Complete Works of Edmund Burke

by Edmund Burke

  Horned cattle and hogs have multiplied almost beyond belief; though at the first settlement the country was utterly destitute of these animals. The meat of the former is as much below the flesh of our oxen, as that of the latter exceeds that of our hogs. The animals natural to the country are deer, of which there are great numbers; a sort of panther or tyger; bears, wolves, foxes, racoons, squirrels, wild cats, and one very uncommon animal called the opossum. This creature is about the size of a cat, and besides the belly which it has in common with all others, has a false one beneath it, with a pretty large aperture at the end towards the hinder legs. Within this bag, or belly, on the usual parts of the common belly, are a number of teats; upon these, when the female of this creature conceives, the young are formed, and there they hang like fruit upon the stalk, until they grow in bulk and weight to their appointed size; then they drop off, and are received in the false belly, from which they go out at pleasure, and in which they take refuge when any danger threatens them.

  They have all our sorts of tame and wild fowl in equal perfection, and some which we have not; and a vast number of birds of various kinds, valuable for their beauty or their note. The white owl of Virginia is far larger than the species which we have, and is all over of a bright silver coloured plumage, except one black spot upon his breast; they have the nightingale called from the country, a most beautiful one, whose feathers are crimson and blue; the mocking bird, thought to excel all others in his own note, and he imitates the notes of all others; the rock bird, very sociable, and his society very agreeable by the sweetness of his music; the humming bird, the smallest of all the winged creation, and the most beautiful, all arrayed in scarlet, green and gold. This bird is said to live by licking off the dew that adheres to the flowers; he is too delicate to be brought alive into England. The sea-coasts and rivers of Virginia abound not only in several of the species of fish known in Europe, but in most of those kinds which are peculiar to America. The reptiles are many; it were tedious to enumerate all the kinds of serpents bred here; the rattle snake is the principal, and too well known in general to need any description.

  CHAP. XV.

  THE great commodiousness of navigation, and the scarcity of handicraftsmen, have rendered all the attempts of the government to establish towns in Virginia ineffectual. James’s-town, which was anciently the capital, is dwindled into an insignificant village; and Williamsburg, though the capital at present, the seat of the governor, the place of holding the assembly and courts of justice, and a college for the study of arts and sciences, is yet but a small town. However, in this town are the best public buildings in British America. The college one hundred and thirty-five feet long in front, resembling Chelsea hospital; the capital directly facing it at the other end of the design of a noble street, not unlike the college in the fashion and the size of the building, where the assembly and courts of justice are held, and the public offices kept; and the church, in the form of a cross, large and well ornamented.

  The great staple commodity of this country, as well as Maryland, is tobacco. This plant is aboriginal in America, and of very ancient use, though neither so generally cultivated, nor so well manufactured as it has been since the coming of the Europeans. When at it’s just height, it is as tall as an ordinary sized man; the stalk is straight, hairy, and clammy; the leaves alternate, of a faded yellowish green, and towards the lower part of the plant of a great size. The seeds of tobacco are first sown in beds, from whence they are transplanted the first rainy weather, into a ground disposed into little hillocks like an hop garden. In a month’s time from their transplantation they become a foot high; they then top them, and prune off the lower leaves, and with great attention clean them from weeds and worms twice a week; in about six weeks after, they attain to their full growth, and they begin then to turn brownish. By these marks they judge the tobacco to be ripe. They cut down the plants as fast as they ripen, heap them up, and let them lie a night to sweat; the next day they carry them to the tobacco house, which is built to admit as much air as is consistent with keeping out rain, where they are hung separately to dry for four or five weeks, then they take them down in moist weather, for else they will crumble to dust. After this they are laid upon sticks, and covered up close to sweat for a week or two longer; the servants strip and sort them, the top being the best, the bottom the worst tobacco; then they make them up in hogsheads, or form them into rolls. Wet seasons must be carefully laid hold on for all this work, else the tobacco will not be sufficiently pliable.

  In trade they distinguish two sorts of tobacco, the first is called Aranokoe, from Maryland and the Northern parts of Virginia; this is strong and hot in the mouth, but it sells very well in the markets of Holland, Germany, and the North. The other sort is called sweet scented, the best of which is from James’s and York rivers in the Southern parts of Virginia. There is no commodity to which the revenue is so much obliged as to this. It produces a vast sum, and yet appears to lay but a very inconsiderable burthen upon the people in England; all the weight in reality falls upon the planter, who is kept down by the lowness of the original price; and as we have two provinces which deal in the same commodity, if the people of Virginia were to take measures to straiten the market, and raise the price, those of Maryland would certainly take the advantage of it; the people of Virginia would take the same advantage of those of Maryland in a like case. They have no prospect of ever bettering their condition; and they are the less able to endure it as they live in general luxuriously, and to the full extent of their fortunes. Therefore any failure in the sale of their goods, brings them heavily in debt to the merchants in London, who get mortgages on their estates, which are consumed to the bone, with the canker of an eight per cent usury. But however the planters may complain of the tobacco trade, the revenue flourishes by it, for it draws near three hundred thousand a year from this one article only; and the exported tobacco, the far greater part of the profits of which come to the English merchant, brings almost as great a sum annually into the kingdom. To say nothing of the great advantage we derive from being supplied from our own colonies with that for which the rest of Europe pays ready money, besides the employment of two hundred large vessels, and a proportionable number of seamen, which are occupied in this trade. From us the Virginians take every article for convenience or ornament which they use; their own manufacture does not deserve to be mentioned. The two colonies export about eighty thousand hogsheads of tobacco of eight hundred weight. They likewise trade largely with the West-Indies in lumber, pitch, tar, corn, and provisions. They send home flax, hemp, iron, staves, and walnut and cedar plank.

  The number of white people in Virginia, is between sixty and seventy thousand; and they are growing every day more numerous, by the migration of the Irish, who not succeeding so well in Pensylvania, as the more frugal and industrious Germans, sell their lands in that province to the latter, and take up new ground in the remote counties in Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina. These are chiefly presbyterians from the Northern part of Ireland, who in America are generally called Scotch Irish. In Virginia there are likewise settled a considerable number of French refugees; but much the larger part of the inhabitants are the negro slaves, who cannot be much fewer than a hundred thousand souls; they annually import into the two tobacco colonies between three and four thousand of these slaves. The negroes here do not stand in need of such vast recruits as the West-India stock; they rather increase than diminish; a blessing derived from a more moderate labour, better food and a more healthy climate. The inhabitants of Virginia are a chearful, hospitable, and many of them a genteel though somewhat vain and ostentatious people; they are for the greater part of the established church of England; nor until lately did they tolerate any other. Now they have some few meeting-houses of presbyterians and quakers.

  CHAP. XVI.

  THIS of Virginia is the most ancient of our colonies. Tho’ strictly speaking the first attempts to settle a colony were not made in Virginia, but in that part of North Ca
rolina which immediately borders upon it. Sir Walter Raleigh, the most extraordinary genius of his own or perhaps any other time, a penetrating statesman, an accomplished courtier, a deep scholar, a fine writer, a great soldier, and one of the ablest seamen in the world; this vast genius, that pierced so far and ran through so many things, was of a fiery excentric kind, which led him into daring expeditions, and uncommon projects, which not being understood by a timid prince, and envied and hated by the rivals he had in so many ways of life, ruined him at last. In person he ran infinite risques in Guiana in search of gold mines; and when this country was first discovered, he looked through the work of an age, at one glance, and saw how advantageous it might be made to the trade of England. He was the first man in England who had a right conception of the advantages of settlements abroad; he was then the only person who had a thorough insight into trade, and who saw clearly the proper methods of promoting it. He applied to court, and got together a company, which was composed of several persons of distinction, and several eminent merchants, who agreed to open a trade and settle a colony in that part of the world, which in honour of queen Elizabeth he called Virginia.

  Raleigh had too much business upon his hands at court, and found too few to second him in his designs, to enable him to support the establishment with the spirit in which he began it. If ever any design had an ominous beginning, and seemed to forbid any attempts for carrying it on, it was that of the first settlement of Virginia. Near half of the first colony was destroyed by the savages, and the rest consumed and worn down by fatigue and famine, deserted the country, and returned home in despair. The second colony was cut off, to a man, in a manner unknown; but they were supposed to be destroyed by the Indians. The third had the same dismal fate; and the fourth quarrelling amongst themselves, neglecting their agriculture to hunt for gold, and provoking the Indians by their insolent and unguarded behaviour, lost several of their people, and were returning, the poor remains of them, in a famishing and desperate condition to England, when just in the mouth of Chesapeak bay they met the lord Delawar with a squadron, loaded with provision, and every thing for their relief and defence, who persuaded them to return.

  This nobleman travelled with as much zeal and assiduity to cherish and support the froward infancy of this unpromising colony, as some have used in it’s better times for purposes of another kind. Regardless of his life, and inattentive to his fortune, he entered upon this long and dangerous voyage, and accepted this barren province, which had nothing of a government but it’s anxieties and it’s cares, merely for the service of his country; and he had no other reward than that retired and inward satisfaction, which a good mind feels in indulging it’s own propensity to virtue, and the prospect of those just honours which the latest posterity will take a pleasure in bestowing upon those, who prefer the interest of posterity to their own. After he had prevailed upon the people to return, he comforted them under their misfortunes, he pointed out their causes, and uniting the tenderness of a father with the steady severity of a magistrate, he healed their divisions, and reconciled them to authority and government, by making them feel by his conduct what a blessing it could be made.

  When he had settled the colony within itself, his next care was to put them upon a proper footing with regard to the Indians, whom he found very haughty and assuming on account of the late miserable state of the English; but by some well-timed and vigorous steps he humbled them, shewed he had power to chastise them, and courage to exert that power; and after having awed them into very peaceable dispositions, and settled his colony in a very growing condition, he retired home for the benefit of his health, which by his constant attention to business, and the air of an uncultivated country, had been impaired; but he left his son, with the spirit of his father, his deputy; and Sir Thomas Gates, Sir George Summers, the honourable George Piercy, Sir Ferdinand Wenman, and Mr. Newport, for his council. These, with other persons of rank and fortune, attended him on this expedition, which gave a credit to the colony. Though there are in England many young gentlemen of fortunes, disproportioned to their rank, I fear we should not see the names of so many of them engaged in an expedition, which had no better appearance than this had at that time.

  Lord Delawar did not forget the colony on his return to England; but considering himself as nearer the fountain head, thought it his duty to turn the spring of the royal favour more copiously upon the province which he superintended. For eight years together he was indefatigable in doing every thing that could tend to the peopling, the support, and the good government of this settlement, and he died in the pursuit of the same object in his voyage to Virginia, with a large supply of people, cloathing and goods.

  It is one of the most necessary, and I am sure it is one of the most pleasing parts of this design, to do justice to the names of those men who by their greatness of mind, their wisdom and their goodness, have brought into the pale of civility and religion, these rude and uncultivated parts of the globe; who could discern the rudiments of a future people, wanting only time to be unfolded, in the seed; who could perceive amidst the losses and disappointments and expences of a beginning colony, the great advantages to be derived to their country from such undertakings; and who could pursue them in spite of the malignity and narrow wisdom of the world. The ancient world had it’s Osyris and Erichthonius, who taught them the use of grain; their Bacchus, who instructed them in the culture of the vine; and their Orpheus and Linus, who first built towns and formed civil societies. The people of America will not fail, when time has made things venerable, and when an intermixture of fable has moulded useful truths into popular opinions, to mention with equal gratitude, and perhaps similar heightening circumstances, her Columbus, her Castro, her Gasca, her De Poincy, her Delawar, her Baltimore, and her Pen.

  CHAP. XVII.

  THE colony of Virginia was so fast rooted by the care of lord Delawar, that it was enabled to stand two terrible storms; two massacres made by the Indians, in which the whole colony was nearly cut off; and to subdue that people, so as to put it utterly out of their power for many years past to give them the least disturbance.

  In the fatal troubles which brought Charles the first to the block, and overturned the constitution of England, many of the cavaliers fled for refuge to this colony, which by the general disposition of the inhabitants, and the virtue of Sir William Berkley, held out for the crown, until the parliament, rather by stratagem than force, reduced them. And what is remarkable, if it may be depended upon with any certainty, they deposed Cromwell’s governor, set up Sir William Berkley again, and declared for king Charles the second, a good while even before the news of Oliver’s death could arrive in America.

  After the restoration, there is nothing very interesting in their history; except that soon after, a sort of rebellion which arose in the province from mismanagements in the government, from the decay of their trade, and from exorbitant grants inconsiderately made, which included the settled property of many people; this raised a general discontent amongst the planters, which was fomented and brought to blaze out into an actual war, by a young gentleman whose name was Bacon. He was an agreeable man, of a graceful presence, and winning carriage. He had been bred to the law, had a lively and fluent expression, fit to set off a popular cause, and to influence men who were ready to hear whatever could be said to colour in a proper manner what was already strongly drawn by their own feelings. This man by a specious, or perhaps a real tho’ ill-judged regard for the public good, finding the governor slow in his preparations against the Indians, who were ravaging the frontiers of the province, took up arms without any commission, to act against the enemy. When he had sufficient force for this purpose, he found himself in a condition not only to act against the enemy, but to give law to the governor, and to force him to give a sanction by his authority, to those proceedings which were meant to destroy it.

  Bacon armed with the commission of a general, and followed by the whole force of the colony, prepared to march against the Indians; whe
n Sir William Berkley, the governor, freed from the immediate terror of his forces, recalled him, proclaimed him a traitor, and issued a reward for apprehending him as such. This brought matters to extremities; the people were universally inflamed; Bacon adhered to what he had done, the people adhered to Bacon; and the governor, who seemed no ways inclined to temporize or yield to the storm, fled over the river Potowmack, and proclaimed all Bacon’s adherents traitors. He put himself at the head of a small body of troops which he had raised in Maryland, and of such of the Virginians as were faithful to him, and wrote to England for supplies. On the other hand, Bacon marched to the capital, called an assembly, and for six months together disposed all things according to his own pleasure. Every thing was now hastening to a civil war, when all was quieted in as sudden a manner as it had begun, by the natural death of Bacon, in the very height of the confusion. The people unable to act without a head, proposed terms of accommodation; the terms were listened to, and peace was restored and kept without any disturbance, not so much by the removal of the grievances complained of, as by the arrival of a regiment from England, which remained a long time in the country. It must be remarked in honour of the moderation of the government, that no person suffered in his life, or his estate, for this rebellion, which was the more extraordinary, as many people at that time were very earnest in solliciting grants of land in Virginia.