what the purchasing power of his income was going to be. The inevitable results of this were extravagance in living and chronic debt. The planter was drawn into a situation from which it was almost impossible to extricate himself. “The system of keeping open accounts in London was calculated to encourage extravagance; and these accounts were habitually overdrawn. Many of the merchants even made it a rule to encourage this indebtedness, so as to assure the continuance of their customers. It gave them a certain advantage in all their dealings with the planters.”195 They charged nearly twice as much for their goods sent to Norfolk or Williamsburg as for the same goods sent to New York.196 In all this they were aided by the Navigation Act.

Extravagance in living was further stimulated by the regal hospitality for which the great planters early became famous. Although the life upon their estates was much more busy than some writers seem to suppose, yet the drudgery of business did not consume all their time; and in their rural isolation, with none of the diversions of town life, the entertainment of guests by the month together was regarded both as a duty and as a privilege; and the example set by the large plantations was followed by the smaller. Even the keeper of an inn, if he wished to make a charge for food and shelter, must notify the guest upon his arrival, for a statute of 1663 declared that in the absence of such preliminary understanding not a penny could be recovered from the guest, however long he might have staid in the house.197 As a rule, no person whose company was at all desirable was allowed to stop at an inn, for the neighbours vied with one another in offering hospitality. Every planter kept open house, and provided for his visitors with unstinted hand.

Let us put ourselves into the position of one of these visitors, and get some glimpses of life upon the old plantation. Our host we may suppose to be a vestryman, justice of the peace, and burgess, dwelling upon a plantation of five or six thousand acres, with his next neighbours at a distance of two or three miles.198 The space is in great part cleared for the planting of vast fields of tobacco, but here and there are extensive stretches of woodland and coppice, with noble forest trees and luxuriant undergrowth, much rougher and wilder than an English park. The cabins for slaves present the appearance of a hamlet. These are wooden structures of the humblest sort, built of logs or undressed planks, and afflicted with chronic dilapidation. An inventory of 1697 shows us that the cabin might contain a bed and a few chairs, two or three pots and kettles, “a pair of pot-racks, a pot-hook, a frying-pan, and a beer barrel;” and advertisements for runaways describe Cuffy and Pompey as clad in red cotton, with canvas drawers, waistcoat, and wide-brimmed black hat. Their victuals, of “hog and hominy” with potatoes and green vegetables, were wholesome and palatable. If there were white servants on the estate, they were commonly but not necessarily somewhat better housed and clothed.

Leaving the negro quarters, with their grinning mammies and swarms of woolly pickaninnies, one would presently come upon other outbuildings; the ample barns for tobacco and granaries for corn, the stable, the cattle-pens, a hen-coop and a dove-cot, a dairy, and in some cases a malt-house, or perhaps, as we have seen, a country store. There were brick ovens for curing hams and bacon; and the kitchen likewise stood apart from the mansion, which was thus free from kitchen odours and from undue heating in summer time. There was a vegetable garden, with “all the culinary plants that grow in England, and in far greater perfection,” besides “roots, herbs, vine-fruits, and salad-flowers peculiar to themselves,” and excellent for a relish with meat.199 Nearer to the house, among redolent flower-beds gay with varied colours, some vine-clad arbour afforded shelter from the sun. A short walk across the mown space shaded by large trees, called, as in New England, the yard, would bring us to the mansion, very commonly known as the Great House. From this epithet no sure inference can be drawn as to the size of the building, for it simply served to contrast it with its dependent cabins and outhouses. It was often called the Home House. It was apt to stand upon a rising ground, and from its porch you might look down at the blue river and the little wharf, known as “the landing,” with pinnaces moored hard by and canoes lying lazily on the bank or suddenly darting out upon the water. Turning away from the river, the eye would rest upon an orchard bearing fruits in great variety, and a pasture devoted to horses of some special breed.

The planter’s mansion might be built of wood or brick, but was comparatively seldom of stone. In tidewater Virginia, good stone for building purposes was not readily found, but there was an abundance of red clay from which excellent and durable brick could be made. A number of brick houses were built in the seventeenth century, but wood was much more commonly used, since the work of clearing away the forests furnished great quantities of timber of the finest quality. Among the many articles that were imported from England, bricks are not to be reckoned.200 Brickmaking went on from the earliest days of the colony, and much of this work was done by white servants and freedmen. In course of time there came to be many brick houses, and chimneys were regularly of this material. For roofs the strong and durable cypress shingle was the material most commonly used. Partition walls, covered first with a tenacious clay and then white-washed, were very firm and solid. The glass windows, for protection against storms of a violence to which Englishmen had not been accustomed, had stout wooden shutters outside, which gave the house somewhat the look of a stronghold.

During the seventeenth century not much architectural beauty was attained. To any criticisms on this score the planters would have replied, as the early settlers did to Captain Butler, that their houses were for use and not for ornament.201 During the eighteenth century some progress was made in this respect, but for the architectural effect of the mansions not much is to be said, though they were often highly picturesque. The earliest type, the house of greater width than depth, with an outside chimney at each end, is familiar to every one, at least in pictures. It was as characteristic of Old Virginia as the house of huge central chimney and small entryway with transverse staircase was characteristic of early New England. Both are slightly modified types of the smaller English manor houses of the Tudor period. A more picturesque style, and somewhat more stately, is that of Gunston Hall, the homestead of the Mason family; while scarcely less attractive, and still more capacious, is that of Stratford Hall, the home of the Lees. The well-known Mount Vernon shows a further departure from English models; while in Monticello both the name and the house present symptoms of the beginning of that so-called classical revival when children were baptized Cyrus and Marcellus, and dwelt in the shade of porticoes that simulated those of Greek temples.202

The differentiation of rooms for specific uses had by no means proceeded so far as in modern houses. One mediæval English feature which was retained was the predominance of the Hall, or Great Room, used for meals and for general purposes. Along with the hall, there might be as few as five or six rooms, or as many as eighteen or twenty, upstairs and down. Stratford Hall, built about 1725-30, contained eighteen large rooms, exclusive of the central hall,203 whereas Governor Berkeley’s house at Green Spring, built three quarters of a century earlier, had but six rooms altogether. Beside the central hall, there might be a hall parlour, equivalent to reception room and family sitting-room combined, and in this there might be chests and a bed; the others were simply bedrooms. Beds were such as we are still familiar with; their ticking might be stuffed with feathers or hair or straw, but leathers were much more commonly used than now, as they are now more commonly used in chilly England than in the fiery summers and hot-house winters of America. With sheets, blankets, and counterpane, pillows, curtains, and valances, the bed was dressed as at present, save that curtains are now departing along with the brass warming-pans, bequests from higher latitudes. Already the Virginia bed often had a protection for which England could have no use, the mosquito net. For such members of the household as were lazily inclined in the daytime there was a couch, which might be plainly covered with calico, or more expensively with russia leather or embroidered stuffs. The chairs might be upholstered likewise, or be seated with cane, wicker, or rushwork. In every bedroom was a chest for storing clothes not in immediate use. There were also the ewer and basin, and the case of drawers with looking-glass. If one of the big chimneys was accessible, there was a fireplace for wooden logs, supported on andirons of iron or brass, and guarded by iron or tin fenders; otherwise there was an open brazier, such as we see to-day in Italy. Floors were usually ill-made in those days, and woollen carpets faithfully accumulated dirt; so that the sunbeam straggling through the dimity or printed calico window-curtains would often gild long dusty rays.

In the Hall, or Great Room, the principal feature was the long dining-table of walnut or oak or cedar, flanked either by benches or by chairs. For daily use it was covered with a cloth of unbleached linen, known as holland, while on extra occasions a damask cloth was used. Napkins were abundant, and often of a fine fabric delicately embroidered. Forks, on the other hand, were in the earlier days scarce. Before the seventeenth century, forks were nowhere in general use, save in Italy. Queen Elizabeth ate with her fingers. A satirical pamphlet, aimed at certain luxurious favourites of Henry III. of France, derides them for conveying bits of meat to their mouths on a little pronged implement, rather than do it in the natural way.204 Forks are nowhere mentioned in Shakespeare. In 1608, while travelling in Italy, one Thomas Coryat took a liking to them and introduced the fashion into England, for which he was jocosely nicknamed Furcifer.205 Naturally the use of forks narrowed the functions of napkins.206 Spoons were in much more common use, and, in the New World as in the Old, were of iron or pewter in the poor man’s house, and of silver in the rich man’s. The dishes and plates were of earthenware or pewter, but in the eighteenth century the use of chinaware increased. Pewter cups and mugs were everywhere to be seen, and now and then a drinking-horn. Well-to-do planters had silver tankards, sometimes marked with the family arms, as well as silver salt-cellars, candlesticks, and snuffers. A cupboard with glass doors, or light drapery, displayed the store of cups and dishes; while about the walls sometimes hung family portraits, and more rarely paintings of other sorts. This central hall retained many marks of its mediæval miscellaneousness of use; capacious linen-chests, guns and pistols, powder-horns, swords, saddles, bridles, and riding-whips, in picturesque and cosy confusion. In the eighteenth century a luxurious elegance was developed quite similar to that of the “colonial mansions” at the North, such as the Philipse manor house on the Hudson River, or Colonel Vassall’s house in Cambridge, where Washington dwelt for a few months, and Longfellow for many years. Panelled wainscots of oak and carved oaken chimney-pieces were common; the walls were hung with tapestry; and artistic cabinets, screens, and clocks adorned the spacious room. In the Lee homestead at Stratford the hall added to its other functions that of library. The ceiling was very high and vaulted, and parts of the panelled walls had bookshelves set into them.207 Such rooms were warmed by huge logs of hickory or oak, burning in open fireplaces. They were lighted by candles, which might be made of beef tallow or deer suet, but the favourite material was a wax obtained by boiling the berries of a myrtle that grew profusely in marshy land. It was extremely cheap and burned with a pleasant fragrance, giving a brilliant light.

The central object in the kitchen was, of course, the fireplace, which was sometimes very large. At Stratford it was “twelve feet wide, six high, and five deep, evidently capable of roasting a fair-sized ox.”208 In the days when pains were taken not to spoil good meat with bad cooking, your haunch of venison, saddle of mutton, or stuffed turkey was not baked to insipidity in an oven meant for better uses, but was carefully turned about on an iron spit, catching rich aroma from the caressing flame, while the basting was judiciously poured from ladles, and dripping-pans caught the savoury juices. Then there was the great copper boiler imbedded in brick and heated from underneath; there were the kettles and sauce-pans, the swinging iron pot, the gridirons and frying-pans, and the wooden trays for carrying the cooked dishes to the dining-hall.

The settlers in the strange wilderness of the Powhatans had once had their Starving Time, but it would be hard to point to any part of the earth more bountifully supplied with wholesome and delicious food than civilized Old Virginia. Venison, beef, and dairy products were excellent and cheap. Mutton was less common, and was highly prized. The pork in its various forms was pronounced equal to that of Yorkshire or Westphalia. Succulent vegetables and toothsome fruits were grown in bewildering variety. Good Henry of Navarre’s peasant, had he lived in this favoured country, might have had every day a fowl in his pot; while, as for game and fish, the fame of Chesapeake Bay is world-wide for its canvas-backs, mallards, and red-heads, its terrapin, its soles, bass, and shad, and, last not least, its oysters. The various cakes which the cooks of the Old Dominion could make from their maize and other grains have also won celebrity.

To wash down these native viands the Virginian had divers drinks, whereof all the best were imported. Englishmen could not in a moment leave off beer-drinking, but the generous, full-bodied and delicate-flavoured ale of the mother country has never been successfully imitated on this side of the Atlantic, and indeed seems hardly adapted to our sweltering summers. Concerning the beer brewed in Old Virginia opinions varied; but since barley soon ceased to be cultivated, and attempts were made to supply its place with maize or pumpkins or persimmons, we need not greatly regret that we were not there to be regaled with it. Cider, with its kindred beverages, was abundant,209 and doubtless of much better quality. Apple-jack and peach brandy were distilled. Other beverages were imported, most commonly sack, of which Falstaff was so fond; the name was applied to such dry (Spanish seco) and strong wines as sherry and madeira. In the cellars of wealthy planters were often found choice brands of red wine from Bordeaux and white wine from the Rhineland. Cognacs were also imported, and of rum we have already spoken. Evidently our friends, the planters, had sturdy tipplers among them.210 Fortunately for them, the manufacture of coarse whiskey from maize and rye had not yet come into vogue, while of the less harmful peaty “mountain dew” from Ireland or Scotland we hear nothing.