[46] _Ibid._, No. 22. [47] T. J. Wertenbaker, _Norfolk: historic southern port_, 57, 67. [48] Dunmore papers, No. 32. [49] _American Archives_, Fourth Ser. 4: 343. [50] _Richmond College historical papers_ 1: 101. [51] _Ibid._, 115-121. [52] _Ibid._, 138, 139, 148. [53] _Lower Norfolk County Antiquary_ 2: 80. [54] _American Archives_, Fourth Ser. 4: 540; _Virginia Magazine_ 23: 414. [55] _Ibid._, Fifth Ser. 1: 150, 151, 431, 432. [56] Dunmore papers, No. 27. [57] _American Archives_ 4: 391. [58] _The writings of Thomas Jefferson_, ed. A. A. Lipscomb, 4: 255. [59] H. B. Grigsby, _The Virginia convention of 1776_. [60] _Virginia Gazette_, Purdie, May 17, 1776. ESSAY ON SOURCES Any political history of Virginia in the colonial period must be based chiefly on the documents in the British Public Record Office. During many months of work in this office the author made more than eight hundred pages of notes and transcripts which he has used freely in the writing of this volume. The notations CO1-3, CO5-1318, etc., in the footnotes all refer to the Public Record Office. It is especially fortunate that these documents have been preserved, since of the copies left in Virginia, when there were copies, most have been destroyed. Among the scores of manuscript volumes on Virginia in the Record Office, thirty-two are devoted to the correspondence of the Board of Trade, seventeen to the correspondence of the Secretary of State, twenty-two to Entry Books, letters, commissions, warrants, etc., for the period from 1680 to the American Revolution alone. In this vast collection are found the instructions to governors; memorials concerning the clergy, the revenue, the College of William and Mary; addresses of the Assembly to the Throne; reports of special agents of the Crown; accusations against governors; nominations to office; the journals of the Council and of the House of Burgesses. During the second half of the nineteenth century William Noel Sainsbury, Assistant Keeper of the Records, made no less than twenty volumes of abstracts of these documents, which have been deposited in the Virginia State Library. They cover the long period from the founding of the colony to 1730. The McDonald Papers, also transcribed from the documents in the Public Record Office, and also deposited in the Virginia State Library, parallel the Sainsbury abstracts, but they are fuller and give some papers overlooked by Sainsbury. The author spent the summer of 1908 in Richmond to study these papers, but they merely whetted his desire to see the original collection. So June, 1910, found him in the chilly old building off Chancery Lane, London, immersed in the musty but fascinating mass of documents.