Narrative and Critical History of America, Vol. 5 (of 8): The English and French in North America 1689-1763
History
Narrative and Critical History of America, Vol. 5 (of 8): The English and French in North America 1689-1763
America -- Discovery and exploration; America -- History; United States -- History
About twenty years later we have another exposition of the condition
of the colony in Hugh Jones’s _Present State of Virginia, giving
a particular and strict account of the Indian, English, and negro
inhabitants of that colony_, published in London in 1724.[668] Jones
was rector of Jamestown and a professor in the college at Williamsburg,
and his book was a missionary enterprise to incite attention among the
benevolent in the mother country to the necessities of the colony. “His
book,” says Tyler,[669] is one “of solid facts and solid suggestions,
written in a plain, positive style, just sufficiently tinctured with
the gentlemanly egotism of a Virginian and a churchman.”
The single staple of Virginia was the cause of constant concern,
whether of good or bad fortune, and the case was summed up in 1733,
in a tract published at London, _Case of the planters of tobacco in
Virginia, as represented by themselves, with a vindication_.[670]
Bringing the history of the colony down to about the date of the
period when Jones made his survey, Sir William Keith in 1738 published
his _History of the British Plantations in America, containing the
History of Virginia: with Remarks on the Trade and Commerce of that
Colony_.[671] Nine years later (1747) Stith published his history, but
it pertained only to the early period, and in his preface, dated at
Varina, December 10, 1746, he acknowledged his indebtedness to William
Byrd.[672]
When Burk published his _History of Virginia_ in 1804,[673] the days
of the Revolution had separated him from those that were in reality
the formative period of the Virginian character, which had grown out
of conditions, then largely a mere record. One would have expected to
find the eighteenth century developed in Burk better than it is. The
more recent authorities have studied that period more specifically,
though Bancroft does not much enlarge upon it.[674] Lodge[675] is
chiefly valuable for the conspectus he affords of the manners of the
time. Doyle in his _English in America_ (London, 1882) depends on
the “Colonial Entry Books” and “Colonial Papers” of the State Paper
Office in London. Since Howison’s,[676] the latest history is that by a
Virginian novelist, John Esten Cooke, and styled _Virginia, a history
of the people_ (Boston, 1883),[677] in which he aims to show, through
succeeding generations of Virginians, how the original characteristics
of their race have been woven into the texture of the population
from the Chesapeake to the Mississippi, as those of New England have
controlled the north from the Atlantic to the Lakes. He laments that
there has never been a study of the Southern people to the same extent
as of the Northern, and says that some of the greatest events in the
annals of the whole country need, to understand them, a contemplation
of the Virginian traits, losing sight, as he expresses it, of “the
fancied dignity of history.” Guided somewhat by this canon, the author
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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