And this, alas! is the first black line in the sketch of Virginia as it now is. The true preface to the present edition of Virginia, which, unhappily, has been for many years stereotyped, may be found in a single entry of Captain John Smith's journal:--
"August, 1619. A Dutch man-of-war visited Jamestown and sold the settlers twenty negroes, the first that have ever touched the soil of Virginia."
They have scarcely made it "sacred soil." A little entry it is, of what seemed then, perhaps, an unimportant event,--but how pregnant with evil!
The very year in which that Dutch ship arrived with its freight of slaves at Jamestown, the Mayflower sailed with its freight of freemen for Plymouth.
Let us pause a moment and consider the prospects and opportunities which opened before the two bands of pilgrim. How hard and bleak were the shores that received the Mayflower pilgrims! Winter seemed the only season of the land to which they had come; when the snow disappeared, it was only to reveal a landscape of sand and rock. To have soil they must pulverize rock. Nature said to these exiles from a rich soil, with her sternest voice,--"Here is no streaming breast: sand with no gold mined: all the wealth you get must be mined from your own hearts and coined by your own right hands!"
How different was it in Virginia! Old John Rolfe, the husband of Pocahontas, writing to the King in 1616, said,--"Virginia is the same as it was, I meane for the goodness of the scate, and the fertilenesse of the land, and will, no doubt, so continue to the worlds end,--a countrey as worthy of good report as can be declared by the pen of the best writer; a countrey spacious and wide, capable of many hundred thousands of inhabitants." It must be borne in mind that Rolfe's idea of an inhabitant's needs was that he should own a county or two to begin with, which will account for his moderate estimate of the number that could be accommodated upon a hundred thousand square miles. He continues,--"For the soil, most fertile to plant in; for ayre, fresh and temperate, somewhat hotter in summer, and not altogether so cold in winter as in England, yet so agreable is it to our constitutions that now 't is more rare to hear of a man's death than in England; for water, most wholesome and verie plentifull; and for fayre navigable rivers and good harbors, no countrey in Christendom, in so small a circuite, is so well stored." Any one who has passed through the State, or paid any attention to its resources, may go far beyond the old settler's statement. Virginia is a State combining, as in some divinely planned garden, every variety of soil known on earth, resting under a sky that Italy alone can match, with a Valley anticipating in vigor the loam of the prairies: up to that Valley and Piedmont stretch throughout the State navigable rivers, like fingers of the Ocean-hand, ready to bear to all marts the produce of the soil, the superb vein of gold, and the iron which, unlocked from mountain-barriers, could defy competition. But in her castle Virginia is still, a sleeping beauty awaiting the hero whose kiss shall recall her to life. Comparing what free labor has done for the granite rock called Massachusetts, and what slave labor has done for the enchanted garden called Virginia, one would say, that, though the Dutch ship that brought to our shores the Norway rat was bad, and that which brought the Hessian fly was worse, the most fatal ship that ever cast anchor in American waters was that which brought the first twenty negroes to the settlers of Jamestown. Like the Indian in her own aboriginal legend, on whom a spell was cast which kept the rain from falling on him and the sun from shining on him, Virginia received from that Dutch ship a curse which chained back the blessings which her magnificent resources would have rained upon her, and the sun of knowledge shining everywhere has left her to-day more than eighty thousand white adults who cannot read or write.