-Caveat Lector-
An excerpt from:
The Virginia Way
Guy Friddell -Text
Wolfgang Roth -Photographs
�1973 by BURDA GmbH
Offenburg
Printed in West Germany
-----
Some of the tidbits amongst the chaff;
[Williamsburg]
---When dignitaries arrive from abroad, [Dept. of] State whisks them by
helicopter to the Colonial Capital for a day or two of restoration before
entering twentieth century Washington.--
Two men began the transformation. After a Phi Beta Kappa banquet at William
and Mary, the Rev. W.A.R. Goodwin of Bruton Parish Church escorted John D.
Rockefeller Jr. through the then dilapidated streets and suggested that the
philanthropist resurrect an entire town. How that dignified pair must have
enjoyed conspiring like boys on the project!--
----Capitol of Colony flies Union Jack on spire above cupola-----
[Richmond]
Coming west, too, across Church Hill, the visitor has a noble prospect of
spires, blocks, and towers � a variety of castles in the air that would stir
the visionary, acquisitive Father Byrd. His Tory son, William Byrd III,
trying to recoup a squandered fortune, auctioned off the lots for the town in
1768.
In other Virginia cities older residents sometimes refer to Richmond as the
Holy City.------
Ya, see it is my contention that Williamsburg is used in mind control and
other conspiratorial milieus. MHO. Bacon is buried there, I believe,also
Om
K
-----
"Go Make Tobacco"
When John Rolfe returned from England, his entrepreneurial eye must have
glistened to see that the tobacco seed he had planted was flourishing. Indeed
the Colonists were growing tobacco in Jamestown's streets. In a tawny leaf,
they had found gold.
King James, for one, was displeased. He said so in language that anticipated
the U.S. Surgeon General and indignant modern-day writers of letters to the
editor. In a "Counterblaste to Tobacco" he criticized the Colonists for the
"vile use" of that precious stink . . . "
But too late. The weed had taken hold, and with it, the Colony. Just how
tight a grip the plant had was evident in 1691 when the Virginia Assembly
authorized Commissary James Blair to go to England and seek a charter for a
proposed college. The King and Queen approved the grant, but Attorney'
General Edward Seymour, who had to draw the charter, balked.
But, argued Blair, the college would train ministers, and Virginians had
souls that needed saving.
"Souls! Damn your Souls! Make Tobacco!". shouted Seymour.
Could King James have seen the consequences of Virginians' making tobacco
along the creeks and rivers he would have been even more vehement in his
attack. Along with all the vices he attributed to it, tobacco engendered in
the Colonists a nasty addiction to independence which prompted them in time
to break away from England's apron strings.
In a lively, scholarly work, The Story of Tobacco in America, Dr. Joseph C.
Robert of the University of Richmond has termed the discovery that tobacco
could be successfully grown and profitably sold "the most momentous single
fact in the first century of settlement on the Chesapeake Bay."
The staple, writes Dr. Robert, "guaranteed the permanence of the Virginia
settlement; created the pattern of the Southern plantation; encouraged the
introduction of Negro slavery, then softened the institution; strained the
bonds between mother country and Chesapeake colonies; burdened the diplomacy
of the post-Revolutionary period; promoted the Louisiana Purchase; and after
the Civil War, helped create the New South..."
Americans ordinarily think of their country's progress as leap-frogging from
Jamestown to Williamsburg and the Revolution. But first the Colonists
ventured up Virginia's creeks and rivers.
(In Virginia's Tidewater there is little difference between the two. Where
Corotoman Creek joins the Rappahannock River, the site from which Robert
"King" Carter directed 42 plantations and 300,000 acres, the creek is three
miles wide. Other creeks in that vicinity arc Hull Creek, half a mile wide,
in Northumberland County, and Antipoison Creek and Dividing Creek in
Lancaster County, also half a mile wide. Tidewater's creeks would make
respectable rivers in Southwest Virginia.)
Up the creek or river a man cleared land on the bank and built a home that
was his castle. The thought began taking root on these far shores that a
man's castle was as good as a king's.
Instead of huddling like shopkeepers in a village, the planters spread apart.
Each managed a little world of wharf, warehouses, store, shipyard, farm, and
a dozen artisans. He was called upon to make incessant decisions. The habit
of judgment he formed in running the plantation was put to work in directing
the Colony through the church vestry, the court, and the elected House of
Burgesses and the appointed King's Council. The planters built, along with
their great houses, a gifted ruling class, and they cemented it with
marriages. The families formed a close-knit kingdom along tidal rivers, the
FFVs.
Their names flow through Colonial history � the Carters, Harrisons,
Fitzhughs, Pages, Burwells, Ludwells, Nelsons, Beverleys, Masons, Carys,
Wormeleys, Diggeses, Lees, Byrds � interlacing like the tributary creeks and
rivers on which they lived.
Their saving grace was a sense of duty to public good. "It is not fine
clothes nor a gay outsight," King Carter advised a grandson, "but learning
and knowledge and virtue and wisdom that makes a man valuable." They exerted
a massive, steady pressure against the King's Royal Governor; and they
readied the stage for the appearance of the great libertarians in the 18th
century's last quarter.
The greatest procession of plantations is along the James River, beginning
with Carter's Grove, which Colonial Williamsburg is restoring under President
Carlisle Humelsine as a working l8th century plantation. King Carter's
grandson, Carter Burwell, began building the mansion in 1750. The paneled
entrance hall frames a lordly carved stairway, up which, 'tis said, Colonel
Banastre Tarleton, a British cavalryman, spurred his horse and, as he rode,
hacked the railing with his sabre � an unmannerly exhibition, if true, and
one not calculated to help the sabre. The notches are there yet.
Route 5 from Williamsburg to Richmond is known as Plantation Road. Its two
winding lanes are wooded most of the way, stippled with brown trunks and
black shadows, so that it could be a private drive for the signs that
announce the great houses lying back in the woods: Berkeley, Shirley,
Westover, President John Tyler's Sherwood Forest, Evelynton, Bel Air, and
Bush Hill.
Shirley was built by Edward Hill III for his daughter Elizabeth, who in 1723
married John Carter, son of King Carter. Anne Hill Carter was born at Shirley
and was married there to Light Horse Harry Lee. Among their children was
Robert E. Lee, who, as a child, visited his mother's home.
Carter blood made Lee Lee, the Carter family likes to think. They probably
are correct. There is evidence for that view in the sight of Lee's mother
struggling to hold the. family together while Light Horse Harry failed in
nearly everything but leading cavalry.
If Robert E. Lee's love of soldering came from his father, his unbelievable
coolness in battle probably stemmed from the Carters' vast equanimity.
The present Carters have a letter Lee wrote after the Civil War to his first
cousin Hill Carter advising him: Work is what we all require, work by
everybody, work especially by white hands" � Lee underlined white, thinking,
as he wrote, of those who had relied so heavily on black hands � "We must
spend less my dear cousin, Hill, than we formerly did. We must use that
little sparingly and only purchase what is actually necessary. By this course
the good old times of former days which you speak of will return again. We
may not see them but our children will."
Catching sight of Shirley, a glowing rose structure with a double two-story
porch and a forecourt of outbuildings, the visitor thinks of it first as a
world to itself. On the river side, under a giant tree, is a massive rock,
which seems in the shade to be a huge cushion. That the boulder was placed
there in the 20th century might seem a reordering out of keeping with the
house's past except that the owner, Hill Carter Jr., is a ninth generation
member of the family, which makes any change a matter of continuity.
Shirley's two-story uprightness, like a child's Christmas dollhouse, is
appealing.
Nearby is Berkeley, the oldest three-story house in America. A Colonial
leader, Benjamin Harrison, built it in 1726. His son, Colonel Benjamin
Harrison, signed the Declaration of Independence, served in the Continental
Congress, and was thrice Governor of Virginia.
Colonel Harrison's younger son, William Henry, was elected President of the
United States and returned to Berkeley to write his inaugural address in the
room in which he had been born. The Harrisons produced another President in
Benjamin, grandson of William Henry.
During the Civil War General McClellan made Berkeley his headquarters. In
1862 General Butterfield composed taps there. Among the Union soldiers was
drummer boy, John Jamieson, not then 14, who years later purchased the
mansion with the idea of retiring there. His son, Malcolm, did a masterful
job in restoring the old home and making the land productive.
It received, recently, a spate of public notice as the site of the first
Thanksgiving two years before the Plymouth Rock festival. A Richmond lawyer,
John J. Wicker Jr., doing research for a speech in 1958 in the Library of
Congress, stumbled upon instructions ordering Colonists when they landed at
Berkeley to set aside a day of Thanksgiving "which shall be observed every
year perpetually." Wicker hurried with the information to Governor J. Lindsay
Almond Jr.
"I noticed," Wicker said, "that as I told him the facts Lindsay was leaning
forward across the desk, almost in my face. He said later he was trying to
sniff my breath to see if I'd been drinking."
Wicker's early efforts at publicizing his cause were at half-time ceremonies
at the Thanksgiving Day football game between the University of Richmond and
the College of William and Mary. Accelerating, he put on a Colonial costume,
knee breeches and all, and flew in 1961 to Massachusetts, where he presented
bemused Governor John Volpe with a Virginia turkey. Then he wrung equal time
in Thanksgiving Day proclamations from Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and a
generous concession from historian Arthur B. Schlesinger Jr.
The Virginia Thanksgiving's most picturesque features have been Wicker's
activities. Meanwhile, the Pilgrim fathers' progeny can, if they're a mind
to, follow Virginians' custom and bill their Massachusetts feast as the
oldest continuous Thanksgiving in the Western Hemisphere.
At stately Westover, a 24-room brick mansion crowning a bluff above the
James, lived William Byrd II, who portrayed "His Great Self' and his time in
secret diaries. Educated abroad, he returned to Virginia at the death of his
father, a wealthy trader who left him 23,000 acres. He first married Lucy
Parke, who inherited her father's celebrated temper. From Westover Byrd
presided over a solar system of six plantations on the James and several
other estates, totaling 177,000 acres.
Reading Byrd's diaries is like eating dried raisins off the stalk, dusty and
pungent sweet, nourishing.
He arose at five nearly every morning and danced his dance, as he described
his gymnastics, and then read a chapter of Hebrew and 200 lines of Greek. He
was something of a food faddist � in addition to trying anything, he swore by
certain dishes � he ate boiled milk for breakfast, and, as he walked about
his domain, chewed frequently on the ginseng root, which, he wrote, "frisks
the spirit beyond any other cordial."
He recorded his quarrels with the tempestuous Lucy � he objected to her
plucking her eyebrows; she sulked at his talking at length in Latin to the
parson � and the love-making that followed, once on the billiards table. (His
second wife, whom Byrd married after Lucy died of smallpox during a visit to
London, was Maria Taylor, of milder temperament. But even Maria became so
excited over letters from England that she stayed awake all night, and so
Byrd, when they arrived late in the day, found it necessary "to pocket them
up until next morning.")
He frequently invited the whole congregation to Sunday dinner and was
hospitable to the Indians that appeared on Westover's broad lawns. He talked
with Bearskin about his god, and he learned to swim Indian style, not
striking out with both hands but alternating one hand after another "whereby
they are able to swim both farther and faster than we do."
He went with naturalist Mark Catesby into the swamp to see a hummingbird's
nest "with one young and an egg in it;" when it snowed, he ordered "drums of
wheat to be thrown to the poor birds;" he dissected a muskrat, and he
bombarded the Royal Society with his observations.
He led a party of 50 in surveying the boundary 241 miles between Virginia and
North Carolina and wrote his spirited The History of the Dividing Line. It
contains his famous analysis of North Carolina as "Lubberland." He was
equally satiric with Virginia. Of the Jamestown settlers, he wrote, "like
true Englishmen, they built a church that cost no more than Fifty Pounds, and
a Tavern that cost Five hundred."
For his day he was, biographers say, humane with his slaves, and felt that
the British Parliament should consider ending "this unchristian traffic of
making merchandise of our fellow creatures."
At one point in his diary, noting a muster of some county militia that he
commanded, Byrd observed: "Everybody respected me like a king."
He was a rare bird, Virginia's Black Swan.
=====
Let's Go to Williamsburg
In 1699 the legislators, who had been burned out of their fourth state house,
gave up Jamestown at last as a bad site and moved the Capitol six miles
inland to the Middle Plantation, which they renamed Williamsburg in honor of
King William II.
Unlike miasmic Jamestown, Williamsburg is spread high and dry upon a ridge on
a peninsula between two broad rivers. Spill a cup of water in the middle of
the Duke of Gloucester Street, the costumed hostesses tell visitors, and half
the contents would flow toward the James River and the other half to the York.
If the legislators found happiness in Williamsburg, then so do today's
Virginians. Williamsburg is the salvation of Virginians when company comes
from afar. What a relief to say, Oh, let's go to Williamsburg! � knowing that
the guides, the movies, and the buildings themselves save a lot of explaining
about the American Revolution and all that followed. Williamsburg offers
instant, reconstituted history. At one spot on the Duke of Gloucester Street
the visitor can, when trees are bare, see the Colonial town's five spires of
power: the Wren Building of the College of William and Mary, the Governor's
Palace, the Capitol, the Courthouse of 1770, and Bruton Parish Church.
The State Department also has caught the habit of letting Williamsburg do the
entertaining. When dignitaries arrive from abroad, State whisks them by
helicopter to the Colonial Capital for a day or two of restoration before
entering twentieth century Washington. Virginia's Governor also relies on
Colonial Williamsburg's expert staff to host such shows as the National
Governors' Conference. The implication to the other states' governors is, oh,
we live like this all the time, just plain old Virginia hospitality. Thus the
town has resumed something of its role as the social, if not the political,
capital of the Commonwealth.
Women especially bask in Williamsburg's well ordered orbit. It's their idea
of paradise. At no time in its past was the town at such a peak of perfection
as it began to attain in 1926. In the old days the houses naturally reflected
their owners' varying pocketbooks. So today's restorers let maintenance lag a
little. Paint flakes on some buildings. A roof needs repairs. Grass grows
long.
When the revival began, Restoration President Kenneth Chorley brought an old
resident to vouch for a tavern's interior. The old-timer turned to where the
bar should be � "There it is" � and then, looking around, he said, "Kenneth,
it is much cleaner now.
Still, the Founding Fathers, always in pursuit of the ideal whether in little
amenities or grand principles. would be pleased with the cared-for town.
Two men began the transformation. After a Phi Beta Kappa banquet at William
and Mary, the Rev. W.A.R. Goodwin of Bruton Parish Church escorted John D.
Rockefeller Jr. through the then dilapidated streets and suggested that the
philanthropist resurrect an entire town. How that dignified pair must have
enjoyed conspiring like boys on the project! Work began in 1926, and, half a
century later, still goes on. The restoration's 50th birthday coincides with
the Nation's 200th � cause, indeed, for the militia to fire a volley of joy.
No other place, no matter where, offers more to excite the mind than the 90
or so buildings clustered on 173 acres.
>From Williamsburg George Washington set out to serve his apprenticeship in
arms with the British in the French and Indian War. Of his baptism of fire,
Washington wrote, "I heard the bullets whistle, and, believe me, there is
something charming in the sound." (Reading the comment in a London magazine,
King George II said, "He would not say so, if he had been used to hear many.")
In Williamsburg, a young lawyer defended a mulatto slave who was seeking his
freedom. Under "the law of nature," the lawyer argued, "all men are born
free, every one comes into the world with a right to his own person, which
includes the liberty of moving and using it at his own will." The court
dismissed the plea, but Thomas Jefferson never let go the proposition.
"The hand that writes this letter wrote the Constitution," James Madison late
in his life advised a correspondent. Early, while Madison was a burgess in
Williamsburg, the hand began learning legislative skills.
On May 29, 1765, wearing frontier dress, newly elected Patrick Henry proposed
to the House of Burgesses his Resolves against the British Stamp Act. The
debate next day was, as Thomas Jefferson observed, "most bloody."
"Tarquin and Caesar each had his Brutus," Henry thundered, "Charles the First
his Cromwell, and George the Third �
"Treason!" interrupted Speaker John Robinson, and others shouted "Treason!
Treason!"
"� may profit by their example," Henry finished. "If this be treason, make
the most of it!"
Jefferson observed later that Patrick Henry, "certainly gave the first
impulse to the ball of the revolution."
On May 15, 1776, however, when the fifth and most productive Virginia
Convention met in Williamsburg, Henry hesitated to make the open break for
freedom until America had allies against Great Britain.
The ball of the revolution passed to Edmund Pendleton, who presided as the
Convention declared Virginia an independent Commonwealth and instructed
Virginia delegates to the Second Continental Congress to propose American
independence.
A few days later George Mason came to the fore (arriving for the session
tardily as usual) and led in framing a State Constitution and presented a
Declaration of Rights, which guaranteed to individuals the security of
government by law. (Later James Madison incorporated Mason's Declaration in
the United States Constitution's Bill of Rights.)
That was the Virginia way, one bold spirit after another seizing the
initiative for the cause of freedom.
"We built a government slowly. I hope it will be founded upon a rock,"
Pendleton observed in a note to Jefferson.
But the patriots' sure, creative strokes came with dazzling rapidity.
"They seemed to have a feeling of urgency about the importance of doing a
great deal now," Colonial historian Jane Carson has observed. "They all
pushed, they all had the feeling that life is short and should be active."
Visitors to Williamsburg gradually sort out the Royal Governors. Save only
Lord Dunmore, who had the misfortune to come along at the time of the
Revolution, they were not a bad lot.
Sir William Gooch, for instance, fostered a sound system for grading and
selling tobacco.
To Jefferson, Francis Fauquier was the ablest. At dinners in the Governor's
Palace with the polished Fauquier, mathematics Professor William Small, and
lawyer George Wythe, Jefferson heard, he remembered in old age, "more good
sense, more rational and philosophical conversations, than in all my life
besides."
That jolly party-giver, Lord Botetourt, so endeared himself to Virginians
that when he died, they erected a statue to his memory. It stands in William
and Mary's Earl Gregg Swem Library, and an inscription conveys his Lordship's
benign outlook: "Let Wisdom and Justice preside in any Country, The People
will rejoice and must be happy."
Governor Alexander Spotswood, left the most to restore. He had a hand in
building the Wren Building, the Powder Magazine, Bruton Parish Church, and
his own residence, which Virginians called the "Palace," first derisively
because of its cost and then in pride for its elegance.
A long-faced, straight-lipped soldier, Spotswood commissioned two sloops that
brought Blackbeard the pirate to bay in Ocracoke. In thousands of miles. of
travel, Spotswood's most fabled excursion was with the Knights of the Golden
Horseshoe to the Blue Ridge. After parrying with stubborn Virginians 12
years, he ended by joining them as a planter near Fredericksburg. He loosed,
it is said, skylarks on the Rappahannock.
In Colonial Virginia one Williamsburg resident failed to get along with any
Royal Governor. Commissary James Blair, Rector of Bruton Parish Church and
first president of William and Mary, was a one-man forerunner of the
Revolution. The contentious Scotsman picked quarrels with three Governors and
forced them out of office. Retiring beaten from bouts with Blair, Spotswood
called him "that old Combustion."
The Commissary interested the planters in starting a college and journeyed to
England to win the Crown's support. While waiting months for royal grants, he
persuaded three pirates to try to win pardons by sharing their booty with the
College.
<snip>
<contemporary pix of Capitol building flying the Union Jack, only>
Capitol of Colony flies Union Jack on spire above cupola
Under the fall foliage, Visitors leave the handsome, glowing, restored
Capitol. It was the key building in the Colony. The House of Burgesses met in
one of the great bay wings and the Council and the general court in the
other. A gallery over at arcaded piazza connects the two bays and has a
conference room in which councilors and burgesses settled their differences.
<snip>
=====
The Holy City
In 1609, 150 colonists, who had been sent from Jamestown to establish a fort
at the Falls on the heights overlooking the James, built, instead, on the low
ground near their boat. They called the area "World's End." Captain John
Smith, when he came to inspect their work, showed his usual superior
judgment. He bought from an Indian chief the high land and named it
"None-Such," because, he said, there was "no place so strong, so pleasant and
delightful." He planned to build there, but on returning from the trip to the
Falls, he received the gunpowder wound that sidelined him in England. For him
the home above the James remained a dream, None-Such.
Next to extol the site was William Byrd II. In September, 1732, while
exploring his properties along the Roanoke and Dan Rivers, he reported in'
his journal that one evening when he and his party returned to camp, "we laid
the foundation of two large cities. One at Shacco's to be called Richmond,
and the other at the point of Appomattox River to be named Petersburg. These
Major Mayo offered to lay out into lots without fee or reward. The truth of
it is, these two places, being the uppermost landing of James and Appomattox
Rivers, are naturally intended for marts where traffic of the outer
inhabitants must center. Thus we did not build castles only, but also cities
in the air."
Coming from the south, looking across the James River, the traveler today
sees Richmond's skyline, an immense, wide-spreading tapestry hanging along
the horizon. On a misty day the jumble of solid structures seems
insubstantial, an airy mirage that the eye might blink away. Coming west,
too, across Church Hill, the visitor has a noble prospect of spires, blocks,
and towers � a variety of castles in the air that would stir the visionary,
acquisitive Father Byrd. His Tory son, William Byrd III, trying to recoup a
squandered fortune, auctioned off the lots for the town in 1768.
In other Virginia cities older residents sometimes refer to Richmond as the
Holy City. Most Richmonders are oblivious to their city's having any such
exalted station, although in addition to being, without much apparent
exertion, the State's leading manufacturer, it also is the seat of the
General Assembly. For four years it was the Capital of the Lost Cause, "the
Troy of the War Between the States." To the American historian, said novelist
Mary D. Johnston, "Richmond has the appearance an touch of cloth of gold." It
also is "the Tobacco Capital of the World."
Richmonders are pleasantly aware of these distinctions, but of fundamental
importance to them, the city simply always has been there and always will be,
changing, true, but not at such a rate that there are not ample reminders of
what it was yesterday. If, despite the natural advantages recognized by
Father Byrd, it has not shot up like an Atlanta or even a Charlotte, and
certainly not a Dallas, then it grows at its own sweet will, as surely as the
gray lichens sheathing the oaks in Capitol Square or the flaming green patina
streaking the great bronze statues along Monument Avenue. Richmond will get
there by and by. Some conjecture that Washington, D.C.'s being 100 miles away
stunts Richmond's expansion, but the explanation could simply be that
Richmond does not want to boom. It wouldn't be Richmond if it did. If the
rate of change accelerated markedly, Richmond wouldn't be able to accomodate
the transition to its own pace. Ambitious invaders from other regions don't
alter Richmond; like China, it assimilates and converts them. Its inhabitants
are, for the most part, content with the city as a place, not just to get
ahead, but, first and foremost, to live, with modern conveniences, yes, but
also with the reassuring presence of certain familiar institutions and
traditions, like old pieces of furniture, handed down through generations,
comforting to the touch.
pps33-34-40; 57
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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