So to New England and Virginia there came the founders of a race led forth from home by different motives, bringing different qualities of body and mind and spirit to the formation of the people, but both foundations possessing strength upon which could be built a mighty nation. And not the men of Jamestown or Roanoke, with their fighting and their tilling, not the Pilgrim Fathers, with their stern courage and their strait creed, but the women of Virginia and the Pilgrim Mothers were those to whom must look that new nation for all its best. It was not the blood of kings and princes that came to vitalize this our land in the period of its rescue from the dominion of the lesser races, but the blood of yeomen and peasants, sprung from generations of fighters with the soil rather than with men, yet soldiers too, and so in all ways fitted for the battles they must wage with men and beasts and the earth itself ere they could win an empire for their race. And this blood comes down to us through the women of that day--the Mothers of a Nation.
There were many marked differences between the period of settlement and the early colonial period, which latter, for our present purpose, we may roughly class as that extending from 1630 to 1685. Of course the most salient difference was that in the colonial epoch there first appeared the racial American as we now know him--not the red man of the forest and plain, to whom such title was really due, but the white American, the son of the soil, but not of generations of dwellers thereupon,--the American as universally entitled to-day.
It must be remembered that there is no parallelism in the chronology of the beginnings of the North and the South. The Virginia colony was, in matter of time, far in advance of that on the shores of Massachusetts Bay, and the colonial period had fairly begun in the South when settlement was yet hardly established in the North. Many white children, native Americans, had succeeded Virginia Dare in the southern colony before Peregrine White made his appearance as the pioneer American of the New England dominion; and therefore the American type had to some extent become confirmed in the one section before it had been modelled in the other. So that synchronistic treatment of the development of the American race in its beginnings is impossible, and this tends to produce confusion of statement and consequently of thought. It is fortunate for our present purpose, therefore, that the development of a distinct feminine type seems to have been almost confined to New England. The Virginia woman was not markedly individual; she had certain definite characteristics, even from the first, but these seem to have been rather of environment as modifying original race than of race as taking impression from environment. There were many reasons for this, which we shall consider later in the chapter; but for the present we will leave the woman of Virginia to turn to her younger but stronger sister of the North, the American Puritan woman.