VIRGINIA ARISTOCRATIC.

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supplied the young republic with many of its leading spirits, but learning and cultivation were confined to a number comparatively small.

The schools and col

leges were not equal to those of New England, and the people did not wish to have the same system of popular education. The men of Virginia were born politicians, the women were admirable wives and mothers, devoting themselves with care to their housewifely duties. The other Southern colonies were in general framed on the Virginia model. South Carolina was even more aristocratic, there being but two classes, the planters and the slaves. The highest civilization in the South, take each State as a whole, was to be found in Virginia. Charleston was a centre of much elegance and cultivation, but the rest of South Carolina was not equally well developed.

James Madison wrote as late as 1774, of the social state of affairs in Virginia, "Poverty and luxury prevail among all sorts; pride, ignorance and knavery among the priesthood, and vice and wickedness among the laity. This is bad enough, but it is not the worst I have to tell you. The diabolical, hell-conceived principle of persecution rages among some; and, to their eternal infamy, the clergy can furnish their quota of imps for such business. This vexes me the most of anything whatever. There are at this time in the adjacent county not less than five or six well-meaning men in close jail for publishing their religious sentiments, which in the main, are very orthodox." Persecution was not confined to any region in America. In both the North and the South, the people inherited the original Teutonic notion of the formation of the community, but it was put into practice in New England as it was not in the other Colonies.

In the New England village, town or city may still be seen the "common" land which all the inhabitants have the privilege of using, and in the early history of the founding of the Colonies it will be noted that the family was the unit; that the settlements began as organized towns, which though bereft now of their communal traits, still stand as representatives of the old town system described by Tacitus as existing among the Germanic tribes eighteen centuries ago. They are self-governing, holding meetings of all the inhabitants, and providing for all local needs. In the other States the towns did not thus form the starting point for the State, but were formed by slow aggregations of individuals, whereas in New England they sprang into existence as organized political facts.

"THE VULGARITY OF TOWNS."

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The Southern gentleman, like his English prototype, did not like to live in the populous town. As a late Southern writer well says, "The predominant tastes of the South were, from the beginning, English;

and an Englishman is a rural animal to the very mar row of his bones; . with this ingrained tradition and prejudice, the first settlers of Virginia and Carolina paid little attention to the building of towns and cities; and to this day all out-and-out Southerners have a smothered contempt for what they are pleased to

6

WASHINGTON'S HOME AT MOUNT VERNON.

call the vulgarity of towns.'" This it was that retarded the development of the South in letters, though its upper classes were highly educated in arts and manufactures, and even in agriculture itself.

The place of the town was imperfectly supplied in some of the States by the vestry, or the plantation, and the people of Virginia actually tried to legislate towns into existence, by passing a law (1680) commanding each county to lay out one.

Seven of the original Colonies began under proprietors. They were New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, the Carolinas, Maryland and New Jersey. Of these, four, New York, New Jersey and the Carolinas, became eventually royal provinces, and Maryland at a time was in the same state. Three of the Colo

THE OLD NEW YORKERS.

209

nies, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island, were settled under charters which were never surrendered. Three others, Virginia, Georgia and New Hampshire, possessed charters for awhile, but eventually became royal provinces.

In the proprietary governments, the proprietors were supreme, excepting, of course, their subjection to the sovereign, who appointed the Governors, controlled the assemblies, and received the moneys raised by taxation.*

The people were more free in the Colonies possess ing a charter, and hence the persistence with which in.

"The population of New York," says Irving, "was more varied in its elements than that of almost any other of the Provinces..... The New Yorkers were of a mixed origin, and stamped with the peculiarities of their respective ancestors. The descendants of the old Dutch and Huguenot families, the earliest settlers, were still among the soundest and best of the population. [At the beginning of the Revolution.] They inherited the love of liberty, civil and religious, of their forefathers, and were those who stood foremost in the present struggle for popular rights. Such were the Jays, the Bensons, the Beekmans, the Hoffmans, the Van Hornes, the Roosevelts, the Duyckinks, the Pintards, the Yateses, and others whose names figure in the patriotic documents of the day. Some of them, doubtless, cherished a remembrance of the time when their forefathers were lords of the land, and felt an innate propensity to join in resistance to the government by which their supremacy had been overturned. A great proportion of the morg modern families, dating from the downfall of the Dutch Government in 1664, were English and Scotch, and among these were many loyal adherents to the Crown. Then there was a mixture of the whole, produced by the intermarriages of upwards of a century, which partook of every shade of character and sentiment. The operations of foreign commerce, and the regular communications with the Mother-Country. through packets and ships of war, kept these elements in constant action, and contributed to produce that mercuria temperament, that fondness for excitement, and proneness to pleasure, which distinguished them from their neighbors on either side- the austere Puritans of New England, and the quiet Friends of Pennsylvania."