Legends of Loudoun: An account of the history and homes of a border county of Virginia's Northern NeckWilliams, Harrison
History
Legends of Loudoun: An account of the history and homes of a border county of Virginia's Northern Neck
Williams, Harrison
Historic buildings -- Virginia -- Loudoun County; Loudoun County (Va.) -- History
by wealthier planters in Virginia grew and until negro slaves later were
generally available to them, there was also much kidnapping of wholly
innocent Irish who, too, were taken to the Colonies and sold into
servitude. Among this heterogeneous mass of unfortunates there were
undoubtedly many who were disorderly, depraved and vicious and who, we
know, subsequently gave great trouble to the Virginians; but to classify
all the Irish forcibly transported as criminals or lawless would be as
unjust as it would be untrue. It well may be borne in mind that to most
of the English, they were a strange, impulsive and foreign people and
equally or even more damning, Romanists in an intensely anti-Roman
community. As such, we may well believe, they seldom enjoyed the benefit
of a doubt of their inherent depravity.
The town of Waterford was, according to tradition, founded by an
Irishman, one Asa Moore, who is reputed to have built his, the first
house there in 1732, naming the new settlement for the place of his
nativity. Later it received many English, Scotch-Irish, Germans and,
particularly, Quakers to whom it largely owed the prosperity and
progress it was then to enjoy.
During the interminable wars of the seventeenth century--in ghastly
refutation as they were of those blissful dreams of the solidarity of
Europe and that international brotherhood of peace and culture so fondly
entertained by the Erasmian school only a few generations before--few
parts of that same Europe had suffered more hideously than the land
known as the Palatinate along the Rhine. The so-called Thirty Years War,
from 1618 to 1648, brought devastation particularly to its lower
portion. In 1688 its whole territory was invaded again by the French of
Louis XIV--an invasion which, for sheer savage brutality to the people
there and the inconceivable atrocities perpetrated on them, is difficult
to parallel in the annals of civilized nations but which, with its
certain legacies of distrust and hatred, is somewhat conveniently
forgotten by the professional French patriot of today. The land was
reduced to little more than a desert and such of its inhabitants as
survived, to the utmost want and privation. For nine years, until the
Treaty of Ryswick (1697), the French scourging of the land ground it to
dust. A few years of quiet followed, in which the poor Palatines sought
to restore their ruined towns and farms but fate seemed resolved on
their annihilation. In 1703 another war, that of the Spanish Succession,
broke out and raged until 1713 and the Palatinate again and again was
overrun by hostile armies. It was during these years and after, that
those left with the breath of life in their bodies appeared to give up
hope of ever again occupying their homeland in peace. A great emigration
began, ten thousand fugitives first going to England where they were
received kindly by Queen Anne and her people and given much aid; but, in
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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