The Life of George Washington. Woodrow Wilson

home of a creed and discipline; but it was not until the Commonwealth was set up in England that the difference began to be marked, and to give promise of becoming permanent. The English in Virginia, like the bulk of their countrymen at home, ha!d stood aghast at a king's death upon the scaffold, and had spoken very hotly, in their loyalty, of the men who had dared do the impious deed of treason; but when the Guinea, frigate, brought the Commonwealth's commission into the river to demand their submission, even Sir William Berkeley, the redoubtable Cavalier Governor, who had meant stubbornly to keep his province for the second Charles, saw he must yield; perceived there was too nice a balance of parties in the colony to permit an execution of bis plans of resistance; heard too many plain men in his Council, and out of it, declare themselves very much of a mind with the Puritans for the nonce in politics— very willing to set up a democracy in Virginia which should call itself a part of the Puritan state in England. But a great change had been wrought in Virginia while the Commonwealth lasted. When the Commonwealth's frigate came in at the capes she counted scarcely fifteen thousand settlers upon her plantations, but the next twenty years saw her transformed. By 1670 quite twenty-five thousand people were added to the reckoning; and of the new-comers a great multitude had left England as much because they hated the Puritans as because they desired Virginia. They were drawn out of that great majority at home to whom Cromwell had not dared resort to get a new parliament in the stead of the one he had ''purged." Many of them were of the hottest blood of the Cavaliers.

      It was in these years Virginia got her character and received her leading gentry for the time to come—the years while the Commonwealth stood and royalists despaired, and the years immediately following the Restoration, when royalists took heart again and Englishmen turned with a new ardor to colonization as the times changed. Among the rest in the great migration came two brothers, John and Lawrence Washington, of a stock whose loyalty was as old as the Conquest. They came of a Norman family, the men of whose elder branch had for two hundred years helped the stout Bishops of Durham keep the border against the Scots; and in every branch of which men had sprung up to serve the king, the state, and the church with steadfastness and honor: dashing soldiers ready for the field at home or abroad, stout polemical priors, lawyers who knew the learning of their day and made their way to high posts in chancery, thrifty burghers, gallant courtiers, prosperous merchants—public-spirited gentlemen all. It was Colonel Henry Washington, cousin to the Virginian refugees, who had been with Rupert when he stormed Bristol, and who, with a handful of men, had made good an entrance into the town when all others were beaten back and baffled. It was he who had held Worcester for his master even after he knew Charles to be a prisoner in the hands of the parliamentary forces. "Procure his Majesty's commands for the disposal of this garrison," was all he would answer when Fairfax summoned him to surrender;" till then I shall make good the trust reposed in me. The worst I know and fear not; if I had, the profession of a soldier had not been begun." But it was an ill time to revive the traditions of the knights of Durham; loyalty only brought ruin. The Reverend Lawrence Washington, uncle to the gallant colonel who was the King's Governor at Worcester, had been cast out of his living at Purleigh in 1643 by order of Parliament, upon the false charge that he was a public tippler, oft drunk, and loud to rail against the Parliament and its armies; but really because, with all his race, he was a royalist, and his living one of the best in Essex. It was his sons who left off hoping to see things mend in England and betook themselves to Virginia. His ruin had come upon him while they were yet lads. He had been a brilliant university scholar, fellow and lector of Brasenose, and rector of Oxford; but he could give his sons neither a university career nor hope of fortune in the humble parish pitying friends bad found for him in an obscure village of Essex; and when he was dead they saw no reason why they should stay longer in England, where Cromwell was master.

      John Washington, the oldest son of the unfortunate rector, reached Virginia in 1656, having made his way to the colony as "second man" to Edward Prescott, merchant and ship-owner, in whose company he had come; and his brother Lawrence, after passing to and fro between England and the colony several times upon errands of business, presently joined him in permanent residence upon the "northern neck" of rich land that lay between the Rappahannock and the Potomac rivers. It was a region where every settlement as yet was new. A few families had fixed themselves upon it when Maryland drove Captain Clayborne and his Virginian partisans forth from Kent Island in the years 1637 and 1638; and they had mustered numbers enough within a few years to send a representative to the House of Burgesses at Jamestown. But it was not till 1648 that the Assembly gave their lands a regular constitution as the County of Northumberland; for it was to this region the Indians had been driven by the encroachment of the settlements on the James and York, and for a while the Assembly had covenanted with the red men to keep it free from settlers. When once the ban was removed, however, in 1648, colonization set in apace—from the older counties of Virginia, from Maryland across the river and England over sea, from New England even, as if by a common impulse. In 1651 the Assembly found it necessary to create the two additional counties of Gloucester and Lancaster, and in 1653 still another, the County of Westmoreland, for the region's proper government, so quickly did it fill in; for the tide out of England already began to show its volume. The region was a natural seat of commerce, and merchants out of the trading ports of England particularly affected it. Rich land was abundant, and the Potomac ran strong and ample there, to carry the commerce alike of Virginia and Maryland to the bay, upon whose tributaries and inlets lay all the older settlements of both colonies. Lawrence Washington, though he still described himself, upon occasion, as "of Luton, County Bedford, merchant," found his chief profit where he made his home, with his brother John, in the new County of Westmoreland in Virginia. About them lived young men and old, come, like themselves, out of England, or drawn from the older settlements by the attractions of the goodly region, looking out, as it did, on either hand to a broad river and an easy trade. They felt it scarcely an expatriation to live there, so constantly did ships come and go between their wharves and the home ports at Bristol and London. It soon grew to be nothing singular to see well-to-do men go every year to England upon some errand of profit or pleasure.

      It was with such a region and such stirring neighbors that the young Washingtons identified themselves while they were yet youths in their twenties; and there they prospered shrewdly with the rest. Prudent men and men of character readily accumulated estates in the untouched glades and forests of Westmoreland. The season of their coming, moreover, sadly as things seemed to go in 1656, turned out propitious. The Restoration opened a new era in the settlement of the country. Englishmen bestirred themselves to take actual possession of all the great coast-line they had so long claimed without occupying. "The Dutch had enjoyed New Netherland during the distractions of the reign of Charles I. without any other interruption" than the seizure of their post upon the Connecticut by the New-Englanders, and the aggressions alike of Swedes and English upon the Delaware; but the ministers of Charles II., though " for some time perplexed in what light to view them, whether as subjects or as aliens, determined at length that New Netherland ought in justice to be resumed," and the thing was presently accomplished in true sovereign fashion by force of arms. To the ducal province of New York, Penn presently added the thrifty Quaker colony which so promptly created a busy town and mart of trade at Philadelphia, and which pushed its rural settlements back so speedily into the fertile lands that lay towards the west. Then, while the new colonizing impulse still ran strong, New Jersey, too, was added, with her limits at one end upon the Hudson and the great bay at New York, where she depended upon one rival for a port of entry, and at the other upon the Delaware, where another rival presided over the trade of her southern highway to the sea. To the southward straggling settlements upon Albemarle Sound grew slowly into the colony of North Carolina; and still other settlements, upon the rivers that lay towards Florida, throve so bravely that Charleston presently boasted itself a substantial town, and South Carolina had risen to be a considerable colony, prosperous, well ordered, and showing a quick life and individuality of her own.

      A new migration had come out of England to the colonies, and Englishmen looked with fresh confidence to see their countrymen build an empire in America. And yet perhaps not an empire of pure English blood. New York was for long scarcely the less a Dutch province, for all she had changed owners, and saw Englishmen crowd in to control her trade. There were Swedes still upon the Delaware; and Pennsylvania mustered among her colonists, besides a strange mixture out of many nations — Germans, French, Dutch, Finns, and English. Even in Virginia, which so steadily kept its English