The Project Gutenberg EBook of Virginia Under Charles I And Cromwell,
1625-1660, by Wilcomb E. Washburn

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Title: Virginia Under Charles I And Cromwell, 1625-1660

Author: Wilcomb E. Washburn

Release Date: July 7, 2009 [EBook #29348]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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VIRGINIA UNDER CHARLES I
AND CROMWELL, 1625-1660

By

Wilcomb E. Washburn

Research Associate, Institute
of Early American History and Culture

and

Instructor in History,
College of William and Mary

Virginia 350th Anniversary Celebration Corporation
Williamsburg, Virginia
1957

COPYRIGHT(C), 1957 BY
VIRGINIA 350TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION
CORPORATION, WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA

Jamestown 350th Anniversary
Historical Booklet, Number 7

Virginia Under Charles I and Cromwell, 1625-1660

VIRGINIA ON THE EVE OF EXPANSION

Woodrow Wilson named the first volume of his _History of the United
States_ "The Swarming of the English." We might go further and compare
the colonization and expansion in the New World to a fissioning process
in which individual atoms are torn loose from a former pattern of
coherence and fused into new and strange patterns. The United States,
indeed, is still in the process of fusion following the earlier fission
process. It has not yet reached the stability that comes to some nations
in history, and which is marked by a fixed pattern of population growth,
land use, day-to-day habits, and philosophic beliefs. It is, rather, a
country in which every generation can look back to a strangely different
era that existed before it came of age.

The period 1625-1660 in Virginia history is an important one for the
study of the fission-fusion process in America. During those years
Virginia's population increased perhaps twenty-five or thirty fold, and
the settlements spread from a thin belt along the James River to the
whole of