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IN 1732, when people spoke of Virginia, they meant commonly so much of the present State as lies between Chesapeake Bay and the Blue Ridge mountains. In the valley of the Shenandoah River, just beyond the first range of mountains, there were a few families, chiefly Irish and German, who had made their way southward from Pennsylvania; the Governor of Virginia, too, was at this time engaged in planting a colony of Germans in the valley. Still farther to the westward were a few bold pioneers, who built their log-cabins in the wilderness and lived by hunting and fishing. No one knew how far Virginia stretched; the old charters from the King had talked vaguely about the South Sea, meaning by that the Pacific Ocean; but the country beyond the mountains had never been surveyed and scarcely even explored. The people who called themselves Virginians looked upon those who lived beyond the Blue Ridge very much as nowadays persons on the Atlantic coast look upon those who settle in Dakota or Montana.

coast line it has, what arms of the sea stretch inland, what rivers come down to meet the sea, and what a network of water-ways spreads over the whole country. You would say that the people living there must be skillful fishermen and sailors, that thriving seaport towns would be scattered along the coast and rivers, and that there would be great shipyards for the building of all kinds of vessels.

But in 1732 there were no large towns in Virginia — there were scarcely any towns at all. Each county had a county-seat, where were a courthouse and a prison, and an inn for the convenience of those who had business in court; usually there was a church, and sometimes a small country store; but there were no other houses, and often the place was in the middle of the woods. The capital of Virginia — Williamsburg — had less than two hundred houses; and Norfolk, the largest town, at the head of a noble harbor, had a population of five thousand or so. A few fish were caught in the rivers or on the coast, but there was no business of fishing; a few boats plied from place to place, but there was no ship-building, and the ships which sailed into the harbors and up the rivers were owned elsewhere, and came from England or the other American colonies. There were no manufactures and scarcely a trained mechanic in the whole colony. Yet Virginia was the most populous and, some thought, the richest of the British colonies in America. In 1732 she had *The Dutch Santa Claus.

Down from these mountains came the streams which swelled into rivers,—the Potomac, the Rappahannock, the York, and the James, with their countless branches and runs and creeks. Look at any map of eastern Virginia and see what a long

half a million inhabitants,- more than twice as pleasure was, and sometimes wished the weed had many as New York at that time.

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never been discovered. The King of England did not like it, and he wrote a book to dissuade people from the use of tobacco; but every one went on smoking Virginia tobacco as before.

The company which sent colonists to Virginia promised fifty acres to any one who would clear the land and settle upon it; for a small sum of money

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so much money, as tobacco. Besides, these Englishmen had not been mechanics or fishermen or sailors in England; they had for the most part been used to living on farms. So they fell at once to planting tobacco, and they could not raise enough to satisfy people in England and other parts of the Old World. All the fine gentlemen took to smoking; it was something new and fashionable; and, I suppose, a great many puffed away at their pipes who wondered what the

VOL. XIII.-13.

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one might buy a hundred acres; and if any one did some special service to the colony, he might receive a gift of as much as two thousand acres. Now, in England, to own land was to be thought much of. Only noblemen or country gentlemen could boast of having two thousand or a hundred or even fifty acres. So the Englishmen who came to Virginia, where land was plenty, were all eager to own great estates.

To carry on such estates, and especially to raise

tobacco, required many laborers. It was not easy for the Virginia land-owners to bring these from English farms. They could not be spared by the farmers there, and besides, such laborers were for the most part men and women who had never been beyond the villages where they had been born and had hardly even heard of America. They lived, father and son, on the same place, and knew little about any other. But in London and other cities of England there were, at the time when the Virginia colony was formed, many poor people who had no work and nothing to live on. If these people could be sent to America, not only would the cities be rid of them, but the gentlemen in the new country would have laborers to cut down trees, clear the fields, and plant tobacco.

Accordingly, many of these idle and poor people were sent over as servants. The Virginia planters paid their passage, sheltered, fed, and clothed them, and in return had the use of their labor for a certain number of years. The plan did not work very well, however. Often these "indentured servants," as they were called, were idle and unwilling to work —that was one reason that they had been poor in London. Even when they did work, they were only "bound" for a certain length of time. After they had served their time, they were free. Then they sometimes cleared farms for themselves; but very often they led lazy, vicious lives, and were a trouble and vexation to the neighborhood.

It seemed to these Virginia planters that there was a better way. In 1619, a year before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, a Dutch captain brought up the James River twenty blacks whom he had captured on the coast of Africa. He offered to sell these to the planters, and they bought them. No one saw anything out of the way in this. It was no new thing to own slaves. There were slaves in the West India Islands, and in the countries of Europe. Indians when captured in war were sold into slavery. For that matter, white men had been made slaves. The difference between these blacks and the indentured servants was that the planter who paid the Dutch captain for a black man had the use of him all his life-time, but if he bought from an English captain the services of an indentured white man, he could only have those services for a few months or years. It certainly was much more convenient to have an African slave.

There were not many of these slaves at first. An occasional shipload was brought from Africa, but it was not until after fifty years that negroes made any considerable part of the population. They had families, and all the children were slaves like their parents. More were bought of captains who made a business of going to Africa to trade for slaves, just as they might have gone to the East In

dies for spices. The plantations were growing larger, and the more slaves a man had, the more tobacco he could raise; the more tobacco he could raise, the richer he was. Until long after the year 1732, the people in Virginia were wont to reckon the cost of things, not by pounds, shillings, and pence-the English currency,-but by pounds of tobaccothe Virginia currency. The salaries of the clergy were paid in tobacco; so were all their fees for christening, marrying, and burying. Taxes were paid and accounts were kept in tobacco. At a few points there were houses to which planters brought their tobacco, and these warehouses served the purpose of banks. A planter stored his tobacco and received a certificate of deposit. This certificate he could use instead of a check on a bank.

The small planters who lived high up the rivers, beyond the point where vessels could go, floated their tobacco in boats down to one of the warehouses, where it made part of the cargo of some ship sailing for England. But the largest part of this produce was shipped directly from the great plantations. Each of these had its own storehouse and its own wharf. The Virginia planter was his own shipping merchant. He had his agent in London. Once a year, a vessel would make its way up the river to his wharf. It brought whatever he or his family needed. He had sent to his agent to buy clothes, furniture, table-linen, tools, medicine, spices, foreign fruits, harnesses, carriages, cutlery, wines, books, pictures, there was scarcely an article used in his house or on his plantation for which he did not send to London. Then in return he helped to load the vessel, and he had just one article with which to make up the cargo-tobacco. Now and then tar, pitch, and turpentine were sent from some districts, but the Virginia planter rarely sent anything but tobacco to England in return for what he received.

CHAPTER II.

A VIRGINIA PLANTATION.

LET us visit in imagination one of these Virginia plantations, such as were to be found in 1732, and see what sort of life was led upon it.

To reach the plantation, one is likely to ride for some distance through the woods. The country is not yet cleared of the forest, and each planter, as he adds one tobacco-field to another, has to make inroads upon the great trees. Coming nearer, one rides past tracts where the underbrush is gone, but tall, gaunt trees stand, bearing no foliage and looking ready to fall to the ground. They have been girdled, that is, have had a gash cut around the trunk, through the bark, quite into the wood;

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thus the sap can not flow, and the tree rots away, falling finally with a great crash. The luckless traveler sometimes finds his way stopped by one of these trees fallen across the road. By the border of these tracts are Virginia rail-fences, eight or ten feet in height, which zig-zag in a curious fashion, the rails, twelve feet or so in length, not running into posts, but resting on one another at the ends, like a succession of W's. When the new land is wholly cleared of trees, these fences can be removed, stick by stick, and set farther back. No post-holes have to be dug, nor posts driven in.

Now the tobacco-fields come into view. If the plant is growing, one sees long rows of hillocks kept free from weeds, and the plant well bunched at the top, for the lower leaves and suckers are pruned once a week; and as there is a worm which infests the tobacco, and has to be picked off and killed, during the growth of the plant all hands are kept busy in the field.

I have said that there were scarcely any towns or villages in Virginia, so one might fancy there was some mistake; for what means this great collection of houses? Surely here is a village; but look closer. There are no stores or shops or churches or schoolhouses. Rising above the rest is one principal building. It is the planter's own house, which very likely is surrounded by beautiful trees and gardens. At a little distance are the cabins of the negroes, and the gaping wooden tobacco-houses, in which the tobacco is drying, hung upon poles and well sunned and aired, for the houses are built so as to allow plenty of ventilation and sunlight. The cabins of the negroes are low wooden buildings, the chinks filled in with clay. Many of them have kitchen gardens about them, for the slaves are allowed plots of ground on which to raise corn and melons and small vegetables for their own use. The planter's house is sometimes of wood, sometimes of brick, and sometimes of stone. The one feature, however, which always strikes a stranger is the great outside chimney, usually there is one at each end of the house,- - a huge pile of brick or stone, rising above the ridge-pole. Very often, too, there are wide verandas and porches. In this climate, where there are no freezing-cold winters, it is not necessary to build chimneys in the middle of the house, where the warmth of the bricks may serve to temper the air of all the rooms. Moreover, in the warm summers it is well to keep the heat of the cooking away from the house, so the meals are prepared in kitchens built separate from the main house. Inside the great house, one finds one's self in large, airy rooms and halls; wide fireplaces hold blazing

fires in the cool days, and in the summer there is a passage of air on all sides. Sometimes the rooms are lathed and plastered, but often they are sheathed in the cedar and other woods which grow abundantly in the country. There is little of that spruce tidiness on which a New England housekeeper prides herself. The house servants are lazy and good-natured, and the people live in a generous fashion, careless of waste, and indifferent to orderly ways.

The planter has no market near by to which he can go for his food; accordingly he has his own smokehouse, in which he cures his ham and smokes

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HALL-WAY OF AN OLD VIRGINIA HOUSE.

his beef; he has outhouses and barns scattered about, where he stores his provisions; and down where the brook runs, is the spring-house, built over the running stream. Here the milk and butter and eggs are kept standing in buckets in the cool fresh water. The table is an abundant but coarse one. The woods supply game, and the planter has herds of cattle. But he raises few vegetables and little wheat. The English ship brings him wines and liquors, which are freely used, and now and then one of his negro women has a genius for cooking and can make dainty dishes. The living, however, is rather profuse than nice.

It fits the rude, out-of-door life of the men. The master of the house spends much of his time in the

saddle. He prides himself on his horses, and keeps his stables well filled. It is his chief business to look after his estate. He has, to be sure, an overseer, or steward, who takes his orders and sees that the various gangs of negroes do their required work; but the master, if he would succeed, himself must visit the several parts of his plantation and make sure that all goes on smoothly. He must have an eye to his stock, for very likely he

the bear and the wild cat. With other planters he
rides after the hounds; and they try their horses
on the race-course. The man who can ride the
hardest, shoot the surest, lift the heaviest weight,
run, leap, and wrestle beyond his fellows, is the
most admired.

With so free and independent a life, the Virgin-
ian is a generous man, who is hospitable both to
his neighbors and to strangers. If he hears of

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"AT THE CAPITAL, DURING THE SESSION, ARE HELD BALLS AND OTHER GRAND ENTERTAINMENTS."

has blooded horses; he must see that the tobacco is well harvested; he must ride to the new field which is being cleared, and inspect his fences. There is enough in all this to keep the planter in his saddle all day long.

With horses in the stable and dogs in the kennel, the Virginian is a great hunter. He lives in a country where he can chase not only the fox, but

any one traveling through the country and putting
up at one of the uncomfortable little inns, he
sends for him to come to his house, without wait-
ing for a letter of introduction. He entertains his
neighbors, and there are frequent gatherings of
old and young for dancing and merry-making.
The tobacco crop varies, and the price of it is con-
stantly changing. Thus the planter can never

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