Initial Studies in American Letters | Page 5

and that the country turns
all people black"--an impression which lingers still in parts of Europe.
The most original portions of the book are those in which the author
puts down his personal observations of the plants and animals of the
New World, and particularly the account of the Indians, to which his
third book is devoted, and which is accompanied by valuable plates.
Beverly's knowledge of these matters was evidently at first hand, and
his descriptions here are very fresh and interesting. The more strictly
historical part of his work is not free from prejudice and inaccuracy. A
more critical, detailed, and impartial, but much less readable, work was
William Stith's History of the First Discovery and Settlement of
Virginia, 1747, which brought the subject down only to the year 1624.
Stith was a clergyman, and at one time a professor in William and
Mary College.

The Virginians were stanch royalists and churchmen. The Church of
England was established by law, and non-conformity was persecuted in
various ways. Three missionaries were sent to the colony in 1642 by
the Puritans of New England, two from Braintree, Massachusetts, and
one from New Haven. They were not suffered to preach, but many
resorted to them in private houses, until, being finally driven out by
fines and imprisonments, they took refuge in Catholic Maryland. The
Virginia clergy were not, as a body, very much of a force in education
or literature. Many of them, by reason of the scattering and dispersed
condition of their parishes, lived as domestic chaplains with the
wealthier planters, and partook of their illiteracy and their passion for
gaming and hunting. Few of them inherited the zeal of Alexander
Whitaker, the "Apostle of Virginia," who came over in 1611 to preach
to the colonists and convert the Indians, and who published in
furtherance of those ends Good News from Virginia, in 1613, three
years before his death by drowning in the James River.
The conditions were much more favorable for the production of a
literature in New England than in the southern colonies. The free and
genial existence of the "Old Dominion" had no counterpart among the
settlers of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, and the Puritans must
have been rather unpleasant people to live with for persons of a
different way of thinking. But their intensity of character, their respect
for learning, and the heroic mood which sustained them through the
hardships and dangers of their great enterprise are amply reflected in
their own writings. If these are not so much literature as the raw
materials of literature, they have at least been fortunate in finding
interpreters among their descendants, and no modern Virginian has
done for the memory of the Jamestown planters what Hawthorne,
Whittier, Longfellow, and others have done in casting the glamour of
poetry and romance over the lives of the founders of New England.
Cotton Mather, in his Magnalia, quotes the following passage from one
of those election sermons, delivered before the General Court of
Massachusetts, which formed for many years the great annual
intellectual event of the colony:

"The question was often put unto our predecessors, _What went ye out
into the wilderness to see_? And the answer to it is not only too
excellent but too notorious to be dissembled. . . . We came hither
because we would have our posterity settled under the pure and full
dispensations of the Gospel, defended by rulers that should be of
ourselves." The New England colonies were, in fact, theocracies. Their
leaders were clergymen, or laymen whose zeal for the faith was no whit
inferior to that of the ministers themselves. Church and State were one.
The freeman's oath was only administered to church members, and
there was no place in the social system for unbelievers or dissenters.
The pilgrim fathers regarded their transplantation to the New World as
an exile, and nothing is more touching in their written records than the
repeated expressions of love and longing toward the old home which
they had left, and even toward that Church of England from which they
had sorrowfully separated themselves. It was not in any light or
adventurous spirit that they faced the perils of the sea and the
wilderness. "This howling wilderness," "these ends of the earth," "these
goings down of the sun," are some of the epithets which they constantly
applied to the land of their exile. Nevertheless they had come to stay,
and, unlike Smith and Percy and Sandys, the early historians and
writers of New England cast in their lots permanently with the new
settlements. A few, indeed, went back after 1640--Mather says some
ten or twelve of the ministers of the first "classis" or immigration were
among them--when the victory of the Puritanic party in Parliament
opened a career for them