known all the consequences of slavery--but at certain times and places,
free labor has thriven; commerce and agriculture, the miner, the
mariner, the tradesman, not less than the planter, found therein scope
for their respective vocations; the life of the sea coast, of the
mountains, and of the interior valleys--the life of the East, West, and
Middle States was there reproduced in juxtaposition with that of the
South. Nowhere in the land could the economist more distinctly trace the
influence of free and slave labor upon local prosperity: nowhere has the
aristocratic element been more intimately in contact with the
democratic. Her colonial record indicates a greater variety in the
original population than any other province: she has given birth to more
eminent statesmen, has been the arena of more fierce conflicts of
opinion, and is associated most directly with problems of government, of
society, and of industrial experiment. On her soil were first landed
African captives; and when the curse thus entailed was dying out, it was
renewed and aggravated by the inducement to breed slaves for the cotton
and sugar plantations. From Virginia flowed the earliest stream of
immigration to the West, whereby a new and mighty political element was
added to the Republic: there are some of the oldest local memorials of
American civilization: for a long period she chiefly represented
Southern life and manners to the North: placed between the extremes of
climate--producing the staples of all the States, except those bordering
on the Gulf--earlier colonized, prominent in legislation, fruitful in
eminent men, she was more visited by travellers, more written about,
better known, and therefore gathered to and grafted upon herself more of
the rich and the reckless tendencies and traits of the country; and
became thus a central point and a representative State--which destiny
seems foreshadowed by her physical resources and her local situation.
Except New England, no portion of our country has been more fully and
faithfully illustrated as to its scenery, domestic life, and social
traits, by popular literature, than Virginia. The original affinity of
her colonial life with the ancestral traditions of England, found apt
expression in Spenser's dedication of his peerless allegory to
Elizabeth, wherein the baptism of her remote territory, in honor of her
virginal fame, was recognized. The first purely literary work achieved
within her borders was