4

EARLY SOCIETY.

[CHAP. I. tory. Many of them lived in baronial splendor. Their abodes, it is true, were comparatively mean, as the country did not yet furnish permanent building materials, except at vast cost, nor did it furnish practiced architects to make use of them: but their spacious grounds and gardens were bravely ornamented; their tables were loaded with plate, and with the luxuries of the Old and New World; numerous slaves, and white persons whose time they owned for a term of years,' served them in every capacity which use, luxury, or ostentation could dictate; and when they travelled in state, their cumbrous and richly appointed coaches were dragged by six horses, driven by three postillions. But usually the mistress of the household, with her children and maids, appropriated this vehicle. The Virginia gentleman of that day, with much of the feeling of earlier feudal times, when the spur was the badge of knighthood, esteemed the saddle the most manly, if not the only manly, way of making use of the noblest of brutes. He accordingly performed all his ordinary journeys on horseback. When he went forth with his whole household, the cavalcade consisted of the mounted white males of the family, the coach and six, lumbering through the sands, and a retinue of mounted body servants, grooms with spare led horses, etc., in the rear.

In their general tone of character, the lowland aristocracy of Virginia resembled the cultivated landed gentry of the mother country. Numbers of them were highly educated and accomplished, by foreign study and travel; and nearly all, or certainly much the largest portion, obtained an excellent education at William and Mary College, after its establishment, or

Yet, if they lacked the baronial piles of England, they did not lack comfortable residences. Beverly (writing about 1720, we think) says that several gentlemen of Williamsburg have "built themselves large brick houses, of many rooms on a floor; but," he adds, "they don't covet to make them lofty, having extent enough of ground to build upon; and now and then they are visited by winds which would incommode a towering fabric. They love to have large rooms, that they may be cool in summer. Of late they have made their stories much higher than formerly, and their windows larger, and sasht with crystal glass; adorning their apartments with rich furniture. All their drudgeries of cookery, washing, dairies, etc., are performed in offices apart from the dwelling-houses, which by this means are kept more cool and sweet." This description would apply equally to the better residences on the James, except that many of the latter were constructed of wood.

"The families," says Beverly, "being altogether on country seats, they have their graziers, seedsmen, gardeners, brewers, bakers, butchers, and cooks within themselves; they have a great plenty and variety of provisions for their table; and as for spicery, and other things the country don't produce, they have constant supplies of 'em from England. The gentry pretend to have their victuals drest and served up as nicely as the best tables in London."

Being apprenticed, to pay their passage money.

CHAP 1.]

THE LOWLAND ARISTOCRACY.

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respectable acquirements in the classical schools kept in nearly every parish by the learned clergy of the Established Church. As a class, they were intelligent, polished in manners, hightoned and hospitable-and sturdy in their loyalty and in their adherence to the national Church. Their winters were often spent in the gaieties and festivities of the provincial capital; their summers, when not connected with the public service, principally in supervising their immense estates, in visiting each other, and in such amusements as country life afforded. Among the latter, the chase held a prominent place. Born almost to the saddle and to the use of fire-arms, they were keen hunters; and when the chase was over, they sat round groaning boards, and drank confusion to Frenchman and Spaniard abroad, and to Roundhead' and Prelatist at home. When the lurking and predatory Indian became the object of pursuit, no strength of the Red man could withstand, no speed of his elude, this fiery and gallantly mounted cavalry. The social gulf which separated this from the common class of colonists, became about as deep and wide, and as difficult to overleap in marriage and other social arrangements, as that which divided the gentry and peasantry of England. Such were the Carters, the Carys, the Burwells, the Byrds, the Fairfaxes, the Harrisons, the Lees, the Randolphs, and many other families of early Virginia.

Various social strata intervened between the great lowland proprietors and the lowest class of whites. Midway in this scale, of conceded respectability and of a fortune neither large nor mean, stood a gentleman by the name of Jefferson, residing at Osborne's, on the James, in Chesterfield county. His

1 For animated pictures of these dashing riders, hunting bears, deer, and "vermine"dragging captured wolves alive at their horses' tails, "none faltering in their pace"-see Beverly, Book iv. chap. 21.

We do not propose to enter upon the question whether the Cavalier or Puritan blood predominated among the early lowland aristocracy of Virginia. It will not probably be disputed by any that this class were generally decided loyalists, whatever their pedigree. Perhaps we should state the question which has been raised more accurately by saying it is whether the lowland grandees" of Virginia were sprung from the higher or lower classes in England. Our opinion is that there have been decided exaggerations in the extreme statements on both sides. If well-preserved and properly connected family traditions and records can be relied on, not a few of the earlier settlers belonged to English families of rank, particularly those which were reduced from affluence to comparative poverty in the civil wars of Charles I.'s time. On the other hand, we entertain no doubt that many of the most opulent and distinguished families of the Old Dominion sprung from enterprising emigrants without any such pretensions. But esteeming the subject of no sort of consequence, we will not stop to bestow investigation on it.

6

MR. JEFFERSON'S ANCESTORS.

[CHAP. I. ancestors had, according to family tradition, emigrated from near Mount Snowden, in Wales; and they were among the first settlers of Virginia. One of them was a representative of Flower de Hundred in the Colonial Assembly convened by Governor Yeardley, on the 30th of July, 1619, in the choir of the church at Jamestown'-the first legislative body of Europeans, we think, that ever assembled in the New World. This was twelve years after the first colonization of Virginia, and one year before the Mayflower reached the "wild New England shore." Virginia contained at the time but six hundred white inhabitants, men, women, and children. The first Jefferson, of whom any particular accounts are preserved, residing at Osborne's as already mentioned, had three sons, Thomas, Field, and Peter. Thomas died young. Field emigrated to a place on the Roanoke, a few miles above the point where the river enters North Carolina, where he lived and died. He had a numerous family, several of whom were competent and successful men in their avocations.' The third brother, Peter, was born February 29th, 1708. His early education had been neglected, but possessing a strong thirst for knowledge, and great energy of character, he subsequently made up for the deficiency by study and reading. Like a celebrated contemporary, twenty-four years younger, George Washington, he started his business career as a surveyor, and it was probably in this capacity he first became acquainted with the Randolph family. If so, business relations speedily ripened into the most intimate social ones, for he soon became the bosom friend of William, the young proprietor of Tuckahoe, and the preferred suitor for the hand of the oldest daughter of Isham of Dungeness, Adjutant-General of Virginia. In 1735 he prepared to establish himself as a planter, after the usual manner of younger sons, by "patenting" one thousand acres of land, at the east opening of the gap where the Rivanna passes through the Southwest Range. His tract lay mostly on the plain, but it

The record of this assemblage only exists, so far as we know, in the British State Paper Office, where it was seen by Conway Robinson, Esq., of Virginia, in 185-. He copied the names of the burgesses. Ensign Rossingham also represented Flower de Hundred. This, we are informed, was Sir George Yeardley's settlement, next below (and on the opposite side of the James River) Shirley Hundred, which was next below Bermuda Hundred, at the confluence of the Appomatox and James.

2 A short instrument, in the handwriting and bearing the signature of one, and we be lieve the oldest of his sons, Thomas, is before us. It betrays a practiced hand and has a family likeness-a very decided one in the signature and in the numerals--to the chirography of a more celebrated cousin of the same name.

CHAP. I.]

HIS MOTHER.

7

also extended up the declivities of the hills, embracing the entire one afterwards named Monticello. His "patent" was joined on the east by another,' of two thousand four hundred acres, made a few days earlier by his friend William Randolph. Not long afterwards, Peter Jefferson " purchased," as the family land-rolls specify, four hundred adjoining acres of the other's tract-probably to obtain a preferred site for his residence, for it was on this portion of his land he subsequently constructed it. But an authenticated copy of the deed, now in the possession of a great grandson, shows that the consideration paid for the four hundred was "Henry Weatherbourne's biggest bowl of arrack punch!" This was somewhat characteristic of the times, and entirely characteristic of all the intercourse between these devoted friends. To his whole farm Peter Jefferson gave the name of Shadwell, after that of the parish in London, where his wife was born. He was married in 1738.

acres was

The Randolphs had been for ages a family of consideration in the midland counties of Warwick and Northampton, in England, and they claimed among their ancestors the powerful Scotch Earls of Murray, connected by blood or alliance with many of the most distinguished families in the English and Scotch peerage, and with royalty itself. Many were the eminent statesmen, warriors, churchmen, and scholars, who sprung from this stock. William Randolph of Warwickshire, the son of a

3

1 Now Edgehill, the seat of Colonel Thomas Jefferson Randolph.

2 Among the latter the reader of early English poetry will not forget the wit and poet, Thomas Randolph, whom Ben Jonson thought worthy to be enrolled among his adopted sons. He was the great uncle of William Randolph, the founder of the Virginia family. Mr. Jefferson, in his autobiographical "Memoir," remarks: "They [the Randolphs] trace their pedigree far back in England and Scotland, to which let every one ascribe the faith and merit he chooses." We have learned, with some astonishment, that the playful fling at long pedigrees generally, contained in the close of this sentence (made obviously to prevent the impression that he attached any undue importance to the fact just named by him, that is, that his maternal pedigree extended far back in England and Scotland), has been construed into a serious intention to discredit the pedigree "traced" by his maternal relatives! Apart from the questionable taste there would be in selecting such an occasion to make this issue with his maternal relatives (when he could quite as easily have passed over the topic in silence), we chance to know that it was the common understanding of his family that, if he attached no special importance to his long maternal pedigree, he never dreamed of throwing any discredit on its accuracy in point of fact-though perhaps he thought all pedigrees running back through ages, a class of records to place implicit confidence in which required a pretty strong exercise of faith!" This was what he meant to express, and all he meant to express, in the remark we have quoted.

He was the third of three sons (John, Richard, and William), sons of William Ran dolph (a) born Oct. 18, 1607, and his wife Dorothy Law, widow of Thomas West and daughter of Richard Law. William Randolph (a) was the son of William Randolph (b) born 1572, and his wife Elizabeth Smith, daughter of Thomas Smith. Their issue were, 1. Thomas (the poet); 2. William (a); 3. Robert; 4. Elizabeth. William Randolph (b) was the son of Robert Randolph and Rose Roberts, etc., etc.

8

THE RANDOLPHS.

[CHAP. I. cavalier whose fortunes had been broken in the civil wars, on arriving at man's estate, or a little earlier, emigrated to Virginia about the year 1660, and established himself at Turkey Island,' twenty miles below Richmond, in James River. He married Mary, daughter of Henry and Catherine Isham of Bermuda Hundred, Virginia, of the family of Isham in Northamptonshire, England, baronets. He brought with him, it is believed, some small remains of a former family fortune, and being a man of sagacity and enterprise he rapidly increased it, and continued to add possession to possession until the day of his death, which took place on the 11th of April, 1711. He was a man of decided mark and consideration in the colony; was made colonel of his county; was one of the Trustees named in the charter to William and Mary College, granted by King William and Queen Mary; and he is said to have held several other public positions of consideration. While preparing to leave a large fortune to each of his numerous children, he had the wisdom to confer upon them a more substantial benefit, in advance, in that finished education, which, in addition to their natural talents and their numbers, laid the foundation of the remarkable future celebrity and influence of his family. He saw several of his sons established on their estates before his death, and with the paternal solicitude and determined energy which marked his character, went in person with his slaves to make the commencement of their improvements, and even to aid them in the erection of their buildings.

His children were William, of Turkey Island; Thomas, of Tuckahoe; Isham, of Dungeness; Richard, of Curles; Sir John, of Williamsburg, knight; Henry, who died unmarried; Edward, who resided in England; Mary and Elizabeth. These held many of the most distinguished offices in the colony, as did their children and their children's children, in that and in the Republican Commonwealth which succeeded it. The family prolificacy also continued; and, until a comparatively recent period, few distinguished families or individuals could be found in Virginia who did not claim kindred with the Randolphs.'

1 Now a point of land, rather than an island (says the Virginia Historical Register), lying between the James and Turkey Island Creek, where they come together. The lat ter divides Henrico from Charles City County, and Turkey Island" is in Henrico.

21. William Randolph (the second of that name of Turkey Island) was a Royal Councillor of State, and two, at least, of his sons held high official positions. 2. Thomas, of