The Life of John Marshall, Volume 1: Frontiersman, soldier, lawmaker, 1755-1788. Albert J. Beveridge
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Название: The Life of John Marshall, Volume 1: Frontiersman, soldier, lawmaker, 1755-1788

Автор: Albert J. Beveridge

Издательство: Public Domain

Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары

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isbn: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/40388

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СКАЧАТЬ most obvious fertilizing materials and methods; new spaces were simply cleared.65 Thus came a happy-go-lucky improvidence of habits and character.

      This shiftlessness was encouraged by the vast extent of unused and unoccupied domain. Land was so cheap that riches measured by that basis of all wealth had to be counted in terms of thousands and tens of thousands of acres.66 Slavery was an even more powerful force making for a kind of lofty disdain of physical toil among the white people.67 Black slaves were almost as numerous as white free men.68 On the great plantations the negro quarters assumed the proportions of villages;69 and the masters of these extensive holdings were by example the arbiters of habits and manners to the whole social and industrial life of the colony. While an occasional great planter was methodical and industrious,70 careful and systematic methods were rare. Manual labor was, to most of these lords of circumstance, not only unnecessary but degrading. To do no physical work that could be avoided on the one hand, and on the other hand, to own as many slaves as possible, was, generally, the ideal of members of the first estate.71 This spread to the classes below, until it became a common ambition of white men throughout the Old Dominion.

      While contemporary travelers are unanimous upon this peculiar aspect of social and economic conditions in old Virginia, the vivid picture drawn by Thomas Jefferson is still more convincing. "The whole commerce between master and slave," writes Jefferson, "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… Thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny … the man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved… 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… Of the proprietors of slaves a very small proportion indeed are ever seen to labour."72

      Two years after he wrote his "Notes on Virginia" Jefferson emphasized his estimate of Virginia society. "I have thought them [Virginians] as you found them," he writes Chastellux, "aristocratical, pompous, clannish, indolent, hospitable … careless of their interests, … thoughtless in their expenses and in all their transactions of business." He again ascribes many of these characteristics to "that warmth of their climate which unnerves and unmans both body and mind."73

      From this soil sprang a growth of habits as noxious as it was luxuriant. Amusements to break the monotony of unemployed daily existence took the form of horse-racing, cock-fighting, and gambling.74 Drinking and all attendant dissipations were universal and extreme;75 this, however, was the case in all the colonies.76 Bishop Meade tells us that even the clergy indulged in the prevailing customs to the neglect of their sacred calling; and the church itself was all but abandoned in the disrepute which the conduct of its ministers brought upon the house of God.77

      Yet the higher classes of colonial Virginians were keen for the education of their children, or at least of their male offspring.78 The sons of the wealthiest planters often were sent to England or Scotland to be educated, and these, not infrequently, became graduates of Oxford, Cambridge, and Edinburgh.79 Others of this class were instructed by private tutors.80 Also a sort of scanty and fugitive public instruction was given in rude cabins, generally located in abandoned fields. These were called the Old Field Schools.81

      More than forty per cent of the men who made deeds or served on juries could not sign their names, although they were of the land-owning and better educated classes;82 the literacy of the masses, especially that of the women,83 was, of course, much lower.

      An eager desire, among the "quality," for reading brought a considerable number of books to the homes of those who could afford that luxury.84 A few libraries were of respectable size and two or three were very large. Robert Carter had over fifteen hundred volumes,85 many of which were in Latin and Greek, and some in French.86 William Byrd collected at Westover more than four thousand books in half a dozen languages.87 But the Carter and Byrd libraries were, of course, exceptions. Byrd's library was the greatest, not only in Virginia, but in all the colonies, except that of John Adams, which was equally extensive and varied.88

      Doubtless the leisure and wealth of the gentry, created by the peculiar economic conditions of the Old Dominion, sharpened this appetite for literature and afforded to the wealthy time and material for the gratification of it. The passion for reading and discussion persisted, and became as notable a characteristic of Virginians as was their dislike for physical labor, their excessive drinking, and their love of strenuous sport and rough diversion.

      There were three social orders or strata, all contemporary observers agree, into which Virginians were divided; but they merged into one another so that the exact dividing line was not clear.89 First, of course, came the aristocracy of the immense plantations. While the social and political dominance of this class was based on wealth, yet some of its members were derived from the English gentry, with, perhaps, an occasional one from a noble family in the mother country.90 Many, however, were English merchants or their sons.91 It appears, also, that the boldest and thriftiest of the early Virginia settlers, whom the British Government exiled for political offenses, acquired extensive possessions, became large slave-owners, and men of importance and position. So did some who were indentured servants;92 and, indeed, an occasional transported convict rose to prominence.93

      But the genuine though small aristocratic element gave tone and color to colonial Virginia society. All, except the "poor whites," looked to this supreme group for ideals and for standards of manners and conduct. "People of fortune … are the pattern of all behaviour here," testifies Fithian of New Jersey, tutor in the Carter household.94 Also, it was, of course, the natural ambition of wealthy planters and those who expected to become such to imitate the life of the English higher classes. This was much truer in Virginia than in any other colony; for she had been more faithful to the Crown and to the royal ideal than had her sisters. Thus it was that the Old Dominion developed a distinctively aristocratic and chivalrous social atmosphere peculiar to herself,95 as Jefferson testifies.

      Next to the dominant class came the lesser planters. These corresponded to the yeomanry of the mother country; and most of them were from the English trading classes.96 They owned little holdings of land from a few hundred to a thousand and even two thousand acres; and each of these inconsiderable landlords acquired a few slaves in proportion to his limited estate. It is possible that a scanty number of this middle class were as well born as the best born of the little nucleus of the genuine aristocracy; these were the younger sons of great English houses СКАЧАТЬ

<p>65</p>

"Though tobacco exhausts the land to a prodigious degree, the proprietors take no pains to restore its vigor; they take what the soil will give and abandon it when it gives no longer. They like better to clear new lands than to regenerate the old." (De Warville, 439; and see Fithian, 140.)

The land produced only "four or five bushels of wheat per acre or from eight to ten of Indian corn. These fields are never manured, hardly even are they ploughed; and it seldom happens that their owners for two successive years exact from them these scanty crops… The country … everywhere exhibits the features of laziness, of ignorance, and consequently of poverty." (La Rochefoucauld, iii, 106-07, describing land between Richmond and Petersburg, in 1797; and see Schoepf, ii, 32, 48; and Weld, i, 138, 151.)

<p>66</p>

Burnaby, 45, 59. The estate of Richard Randolph of Curels, in 1742 embraced "not less than forty thousand acres of the choicest lands." (Garland, i, 7.) The mother of George Mason bought ten thousand acres in Loudoun County for an insignificant sum. (Rowland, i, 51.) The Carter plantation in 1774 comprised sixty thousand acres and Carter owned six hundred negroes. (Fithian, 128.) Compare with the two hundred acres and few slaves of John Marshall "of the forest," supra.

Half a century later the very best lands in Virginia with valuable mines upon them sold for only eighteen dollars an acre. (La Rochefoucauld, iii, 124.) For careful account of the extent of great holdings in the seventeenth century see Wertenbaker: P. and P., 34-35, 97-99. Jefferson in 1790 owned two hundred slaves and ten thousand acres of very rich land on the James River. (Jefferson to Van Staphorst, Feb. 28, 1790; Works: Ford, vi, 33.) Washington owned enormous quantities of land, and large numbers of slaves. His Virginia holdings alone amounted to thirty-five thousand acres. (Beard: Econ. I. C., 144.)

<p>67</p>

Burnaby, 54.

<p>68</p>

In the older counties the slaves outnumbered the whites; for instance, in 1790 Westmoreland County had 3183 whites, 4425 blacks, and 114 designated as "all others." In 1782 in the same county 410 slave-owners possessed 4536 slaves and 1889 horses. (Va. Mag. Hist. and Biog., x, 229-36.)

<p>69</p>

Ambler, 11. The slaves of some planters were valued at more than thirty thousand pounds sterling. (Fithian, 286; and Schoepf, ii, 38; also, Weld, i, 148.)

<p>70</p>

Robert Carter was a fine example of this rare type. (See Fithian, 279-80.)

<p>71</p>

Burnaby, 53-54 and 59. "The Virginians … are an indolent haughty people whose thoughts and designs are directed solely towards p[l]aying the lord, owning great tracts of land and numerous troops of slaves. Any man whatever, if he can afford so much as 2-3 [two or three] negroes, becomes ashamed of work, and goes about in idleness, supported by his slaves." (Schoepf, ii, 40.)

<p>72</p>

"Notes on Virginia"; Works: Ford, iv, 82-83. See La Rochefoucauld, iii, p. 161, on Jefferson's slaves.

<p>73</p>

Jefferson to Chastellux, Sept. 2, 1785; Thomas Jefferson Correspondence, Bixby Collection: Ford, 12; and see Jefferson's comparison of the sections of the country, ib. and infra, chap. VI.

<p>74</p>

"Many of the wealthier class were to be seen seeking relief from the vacuity of idleness, not merely in the allowable pleasures of the chase and the turf, but in the debasing ones of cock-fighting, gaming, and drinking." (Tucker, i, 18; and see La Rochefoucauld, iii, 77; Weld, i, 191; also infra, chap. VII, and references there given.)

<p>75</p>

Jones, 48, 49, and 52; Chastellux, 222-24; also, translator's note to ib., 292-93. The following order from the Records of the Court of Rappahannock County, Jan. 2, 1688 (sic), p. 141, is illustrative: —

"It having pleased Almighty God to bless his Royall Mahst. with the birth of a son & his subjects with a Prince of Wales, and for as much as his Excellency hath sett apart the 16th. day of this Inst. Janr'y. for solemnizing the same. To the end therefore that it may be don with all the expressions of joy this County is capable of, this Court have ordered that Capt. Geo. Taylor do provide & bring to the North Side Courthouse for this county as much Rum or other strong Liquor with sugar proportionable as shall amount to six thousand five hundred pounds of Tobb. to be distributed amongst the Troops of horse, Compa. of foot and other persons that shall be present at the Sd. Solemnitie. And that the said sum be allowed him at the next laying of the Levey. As also that Capt. Samll. Blomfield provide & bring to the South side Courthouse for this county as much Rum or other strong Liquor Wth. sugar proportionable as shall amount to three thousand five hundred pounds of Tobb. to be distributed as above att the South side Courthouse, and the Sd. sum to be allowed him at the next laying of the Levey."

And see Bruce: Econ., ii, 210-31; also Wise, 320, 327-29. Although Bruce and Wise deal with a much earlier period, drinking seems to have increased in the interval. (See Fithian, 105-14, 123.)

<p>76</p>

As in Massachusetts, for instance. "In most country towns … you will find almost every other house with a sign of entertainment before it… If you sit the evening, you will find the house full of people, drinking drams, flip, toddy, carousing, swearing." (John Adams's Diary, describing a New England county, in 1761; Works: Adams, ii, 125-26. The Records of Essex County, Massachusetts, now in process of publication by the Essex Institute, contain many cases that confirm the observation of Adams.)

<p>77</p>

Meade, i, 52-54; and see Schoepf, ii, 62-63.

<p>78</p>

Wise, 317-19; Bruce: Inst., i, 308-15.

<p>79</p>

Bruce: Inst., i, 317-22; and see especially, Va. Mag. Hist. and Biog., ii, 196 et seq.

<p>80</p>

Ib., 323-30; also Fithian, 50 et seq.

<p>81</p>

Bruce: Inst., i, 331-42.

<p>82</p>

Ib., 452-53.

<p>83</p>

Ib., 456-57. Bruce shows that two thirds of the women who joined in deeds could not write. This, however, was in the richer section of the colony at a much earlier period. Just before the Revolution Virginia girls, even in wealthy families, "were simply taught to read and write at 25/ [shillings] and a load of wood per year – A boarding school was no where in Virginia to be found." (Mrs. Carrington to her sister Nancy; MS.) Part of this letter appears in the Atlantic Monthly series cited hereafter (see chap. V); but the teacher's pay is incorrectly printed as "pounds" instead of "shillings." (Atlantic Monthly, lxxxiv, 544-45.)

<p>84</p>

Bruce: Inst., i, 402-42; and see Wise, 313-15. Professor Tucker says that "literature was neglected, or cultivated, by the small number who had been educated in England, rather as an accomplishment and a mark of distinction than for the substantial benefits it confers." (Tucker, i, 18.)

<p>85</p>

Fithian, 177.

<p>86</p>

See catalogue in W. and M. C. Q., x and xi.

<p>87</p>

See catalogue in Appendix A to Byrd's Writings: Bassett.

<p>88</p>

See catalogue of John Adams's Library, in the Boston Public Library.

<p>89</p>

Ambler, 9; and see Wise, 68-70.

<p>90</p>

Trustworthy data on this subject is given in the volumes of the Va. Mag. Hist. and Biog.; see also W. and M. C. Q.

<p>91</p>

Wertenbaker: P. and P., 14-20. But see William G. Stanard's exhaustive review of Mr. Wertenbaker's book in Va. Mag. Hist. and Biog., xviii, 339-48.

<p>92</p>

"One hundred young maids for wives, as the former ninety sent. One hundred boys more for apprentices likewise to the public tenants. One hundred servants to be disposed among the old planters which they exclusively desire and will pay the company their charges." (Virginia Company Records, i, 66; and see Fithian, 111.)

<p>93</p>

For the understanding in England at that period of the origin of this class of Virginia colonists see Defoe: Moll Flanders, 65 et seq. On transported convicts see Amer. Hist. Rev., ii. 12 et seq. For summary of the matter see Channing, i, 210-14, 226-27.

<p>94</p>

Fithian to Greene, Dec. 1, 1773; Fithian, 280.

<p>95</p>

Fithian to Peck, Aug. 12, 1774; Fithian, 286-88; and see Professor Tucker's searching analysis in Tucker, i, 17-22; also see Lee, in Ford: P. on C., 296-97. As to a genuinely aristocratic group, the New York patroons were, perhaps, the most distinct in the country.

<p>96</p>

Wertenbaker: P. and P., 14-20; also Va. Mag. Hist. and Biog., xviii, 339-48.