[This dedication was written, without the least intimation to Mr. Frew of my purpose, a few months before his death. Though earthly praise or censure can never be anything to him more, this may stand, as written, a poor tribute to his memory j PREFATORY The design of this volume is to tell the story of the severance of Virginia into two commonwealths, prefacing with some account of the causes leading up to the event on the one hand, the internal antagonisms which had wrought towards disruption from an early day; on the other, the Southern Rebellion, which involving Virginia and setting up a military usurpation therein precipitated the crisis between the eastern and western sections that had been gathering head for fifty years. To this narrow estate has Virginia shrunken from an imperial domain. It is probable European eyes first beheld the lovely shores and waters of Virginia in 1498, when John Cabot is believed to have entered the Chesapeake Bay. In 1584, in the nebulous days of ante-colonial discovery and exploration, when the boundaries and limits of the New World were yet undefined and when European monarchs were claiming "everything in sight," Raleigh's ships returned to England with glowing accounts of the region from Albemarle to Chesapeake; and in the fervor of that triumphant hour, he was permitted to name all English North America "Virginia," in honor of the "Virgin Queen." The attempted colonization under the charter given Raleigh in that year to plant a colony in Virginia ended in failure. He dispatched a fleet the next year, but the settlers returned discouraged the year following. Another party sent out in 1587 perished, and permanent settlement of Virginia had to wait another twenty years. Under James' patent of 1606, two colonies in Virginia were authorized: one to be located by the Plymouth Company between 38 and 45 degrees north latitude; the other between 34 and 41, with reservation of at least one hundred miles between them. Late in the year, Sir Thomas Gates set out for the southern location; but his vessels were driven on the Bermudas and he did not reach Virginia till the following spring. It was this expedition which, entering Hampton Roads and naming the river after the English King, gave the world the romantic (and somewhat apochryphal) history of the adventures of Capt. John Smith. Three years later the Gates grant was superseded by one to the London Company, on whom was conferred a sea front of four hundred miles north and south from Hampton Roads, extending "throughout from sea to sea." To this charter the fragmentary Virginia of to-day goes back for its original authority. To this Virginia England sent out her white-handed and useless cavaliers, of whom Col. William Byrd of Westover, in his "History of the Dividing Line," wittily says that they were "most of them reprobates of good families," who "like true Englishmen built at Jamestown a church that cost no more than fifty pounds and a tavern that cost five hundred." In this book, Colonel Byrd shows how all English America had once been Virginia and how the colonies had been carved out of it. By the Peace of Paris in 1763, the boundaries of Virginia were definitely fixed, with the Mississippi River for |