tensive territory and largest
slaveholders, the aristocratic element disturbed and overmastered
democratic principles. During Cromwell's rule, when virtually
independent, Virginia proffered a fleet to the fugitive monarch; who,
when restored, in gratitude ordered her arms to be quartered with those
of England, Scotland, and Ireland; in exile even accepted her invitation
to migrate thither and assume the privileges of royalty: coins of the
Old Dominion yet testify this projected despotism. Instead of Dissenters
as in New England, Quakers as in Pennsylvania, or Romanists as in
Maryland, Virginia, from her earliest colonization, was identified with
the Church of England. It was regarded, says one of her historians, as
an 'unrighteous compulsion to maintain teachers; and what they called
religious errors were deeply felt during the regal government:' the
children of the more prosperous colonists were sent to England to be
educated; their pursuits and habits, on returning, were unfavorable to
study; and, therefore, the advantage thus gained was, for the most part,
confined to 'superficial good manners,' and the ideal standard attained
that of 'true Britons and true churchmen;' the former was a more
cherished distinction there than elsewhere in America. In 1837 was
copied from a tombstone in an old-settled part of the State, this
inscription: 'Here lyes the body of Lieut. William Harris, who died May
ye 16, 1608--a good soldier, husband, and neighbor: _by birth a
Briton_.' In these facts of the past and normal tendencies we find ample
means and motives to account for the anomalous political elements
involved in the history--social and civic--of Virginia. While boasting
the oldest university where four Presidents of the United States were
educated, she sustained a slave code which was a bitter satire on
civilized society: the law of entail long prevailed in a community
ostensibly democratic, and only by the strenuous labors of Jefferson was
church monopoly abolished. It is not surprising, in the retrospect, that
her roll of famous citizens includes the noblest and the basest names
which illustrate the political transitions of the land; the architects
and subverters of free polity, the magnanimous and the perfidious. When
the ameliorating influence of time and truth had, in a degree,
harmonized the incongruous elements of opinion and developed the
economical resources, while they liberalized the sentiments and
habitudes of the p